"Why did you take this job?"
"I don't know why I took this job. It was my uncle told me. He was my father's older brother. My father believed everything he said. So he said I should get a peaceful job in the jailhouse, retire in twenty years on half pay and begin a new life at forty with a guaranteed income. Do anything. Open up a parking lot. Grow oranges. Run a motel. Only he didn't know that in a place like this you get so tensed up that you can't digest a Lifesaver. I threw up my lunch. We had a good meal for once-chickpeas and chicken wings-and I threw up the whole mess, right on the floor. I can't keep nothing on my stomach. Another twenty minutes and I'm walking to my car and I'm driving my car home to 327 Hudson Street and I'm getting my bottle of Southern Comfort out of the top of the closet and my glass from the kitchen and I'm going to forget everything. When you type those out put them in my office. It's the one with the plants. The door's open. Toledo 'll pick them up.
He closed the glass door. The radio was dead. Farragut typed: LOUISA PIERCE SRINGARN, IN MEMORY OF HER BELOVED SON PETER, HAS ARRANGED FOR INTERESTED INMATES TO BE PHOTOGRAPHED IN FULL COLOR BESIDE A DECORATED CHRISTMAS TREE AND TO HAVE SAID PHOTOGRAPHS MAILED AT NO COST TO THE INMATE'S LOVED ONES. PICTURE-TAKING WILL BEGIN AT 900/8/27 IN THE ORDER OP RECEIVED APPLICATIONS. WHITE SHIRTS ALLOWABLE DON'T BRING NOTHING BUT A HANDKERCHIEF.
Farragut turned off his light, closed the door and walked down t he tunnel to the open door of Marshack’s office. The room had three windows and it was the one, as Marshack had said, with the plants. The windows had vertical bars outside, but Marshack had put horizontal rods on the inside and many plants hung from these. There were twenty or thirty hanging plants. Hanging plants, Farragut thought, were the beloved of the truly lonely-those men and women who, burning with lust, ambition and nostalgia, watered their hanging plants. They cultivated their hanging plan is and he guessed that they talked to them since they talked to everything else-doors, tables and the wind up the chimney. He recognized very few of the plants. Ferns he knew; ferns and geraniums. He picked a geranium leaf, broke it in his fingers and smelted the oil. It smelted like a geranium-the stuffy, complex perfume of some lived-in and badly ventilated interior. There were many other kinds with leaves of all shapes, some of them the color of red cabbage and some of them dull browns and yellows-not the lambent autumnal spectrum, but the same spectrum of death, fixed in the nature of the plant. He was pleased and surprised to see that the killer, narrowly confined by his stupidity, had tried to change the bleakness of the room where he worked with plants that lived and grew and died, that depended upon his attention and his kindness, that had at least the fragrance of moist soil and that in their greenness and their life stood for the valleys and pastures of milk and honey. All the plants hung from copper wire. Farragut had built radios when he was young. He remembered that a hundred feet of copper wire was the beginning of a radio set.
Farragut unhooked a plant from a curtain rod and went after the copper wire. Marshack had looped the wire through holes in the pots, but he had used the wire so generously that it would take Farragut an hour or more to get the wire he needed. Then he heard footsteps. He stood in front of the floored plant, a little frightened, but it was only Toledo. Farragut passed him the ditto sheets and gave him a strong interrogative eye. "Yeah, yeah," said Toledo. He spoke not in a whisper but in a very flat voice. "They got twenty-eight hostages. That's at least two thousand eight hundred pounds of flesh, and they can make every ounce of it sing." Toledo was gone.
Farragut returned to his desk, broke the least-used key from the typewriter, honed it on the old granite of the wall, thinking of the ice age and its contribution to the hardness of the stone. When he had the key honed to a hair edge, he went back to Marshack’s office and cut the wire off eighteen plants. He put the wire in his underpants, turned off the lights and walked back up the empty tunnel. He walked clumsily with the wire in his pants and if anyone had questioned him about his limp he would have said that the shitty humid day gave him rheumatism.
"734-508-32 reporting in," he said to Tiny.
"What's the news?"
"Beginning tomorrow at nine hundred any asshole who wants to be photographed in full color standing beside a Christmas tree has got his wish."
"No shit," said Tiny.
"I'm not shitting you," said Farragut. "You'll get the announcement in the morning."
Farragut, loaded with copper wire, sat down on his cot He would hide it under the mattress as soon as Tiny's back was turned. He unwound the toilet paper from its roll, folded the paper into neat squares and put this in his copy of Descartes. When he had made radios as a boy he had wound the wire on an oatmeal box. He guessed a toilet paper roll would be nearly as good. The bedspring would work for an aerial, the ground was the radiator, Bumpo's diamond was the diode crystal and the Stone had his earphones. When this was completed he would be able to get continuous news from The Wall. Farragut was terribly excited and highly composed. The public address system made him jump. "SHORT ARM FOR CELLBLOCK F IN TEN MINUTES. SHORT ARM FOR CELLBLOCK F IN TEN MINUTES."
Short arm was, for the calendar freaks, the first Thursday of every month. It was for the rest of them whenever it was announced. Farragut guessed that short arm, along with the Christmas tree, was a maneuver to dissipate their excitement. They would be humiliated and naked and the power of mandatory nakedness was inestimable. Short arm involved having some medical riffraff and a nurse from the infirmary examine their genitals for venereal suppuration. At the announcement there was some hooting and shouting, but not much. Farragut, with his back to Tiny, got out of his pants and put them neatly under the mattress to preserve their press. He also got rid of the copper.
The doctor, when he was let in, was wearing a full suit and a felt hat. He looked tired and frightened. The nurse was a very ugly man who was called Veronica. He must have been pretty years ago because in a dim, dim light he had the airs and graces of a youth, but in a stronger light he looked like a frog. The ardor that had rucked his face and made it repulsive still seemed to burn. These two sat down at Tiny's desk and Tiny gave them the records and unlocked the cells. Naked, Farragut could smell himself and he could also smell Tennis, Bumpo and the Cuckold. They had not had a shower since Sunday and the smell was strong and like a butcher's spoiled trimmings. Bumpo went on first. "Squeeze it," said the doctor. The doctor's voice was strained and angry. "Pull back the foreskin and squeeze it. Squeeze it, I said." The doctor's suit was cheap and stained, and so were his tie and his vest. Even his eyeglasses were soiled. He wore the felt hat to stress the sovereignty of sartorial rule. He, the civilian judge, was crowned with a hat while the penitents were naked, and with their sins, their genitals, their boastfulness and their memories exposed they seemed shameful. "Spread your cheeks," said the doctor. "Wider. Wider. Next-73482."
"It's 73483," said Tiny.
"I can't read your writing," the doctor said. "73483."
73483 was Tennis. Tennis was a sunbather and had a snowy bum. His arms and legs were, for an athlete, very thin. Tennis had clap. It was very still. For this ceremony, the sense of humor that survived even the darkness of the Valley was extinguished. Extinguished too was the convulsive gaiety Farragut had seen at chow.
"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."