Searches & Seizures

by Stanley Elkin

  “But you know something? I lied, I told a fib to the fucking service department of Ohio Bell. Because it ain’t A-OK. Pas de doing with the university. The chancellor is not making his arrangements. You play golf, Doctor? What’s your handicap? Wait, I’ll tell you. Your handicap is that when this place goes sky-high you won’t know where to turn! Do the deal, my dear Doctor of Philosophy. Twenty-five hundred kids at an average bond of three hundred dollars. That’s three-quarters of a million dollars, Doc. Who’s going to approve that kind of dough? Your trustees? With their politics? ‘Let the bastards rot,’ they’ll say. Right. And from that moment on the world can forget the University of Cincinnati. After all you did. All that work down the drain.

  “All right, let’s be serious, let’s be serious business people. I can’t take on twenty-five hundred kids by myself. It’s not the money; I could probably raise that. A bondsman has tie-ins with insurance companies, loan associations, sometimes he can even get banks to pick up some of his paper. The sky just could be the limit in certain circumstances. So it ain’t the money. It’s the number. How can I keep an eye on two thousand, five hundred crazies? I can’t. Humanly impossible. Statistically out of the question. I’m sorry; that’s it, it’s useless to argue. But I’ll tell you what I will do. I’ll spring five hundred. It’s asking a lot, but I’ll do it. I’m overextending, but don’t concern yourself. I’ll want a retainer from the university. A buck a head.”

  “This is incredible. Are you actually a bondsman?”

  “Thirty-eight years in the same location. Centrally located, convenient to all courts and many jails. Look, here’s what I’m doing. I’m having a contract drawn up. Mr. Crainpool will hand-carry it to the university. If you like what you see, sign it. If not don’t, and you haven’t spent a dime. You’ll have the specimen contract inside twenty-four hours. That’s pressing me, but we have to get off our duffs, Chancellor, the sky is falling.”

  I hang up, slip the contract I’ve already drawn up out of my desk, sign it, have Mr. Crainpool witness it and tell him to pop it by the university on his way to work tomorrow. Mr. Crainpool lives out that way. A respectful, very soft-sell letter accompanies the document spelling out our mutual undertakings. Chances are nothing will come of it, but in these times who can tell? I do take the campus newspaper; something like what I outlined to the chancellor could happen. A bright bondsman stays on top of things.

  “What’s on, Mr. Crainpool? Anything come up while I was at court?”

  “No.”

  “Nothing at all? Sometimes the merest inquiry or the most innocuous information can lead to the biggest action.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Where’s all this fucking crime in the streets I keep hearing about? I sometimes think the people around here aren’t pulling their oar.”

  “No, sir.”

  “They’re letting us down, Mr. Crainpool.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You remember when Covington was wide open?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “That’s what this reminds me of.”

  Covington is across the Ohio River in Kentucky. Till they cleaned it up a few years ago it used to be the wildest town in America. Gambling, strip joints, after-hours places, whorehouses, the lot. It may have been the only small town in the country with its own press bureau. Articles used to come out regularly in the men’s magazines—“Covington, Kentucky: Sin City, U.S.A.” It was terrific. It was terrific, but it was an optical illusion. Organized crime, you could starve to death. The only licensed bondsman in town used to complain to me. He’d cross the river and sing the blues. I told him when he first moved out there, “Harry, you’re wasting your time in the suburbs. They’ll never amount to a hill of shit. That’s syndicate money, that’s family. That’s no place for the little man.”

  “Button your sweater, Mr. Crainpool, please. How many times do I have to tell you?”

  I like him to look cold. It gives him the look of a clerk in Dickens and lends tone to the place. I even made him a high stool he can sit on when a client comes into the shop. He slips on these arm garters and a little green eyeshade. I try to get him to wear a muffler but he’s allergic.

  “You’re supposed to call Edna,” Mr. Crainpool says.

  “Right, Mr. Crainpool. Thank you.”

  There’s no need for Mr. Crainpool to dial it for me; I remember the number. Oh, my flat Phoenician head, my definitive, paradigmatic eyes like the cutouts in masks—all my archaeological features like the beaked profiles of birds, the ledges of my lids deep as window sills, my ears, pressed back as a hairdo: all this information in me, my face built for remembering, my black eyes that can hold accusation and grudge in them, commodious, flexible as the infinity of configurations in the interiors of airplanes. Of course I remember the number.

