A Bad Man

by Stanley Elkin

  It was essential that he make himself inconspicuous, so he went up to the couch and squeezed in. Because it was already crowded, he had to place the edge of one thigh in a woman’s lap. He had not had this close a contact with a woman in months, and soon he had a hard-on. In those close quarters his erection was pretty apparent, but he reasoned that because of her age—she was about seventy—the woman might not mind.

  “Recidivism’s not important, Julia. What counts is that we catch these guys,” the man on Feldman’s left said. “The very fact that we have statistics on recidivism demonstrates the efficacy of our policework.”

  “I don’t contest that,” Julia said. It was the old lady. She had a gentle voice. Feldman fought off a vagrant impulse to blow in her ear. “It isn’t that at all. It’s the older parolees. Men who’ve done twenty and thirty years. It annoys me that they don’t behave.”

  “You think age quiets those old thieves down?” the man asked. “Infirmity? How thick is plate glass? How heavy is a watch? A diamond bracelet?”

  “The inspector’s right,” said a man at the other end, half of whose body Feldman’s presence had forced far over the arm of the couch. He supported himself with his right arm extended on the floor, so that he looked like a downed boxer waiting to rise. Feldman hoped someone would step on his watch. “And I’ll tell you something else. Science in its development of transistorized equipment has made our problem tougher. A thief’s armload today is worth more than a thief’s armload was yesterday, and a thief’s armload tomorrow will be worth even more. I foresee a time when the thief’s armload will be approximate in value to the thief’s truckload of yesteryear. That’s what science has done with its vaunted miniaturization!”

  With the strain on his arm the man had spoken louder than he had perhaps intended, and Paul heard him. “And not only that,” Paul said, “but improper diet—the snack-food industry is a three-billion-dollar-a-year business today—has made his thief’s arms longer.” He saw Feldman. “Which it worse for you, the day or the night?”

  “The night,” Feldman said. He got up quickly and moved away from them. Across the room he blew a kiss covertly to Julia.

  Behind him the warden was standing with two men. “Keep them under,” one was saying.

  “But there’s no need to keep them under,” the second man said. “You’ve changed the goal,” he objected. “Hasn’t he, Warden? Hasn’t he changed the goal?”

  “Well—” the warden said evasively.

  “What’s the goal?” Feldman asked, turning around.

  “Order,” the second man said.

  “Acquiescence, I’d say,” said the first man.

  “Acquiescence?” Feldman said.

  “Well, silence,” the first man said.

  Feldman nodded. He joined another group. He was afraid he was drunk. The Lord has failed me, he thought miserably. On his own he avoided the servant with the tray, turning his back whenever the man approached. In a while, though, he could no longer remember his reason for wanting to remain sober. What am I afraid of, he asked himself—that I won’t be invited again? He giggled and sought out the fellow with the drinks. “Thanks, gumshoe,” he said, taking another drink from the cop. They were all cops here. It was the Policemen’s Ball. He could smell rectitude. The odor of ordinance was in the air.

  Suddenly he felt compassion for his fellow inmates. It was a shame, he thought. They talked about the underworld—“Keep them under,” someone had said—but what about the overworld? They talked about organized crime, but Feldman couldn’t think of two hoods who could stand each other. If one had a gun, sooner or later the other was a dead man. The real organization belonged to the overworld. Did cops shoot each other, horn in on each other’s territory, beat each other’s time? No, the cops had their cop cartels, their FBI’s and state troopers and Policemen’s Benevolent Associations. It was the poor crook who was alone. The crook had no ecumenical sense at all. For one Appalachia Conference, and he could just imagine the screaming and backbiting that must have gone on, there were hundreds of parties like this one. He was consumed by a truth, sudden and overwhelming. He had to share it at once or he would burst. He rushed up to someone. “There isn’t any,” he told him passionately.

  “What’s that?”

  “There isn’t any. It doesn’t exist.”

  “There isn’t any what?”

  “There isn’t any Syndicate. There isn’t any Mafia. There isn’t any Cosa Nostra. You can all go home.”

