“It makes a difference.”
“It certainly does.”
“I enjoyed talking to you,” Lurie said.”
“I enjoyed talking to you.”
“It’s a terrible thing to say, but it makes the day go faster when I run into a sick con.”
Feldman nodded.
“This ain’t fun,” Lurie said.
“No,” Feldman said.
“Scrubbing’s no deal.”
“No,” Feldman said, “I guess not.”
“Even when you got a crew chief like Dean.”
The man folded his rag and pushed it up the sleeve of his sweat suit, where it lay on the thick ridge of muscle along his big forearms like the handkerchief of a gentlewoman. “Everybody’s got troubles,” he said.
Feldman decided to eat his lunch with the men.
Tables with large black numbers painted on their tops were assigned them, and twice each month everyone was given a new number corresponding to one of the tables. They had to carry this number with them and show it to the dining-hall official if he asked to see it. The men had their special friends, of course, and sometimes moved beside them regardless of their assigned numbers. It was a major offense if they could not justify their seating, but they often took the risk. The dining-hall official moved arbitrarily among the tables, spot-checking.
Feldman, studying the men as they took their trays and moved silently to seats, could tell, just as surely as the dining-hall official, from the gestures and nudges and shufflings, which men were falsifying their assignments. It was queer how men properly assigned to a place noiselessly submitted to those who would force them in turn to seek false positions. To break silence if one was being pushed away from one’s proper place was permitted, of course, but such an action was considered a betrayal by the men and was severely punished by them. And since to scuffle openly in the dining hall was an even more serious offense than either sitting at an unassigned table or breaking silence, the displaced and expelled stalked nervously under the eyes of the official toward some hopefully unassigned space. (There were several such spaces: “free spaces” deliberately kept open by the warden; the unoccupied seats of the sick, of men on special-duty rosters, of men brooding in their cells.) Usually, so suspicious did they look, an official did not spot-check in vain, although the man caught was more frequently the moved than the mover. The official, silent himself, would tap a man on the left shoulder, and all the men at the table, so no con at the right table could slip his number to an interloper, had to place face up in a vacant corner of their trays the laminated plastic numbers they were forced to carry.
Occasionally there was an attempt to divert an official. Taking circuitous routes among the tables, prisoners might deliberately try to seem suspicious so as to make a fool of a guard, or to serve some friend actually counterfeiting a table assignment as a decoy. The men did not seem to understand that they were serving the warden’s ends and not their own when they played these jokes, by bringing astute and astuter officials into the dining hall. The beauty of the warden’s system did not escape Feldman, however. Like many other rules in the prison it seemed unbeatable, and provided the warden with still another means of testing the convicts. (“It accomplishes several things,” the warden later told Feldman. “For one, it exposes the queers. It gives me an insight into who might be planning an escape. It speeds up meals. It saves the state money. The men grab their trays and move on to their seats rapidly so as not to be shouldered out of the way. They take less food on their trays.”) They might have tried to trade numbers, Feldman thought, but they were a disorganized bunch, and this never seemed to occur to them. They relied instead on risk and change. Yet Feldman was aware of the astonishing fact that it was love—the conspirators, the escape-planners, could always meet in holes and corners; the rules, if they had to contend only with the plotters, would have forced them to plot elsewhere—which made the system work, that there would always be those who would take the risks.
Reckless, reckless people, he thought contemptuously as a new man, obviously an intruder, moved into place beside him. It was a stunning fact, he thought, that whoever the man’s friend was, he would not even be able to talk to him. Watching the man’s eyes, Feldman spotted the friend. The new man looked at him with something like love, and the friend smiled briefly and looked down at his tray shyly.
The others at the table were as conscious as Feldman of the friendship. They smiled openly, fondly, as at lovers who have overcome difficulties and earned a sympathy which costs no one anything. Indeed, Feldman himself felt a fillip of kindredness and had a sense of being at table at a resort, or aboard ship.
