Searches & Seizures

by Stanley Elkin

  Taciturn still, yet his imagination so greased by daily contact with the surreal that over the years his character had seemed to turn itself inside out as you would reverse trousers to sew their seams, it was Lester Adams who opened the conference. “They’re killing us, gentlemen. The social scientists and New Left coalitions and civil libertarians. The Supreme Court—and don’t kid yourselves, the Burger Court not only is not all that different from the Warren Court but in certain respects is even more dangerous, because where the Warren guys merely built up the rights of the indigent, this so-called conservative crew is inventing rights for the fat cats. Anybody here who wouldn’t rather go bail for the president of GM than Pete the Tramp? All that’s happened is that now they have a legacy. With a legacy these strict constructionists are going to wall up our assholes. History is stubborn; once its mind is made up it’s made up. Compassion is an historical inevitability and we have no better chance of bringing back laissez-faire than we do public whippings.

  “So they’re killing us. The 1966 Federal Bail Reform Act which gave federal courts the discretion to act as their own bondsmen and accept a ten-percent bond up front has already put us out of kidnapping, skyjackings and political assassinations. It’s put us out of bank stickups where the robbers have crossed state lines. It’s pushed us off antitrust, and it’s going to take the big antipollution cases that are coming up right out of our fucking mouths. Crime, gentlemen, is increasingly political. It’s thrown us out of the more apocalyptic riots and raised the bridge on espionage—which admittedly has never been big for us—and it has the potential to squeeze us out of narcotics, to say nothing of the new pattern of conspiracy prosecutions which I see emerging. With all these grass-roots Legal Defense Funds, this could have been the most lucrative fiddle of all.

  “Mark my words. As crime turns increasingly against the state and the people get the wind up, all that’s going to be left for us poor bastards are the petty thieves, wife beaters and dog poisoners. The chicken stealers—that’s our meat. Vagrants. Shit, colleagues, even abortion’s legal today. Five and dime, gentlemen, penny ante times, a métier of small potatoes like a little Ireland. In fact, there’s some doubt in my mind that even this will be permitted us. As heart wins the battle of history and bail commissions throughout the length and breadth of the land each day secure releases for ‘good risks,’ we’re going to be left with only the two- and three-time losers. You’d do better to take a flier in a Bronx uranium mine. We’re dead ducks, fellows, law’s dirty old men.”

  “We know all that,” Barney Fetterman said. “We know all that. What do we do?”

  Ted Caccerone stood up. He had a Coca-Cola in his hand. There was A-1 sauce on the side of his mouth, and crumbs from the open-faced bun on which his London broil had lain. “We undersell. We cut our fee to seven and a half percent.”

  “A gas war,” Art Klein said, “we’ll have a fucking gas war.”

  “We won’t be so quick to shoot,” Paulie Shannon said. “Somebody jumps bail on us we bring him back alive, we talk him down like an expert in the control tower, we come on like social workers, we change our hard-guy image.”

  “We take turns at the courthouse, we draw a number, stand on line, everything courteous. We get rules, choreography. Like in gin rummy the dealer gives the other guy first shot at the face card.”

  “Who’s in?” Adams asked.

  “I am,” said Shannon.

  “Me too,” said Klein.

  “It’ll have to be worked out,” Ted Caccerone said, “but I guess I can go along.”

  “Something has to be done, that’s for sure,” Walter Mexico said. “Some sort of committee ought to study some of these suggestions we’ve been hearing, formalize them, and then we can put it to a vote.”

  “Would you chair such a committee?” Adams asked.

  “Sure, why not?”

  “Where’s the Phoenician?” Barney Fetterman said.

  “It’s got to be rationalized,” C. M. Smith said. “Blunt the competition, is that what we’re saying?”

  “Just about,” said Lester Adams.

  “Lapels shouldn’t come off in our fingers in the corridor, is that the idea? Okay, who’s going to be on the committee?”

  “We’re the committee,” Adams said, “this is the committee.”

