Stanley Elkin - A Bad Man

The developer turned out to be little Oliver B.’s father.

Feldman went with him to the site, an ovoid valley three miles from the western edge of the city, where the developer tried to explain what the scarred, bulldozer-bruised area would look like in a few months, with its facilities in — the spanking planes of cement and intricate ramps and the cunning approach of the access road from the new interstate. But Feldman, who had no imagination in these affairs — he could not read blueprints or conceive how furniture would look rearranged — and for whom there was a terrible inertia in things, had difficulty following the developer’s explanations.

Instead, he found himself fascinated by the man, saw something terribly virtuous in him. For all the developer’s slim, distinguished appearance, his large eyes scholarly behind glasses, and odd, ruminative quality as he talked, the muscular mounds of cheek rising and falling comfortably with his words, Feldman sensed in him a fearful, optimistic energy, and found himself resenting what he knew would be the man’s good luck with machines — he was positive the developer got better mileage than he did — and skill with nature. He looked into the developer’s white, fierce teeth and knew at once that they were teeth that had sucked blubber and jerky — is that jerky on his breath now? he wondered — as easily as his own had scraped the pulp from an artichoke. He had a mouth that had saved lives. Feldman imagined its ardent kiss on a snakebite, or slipping over the blue lips of a man dragged from the sea. Listening to him, Feldman grew oddly comfortable, easy, and found that he had to move about to shake out the warm sensation in his extremities, the sense he was beginning to feel of melting into the universe.

Frequently, as Feldman spoke, the developer smiled, inclining his head in an attitude of listening and judgment, his mood not of attention but of nostalgic concentration and courtesy and patience. At these times Feldman looked over the teeth and into the mouth and throat at the healthiest tongue he had ever seen, choice and red as a prime cut. You could drink his bright juices, his saliva clear as a trout stream. He could feel the man’s immense, beaming tolerance, concentrated as heat from a sun lamp, and had actually to shuffle his feet to dodge bolts of the chipper good will.

Then the developer, making a point, smiled a wide one, the biggest Feldman had yet seen, and Feldman stared deep down the man’s eyes, past good wishes, deeper than good hope, past faith itself to the sourcy bedrock of the developer’s vision, where he thought he saw the basic mix — the roily vats of molassesy premise that worked the circuits of his phoenixy will and gave him his feel for reclaimed land, for swamp and ashpit and trashy field where rats lurked and mice skittered. Feldman had seen enough. He interrupted him. “Excuse me, but that’s some smile you’ve got there.”

“I beg your pardon?” the developer said.

“You make jumping rabbits for Oliver out of an ordinary pocket handkerchief. Am I right?”

“Well, yes — but…”

“Sure,” Feldman said. “You do an admiral’s hat and a paper airplane from the war news. You make a tree from rolled-up newspapers, and forest animals from the shadows of your fists. Right?”

“The developer nodded slowly.

“I know. And a flute from a reed, and a kite from the wrappings around your shirts from the laundry.”

“What about the property?” the developer asked coolly.

“The property? I don’t want it.”

“Mr. Victman said—”

“I don’t want it,” Feldman said. He was very excited. “I won’t have it. Fuck your virgin land.” He looked at him narrowly. “We’re in the homestretch of a race: your energy against my entropy. The universe is running down, Mr. Developer. It’s bucking and filling. It’s yawing and pitching and rolling and falling. The smart money’s in vaults. Caution. Look both ways. Look up and down.” He picked up a beer can one of the workers had discarded. “Here,” he said, pushing the can toward him, “get yourself a string and another can. But don’t call me, I’ll call you!”

Shortly after Warden’s Assembly, Feldman was notified that he had been elected to the Crime Club. The notification came in the form of a note from the warden:

Your name has been placed in nomination for membership in the Crime Club. Lest you get any funny ideas about your popularity, let me tell you right now that I do the nominating and the electing. I nominate and elect people to the Camera Club, the Model Airplane Club, the Literary Club — all the clubs. That’s what it means to have power, Feldman. Also I have made you president of the Crime Club; you will conduct your first meeting this Tuesday week. (Room 14, W. wing, 7 o’clock. Sharp! )

Your Warden,

Warden Fisher

P.S. The other members do not know that you have been accepted as a member or that you are their president, so you will have to wrest your leadership from the incumbent. He is a man that the others have nicknamed “God,” and you will have no difficulty recognizing him, as the underside of his tongue is tattooed. (It is my understanding that his armpits are also tattooed, so it’s my guess that he probably isn’t ticklish .)

Feldman decided to ask for Official Respite, making his request formally, in a document witnessed by a guard from another cellblock (he had to waste a permission slip and a pass) and by a prisoner in sick bay (another permission slip, another pass). In his petition he asked the Director of Prison Labors that he be permitted to absent himself from the canteen during a portion of the workday on which the Crime Club was to meet.

He wanted the extra time because the warden had underscored the necessity of being punctual, but the terms of Respite were difficult: three hours of labor for every one of Respite, the labor to be accomplished in shops in which the Respiter was a stranger. What made the conditions even harder was that mistakes were to be paid for on a strict retail basis. Thus, if a Respiter were to fudge, say, a license plate, he was charged the full sum the state would have received for the perfect plate. Moreover, this sum was repayable only in work — again, exclusively in shops in which the prisoner had had no experience — at a rate just one third the convict’s already low rate of pay. An inept man could conceivably add months to the end of his sentence by accepting even one hour of Respite.

Feldman worried fitfully about his decision, changing his mind at least a dozen times. He considered the other avenues open to him — Warden’s Desk, for example, a prisoner’s single opportunity to petition the warden directly. But because no “sweat”—the prisoners’ term for intense effort, the cost to him of favors — was attached to it, it was unreliable. A refusal at the level of Warden’s Desk was binding, and Feldman rejected this option. Nor could he see how he might have resorted to simple absenteeism from the canteen, even if he had been willing to accept the additional day tacked on to his sentence. An absentee was required to “freeze” within one hundred yards of the area where he had declared his absenteeism. As a last resort, he considered the Buddy System. The term was misleading. It meant that any prisoner could at any time ask for and have a privilege belonging to another prisoner, but since favors could not be paid back in kind, the borrower became, in effect, the lender’s slave. Here was a loophole big enough to drive the entire system through. “Only show restraint,” Feldman had urged the convicts in the informal discussion groups on prison regulations. “Give the privilege and ask for nothing in return. Don’t make a slave of the borrower. Then when anyone needs something, he can have it with immunity.” They had agreed in theory, though some scoffed and called him Red, but in practice, the temptation to assert power when it was so infrequently available was always too great. So he was forced at last to ask for Respite. (Nor, once the decision was made, did he easily determine how many hours of Respite to ask for, rejecting the three that would probably serve, to settle finally on the five which if they did not serve could only mean that fate and circumstance had been against him from the start.)