"Where did you get it?" the doctor asked. "I want his name and his number." With a case in hand, the doctor seemed reasonable and at ease. He reset his eyeglasses elegantly with a single finger and then drew his spread fingers across his brow.
"I don't know," said Tennis. "I don't remember any such thing."
"Where did you get it?" the doctor said. "You'd better tell me."
"Well, it could have been during the ball game," said Tennis. “I guess it was during the ball game. Some dude blew me while I was watching the ball game. I don't know who it was I mean if I'd known who it was I would have killed him, but I was so interested in the game that I didn't notice. I love baseball."
"You didn't slip it up somebody's ass in the shower," said the doctor.
"Well, if I did it was by accident," said Tennis. "It was entirely by accident. We only get showers once a week and for a man, a tennis champion, who takes showers three or four times a day, when you only get into the shower once a week it's very confusing. You gel dizzy. You don't know what's going on. Oh, if I knew, sir, I'd tell you. If I'd known what was going on I would have hit him, I would have killed him. That's the way I am. I'm very high-strung."
"He stole my Bible," Chicken screamed, "He stole my limp leather copy of the Holy Bible. Look, look, the sonofabitch stole my Holy Bible."
Chicken was pointing at the Cuckold. The Cuckold was standing with his knees knocked together in a ludicrous parody of feminine shyness. "I don't know what he's talking about," he said. "I ain't stole nothing of his." He made a broad gesture with his arms to demonstrate his empty-handedness. Chicken pushed him. The Bible fell from between his legs and hit the floor. Chicken grabbed the book. "My Bible, my Holy Bible, it was sent to me by my cousin Henry, the only member of my family I heard from in three years. You stole my Holy Bible. You are so low I wouldn't want to spit on you." Then he spat on the Cuckold. "I never heard, I never dreamed of anybody so low that he would steal from a man in prison a Holy Bible given to him by his loving cousin."
"I didn't want your Goddamned Bible and you know it," roared the Cuckold. He had much more volume to his voice than Chicken and pitched it at a lower register. "You never looked at your Bible. There was about an inch of dust on it. For years I heard you talking about how the last thing in the world you needed was a Bible. For years I've been hearing you bad-mouth your cousin Henry for sending you a Bible. Everybody in the block is tired of hearing you talk about Henry and the Bible. All I wanted was the leather to make wrist-watch straps. I wasn't going to hurt the Bible. I was going to return the Bible to you without the leather was all. If you wanted to read the Bible instead of complaining about how it wasn't a can of soup, you would have found the Bible just as readable when I returned it."
"It stinks," muttered Chicken. He was holding the Bible to his nose and making loud noises of inhalation. "He stuck my Bible up under his balls. Now it stinks. The Holy Scripture stinks of his balls, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy stink."
"Shut up, shut up," said Tiny. "The next time any of you opens your mouth you get a day's cell lock."
"But." said Chicken.
"There's one," said Tiny.
"Religious hypocrite," said the Cuckold.
"Two," said Tiny wearily.
Chicken clapped the Bible over his heart as some men put their hats over their hearts when the flag is passing by. He raised his face into the light of that late August afternoon. Tennis was crying. "Honestly I don't remember. If I could remember I'd tell you. If I'd known who it was I'd kill him."
It was a long time before the doctor gave up on Tennis and wrote him a prescription. Then one by one the others exhibited themselves and were checked off the roster. Farragut felt hungry, and glancing at his watch, saw how late it had gotten. It was an hour past chow. Tiny and the doctor were arguing about something on the roster. Tiny had locked the cells after the Cuckold grabbed the Bible and they stood naked, waiting to get back into their cells and into their clothes.
The light in the prison, that late in the day, reminded Farragut or some forest he had skied through on a winter afternoon. The perfect diagonal of the light was cut by bars as trees would cut the light in some wood, and the largeness and mysteriousness of the place was like the largeness of some forest-some tapestry of knights and unicorns-where a succinct message was promised but where nothing was spoken but the vastness. The slanting and broken light, swimming with dust, was also the dolorous light of churches where a bereft woman with a hidden face stood grieving. But in his darling snowy forest there would be an everlasting newness in the air, and here there was nothing but the bestial goat smell of old Farragut and the gall of having been gulled. They had been gulled. They had gulled themselves. The word from The Wall-and it was known to most of them-had promised them the thrust, the strength of change, and this had been sapped by quarrels about clap and prayer books and wrist-watch straps.
Farragut felt impotent. No girl, no ass, no mouth could get him up, but he felt no gratitude for this cessation of his horniness. The last light of that sweaty day was whitish, the white afterglow you see in the windows of Tuscan paintings, an ending light but one that seems to bring the optical nerve, the powers of discernment, to a climax. Naked, utterly unbeautiful, malodorous and humiliated by a clown in a dirty suit and a dirty hat, they seemed to Farragut, in this climax of the light, to be criminals. None of the cruelties of their early lives-hunger, thirst and beatings-could account for their brutality', their self-destructive thefts and their consuming and perverse addictions. They were souls who could not be redeemed, and while penance was a clumsy and a cruel answer, it was some measure of the mysteriousness of their fall. In the white light they seemed to Farragut to be fallen men.
They dressed. It was dark. Chicken began to scream, "Chow. Chow. Chow." Most of the others joined in on the chant. "No chow," said Tiny. "Kitchen's closed for repairs." "Three squares a day is our constitutional right," screamed Chicken. "We'll get a writ of habeas corpus. We'll get twenty writs…" Then he began to shout; "TV. TV. TV." Almost everyone joined in on this. “TV's broken," said Tiny. This lie increased the loudness of the chanting and Farragut, weary with hunger and everything else, found himself sinking, with no resistance at all, into a torpor that was the worst of his positions of retreat. Down he seemed to go, his shoulders rounded and his neck bent, down into a lewd and putrescent nothingness. He breathed, but that seemed to be all he did. The din of the shouting only made his torpor more desirable, the noises worked on him like the blessing of some destructive drug, and he saw his brain cells like the cells of a honeycomb being destroyed by an alien solvent. Then Chicken set fire to his mattress and began to blow on the small flames and ask men to pass him paper to keep the fire going. Farragut barely heard him. They passed up toilet paper, hoarded announcements and letters from home. Chicken blew so hard on the flames that he blew out all h is teeth-uppers and lowers. When he got these back into place he began to yell-Farragut barely heard him-"Set fire to your mattress, burn the fucking place down, watch the flames leap, see them coughing to death, see the flames shoot up through the roof, see them burning, see them burning and crying." Farragut heard this remotely, but he distinctly heard Tiny pick up the phone and ask: "Red Alert." Then Tiny shouted: "Well, what the hell did you tell me you got a Red Alert for when you ain't got no Red Alert. Well, all right-I got them all yelling and throwing stuff around and setting fire to their mattresses, so why ain't my cellblock just as dangerous as C and B? Just because I ain't got no millionaires and governors in here don't mean that my cellblock ain't as dangerous as some other cellblock. I got all the boobs in here and it's like a dynamite cap. I tell you they're burning their mattresses. Well, don't tell me you got this Red Alert when you're drinking whiskey in the squad room. All right, you're scared. So am I. I'm human. I could use a drink. Well, all right, then, but step on it."