  “Try to eat something,” the man said. “Would you like some coffee?” he asked solicitously.

  “No,” Feldman said glumly. He found a chair and sat down. They’d probably have to shut him up, now they knew he was on to them. Already the man was conferring with someone; together they were staring at him. It was all a fake. Maybe even evil was a fake. He’d better keep his ears open and his mouth shut. (The thought nauseated him.) He had to focus, concentrate. There were things to learn he could bring back to the boys. He thought fondly of the boys. Good old Bisch. That grand old man Ed Slipper. And Hover—fine, maligned Hover. Sky and Flesh and Walls were the best pals a guy ever had. He thought of his friends asleep on their cots. They might be thieves and murderers, but they were good old boys. He had a duty to the guys to sober up, to tell them what he’d learned: that they were a myth. He imagined a youthful eagerness in his voice as he told them. It was news to make a tenor of a man.

  Concentrating, he was astonished at the enormous varieties of cophood there were in the room. In addition to those he had already met, the sheriffs and marshals and constables and private detectives, there were insurance investigators and high officials in the National Guard. There was a man who trained German shepherds and leased them to department stores and warehouses. Another man was in charge of an army of crowd handlers at ball parks and arenas. There was a chief of house detectives for a large hotel chain and a woman who headed up an agency of store detectives. There were polygraph experts and fingerprint men and a police artist who was introduced to Feldman as the Rembrandt of his field. There were prison chaplains and expert witnesses for the prosecution at murder trials.

  He felt as if he had been caught in the guts of an enormous machine. As he had noted before, there were no windows, and he rushed instead to the door to get some air. Outside stood the deputy who had brought him to the prison. The man passed him by, smiling. “It’s ten thirty-seven,” he said, waving his wrist with Feldman’s watch on it.

  When he was calm enough Feldman went to the buffet table; his new knowledge had made him hungry. He was surprised at the meager character of the food. Perhaps there was something in the make-up of good men that subdued their tastes and deadened their appetites, something surly in their hearts that made them trim their lettuce and chop their food, as though matter had first to be finely diced and its atoms exposed before they would eat it. Feldman almost gagged on the liquescent potatoes and minced loaves of meat and could not even look at the colorless gelatinous molds with their suspended chips of pimento and halved olives and thin, biopsic bits of carrot, like microbes in a culture.

  He toured the room, a spy among spies. There was an element of nervousness in their talk, which surprised him. They spoke of men still at large, public enemies who were armed and dangerous, their very vocabularies reminding Feldman of news bulletins that interrupted dance music on the radio in old films. They could have been residents of some storm-threatened outpost on the mainland. But there was smugness too, a basic confidence in their cellars of guns and stacked riot helmets and cases of tear gas. What was Armageddon to these guys?

  “All the borders were closed,” one said. “It was the tightest security net in the history of the state. They used three hundred squad cars, for Christ’s sake. They couldn’t have done any more.”

  “I know, Chief Parker was telling me,” another said.

  “Still,” someone else said, “I see Commissioner Randle’s point. They didn’t take the mountains into account. One call t
o Lane Field, and they could have had fifty helicopters over that area in twenty minutes. They could have dropped troopers with infrared gun sights. They could have lit up the entire state with flares. It doesn’t make any sense for a manhunt to fail when you can get that kind of cooperation.”

  “I’m glad you brought that up about the mountains. We’d improve security a thousand percent if the borders were redefined. Take Wyoming and Montana, for example.”

  “Flanders and Labe have a tough one there, all right. I wouldn’t want to be those two lawmen.”

  “Well, sure. They’ve got it tough, but it’s not much different for True in Tennessee or Wright in South Carolina, or even Grand and Nobel in Massachusetts and Connecticut. I could give you a dozen examples. The mountainous common borders of those states offer the criminal a million places he can hole up. We’ve simply got to recognize that sooner or later the frontiers have to be moved in this country. The natural border is a thing of the past anyway, since four-wheel drive. Place your state lines far enough away from your mountain ranges—create a twenty-mile belt of flatland around the high country—and when they come down from those hills they fall right into our nets without all this crap about extradition.”

