Stanley Elkin - Searches & Seizures

“So they’re killing us. The 1966 Federal Bail Reform Act which gave federal courts the discretion to act as their own bondsmen and accept a ten-percent bond up front has already put us out of kidnapping, skyjackings and political assassinations. It’s put us out of bank stickups where the robbers have crossed state lines. It’s pushed us off antitrust, and it’s going to take the big antipollution cases that are coming up right out of our fucking mouths. Crime, gentlemen, is increasingly political. It’s thrown us out of the more apocalyptic riots and raised the bridge on espionage — which admittedly has never been big for us — and it has the potential to squeeze us out of narcotics, to say nothing of the new pattern of conspiracy prosecutions which I see emerging. With all these grass-roots Legal Defense Funds, this could have been the most lucrative fiddle of all.

“Mark my words. As crime turns increasingly against the state and the people get the wind up, all that’s going to be left for us poor bastards are the petty thieves, wife beaters and dog poisoners. The chicken stealers — that’s our meat. Vagrants. Shit, colleagues, even abortion’s legal today. Five and dime, gentlemen, penny ante times, a métier of small potatoes like a little Ireland. In fact, there’s some doubt in my mind that even this will be permitted us. As heart wins the battle of history and bail commissions throughout the length and breadth of the land each day secure releases for ‘good risks,’ we’re going to be left with only the two- and three-time losers. You’d do better to take a flier in a Bronx uranium mine. We’re dead ducks, fellows, law’s dirty old men.”

“We know all that,” Barney Fetterman said. “We know all that. What do we do?”

Ted Caccerone stood up. He had a Coca-Cola in his hand. There was A-1 sauce on the side of his mouth, and crumbs from the open-faced bun on which his London broil had lain. “We undersell. We cut our fee to seven and a half percent.”

“A gas war,” Art Klein said, “we’ll have a fucking gas war.”

“We won’t be so quick to shoot,” Paulie Shannon said. “Somebody jumps bail on us we bring him back alive, we talk him down like an expert in the control tower, we come on like social workers, we change our hard-guy image.”

“We take turns at the courthouse, we draw a number, stand on line, everything courteous. We get rules, choreography. Like in gin rummy the dealer gives the other guy first shot at the face card.”

“Who’s in?” Adams asked.

“I am,” said Shannon.

“Me too,” said Klein.

“It’ll have to be worked out,” Ted Caccerone said, “but I guess I can go along.”

“Something has to be done, that’s for sure,” Walter Mexico said. “Some sort of committee ought to study some of these suggestions we’ve been hearing, formalize them, and then we can put it to a vote.”

“Would you chair such a committee?” Adams asked.

“Sure, why not?”

“Where’s the Phoenician?” Barney Fetterman said.

“It’s got to be rationalized,” C. M. Smith said. “Blunt the competition, is that what we’re saying?”

“Just about,” said Lester Adams.

“Lapels shouldn’t come off in our fingers in the corridor, is that the idea? Okay, who’s going to be on the committee?”

“We’re the committee,” Adams said, “this is the committee.”

“Where’s that Phoenician?”

“We don’t jump the gun,” said Paulie Shannon, “we pool our resources. I think it’s the only way. I’m glad this is your thinking. I think a lot’s been accomplished today.”

“But we’ve all got to commit ourselves to this, that’s the important thing. Otherwise it’s no good. We’ve got to behave like brothers. Where’s that goddamn Phoenician?”

“That fucker. He’s off beating our time.”

“He plays Sooner with us we’ll wipe him.”

“Where is the son of a bitch?”

Alexander nods to the guard. The old man frowns, bored as ever. Main notes his shoes, the heavy, cumbersome shoe shape like some pure idea of foot in a child’s drawing. The broad black leather facing, a taut vault of hide, a sausage, all its tensions resolved as if ribbed by steel or some hideous flush fist of foot. The shine speaks for itself. There is discipline in it, duty, and he wonders if there is a changing room somewhere where the men polish these stout casings, get them that lusterless, evenly faded black that has no equivalent in nature.

The shoes are made to go with the heavy serge of the uniform, the now formless trousers that may have been formless when new, the long drop to the dark ankles, black themselves, black on black on black, undifferentiated as the cloths in a stage illusion. Alexander wonders if the guard has back trouble, if he soaks his feet in hot salt water. These oiled and bare wood floors, pale as match sticks, faintly dipping, uneven. Marbles set down on them would tumble erratically, collect in some unpredictable pool of gravity. This same force would suck at the man’s feet, pulling at them painfully through the solid soles as he stood all day in his area. Alexander senses the old man’s crotchets, his distaste for stragglers, his ambiguous desires for female art students whose backs, propelled forward in their chairs, reveal an orbit of the elastic tops of underwear above their blue jeans, sliver of the moon, cantaloupe slice of pantie, square inches of backflesh forgotten behind them in their young concentration like Cinderella’s slipper. Does he even see the exhibits? Has he a favorite? Or is his concern only for the glass cases themselves, for whistling, loud talk and no smoking?

As he often does, Main feels an odd envy of the man, of his circumscribed conditions. It suddenly strikes him that the guard is the only person on his Christmas list who is not a lawyer or judge, cop or custodial officer, clerk of the court or prison official. And though the guard gets nothing that Main has especially picked out for him, only the box of good cigars or bottle of Scotch or top-grade Florentine leather wallets bought in bulk for his least important contacts, this makes him, he supposes, his friend. A friendship that is entirely one way, for to the extent that he considers Main at all, the man almost certainly thinks of him as a crank. There must be others, drawn as he is, to this place, or to some other like it. Though Alexander has never seen them, has seen only the schoolchildren and illicit lovers and the vague flirts and lonely, overanxious men.

He loves the cool, big room, its antiquated radiators and old-fashioned exhibit cases, its antiquated space, the corny visual aids, the large type on the yellowing cards by the exhibits. He loves the teeth.

“Afternoon,” Main tells the guard.

The man nods and Main steps away from him and goes toward the case. “These specimens,” reads the legend, “were obtained from drugstores in the Far East. The apothecaries regarded them as ‘dragon’s teeth,’ no matter what they really were. The teeth shown here probably came from cave deposits in the Karst of South China, for they are like the teeth of the Middle Pleistocene animals found in the region.”

He sees the tooth of the giant panda, large as a small seashell, the impression across its broad grinding surface like a curled fetus. Next to it a pair of molars from an orang-utan, the shape and shade of old dice, three deep holes in each like a goblin’s face, history throwing a six. There’s the dentin of a wild pig, dark as root beer, the pulp chambers in cross section like the white veins in liver. He sees the enormous tooth of a rhinoceros, taking the card’s word for it. It does not even resemble a tooth; it is deep, chambered as a lock. In another case there is a comb of kangaroo jaw, four teeth blooming from the bone like cactus.