Searches & Seizures

by Stanley Elkin

  “And the same with people. What the liver fluke can do man can do. The fix is in, takes two to tango, all crime’s a cooperation. This I wanted to see. I’ve seen it, show me something else. Phooey. A Phoenician’s phooey on it all.”

  Crainpool listens and nods, but his eyes are glazing. Not much interested in the overview, my Mr. Crainpool, not much feeling for the morphology of our business.

  I dreamed of Oyp and Glyp again last night. Perhaps I should tell Crainpool. Would cheer him up. Well, I won’t, don’t. Bother Crainpool’s moods. I’ll be his Nature as Nature is mine. Ah, Nature, who can send us so many dreams, which do you choose? Do we dream of feasts? Three-star Michelin picnics on a checkered cloth on soft, spongy zoysia, wicker work baskets with wine in linen and gorgeous chicken sandwiches on a windless day? Of beautiful women yielding to us in lovely water, or riding behind us bareback on horses in splendid country? Do we hear wit in our sleep, or does Nature deposit millions in our account or furnish our houses as we would wish them? Does She show us new colors or sound new notes or whisper good news? Would She grant us a view of the stars close up, or entertain us with the contemplation of beasts? Where is there to be found in dreams new masterpieces to study or even the slow motion of the ordinary cinema? No. She is too niggardly, gives us rag-shop, rubbish, engineers trivial enigma we forget on rising. Better altogether to leave us dreamless—but no, not Nature. She sends us Oyp and Glyp. I can’t really remember where they were in my dream, but it was someplace high, I think, mountains (though the view was not spectacular), above Nature’s three-mile limit, smug, warm behind their beards—they do not have beards in life; they’d grown them there, though these were matted ice and hair, an awful aspic. I saw them from below. (I was not even with them.) Such heights no place for a Phoenician; God gave us men to match our mountains. Oyp and Glyp. They’re alive. Alive and loose and flouting my extraditionary will. But there’s my comfort if the dream speaks true. They are still together, and to find one is to find both. It wasn’t so with Evans, it wasn’t so with Stern, it wasn’t so with Trace. The Phoenician’s scattered, his Diaspora’d enemies drifting outward like the universe. It took years to find them. I put them together like a collection.

  “Will there be any special instructions for me today, sir?”

  “Do your accounts. Update your inventory. Bookkeep me my criminals. Advance the calendars. Mullins has run out of postponements. We can pull off November now.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Destroy it. Don’t just leave it lying about as you did October.”

  “No, sir.”

  “I want November off my walls and out of here.”

  “I’m rather fond,” Crainpool says slyly, “of the angler in hip boots. He looks like my brother.”

  “Sure, kid, take it.” I think Crainpool keeps a scrapbook of the pictures on my calendars. That angler doesn’t look like his brother. He has no brother. I think Crainpool associates the pictures with the month’s crimes in some mnemonic way. November would be a rapist and three car thieves, a pair of armed assaults, a little breaking and entering, a dangerous driver and a berk who threw away a suitcase of traffic tickets. Crainpool’s Wanted poster Americana. Perhaps he’s right, perhaps there’s more connection than I’ve thought about between the pictures on those calendars and the life of crime. “It’s all yours, sirrah, a fringe benefit.”

  “Yes, sir, thank you.”

  “Stay by the phones, it’s a telethon. When that cop calls, tell him I’m at the jail. Have him leave a message with Lou who the guy is I’m supposed to see.”

  “Sir?”

  “Yes, Mr. Crainpool?”

  “Shouldn’t you take the call yourself? The officer might be reluctant to pass on such information through a fellow policeman.”

  “Reluctant? You forget the liver fluke, sir. Where would the liver fluke be if he attended the cow’s compunction or the sheep’s scruple? Screw his sensibilities and reluctances. I’m down at the jail.” I take my hat and go out. The little bakery bell tinkles pleasantly and I smile. I have made my joyful noise in the world.

  The jailhouse is two miles from municipal court—a big reason for that referendum next year—and I call there regularly. I like the idea of having places to be to conduct my business. I have the route salesman’s heart. It gets me outside. There are many such places: the jail (and its interview rooms where I consult with my clients), the courthouse, police headquarters, various law offices, the chambers of certain judges, even the main post office (one of the best ways to trace a jumper is to keep in touch with the postal authorities; sooner or later some of them send in one of those change-of-address cards requesting that their mail be redirected to a particular P.O. box in a distant city), the homes and apartments of their relatives, and, when I’m on the road tracing these mugs, the world itself. I don’t drive—I know how but I don’t—and always take public transportation (you might spot someone you’re looking for or overhear something you need to know; you can’t do this in a closed car).

  The jailhouse is my favorite. It relaxes me to go there. There’s a lot of shit and sycophancy in this business. It’s “Yes, Your Honor” and “No, Your Honor” even when the guy is on your payroll. The lawyers are worse; they think we’re scum. I keep half the town’s lawyers in booze, but have yet to be invited to have a drink with one. I always send a nice present when their kids get married but have never been within goddamn hailing distance of one of those weddings. So the jail relaxes me. It’s all cops there. Cops and robbers. And though I’m as deferential to the guards as I am to the biggest judge or hot-shot pol, somehow I don’t mind so much.

