A Bad Man

by Stanley Elkin

  Indeed, his expression was now one of intense disengagement. He could have been one of those stone-faced palace guards whom tourists try to ruffle for a photograph. He performed all his duties—even those which he had once found loathsome, like scrubbing the toilet bowl or, in the canteen, fetching the petty items the prisoners requested and ringing up the petty sales—with a determination that rose from the bedrock of the will. In the exercise yard he counseled his body like a fight manager, and with the effort of a trained athlete, managed to get through his now near-perfect mimes of the ordinary strolls and walks and pacings of the unmarked convicts. Only he knew how much he sweated. (Perhaps it was this that had brought him down sick before, and unwilling to risk the disease again for fear that he might not have temperature the next time—sure, immunities, antibodies and unhealth’s diminishing returns—he let up a little, allowing his body those occasional epileptic leaps of character that he had formerly feared.)

  He went to the movies when they were shown, and paid careful attention to the plots for fear that a disarmed answer to a guard’s or fellow prisoner’s question about the film might be taken amiss and register a chain of consequences that he would live to regret. He devoured the prison newspaper for the same reason, and familiarized himself with every notice on every bulletin board. (Confronted from time to time with some strange new obligation—“Prisoners not involved themselves with intramural athletics are nevertheless required to pick a sport and a team, and to familiarize themselves with the records of all the players on that team”—he never speculated as to meanings. Meaning was beside the point; only performance mattered.) He memorized his table assignments as if the numbers had been state secrets and he a spy, and because prisoners were encouraged to have interests as well as duties, he participated in a hobby club, joylessly teaching himself to make irrelevant little leather and wooden artifacts. He took special care to be in the right place at the right time, rushing to his cell long before lockup, conspicuously present at each major census four times a day and at most of the minor ones on each half-hour.

  Yet for all his attention to detail, for all the assiduity which the prospect of his release provoked in him, he never became what could be called a “model prisoner.” He had none of the cheerfulness of such men, nothing of their dopey good will. Even this was calculated, for he anticipated the effect that such falseness might have on others. (And by “others” he meant everyone.) Instead, he sought to impart a sense of performance without eagerness, a careful balance of going through motions and touching all bases. (Ironically, he behaved exactly as a good cop would who neither hated nor cared for his suspects.) This, of course, made him vulnerable too, and he was aware of the dimensions of that vulnerability, knowing that he must appear to them exactly as he was, keeping nothing of himself in reserve, his distaste for his plight obvious, the desperation behind his willingness to do his job clear to anyone. In short, his eagerness, though it was the reverse eagerness of a model prisoner, was clearly visible. Anyone could see it. Yet it was his only feasible choice: tight-faced to walk the tightrope, his discomfort and hatred public as a monument. If this were a lying low it was a lying low with his head visible, his bald spot bright as a bull’s-eye.

  Besides, there was still the notoriety of the bad-man crap: news items about him in the paper, editorials, the book of his life a public record in the library, his club the only one disbanded by a warden’s fiat in thirty-five years, the semi-sent-to-Coventry treatment from the other prisoners, whose only remarks to him since Warden’s Assembly had smacked of command, distinctly like the no-nonsense exchanges between officers and men. Why, he had not had conversation as such in months. (And now that he thought of it, when had he had it? When had he last listened to someone else or spoken to offer an opinion that another might take or leave alone? He had always been in Coventry. He could not remember a time when he hadn’t been, though again, now that he thought of it, he had listened to Miss Lane’s letter, reading it over to see what she thought. Then he fired her.) How low, then, could he lie? But despite their ominous interest in him, he behaved the deaf-mute, a pretended mantle of invisiblity as fastidiously assumed as ever any by some discreet serving man in the presence of his quarreling masters. That was it. Of course! They had turned him into a nigger, and he had learned to live under threat, a quality of last-hired, first-fired doom dogging his steps and days.

