A Bad Man

by Stanley Elkin

  He recalled his initial tours of their grounds when his son was a small boy and they had first moved to their house in the private suburb. In the back, set a good distance from the house and closed in by a low wall, was a large patio. One night Lilly had made supper out there—big steaks like great meaty South Americas, long fat cobs of corn, potatoes like brown, warm rocks, pale yellow butter, sour cream, rye bread, deep wet lakes of cream soda. Afterwards she went back into the house to do the dishes.

  Feldman laid down along the wide top of one of the patio walls and stared up at the just dark sky. One bright star blazed directly above him.

  “Come here, Billy,” he said to his son. The boy came and Feldman touched his cheek. “Bring Daddy a pillow from the house,” he said. When his son came back with the pillow, Feldman pulled him up on his stomach. “I’ll be your pillow.” He pulled him gently along his body. “Be careful,” he said, “don’t hurt me with your head.” Billy snuggled against Feldman. “Let’s look up at the night sky,” Feldman said. “I’ll give you all the stars you can count.”

  The boy counted four pale stars and the bright one Feldman had seen when he first lay down.

  “No you don’t,” Feldman said, “that bright one is mine.”

  “You said I could have all of them,” Billy said.

  “Not the bright one.”

  “What makes that star so bright?”

  “It’s closer.” He thought about light years.

  “Is that one Mars?”

  “Mars is a planet,” Feldman said. “It’s red.”

  “I can’t see it.”

  “It’s not out yet.” Feldman had never seen Mars.

  “What’s a planet? Is a planet a star?”

  “There are nine planets,” Feldman said. “Earth is a planet. And Mars. There’s Jupiter, and Saturn. Saturn has rings.” I’ve never been able to see the damn things, Feldman thought irritably. “Uranus is another planet.” He couldn’t think of the names of the other four. Maybe there were just two more. He couldn’t remember. He was pretty sure there weren’t just five. So much for the night sky.

  “I tell you what,” Feldman said, “I’ll trade you your four stars for my bright one.”

  “All right,” his son said.

  “Done,” Feldman said. By this time more stars had appeared.

  Feldman counted off eleven. “Those eleven stars are mine,” he said. “Daddy has fifteen, Billy has one.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “Look alive then.”

  “I’m mixed up,” his son said.

  Feldman had hoped that as the sky grew darker one of his stars would outshine his son’s, but it hadn’t happened. He saw that he had to get the bright star back from the kid. “Billy,” he said, “I’ll give you that new star for your star.” There wasn’t any new star, but Feldman pointed vaguely into the heavens.

  “No,” Billy said.

  “Billy, I think that new star is a planet.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It looks like a planet.”

  Billy looked into the sky.

  “All right,” he said.”

  “It’s an even trade,” Feldman said. “I get the bright star.”

  “All right,” Billy said. After that, Feldman grew tired of the game and made his son get up.

  “Billy has no sense of values,” he told his wife later. “He doesn’t have any idea how to do business. I killed him. You can tell him anything.”

  It bothered him, however, that he didn’t know anything about the stars except how to trade them. The next week he brought home a high-powered telescope from Cameras, but he never learned how to focus it properly.

  He saw at once on his tour of the prison that he would never use the gymnasium or the pool or go back to the crafts hall. But Jesus, he thought, remembering the warmth of his son’s body, what’s a man like me doing in prison?

  In the mornings a bell rang at 6:30, and the men had twenty minutes to dress and shave and clean their cells.

  His cellmate had told him the first morning that Feldman would have to clean the toilet and that he would do the sink himself.

  “Why don’t we draw straws?” Feldman asked cheerfully.

  “I already drew straws,” the man said. “You do the crapper.”

  It’s my new concern with shit, Feldman thought darkly. Some gesture must have revealed his repugnance, for a man directly across from him stood at the front of his cell, watching as Feldman, still in his blue suit, scrubbed the inside of the bowl, flushing it constantly as he worked. The man said nothing, but Feldman could hear him come forward each morning he kneeled into position above the toilet.

  One day Feldman watched as the man cleaned his toilet. That ended it—their caged inefficacy must have seemed as ridiculous to the man as it did to him, as if contempt without the possibility of blows and wounds was too wasteful, too extravagant. Perhaps it was for this reason that though arguments between men in the same cell were frequent and violent, conversations between cells were for the most part gentle. If their impotence taught them tolerance, it taught Feldman that the emotions were the first to go. There was comfort in this. Was that good?

  Was it even true? He was still suffering from the warden’s avowal that he was a bad man, his proclaimed nostril knowledge of his soul. (And Feldman was a man used to hatred. There had been competitors, people who worked for him, even some people who had loved him who yielded to hatred at the last. Too many men had bad hearts, ulcers; nail biters and strainers to piss, they wasted their substance, dissipating in envy and worry and grudge everything they had. The Ten Commandments were good hygiene, the Sermon on the Mount an apple a day. Victman was his enemy, Dedman was, Freedman, but was he theirs? He was as indifferent to their loathing as he was to the mechanical blessings of beggars he gave quarters to in the streets.) The warden’s hatred was different. It was the hatred of someone who didn’t have to hate him, hatred that flowed from strength rather than weakness, choice rather than injury, and it was disturbing to him, and confusing.