  It’s a big facility, eleven stories high with rough gray stone and bars so black and thick you can make them out even on the top story, law and order’s parallel lines. I love the jail. It’s a building which constantly hums, murmurs, the cons at the windows of the lower floors ragging the pedestrians or shouting obscenities across the areaway to the women’s block. And the woman shouting back, soliciting Johns from the eighth floor. The invitations and promises tumbling all that way somehow lose their viciousness, space moderating the human voice. It’s as though they were all outside at recess and the rest of us indoors with flus and colds.

  Some old gal spots me getting off the bus. (Whores must have incredible vision.) “Dey’s dat nice Mr. Bondsman,” she yells. “Hidy, lover. You still got dat golden prick on you? Man got a golden weewee,” she explains to the street.

  “Whut you sayin’, fool? Him? Ain’ nuthin’ weewee ’bout it. It de Trans’lantic Cable. You kin get J’rus’lem on it. One time I call up Poland, talk to de Prince.”

  “Dat de hot line den in dat white man’s pan’s?”

  “Yeah, dass ri’, dass it all ri’.”

  “If dat so,” another voice adds, “let dat boy get up de vigorish an’ get us all a partner.”

  “You means a pardon.”

  “Shit, fool, I know what I means. I means a partner. I gettin’ tired dis ole cellmate dey gimme. She ain’ no bad lookin’ girl, ya unnerstan’, but she got fingernails on her like de railroad spikes. She makin’ my po’ ole hole bleed.”

  A crowd has gathered in the street to listen. Another face has come to the window and takes the place of the woman who has just spoken. “Dat ain’ blood, honey, dass gism. Dis gal got fo’ty years ub de gism packed up her crack. I jus’ heppin’ her to get it out. She got so much gism we habbin’ us snowball fights up heah.” The men laugh.

  I squint against the sun and look up at the women, staring into their eclipse. I can’t recognize them, though I go with whores from time to time. If they know me it’s because I’ve become part of the jail’s unofficial personnel, as the lawyers have. They wouldn’t dare speak this way to the guards, or even to the prison’s cooks and bakers. Nor, I’ve noticed, do they tease each other’s visitors. Only strangers and those of us who can help them.

  The girls have had their turn. Now it’s the men’s chance at me. An enormous blac
k face appears at a barred window on the third floor. He sticks his arms through the bars and holds them out in front of him, suddenly turning his head and bending, pressing his ear against the bars as if he’s listening to them. He makes some sort of imaginary adjustment on the bars with the fingers of his right hand, then strums them with his left. He begins to sing in a loud, terrible voice.

  “I got de blooooooz,

  I got de blooooooz,

  Oh boy oh boy, do I got de blooooooz!

  I got de blues in de mornin’

  I got de blues in de ebenin’,

  I eben got de blues in de afternoooooon.

  I got de blooooooz,

  I got de mornin’, ebenin’, afternoon blues.

  I got de blues in Febr’ary,

  I got de blues in fall,

  I got de blooooooz on Thursday, April twelfth.”

  A white face appears in the cell next to his. “I’m in a jungle,” he screams. “I’m in a fucking jungle. I’m locked up in a fucking jungle with a bunch of fucking coons. I feel like Dr. David Fucking Livingstone.”

  The black man opens his fingers and turns fiercely to the white man. “You made me drop my guitar, you pink-toed bastard. How in hell I supposed to practice without I got a guitar? How they gonna scubber me I ain’t got my twenty-string guitar? It’s useless to me now all busted up on the cement. You think they treat Leadbelly this way?”

  “Use your accordion,” someone calls. “Let them discover you on the accordion.” There are many white faces at the windows now.

  The singer disappears, returns, thrusts his arms through the bars again and starts to make crazy, waving, squeezing movements.

  “Lady ub Spain, ah adores you,

  Lady ub Spain, ah adores you.”

  He breaks off. “It ain’t the same,” he says disconsolately.

  “Then take up track!” a prisoner shouts. They laugh.

  Below them I applaud. “Very funny, ladies,” I call. “Very amusing, gentlemen.”

  “You liked it?”

  “Oh, yes. ‘Vastly entertaining dot dot dot.’ ‘Four stars dot dot dot—Alexander Main, Cincinnati bailbondsman.’ You’ve got a big hit, kids. Boffo!”

  “You think they’ll hold us over?”

  “Months. Years.” I do a two-step, a little shuffle. I break into song:

  “There’s no business like show business,

  Like no business I know.

  One day they are saying you will not go far,

  Next day on your dressing room they hang…you.”

  “Sheeeit.”

  “You think so?” I hold my palms out and up to them. I turn them over. “You see that? Recognize that? Any you people remember what this stuff is? Sunshine. Look, watch this.” I breathe deep. “Fresh air. Smells good. I’ll tell you something else. I ever need to take a crap I get to lock the door. No lids. Sit on a toilet seat like a kid’s inner tube. I go out to lunch they hand me a menu. There’s a napkin on my lap so I shouldn’t get crumbs on my suit. After lunch, I feel like it I walk in the park, sit on a bench, look at the girls. If I wanted I could throw a ball over a wall and chase it. I could walk a mile for a Camel. I got a radio next to my bed pulls in all the stations and there’s never any interference on the TV from the electric chair.”

