Stanley Elkin - A Bad Man

“But I made her do it, and it was terrible for her. She was a beautiful woman.

“But she was right. It didn’t make any difference. She still had the fever after they pulled the teeth. They said it would go down when the gums stopped draining, but the gums didn’t stop draining. It was as if there was a fire inside her somewhere and they couldn’t find it. They couldn’t do anything.

“Her jaw was too small. The teeth they made her didn’t fit. I got her others. She couldn’t wear them. She said what difference did it make. I tried to kiss her, but she wouldn’t let me. We didn’t sleep together any more. One night I went to wipe her lips and I bent down to kiss her while she slept. It was soft — her mouth. I never felt anything like that before. It was as if there was just this soft skin over her and she was empty inside. I threw up. It was awful. I still taste my wife’s mouth.

“She couldn’t forgive me. She was always crying. I made her beautiful dresses. I always made her beautiful dresses, but these were even more beautiful. She wouldn’t wear them. She thought I was laughing at her. Laughing at her— Jesus! ”

He killed her, Feldman thought. The poison flowed from the high ground of her fever and he couldn’t stand it and he killed her. He looked away from Bisch’s shining eyes. Why, he’s like a soldier, he thought. He serves his trouble. Feldman shuddered and nodded helplessly.

Bisch sighed, observing him.

Ghost stories, Feldman thought.

He went to the television room, where he saw a documentary on migrant workers and their families and a situation comedy about a little boy with divorced parents who goes to visit his father or mother on alternate weeks in the series. Feldman had seen the program before. The kid, obsessed, conspired to bring his mother and father together again, and tonight he shammed infantile paralysis. The news program reported white reprisals in Philadelphia for the attack of two fifteen-year-old Negroes on a nun. It told of cold war and plane crash and storm. Today the President, after a flying trip covering eight states, had declared seven new disaster areas. The governors in the Midwest had asked for only five. He knows, Feldman thought. He returned to his cell. Bisch, asleep, was groaning in a dream. Feldman wondered if he should wake him, wipe his lips.

Until now Feldman had tried to ignore his fellow convicts. He feared them, of course. They were hostile men and seemed to know more about him than he wished. The famous grapevine, he thought, and imagined a sort of demonic pony express. It’s all that talking out of the side of the mouth (he fancied a great hoarse chain of whispered intimacies). What was astonishing was their accuracy. Because they were accustomed to conspiracy’s low tones nothing was lost, and because they had no imagination nothing was distorted. So he kept out of their way.

Now, however, he was interested. Appalled by their horror stories, he wondered about them. (Wondering about them, he wondered about himself. Is this character? he thought.) He had none of their desire to gossip. Yet he discovered a quality in himself that he had been unaware of before. Surprised at their unhappiness— how unhappy? why unhappy? weren’t all men happy? — he wished now to know about other men, to ask them questions.

He thought it would be difficult, but it was easy. People were willing, even eager, to talk. There was in them, he supposed, a respect for his wealth, his differences from them. Then they were losers, and losers were accustomed to talking about themselves. They spilled the beans and exposed the linen to guidance counselors, juvenile parole officers, social workers, free psychologists, free psychiatrists, sob-sister reporters, and at last to their court-appointed lawyers. They would mourn to anyone who might help them, to anyone not in trouble who might get them out of trouble. Open not to advice but to miracle, they rattled away in any ear.

So he made it his business to find out about them. With their permission he peeked into their moneyless wallets, stared fascinated through the yellowing plastic windows at wives and fathers and sweethearts and mothers and sisters and sons and daughters, the human background of even the loneliest men. (Staring, he thought: Everyone has been photographed, everyone in the world; everyone, smiling, posing, has made the small, poor holiday before a camera, thinking: Catch me, hold me, keep me.) How thin they all were. Even in pictures, which normally added pounds, these people seemed light, foreign and a little like Indians. They looked to have frailty’s toughness and wiry strength, but they would not last, he knew. The children had the sharp vision of the poor, their clever legs. They could see long distances down alleys and run quickly through city streets, making fools of their pursuers, but they would not last either. What attracted Feldman most were the women — thin, hard-armed, hard-breasted, and with babushkas on their heads. Yesterday’s B-girls and waitresses and bench workers and bruised daughters, foulmouthed, pitiful and without pity, their suspicion misplaced and their trust too. Kid-slappers, Feldman thought, smokers in bed, drinkers in taverns while the apartment is burning, runners amok. Whew, whew, he thought, tricky in bed, tricky, tricky, too much for me— I wouldn’t last — clawers of ass and pullers of hair and suckers of cock.

“What is your wife doing, now that you’re in jail?” Feldman, looking up from the picture, asked Coney.

“Tricks,” Coney said gloomily.

“Ah, a magician.” (I’ll bet , he thought, seeing the girl’s grim mouth and long nails. He suspected palmed hatpins, bold kicks to the groin, all the rough whore’s holds. He thought of Lilly, who had no trade and knew no tricks and couldn’t take a punch. He thought of Lilly’s dull loneliness.)

“How does your family make out?” he asked Maze, in the cell across from his.

“On relief,” Maze said. “On A.D.C On Community Chest.”

“I’m a very big taxpayer in this state,” Feldman said thoughtfully.

He saw a picture of a big boy in one of those double strollers for twins.

“My kid is sick,” Butt said, “he needs an operation on his back. He can’t move his legs, and the nurse at the clinic says he has to get fresh air so he’ll be strong enough if we ever get the money for his operation. We live on the third floor, and my wife has to carry him up the stairs. She ain’t strong and he weighs a hundred pounds and we have to move into a building which has an elevator if he’s ever to get enough fresh air and sunshine. We ain’t got the rent for that kind of building. They’re asking a hundred dollars. She’s moved his bed next to the window, but the night air gives him a sore throat.”

“We need a wagon,” Clock said. “It’ll be spring and the phone books come out, and my wife can deliver them but we don’t have a wagon. She used to get five cents a book, but in the last election the townships all merged and the book is much thicker. They’d give her a dime if she just had a wagon. The wagon she used was stolen last year, but it wasn’t no good for it was too small. She needs a new big one — an American Cart. They’re twenty-eight bucks, and she ain’t got the dough. If she just had the wagon she was promised the job.”

“I’ve—” Feldman said.

“Flo doesn’t drive,” McAlperin said. “She never learned how and the car’s up on blocks. There’s no one to teach her, and lessons are high. She ain’t got the nerve, to tell you the truth. Her first husband died — he was creamed by a truck. But if she could drive she could get a good job. Selling cosmetics, or maybe those books. You make a commission, they pay very well. They’re crying for help, and Flo would be good. People all like her, she knows how to talk. Presentable too, attractive and neat. Now she’s a waitress, but that’s not for her. If she just learned to drive she’d be better off. The car could come down. It’s not good for a car to be idle like that. I don’t like the idea of her being out late, waiting on tables and talking to men. You know how men are, what they want from a girl. If she’d just learn to drive she could sell door to door, talking with housewives and doing some good. Getting those books into their homes. If she’d just learn to drive.”