  “Where’s that Phoenician?”

  “We don’t jump the gun,” said Paulie Shannon, “we pool our resources. I think it’s the only way. I’m glad this is your thinking. I think a lot’s been accomplished today.”

  “But we’ve all got to commit ourselves to this, that’s the important thing. Otherwise it’s no good. We’ve got to behave like brothers. Where’s that goddamn Phoenician?”

  “That fucker. He’s off beating our time.”

  “He plays Sooner with us we’ll wipe him.”

  “Where is the son of a bitch?”

  3.

  Alexander nods to the guard. The old man frowns, bored as ever. Main notes his shoes, the heavy, cumbersome shoe shape like some pure idea of foot in a child’s drawing. The broad black leather facing, a taut vault of hide, a sausage, all its tensions resolved as if ribbed by steel or some hideous flush fist of foot. The shine speaks for itself. There is discipline in it, duty, and he wonders if there is a changing room somewhere where the men polish these stout casings, get them that lusterless, evenly faded black that has no equivalent in nature.

  The shoes are made to go with the heavy serge of the uniform, the now formless trousers that may have been formless when new, the long drop to the dark ankles, black themselves, black on black on black, undifferentiated as the cloths in a stage illusion. Alexander wonders if the guard has back trouble, if he soaks his feet in hot salt water. These oiled and bare wood floors, pale as match sticks, faintly dipping, uneven. Marbles set down on them would tumble erratically, collect in some unpredictable pool of gravity. This same force would suck at the man’s feet, pulling at them painfully through the solid soles as he stood all day in his area. Alexander senses the old man’s crotchets, his distaste for stragglers, his ambiguous desires for female art students whose backs, propelled forward in their chairs, reveal an orbit of the elastic tops of underwear above their blue jeans, sliver of the moon, cantaloupe slice of pantie, square inches of backflesh forgotten behind them in their young concentration like Cinderella’s slipper. Does he even see the exhibits? Has he a favorite? Or is his concern only for the glass cases themselves, for whistling, loud talk and no smoking?

  As he often does, Main feels an odd envy of the man, of his circumscribed conditions. It suddenly strikes him that the guard is the only person on his Christmas list who is not a lawyer or judge, cop or custodial officer, clerk of the court or prison official. And though the guard gets nothing that Main has especially picked out for him, only the box of good cigars or bottle of Scotch or top-grade Florentine leather wallets bought in bulk for his least important contacts, this makes him, he supposes, his friend. A friendship that is entirely one way, for to the extent that he considers Main at all, the man almost certainly thinks of him as a crank. There must be others, drawn as he is, to this place, or to some other like it. Though Alexander has never seen them, has seen only the schoolchildren and illicit lovers and the vague flirts and lonely, overanxious men.

  He loves the cool, big room, its antiquated radiators and old-fashioned exhibit cases, its antiquated space, the corny visual aids, the large type on the yellowing cards by the exhibits. He loves the teeth.

  “Afternoon,” Main tells the guard.

  The man nods and Main steps away from him and goes toward the case. “These specimens,” reads the legend, “were obtained from drugstores in the Far East. The apothecaries regarded them as ‘dragon’s teeth,’ no matter what they really were. The teeth shown here probably came from cave deposits in the Karst of South China, for they are like the teeth of the Middle Pleistocene animals found in the region.”

  He sees the tooth of the giant panda, large as a small
seashell, the impression across its broad grinding surface like a curled fetus. Next to it a pair of molars from an orang-utan, the shape and shade of old dice, three deep holes in each like a goblin’s face, history throwing a six. There’s the dentin of a wild pig, dark as root beer, the pulp chambers in cross section like the white veins in liver. He sees the enormous tooth of a rhinoceros, taking the card’s word for it. It does not even resemble a tooth; it is deep, chambered as a lock. In another case there is a comb of kangaroo jaw, four teeth blooming from the bone like cactus.