  “Is Edna up, Mrs. Shea?…What, don’t recognize my voice yet? And meself after callin’ yer daughter these many times these many months?…Well, if you don’t, you don’t. You’re a good woman, Mrs. Shea, sad fortune gave you your daughter and your cross.…What’s that?…No no, ’tisn’t Fatha, Mrs. Shea, ’tis Mr. Main. Through whose good offices your daughter sleeps under your roof instead of in some godless cell, or walks where you and me both know she oughtn’t! Be so good as to wake her for me, Mrs.…Edna? Alexander, Edna. Mother tells me you were in bed. Been taking those pills then, have you, Edna? Good, sweetheart. How many have you got left?…What’s that?…Then go see at once, you filthy pig. Wait. Put Mom on the extension.…Mrs. Shea, hasn’t Edna gone through the bottle Mr. Crainpool left? How many?…As much as that? Edna, you fiend, Mummy tells Uncle Al you’ve still got twelve tabs in the bottle. You haven’t been taking your medicine, dear.…Oh, la, you answer pretty good for a girl who’s supposed to be doped up. You haven’t been taking the pills, Eddy. Never mind putting on that where-am-I voice for me. You came to the phone too quick. You want me after you, girl? You want me to have you fixed? You want your tongue rolled in the acid bath, or the knife taken to your taste buds? That’d fix you pretty good, wouldn’t it, dearie? Don’t you know even the first thing about appetite—a girl with one like yours? Think, sweetheart, if you beat this rap and they let you out in the streets again, you wouldn’t even be able to smell a playground. You’d rub up against the first diamond wire fence you came to. Pathetic, pathetic, child. You’d wait for recess and find when the whistle blows it’s only some factory you’ve been hanging round.”

  “They make me sleepy,” Edna whines. “I can’t think. They make me goofy.”

  “Mnephenedrin? They relax you, doll. They keep you away from the bus stations and off the superhighways, and Uncle Al doesn’t have to worry about you. Enjoy the pills. Pretend you’re on vacation.”

  “I get nervous.”

  “All right, Edna, if you’re not going to cooperate I’ll have to send Mr. Crainpool out with the cold serum. You’re leaving me no alternative. One injection and your nose will run till your trial comes up. Your head will be stuffed. Your throat will tickle like poison ivy. You want that, darling?”

  “I’m not going off anywhere.”

  “Mama, you still on the phone?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Two pills for Edna today. One with her orange juice, another tonight. Drop it in the back of her mouth yourself so you can see she’s really swallowing it. All right, Edna, listen dear, it’s only another two weeks. Do as I say. You think all I’m trying to do is protect an investment? Kid, I like your style. I take an interest in your case. You’re a credit to the deviates, darling. I don’t want to see a really innovative cookie like you shut up with a lot of tough broads. They menstruate, Edna. Every babe in the Ohio whoresgow—that’s my name for it, daughter, the whoresgow—has blood on her. An odor so strong it would come right through Mr. Crainpool’s serum. I’m telling you, Eddy, the state gives out sanitary napkins. The toilets are choked with ’em. More egg in the air than at all the breakfast tables in the world. You want to go to a place like that? Now
stop that crying, Edna; don’t go soft, kid. I’m just laying the cards out on the table for you, covering aspects you might have missed. You’ve got a good lawyer. With your psychiatric record you don’t have a thing to worry about. Chances are they won’t even lock you up; you’ll be an outpatient right in Cincinnati. Do you know where the clinic is, Edna? I’ve saved the best for the last, dear. Do you have any idea at all where they built that clinic? Right next to a nursery school!…Of course I’m not kidding, sure I’m telling the truth. Take your pill, doll. Go back to bed. In a couple of weeks we’ll wake you and take you to court. Okay? Say okay, sweetheart. Tell me okay.”

  “Okay.”

  “Good. That’s a promise, Edna. That’s a bond, honeybunch. Sleep now, sweetie. Night night.…Mama, are you still there? The orange juice, Mama. Go get it for her please.”

  Mr. Crainpool grins slyly when I replace the receiver. “There’s no such serum,” he says.

  “Botheration, Mr. Crainpool, this is intolerable! Listening to my private conversation, were you?”

  “Wasn’t private, was a business call.”

  “Blow on your hands, sir. Button your sweater. Look cold.”

  “It’s almost April.”

