Stanley Elkin - A Bad Man

“State your new business.” The man was huge. He looked like all the dock-wallopers and bodyguards who had ever lived.

“You’re out of order,” Feldman said. “I’m the new president of this club.”

“Who the hell are you?”

It was disconcerting to Feldman not to be known here. Troublesome as his notoriety had been in the other parts of the prison, he had always been able to take from it a kind of reassurance, reading the prisoners’ contempt (and perhaps fear) almost — he knew this was insane — as a sign of their culture . Now their ignorance of him deepened his impression that they were corrupt. There was no telling what such men might do. As yet, however, he had no real fear of violence, taking comfort from the man’s very size, trusting in a big man’s admiration for order and due process.

“My name is Feldman,” he said.

“Credentials,” the incumbent said calmly.

“I have credentials.” He took out the warden’s letter and read it to them, leaving out the postscript.

“Check the signature, Forger.”

The man seated at Feldman’s knees held out his hand and took the letter. “It’s legit,” he said after examining it.

“I have a letter saying I’m the new president too,” one of the other convicts said.

“Sure you do,” said a man on the outer edges of the circle. (They formed a rough circle, Feldman saw now.) “We all have letters like it. As the son of a bitch says himself, he’s the one does the nominating and electing.” The men laughed.

“That’s right,” Feldman said. “That’s right. You all would have similar letters.”

“It’s a goddamned banana republic, we got so many presidents,” someone else said.

“What are we going to do?” Feldman asked.

“What the hell,” the big convict shrugged. “You be the president.” He sat down.

“Installation of officers,” a convict called mechanically. “Let’s get on with it.”

They swore Feldman in at once, the outgoing president administering an oath that he seemed to compose as he went along. (It wasn’t a bad oath, Feldman thought, considering it had been made up on the spur of the moment.)

“Well, what do we do now?” Feldman asked. None of the men said anything. “Old business?” he asked, remembering the formula of the past president (not, despite appearances, a bad officer, all things considered). He tried “New business?” with the same results, then looked around the room at the Crime Club membership. “Let’s steal something,” he suggested, giggling. He stared out at them for a few more minutes and then sat down, no longer uncomfortable. Gradually he felt even more at ease, and despite the physical closeness in the room, he began to grow sleepy and once or twice actually caught himself nodding. He wondered what they were doing over at the Model Airplane Club.

It was strange, another of the endless rituals and counterrituals he had met with here. Some time ago he had begun to think that he saw a design. It had to do with the nullifying of energies, as though the warden’s final intention were to keep the men quiet by having them perceive just what Feldman was slowly perceiving, that they were caught up in a treadmill rhythm of opposing impulses. It seemed too simple a theory perhaps for the elaborateness of the rules and ceremonies, but he was relieved by its very simplicity. It humanized the warden. Not that it made him kinder or easier to get along with, but it stripped away some of the mystery. If the mystery was unearned he was glad to know it. And now, hoping that they knew it too, he felt suddenly closer to his fellow convicts. Surely they shared his perceptions and accepted them. (After all, they all stood to gain from passivity, stood to gain from the saltpetered food and the worked-off violence and the deflection of their intentions. Let us all take the cold shower together, he thought. Let everyone behave: no prison breaks, no complaints about the food, no misspelled petitions for the redress of grievances.) Expansive, he felt not their good will, but the clubby chill of their sophistication. Their discreet indifference was attractive. Something could be said for superior sales resistance, for sulk and moroseness of spirit, and suddenly he felt like congratulating them and being congratulated by them. “We’ll pull through,” he would have said, “it’s not so bad.” Before he could speak, however — and why, anyway, did he want to? why had he tried to comfort his personnel that time in the soiled back rooms of his department store? what had he meant to tell them? why did he still feel a necessity to respond? was his own sales resistance not so superior after all? — he heard a stirring of the chairs and someone rising.

“I’ll tell you something about crime,” a convict said, startling him with the unexpectedness of his speech. “It’s too indoorsy. Why’s your average con doing time today? Shit, look at the terms used to describe him: he’s a breaker and enterer ; he’s a second-story man ; he’s on the inside , he says of his jail, behind the walls . It’s all inside jobs, I tell you. What’s his own term for the world but the outside? Never Chicago, never Detroit.

“His pallor. His plans made in pool halls! All that messing with locks, that struggle with safes. And rape! Breaking, entering and the airtight case.

“What, I ask you, is the highest act of crime? The one that takes the most planning, the greatest research and preparation? It’s the bank robbery — the bank robbery! All that snuggling in cozy vaults down among the safe-deposit boxes. He asks for it. Your crook asks for it. He loves his handcuffs, worships his bars, his restraints. Give him balls and chain, give him ringbolts, straw in a dungeon give him. And don’t talk to me about escape. That’s all it is, my dears — talk. Why, these jails couldn’t hold us a minute if we really believed in escape. Twenty to one? Thirty? Fifty to one? One hundred to one in many places. What odds are we waiting for? It’s a sickness. Most of your crime is a sickness.

“I became a sluice robber, and I remained outdoors. I breathed real air in my lungs. And the sun. Three years I’ve been here, and I’ve still a piece of my tan. That’s how deep it burns you. The bones themselves are browned by now. And there was never any skulking, any stooping, any crawling. And I never hid in hallways or crouched behind the stairs.

“The troughs I robbed, like great wooden Babels up the mountain. The tumbling nuggets, oh, that skittery wealth. It wasn’t robbery. You couldn’t call it robbery. Just a man on a line on a mountain with sense enough to reach. And first on line too. First. To cut the theft if there was one, and give a sporting target. (I was caught on a mountain.) All I ever needed was to make a fist. I made tools of my palms — as God intended — found a use for my opposing thumbs. God’s will in a handful, you guys. (And testing always my prehensileness, growing a grasp.) Palming more than magicians palm, then basketball players.”

His eyes shone, glittered with memory. Feldman felt he should say something, call for order. Though no one made a sound, it was as if there had been a sudden displacement of passion in the room, like the pressure of the first thighs against a barricade.

“Nevada is right,” a convict said.

“He’s wrong.”

“No, he’s right. Only he’s got too narrow a sense of it. I’m a rustler — horses, cattle. The feel of flesh is what I like, the mass of beast. All that muscle. All that meat. Like an appointment at the source of things. It was nothing for me to steal a hundred tons, two hundred, three. Think of the weight of such a theft.”