Stanley Elkin - A Bad Man

“No,” Billy said.

“Billy, I think that new star is a planet.”

“How do you know?”

“It looks like a planet.”

Billy looked into the sky.

“All right,” he said.”

“It’s an even trade,” Feldman said. “I get the bright star.”

“All right,” Billy said. After that, Feldman grew tired of the game and made his son get up.

“Billy has no sense of values,” he told his wife later. “He doesn’t have any idea how to do business. I killed him. You can tell him anything.”

It bothered him, however, that he didn’t know anything about the stars except how to trade them. The next week he brought home a high-powered telescope from Cameras, but he never learned how to focus it properly.

He saw at once on his tour of the prison that he would never use the gymnasium or the pool or go back to the crafts hall. But Jesus, he thought, remembering the warmth of his son’s body, what’s a man like me doing in prison?

In the mornings a bell rang at 6:30, and the men had twenty minutes to dress and shave and clean their cells.

His cellmate had told him the first morning that Feldman would have to clean the toilet and that he would do the sink himself.

“Why don’t we draw straws?” Feldman asked cheerfully.

“I already drew straws,” the man said. “You do the crapper.”

It’s my new concern with shit, Feldman thought darkly. Some gesture must have revealed his repugnance, for a man directly across from him stood at the front of his cell, watching as Feldman, still in his blue suit, scrubbed the inside of the bowl, flushing it constantly as he worked. The man said nothing, but Feldman could hear him come forward each morning he kneeled into position above the toilet.

One day Feldman watched as the man cleaned his toilet. That ended it — their caged inefficacy must have seemed as ridiculous to the man as it did to him, as if contempt without the possibility of blows and wounds was too wasteful, too extravagant. Perhaps it was for this reason that though arguments between men in the same cell were frequent and violent, conversations between cells were for the most part gentle. If their impotence taught them tolerance, it taught Feldman that the emotions were the first to go. There was comfort in this. Was that good?

Was it even true? He was still suffering from the warden’s avowal that he was a bad man, his proclaimed nostril knowledge of his soul. (And Feldman was a man used to hatred. There had been competitors, people who worked for him, even some people who had loved him who yielded to hatred at the last. Too many men had bad hearts, ulcers; nail biters and strainers to piss, they wasted their substance, dissipating in envy and worry and grudge everything they had. The Ten Commandments were good hygiene, the Sermon on the Mount an apple a day. Victman was his enemy, Dedman was, Freedman, but was he theirs? He was as indifferent to their loathing as he was to the mechanical blessings of beggars he gave quarters to in the streets.) The warden’s hatred was different. It was the hatred of someone who didn’t have to hate him, hatred that flowed from strength rather than weakness, choice rather than injury, and it was disturbing to him, and confusing.

What was there bad enough to hate? There was nothing. Being uncomfortable maybe. He thought of winded boys in shorts he had seen in the park, racing against themselves, their faces inhuman, distorted, their lungs bursting; of hedge-clippers, mowers of lawns, weekend washers of cars, of husbands and fathers around their own dinner tables on hot summer evenings with their jackets on — of all the volunteers for pain, chippers-in for suffering, tzouris -chasers there were in the world, of all the men and women who out of propriety refused second helpings, other people’s last cigarettes, candy, tips, favors, of every abstainer and ascetic and celibate who celebrated some baseless principle of thinness and hunger and lack. You can have it, Feldman thought, you can have not having.

Yet the certainty of the warden’s contempt was alarming. Forget it, he told himself, the man’s a jerk, a man on a mountain with an upper hand. But he could not see him — in the first week he saw him twice more — without offering up some travesty of surrender, without waving some not understood white flag in his face.

One afternoon the warden stopped by Feldman’s cell. “Why isn’t this man out with the others?” he asked the guard.

“He says he’s sick, sir.”

“How are you, Warden?” Feldman asked compulsively.

The warden, of course, turned and walked on without answering.

Then, during Warden’s Rounds, he came into their cellblock again. Feldman, excited, went to the bars to watch him. He noticed that the warden would stop before certain cells but not before others, and he understood at once that the cells he bypassed contained other bad men.

The warden came up to his cell. “How are you getting on?” he asked.

“About the same, sir,” Feldman said hurriedly. “Thank you.”

“I was talking to Bisch,” the warden said, and backed off as if struck.

It’s an act, Feldman thought angrily, it’s an act.

But he was not at all sure that it was.

It had been more than a week, and they hadn’t bothered him. For three days his cold, which had never been bad, was better. One day he stopped his shammed cough. Momentarily he expected word from the officials, a command to appear at one of the prison shops. Perhaps they were waiting until he had his prison clothes. (He still wore his blue suit.) It was possible that they had run out of uniforms — loose, grayish sweat suits — for in the dining room and from his window overlooking the exercise yard he would occasionally spot others who still wore their street clothes too.

So far he had had little contact with the other prisoners. His cellmate continued to ignore him (though from time to time, Feldman caught him eyeing him from his cot), and in the dining hall it was forbidden to speak. It was strange to sit there while food traveled noiselessly about the table: baskets of bread, bowls of scrawny fruit, platters of grayish vegetables and plates of thin, disreputable meat — apparently floating in sourceless, graceless flux, from one prisoner to the other. Initially Feldman was grateful for the enforced silence — he had feared harassment — but after a few days he began to regret it. He himself had been a bully at dinner tables, pushing and pulling conversation out of his guests like an old bored king. In restaurants he picked up checks to pay for the privilege.

Now his fear was that no command would come, and he realized that his overtures to the warden had been probably meant to provoke one. It was surprising to think of, but he had never expected, after his arrest, to be let off. In a way he had actually been anticipating jail. He had missed the army, had never lived in a dormitory. His knowledge of large groups of men had been limited to the locker rooms of country clubs, but even there, in the carpeted corridors and shower rooms, with the tall, colorful bottles of hair oils stacked on the marble washstands like thick liqueurs behind a bar, he had sensed undertones of violence and truth. He did not want camaraderie; he wanted men: to be thrust among them, to see what would happen to him among them, to see what they would be like unencumbered by wives and kids and jobs they cared about — to see, finally, if they would be like himself.

And still he waited — for prison clothes, for Bisch to talk to him, for a command. He spent most of his time lying on his cot alone in his cell — Bisch did not return until evening — and he could not have told himself that night what he had been thinking of that day. He thought, he supposed, of what men think of in the waiting rooms of train stations, or standing in lines, or driving on turnpikes.