I wish I were seventy-five years old, Feldman thought.
“Privilege!” The warden almost spit the word. “I hate that word. Angles, cut corners—there’s nothing else in your geometry, is there?”
Feldman stared at him.
“The Finks change daily. Didn’t you think of that? Corner-cutter, didn’t you think of that? I change my Finks daily.”
Like sheets in a hotel, Feldman thought.
“What did you have to give him? Cigarettes? Probably cigarettes. Two? Three?”
Six, Feldman thought. I’ve been screwed.
“You’re a laughingstock, Feldman. Evil is clumsy, funny. Get back to your cell.”
The guard would stop him. He would be put on report. “I request a permission slip, sir,” Feldman said.
“You’ve already had two this quarter,” the warden said.
“I’m entitled to a round trip.”
It was hopeless. There was something wrong somewhere. He had cheated, but someplace it had all been canceled out, and now they were cutting corners on him.
The warden considered Feldman for a moment and then took a pad of fresh permission slips from his pocket. He wrote one out. “Here,” he said magnanimously. “The warden declares the quarters.”
Feldman hesitated. It would be charged as his first permission slip of the new quarter. He would be forever one half a round trip behind—maybe a whole trip. He couldn’t think. You had to be a Philadelphia lawyer to serve time here.
“Go on,” the warden said, “take it.” He held out the slip to Feldman. “There are more than four quarters,” he explained. “The warden declares the quarters, and the warden declares how many quarters there will be.”
Feldman took the slip in a daze.
“Candy?” the warden asked.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Candy, wasn’t it? Chocolate-covered cherries?”
Feldman feared for his life.
“No, no,” the warden said, “there’s no magic, I’m no magician. It’s attention to detail, endless attention to detail. That’s why crime doesn’t pay. Crime is a detail-evasion technique. It’s pushing, pulling, the physics of force. You have the blackjacks, the shivs, the machine guns and bombs. We have them too, of course, but mostly for show. We have investigators, the crime lab. We have the laws and the rules, don’t you see? We keep the records and have the radios and the alarm systems and the TV over the teller’s cage. We have the cells and the jails and the institutions. We have the speed zones and the traffic signals and the alternate-side-of-the-street parking regulations. We have the magnified maps of the city, the pins in the colored neighborhoods. We have the beats and patrols. We have the system. Virtue is system, honor is order. God is design, grace is a covenant, a contract and codicils, what’s down there in writing.”
“Cops,” Feldman said softly, as if to himself, “cops twisting arms, hitting where it doesn’t show.”
“What, are you kidding me? Fire with fire. That’s nothing,” the warden said.
“Punishment.”
“Sure, why not?” the warden asked.
“I have to be back in my cell by ten,” Feldman said nervously. It was another rule. He looked at the clock on the wall. “I’ve only got five minutes,” he said. He turned to go, but the warden stopped him. He winked again at Feldman.
“Hey,” the warden called. “THIS IS THE WARDEN,” he shouted.
“Yes, Warden, what is it?” a voice down the corridor called back.
“Is that a guard there?” the warden yelled.
“Yes sir. What is it?”
“THIS IS THE WARDEN. IT’S NINE-THIRTY. GOT THAT?”
“Yes, Warden,” the guard answered.
“Now we can talk,” the warden said, smiling at Feldman.
“The rules are for me,” Feldman said. “Is that it?”
“The rules are for everybody. Somebody has to make them up,” he said quietly.
Feldman wondered if it was an apology. He looked at the warden and knew it wasn’t. He thought of the year ahead, of the rules. He was lonely. What he missed, he supposed, was the comfort of his old indifference when nothing counted and madness was all there was. Now there was a difference. It was because he counted; his life counted. It always had. How could it be? It didn’t make sense.
“So,” the warden said comfortably, “it was the chocolate-covered cherries.” He regarded Feldman intensely, with a swift, inexplicable ardor. “Stop to figure. Corner-cutter, clown, stop to figure a minute. Who do you suppose stocks that canteen, decides the items and proportions? Who fixes the prices? Didn’t you know? Didn’t you even know that? It’s the texture that gets these old men—the thick syrup, the fruit, smooth, bright as a prize, the dark chocolate soft as meat. I know the chemistry of old men, their sweet greeds. It’s detail, Feldman, painstaking attention to dependency. I have to know who’s vulnerable here.”