  “Out there, Mr. Crainpool.” I point to the Venetian blinds, so tightly shut that their louvers make a solid creamy wall. “Out there it’s almost April. In here it’s the Dark Ages. There’s capital punishment, men languish in prison for debt, hang for a stolen horse, poaching, a loaf filched for love. Severed heads, could you but see them, perch taking the weather on the flagstaffs above Riverfront Stadium, and not the pennants of the National League. The executioner’s head like a black bullet in its hood. Yes and class divides like the surgeon. It Moseses us left and right. You eat too much, Mr. Crainpool, you’re too well-fed. Easy on the starch and sauces, sir. Make yourself wan and drawn, if you’d be so kind.”

  Mr. Crainpool chuckles. His master is a strange old codger.

  “Cool the cackle, Crainpool. I’m talking about image. How would tapers look in here, do you suppose? A bit much, you think? Eh? Oh well, you may be right. We must learn to make do with what’s given—fluorescent tubing, running water and the rulings of the late, unlamented Warren Court.”

  The door opens and a little bell sounds. Like in a bakery or an old candy store. I don’t suppose much of this registers on my clients, but perhaps I get to them subliminally.

  Mr. Crainpool, per his training, scratches arduously in a ledger. I look up casually and greet the newcomer, a man in a checkered sports coat, loud matching shirt and tie, new style cuffs on his flaring trousers. He has a sort of crew cut and looks for all the world like an off-duty cop. (I cast no aspersions. I like cops, but they do look vacuous sometimes. That air they have of concentration that comes from having to remember their lines, the unnatural vocabulary they’re lumbered with, that abject, dispassionate diction of the trade, having to say words like “Negro” and “alleged” and “suspect,” speaking as they do increasingly these days for Xerox and the tape recorder, for bookkeeping and the public record. And that sense of direction cops have, having always to be oriented, going about like human compasses, knowing the avenues, forced to think in terms of east and south, his left, my right—that’s what does it.) So this fellow looks abstracted. We often get them in here. They tip us off about raids and sometimes consult us about the nature of the charges to be brought. One man’s collusion is another man’s professional courtesy. (But the cops don’t really like us. They envy us our powers of arrest, stronger even than their own. And we don’t have to deal with the technicalities of extradition, and carry guns lightly as credit cards.)

  “Top of the morning,” I tell him pleasantly.

  “Top of the morning yourself.” This man is not a policeman.

  “Raise the blinds please, Mr. Crainpool. A little sunshine on the tough here. You had me fooled, son.”

  “You the Phoenician?”

  “I am Mr. Alexander Main, the bailbusinessman.”

  “I’m from out of state.”

  “You’re lost?”

  “I’m Mafia, Pops.”

  “Mafia, wow.”

  “Wow? This is how you talk to a mobster?”

  “One call on the hot line and you’ll never talk out of the side of your mouth again. Me and the Don of all the Dons are like that. I call him Donny. Behave yourself. Nice folks don’t come in off the street on a bright and sunny morning and say ‘I’m Mafia, Pops.’ Who are you, son? Where are you from?”

  “Chicago. They call me ‘the Golfer.’”

  “The Golfer, eh? What do you shoot?”

  “People,” we both say together. I turn to Mr. Crainpool. “Mr. Crainpool, do you hear this dialogue? What a business this is! The nearer the bone you go, lifewise and deathwise, the saltier the talk. Peppery. You could flavor meat with our exchanges.”

  It’s true what I tell Crainpool. I’m called on to make colorful conversation in my trade. Don’t think I enjoy it. I’m a serious man; such patter is distasteful to me. When day is done I like nothing better than to ask my neighbor how he’s feeling, to hear he’s well and tell him same here, to trade what we know about the weather, to be agreeable and aloof and dull. Leave poetry to the poets, style to the window trimmers. I’m old. I should have grandchildren. But I turn back to the young man who will tire one day, should he outlive his apprenticeship, of such cheap excitements. We’re doing business. He’s come from Chicago and expects his money’s worth. “All right,” I tell him, “you’re Mafia. What do you want, you gonna put a jukebox in here? I got to change the beer I been using thirty years? What?”

  “There’s a man in town. We don’t know where he is, but the pigs do. He’ll be picked up. We want you to spring for him.”

  “What? On your recognizance? Do you hear this, Mr. Crainpool? I put up my money—if the man is even bailable—then the Golfer here takes him out in a hole-in-one, and when the yobbo doesn’t show up for his trial I’m out of pocket.”

