Stanley Elkin - A Bad Man

And if only that, then only at the end of the year, when he had served out his sentence. Only then. The sons of bitches. The fuckers. The sons of bitches. (And anxiety did count. It wasn’t interesting after all, and terror, this kind, the fear of death, was boring. The dread of pain was. Only that.) Only then. Only after the year of shit. They’d had him. They’d had him all along. The bastards. The sons of bitches. The bastards. They had him now. Feldman the sucker, the supersalesman supersold. Suddenly he was very afraid. Oh God, he prayed, call the police! Get my lawyer! Call the Better Business Bureau! I want my money back!

Life had never been so dear to him. He prized his past. He knew he must write letters to his lawyers to tell them what he suspected. (Suspected? What he knew .) But even more urgent was his need to remember his life, to have it in some formal way. He began again to write letters to Lilly. These were different from the others, which had been merely domestic patter, bland household inquiries — devices, really, for starting his life up again. Now his letters contained minutely detailed and loving descriptions of what they both knew: an exact picture of their living room, their entrance hall, the flowers in their garden, the equipment in their kitchen, what hung in a closet, all the meals he could remember, an account of their television-viewing for a week — along with whatever he could recall about the plots and the songs or the reasons a particular guest had appeared before a panel. He described their furniture and the meaning of all the random jottings and stray numbers that lay beside their telephones. He wrote about Billy’s toys and the look of their pantry, and recalled to her pieces of conversations between them, arguments, brief passages of affection. He told her he loved her, asked for her prayers and pled for her help in keeping him alive.

To his lawyers he sent dispatches outlining his apprehensions, desperately offering them reasons which seemed, on paper, always more paltry than they actually were. He told about the poor bargain he’d made, how they had extracted the last penny of his debt to society, for a year keeping him on his toes with their dark menace, only to kill him at the end, compounding the interest, usurers, fiends. Most of these letters he destroyed, but others, equally strident, he sent, hoping, in his despair, to trigger an adjustment of some powerful judicial balance. He reasoned that he had shown restraint when he had destroyed the bulk of the letters and that this entitled him to use those that remained. If the lawyers could know how circumspect he had been, they would give more weight to the letters that got through — a point he felt obliged to include as an addendum to a final letter he was sending.

He was addressing this when Bisch, studying him from where he lay on his cot, spoke out. “You sure been having yourself a correspondence lately.”

“One of the signs of rehabilitation,” Feldman said automatically, “is a con’s interest in sending and receiving mail.”

“Sure,” Bisch said scornfully, “is that what it’s all about? Rehabilitation.” He laughed. Feldman thought for the first time of the censors. Of course, he thought helplessly, none of it would get through.

“Have they been reading my letters, Bisch?”

Bisch winked at him.

“But I’ve written the people at my store,” he said urgently, as though it were Bisch he had to appease if his cries for help were to get to the lawyers, “and been getting answers. Everything I want to know.”

“Is that so?” Bisch said. “Very interesting. I suppose then, now that you’ve taken an interest in your store, the folks back home will be expecting you.”

“What do you mean? What do you mean, Bisch? Do you mean that they let those letters through just to show them I think everything’s all right? Is that it? To throw them off so that when — so that if something happens to me it will seem accidental? Is that how they do it, Bisch?…Bisch?”

Bisch was silent, and Feldman, if anything, was grateful.

Now each moment was precious to him. Only eight weeks of his sentence remained, but he doubted he would live through them. A strange joy was born in him. He had received no word from the lawyers, save only the occasional posting of their ordinary business, and he still had not heard from Lilly. Their silence confirmed his suspicions. He was helpless, but it was this helplessness which gave him strength now. He continued his routines, behaving exactly as he had when he still believed he would be released and did not want to queer his chances by giving trouble. But now his actions came from a desire to savor those actions. Discipline acted as a sort of slow motion on his days, giving him a chance (because he knew where he would be at a given time and what he would be doing) to anticipate, to go over in his imagination exactly what such and such a motion would feel like when he made it, what a particular gesture made, say, by the pencil man when he took the census (laboriously pointing now at one prisoner, now at another with the eraser end, moving his lips as he counted, licking the lead with a thick, slow tongue) would seem like to him when it happened. He prophesied the sounds of machinery starting up and faint individual smells, then softly laughed when they occurred, like a listener appreciating a story whose punch line he has foreseen.

It went on and on like this, and the next time he looked at a calendar he had just over six weeks left, and the time after that just over five, though the time between seemed like a year. It had worked. What he had felt for his furniture he felt now for the bars of his cell, for the counter in the canteen, the lunches of cold cuts they served on Sundays, the bluish flicker of the light in the TV room. And all life, all history, what he had been, what he was now, the stars and everything in books, all the wars that had ever happened, the reason behind things he never questioned, the facts about electricity and the skeletons of beasts and the mystery of God, were contained for him in the few drops of soapy water he felt this moment splash on the back of his hand as he dipped his scrub bush into the pail beside him and scrubbed and prayed to the floor of his cell.

And the next time he looked, he had three weeks left, three weeks before they would kill him, and it seemed as if only yesterday there had been eight. Oh God, he thought, I blew five weeks. Oh Jesus, they cheated me again!

They nailed him in the canteen on a Tuesday evening one week before he was scheduled to get out.

Come with us, Feldman , he had dreamed. Men outside his cell, he had dreamed. I get out in a few days. Go yourselves. Take Bisch. Go with them, Bisch. Come , he had dreamed, with us, Feldman. No. Your plan won’t work. The warden knows what you’re up to . Then a prisoner had put his hands on the bars of Feldman’s cell and drawn the door wide. Come with us. Who left that open? he asked, he had dreamed. And yelled he dreamed, Jailbreak! Jailbreak! And another prisoner came in to get him. They took, he dreamed, him to the basement of Warden’s Quarters, and strapping him in, punched him to death in the electric chair.

What happened was not like this, or, rather, only a little like it. Their posse presence seemed the same, their faces and the dark look of delegation on them, of caucused principle, passionate as the decision of revolutionaries in the street. Also familiar was the queer propriety of their approach, their almost touching courtesy, so that looking at them, he could tell from their shyness, from their air of an up-the-sleeve fate in reserve, that these were merely agents, lumpish younger brothers, and that others would deal with him.