A Bad Man

by Stanley Elkin

  You got all that down? You got all that down, you good punctuators and spellers? Feldman wondered.

  “Well,” the warden said cheerfully, “well. That felt good, I have to admit. It clears the lungs. A shout clears the lungs. Ah, there’s nothing like rage, men. It tones a man. But I tell you criminals, until you guys go straight you’ll never know what it feels like. Oh, you’ve your anger, I suppose, but you’ve never peaked to wrath or felt a fine fury. Guilt waters your whiskey and niggles your righteousness. Pikers, pikers, you nickled-and-dimed. Well, it stands to reason. You’re all debtors to doubt, uncertainty. There’s vacillation’s dreary falsetto in your tantrums. It amateurizes you, men. Try as you will, how can you hate a man with your gun in his ribs? Is a shooter e’er sore or a mugger e’er maddened? God damns and makes decisions and denotes, but the devil’s all contingency and connotation. There’s something listless in a crime of violence, something pale in a prisoner’s pique. So you lose wrath and make do with a lousy bitterness, settling for slurs instead of curses. Petulance, bitterness and the soured heart. Dyspepsia and low dudgeon and never the high decorum of an injured outrage or the sweet reason in a rich reprisal.

  “Why, look around you! Who blooms here? Who’s got the health? Is the charlatan cheerful or the robber robust? Only your cuckold thrives, your murderer for morality. Sure, sure, only your criminal of passion, your redresser, your reparator—your strangles your stabber—only your gut-ripper and your castrator. There’s nothing like their strength unless it’s the fine fettle of the framed. Innocence. Innocence does it, self-defense does.

  “Well, I’ll let you get back to your cells in a moment. I’ll lock you up. There are some night-shift personnel and their families outside that I’ve still got to talk to, but before I let you go I want to urge you again to think about what I’ve told you. I wish I could imagine that your malice toward bad men were predicated on your own good will, that you won’t just do what I ask merely to assure your paroles, but…well, I’m not naïve. I wasn’t born yesterday in a cabbage patch, I tell you, and I think I know the score. So I’m making it attractive, sweetening the pot.

  “Yet—yet—yet a still small voice within me whispers that the time may come when you won’t be in it for the money, when you’ll vie for vengeance and strive for spite, your hearts swept by a lust for havoc and the will to afflict. You’ll get the hang of it, you hangmen. Trust me. Think—think—a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. In the meantime you’ve your own motives. So go back and size up your fellows. Don’t let them out of your sight. Take notes. Be suspicious. Watch in the foundry, in the print shop—in the canteen—the laborer’s labor. Does he love his work? When he whistles, is it a stirring march to set himself a fine pace, or is it a dreamy love song he hums to distract himself? The perfect crime’s imperfect. Sin leaves clues. Open your eyes, be alert. Stop, look and listen, for the world’s unsafe still. Earn your paroles. Time off for good behavior, everyone. Leave me with a remanence of corrupt men, I ask only that. Remember—rat and do worse, but leave no visible bruises. Connote injuries and stop short of murder, or we’ll both be in trouble.

  “That’s that,” the warden said.

  “That’s that,” the men said.

  The warden nodded and they rose to leave. Guards came to prod them toward the doors. Someone shoved Feldman, but it was not a guard. It was his neighbor, a quiet convict from his own cellblock, stepping on his heels, jabbing him in the back.

  They were marched to the rear-center door but then jammed together into the last few rows in order to let the night-shift personnel and their families pass into the auditorium first. While they were halted, the man behind Feldman leaned toward his ear. “You shit,” he whispered. “You mother-fucker kike bastard. Son-of-a-bitch cocksucker,” he told him softly. “Prick, fartass, scumbag, jerk. Fairy.” Feldman determined to ignore him, but the man’s mouth was almost in his ear. Once he felt the fellow’s lip brush against his lobe. He pulled his head away, but the man became bolder. He pinched Feldman’s back, first surreptitiously, then openly. Feldman moved forward and bumped into the man in front of him.

  “Stand still there, you,” a guard said angrily, and smiled his sanction when the one Feldman bumped shoved him back roughly. Feldman stood still, enduring their pinches and shoves, the small talk of their marginal violence.