So they sat, each man conscious of the number that gave him the right to be there, but each with a little viciousness in reserve, his self-righteousness underwritten by the fact that he could produce his number on demand. However, the viciousness may have been softened by the jeopardy of the intruder and regard for his lover’s boldness, they would, if the need arose, have dissolved in a moment the accidental community which that boldness had made manifest, and brought guiltlessly and quickly to bear their detachment, even the man who had inspired the risk, the surprised friend like the obligationless guest of honor at a party.
Feldman was aware that the enforced silence made the companionship of the two friends somehow deeper, more meaningful. They all felt it. They felt, too, all the significance of the pair’s proximity and were charged with a kind of sympathetic giddiness, a sense of the glowingly unstated, of the imminent. It was just as if someone they did not hear stood behind their backs, or as if, in the dark, they could sense the nearness of walls, the presence of furniture.
Then something happened that had never happened.
“The Talking Lamp is lit,” a voice said suddenly over the loudspeaker, startling them. It was Warden Fisher.
“How did you know where I was? I haven’t seen you since the new assignments,” the friend said.
“I was behind you in the line last night, Joseph. Are you angry?”
“Of course I’m not angry,” Joseph said. “But you took a risk. You could have gotten us both into trouble.”
“I didn’t think about that, Joseph,” the man said gloomily. Then he brightened. “But isn’t it wonderful?” he asked, reaching across the table. “We can talk. It’s a miracle.”
“No. You mustn’t touch me, Bob.”
Feldman wondered how the other men took this. He looked around the table, but no one seemed interested in the pair any longer. They were more concerned with the warden’s announcement, clearly puzzled by the opportunity to talk in the dining hall. They contained themselves, halting in their silences, like inexperienced people asked to give their opinions into a microphone. Then, gradually, they found things to say.
A man leaned toward Feldman and spoke in a low voice. “I thought it was you he come to see, Feldman. It surprised me.”
“No, of course not. I don’t know him.”
The man laughed, and Feldman was conscious suddenly of hips touching his on the crowded bench, conscious of shoulders brushing his own, conscious of hands lifting spoons, conscious of men’s tongues. Under the table someone stroked his thigh.
“Stop it.”
“Sure,” a man said, winking. “You’re not my type.”
“Feldman isn’t anyone’s type,” Joseph said.
Feldman couldn’t eat with them. (I’ll starve, he thought, thinking of the dozens of meals he had still to eat with these men.) Undeclared, in the silence, their friendship—their love—had a certain dignity, and even the imagined possibility of their acts together had a built-in innocence: the allowance one made for life under difficulties, life against odds. Talking, they seemed grotesque. What lay behind it all was more of the same, importunateness, rough will. Probably Joseph did not even care for Bob.
“How long has it been, old-timer,” one man asked a trusty Feldman had seen in his own cellblock, “since the Talking Lamp’s been lit?”
> “Not in my time,” the old man said. He turned to the man on Feldman’s right. “You ever know it to happen, Bob?”
“Once,” Bob said. “When Fisher had been here a year,” he said. “Isn’t that right, Joseph?”
“It was on the first anniversary of Fisher’s system,” Joseph said.
Feldman, frightened, perceived something complex and astonishing: Bob and Joseph had been softened. They confronted him, he realized, not as men but as changed men. Feldman saw that very plainly. They might have been old acquaintances with whom he had lost contact for twenty years and suddenly saw again in their acquired differences as in a costume. These softened men had once been dangerous. The length of their terms here proved the violence of their crimes. It meant that if love was what lay behind the efficiency of the warden’s vicious system and made that system work, then it was viciousness that ultimately made love work. Character tumbled, and even these men could not finally hang on to themselves. They’d had the tenaciousness of murderers, of men who took guns in their hands and pulled triggers. But even these—they were talking quietly now, courting sedately—hard cases had proved malleable in the end. Appetite died last; nobody lost his sweet tooth. It was the most nearly immortal attribute of men. As a businessman, Feldman was impressed by the warden’s techniques (What an operation this is, he thought), but as a man he was terrified. Oh, men’s troubles, he thought; that warden, he’ll get me too.