  It was what had made the time fly until Warden’s Assembly. And afterwards, it was what had slowed it down. When he first arrived at the penitentiary, each threat, its manifestation specific but its source veiled—the warden’s early aggressions and the contempt of the guards, the appearance of the blue fool suit on the cot in his cell, the discovery of the Feldman books in the library, solitary confinement—had posed a problem for him and created an interest that rose to meet it like the love of truth rising to meet fact. Time raced. Later, when he had learned to identify the source, the episodes became indistinct, and it stood still. Yet everything had involved waiting, and everything had been exciting. But for what had he waited? For them to make good on their bad-man talk. And they hadn’t. They hadn’t. Now, he realized, they would have to get him soon or miss him forever. They would have to get him at once. (Though he didn’t intend to search for meaning, it occurred to him that maybe this was what it was all about: to do him a favor, to excite him, to distract him, to make time race.) Now, for the first time, he realized that he had never been beaten up. It seemed astonishing. No guard had made his nose bleed, no cons had punched him! A blow in the chest, and his homunculus could dislodge, rupturing his heart. They knew that, but nothing had happened. Nothing. Only a physical disaster would have meant anything. Blows, pain counted. Death did. (Boredom would have been unbearable, but it wouldn’t have mattered, and anxiety was interesting, and it hadn’t mattered.) Only a physical catastrophe. Only that.

  And if only that, then only at the end of the year, when he had served out his sentence. Only then. The sons of bitches. The fuckers. The sons of bitches. (And anxiety did count. It wasn’t interesting after all, and terror, this kind, the fear of death, was boring. The dread of pain was. Only that.) Only then. Only after the year of shit. They’d had him. They’d had him all along. The bastards. The sons of bitches. The bastards. They had him now. Feldman the sucker, the supersalesman supersold. Suddenly he was very afraid. Oh God, he prayed, call the police! Get my lawyer! Call the Better Business Bureau! I want my money back!

  Life had never been so dear to him. He prized his past. He knew he must write letters to his lawyers to tell them what he suspected. (Suspected? What he knew.) But even more urgent was his need to remember his life, to have it in some formal way. He began again to write letters to Lilly. These were different from the others, which had been merely domestic patter, bland household inquiries—devices, really, for starting his life up again. Now his letters contained minutely detailed and loving descriptions of what they both knew: an exact picture of their living room, their entrance hall, the flowers in their garden, the equipment in their kitchen, what hung in a closet, all the meals he could remember, an account of their television-viewing for a week—along with whatever he could recall about the plots and the songs or the reasons a particular guest had appeared before a panel. He described their furniture and the meaning of all the random jottings and stray numbers that lay beside their telephones. He wrote about Billy’s toys and the look of their pantry, and recalled to her pieces of conversations between them, arguments, brief passages of affection. He told her he loved her, asked for her prayers and pled for her help in keeping him alive.

  To his lawyers he sent dispatches outlining his apprehensions, desperately offering them reasons which seemed, on paper, always more paltry than they actually were. He told about the poor bargain he’d made, how they had extracted the last penny of his debt to society, for a year keeping him on his toes with their dark menace, only to kill him at the end, compounding the interest, usurers, fiends. Most of these letters he destroyed,
but others, equally strident, he sent, hoping, in his despair, to trigger an adjustment of some powerful judicial balance. He reasoned that he had shown restraint when he had destroyed the bulk of the letters and that this entitled him to use those that remained. If the lawyers could know how circumspect he had been, they would give more weight to the letters that got through—a point he felt obliged to include as an addendum to a final letter he was sending.

  He was addressing this when Bisch, studying him from where he lay on his cot, spoke out. “You sure been having yourself a correspondence lately.”

  “One of the signs of rehabilitation,” Feldman said automatically, “is a con’s interest in sending and receiving mail.”

  “Sure,” Bisch said scornfully, “is that what it’s all about? Rehabilitation.” He laughed. Feldman thought for the first time of the censors. Of course, he thought helplessly, none of it would get through.