Feldman felt his heart scratched by the homunculus.
“So,” the warden said, “what was the bargain? What did you make him do for you? What’s your dependency? Speak up. I’ll order it for the canteen on the next requisition. No? It doesn’t come in a box? Wait, wait, you’ve still got your teeth. What did you make that old man—my trusty, my trusty, Feldman—promise you? This is the warden speaking.”
“I needed a man,” Feldman said hoarsely.
The warden stared at him. “Fool,” he said.
Feldman added his losses—twenty-five cents for the candy, the money for the stamp on the letter to his lawyer, the five dollars it was too late to stop, his valuable time at eight and a third cents a day, say another two cents. It was as Sky said. It was the Depression.
9
One morning when Feldman could not endure the thought of being in the prison, or of going to his job in the canteen, or of fencing one more time with the guards and trusties and pencil men, or of having to cope one more day with the elaborate rules of the community, complex and arbitrary as the laws of a boxed game, he chose to remain in his cell. It would cost him. It was bad time and did not count toward the fulfillment of his sentence. He lay on his cot, seething. The idea that it was costing him, that in several months he would have to relive this day, made him furious. He couldn’t afford his holiday. Ah, he was a sucker, he thought angrily. The shame and guilt he felt came from his recognition of how futile it is to defy one’s poverty.
He heard someone humming tunelessly and looked up. It was a prisoner on his hands and knees. The man pushed a scrub brush before him and pulled a pail. He crawled along like a chipper pilgrim, scrubbing forcefully with the brush. Feldman stared at his soapy hands and at the brush, its thick, plain wooden handle like something baked in an oven.
The man paused for a moment and raised his sweat shirt to wipe his face. “Whew,” he said, “whew,” and saw Feldman. He dipped into the pail. “Son-of-a-bitching brown soap,” he said, holding it up for Feldman to see. “What the hell’s wrong with you guys in Seven Block? In Five, where I’m from, we get Tide, Glo, all the latest products. Brown soap’s for poison ivy, clap. It’s medicine. It ain’t no more effective on floors than fucking spit. It’s your maintenance screw, Jerrold. I told Dean I wouldn’t be able to get along with him.” He looked at the floor. “Who does this floor anyway? Who’s Crew in here? I hope he gets better soon, so’s I can go back to Five. Who is he?”
Feldman shook his head.
“Me neither,” the man said. “The guy wouldn’t last ten minutes in Five. He’d be thrown the hell off Crew like that. Dean doesn’t take no shit. You know Dean?”
Feldman shook his head again.
“Chief of Crew in Five. The best maintenance screw in this place, I don’t care who you work for. He works us hard as hell. When I first come with him I thought: Why, you son of a bitch, I’d like to get you on the outside sometime. But that was just to see if we could take it—he was testing. You play ball with Dean, Dean’ll play ball with you. That guy ain’t put me on report once in fourteen
years.”
“You’ve got it made,” Feldman said.
“But let him catch me talking to you like this, he’d kick his boot so high up my ass I’d be three days crapping it out,” the man said, chuckling.
“He kicks you?”
“Hell yes, he kicks me. Dean’s old school. But he won’t kick a man unless that man’s disappointed him.”
“Fair enough,” Feldman said.
“A guy has to bug out once in a while, though,” the man said. “Dean knows that.”
“It’s human nature,” Feldman said.
“I don’t care how hard a worker a man is,” the man said. “There’s more to life than scrubbing floors.” He stood up. “Let me go get my rinse water.” He disappeared and Feldman lay down again on the cot.
“Our detail picks up the supplies for all the other crews.” Feldman looked around. The man was rubbing the bars of Feldman’s cell with a cloth.
“It’s treated,” he explained, showing Feldman a dark purple-stained cloth. “It’s yellow in the tube. Ferr-all. It turns that color on the cloth. It’s a chemical. I seen Dean use it on his pistol barrel once. He let me borrow it to try on the bars.”