  Meanwhile, the warden, still on the stage and able to see the temporary bottleneck at the doors, had begun to speak again, shouting a sort of recessional to them. “Not enough of you have been using Warden’s Forest in your free time,” he said. “I set this plot aside for your benefit, not my own. Yet when I look out on it from my office window I rarely see anyone in it. It’s not enough to reason that it’s winter and that the trees are all bare. Much can be learned from the cold. Much. What good does it do, men, to see the spring but not to suspect its sources? Little credit redounds to the gazer on fall’s fat spectacle.

  “This is your copse, you robbers, and I want to see it used! Is that clear? All right, then. Move on out back there.” He began to clap his hands. “Virtue, virtue, virtue, virtue, virtue,” he cried. “Virtue, virtue.”

  They started to march again, Feldman sliding out in a long first step to elude an anticipated shove or at least reduce its force. As they went up the aisle, he saw that his face had been the model for one of the gargoyles on the last panel of the Gothic siding.

  Virtue, virtue, virtue, virtue, virtue, Feldman thought. Virtu, virtu, virtu, virtu, virtu, Vertigo!

  14

  Elegant Feldman, mandarin-robed, tasseled, the silken fringes of his belt like a very soft cat-o’-nine-tails—“To beat down grime. To punish all ordinary life’s shabby shit”—came up to the satinwood sideboard—“Get me breakfast, Innkeeper. See to the horses. Feed the postern, feed the coachman. Wenches, farewell. Here’s your health. Hey, nonny, nonny, with a hi and a ho and the rain it raineth every day”—and raised heavy silver lids; ladled, as if giving breakfast a downbeat, from the still-steaming chafing dish, goldenly scrambled eggs onto a thin white plate, smooth to the touch as cake icing. He picked, to go with the eggs, a sprig of lush mint, like a flower for a loved one, or a ceremonial herb for the gown of a bride, and carved a slice of ham, ruddy, scorched beneath its luscious glaze. He poured his coffee—black, for he admired the way it looked in the light cup, and loved to see the way it set off the steam. He brought his prizes to the table, already laid, and set them beside a napkin furled in its ring. He returned to the sideboard and hefted the viscous cocktails of jam and crystals of bright sweet jellies. He chose his toast, dark brown and crisp as bark, and took up a dish of butter pats jammed in a frozen choke of crushed ice. He lifted down a halved melon in its silver ring, its green meat pale as money.

  Seated in the high white leather chair, squat as a jolly king in the polished-lensy side of one bright brim-to-cloth goblet, he tucked himself into the broad twilled napkin and smoothed his damasked lap, comfy as a man in a deck chair. Beside his plate, in three smart folds, Lilly, as she did every day, had placed the front section of the New York Times (air-mailed, but more than a day old anyway. Wednesday’s paper mailed Tuesday night and read Thursday morning, so that he had come to think of all facts as tentative, subject to change, already changed, all bulletins stale, all remarks by all spokesmen revised by now or framed in clearer contexts, all outbursts toned down, apologized for, corky with loophole—so that gradually he conceived of most truth as of something even the air could change, set to spoil like standing milk or the browning oxidized flesh of halved apples, and learned to view the world and everything in it with a comfortable hindsight, and thought of wars and strikes and uprisings as fictions).

  Feldman loved his solitary breakfasts, loved his own corpulent sense of them, and enjoyed, in the dark smoked mirror, seeing himself eating them, turning the pages of his paper, tapping at egg in the corners of his mouth with a thick, linen-wrapped finger, lighting cigarettes. Although he usually ate alone, Lilly—
in an old beltless raincoat she used as a bathrobe, in damaged high heels, the counters broken—sometimes came in while he drank a second cup of coffee (in this one he took cream, two spoons of sugar, high, rounded as dunes).

  He finished and scraped his nail absently on a piece of toast. He allowed himself to think of the store, and his mood changed. He did not even remember to enjoy the opulent ruin of his breakfast—the dark toast crumbs on the thick table linen, the stains of coffee and the greased plates and smudged tumblers and the jellied, sticky handles of the silver, the tiny bits of stiffened egg in the creases of his napkin like clots of rheumy eye matter. The store is not doing well, he thought. Things must pick up, he thought; they must.