  What was there bad enough to hate? There was nothing. Being uncomfortable maybe. He thought of winded boys in shorts he had seen in the park, racing against themselves, their faces inhuman, distorted, their lungs bursting; of hedge-clippers, mowers of lawns, weekend washers of cars, of husbands and fathers around their own dinner tables on hot summer evenings with their jackets on—of all the volunteers for pain, chippers-in for suffering, tzouris-chasers there were in the world, of all the men and women who out of propriety refused second helpings, other people’s last cigarettes, candy, tips, favors, of every abstainer and ascetic and celibate who celebrated some baseless principle of thinness and hunger and lack. You can have it, Feldman thought, you can have not having.

  Yet the certainty of the warden’s contempt was alarming. Forget it, he told himself, the man’s a jerk, a man on a mountain with an upper hand. But he could not see him—in the first week he saw him twice more—without offering up some travesty of surrender, without waving some not understood white flag in his face.

  One afternoon the warden stopped by Feldman’s cell. “Why isn’t this man out with the others?” he asked the guard.

  “He says he’s sick, sir.”

  “How are you, Warden?” Feldman asked compulsively.

  The warden, of course, turned and walked on without answering.

  Then, during Warden’s Rounds, he came into their cellblock again. Feldman, excited, went to the bars to watch him. He noticed that the warden would stop before certain cells but not before others, and he understood at once that the cells he bypassed contained other bad men.

  The warden came up to his cell. “How are you getting on?” he asked.

  “About the same, sir,” Feldman said hurriedly. “Thank you.”

  “I was talking to Bisch,” the warden said, and backed off as if struck.

  It’s an act, Feldman thought angrily, it’s an act.

  But he was not at all sure that it
was.

  It had been more than a week, and they hadn’t bothered him. For three days his cold, which had never been bad, was better. One day he stopped his shammed cough. Momentarily he expected word from the officials, a command to appear at one of the prison shops. Perhaps they were waiting until he had his prison clothes. (He still wore his blue suit.) It was possible that they had run out of uniforms—loose, grayish sweat suits—for in the dining room and from his window overlooking the exercise yard he would occasionally spot others who still wore their street clothes too.

  So far he had had little contact with the other prisoners. His cellmate continued to ignore him (though from time to time, Feldman caught him eyeing him from his cot), and in the dining hall it was forbidden to speak. It was strange to sit there while food traveled noiselessly about the table: baskets of bread, bowls of scrawny fruit, platters of grayish vegetables and plates of thin, disreputable meat—apparently floating in sourceless, graceless flux, from one prisoner to the other. Initially Feldman was grateful for the enforced silence—he had feared harassment—but after a few days he began to regret it. He himself had been a bully at dinner tables, pushing and pulling conversation out of his guests like an old bored king. In restaurants he picked up checks to pay for the privilege.

  Now his fear was that no command would come, and he realized that his overtures to the warden had been probably meant to provoke one. It was surprising to think of, but he had never expected, after his arrest, to be let off. In a way he had actually been anticipating jail. He had missed the army, had never lived in a dormitory. His knowledge of large groups of men had been limited to the locker rooms of country clubs, but even there, in the carpeted corridors and shower rooms, with the tall, colorful bottles of hair oils stacked on the marble washstands like thick liqueurs behind a bar, he had sensed undertones of violence and truth. He did not want camaraderie; he wanted men: to be thrust among them, to see what would happen to him among them, to see what they would be like unencumbered by wives and kids and jobs they cared about—to see, finally, if they would be like himself.

  And still he waited—for prison clothes, for Bisch to talk to him, for a command. He spent most of his time lying on his cot alone in his cell—Bisch did not return until evening—and he could not have told himself that night what he had been thinking of that day. He thought, he supposed, of what men think of in the waiting rooms of train stations, or standing in lines, or driving on turnpikes.

  He was a man in jail for a crime that technically he had not committed. And that made him a victim. Yet he did not feel like a victim, nor even particularly wronged. He did not find himself, as he supposed many here did, waiting expectantly for communiqués from his lawyers. He did not even particularly believe in his appeal, nor in second chances generally. Though he was a man who usually made first moves, there was a vast inertia in him which made it difficult for him to believe in changes, revolutions, upsettings, rectifications, undoings.

  “Nothing doing,” he said aloud. It was as hard to get started on himself as it was to learn about the stars. (He wondered what was written about him in those records they kept.) In this prison, in this small cell no bigger than the rooms where he had slept out his childhood, guilt came as hard as righteousness.

