The house was very old and so was most of the furniture. Eben had, quite unselfconsciously, reconstructed the environment of what he claimed was his miserable youth. The blue china had been brought from Canton in a sailing ship by their great-grandfather and they had learned to crawl on the hieroglyphs woven into the Turkey rugs. Marcia and Zeke sat down and Eben went into the pantry to make some drinks. His wife, Carrie, was in the kitchen, sitting on a stool and crying.
"I'm leaving," she sobbed, "I'm leaving. I don't have to listen to your shit anymore."
"Oh, shut up," Eben shouted. "Shut up. Shut up. You've been leaving me weekly or oftener for as long as I can remember. You started leaving me before you asked me to marry you. My God! Unless you rent space in a warehouse, there Isn't a place in the county with enough room for your clothes. You're about as portable as the Metropolitan Opera Company's production of Turandot. Just to get your crap out of here would keep the moving men busy for weeks. You have hundreds of dresses, hats, fur coats and shoes. I have to hang my clothes in the laundry. And then asked him if it was hard to get on Trial and Error and he said no, he thought he could arrange it. So he called me a few days later and said he thought they could use me on Trial and Error the next day. It's a live show and I was to get to the studio at five for makeup and so forth. It's one of those shows where you pay forfeits and what you had to do that night was to walk over a water tank on a tightrope. They gave me a suit of clothes because I'd get wet and I had to sign all sorts of releases. So I got into this suit and went through the first part of the show, smiling all the time at the cameras. I mean I was smiling at Carrie. I thought that for once she might be looking at my smile. Then I climbed up the ladder to the tightrope and started walking over the pool and fell in. The audience didn't laugh too uproariously so they taped in a lot of laughter. So then I got dressed and came home and shouted, 'Hey, hey, did you see me on television?” She was lying on a sofa in the living room by the big set. She was crying. So then I thought I'd done the wrong thing, that she was crying because I looked like such a fool, falling into the tank. She went on crying and sobbing and I said, 'What's the matter, dear?' and she said, 'They shot the mother polar bear, they shot the mother polar bear!' Wrong show. I got the wrong show, but you can't say that I didn't try."
When he got up to collect their glasses he moved the curtain at t he window where he sat and Farragut saw that behind the curtain were two empty vodka bottles. That might account for his stolid, seafaring walk, his thick speech and his air of stupid composure. So with his wife sobbing in the kitchen and his poor daughter crazy and his son in jail, Farragut asked, "Eben, why do you live like this?"
"Because I love it," said Eben. Then he bent down, raised the old Turkey carpet and kissed it with his wet mouth.
"I know one thing," shouted Farragut. "I don't want to be your brother. I don't want anyone on the street, anywhere in the world, to say that I look like you. I'll be any kind of a freak or addict before I'll be mistaken for you. I'll do anything before I'll kiss a rug.
"Kiss my ass," said Eben.
"You’ve got Dad's great sense of humor," Farragut said.
"He wanted you to be killed," screamed Eben. "I bet you didn't know that. He loved me, but he wanted you to be killed. Mother told me. He had an abortionist come out to the house. Your own father wanted you to be killed."
Then Farragut struck his brother with a fire iron. The widow testified that Farragut had struck his brother eighteen to twenty times, but she was a liar, and Farragut thought the doctor who corroborated this lie contemptible.
The trial that followed was, he thought, a mediocre display of a decadent judiciary. He was convicted as a drug addict and a sexual adventurer and sentenced to fail for the murder of his brother. "Your sentence would be lighter were you a less fortunate man," said the judge, "but society has lavished and wasted her riches upon you and utterly failed to provoke in you that conscience that is the stamp of an educated and civilized human being and a useful member of society." Marcia had said nothing in his defense, although she had smiled at him when she was on the stand, smiled at him sadly while she agreed to their description of the grueling humiliation of being married to a drug addict who put the procurement of his fix miles ahead of his love for his wife and his only son. There were the stalenesses of the courthouse to remember, the classroom window shades, the sense of an acute tedium that was like the manipulations of the most pitiless and accomplished torturer, and if the last he would see of the world was the courthouse, he claimed he had no regrets, although he would, in fact, have clung to any floorboard, spittoon or worn bench if he thought that it might save him.
"I'm dying, Zeke, I'm dying," said Chicken Number Two. "I can feel that I'm dying, but it ain't done my brain no harm, it ain't done my brain no harm, it ain't done my brain no harm, it ain't done my brain no harm." He slept.
Farragut remained where he was. He heard music and voices from the radios and the TV. There was still some light in the window. Chicken Number Two woke suddenly and said, "You see, Zeke, I ain't afraid of dying at all. I know that sounds lying and when people used to say to me that because they had already tasted death they weren't afraid of death I figured they were talking with no class, no class at all. It seemed to me that you didn't have any quality when you talked like that, it was like thinking you looked beautiful in a mirror-this shit about being fearless before death ain't got no quality. How could you say you were fearless about leaving the party when it's like a party, even in stir-even franks and rice taste good when you're hungry, even an iron bar feels good to touch, it feels good to sleep. It's like a party even in maximum security and who wants to walk out of a party into something that nobody knows anything at all about? If you think like that you ain't got no class. But I feel I've been around longer than fifty-two years. I know you think I'm younger. Everybody does, but I'm really fifty-two. But take you, for instance. You ain't never done nothing for me. And then take the Cuckold, for instance. He's done everything for me. He gets me my smokes, my paper, my outside food and I get along with him fine, but I don't like him. What I'm trying to say is that I ain't learned all I know through experience. I ain't learned through experience at all. I like you and I don't like the Cuckold and it's that way all down the line and so I figure I must come into this life with the memories of some other life and so it stands that I'll be going into something else and you know what, Zeke, you know what, I can hardly wail to see what it's going to be like, I can hardly wait. I don't want to sound like one of those freaks who ain't got no class, one of those freaks who go around saying that since they have tasted death they got no fear, no fear at all. I got class. I mean like right now, right now if they were going to take me out before a firing squad I'd go out laughing-I don't mean bitter laughing or broken-hearted laughing, I mean real laughing. I'd go out there and I'd dance my soft-shoe and with luck I'd have a good hard-on and then when they got the command to fire I'd throw my arms out so as not to waste any of their ammunition, so as to get the full benefit of their banging, and then I'd go down a very happy man because I'm intensely interested in what's going to happen next, I'm very interested in what's going to happen next."
There was still a little light in the window. Dance music came from Ransome's radio and at the end of the corridor on TV he could see a group of people having trouble. An old man was intoxicated with the past. A young man was intoxicated with the future. There was a young woman who had trouble with her lovers and an old woman who could be seen hiding gin bottles in hat boxes, refrigerators and bureau drawers. Out of the window beyond their heads and shoulders Farragut could see waves breaking on a white beach and the streets of a village and the trees of a forest, but why did they all stay in one room, quarreling, when they could walk to the store or eat a picnic in the woods or go for a swim in the sea? They were free to do all of this. Why did they stay indoors? Why didn't they hear the sea calling to them as Farragut heard it calling, imagined the clearness of the brine as it fanned out over the beautiful pebbles? Chicken Number Two snored loudly or his breathing was guttural or perhaps this was the death rattle.