Stanley Elkin - A Bad Man

“Hold it there,” the warden said as Feldman passed. “What are you doing in here?”

Feldman showed him the permission slip he had gotten from the opposite number. The warden took it and tore it up without looking at it.

“That’s my permission slip,” Feldman said. “I need that to show the guard to get my pass.”

The warden stuffed the pieces of the permission slip into his pocket. “Why are you in these halls without a permission slip?” he demanded.

“I had a permission slip. You tore it up. Hey,” he said, “what is this?”

The warden smiled broadly and winked at Feldman.

Feldman blinked back, startled. He has to take care of me, Feldman thought. He has to. He’s the warden. It’s civil service.

The warden turned to go. Feldman started after him and held his elbow. “There have to be rules,” he insisted crazily.

The warden turned on him suddenly, shaking his elbow loose from Feldman’s grasp. “ Yes ,” he said, “there have to be rules. It had grease on it! Your permission slip had grease on it! ”

“No,” Feldman said, “no. It didn’t. You’ve got the pieces in your pocket. See if it did.”

“Not this one,” the warden said, tapping his pocket. “This one is just the wages of sin. The other one. The one you gave the Fink tonight. I look at the permission slips and I see the grease on them and then I have you guys. Grease. Grease . You bad men are all the same. You live in grease.”

I wish I were seventy-five years old, Feldman thought.

“ Privilege! ” The warden almost spit the word. “I hate that word. Angles, cut corners — there’s nothing else in your geometry, is there?”

Feldman stared at him.

“The Finks change daily. Didn’t you think of that? Corner-cutter, didn’t you think of that? I change my Finks daily.”

Like sheets in a hotel, Feldman thought.

“What did you have to give him? Cigarettes? Probably cigarettes. Two? Three?”

Six, Feldman thought. I’ve been screwed.

“You’re a laughingstock, Feldman. Evil is clumsy, funny. Get back to your cell.”

The guard would stop him. He would be put on report. “I request a permission slip, sir,” Feldman said.

“You’ve already had two this quarter,” the warden said.

“I’m entitled to a round trip.”

It was hopeless. There was something wrong somewhere. He had cheated, but someplace it had all been canceled out, and now they were cutting corners on him.

The warden considered Feldman for a moment and then took a pad of fresh permission slips from his pocket. He wrote one out. “Here,” he said magnanimously. “The warden declares the quarters.”

Feldman hesitated. It would be charged as his first permission slip of the new quarter. He would be forever one half a round trip behind — maybe a whole trip. He couldn’t think. You had to be a Philadelphia lawyer to serve time here.

“Go on,” the warden said, “take it.” He held out the slip to Feldman. “There are more than four quarters,” he explained. “The warden declares the quarters, and the warden declares how many quarters there will be.”

Feldman took the slip in a daze.

“Candy?” the warden asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Candy, wasn’t it? Chocolate-covered cherries?”

Feldman feared for his life.

“No, no,” the warden said, “there’s no magic, I’m no magician. It’s attention to detail, endless attention to detail. That’s why crime doesn’t pay. Crime is a detail-evasion technique. It’s pushing, pulling, the physics of force. You have the blackjacks, the shivs, the machine guns and bombs. We have them too, of course, but mostly for show. We have investigators , the crime lab. We have the laws and the rules, don’t you see? We keep the records and have the radios and the alarm systems and the TV over the teller’s cage. We have the cells and the jails and the institutions. We have the speed zones and the traffic signals and the alternate-side-of-the-street parking regulations. We have the magnified maps of the city, the pins in the colored neighborhoods. We have the beats and patrols. We have the system. Virtue is system, honor is order. God is design, grace is a covenant, a contract and codicils, what’s down there in writing.”

“Cops,” Feldman said softly, as if to himself, “cops twisting arms, hitting where it doesn’t show.”

“What, are you kidding me? Fire with fire. That’s nothing,” the warden said.

“Punishment.”

“Sure, why not?” the warden asked.

“I have to be back in my cell by ten,” Feldman said nervously. It was another rule. He looked at the clock on the wall. “I’ve only got five minutes,” he said. He turned to go, but the warden stopped him. He winked again at Feldman.

“Hey,” the warden called. “THIS IS THE WARDEN,” he shouted.

“Yes, Warden, what is it?” a voice down the corridor called back.

“Is that a guard there?” the warden yelled.

“Yes sir. What is it?”

“THIS IS THE WARDEN. IT’S NINE-THIRTY. GOT THAT?”

“Yes, Warden,” the guard answered.

“Now we can talk,” the warden said, smiling at Feldman.

“The rules are for me,” Feldman said. “Is that it?”

“The rules are for everybody. Somebody has to make them up,” he said quietly.

Feldman wondered if it was an apology. He looked at the warden and knew it wasn’t. He thought of the year ahead, of the rules. He was lonely. What he missed, he supposed, was the comfort of his old indifference when nothing counted and madness was all there was. Now there was a difference. It was because he counted; his life counted. It always had. How could it be? It didn’t make sense.

“So,” the warden said comfortably, “it was the chocolate-covered cherries.” He regarded Feldman intensely, with a swift, inexplicable ardor. “Stop to figure. Corner-cutter, clown, stop to figure a minute. Who do you suppose stocks that canteen, decides the items and proportions? Who fixes the prices? Didn’t you know? Didn’t you even know that? It’s the texture that gets these old men — the thick syrup, the fruit, smooth, bright as a prize, the dark chocolate soft as meat. I know the chemistry of old men, their sweet greeds. It’s detail, Feldman, painstaking attention to dependency. I have to know who’s vulnerable here.”

Feldman felt his heart scratched by the homunculus.

“So,” the warden said, “what was the bargain? What did you make him do for you? What’s your dependency? Speak up. I’ll order it for the canteen on the next requisition. No? It doesn’t come in a box? Wait, wait, you’ve still got your teeth. What did you make that old man — my trusty, my trusty, Feldman — promise you? This is the warden speaking.”

“I needed a man,” Feldman said hoarsely.

The warden stared at him. “Fool,” he said.

Feldman added his losses — twenty-five cents for the candy, the money for the stamp on the letter to his lawyer, the five dollars it was too late to stop, his valuable time at eight and a third cents a day, say another two cents. It was as Sky said. It was the Depression.

One morning when Feldman could not endure the thought of being in the prison, or of going to his job in the canteen, or of fencing one more time with the guards and trusties and pencil men, or of having to cope one more day with the elaborate rules of the community, complex and arbitrary as the laws of a boxed game, he chose to remain in his cell. It would cost him. It was bad time and did not count toward the fulfillment of his sentence. He lay on his cot, seething. The idea that it was costing him, that in several months he would have to relive this day, made him furious. He couldn’t afford his holiday. Ah, he was a sucker, he thought angrily. The shame and guilt he felt came from his recognition of how futile it is to defy one’s poverty.