  “Go peddle your papers, motherfucker.”

  “He is.”

  “I am.”

  “Sheeeit.”

  “There are seven million arrests in the United States annually—I’m giving you the latest year for which we have statistics—a hundred and sixty thousand people in the jails, prisons, pens and work farms at any given moment. I’m giving you the latest moment for which we have statistics.”

  “Sheeeit.”

  “Eighty thousand of you monkeys are in a pretrial or preconviction stage. Eighty thousand. Do you follow what I’m telling you? One out of every two could be out this afternoon if he went bail. I’m coming inside. I’ve arranged with the guards to see as many of you as I can. They’ll be no trouble. Just call the guard and tell him you want to see Mr. Main.” I have a sudden inspiration. “Tell the screw to take you to the visitors’ room. What the hell, I’ll do the lot of you. This town’s been kind of boring with you mothers off the streets.” There are catcalls but I shout above them. “I talk this way in the public streets because this ain’t privilege but constitutional rights we’re discussing. Don’t ask me how it happens, but you creeps have constitutional rights. God Bless America and I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

  The screens in the visitors’ room give it the look of high summer. I wave to the guards, chipper Phoenician that I am. An act of the purest good will because it makes no difference to these sober, side-armed fellows. They have no more regard for me than for their charges. The public makes a mistake when it assumes that all its officials are on the take. Many of these men, low fellows bribed by their very jobs, don’t get a penny off me.

  “Give us a fiver, Phoenician,” one hisses before the men arrive. “You’ll never miss it, sir.”

  “I never heard that,” I tell him, waving the paper container of coffee at him that I got from the machine. “You never said it and I never heard it. Now, where are my boys and girls? Whatever can be keeping them? If there’s been any infringement of their constitutional rights—”

  “Naw, naw,” Poslosky, the chief guard, says. “Nothing like that.”

  They begin to file through a thick door on the other side of the screening. “Paul, they’re on the other side. I want to go in there with them.”

  “Aw, Phoenician, you know the regulations. You shouldn’t be here at all. You’re supposed to see them in the interview rooms. I’d get in trouble.”

  “All right, kid, you’re down for five percent of whatever I take in, but we got to go backstage.”

  “Phoenician, I mean it, you could cost me my job one day.”

  “Good. Terrific. Then you’ll come work for me. What do you say? You’ll be my field representative in the southwest in charge of wetbacks and Indians. I’ll turn you into a real policeman. A hundred fifty bucks for every jumper you kill. I’m getting old, Paulie, slowing down. You don’t know what all those Big-Boys and Burger-Chefs do to a man’s stomach when he’s out on the road looking for the bail jumpers. What’s going to happen to the business when I’m gone?” I put my arm around his shoulder and we go out of the room and into the corridor.

  “I shouldn’t be taking you back there,” Poslosky tells me, “I mean it’s really off-limits.”

  I steer him toward a barred gate. The guard there stands up when he sees me. “Hey, Phoenician, I got a message for you.”

  “Not now, Lou.”

  “I think it’s important, I kinda recognized the voice. A chief, I think. About some guy named Morgan.”

  “Later, Lou, please. I’m running late. Open the gate.” He presses the button and the gate slides open. “Lou, I’ll get back to you.” We go through another gate and pause before a thick metal door. “Open it,” I tell Poslosky.

  “No kidding, Phoenician, civilians strictly ain’t allowed back here.”

  “Civilians? That’s the way you talk to a man who’s been in the war against crime all his life? Unlock the fucking door, I’m reviewing the troops.”

  Inside, in addition to the guards, there are seven men and four women. I hadn’t expected a crowd, but it’s a poor showing. I rub my hands. “Most bondsmen wouldn’t take this trouble,” I tell them. “What can I say? It’s the way I’m built. Painstaking attention to detail. We try harder.” I recognize no one. Most of them have probably been refused bail already. Others couldn’t find anyone who would put it up for them. They mill about listlessly. Some have come just to get out of their cells. I go up to one. “How’s the grub?”

  “I’ve tasted worse.”

  “My compliments to the chef. Beat it, I wouldn’t touch you. All right, anybody else like the food here? No? Who’s been refused bail? Come on, come on, don’t waste my time.” I grab a nigg
er. “Hey, didn’t I already turn you down for bail?”

  “No, sir, Cap’n, I never got no hearing.”

  “No hearing, eh?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Must have been pretty bad, what you did, if you didn’t get a hearing. What’d you do, slice up on someone.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Shoot? Chain whip? Don’t stand there and tell me you used poison. Dropped a little something extra in the soul food?”

  “I didn’t do none them things.”

  “Well, my bad man, you must have done something pretty awful if you never got a hearing.”

  “They say I slep’ with my child.”

  “Who says that?”

  “My wife. She swore the complaint.”

  “And you want to get out of here.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Bad?”