  “I don’t know, Jim, it sounds pretty idealistic to me.”

  “Hell, Murray, we’ve been doing it in our penitentiaries for years. What’s your yard between your outside walls and your main buildings?”

  We’re surrounded, Feldman thought. We’re lost, but we’re surrounded.

  He took a cup of coffee with him into an empty room. Even normally he moved around a lot at parties, but tonight he had covered miles. He was looking for a place to hole up, but what he really wanted was to go back to his cell, to be with those who knew him. I’m Feldman, he thought; my book is in the library. He longed to be with anyone who had read his book, who knew about his life. What was this party all about, anyway?

  Always an invitation had meant to him something more than it was: a secret message, a signal, a declaration of love. And though he was not a public man he had gone to all parties open to the regard of others, to their attention. It was all that he would ever do for anyone—show them his moods, demonstrate himself. I should have been a late-model automobile, he thought. But these people, these cops and armored-car executives and czars of baseball and auditors of books, wanted only to be protected from him, and to have the right of protecting others from him. His blue fool suit was as heavy as armor. Ah, he thought, I’m such an amateur. He despised his clumsiness, his bad balance. He knew himself for a stumbler in the dark, a stubber of toes, a snagger of pockets. The insurance companies wouldn’t touch him.

  Once—it was the year his father died—he had sent himself to Boy Scout summer camp. Joining on a whim at the last moment—he had seen a poster of some boys around a campfire, Negroes, Asians, white kids, all of them strangely Caucasoid—he’d had to go as a Tenderfoot, years older than any other boy of that rank, and as a pauper, with none of the equipment that the others had. He hadn’t understood why he’d come. He couldn’t tie the knots or make a fire or pitch a tent. He didn’t know the pressure points and was clumsy in the canoe and didn’t recognize the plants. He couldn’t find the North Star. He suffered much from the taunts of the other boys and from the commands of boys much younger than himself; yet for the two weeks he was there he had been convinced of his happiness. He remembered one clear, cool evening of a three-day portage when they had slept in the open. He had no sleeping bag and lay in his town clothes, his only protection the few rubber rain slickers the others had lent him and would take back as soon as it rained. He recalled looking at the sky, knowing none of nature’s names but smelling its woods and feeling its earth, sensing himself there in it, who knew no cloud formations nor the shapes of leaves. He was too excited to sleep, and he began to talk to a thirteen-year-old boy who lay near him, telling him about himself, speaking as someone younger might have spoken to someone older but rarely as someone older ever spoke to someone younger. And the kid listened. Then it rained and that kid was the first to ask for his slicker back. Best pal I ever had, Feldman thought.

  It’s the liquor, he told himself. It makes you sentimental. Hell, he thought, something has to.

  A woman came into the room and sat down in a straight chair a few feet from the couch where Feldman was sitting. She slumped backwards, her behind sliding down inside her clothing, so that her body appeared to be lowered from her dress, exposing thigh, straps, the top of a stocking like a vase of flesh. Her position might have been something the Red Cross recommended as a specific against a certain kind of respiratory attack. Feldman waited for her to speak, then realized that she was tipsy and hadn’t yet noticed him. He watched her underwear, soon imagining shapes in it, lumps and shadows and stains. It made him nervous to stare, and he wondered if he should cough or scrape his feet. He looked at her face. He knew nothing about people’s eyes, couldn’t tell character from facial planes. People were young or old, dark or fair, fat or thin. This woman seemed to be in her thirties, a brunette, an inch or so taller than he was, though perhaps it was only the way her legs were extended in front of her that made her seem tall. (He thought of her posture as Lincolnesque.) He found it pleasant to be there with her, their accidental intimacy and her apparent ignorance of his presence enormously sexy. She looked up once and still didn’t seem to notice him, and he settled into a comfortable contemplation of her. He let his hands rest in his lap.

