Falconer+-+John+Cheever

Falconer 129
“No, no, no,” said Chicken. “I don’t want nothing like that. That
ain’t what I want. If I was on the grievance committee, whatever
that is, one of the first things I’d bring up is the visiting room.
Now, they tell me it’s a lot better than the visiting room at The
Wall, but even so, if I had some chick come in to visit me I
wouldn’t want to meet her over a counter like I was trying to sell
her something. If some chick come in to visit me—”
“You been in here twelve years,” shouted Tiny, “and you ain’t
never once had a visitor. Never once, not ever in twelve years.”
“Maybe I had a visitor when you was on vacation,” said Chicken.
“Maybe I had a visitor when you had that hernia operation. You
was out six weeks.”
“That was ten years ago.”
“Well, as I say, if some chick come to visit me I wouldn’t want to
have her sweet-talk me across a counter. I’d like to sit down with
her at a table with an ashtray for butts and maybe offer her a soft
drink.”
“They got soft-drink machines.”
“But at a table, Tiny, at a table. You can’t have no kind of intimacy
across a counter. If I could talk to my chick across this table, well,
then I’d feel contented and not want to hurt nobody or start no
trouble.”
“In twelve years nobody come to see you. That proves that there
ain’t nobody on the street who knows your name. Even your own
mother don’t know who you are. Sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles,
friends, chicks—you ain’t got nothing to sit down at a table with.
You is worse than dead. You shit. The dead don’t shit.”
Chicken began to cry then or seemed to cry, to weep or seemed to
weep, until they heard the sound of a grown man weeping, an old
man who slept on a charred mattress, whose life savings in tattoos
had faded to a tracery of ash, whose crotch hair was sparse and