Stanley Elkin - A Bad Man

You’ll be getting another examination in a month. If you’re no better then, stronger measures will have to be taken .

Fisher

Sure it’s ordinary, Feldman thought, awakened the next morning by the flash of sun on the bright mirror surfaces of the bars Lurie had shined. Sure it’s ordinary, he thought, plunging his arm deep into the toilet bowl to polish it. He looked up and down the long line of cells. Men sat on the sides of their cots, their shoulders slumped, their heads in their hands. Sure it is.

“Good morning, fellas,” he said to the cellblock at large, to the murderers and robbers of banks, “how’d you sleep?”

“Stow it, big mouth,” warned a convict in another cell. “Watch your step, pig creep. Fuck with me and I’ll get you on your way through the foundry to deposit the chits. I’ll crack your skull with a shovel and stuff your body into furnace six.”

“These things happen,” Feldman said.

He would give the warden his way. When in jail, he thought. It was a matter of indifference to him. Life was ordinary. Only what happens to you , he thought, not entirely clear what he meant. Then he thought: My crime, one of them, was that I thought the world itself was happening to me. And when it didn’t, I tried to make it happen. Ah, he thought, like the other bad man — like Mix.

That warden, he thought, shuddering, he’ll pull me apart. The thing to do is to play ball. The warden was a great man. As great a man as he had encountered. As great as his father. Greater. To use his health like that, to scare him into docility! The man used the character of the opposition. To fright he applied fear, to greed dreams of surfeit, to courage (the complicated possibilities of his system of silence in the dining hall) encouragement. It was important to know what he thought of you. Feldman remembered his file. What was in it? Ed Slipper had let him down. Slipper had been in the infirmary nine days. Had the warden anything to do with that? Incommunicado. When he was there for his physical, Feldman had bribed an orderly to get a report on him.

Higher purposes. He was all higher purposes, the warden. Feldman knew that , and the warden knew he knew. That probably explained the warden’s note, the explanations that explained nothing, the warden’s fear that Feldman was on to something. (Sure, fear. The son of a bitch was on the run. You didn’t understand fear that well without having known a fair amount of it yourself. You couldn’t manipulate greed unless you’d been there.) Then — he had come a long way today — this: he’s one too. The warden. He’s a bad man too!

Maybe. Higher purposes. Nobody understood the prison. Rules, exceptions to rules. The world as tightrope. Feldman didn’t know. Does he want me to understand? Does he not want me to understand?

Anyway, okay. The warden said be calm. He’d be calm. He was calm. There were certain dentists you could trust. They said, “This won’t hurt you,” and it didn’t. That was no guarantee you wouldn’t die from pain on the way home, but you knew you were safe just then. That’s how he felt. Safer, for the time being at least, than at any time since he’d come. That’s why he had spoken out his greeting like that. He was pretty happy. What couldn’t he do now that he was safe for a while?

“Bisch,” he told his cellmate, “watch my smoke.”

The first thing he did was to get Wall’s power of attorney. Then he got Flesh’s. Sky’s was more difficult. “Authority isn’t authority until it’s deputed,” Feldman said. “Responsibility doesn’t mean anything until it’s delegated.”

“I’m in charge of the operation,” Manfred Sky said sullenly.

“I know that, Manfred. I know that. Listen to me a minute. Did you ever see a general?”

“What is this? Why rake over the past? Just because I once sold phony Prisoner-of-War Insurance—”

Feldman had forgotten about the man’s war experience. He didn’t believe for a minute in Sky’s sore spot, but understood that it was fashionable just then in the prison for bad men to assume long, penitent faces, to “make warden’s mouths,” as the phrase had it. (He had thought it a chink in the warden’s armor when he realized that the man would settle for insincerity, but he had been quickly straightened out about that in Warden’s Assembly. “ Forms , gentlemen,” the warden had roared over the convicts’ forced applause and cheers, “civilization is forms .” There was even some talk that the warden would soon reinstitute an experimental measure that had been abandoned shortly before Feldman’s arrival. When the practice was in force, a convict encountering a guard in the corridor had to greet the guard formally, inquire after his health, and his family’s if he had one. Then the guard had to do the same for the convict. Each was required to offer some minor complaint, some small concern — these didn’t have to be real — for the other to be solicitous about. The system had been discontinued, Feldman understood, because the prisoners were helpless to project a believable insincerity.)

“Did you ever see a general?” Feldman repeated. “Did he carry an M-one? Was he issued a trenching tool? Did he, except on formal occasions, wear as many ribbons as his driver, say? Manfred, I’ve seen a general. I sat with one across a conference table when the store was promoting defense bonds for the government. He had assistants — captains, majors, a full colonel. Manfred, those junior officers looked Toyland next to this fellow. Do you understand? West Point cadets, senior prom, Flirtation Walk. They looked like men who had never done anything more military than hold a sword above some R.O.T.C. lieutenant and his pretty bride. But that general, that general was a dream of power! In a khaki uniform, very plain, unribboned, almost a business suit. He deputed his messkit, Manfred, he delegated his knapsack. Just the stars on each shoulder like awry stick pins, like something in a brown firmament. He looked like the United States sitting there. He never opened his mouth. This was a complicated thing. I had lawyers from my staff; he had his judge-advocate people. I was asking concessions for the space. Many things had to be worked out. Decisions. He never said a word. With the eyes, everything with the eyes. He never made a sound. Well, that’s an exaggeration. I was sitting across from him and I heard this faint hum. Like a generator or a transformer. Oh, the power in that man. Don’t kid yourself, Manfred. He was in charge of his operation too.”

“Wow,” Manfred Sky said.

“I ask for your power of attorney, Manfred. Give me your hand on this.”

“Why? What’s in it for you?”

“ Me? ” Feldman said, “I’m a workhorse , Manfred, a grind . Feldman the fetcher, the rough and tumbler. This is true, Manfred. I have no executive gifts. I haven’t the gift of silence. Hear how I talk. It’s a failing.”

Flesh and Walls were listening. Feldman had simply promised them he would do their work.

“How about it, Manfred?”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“Look, Flesh, look, Walls. Look at Manfred. With the eyes, everything with the eyes.”

“Well, I don’t know,” Manfred said.

“What would you say to a bribe , Sky?”

“Done,” Sky said.

Then Feldman took down the chewing-gum displays. Walls, who had taken some trouble with the arrangement of these, objected. “Wait,” Feldman told him, “you’ll see.”

He cleared away the toothpaste tubes. He had Flesh hide the cigarettes, and he removed the shaving creams and aerosol deodorants. He stood back critically and looked at the shelves. “My God,” he said, “the candy!”