Feldman winced at the odor.
“It stands to reason. They got the same base. It works too. Look at that. He showed Feldman the bar he had been working on. The dark iron bristled with light. “I wanted you to see that because you work in the canteen.”
“You know that?”
“Sure. You’re Feldman. I’m pleased to meet you. I’m Lurie.”
He pushed his hand and wrist through the bar, and Feldman shook it. “It’s my forearms,” Lurie said apologetically, “they’re too big. I can’t get them all the way through. It’s from scrubbing.”
Feldman released Lurie’s big, clean hand.
“Excuse the stink,” the man said. “It’s this stuff, the Ferr-all. I don’t mind it, but I guess you’ve got to get used to it.” Feldman smelled his hand. It smelled ferrous, dense, like the odor of pistol barrels. The bars had such an odor too, of pistol barrels, spears, chains, the blades of knives.
“It’s too expensive for the state to buy for the inmates. They just get it for the guards. The men use it for their armor. I was the one first found out it works on bars. I told Dean, and he took it up with Requisitions. I’m glad I ran into you. If you stocked it in the canteen the men would buy it and do their cells. You see how it shined up this bar? And it wouldn’t take that much effort. Three, four times a year tops, that’s all it takes. It makes a difference.”
“I don’t have the authority,” Feldman said.
“I know that,” Lurie said. “But you could talk to the men. You’re in a position. If enough guys wanted it, the warden would stock it.” He put his face close to the bars and lowered his voice. “You know what would happen if a few guys started treating their bars? Pretty soon it would become mandatory. For the uniformity. That’s what happens,” he whispered. “They’d make it a rule.” Feldman sat down on his cot. “Some of these soreheads would grouse. Sure. What the hell? Cons. But it makes a difference.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Feldman said.
“It’s all I ask,” the man said. “Here, as long as I started, let me do the rest of these. Then I’ll slip the tube through and you can do the bars over the window.”
Lurie rubbed the bars. They gleamed. They stank. It smelled like a munitions dump, a metal butcher shop. “I was telling you,” he said as he worked, “we pick up the supplies for all the crews. In ’57, during that railroad strike when the trains weren’t rolling, it was a pigpen around here. There was even a comment in the paper: ‘It isn’t a pen, it’s a pigpen.’ That was printed right in the paper. Well, there weren’t any supplies. After a while we were trying to keep this place clean just with water. There wasn’t any antiseptic, nothing. (And your cons are dirtier than your Honest Johns anyway. It’s not just the way they live, it’s the way they are.) The infirmary was filling up. Well, Dean picked me and another guy, and we drove seventy-five miles into Melbourne to pick up some emergency supplies. The warden wanted Shipman’s crew to go, but old Dean said, ‘Fuck Shipman’s crew. Does Shipman’s crew take the stuff off the cars down to the depot when the stock is rolling? Does Shipman’s crew wind the toilet paper after a riot?’ You should’ve heard him. This was one screw talking about another screw in front of the warden. But Dean stands up for his boys, and the warden went along. So we got our ride in the deuce and a half all the way into Melbourne. I asked Dean if I could drive, and he let me for fourteen miles. Well, the part I wanted to tell you about is this. We picked up the stuff in a big supermarket. I pushed one cart, and Millman the other. And Dean come along behind us with the shotgun. You should’ve seen them housewives. We scared them whores right out of their panties. ‘It’s a stickup,’ Millman would tell them, and one time he reached right into this whore’s cart who’d got the last box of Duz and took it right away from her. I’d take the ammonia bottles and hold them up with the top unscrewed and I’d turn to Millman. ‘Do you think this wine will go good with dinner, dear?’ I’d ask him. ‘Delicious,’ Millman would say. Even Dean had to laugh. It was something.” He paused, chuckling. “You ever been in one of them supermarkets?” he asked Feldman.
“Yes.”