  “Have they been reading my letters, Bisch?”

  Bisch winked at him.

  “But I’ve written the people at my store,” he said urgently, as though it were Bisch he had to appease if his cries for help were to get to the lawyers, “and been getting answers. Everything I want to know.”

  “Is that so?” Bisch said. “Very interesting. I suppose then, now that you’ve taken an interest in your store, the folks back home will be expecting you.”

  “What do you mean? What do you mean, Bisch? Do you mean that they let those letters through just to show them I think everything’s all right? Is that it? To throw them off so that when—so that if something happens to me it will seem accidental? Is that how they do it, Bisch?…Bisch?”

  Bisch was silent, and Feldman, if anything, was grateful.

  Now each moment was precious to him. Only eight weeks of his sentence remained, but he doubted he would live through them. A strange joy was born in him. He had received no word from the lawyers, save only the occasional posting of their ordinary business, and he still had not heard from Lilly. Their silence confirmed his suspicions. He was helpless, but it was this helplessness which gave him strength now. He continued his routines, behaving exactly as he had when he still believed he would be released and did not want to queer his chances by giving trouble. But now his actions came from a desire to savor those actions. Discipline acted as a sort of slow motion on his days, giving him a chance (because he knew where he would be at a given time and what he would be doing) to anticipate, to go over in his imagination exactly what such and such a motion would feel like when he made it, what a particular gesture made, say, by the pencil man when he took the census (laboriously pointing now at one prisoner, now at another with the eraser end, moving his lips as he counted, licking the lead with a thick, slow tongue) would seem like to him when it happened. He prophesied the sounds of machinery starting up and faint individual smells, then softly laughed when they occurred, like a listener appreciating a story whose punch line he has foreseen.

  It went on and on like this, and the next time he looked at a calendar he had just over six weeks left, and the time after that just over five, though the time between seemed like a year. It had worked. What he had felt for his furniture he felt now for the bars of his cell, for the counter in the canteen, the lunches of cold cuts they served on Sundays, the bluish flicker of the light in the TV room. And all life, all history, what he had been, what he was now, the stars and everything in books, all the wars that had ever happened, the reason behind things he never questioned, the facts about electricity and the skeletons of beasts and the mystery of God, were contained for him in the few drops of soapy water he felt this moment splash on the back of his hand as he dipped his scrub bush into the pail beside him and scrubbed and prayed to the floor of his cell.

  And the next time he looked, he had three weeks left, three weeks before they would kill him, and it seemed as if only yesterday there had been eight. Oh God, he thought, I blew five weeks. Oh Jesus, they cheated me again!

  18

  They nailed him in the canteen on a Tuesday evening one week before he was scheduled to get out.

  Come with us, Feldman, he had dreamed. Men outside his cell, he had dreamed. I get out in a few days. Go yourselves. Take Bisch. Go with them, Bisch. Come, he had dreamed, with us, Feldman. No. Your plan won’t work. The warden knows what you’re up to. Then a prisoner had put his hands on the bars of Feldman’s cell and drawn the door wide. Come with us. Who left that open? he asked, he had dreamed. And yelled he dreamed, Jailbreak! Jailbreak! And another prisoner came in to get him. They took, he dreamed, him to the basement of Warden’s Quarters, and strapping him in, punched him to death in the electric chair.

  What happened was not like this, or, rather, only a little like it. Their posse presence seemed the same, their faces and the dark look of delegation on them, of caucused principle, passionate as the decision of revolutionaries in the street. Also familiar was the queer propriety of their approach, their almost touching courtesy, so that looking at them, he could tell from their shyness, from their air of an up-the-sleeve fate in reserve, that these were merely agents, lumpish younger brothers, and that others would deal with him.

