Stanley Elkin - A Bad Man

Feldman could think of nothing to pray for. He felt immensely stupid, but the old man was poking him in the ribs. “And God bless Mommy,” he suddenly blurted in a loud voice, “and Poppy and Uncle Ned and Aunt Stephanie and Uncle Julius and Cousin Frank and Dr. Bob and Baby Sue.” He reeled off fifty names. Who the hell are these people? he wondered, amazed at himself. Suddenly he was conscious that the old man had stopped praying and was looking at him.

“You got a big family, you know that, Leo?” Slipper said respectfully. Then he began to laugh, and he seemed greedy again. Avarice boomed out of his glee.

“Okay,” Feldman said. “I get it. There was no guard.”

“Leo,” Ed Slipper said, wiping his eyes, “I swear I thought I heard him. Anyway, I knew what you were going to say. The warden warned me, but I saw the results of the tests myself. I got it, Leo. I got it, kid. I think I got it. Anyway, can I take the chance? I want to live. I’m second oldest con in the country now if the warden didn’t lie about that. What would you do in my place?”

“What about my file?”

“Oh sure,” the old man said. “Come on, I’ll show you. That laugh was terrific.”

Feldman stood.

“Better brush your blue suit off,” Ed Slipper said. “Floor’s dirty. You got some dust on your knees.” He was still chuckling.

“Yeah,” Feldman said. “I pray sloppy.” Some shape I’m in, he thought. I make him laugh, the second oldest con in all the prisons. Relax, he told himself, life is ordinary. Nothing happens. “Rested up, old-timer?”

“Oh yes,” Ed Slipper said, “just give me a hand up, please.”

He has a buzzer, Feldman thought. I touch him, ten thousand volts of electricity go through my body. A practical joke. You live, you die. Nothing to it.

He helped the old man up.

“Your file’s just down the hall,” Ed Slipper said, leading Feldman out of the chapel, “come on.”

Feldman felt like someone walking into ambush who knew what was coming but not when. It wasn’t too late to turn back, but somewhere along the way his duty had taken over. He had to see it through to the end now. Comic obligation had to have its way. Life was ordinary. He was going to have to step through some door into a pitch-black room where suddenly the lights would snap on. A thousand killers would be singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” His wife would be there, his son. And at the instant that he started to think: Today is my birthday — all the tenors, two hundred and seventy-five of them, would beat the shit out of him. They would cut out his son’s heart and feed it to him, and he’d have to eat it — they’d have a way of making him. His wife would be doing a striptease under a magenta light. And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Feldman together again. He groaned.

They passed Bisch in the hall. Bisch nodded. “What’s new?” he said.

“What could be new?” Feldman said.

Slipper took Feldman’s arm and guided him to a door. The word “Library” was painted on the milky glass.

“Beyond this one, right?” Feldman said.

“Yes sir,” Slipper said.

You don’t have to call me “sir,” Feldman thought. Not before a big job. “Shall I open it or shall you?” he asked sweetly.

“You open it,” Slipper said.

I am going to blow up, Feldman thought. I am going to explode into a trillion billion fragments, and they will put out a report that I have escaped. There’s going to be a disaster, he thought, looking at the old man’s virtuous face. There’s going to be a disaster, and all I can do is cooperate. And if there is no disaster there will be a disaster. Warden Fisher demands a disaster.

He opened the door. They were in what appeared to be the library. He looked at the book-stuffed shelves. They didn’t have to go to all this trouble, Feldman thought, transferring all those books, alphabetizing the cards, setting up the Dewey decimal system. Or did they use Library of Congress? He would never know now. That would be the problem he took with him to the grave.

“This is it,” Slipper said.

“This is it, right, old-timer?”

“Yep.”

“Yep,” Feldman said, “this is it.”

“Yep.”

“My file, please, Slipper,” Feldman said. He felt like a straight man feeding a line to the second oldest and second funniest banana in all the prisons in all the United States of America and all its territories and possessions. He felt like sticking his fingers into his ears to muffle the explosion of the big laugh.

Slipper marched up to the check-out desk. “The file on Bad Man Feldman,” he told the trusty.

The man looked up at them. Feldman remembered thinking he had the bluest, clearest eyes he had ever seen. “Bad men are on the open shelves,” he said. “ F eldman,” he said, underscoring the first letter. “Is that a Ph or an F? ”

So, Feldman thought. They use phonetics.

“ F ,” Ed Slipper said.

“Open shelves, under F ,” the trusty said.

Uv course, Feldman thought, whut then? Liphe is ordinary, and the man’s a phool who thinks it’s phancy.

“Come on,” Ed Slipper said. They walked back to the open shelves and there, just as the trusty had said, under F , between a volume entitled Federal Offenses and another called Felons and Felony , were seven copies in high stiff black covers of the book on Feldman. Slipper took down a copy, flipped through the two hundred or so mimeographed pages and then removed the card from the little pocket in the back. “This one’s been checked out five times,” he said, offering it to him.

Feldman shook his head. “I saw the picture.”

Suddenly the door flew open. It was the warden. Two guards were with him. “Guards,” he shouted, “arrest that man!” They rushed up to Feldman and grabbed his arms. “Throw him in solitary confinement,” the warden roared. “I warned you and warned you! I sent you a letter. I explained how you get along. ‘Life is ordinary,’ I told you. But you think you’re an exception. I know what you did at the canteen, how you forced items on the men they didn’t need, bankrupting them, bankrupting poor men. Deliberately twisting what I told you. You’re up to here with passion. Up to here with it. But life is simple, Feldman. Now you’ll see that. Get him away. Get him into solitary. Lock him up in a cage by himself. Now he’ll learn. Now he will. Fuck-up!”

Phuck-up yourself, Feldman thought.

Now I am alone.

The cell to which they brought Feldman for his solitary confinement was no smaller than the one he shared with Bisch. If anything, because of the absence of the other cot and the small table on which each convict was allowed to arrange his possessions, it seemed a little larger. Nor was it, as he expected, darker. When the warden roared the words “solitary confinement,” they had suggested some black hole-and-corner of the universe, or cramped subterranean quarter the sun never touched. He had expected, really, that it would be a place bad for one’s bronchial condition — a calcimined, limey strongbox locked by big keys, the bedsprings rusted and the mattress mildewed.

It ain’t the Ritz.

On the other hand, it was no less institutional-looking, and thus, in a strange way, competent, functional, than anyplace else in the prison.

When he had taken in that they had not put him into a torture chamber, that he was nowhere where preceding sufferers had etched their dark dates on the walls of their cells like poems of their catastrophes, he substituted another expectation: science. That is, he began to think of himself as of some modern, poisonous by-product, a radioactive pile perhaps, which may only be handled remotely, by tube digits, mechanical arms operated from the other side of thick walls by men in lab jackets.