That evening he asked Bisch about his life. For all his apparent formidableness, his cellmate was a gentle man (After all, Feldman thought, he’s a tailor, he makes men’s clothes), and he began to talk about his life as if he had only been waiting to be asked. Telling Feldman of his troubles, the gloomy man seemed to brighten. Feldman remembered the expression. He had seen it before, in his basement when people had come to him for his favors. He had not wanted their stories—only their demands, the swooped desperation of their terrible solutions. But nothing could keep them from talking. They became debaters, makers of speeches, articulating grievances as if they had been statements of policy, listing troubles like logicians posting reasons. On their faces too he had seen the same queer gaiety, the high hilarity of their justifications. It was not gaiety, of course, or even nervousness, but a kind of awe, as if, hearing what they said themselves, they were not so much touched by their griefs as impressed by them. They smiled as they spoke. It was the smile anterior to sin. Priests never saw that smile, policemen didn’t. All confessions were bawled, whined, whispered from trance. Trouble only sounded bold, choppy with detail like the breathless report of a messenger from a burning city.
“She had this infection,” Bisch said. “In her face. She’d get a fever. A hundred. A hundred one. It would swell. My wife’s beautiful face. The gums drained. In her sleep. One night she almost choked on it. It stank. I made her pillows in my shop. She slept sitting up. She wouldn’t let me sleep with her. She was ashamed of the way she smelled. I would wipe her lips in her sleep with a tissue. I flushed it down the toilet. I wanted her to think she was getting better. But I couldn’t wipe the taste out of her mouth.
“The doctor said it was sinus. That’s what they treated her for. But it wasn’t sinus. They gave her tests. All the tests. She was always in pain. She said it was like having cuts inside her mouth. Then they said she had to have all her teeth out. What was she—twenty-eight? She didn’t want to. They weren’t even sure, she said. It changed the face. She had a very beautiful face. The muscles collapse. Something happens to the jaw, the lips. The expression is different. It looks like spite.
“But I made her do it, and it was terrible for her. She was a beautiful woman.
“But she was right. It didn’t make any difference. She still had the fever after they pulled the teeth. They said it would go down when the gums stopped draining, but the gums didn’t stop draining. It was as if there was a fire inside her somewhere and they couldn’t find it. They couldn’t do anything.
“Her jaw was too small. The teeth they made her didn’t fit. I got her others. She couldn’t wear them. She said what difference did it make. I tried to kiss her, but she wouldn’t let me. We didn’t sleep together any more. One night I went to wipe her lips and I bent down to kiss her while she slept. It was soft—her mouth. I never felt anything like that before. It was as if there was just this soft skin over her and she was empty inside. I threw up. It was awful. I still taste my wife’s mouth.
“She couldn’t forgive me. She was always crying. I made her beautiful dresses. I always made her beautiful dresses, but these were even more beautiful. She wouldn’t wear them. She thought I was laughing at her. Laughing at her—Jesus!”
He killed her, Feldman thought. The poison flowed from the high ground of her fever and he couldn’t stand it and he killed her. He looked away from Bisch’s shining eyes. Why, he’s like a soldier, he thought. He serves his trouble. Feldman shuddered and nodded helplessly.
Bisch sighed, observing him.
Ghost stories, Feldman thought.
He went to the television room, where he saw a documentary on migrant workers and their families and a situation comedy about a little boy with divorced parents who goes to visit his father or mother on alternate weeks in the series. Feldman had seen the program before. The kid, obsessed, conspired to bring his mother and father together again, and tonight he shammed infantile paralysis. The news program reported white reprisals in Philadelphia for the attack of two fifteen-year-old Negroes on a nun. It told of cold war and plane crash and storm. Today the President, after a flying trip covering eight states, had declared seven new disaster areas. The governors in the Midwest had asked for only five. He knows, Feldman thought. He returned to his cell. Bisch, asleep, was groaning in a dream. Feldman wondered if he should wake him, wipe his lips.
