Stanley Elkin - A Bad Man

The deputy won the game and sat back comfortably. “Some revenge, Dedman?” he said. “I believe a man is entitled to revenge.” He dealt the cards, and they played for another hour.

Feldman urinated in his suit. The deputy and Dedman watched the darkening, spreading stain.

“That’s more like it,” the deputy said.

There was an old Packard touring car waiting for them at the station.

The deputy had fallen asleep; Feldman had to wake him. Dedman had disappeared. Before they left the train the deputy unlocked Feldman’s handcuff and the chain that wrapped his wrist. He moved him down the steps and into the back seat of the car. It was very dark.

“You’re where they shoot to kill now, Feldman,” the deputy said.

The driver laughed sourly and the deputy closed Feldman’s door and walked around the car and got into the front seat next to him.

When they had ridden for almost an hour — Feldman could see the tan twist of dirt road as the car’s head lamps swept the sudden inclines and turns of the arbitrary mountain — he asked how far it was to the penitentiary.

“Hell,” the deputy said, “you’ve been in it since the train went through that tunnel just after dark. It’s all penitentiary. It’s a whole country of penitentiary we got up here.”

“It’s four miles from where we are now to the second wall,” the driver said.

In twenty minutes Feldman saw a ring of lights, towers, walls.

“That’s her,” the deputy said.

The car stopped. Feldman guessed they had come to a gate, though he could see no passage through the solid wall.

“Out,” the deputy said. “Nothing wider than a man gets through that wall. There’s no back-of-the-laundry-truck escapes around here.”

The driver opened a metal door, and they walked single file, Feldman in the middle, through a sort of narrow ceilingless passageway that curved and angled every few feet. Along the wide tops of the walls strolled men with rifles. Feldman looked up at them. “Head down, you,” a guard called. Every hundred feet or so was another metal door, which opened as they came to it.

“Maximum security,” the deputy said.

“Maximum insecurity,” said the driver.

They came to a final door, which opened onto a big yard lighted with stands of arc lamps, bright as an infield. Across from him, about two hundred yards away, in an area not affected by the lights, he could see the outlines of buildings like the silhouette of city skylines in old comic strips. They took him to one of these buildings — all stone; he could see no joints; it was as though the building had been sculpted out of solid rock — and the deputy prodded him up the stairs.

“You’ll have your interview with the warden here,” the deputy said.

Feldman looked at his wrist for marks that might have been left by the chain. He was certain the deputy had abused him, that the business of the suitcase had been his own invention. There was something in the Constitution about cruel and unusual punishment. There was a slight redness about his left wrist but no swelling. He was a little disappointed. If he got the chance — he would study the warden carefully; didn’t they have to be college graduates? — he would report the deputy anyway.

They took him to an office on the second floor.

Feldman was surprised. For all the apparent solidness of the outside of the building, the inside seemed extremely vulnerable. There was a lot of wood. He could smell furniture polish. The old, oiled stairs creaked as they climbed them. It was like the inside of an old public school. There were even drinking fountains in the hall.

“You wait here,” the deputy said. He opened a door — it could have been to the principal’s office; Feldman looked for the American flag — and pushed him inside.

“The warden doesn’t want anyone around when he talks to a con,” the deputy said. “I’m sacking out. The driver’s your guard now. He’ll be right outside.” He closed the door and left the room. Feldman waited a few minutes and opened the door. A few things the driver had said made him think he might be approachable.

The driver was sitting in a chair, a machine gun in his lap. “I’m no friend of yours,” he said. “Get back in there.”

Feldman sat down to wait. I’m probably on television, he thought. They’re watching me this minute. Strangely, he felt more comfortable. If everything was just a strategy he could deal with them. Just don’t let them touch me, he thought. He fell asleep. Let them watch me sleep, he dreamed.

When he woke up he expected to see the warden standing over him. It was not impossible, he felt, that the warden could even turn out to be the deputy. But when he opened his eyes no one was there, and he knew that there were no one-way mirrors, no hidden microphones, and was more frightened than at any time since he had been arrested. I’m in trouble, he thought, I’m really in trouble.

He began to pray.

“Troublemaker,” he prayed, “keep me alive. Things are done that mustn’t be done to me. Have a heart. If the question is can I take it, the answer is no. Regularity is what I know best. I have contributed to the world’s gloom, I acknowledge that. But I have always picked on victims. Victims are used to it. Irregularity is what they know best. They don’t even feel it. I feel it. It gives me the creeps.”

He finished his prayer, and still seated, looked around the office. It was past midnight. He might have hours to wait yet. “You wait here,” the deputy had said. Was it a stratagem? They file you paper-thin with expectation and anxiety. I expect nothing. I’ll take what comes. He folded his arms across his chest, trying to look detached. It would be best, he thought, if he could sleep again. A sleeping man had a terrific advantage in a contest of this sort. It would invariably rattle whoever came to shake him awake. “You see what I think of you?” a sleeping man said to the shaker.

But he wasn’t sleepy. He was too cold. It’s the altitude, Feldman thought. At night you need a coat up here even in summer. He looked down at his suit and stroked his sleeve. It was lucky he believed in appearances. (“A heavy material,” he had told the buyer. “In this heat?” “What should I wear in that courtroom, a luau shirt?”) A man of conservative, executive substance, silver-templed, and tan for a Jew. Never split a Republican ticket in my life, gentlemen.

The door opened and Feldman looked up. A man stood in the doorway for a moment and then moved behind the desk and sat down. He had some papers with him which he examined as if they contained information with which he was already familiar, using them easily but with a certain disappointment.

Feldman watched the warden, if this was the warden. (Already he had begun to do what all strangers in new situations do — attribute to others exalted rank, seeing in each comfortable face an executive, a person of importance.) He was a man of about Feldman’s age, perhaps a little younger. Feldman guessed they were the same height, though the warden was not as heavy. What struck him most was the man’s face. It seemed conventional, not unintelligent so much as not intelligent. It was, even at midnight, smooth — not recently shaved, just smooth — as though lacking the vitality to grow hair. Its ruddiness could probably be accounted for by the heavy sun striking at this altitude through the thin atmosphere. He might have been one of the salesmen who called at his store. Feldman had hoped, he realized now, for someone mysterious, a little magical. He saw, looking at the warden’s face, that it would be a long year.

“Is it all right with you if I open a window? It’s a little stuffy in here,” the man said.