A Bad Man

by Stanley Elkin

  “A man can’t be made to testify against himself,” Feldman said.

  The warden considered him for a moment. “All right,” he said. “I’m Warden Fisher, the fisher of bad men. I make the rules, and what happens here happens because I make it happen or because I let it happen. You’re innocent. I declare it a standoff and direct these men to ignore whatever they may have heard up to now. Feldman’s innocent. I whitewash his history and make good all the bad checks drawn on his character. He stands or falls on Dedman. Is that fair, Feldman?”

  Feldman stared at him.

  “Good. Then it’s a deal. We shall have all of it, however. You must give us all of it. All right then. Attention, everyone. Feldman gives us Dedman.” The warden, who had been standing, now sat down on a cot. He folded his arms across his chest and looked up impassively, waiting for him to explain what was inexplicable.

  Feldman began.

  “I had a friend,” he said. “Leonard Dedman.”

  “No one met your boat, Feldman. No one met your boat, you said.”

  “No. This was after…He wouldn’t have met it. It was after I decided we could be friends.”

  “You decided?”

  “Yes. I used to watch them. Boys. In the towns where I lived. I wasn’t envious, you understand. It was strange to me. I grew up in small towns where boys tossed pebbles at each other’s windows, where they imitated the sounds of birds, made signals.” He spoke as before. There was no other way now. “I’d been in their rooms and seen them cross-legged on the bed, browsing possessions, scholars of toy, touching the gifts with a curious peace. Solaced with balls, getting their heft, rolling them off with a wave of the hand. Examining guns and aiming at space, squeezing the trigger and blowing their breath down the barrel as if to clear it—death’s light housekeeping. The model airplanes, the ships and cars and toy soldiers—calmed by all the bright lead effigies of the dangerous world snug in their palms. Borrowing, trading, and a major greed. I understood this. But afterwards, after the trades, an amnesty of self, a queer quiet when the playing began. Using the toys, to be sure, but something else, something undeclared but binding—”

  “Dedman. Feldman, Dedman.”

  “But binding. It was honor. In the fields, running, exercising—”

  “Dedman, Feldman. Feldman, Dedman.”

  “—the honor still there. And even in their angers, their roughnesses, there were those who were sure to be each other’s allies, doing favors in a fight, passionate to cheer or console, committed as seconds in old-timey duels. A balance in the world like a struck bargain.

  “It was curious to me how they knew whom to select, how they chose up their sides so that there were teams within teams, natural combinations, feats of friendship beyond athletics, a construct of amities. One boy, in practice, who always threw a particular other boy the ball without being asked. And no one left out, not even myself, though when I had the ball I never knew who to throw it to, and had to choose, and sometimes threw it away.

  “Or secrets. They told secrets, each day trusting the other with a shame or a plot, trading these as they had their toys.

  “How did they know? How? This was the thing I didn’t understand. How they made up their minds whom to like. It had nothing to do with talents, and even less with qualities, or the loved gifted and the loved good would have had it all. It was a Noah’s Ark of regard.

  “Was it love? Was friendship love?”

  “Dedman, damnit. Damnit, Dedman. Get to Dedman. Get to the part where you betrayed him.”

  “I met Dedman in the city when I came there a few years after my father died,” Feldman said. “He was my age and had come from the West. Like myself he had no family. We lived next door to each other in the same rooming house and sometimes ate our meals together. He had been a student, but he’d had to drop out because he had no money. He never had a talent for money. All the time we knew each other, I became richer and richer and he remained the same.”

  “But you gave him money,” the warden said.

  “Yes. To start up businesses. Dedman’s businesses. They always failed.”

  “Yes,” the warden said.

  “It was Dedman who proposed our friendship,” Feldman said. “He asked for it formally. It was a wonder he didn’t go down on his knees.”

  “Was Dedman queer?” Bisch asked.

  “Yes. He was queer. But not in the way you mean. He was queer. ‘We should be friends,’ he said, ‘us birds of a feather. We should take pledges, slice flesh and brush bloods. Two people like us, like the last left alive, no kin in the kit.’

  “‘Too sad, Dedman,’ I told him. ‘Too serious, kid. It’s your America’

  “‘It’s their America.’