  He moves along a ledge of the extinct, peers at the camel-like jaw of the Macrauchenia Patachonica: “a member,” says the card, “of the peculiar South American ungulate orders. This genus was camel-like but others were horse-like. Thus the litopterns show parallelism with the more familiar true camels and horses.” The keyboard of teeth float in the petrified gum like tulip bulbs. And the lower jaw of a ground sloth, relative of the Megatherium, the teeth driven like stakes deep into the bone, all shapes, one a figure eight worn down to the ground, another like a tree stump, a third like a pipe, a fourth with a crown the texture of target cork. The teeth are in terrible disrepair. (They died this way, Alexander thinks, biting their pain.) A root thicker than the wire in a coat hanger rises a full inch above the awful terraces of decay which surround it. There are teeth long and thick and curved as tusks—these were inside a mouth, Main thinks—huge as jai alai bats.

  As always, Alexander ignores the skeletons, the carefully wrought xylophonic carcasses, immense scaffoldings of spine, he supposes, from a hundred animals, so that what he sees is some ancient committee of beast he finds it difficult to believe in (though he is fascinated by the individual parts: the shield-like pelvis, the separate vertebrae, long as the hilts of swords, a hinged jaw like the underedge of a key). Comically a megathere squats upright pawing a prop tree, its odd squat like some plantigrade, prehistoric crap. No. It is the teeth. The tiny spines in the skull of a young jaguar, curiously white, sharp as toenail. Skin still adheres to the palate, the concentric tracery distinct and fine as what he touches with his tongue at the roof of his own mouth. It is teeth that he comes back again and again to see, as if these were the distillate of the animal’s soul, the cutting, biting edge of its passion and life.

  He is thinking in geological time now, in thousands of millions of years—thinking Pre-Cambrian, Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous, saddened at the sixty-million-year-old threshold of his own immediate past, Paleocene, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene, Quaternary. From seaweeds, younger only than the earth’s crust, through invertebrate animals, fishes, land plants, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, birds and men. He is weeping.

  The guard approaches him. “Are you all right, sir?”

  “What? Oh. Yeah,” the Phoenician says, “I’m a sentimental old fool.” He starts past the guard, his friend.

  “I was wondering something,” the guard says.

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, it’s just that you spend so much time here.”

  “Yeah, well,” he tells the keeper, “I’ll tell you why that is. I’m a dentist.”

  He was late for lunch. (As so often on museum days, his sense of time—he is an early riser, beats others to appointments, brisk as a candidate when it is time for the next, goes late to bed, paper work in the toilet, on the bus home, carrying no brief case but all pockets stuffed with correspondence, pens, notepaper, stamps ready in his wallet—turned tragic, pulling long faces, the past slowing his blood, thickening it, stopping his watch.) He did not even have time to go back to the office.

  The bus stop he’d chosen, looking back over his shoulder as he walked from one the two blocks to the next, was outside a drugstore. A woman waited with a shopping bag.

  “Missus,” Alexander said, “have you been waiting long?”

  “About ten minutes.”

  “Just miss a bus?”

  “It was pulling away when I came out of Kroger’s.”

  If he hurried he would have just enough time to call Crainpool.

  “Crainpool?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What’s up?”

  “It’s been very quiet.”

  “No messages?”

  “The man who was in earlier stopped by.”

  “What? The mobster?”

  “He said Mr. Morgan gave him the slip. He holds you responsible.”

  “Does he, now? Has there been an afternoon mail?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well?”

  “There was nothing from Chile, nothing from Iran.” Crainpool chuckled.

  “East Germany?”

  “No word from East Germany.”

  The Phoenician cracks down the receiver so hard that the drugstore clerk looks up at him. Loose, he thinks, fugitives at large—the phrase, as always, chilling, raising goosebumps. He thinks of swamps, caves, passes in mountains. Loose. At large. He thinks of settlements so inland in terrains so forbidding that the inhabitants have no language. The chatter of apes, perhaps, the signals of birds. As always, the idea of such remoteness abstracts his face, neutralizes his features, a sort of paralysis of the attention. People watching him wish to help.

