Falconer+-+John+Cheever

Falconer 71
fall, Farragut stood at his window and watched the black birds
cross the blue sky above the walls. There would be one or two in
the beginning, and while they must have been leaders, there was
nothing adventurous about their flight. They all had the choppy
flight of caged birds. After the leaders came a flock of two or three
hundred, all of them flying clumsily but given by their numbers a
sense of power—the magnetic stamina of the planet—drawn
through the air like embers on a strong draft. After the first flock
there were more laggards, more adventurers, and then another
flock of hundreds or thousands and then a third. They made their
trip back to their home in the swamp after dark and Farragut
could not see this. He stood at the window waiting to hear the
sound of their passage, but it never happened. So in the autumn
he watched the birds, the leaves and the Fiduciary University
announcements moving as the air moved, like dust, like pollen,
like ashes, like any sign of the invincible potency of nature.
Only five men in cellblock F applied for the course in banking.
Nobody much took it seriously. They guessed that the Fiduciary
University was either newborn or on the skids and had resorted to
Falconer for publicity. The bounteous education of unfortunate
convicts was always good for some space in the paper. When the
time came, Farragut and the others went down to the parole board
room to take the intelligence quotient test. Farragut knew that he
tested badly. He had never tested over 119 and had once gone as
low as 101. In the army this had kept him from any position of
command and had saved his life. He took the test with twentyfour
other men, counting blocks and racking his memory for the
hypotenuse of the isosceles triangle. The scores were supposed to
be secret, but for a package of cigarettes Tiny told him he had
flunked out with 112. Jody scored at 140 and claimed he had never
done so badly.
Jody was Farragut’s best friend. They had met in the shower,
where Farragut had noticed a slight young man with black hair
smiling at him. He wore around his neck a simple and elegant gold