“They got the products, Gleam, Oxydol, Shine, Spic and Span, Jesus. I don’t see how they keep them all straight. Dean let us take one of everything just to sample. You know what we done? We give Shipman’s crew all the pansy, perfumy kind.” Lurie laughed. “You should of seen. They had a time, those bastards, trying to get this place clean with all that shit the broads use on their cruddy underwear. That must have been something. I got down on the floor where Shipman’s crew works, and it smelled like some fucking cunt-castle. Jesus!”
Feldman stretched out on his cot.
“Sick?” Lurie asked him.
“Yes.”
“Go on sick call?”
“I’m taking care of it myself.”
“That’s it,” Lurie said. “Stay away from these sawbones. A man with your history. They wouldn’t be allowed to patch a tire on the outside. I haven’t gone on sick call since Brunner left. He was terrific. He really knew medicine. He was a genius.”
Feldman had wearied of the man’s incredible loyalties, his fierce spites. This was prison, he thought. In his office there were a million ways to defend against bores. He could make a telephone call, go to lunch early, plan a trip, have an appointment, get off a letter. There were things to do with his hands. He remembered filling his water carafe, taking a cigar from a humidor that played “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” lighting it with a lighter shaped like a cash register (you punched No Sale), adjusting the Venetian blinds, slanting the sun in a visitor’s eyes. Or the toys—the absurd executive toys: the gold Yo-Yo’s on silken strings, the pointless machines with visible moving parts, the kaleidoscopic paperweights, the office golf (he only played golf in the office), the tiny TV set on which he caught the noon news. There were conferences, committee work (he was a downtown merchant, public-spirited, the inventor of the Free Friday Bus Ride and the Shopper’s Nursery Service in the public park). And there was his basement. But here he could not even pull down a shade or open the window. He lived in a cage, bored as a beast.
Lurie was still talking. Feldman had a thought, a wish so clear and incisive it could almost have been an idea. He wanted Lurie to die. He wished desperately that this bore might be suddenly seized with something angry and irrevocable, that he would disintegrate! But he had thick forearms and hadn’t gone on sick call since Brunner. A collapse was unlikely, but Feldman knew that if he had a gun and the opportunity to get away with it, he would kill Lurie. It didn’t surprise him. It was the system which shaped these thoughts. It did not provide for the splendid half and quarter measures of freedom—executive toys and committees and the heft of a paperweight in the palm of your hand and the rest.
Suddenly Feldman stood up and dropped his tro
users and went to the toilet between the two cots. He squatted on it and strained and stared at Lurie. The man continued to rub the bars. Feldman might have been doing nothing more private or offensive than biting his nails. I don’t know, he thought, this would have cleared them out back at the office. He sat hopelessly, beginning, despite himself, to nod as Lurie talked.
“Cancer,” Lurie was saying, “the big one. That’s what they finally diagnosed. After all that time. So he’s finally lying there—my cellmate—in the infirmary. They ain’t doing nothing to clean it out of him. Too late, they told him. What do these guys care? You know something? This is a guy that always worried about himself. He kept up. He used to drive me nuts with his grousing. You know those seven danger signals they’re always talking about? My friend had a match cover that listed them, and he had four out of the seven. Four out of the seven danger signals, when only one’s enough. He went to the infirmary each time he’d get a new danger signal, but they didn’t know it was cancer until his third danger signal. That’s the kind of doctor they got over there in that infirmary. He’s laying there now. Last week a guy on infirmary crew fucked up and got thrown in solitary, and Dean fixed it so I could clean my friend’s room. It tore me up. He was a strong guy, my friend. He’s nothing now. He told me he’s up to six of the seven danger signals. He laughed about it.”
Feldman flushed the toilet.
“Listen,” Lurie said, “if you’re sick you probably don’t feel like getting the bars over your window. You can do it later, or—I’ll tell you what—I’ll come back sometime when your cell is open and do it for you myself.”
Suddenly, irrationally, Feldman was moved. “Thank you,” he said. He wanted to cry. I’m crazy, he thought. They’ve driven me crazy.
“No, it’s nothing,” Lurie said. “You can see yourself what a difference it makes.”
“It’s very nice,” Feldman said. “I’ve got the shiniest bars in my cellblock.”
A Bad Man Page 8