Stanley Elkin - A Bad Man

“But it’s all right. I found out today it’s all right.”

“That’s good.”

“It’s my callus. I went to see Freedman about it.”

“Best not to play around with these things — Freedman?”

“Yes, and do you know, Leo, that man looked at me in the queerest way.”

“You took your callus to Freedman?”

“It was absolutely embarrassing, Leo. He tested me for syphilis.”

“He tested you for — oh no — he t-test — tee hee — tested you for syph-ha-ha-lis?”

“You’d think he never saw a callus before.”

“She saw Freedman. She took her callus to Freedman.” Feldman laughed. He roared. He threw his right hand up in the air and laughed harder.

“Leo, what is it?”

“F-F-Freedman,” he sputtered. “Freed man ,” he guffawed. “Freeeeeedman,” he sniggered. He tittered and giggled and snickered and chuckled and cackled and chortled. “ F-F-Freeeedman! ” He couldn’t stop laughing, and as he laughed his erection grew. It became enormous. It was the biggest hard-on he had ever had. Lilly, astonished, pulled him on top of her greedily. Laughing, he rocked and shook himself into an orgasm.

The next morning he still had to laugh every time he thought about it. His eyes teared and his nose ran. Once, during a sales conference, he actually slapped his knee in his mirth like a vaudeville farmer. It was the best laugh of his life, persistent as the symptom of a cold. When he tried to work, the thought of Freedman and Lilly kept getting in the way and he had to lay aside whatever he was doing. The people around him, Miss Lane and some of the executives and buyers, had never seen him this way, but his laughter was so infectious that they had to join him, laughing the harder because they didn’t know the joke. Possessed by his laughter, he made a decision — he would remember this laughter and try always to be happy.

Then, riding the escalator up to the third floor when he returned from lunch, he saw something that made him stop laughing. A girl he had sent to the abortionist was mulling over some handkerchiefs at a counter. And as he peered through the crowd he recognized others he had seen in his basement.

“Oh, hi,” a young man said to him on the fourth floor. It was the lad for whom he had obtained the prescription.

On a sofa in the furniture department, sitting there as if the thing already belonged to her, was a lady for whom he had obtained a black-market baby. She nodded to him as he went by and fumbled with her pocketbook as if she meant to show him a picture of the child. He hurried to an elevator to take him the rest of the way up to his regular office. How had they come up? He wondered. Why weren’t they in the basement? What were they doing this high in his store?

Sure enough, when he stepped into the elevator, there was the man he had sent to the queers.

What would you do if a hole opened up in that wall?” Bisch asked.

“That couldn’t happen,” Feldman said warily. “How could that happen?”

“No, I mean it. Suppose a hole, big enough for a man to go through, suddenly opened up in our cell wall. What would you do?”

“The exercise yard’s right outside, Bisch.”

“Yes, but suppose it wasn’t? Suppose the cell wall was the only thing between you and the outside. Suppose it was light shift and all the guards had rushed to the other side of the prison to put out a fire, and the heat traveling in waves along the wall made this cell so hot you couldn’t stand it, so hot in fact that a hole was melted in the wall. What would you do?”

“What would you do, Bisch?”

“I’d try to save my life.”

“You’d go through the hole?”

“Self-defense,” Bisch said.

“Then what would you do?”

“I’d go around to the other side of the prison and turn myself in,” Bisch said. “And you?”

“So would I.”

“Yes, but suppose the guards are so busy fighting the fire that no one can get to the main gate to let you back in? And suppose it turns cold, below freezing, and you know that all you have to do to get warm is just go down the mountain a few thousand feet? What would you do?”

“I’d go down the few thousand feet,” Feldman said.

“You would?”

“To the first house.”

“Ain’t no houses down there.”

“To the first house. Sooner or later I’d come to one. Now then, what would you do?”

“I’d do the same.”

“What would you do when you got to the house?”

“I’d go inside and wait until I thought the fire was out. Then I’d come back.”

“You wouldn’t turn yourself over to the owner and demand that he make a citizen’s arrest?”

“Goddamnit,” Bisch said angrily, “you wouldn’t either. You made that up.”

“Of course I would, Bisch.”

“You wouldn’t. That’s unrealistic.”

“Oh, it is, is it?” Feldman said. “But it’s not unrealistic I suppose when you tell me you’d go around to the main gate and turn yourself in to a guard. That’s not unrealistic. The only difference is one’s a paid enforcer and the other isn’t. Why, your notion of justice is that it’s of concern only to the professional. You don’t care a fig about law and order for its own sake, do you?”

“Wait a minute. I didn’t say that.”

“You as good as said it.”

Bisch was silent. Then, in a low voice, he asked what Feldman meant to do about it. It was a trap: if he said he was going to report him, Bisch would lean on him, but if he told him to forget it, he would be admitting to exactly the sort of indifference Bisch was trying to maneuver him into confessing.

“I haven’t got enough to go on yet,” he told him finally, “but a few more slips like that last one, Bisch, and I’ll have you dead to rights.”

Bisch ground his teeth and glared. It had been a trap, Feldman saw, though Bisch returned to his bunk, accepting defeat.

It was the sort of conversation that was sweeping the prison. For three months — since, in fact, the strange assembly in which Warden Fisher had first articulated his vigilante policy — the talk in the exercise yards, in the shops, in the discussion groups, everywhere the men gathered, had exactly this quality of probing hypothetical situations, fussy as boys challenging each other to spend a billion dollars. Most of it was just “making warden’s mouths,” as even the most pious convicts conceded. The warden himself, overhearing one of their voices raised in virtue when he passed, would respond with a wry smile, knowing as the expression of a parent come into a noisy bedroom now peaceful with the counterfeit deep breathing of sleep. (Assumed zealousness became a source for certain wicked jokes daringly told by one convict to another. One story — Feldman had had to read it in the warden’s column of the prison newspaper — was about a convict serving a short sentence, caught stealing food from the kitchen. Asked what he was up to, he replied, “The cook’s a lifer. I don’t trust him.” He was caught again some months later in the visiting room, making love to the cook’s wife. “How many times do I have to tell you?” he said. “I just don’t trust that damn cook.”)

Hypocrisy flourished and became a sort of virtue, but warden’s mouths or no, the prison rules had never operated so efficiently. It was almost impossible, for example, to find a Fink who would still help you through the loopholes for a few cigarettes, although the new policy had created in effect another loophole. Because the legitimacy of permission slips and passes was seldom questioned now, one began to feel a positive virtue for being grounded in details and honorably fulfilling the small procedures of prison function. Feldman sometimes wondered if this, rather than the announced object of rooting out the bad men, might not actually be in the back of “Warden’s Mind” (a branch of a sort of speculative philosophy among certain prisoners). Despite himself, even Feldman felt a certain pride in knowing the guards knew he was where he was supposed to be. But if the atmosphere was now a little freer and the prisoners had less to fear from the warden and the guards, they had more to fear from each other. The new policy had shifted the tensions from between prisoners and keepers to between kept and kept.