Stanley Elkin - A Bad Man

“Booty is bulk and bulk booty,” a convict heckled.

“The nostrils,” the rustler said, raising his voice above their laughter, “that wild gristle. The rheumy eyes, their mucky silts. Those dreadful genitals and those steamy hides.”

“I don’t understand any of that,” another prisoner said quietly, “but if it’s the wide-open spaces that Nevada was talking about, or that Tex here meant when he said he agreed with him, I can see the reasoning.”

“I’m a poacher,” a prisoner said. “In my time I’ve fished other men’s rivers and killed the deer in other men’s woods. There’s nothing beats nature, men. I’m a bit of a squatter too. I’ve done some squatting. I nick myself off a piece of their land, and they never miss it, don’t know it’s gone.”

“Kentucky, you piker, you make me ashamed,” a fourth man said. “I’m a sooner. I steal land. Vast tracts in Alaska. In Hawaii vast tracts. Land, steal land. I jump the gun and beat the bell and move before the whistle. I’ve made a living out of always being offside, and I tell you there’s nothing like it. The race is always to the swift.”

“I know about that,” said a fifth convict. “I trespass too. But deeper than you boys. Down, deep down in the mines. I jump other men’s claims. I move in and take over. It’s work, but rewarding. I hate the sluice robber. He’s meager. I tell him to his face.”

I’m in Hell, Feldman thought. I’m the president of Hell. How had he ever imagined these men to be indifferent?

“Well, you’re all out of touch, it seems to me. You live in the past. The mines are played out. There’s detergent in the rivers and streams. Tourists in the forests pose the bears. Myself, I’m an artist.” The forger was speaking. “There’s got to be some art to crime. It’s show biz. Catch me with a gun? The rough stuff is out. Jazz and pizzazz are what’s wanted today. Me, I forge license plates. I’m a sort of a sculptor.”

“He’s right.”

“He’s wrong.”

“No, he’s right. I dress up as a cop. I impersonate dames.”

“I make my own moon.”

“I fake petitions, a nickel a name. A dime for addresses. It’s very satisfying to make up people and where they live. Listen to this: Wilma Welfing Pearsall, 7614 Carboy Street, Marples, Ohio. Jerome Loss, Rural Route Two, Clegg, New York. Ed and Naomi Baird, Apartment 404, the Sinclair Apartments, 16 °Clipton Drive, Archer Hills, Oregon. I don’t mess with the zip code. Federal offense.”

“I give false measure,” a convict said.

“And I was a dentist who short-changed on teeth. I’d water the silver, adulterate gold. Delicious my fillings; they’d melt in your mouth.”

“I worked for a real estate firm. I seeded treasure in vacant lots for the suckers to see. I buried coins and statues and place settings for twelve — that sort of thing.”

A very small convict stood up. “I made the stock certificates that the con men sell,” he said. “Suitable for framing, they were. On a thin parchment, very expensive. The paper around the borders like the rough edges of the pages in old novels. Painstaking. I tore it myself. And a seal like a sunset or a harvest moon. A great wheel of a seal. Very official. Barbed at the circumference, the full three hundred sixty degrees.

“And the types. Hand-lettered. Glorious stuff: roman, italic, old-style roman, old-style italic. Cursive and minion. Sans serif, nonpareil. Brevier, bourgeois, and brilliant and canon. Columbian, English, excelsior too. And what we call the stones: diamond and pearl and agate. And primer I did. And great primer. Pica, of course, and small pica and double pica, and double-small pica as well. And much of this, you understand, in condensed and even extra-condensed. (To discourage the reading, I guess. I didn’t ask questions.) Only the great fictive companies themselves in extra-bold black letter. But almost illegible. Like a sketch of chop suey.

“But what I liked best were the pictures I drew. Spidery, thin as a watermark, of old engines, old cars. And a hotel in St. Paul, Minnesota, I took off a soap wrapper. And a factory after the one on the box of Shredded Wheat.” He sighed.

“Yes,” said a distinguished-looking convict. “I know the feeling. I was a quack. I worked with machines. I had an electrodynathermy machine, a honey. And an adgitronic nucleosiscope, cost me two thousand dollars. Also a honey. And I had this vibrating wooden box with insets for the patient’s hands. He’d wear coated rubber gloves and press down hard for fifteen minutes at a time for an advanced cancer. Less for something not so serious.

“I loved to watch the colored lights. There was no special sequence. I liked to hear the hum it made, the whiz and whir, the crackles, and crepitations and thuds. I don’t see the harm. I did a lot of good and may even have effected some cures, I think.”

“He’s wrong.”

“No, he’s right. Doc’s right.”

“He’s wrong. Two thousand dollars for a piece of equipment? Seeding all those miles of vacant lot? I don’t care how shallow a man buries that stuff, it’s backbreaking work. Or all those hours over a draughtsman’s board. Just take a look at the glasses that guy wears, not to mention the condition of his lungs from breathing those inks.

“ No . Get in and get out. That’s what I say. Who needs all those props? Sure there’s satisfaction in the artist’s life, but we live in a practical world. Profit margins and overhead and cost per unit have got to be thought about. My money’s on the middleman. I’m a suborner myself. I can give you statistics. It costs me anywhere from five hundred to twenty-five thousand dollars to fix a judge today, depending, of course, on the offense and the defendant’s prospects of being convicted. All right, let’s take a closer look. We’ll take a relatively modest case: a white kid accused of a car theft. A first offense, and the kid’s from a nice middle-class family, say. It costs three thousand dollars to get that boy off. Of that three thousand I take home a grand, the judge fifteen hundred, and the rest is divided up between the officers of the court and expert witnesses like the social worker or the arresting officer. Notice that the judge gets more than I do. That’s important. I do that on purpose. And I’m pretty careful to let him know it too. Something like the same principle holds for the law clerks and the others. I know the judge’s unlisted number. That isn’t the point. I could reach him direct . The thing is, I try to implicate as many people as I can. I bring in the middlemen. If a conspiracy is wide enough no one gets hurt.”

“Me, I’m a fence. I receive stolen goods I might never see. I buy up a thousand transistor radios and never lay eyes on a single one. I don’t want to see it. I make a few phone calls, tell the trucks where to go.”

“Did you ever hear of champerty?” another man asked. “That’s what I do. I’m a party to law suits that don’t concern me. I bankroll a plaintiff. I buy him his x-rays. We split on the judgment. Some grievances I invent, I make up offenses. It goes back before Coke, the old common law.”

Feldman wondered why he had thought he should call for order before. There had been order. It was as ordered in here as a pageant or masque. Even the chairs made a circle.

“Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum,” a man said.

“The chair recognizes the pirate,” Feldman mumbled. Pegleg’s wrong, he thought. No, he’s right. He’s wrong and he’s right.

A prisoner rose and spoke of hijacking the big rigs, of ambush at crossroads and hazardous tailgating through the mountains, broadside duels on dangerous turns at sixty miles an hour. Another agreed and told of how he put up false lights in treacherous waters to lure the shipping and then scavenged the wrecked vessels. A third was a rumrunner, a fourth the leader of bandits in caves in the hills who stole from the tourists. There was a bartender who worked for a ring of white slavers on the waterfront. He slipped Mickey Finns into the girls’ drinks. He showed how he winked a signal to a man at the jukebox when they collapsed on the stool. The appeal, they agreed, was in the strategy, the sense of maneuver, of logistics, the idea of government itself perhaps, some rich, loyal, aggressive joy taken in gangs and bands and mobs and rings.