  “You won’t be out of pocket. The cops don’t know what they’re getting. His bond won’t be set higher than a few thousand—five thousand. We advance you the cash forfeiture. You make five hundred bucks.”

  “Young fellow, no. I don’t need the business.”

  “Mr. Main, it’s Command Performanceville,” he says softly.

  Oh, he’s very sinister. “Why didn’t you say Command Performanceville in the first place? Command Performanceville’s another story. For Command Performanceville my commission is thirty percent.”

  “Drinks all around,” he says agreeably. “I’ll put you in the picture.”

  “I read the book, I seen the picture. Your man downtown calls my man downtown who tells me your lad is under arrest. It’s strictly offside vis-a-vis the other bondsmen, but I get to him first, arrange the bail, and he steps out into the sunshine a free man.”

  “A hundred percent.”

  “That will be sixty-five hundred dollars please.”

  “C.O.D.”

  “C.O.D.?”

  “Phoenician, Mr. Main, I’m a sporty young man. I drive fast cars fast. How would it look I was picked up for speeding and the cops found sixty-five hundred bucks on me? Use your keppeleh. Did we know you drive such a hard bargain?”

  “I drive hard bargains hard.”

  “Of course, of course. You’ll be paid. The handle plus thirty percent. You’ll get registered mail. Who’s more honest than a syndicate man?”

  “Then why do you speed?” I ask gloomily.

  But there’s reason on the young fellow’s side. We shake and he leaves. The little bakery bell jingles behind him. Mr. Crainpool looks at me reproachfully, sorrow in his eyes like the toothache. “Something on your mind, Jiminy Cricket?”

  “No, sir.”

  “What would happen if I refused? Fetterman would do it, or Klein. Adams would. Does Macy tell Gimbel?”

  “It’s only fifteen hundred dollars after the forfeit.”

  “Oh h
o. I see where it is with you. It’s all right to finger a man, just make sure you get a good price. Mr. Crainpool, kid, my finger comes cheap. If they ask how I do it, say it’s my terrific turnover.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We would rather be a banker in a fine suit. We would rather conduct discreet business over drinks at the club. Heart to heart, man to man, gentlemen’s agreements and a handshake between friends. We would prefer silver at our temples and a portrait in oils in the marble lobby. But…”

  Even Crainpool gets the benefit of my colorful rhythms. This is what is distasteful, not the high hand and the strong arm. The rhetoric. To be laconic, taciturn, the quiet type. To speak modestly and thank my clients for their custom. Nothing can make up for this, not the viciousness or the seamy excitements or my collective, licey knowledge of the world. Boy oh boy, what goes on. My thoughts explode in words. I tell Crainpool.

  “Do you know, Mr. Crainpool, the progress of the liver fluke through a cow’s intestine to a human being? That’s a picture. The trematode worm forms itself in shit, is discharged in a cow’s stool. It can’t crawl, it can’t fly. All its mobility is concentrated toward one end, the act of boring. So, good nature’s corkscrew that it is, it infiltrates the foundation of a blade of grass. Everything else in the cow pat dies off—every microbe, every virus. Just the flatworm, rising out of its matrix of shit like a befouled Phoenix to nest in the basement of a single blade of grass, only that survives. Even the cow moves on, wants distance between its manure and its lunch. Well, the rains come, the sun shines, the grass grows. The fluke hasn’t hurt it; it’s only along for the ride. Till finally it’s at the top, which is the only part of the grass that the sheep will touch—his heart of artichoke and palm. A connoisseur, the sheep. And that’s all that that trematode has been waiting for, some nasty radar in him that Reveres his logy instincts and tells him the sheep are coming, the sheep are coming. Lying in ambush all that time till the grass is high enough to munch. Then the paralyzed little creature goes crazy. It hasn’t stirred its ass all the while it’s been on the grass, mind, but now suddenly it leaps out of its wheelchair and walks, runs, does fucking triples, commandos the sheep’s liver, where it’s wanted to be all along, you see. Swimming the mile, doing the decathlon, dancing, dining, diamonds shining, making right for the liver, riding there like an act of vengeance, like a bronco-buster, spoiling the sheep’s piss, poisoning the ground the sick sheep shits. Only now it’s metamorphosed, now it’s some viper butterfly to sting the heels of the barefoot kid on one of those fucking calendars of ours. Nature’s nasty marathon, its stations of the cross and inside job.