Until now Feldman had tried to ignore his fellow convicts. He feared them, of course. They were hostile men and seemed to know more about him than he wished. The famous grapevine, he thought, and imagined a sort of demonic pony express. It’s all that talking out of the side of the mouth (he fancied a great hoarse chain of whispered intimacies). What was astonishing was their accuracy. Because they were accustomed to conspiracy’s low tones nothing was lost, and because they had no imagination nothing was distorted. So he kept out of their way.
Now, however, he was interested. Appalled by their horror stories, he wondered about them. (Wondering about them, he wondered about himself. Is this character? he thought.) He had none of their desire to gossip. Yet he discovered a quality in himself that he had been unaware of before. Surprised at their unhappiness—how unhappy? why unhappy? weren’t all men happy?—he wished now to know about other men, to ask them questions.
He thought it would be difficult, but it was easy. People were willing, even eager, to talk. There was in them, he supposed, a respect for his wealth, his differences from them. Then they were losers, and losers were accustomed to talking about themselves. They spilled the beans and exposed the linen to guidance counselors, juvenile parole officers, social workers, free psychologists, free psychiatrists, sob-sister reporters, and at last to their court-appointed lawyers. They would mourn to anyone who might help them, to anyone not in trouble who might get them out of trouble. Open not to advice but to miracle, they rattled away in any ear.
So he made it his business to find out about them. With their permission he peeked into their moneyless wallets, stared fascinated through the yellowing plastic windows at wives and fathers and sweethearts and mothers and sisters and sons and daughters, the human background of even the loneliest men. (Staring, he thought: Everyone has been photographed, everyone in the world; everyone, smiling, posing, has made the small, poor holiday before a camera, thinking: Catch me, hold me, keep me.) How thin they all were. Even in pictures, which normally added pounds, these people seemed light, foreign and a little like Indians. They looked to have frailty’s toughness and wiry strength, but they would not last, he knew. The children had the sharp vision of the poor, their cl
ever legs. They could see long distances down alleys and run quickly through city streets, making fools of their pursuers, but they would not last either. What attracted Feldman most were the women—thin, hard-armed, hard-breasted, and with babushkas on their heads. Yesterday’s B-girls and waitresses and bench workers and bruised daughters, foulmouthed, pitiful and without pity, their suspicion misplaced and their trust too. Kid-slappers, Feldman thought, smokers in bed, drinkers in taverns while the apartment is burning, runners amok. Whew, whew, he thought, tricky in bed, tricky, tricky, too much for me—I wouldn’t last—clawers of ass and pullers of hair and suckers of cock.
“What is your wife doing, now that you’re in jail?” Feldman, looking up from the picture, asked Coney.
“Tricks,” Coney said gloomily.
“Ah, a magician.” (I’ll bet, he thought, seeing the girl’s grim mouth and long nails. He suspected palmed hatpins, bold kicks to the groin, all the rough whore’s holds. He thought of Lilly, who had no trade and knew no tricks and couldn’t take a punch. He thought of Lilly’s dull loneliness.)
“How does your family make out?” he asked Maze, in the cell across from his.
“On relief,” Maze said. “On A.D.C On Community Chest.”
“I’m a very big taxpayer in this state,” Feldman said thoughtfully.
He saw a picture of a big boy in one of those double strollers for twins.
“My kid is sick,” Butt said, “he needs an operation on his back. He can’t move his legs, and the nurse at the clinic says he has to get fresh air so he’ll be strong enough if we ever get the money for his operation. We live on the third floor, and my wife has to carry him up the stairs. She ain’t strong and he weighs a hundred pounds and we have to move into a building which has an elevator if he’s ever to get enough fresh air and sunshine. We ain’t got the rent for that kind of building. They’re asking a hundred dollars. She’s moved his bed next to the window, but the night air gives him a sore throat.”
A Bad Man Page 9