Falconer+-+John+Cheever

Falconer 162
half-standing, he saw that he had been sitting on Chicken’s false
teeth. “Oh, Chicken,” he cried, “you bit me in the ass.” His
laughter was the laughter of the deepest tenderness and then he
began to sob. His sobbing was convulsive and he rode it and let it
run its course. He then called Tiny. Tiny came without asking any
questions. “I’ll get a doctor,” he said. Then, seeing Chicken’s
naked arm with its dense and faded designs of gray tattooing, he
said, “I don’t think he spent no two thousand on tattoos like he
said. It looks more like two hundred to me. He strangled an old
woman. She had eighty-two dollars in her sugar bowl.” Then he
left. The light in the window was gone. The dance music and the
misunderstandings on TV went on and on.
When the doctor came in he wore the same hat he had worn when
he gave them short arm during the revolution. He still seemed
unclean. “Call heaven,” he said to Tiny. “We can’t move no stiffs
until twenty-two hundred,” said Tiny. “That’s the law.” “Well, call
later, then. He won’t ferment. He’s nothing but bones.” They left
and then Veronica and one of the other nurses came in with a
canoe-shaped form made of light metal, which contained a long
tan sack. They put Chicken into this and went away. Both the TV
and Ransome’s radio were giving commercials and Ransome
tuned up his radio, a kindness perhaps.
Farragut stood with difficulty. Cunning was needed; cunning and
the courage to take his rightful place in things as he saw them. He
unzippered the sack. The noise of the zipper was some plainsong—
some matter-of-fact memory of closing suitcases, toilet kits and
clothes bags before you went to catch the plane. Bending over the
sack, his arms and shoulders readied for some weight, he found
that Chicken Number Two weighed nothing at all. He put Chicken
into his own bed and was about to climb into the burial sack when
some chance, some luck, some memory led him to take a blade
out of his razor before he lay down in the cerements and zipped
them up over his face. It was very close in there, but the smell of