"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 gray, whose flesh hung slack on his bones, whose only trespass on life was a flat guitar and a remembered and pitiful air of "I don't know where it is, sir, but m find it, sir," and whose name was known nowhere, nowhere in the far reaches of the earth or in the far reaches of his memory, where, when he talked to himself, he talked to himself as Chicken Number Two.
The chow bell rang past one and they got the order for single file at ten paces and went down the tunnel past the guards, who looked sicker, chow was two sandwiches, one with cheese and the other with nothing but margarine. The KP was a stranger and wouldn't talk. A little after three, back in their cells, they were ordered to the education building, and single file, ten paces apart, they went there.
The education building was no longer much used. Budget cuts and a profound suspicion of the effects of education on a criminal intelligence had put out most of its lights and left it a ghostly place. On their left, unlighted, was the ghostly typewriter classroom, where eight huge, ancient and unused machines gathered dust. There were no instruments in the music room, but there was a clef, a staff and some notes drawn on the blackboard. In the dark history class, lighted only from the hall, Farragut read on the blackboard: "The new imperialism ended in 1905 to be followed by…" That could have been written ten or twenty years ago. The last classroom on the left was lighted and there was a stir there and over Ransome's and Bumpo’s shoulders Farragut could see two bright lights on skeletal poles beamed at a plastic fir tree, blazing with ornaments. Beneath the tree were square and rectangular boxes, wrapped professionally with colored paper and brilliant ribbons. The intelligence or the craft of the hand that had set this scene filled Farragut with the deepest admiration. He listened for the clash of men, the sirens, the roar of mortal enemies, tearing at one another's heads, but this was gone, conquered by the balm of the plastic tree, glittering with crown jewels and surrounded by treasure. He imagined the figure he would cut, standing in his white shirt beside the boxes filled with cashmere sweaters, silk shins, sable hats, needlepoint bed slippers and large jewels suitable for a man. He saw himself in the curious spectrum of color photography being taken out of an envelope by his wife and his son in the hallway at Indian Hill. He saw the rug, the table, the bowl of roses reflected in the mirror as they regarded their shame, their bad penny, their fouled escutcheon, their nemesis posed in stunning color beside a truly beautiful tree!
There was a long, battered table in the corridor, with forms to be filled out that must have been manufactured in the street by some intelligent agent. The form explained that one photograph would be mailed cost-free to a recipient designated by the inmate. The recipient should be a member of the family, but common-law wives and homosexual unions were acceptable. A second print and the negative would be delivered to Falconer, but any duplicates would be made at the inmate’s own expense. Farragut printed: "Mrs. Ezekiel Farragut. Indian Hill. Southwick, Connecticut. 06998." He printed a form for the Stone, whose name was Serafino DeMarco and whose address was in Brooklyn. Then he stepped into the brightly lighted room with the presents and the tree.
The irony of Christmas is always upon the poor in heart; the mystery of the solstice is always upon the rest of us. The inspired metaphor of the Prince of Peace and his countless lights, overwhelming the maddening and the threadbare carols, was somewhere here; here, on this asshole August afternoon the legend still had its stamina. Their motives were pure enough. Mrs. Spingarn genuinely loved her son and grieved at his cruel and unnatural end. The guards genuinely feared disorder and death. The inmates would fleetingly feel that they had a foot in the faraway street. Farragut looked above this spectacle to the rest of the classroom. There was an empty blackboard and above this an alphabet written in a Spencerian hand long, long ago. The penmanship was very elegant, with loops, hoops, tails, follow-throughs and a crossed t like an acrobat’s bow. Above this was an American flag with forty-two stars, the white stripes dyed by time to the yellow of hot piss. One would have liked to do better, but that was the color of the flag under which Farragut had marched into battle. Then there was the photographer.
He was a slender man with a small head-a dandy, Farragut thought. His camera, on a tripod, was no bigger than a wrist-watch box, but he seemed to have a relationship with or a noticeable dependence upon the lens. He seemed to take his squinted eye away from it reluctantly. His voice was croupy and elegant. Two photographs were taken. The first was a picture of the form with the prisoner's number and the designated address. The second was of the prisoner himself, taken with a little gentle guidance. "Smile. Lift your head a little. Bring your right foot closer to your left. That's it!" When Chicken took his place and held up his form, they all read: Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus. Icicle Street. The North Pole. The photographer smiled broadly and was looking around the room to share this joke with the rest of them when he suddenly grasped the solemnity of Chicken's loneliness. No one at all laughed at this hieroglyph of pain, and Chicken, sensing the stillness at this proof of his living death, swung his head around, shot up his skinny chin and said gaily, "My left profile's my best."
"That's it," said the photographer.
At his turn Farragut wondered what role to aim at, and trying to look and feel like a constant husband, a comprehensive father and a prosperous citizen, smiled broadly and stepped into the intense brightness and heat of the light. "Oh, Indian Hill," said the photographer. "I know that place. I mean I've seen the sign. Do you work there?"
"Yes," said Farragut.
“I have friends in Southwick," said the photographer. "That's it."
Farragut went to the window, where he had a broad view of cellblocks B and C. They looked, with their ranks of windows, like some obsolete Northern cotton mill. He looked in the windows for flames and a rush of shadows, but all he saw was a man hanging up his wash to dry. The passiveness of the place bewildered him. They could not all have been humiliated and gulled by nakedness and a glittering tree, but that seemed to be the case. The place seemed sleepy. Had they all retreated into the torpor he had chosen when Chicken fired his mattress? He looked again at the stranger hanging out his wash.
Farragut joined the others waiting in the corridor. Outside it had begun to rain. Ransome went among them, collecting the forms that had been photographed. These were useless and Farragut watched Ransome with interest, for he was so secretive a man that to follow any of his consecutive movements promised to be revealing. What he did, when he had collected a dozen forms, was to climb onto a chair. Ransome was a big man and the chair was rickety and he checked his safety by shifting his weight. When he felt secure he began to tear the forms into small pieces and cast them, like a sower, over the heads and shoulders of the others. His face was beaming and he sang "Silent Night." The Cuckold picked up a good bass, and considering the distance they had all come from caroling, they formed a small, strong choir, singing enthusiastically about the Virgin. The old carol and the scraps of paper falling softly through the air onto their heads and shoulders was not at all a bitter recollection on that suffocating rainy day, but a light-hearted memory of some foolishness, linked to a fall of snow.