  “He felt it did Dedman, his condition a guilt. With a whine for a war cry he assaulted my camp. A poet he was, and two poems he had. Feldman was Dedman’s, and Dedman was Feldman’s. He rhymed our lives, orphan for orphan and hick for hick, and what he made of the city we’d found, I won’t even say. And the rooming house, of course. He told me it was significant that we sometimes chose the same restaurant and picked the same soup. (But he had no sense about money, and what I did for budget he did for hunger.) Each evening a courting, petitions, a woo, his reasons my roses and chocolates. ‘And what have you got to trade?’ I asked him. ‘And show me your toys,’ I said. But Dedman’s dowry was the lack of one. ‘Bankruptcy, Dedman,’ I warned him. ‘Love flies out the window when the wolf comes in the door.’

  “About this time I had come on the spoor of my fate. A jobber I was in those days—small-time, of course, just riding the fads and making a go. But getting first clues about a better class of merchandise. Brand names and top grade, first cut and choice and prime. Founded 1780. (This was my dream.) Aspirations of the pushcart heart, stirrings—I have not been unstirred—in the spieler’s soul. (Grand pianos are grand. Peddler. Old clothesman. Alley cat!) Riddled with need I was, hunting a piece of the action like a grapple of grail. ‘Shit on the shoddy,’ I declared to the roomers, and scorning thread-barrenness, gave up the place. I found an apartment, and what do you think?

  “Dedman, of course. It took him a week. We were neighbors again. No sense about money, no feel for the score. ‘Dedman,’ I asked, ‘just what do you do?’ He was a clerk, he drove taxis, he worked at a bench, a gardener, an usher, a pumper of gas. Caddy, orderly, schlepper of mail. What didn’t Dedman? Dedman of the semiskill and the student duty. For understand, these were all summer jobs, Christmas rush, the small-time tasks of piecemeal pressure, timed to semesters, holidays, school dismissed because of the snowstorm. As though simply by going through a process of part-time employment, he could maintain the fiction that he was making it the hard way like orphans before him. He lived in a myth. And without the squirrel’s sense of winter but only his busyness had this strange garret notion of himself, laying in his profitless, pointless struggles like grist for those plaque landmarks that honor puny origins. ‘On this day, in this place, on this spot, nothing happened, Dedman,’ I told him.

  “But all he gave me was the old business—hot pursuit and the language of romance. ‘Two can live cheaply as one,’ he said, and slipped me ardor and the arguments of old time’s sake.

  “‘Dedman, Dedman, tell no tales,’ I told him. There had been no old times, you understand, only Dedman’s hard-sold dream out of books of a Damon Dedman and a Pythias Feldman, a Romulus Leonard and Remus Leo. (And what he made of our names! ‘Leonard, the Leo-hearted,’ I called him once.)

  “I tried to discourage him—that’s the truth. The man insisted on our intimacy, giving me—met in the street, on corners, in stores, or even on the stairs or at the mailbox in the hall, gratuitous for us then as the garage in the back—the secret handshake of the heart. He was obsessed by our birthwrong. (And something just occurred to me: how did he know about mine? How did he know? I don’t remember telling him, but I might have. Put that down to my credit. Fair’s fair. Or if I never told him, then put down to my
credit that it was written all over my face.) And leaned heavily on the Dedman-deemed mutuality of our lives like some old out-of-work frat man—he’d been, as I say, a student—making a nuisance of himself in his fraternity brother’s office. But of course even his premise was wrong. I’d had my father for sixteen years, and my homunculus, if I’d known it, forever.

  “It’s a wonder I didn’t call a cop. ‘Get yourself a girl,’ I said. ‘Buy a paper tonight. Go through the want ads carefully. Look out for something with a future. Flourish. Thrive. Purge those gypsy grudges, Dedman. Lord,’ I called over my shoulder, ‘deliver this delivery boy.’

  “So saying, I took hold myself. What’s good for the goose is unexceptionable for the gander, is it not? And to practice what one preaches makes perfect, doesn’t it? I seized the bullish world. What can I tell you? The war and all, opportunity, the seller’s market and all—I grew rich. By 1940 I had already chosen the warehouse that would become my department store, by ’41 I was already in it, and by ’42 and ’43 I was established, getting while the getting was good and the casualties mounted.

