The instant seemed conspiratorial in its intensity. Farragut felt pursued but easily ahead of his pursuers. Cunning was needed; cunning he seemed to possess, that and tenderness. He went to the chair beside Chicken Number Two's bed and took the dying man's warm hand in his He seemed to draw from Chicken Number Two's presence a deep sense of freeness; he seemed to take something that Chicken Number Two was lovingly giving to him. He felt some discomfort in the right cheek of his buttocks, and half-standing, he saw that he had been sitting on Chicken's false teeth. "Oh, Chicken," he cried, "you bit me in the ass." His laughter was the laughter of the deepest tenderness and then he began to sob. His sobbing was convulsive and he rode it and let it run its course. He then called Tiny. Tiny came without asking any questions. "I'll get a doctor," he said. Then, seeing Chicken's naked arm with its dense and faded designs of gray tattooing, he said, "I don't think he spent no two thousand on tattoos like he said. It looks more like two hundred to me. He strangled an old woman. She had eighty-two dollars in her sugar bowl." Then he left. The light in the window was gone. The dance music and the misunderstandings on TV went on and on.
When the doctor came in he wore the same hat he had worn when he gave them short arm during the revolution. He still seemed unclean. "Call heaven," he said to Tiny. "We can't move no stiffs until twenty-two hundred," said Tiny. "That's the law." "Well, call later, then. He won't ferment. He's nothing but bones." They left and then Veronica and one of the other nurses came in with a canoe-shaped form made of light metal, which contained a long tan sack. They put Chicken into this and went away. Both the TV and Ransome's radio were giving commercials and Ransome tuned up his radio, a kindness perhaps.
Farragut stood with difficulty. Cunning was needed; cunning and the courage to take his rightful place in things as he saw them. He unzippered the sack. The noise of the zipper was some plainsong- some matter-of-fact memory of closing suitcases, toilet kits and clothes bags before you went to catch the plane. Bending over the sack, his arms and shoulders readied for some weight, he found that Chicken Number Two weighed nothing at all. He put Chicken into his own bed and was about to climb into the burial sack when some chance, some luck, some memory led him to take a blade out of his razor before he lay down in the cerements and zipped them up over his face. It was very dose in there, but the smell of his grave was no more than the plain smell of am vas; the smell of some tent.
The men who came to get him must have worn rubber soles because he didn't hear them come in and didn't know they were there until he fell himself being lifted up off the floor and carried. His breath had begun to wet the cloth of his shroud and his head had begun to ache. He opened his mouth very wide to breathe, afraid that they would hear the noise he made and more afraid that the stupid animalism of his carcass would panic and that he would convulse and yell and ask to be let out. Now the cloth was wet, the wetness strengthened the stink of rubber and his face was soaked and he was panting. Then the panic passed and he heard the opening and the closing of the first two gates and felt himself being carried down the slope of the tunnel. He had never, that he remembered, been carried before. (His long-dead mother must have carried him from place to place, but he could not remember this.) The sensation of being carried belonged to the past, since it gave him an unlikely feeling of innocence and purity. How strange to be carried so late in life and toward nothing that he truly knew, freed, it seemed, from his erotic crudeness, his facile scorn and his chagrined laugh-not a fact, but a chance, something like the afternoon light on high trees, quite useless and thrilling. How strange to be living and to be grown and to be carried.
He felt the ground level off at the base of the tunnel near the delivery entrance and heard the guard at post number 8 say, "Another Indian bit the dust. What do you do with No Known Relatives or Concerned?" "NKRC's get burned cheap," said one of the carriers. Farragut heard the last prison bars open and dose and felt the uneven footing of the drive. "Don't drop him, for Christ's sake," said the first carrier. "For Christ's sake don't drop him." "Look at that fucking moon, will you?" said the second carrier. "Will you look at that tucking moon?" They would be passing the main entrance then and going toward the gate. He felt himself being put down. "Where's Charlie?" said the first carrier. "He said he'd be late," said the second. "His mother-in-law had a heart attack this morning. He's coming in his own car, but his wife had to take it to the hospital." "Well, where's the hearse?" said the first carrier. "In for a lube and an oil change," said the second. "Well, I'll be Goddamned," said the first. "Cool it, cool it," said the second. "You're getting time and a half for doing nothing. Last year, the year before, sometime before Peter bought the beauty parlor, Pete and me had to carry out a three-hundred-pounder. I always thought I could lift a hundred and fifty easy, but we had lo rest about ten times to get that NKRC out of here. We were both puffing. You wait here. I'll go up to the main building and call Charlie and see where he is." "What kind of a car's he got?" asked the first. "A wagon," said the second. "I don't know what year. Secondhand, I guess. He put a new fender on himself. He's had trouble with the distributor. I'll call him." "Wait a minute, wait a minute," said the first. "You got a match?" "Yeah," said the second. "Your face and my ass." Farragut heard a match being struck. "Thanks," said the first, and he heard the footsteps of the second walk away.
He was outside the gate or anyhow near the gate. The watchtowers were unarmed at that hour, but there was the moon to worry about. His life hung on the light of the moon and a secondhand car. The distributor would fail, the carburetor would flood, and they would go off together looking for tools while Farragut escaped. Then he heard another voice: "You want a beer?" "You got one?" asked the carrier unenthusiastically, and Farragut heard them walk away.
By bracing his shoulders and his arms, he checked the stress points in his shroud. The warp of the canvas was reinforced with rubber. The neck or crown of the shroud was heavy wire. He got the razor blade out of his pocket and began to cut, parallel to the zipper. The blade penetrated the canvas, but slowly. He needed time, but he would not pray for time or pray for anything else. He would settle for the stamina of love, a presence he felt like the beginnings of some stair. The blade fell from his fingers onto his shirt and in a terrified and convulsive and clumsy lurch he let the blade slip into the sack. Then, groping for it wildly, he cut his fingers, his trousers and his thigh. Stroking his thigh, he could feel the wetness of the blood, but this seemed to have happened to someone else. With the wet blade between his fingers, he went on cutting away at his bonds. Once his knees were free he raised them, ducked his head and shoulders from under the crown and stepped out of his grave.
Clouds hid the light of the moon. In the windows of a watch house he could see two men. One of them drank from a can. Near where he had lain was a pile of stones, and trying to judge what his weight would be in stones, he put a man's weight into the shroud so that they would feed stones in the fire. He walked quite simply out of the gates into a nearby street that was narrow and where most of the people would be poor and where most of the houses were dark.
He put one foot in front of the other. That was about it. The streets were brightly lighted, for this was at that time in our history when you could read the small print in a prayer book in any street where the poor lived. This scrupulous light was meant to rout rapists, muggers and men who would strangle old women of eighty-two. The strong light and the black shadow he threw did not alarm him, nor was he alarmed by the thought of pursuit and capture, but what did frighten him was the possibility that some hysteria of his brain might cripple his legs. He put one foot in front of the other. His foot was wet with blood, but he didn't care. He admired the uniform darkness of the houses. No lights burned at all-no lights of sickness, worry or love-not even those dim lights that burn for the sake of children or their sensible fears of the dark. Then he heard a piano. It could not, that late at night, have been a child, but the fingers seemed stiff and ungainly and so he guessed it was someone old. The music was some beginner's piece-some simple minuet or dirge read off a soiled, dog-eared piece of sheet music-but the player was someone who could read music in the dark since the house where the music came from was dark.