Stanley Elkin - A Bad Man

“Walls,” Sky said.

“It’s not a good one, Manfred. A blue suit is a blue suit.”

“All right, all right,” Sky said. Harold Flesh had drifted off toward the rear of the canteen — it seemed to be several converted four-man cells — and was thumbing through inventory slips. “I’m going to explain the operation if it kills me,” Manfred Sky said.

Feldman, who was uneasy, wished he would begin.He looked as wide-eyed as he dared at Manfred Sky.

“First of all,” Sky said, “you’ve got to imagine it’s a gigantic, permanent depression, and everyone’s on relief. Everyone. That’s this place. These guys don’t have any money. They use prison chits. The state pays them three-fifty a month, after taxes, for the work they do here. Almost everybody gets the same.”

“Some get more?” Feldman asked, surprised.

“Some get less,” Sky said. “You do, I do. All the bad men.”

“That’s not fair,” Feldman said. “That’s not legal.”

“It’s for our costumes,” Harold Flesh said, plucking at his cashmere sweat shirt. “They dock us for the labor and the special material. They get another five dollars from the outside if their family comes up with it. It’s credited to their accounts. I suppose you won’t have any trouble about that if you’ve got a department store.”

“That’s right,” Walls said, “in the department-store department he’s all fixed.”

“You’re a clown, Walls,” Harold Flesh said.

“You’re a clown too, Harold. We’re all clowns.”

“I won’t go on with it, okay?” Sky said dramatically. “I’ll stop right there.”

’No, Manfred, tell him,” Walls said.

“No. You guys want to crap around, crap around. Go on. I’ll just sit here with my mouth shut.”

“The conniver in conniptions,” Harold Flesh said.

“The dissimulator digusted,” Walls said.

“The piker piqued,” Harold Flesh said.

“That’s enough,” Sky told them. He turned to Feldman. “I cheated the poor,” he said. “I nickeled-and-dimed them. Widows and grandpas, the old and the sick. I reduced the reduced.”

“Oh Christ,” Flesh said, bored, “explain the operation, Sky.”

“This is the operation,” Sky cried, wheeling. “What do you think? This is the operation. There are fortunes in doom and dread. Look,” he said, staring at Feldman, holding him, “during the war—”

“We’ve heard all this, Manfred,” Flesh said.

“During the war — everything I touched. Gold! The things I sold. Amulets. To send to their boys so they wouldn’t be hurt. And privilege. I made my collections. Like the insurance man I went around from scared door to scared door. I sold a policy to the parents, the wives — Prisoner-of-War Insurance, ten dollars a week. People are stupid, they don’t know. They think, when they’ve nothing, that things are controlled. They believe in our money. Theirs only buys bread, but ours can buy fate. I told them I worked through the international Red Cross, that their boys would be safe as long as they paid. They couldn’t afford not to believe me. That’s where the money is. Where people gamble because they can’t afford to take the chance.”

Sky closed his eyes. “Ah,” he said heavily, “I never had any confidence in my generation. I thought we’d lose the war. I’m here today because we won.”

“This all came out at the trial,” Walls said wearily.

Sky opened his eyes. “Well,” he said, suddenly cheerful, “forgive and forget, let bygones be bygones.”

“Guilty as charged,” Walls said.

Flesh — the tough one, Feldman guessed — snickered.

“All right,” Sky said, “you keep the accounts. Is that okay?”

“Whatever you say,” Feldman said.

“I say Freedman,” Walls said suddenly.

“I say Victman,” Flesh said.

“All right,” Sky said, “I say Dedman!”

Feldman lay on his cot, thinking: Uh oh, uh oh, uh oh.

Across the cell, Bisch farted in his sleep.

It was the bad man deal, Feldman thought. They would give him the business, like the Duke of West Point. What a place, he thought. Thieves, he thought, safe-crackers, bookies, guys who jump cars. Pickpockets, he thought. Larcenists and arsonists and murderers in all degrees. Rapers, embezzlers, hit-and-run drivers. Fences and inciters to riot. Bagmen, wheelmen, fixers and bribers. Kidnappers, he thought, counterfeiters, short-changers, pushers and pimps. Menslaughterers, drunken drivers, and guys who didn’t give fair measure. Jack-offs. Disturbers of the peace. Vandals. Scoff laws. Bad sports.

The homunculus seemed to stretch in its death. Pain flared briefly at his heart.

Blackmail , he thought. The perfect crime.

He paced the cell like a benched athlete stalking the sidelines, stalking the game.

Ed Slipper was the oldest inmate in the penitentiary, the fourth oldest inmate in the country. Two years before, he had been only the seventeenth oldest prisoner, but the succeeding winters had been hard. Many of the old-timers had died and Ed had moved rapidly up the list. “You watch my smoke now,” he would say to the men gathered about the television set in the recreation room as the announcer on the screen stood before the weather map and spoke of storms developing in the northwest, of cold spells in their ninth day, their tenth, their eleventh.

“Did you hear that, Ed?” a prisoner said one evening as Feldman, on a break, sat watching television. “Thirty-eight below in Medicine Bow, Wyoming.”

“Shit,” the old man said, “that’s unimportant. That’s a fucking wasteland up there. There’s no prison, no jail even. All that place is is a ton of ice and a thermometer. Nobody never died of the cold in Medicine Bow, Wyoming. You tell me what the cloud cover is in Leavenworth, Kansas, in Atlanta, Georgia, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Then I’ll listen.”

Feldman remembered the old man when he saw him the next night at the canteen. Walls was in the infirmary, and Feldman had taken his place behind the candy counter.

“Have you got the chocolate-covered cherries?” the old man asked.

Feldman pushed a box toward him.

“That’s a quarter,” Sky said. “You got the chits for it, Ed?”

“Aw Sky,” Ed Slipper said, “it’s not but a week till payday.”

“You know the rules. No credit.”

“I only got ten cents.”

“Try the licorice.”

“Sky, you bastard, I ain’t eaten the licorice since Cupid was warden here in ’37. I’m the fourth oldest inmate in this damn country, and I ain’t got the teeth for no licorice.”

Sky shrugged. “Get your warden pal to help you out,” he said.

“Your ass, Sky,” Slipper said. He took a small Hershey bar without nuts and a cylinder of cherry Life Savers. “Home brew,” he explained to Feldman. “I have to do that sometimes.” He gave him the last of his chits and turned away forlornly.

Later that evening Feldman, by-passing the pencil man, used the permission slip the Fink had given him for the cigarettes. The new Fink on duty in his cellblock gave him a pass for it, and he showed this to the guard.

“It is important?” the guard wanted to know. “I ask because you’re entitled to only two round trips in a quarter. You’ve already had one this quarter.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Feldman, troubled. “When is the next quarter?”

“The warden declares the quarters,” the guard said. “No one knows.”

What a place, Feldman thought uneasily. A guilt factory.

“It keeps it interesting,” the guard said.

“Sure,” Feldman said.

“There’s got to be calm and there’s got to be excitement,” the guard said as Feldman moved off.