  “I didn’t see a lot of Dedman in those years. I still maintained the same apartment but was away so much, putting together my store, that I didn’t see him. (Though he was there. Like myself he was four-F, and what he made of that I don’t have to tell you. ‘Our disease,’ he called it.) Then, suddenly, the year the war ended, I decided to capitulate. After a siege of ten years or so, I called him in and told him we would be friends. He smiled me a smile and shook my hand, and we made the manly acknowledgments, the toasts and the jokes, and I discovered before he went back to his apartment that night that it was too late—that we were already friends, that we had been friends all along and that our friendship ended on the evening I gave in to him. That until then I’d been fonder of him than he was of me, because, after all, he’d seen in me only an analogue of himself, only some far-fetched Dedmanic Doppelgänger, while I had seen in him qualities, states of being and the hardware of character. Before that evening was over I’d had it with him, with Feldman’s friend Dedman, his enemy Dedman.

  “Though I didn’t let on. I knew I’d get him. (Let me make something clear. I don’t say I needed reasons. Maybe, at first. And maybe I had some. But what happened would have happened without reasons. So let me make something clear. What I did was not because I was acting on faulty reasons. It wasn’t poor judgment or a lousy argument.)

  “It was very rough, being his friend. A little Dedman went great distances—light-years. Christ, I was bored.

  “‘What do we do, Dedman, now that we’re friends?’ And don’t let him kid you—it was as new to him as it was to me. Neither of us had the hang of it. I know I was sorry we weren’t still kids. Kids have it soft. They wrestle, they run, shout, sing, throw the ball. So we just sat around, seemly now, shy. And suddenly making telephone calls.

  “‘What’re you doing?’

  “‘Lying around.’

  “‘You want to come down?’

  “‘I got my TV. Come up if you want.’

  “‘Your television came?’

  “‘I brought one home from the store.’

  “‘How does it work?’

  “‘Okay. Pretty good.’

  “‘What’re you watching?’

  “‘Wrestling.’

  “‘Wrestling is fixed.’

  “‘It’s all they have on.’”

  “My God, the arrangements, the crabbed propositions of regard! Consideration’s deflections like blindness to a wart on a pal’s nose. Friendship is fixed. Friendship is. The dives of deference and the shaved points of solicitude.

  “‘Leo, it’s Leonard.’

  “‘Yeah, Leonard. Hi.’

  “‘Do you want to go out?’

  “‘What’s there to do?’

  “‘There’s this movie downtown.’

  “‘A movie? You think?’

  “‘We could go tie one on.’

  “‘Well, tomorrow there’s work.’

  “‘You’re right. I forgot.’

  “‘We’d get back too late.’

  “‘There’s a lecture at school.’

  “‘Is that so? What’s it on?’

  “‘The Second World War.’

  “‘Sounds over my head.’

  “’Wanna come down and read?’

  “‘Well, maybe. Okay.’

  “‘Not too exciting.’

  “‘Well, I’m tired tonight.’

  “‘What time you be down?’

  “‘Gee, I’ve still got to eat.’

  “‘What time? Say a time.’

  “‘Around eight? Around nine?’

  “‘All right. See you then.’

  “One night Dedman took me to a restaurant. I’d told him it was my birthday, though it wasn’t. I’d said it to give us something to do—just as when he got a new job or I had done well at the store, I would take him out, declare a celebration, so that at this time our relationship was one of shared occasions, Fictive red-letter days, spurious as the commemorative excuse for a sale of used cars. Oh, those celebrations, those pious festivals!

  “And this was the night that I told him it wasn’t working out—though I hadn’t planned to, didn’t know that I’d do it till I’d done it, so that, let me make something clear, what happened, what I did, was never what you could call a conspiracy, just as it wasn’t predicated on feeble arguments—that the friendship had failed. ‘Phooey on our kid-glove comity, our loveless diplomatic chumhood. My apartment’s no embassy, Leonard. Tact’s crap, it’s defunct. Well, I take your line,’ I said. ‘No one’s to blame. What, orphans like us? You kidding? Shy, sure we’re shy. Us virgins in croniness, us unpanned-out pals. Oh, the roughnecks, Leonard’ I said, ‘they have the fun. They’re the ones.’ (Let me make something clear. I’ve said I’d known I would get him. I’ve told you that. So that what was beginning to happen that night, unreasoned, not worked out, was maybe just a sort of destiny, Leonard’s lot, say, or Dedman’s portion, perhaps.) ‘Let’s really cut loose. Other guys do. Will you try? Are you game? Will you take my advice?’