  He didn’t grieve for his condition so much as for the effort it would take to improve his condition. This he dreaded, as he dreaded all revision. He had discovered long ago that he did not enjoy competition, or even “business.” The truth was Feldman had no feel for patterns. Trends bored him. He hated even to be controlled by the seasons, the holidays, thought of Christmas as a violation of free enterprise, of the climate—summers, say, when he sold no skis—as a restraint of trade. He endured the nation’s economic crises impatiently, was indifferent to predictions of boom and angered by warnings of bust. He scorned even the empty optimisms of designers about a certain color or a length of skirt. Yet adopting an attitude toward the competition that was vaguely laissez-faire, coming, as it were, to Christmas as he came to the obsolete news in his thirty-six-hours-old newspaper—his store did the biggest volume in the state in post-Christmas selling—he had prospered, acquiring over the years a reputation for flair which had less to do with deliberation perhaps than with a certain looseness of timing. And of course he demanded good salesmen. Many of his people were old pitchmen, who—behind their counters, talking with their hands; their voices slightly raised, faintly nasal in high pressure’s elliptic twang; pointing, quick and graceful as men doing card tricks, to the features of a shirt—knew how to “build a tip.” (“You know, Leo,” one of them once said, “half us guys ain’t used to working indoors yet.”) A handful of men in departments like Furniture or Housewares had once sold on television. Others had sold over the telephone or door to door. There were barkers, men who’d owned shooting galleries or Pitch-a-Penny booths in carnivals.

  What hurt him now was a shift in the structure of the city: the decay of old neighborhoods and proliferation of suburbs, the incursions of Negroes, the lousy parking and all the rest. Feldman’s city had held its shape into the postwar years, and he had not had to face the problem of discount houses, or—to show the flag—had to build, shopping center for shopping center, the murderous big branch stores. (It was the new Diaspora, the Diaspora of fat cats, the whole middle class in flight.) Now, belatedly, he had to do something. He had been paralyzed by conservatism—not fear, not even caution—just a strange Feldmanic inertia when it came to expending any energy on the merely remedial and makeshift. It was as if he were impatient with time itself, forbidding flux as he might have forbidden, if he knew it was happening and he had the power, a change in the structure of his cell tissue.

  He heard Lilly before he saw her, the timid clack-clack of her heels and the lungy, wheezy chuffing of her feet as they moved over the broken counters and deeper into her shoes. “My dear?” he said, not looking up.

  “Billy needs a tutor, Leo.” She carried a bowl of cold oatmeal in one hand and half a hardened fried egg on a plate in the other. It was their son’s unfinished breakfast. She would sit down now and finish it, wiping the egg into her mouth with Billy’s discarded crusts. Feldman appraised her. In her open raincoat she looked like a disaster victim. Lilly, the mailman’s treat, he thought, the paper boy’s first young love. “Billy should have a tutor, Leo. You saw last night.”

  He had. A revelation. They had gone to “open house” at Billy’s school, and Billy’s second-grade teacher, Mrs. Blane, who looked to Feldman like an aging whore—it was the trenchcoat draped over the top of her desk; he knew those trenchcoats: $45.95, a big item with the singers in piano bars—had tried to give them an orange card with the words “Billy F.’s Father” printed across it. He had no intention of pinning the thing to his suit. (Billy F.’s mother already wore hers. Billy F.’s mother would pin on anything anyone gave her. She regarded her breasts as a sort of vast field bordering the highways and byways of her lapels and collars, the superhighway that was her cleavage. Around all this she would hang great shining pins like the blazing signs of motels.) Trampy Mrs. Blane’s own bosom was bare except for the pointy warheads of her nipples puckering her sweater. Feldman shoved the card into his pocket, pricking his finger on the pin.

  “Goddamnit,” he said.