  “Come with us, please,” one said softly. (You knew he really wanted to shout it.) “We’re putting you on trial. There’s going to be a kangaroo court.” (And you knew this one had already said too much, exceeded his authority. The others stared at him in shushing shock. Feldman’s heart dived. Aw, shit, he thought, it’s planned. If he can make mistakes, it’s planned. What chance have I?)

  A guard came into the canteen and shoved through the men crowding the room. “Listen, Sky,” he said, “it’s almost closing. Start straightening up in here. Get these guys out.”

  “There’s going to be a kangaroo court,” Feldman said. “They’re taking me off.”

  “Did you hear me, Sky? Walls, Flesh? Start cleaning up.”

  “They’re taking me off.”

  The guard looked at him. “Up yours,” he said.

  Just so. Up mine.

  They took Feldman back to his cellblock, walking openly through the corridors, Feldman himself actually setting the pace, the outraged stride of brisk business, of one challenged, leading his accusers to the place where his side of the story would be verified (having decided to show assurance, making not warden’s mouths this time but Feldman’s faces).

  A hundred men, it seemed, were waiting for them. Prisoners from other cellblocks stood in the cement court between the cells. Doors were open, just as they had been in his dream, and the convicts had pulled their cots out onto the apron of the cells, where, lolling on them, they seemed like sleepless tenants before their apartment buildings on a hot night. There was a peculiar intimacy of emergency about the scene, of shifted rhythms and lives suddenly changed by, say, a power failure. Even Feldman could feel the good will, the fresh democratic air of the place, the sense of some newmade first-name basis. Bags of potato chips were broken out, cups of soda shared. Only Feldman they stared at with a fixed, rote stoniness. (Now he had slowed down, letting the others lead him. He would soon be with leaders, and the thought of this was not unpleasant. He sensed them before he saw them—suspicioned before he heard it their special articulateness, imagining labor leaders, officers commissioned in the field, and counted on the edge of natural aristocracy in them.) As he went by the men in the corridor he triggered their silences, set off their concentration, so that at last it seemed only he himself could be heard, moving like fire along the fuse of their attention. They brought him finally before a dozen or so men at the end of the cellblock. It was immensely interesting to see who was in on his fate, as though his life had been a mystery or detective story, and now, just before the end, he was to be regaled with solutions, satisfy curiosity in a last sumptuous feast of truth.

  But there was no time to savor the irony of his various betrayers. “Get him dressed,” one of them said, and Feldman felt himself deftly turned by the young convict at his side, elbow-urged back up the corridor they had jus
t come down, and guided to his cell.

  “Put on those clothes,” the convict said. “We’ll stand in front of the bars.” The deputies with whom he had come from the canteen lined up across the front of his cell, blocking him from the view of the other prisoners. Feldman turned toward his cot and saw neatly laid-out there the suit in which he had come to the prison, the very suit which he had got the buyer to bring him for his trial. Next to it was his white shirt, freshly laundered, and on top of that his tie.

  “Wash in the sink before you put that stuff on,” the young convict called over his shoulder. Feldman undressed, and standing over the tiny sink, soaped and scrubbed his body, then rinsed himself off and looked around for a towel. “Dry yourself with the fool suit,” the young convict said. “Okay. Now get dressed.”

  He put on the fresh clothes. A bad sign, he thought uneasily. He wasn’t superstitious; it had nothing to do with the fact that he had already been found guilty in this suit. The clothes themselves were ominous, as if dressing him like this were to give him everything they ever would of the doubt’s benefit. All his respectability in his pressed suit, his fresh shirt mustering his innocence, his carefully knotted tie virtue. He knew that everyone out there had once worn clothes like these, trusted hopefully in their telling neatness, thrown themselves impeccably upon the mercy of the court. (It was just this that he feared about justice, its conscientiousness about small things, all its zealous, meaningless courtesies. It appointed lawyers and served up gourmet last suppers, final cigarettes from the warden’s own pack and provided spiritual counsel that would meekly accept any insults. Patiently it abided last words and proffered blindfolds. He bitterly considered all its Greekey gifts.)