  “I read about you,” she said suddenly, and Feldman jumped. “I read about you,” she repeated, her voice shriller than Feldman would have guessed. He allowed himself a stiff, frightened nod in her direction, only then realizing the danger of his position. There were many things that he, their prisoner, could do to earn their anger, and knowing this, he had had any disadvantaged man’s low-souled regard for his own prerogative. His contempt for his captors had been modest, abased, and he had moved only reluctantly around their rules, all the while unconsciously—doing superstitiously the personality’s special pleading—trusting in miracle to save him in some final pinch. Now he was furious with himself. He had been about to commit the great sin: to have been at ease with one of their women. And that, he understood at last, was what the party was all about.

  Of course, he thought, seeing everything. Guest of honor, life of the party. His first thought, his first, had been to wonder if there would be women. He thought of the omniscient Fisher. How that man worked him! He had wanted a maudlin Feldman, a Feldman sorry for himself—Boy, oh boy, Feldman thought, he’s yours, you’ve got him—and had scared him into self-pity with the shilled routines he had been suckered into overhearing. Then they had softened his fear, using forgotten comfort as an aphrodisiac, turning him into a yearner for tenderness and solace, off balance as a man on tiptoe. Even now, as he looked at the girl, he found it difficult to resist, and he longed to touch her, to pull at one of her straps as at a ripcord. He considered rape, though even as it crossed his mind, he knew she would know judo, know karate, know Burmese foot fighting, and he contemplated his sensuous, bone-shattering comeuppance, the intimate complicated smells of the hammer lock and bear hug. But all that she could do to him would be nothing; it was what the others—he thought of them as of her older brothers—would do. He could see a creosote-and-spit-on-the-floor doom, some blunt-instrumented humiliation, steamy clouds of race hatred, rage, righteous anger, an edge-of-the-bread-knife ruin. He understood how they felt. In a way, he was even on their side.

  “My name is Mona,” the woman said.

  “Mona. Well, well. How do you do? Mona, is it? Nice weather, Miss Mona. Well, well.”

  “Why are you so nervous, a tough guy like you?”

  “Me? Tough? Say, that’s rich. Yes sir. Kind of chilly, don’t you think? Feels like rain.”

  “You just said it was nice.”

  “Nice for some, not nice for others. Me, I like it. I do, I like it. Suits me.”

  “Hey, where are you going?”

>   “Got to be running along, got to be skedaddling. It’s been a real pleasure, Miss Mona. Yes.”

  “Ooh, I love you tough guys. You killers kill me.”

  “Pshaw, Miss Mona, I’m no killer.”

  “Well, you wheelers and dealers then, you big-time operators, you behind-the-scenes guys who can get someone killed by picking up a phone.”

  “Heck, miss, I wouldn’t know what number to dial.”

  “Sure, sure. I know. Tell me something, will you? Will you tell me something?”

  “I’ll try,” Feldman said. “I’ll give it a try.” I’ll kick it around, he thought. I’ll see what I can come up with.

  “Well, a thing that’s always fascinated me is why when you people are arrested and step out of those cars at the courthouse you always hold your hats over your face. It can’t be you’re afraid of the publicity. Everyone already knows what you look like. Why do you do it?”

  “Our hats, is it?” Feldman said.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Yes, well, we like the smell, that’s why we do that.”

  Mona looked at him. Now she blows the whistle, Feldman thought. Now she taps the glass with the little hammer. Mona to Warden, Mona to Warden, come in, Warden. “That’s cute,” Mona said. She came over to his couch and sat next to him. She put out a finger and touched his arm. Don’t touch me with that, he thought. “I liked the part,” she said, “in the basement, where you did all those terrible things for people.”

  Feldman couldn’t move. He was frightened, but now that she was close he could smell her perfume, the odor, he imagined, of cunning poisons. Her hand on the sleeve of his jacket made a complicated gesture of petition and restraint; it was as light as air and weighed forty-seven pounds. He could feel the warm tickle of her fingernail beneath the cloth of his suit.