  When Feldman was not on his cot or in the dining hall, he was at his window watching the exercise yard. There, in the early afternoon, the men came randomly from the different buildings about the enormous yard to walk beneath the guns of the guards. Most moved about talking quietly in small groups, seemingly conspiratorial clusters. But others—even two floors above, Feldman sensed their ruthless energy—might almost have been men splashing naked in lakes. It excited him to watch them. Frequently one would bolt forward in a sudden passionate run. It was pathetic to see him turned by a wall or have to pull abruptly up as he came near the others. Another might stop where he was to jump violently in place for a few moments. One man was constantly winding up in frantic arcs, but nothing came out of his hand when he threw. And certain others would sink abruptly to their knees as though hit by bullets and then roll about on the ground.

  The first time this happened Feldman looked instinctively to the guards who, though they had seen all that Feldman had, continued their careless, placid patrols along the walls. They did not seem to regard as important the sudden screams that tore from the throats of a few of the men like great flags of pain. Only later did Feldman realize that the guards never watched the groups at all, but concentrated instead on the seven or eight he had noticed.

  They were, like himself, men in street clothes.

  “We’re in business,” Feldman said softly. “Now. Now it comes.”

  4

  It did.

  Two days later when Feldman returned from his noon meal there was a brown paper parcel on his cot. He unwrapped it quickly. Inside was a blue suit like the one he wore but of a vastly cheaper quality. He understood that these were to be his prison clothes. The thick rich wool of the original had been vulgarized into a thin cotton blend, but the color and cut and shape were enough like his own that except for the feel Feldman suspected that even he couldn’t tell them apart.

  “The crooks,” he said, “they forged a suit.”

  He tried it on. There was no mirror, but he knew something was wrong. He felt oddly unbalanced, almost as if he had just put on new eyeglasses. When he walked across the cell he was aware from how it felt—coming suddenly up against a trouser leg with his thigh, or feeling a shoulder slip slightly from under a plank of cloth, experiencing as he moved in it an almost orchestrated series of tugs, clingings, pulls and slacknesses—that it was not so much a copy of his suit as a clever parody of it.

  He handled the pearl-gray buttons on the jacket. They were just too small for the buttonholes, which were just too large. On the sleeves, buttons big as watch crystals were sewn in a crooked line. He shoved one hand into a trouser pocket, blunting his fingers against its incredibly shallow bottom. On the other side the pocket was as deep as a third pants leg.

  He found one of Bisch’s pencils and wrote a note to the warden:

  I may be a bad man, but I am not a clown.

  This he gave to a guard, requesting that it be shown to the warden.

  Within an hour he had a reply:

  Don’t be ridiculous. Every bad man is a clown. All evil is a joke. And vice versa. Don’t send me notes; we are not pen pals.

  The guard came into the cell and confiscated Bisch’s pencils.

  “They’re not mine,” Feldman said worriedly. “They’re Bisch’s. He’ll kill me.”

  The guard shrugged and took the pencils.

  That very night Bisch wanted to write a letter. “Where’s my pencil?” he asked darkly.

  “The guard took your pencils,” Feldman said. It was the first conversation they had had since Feldman suggested that they draw straws.

  “The guard’s got his own pencil,” Bisch said, grabbing Feldman’s suit. “He gets them from supply.”

  It was very quiet. The men in the other cells had stopped talking. Feldman could sense them straining to listen. He thought of himself at the window.

  “Where’s my pencil?” Bisch roared.

  “Look,” Feldman said. “I’ve got a big department store. How would you like new pencils? A whole bunch of them.” Bisch loosened his hold on Feldman’s collar. He seemed interested. “And maybe a nice pencil box with special drawers?” Feldman said quickly, following up his advantage.

  “Crayons?”

  “Sure, crayons. Absolutely. Crayons.”

  “Scissors?”

  “You bet, scissors. Scissors it is.”

  “Shit,” Bisch said, “they’d never let me have scissors in here.” He grabbed the suit again.

  “No, no,” Feldman said, “these are blunt scissors. For a child.”

  “What do you mean for a child?”

  “No, not for a child. I don’t mean for a child. But a child could use them. Safety scissors! Look, for God�
�s sake, don’t touch me. I didn’t take your pencil. I used it for a minute to write a note. We’re cellmates. Guys in the same cell use each other’s pencils. I wrote a note to the warden and he got sore and the guard took them.”

  “What’d you say in the note?” Bisch asked. “Was it about me? If it was about me—”

  “I swear it wasn’t. Of course not. It was about me. I swear to God.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “It was about me.” He pulled Feldman closer to him.

  “No,” Feldman said, terrified. “It was about me.”

  “What did you say?”

  “That I’m not a clown,” he said helplessly.

  Suddenly there was laughter. The big hands released Feldman’s suit, and he sank weakly to the cot. All the men in the cellblock were laughing. Some guards had come in. They were laughing too. Bisch, choking, had tears in his eyes. He sat down heavily on the cot and wrapped his big arms around Feldman’s shoulders.

  “That I’m not a clown,” he sputtered between fits of laughter. Inspired, he let go of Feldman’s shoulders and began to button the buttons of his suit coat. They tumbled out of the wide buttonholes.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Bisch said when he had regained control of himself, “I’m your tailor.”

  There was a second burst of laughter, like a round of applause.

  Feldman slumped backwards, falling against his pillow.