Falconer+-+John+Cheever

Falconer 57
at him,” said Farragut. “I’m terribly sorry. I lost my temper. I hope
I didn’t hurt him.”
“He said he left his pen here,” said the orderly. He looked under
the bed, in the drawer of the cabinet, under the pillow, along the
window sill and under the mattress. Then a guard joined him in
the search, stripped the bed, stripped Farragut naked and made
some slighting reference to the size of his cock, but neither of them
—through kindness, Farragut thought—went near the pen. “I
can’t find it,” said the orderly. “We’ve got to find it,” said the
guard. “He says we’ve got to find it.” “Well, tell him to find it
himself,” said the orderly. The guard went out and Farragut was
afraid that the beard would return, but the guard returned alone
and spoke to the orderly. “You’re going up in the world,” said the
orderly to Farragut, very sadly. “They’re putting you in a private
room.”
He passed Farragut his crutches and helped him into his shift.
Farragut, swinging forward clumsily on his crutches and with the
pen up his ass, followed the guard out of the ward and down a
corridor that smelled sharply of quicklime to a door locked with a
bar and a padlock. The guard had some trouble with the key. The
door opened onto a very small cell with a window too high to be
seen from, a toilet, a Bible and a mattress with a folded sheet and
blanket. “How long?” asked Farragut. “The lawyer’s booked you in
for a month,” said the guard, “but I seen Tiny give you some
tomatoes and if Tiny’s your friend you’ll be out in a week.” He
shut and barred the door.
Farragut removed the pen. It was with this precious instrument
that he would indict Chisholm, and he clearly saw Chisholm in his
third year of prison grays eating franks and rice with a bent tin
spoon. He needed paper. There was no toilet paper. If he
demanded this he would, he knew, with luck get one sheet a day.
He seized on the Bible. This was a small copy, bound in red, but
the end pages were a solid, clerical black and the rest of the pages