  “Is there something you wanted, sir?” the clerk asks. At large, loose.

  “Hmn?”

  “Is there anything I can get you?” Loose.

  “What have you got that’s binding?” He sees his bus outside and rushes to board it.

  They are in Hilgemann’s Restaurant at the girl’s request. At his they have chosen to remain indoors rather than to dine outside in the beer garden. Though it’s warm enough, the long bare vines snaking among the trellis make him nervous. He could never have been a farmer; he is a bailbondsman because he can exercise some control over his crops of criminals, his staggered harvests so nearly continuous that he feels he does not deal in time at all. (His calendars are only a sort of map, like the precinct maps in police stations.) So they are inside, in an Ohio approximation of Bavaria, leashed to reality by the sealed blue hemispheres of Diners Club, American Express’s bland centurion and Master Charge’s interlocking gold and orange circles decaled on the window like bright postage. He sees airy clubs, spades and hearts between the spindles of the heavy, low-backed captain’s chairs, notices the sweet intrusion of a stuffed deer’s head—no teeth there—and the elaborate plaster-of-Paris mugs that hang from their handles above the bar and that gravity arranges in identical angles, a fringe of falling men, with here and there a lidded pewter beer mug like a tiny hookah or an early, complicated steam engine. Once Herr Hilgemann offered to present the Phoenician with his own, and to have his name inscribed on it. “I’m not a joiner,” he told him. He sees without appetite the heavy portions of thick, stringy meats—flank and chuck and pot roasts, and sanded schnitzels, worms of anchovy curled on them like springs. Thick gravies wound the table linen. There are constructs of pastry, geometric lattices of chocolate, baked bridges of caramel, fretworks of crust, flake, cherries in cross section like the intimate slivers of biopsy. Among these moist ruins Main chews the sandwich he cannot taste; he does not want the fearful cutlery in his mouth, those heavy tines.

  He is amazed at the girl’s appetite. The lunch, as Miss Krementz might have guessed, is unnecessary; this could have been handled in the office, or on the phone. He might have asked her, as he had asked others, to write a composition for him: “Why I Think——————Will Not Jump Bail.”

  He doesn’t even feel like explaining it to her. He feels like taking a nap, like dreaming of fugitives, for though they are his nightmares, at least in his dreams he is with them, learning their plans, seeing them in their new settings and fresh disguises.

  “All right,” he says, and puts down his sandwich. By the time he is ready to speak he has already decided against her boyfriend. “Arson’s one of the highest bonds there is. It’s a very high bond. You set fire to a building—”

>   “But he didn’t.”

  Alexander shrugs. “You set fire to a building you bring the insurance companies into it. They’re the ones who determine the prices; not me. I admit it isn’t fair. Every sort of minority pressure group exists in this country, but who gives a second thought to the arsonist? Fire Power! I’m just thinking out loud.”

  “His lawyer says we’ve got to get him out, that there’s too great a presumption of guilt if he stays in before the trial.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Well, what do you say? Have you made up your mind?”

  “I have to give you a test.”

  “A test.”

  “It’s routine.”

  “What do I have to do? Hey, wait a minute, I’m not looking for a part in your picture. Don’t get any funny ideas.”

  “What, the crap you eat? You’d blow me out of bed.”

  “Okay, I just wanted that understood. I’ll give you a cashier’s check. We’ll go to the bank and have it drawn up.”

  “You have to pass the test.”

  “I have to pass the test.”

  “It’s a very stupid test.”

  “All right. Let’s get it over with.”

  “It’s not scientific. It isn’t for an educated person like yourself.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Actually it’s an insult to your intelligence.”

  “Try me, for God’s sake.”

  “How much do you love Mr. Hunsicker?”

  “What?”

  “How much do you love him? Do you love him a bunch?”

  “Certainly. Of course I do.”