  Mrs. Blane, who liked that kind of talk, smiled broadly and stroked her trenchcoat. A whore certainly, Feldman thought, and had an idea. Why not a sort of Show Biz Board, something like the board of college girls he used in the store during the summer? He could aim it at “26” Girls, Go Go dancers, burlesque queens, waitresses behind the bars in bowling alleys, the wives of army sergeants. A whole new line: satin stretch pants, brassieres like spider webs, half-bras like the pouches of kangaroos, panties with a quilted male finger at the crotch; rubber butts, foam tits; gratuitous garters. Marvelous, he thought.

  Lilly had found Billy’s desk and was reading a note he had left for them on the top of his workbooks. “Leo,” she called, “look.” He took the sheet of paper from her and read:

  dear mothat nad fothar, Hi. Lok arand my room hav a nice tiem. your Son billy F.

  There were two words on the other side: “Lok taebl.” Feldman didn’t understand all of it, but since he hadn’t known his son had started to learn to write he was rather pleased by the note. He gave it back to Lilly and smiled. “Not bad,” he said. Then he noticed that there were notes on all the children’s desks, and he leaned over to read them. “Welcome to our open house,” the note on the next desk said. “We have been working hard all week on the projects you see tonight. I hope you enjoy everything. Please look at my workbook before you leave and be sure to see the ‘city’ the class has been building on the table at the back of the room. It should amuse you. Certainly it has been a lot of fun to make. I made the fire station. I love you both and will see you at breakfast tomorrow before Dad goes to work. Your son, Oliver.”

  Feldman looked around the room for Oliver’s parents. Standing next to a striking woman in tweed, he saw a tall, handsome, successful-looking man wearing a card that said “Oliver B.’s Father.” He didn’t like their looks.

  “Leo,” Lilly said, “look at this one. These are really charming.”

  Feldman bent over the tiny desk and stared at the paper.

  Dear Mom, Dear Dad,

  Your being here makes me glad.

  Please look around and see our work,

  I hope you like it,

  Your son, Burke.

  “Beautiful,” Feldman said, and glowered at Burke’s mother. He read all the notes, sneaking up to seats only moments after a parent had vacated them.

  “You’ll eat your heart out, Leo,” Lilly said.

  “Not at all, not at all,” Feldman said, waving her off. “I’ve been meaning to ask you, sweetheart, was there much idiocy in your family?” He went back to Billy’s desk and opened one of the workbooks. “Why,” asked the box beneath the story, “did Tim’s grandfather make Tim promise to keep the calf a secret until Sue’s birthday?” Below there was a sentence with the last word left blank: “Tim’s grandfather wanted the calf to be a—.” Billy had printed the word “apple” in the blank space. Feldman closed the book.

  He went to the table at the back of the room and looked at the city the class had made. There was a water tower made from half a Quaker Oats box painted silver. It was supported by four black pencils stuck into the bottom. There were cigar-box schools and skyscrapers fashioned out of cereal boxes. Tiny windows had been cut into the cardboard and glazed with Scotch tape. There was an elaborate Cit
y Hall, a jail, a railroad station. The names of the builders had been worked into their buildings, and Feldman stared glumly at Oliver B.’s cunning little firehouse with its shiny brass peashooter for a fireman’s pole. He tried to find his son’s contribution but couldn’t see it anywhere. Then, behind the city, he noticed a small vague area with two crumpled-up wads of paper and a few loose pieces of gravel and clumps of dirt. He smoothed out one of the pieces of paper. “Grabage dunp. Billy F.,” it said.

  Furious, he looked around for Lilly and saw her talking with Mrs. Blane. The teacher nodded and compressed her lips sympathetically. He watched them bitterly. He was going to march up there and pull his wife away from the woman, but his eye was caught suddenly by a series of charts and graphs tacked to the walls. Examining them, he saw that thinly disguised as games and contests, they indicated a kid’s standing in a particular subject. There were charts for spelling, reading, arithmetic, social studies, science—other things. By the name of each child was a tiny paper automobile pinned to a mapped track that led toward towns on a kind of West Coast called things like “Scholarsville” or “Goodstudentberg.” On the spelling chart Billy’s car had never even left its garage, and he had barely made it to the city limits on the reading and penmanship charts. On the arithmetic chart Billy had no automobile at all.