Stanley Elkin - Searches & Seizures

The Phoenician was not with them today, and since word of Ehrlinger’s joke had already been leaked, some of the bondsmen were disappointed that he was not there to take their ragging. None made any comment, however. This was not their usual social gathering. It was a new departure, more or less a formal business meeting, scheduled weeks ago. They had never had a business meeting and were a little uncertain how to begin. In the trade all their adult lives, these were men who had never tired of the infinite eccentricity that came their way, who by the simple process of constant witness had become expert raconteurs, sheer access to “material” democratizing any differences in imagination and delivery chat might once have existed between them. They looked around the table at each other, their glance finally settling on Lester Adams, a tall, speckled, taciturn bondsman in his seventies.

Adams had got into bailbonds in the thirties when his farm was taken from him by the banks. He had come to Cincinnati to look for work and found $100 in the street on his first day in the big city. He was on his way to the courthouse (his small village of Bend, Ohio, had no jail, though it had a J.P. who functioned also as a law enforcement officer and Lost and Found service) to return it, carrying it openly in his hand because he had never seen such traffic before and was a little afraid he might be run over by a truck and the money found concealed on his person and people would wonder what a simple, destitute farmer like himself was doing with a hundred dollars cash in his pockets. He was looking for the Lost and Found, which was, he reasoned by analogy, in the immense courthouse. He waved the bill in front of him as he came down the corridors, snapping it like a flag of safe passage, the ostentation of the gesture only slightly less painful to him than his fear that people might think he came by it wrongfully, until he was stopped by a lawyer who was looking for a bondsman to put up $75 bail for his client.

The lawyer, who had seen Adams waving his money, touched his sleeve to get his attention. “Bondsman,” the lawyer said, and Adams, thinking the man had said “Bendsman” and that it was a question, immediately answered “Yes.” The lawyer explained his client’s circumstances and Adams, who hadn’t followed a word of what the man was saying but who was chagrined not to have recognized a fellow townsman, thought: In the big city not a whole day and whole night and so shook that I not only don’t remember this feller though we come from the same village but don’t even recognize that he looks familiar to me, and nodded in agreement to everything the lawyer said, figuring out only as the lawyer went on and it was too late, and that it was his own pleasant nodding that had made it too late, that his old friend seemed to want to borrow seventy-five dollars of the farmer’s found hundred to help out a friend of his own — possibly, Adams imagined, another fellow Bendsman. When the lawyer’s client was produced, he thought: Yep. I’m in worse trouble than I thought, for this feller don’t look no more familiar to me than the first. Not in the big city a whole day and whole night and already I can’t remember nobody. Spoiled, he thought, cursing himself, spoiled rotten, bigger headed ’n a sow’s belly.

So he was already prepared to turn over the hundred dollars to the lawyer and the twenty-five dollars change to the Lost and Found as soon as he could get away from him and find it when the lawyer said, “What about the form?”

Adams shook his head sadly. “Ain’t got no farm. Lost the farm.”

“Never mind,” the lawyer said, “I’ll be right back.” He was as good as his word. In a few moments he was back with a piece of paper. “This’ll do,” he said. “I got it from the clerk. Here. Sign.”

And though Adams couldn’t read very well he could write his name all right — wasn’t that how he’d lost the farm in the first place? — and he imagined that this was something to do with the loan, it not seeming at all strange to him that in the big city, where everything else was turned around, it was the lender who should fix his name to an IOU rather than the borrower. Then he saw that it was going to be all right when the lawyer’s client signed too. “When do I give the seventy-five dollars?” he asked.

“What?” said the lawyer. “Don’t worry, he isn’t going anywhere. Hey,” said the lawyer, “Baxter, pay the man.” And Baxter, the lawyer’s friend and fellow townsman, handed Lester Adams $7.50 for which Lester didn’t even thank him, so concerned was he that not only could he not place the lawyer and the lawyer’s friend, but couldn’t even remember Baxter now that he knew his name.

It was all over in a few minutes; Baxter and the lawyer left the building and Adams was standing there with one hundred and seven dollars and fifty cents. He was so confused by now that he couldn’t move, and others approached him — all asking, it seemed, to borrow money. Under no obligation to these new borrowers since none claimed kinship with him, he was still too good-natured and too timid to have to tell them that he himself had no money and so he refused no one, and when he left the courthouse that day he had not only the hundred found dollars but eighty-four additional dollars that the new borrowers had pressed on him!

Now Lester Adams was no dope. He knew a good thing when he saw one, and though he did not understand what had happened he understood that there had been a misunderstanding. When the corridors finally cleared, he approached one of the policemen and told him the story from the beginning and asked him if he could make anything out of it. The policeman couldn’t stop laughing for fifteen minutes, but when he finally did he explained it all to Adams, careful to omit nothing, not the most trivial detail, since the cop felt that only the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, could drive home to the farmer what an outrageous hick he was, and this, meant as cruelty, was the best lesson anyone could ever have had about the ins and outs of bailbondery.

“I’ll be damned,” Adams said to all the policeman had told him, “I’ll be goddamned. That’s some business! Why, I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts that in a wicked city like Cincinnati there’s always some feller or other in trouble.” With some of his one hundred eighty-four dollars he hired a private tutor, and inside two months he had not only improved his reading skills but could read and understand the most complicated legal documents, and inside three he was licensed by the State of Ohio to set himself up in the bailbond business, and by the fourth he had already had to go out after Baxter, the original borrower, shoot him in the leg, and bring him back by force to the courthouse to stand trial as best he could on one leg. In the years since he had killed eleven men, was no longer a hick and could tell stories of depravity that curled hair.

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.