  “‘What do we do?’

  “‘We must do as other men do. Don’t be embarrassed.’

  “‘No.’

  “‘Don’t be self-conscious. Don’t get cold feet.’

  “‘No.’

  “‘We must do as other men do.’

  “‘But what? What is it?’

  “‘Dedman, I’m going to ask you to call me “Ace.” It’s what the roughnecks call each other. I hear it everywhere. I heard it on the campus that time I went with you to the library. “Ace,” call me “Ace.” It’s manly. It has a fine ring. If you see me in the hallway, say “How’s it going, Ace?” When you pick me up to eat, say “Let’s chow down, Ace.” Or “Chow time, Ace.” And I’ll call you “Chief.” Or “Flash.” Whichever you prefer. We’ll work it out. I’ll say, “Way to go, Flash.” “Yo, Chief,” I’ll say. It’ll make a difference. You’ll see.’

  “‘It will make a difference?’

  “‘Absolutely. It will. Look, do me a favor. Give it a chance. When the waiter brings the check, say, “Here comes the man with the bad news, Ace.” ’

  “‘Here comes the man with the bad news, Ace,’ Dedman said when the waiter came.

  “‘Read it and weep, Flash,’ I told him.

  “Dedman, who had no brains about money, as I say, paid the check without adding it up and overtipped the waiter a dollar. ‘Way to go, big fella,’ I said.

  “‘Happy birthday, Ace.’

  “‘Thanks, Chief,’ I winked at him. ‘Flash, how are they hanging?’

  “‘Better, Ace. Really better.’

  “And Dedman was into his fall now, leaning exultant into his descent like a breaster of tape. Lord, we had fun! Such times! The new-goosed Damon and piss-vinegar Pythias. Hurrah, I say! Like student princes we were, like heirs and heroes, raucous as drunks past curfew on cobble. Good times and high, Ace. And Dedman as
good a man as myself. Because I had led him into the games now. Shilled and hustled him down this slow-boat-to-China garden path. Led him into the games now of Feldman’s Olympic friendship. And Dedman good at them, you understand, skilled as an actor, no feel only for what was what. Led him into the games now. The latest thing in friendship. Damon down and Pythias perished. Long live Quirk and Flagg! Gusto and zeal and zest and joy like new soaps for the shower!

  “Listen, let me make something clear—it was a classic friendship out of operetta, musical comedy, Dennis Morgan movies. I honed this rivalry with him. We played cliches on each other. Jesus, the jokes!

  “Dedman bought a car. We went to a ballgame. He had a beer in the third inning. In the parking lot as he was taking out his keys, I clipped him hard as I could on his jaw and knocked him out. ‘Sorry, Flash,’ I said over his unconscious body, ‘that hurt me more than it did you, but it would be suicide to let you get behind the wheel in your condition.’

  “We pretended we were athletes in training. At night we’d each try to sneak past the other’s apartment to go out and meet this blond divorcée waitress we made up, who worked in this all-night diner we made believe was on the corner. We’d walk tiptoe and carried our shoes in our hands, wearing a bathrobe and pretending we were dressed underneath it. I’d spot him sneaking out, and Dedman would feign this angelic look and begin whistling. (He couldn’t really whistle, but he’d pretend to.) ‘Where you going, Chief?’

  “‘Who? Me, Ace?’

  “‘Yeah, big guy, you.’

  “‘Oh, nowhere, Ace. I thought I heard a suspicious noise in the hall, and I came out to check it.’

  “‘A suspicious noise. You mean like a burglar would make?’

  “‘That’s right. Like a burglar.’

  “‘Then why were you whistling?’

  “‘I was pretending to whistle, Ace.’

  “‘You were off to see Trixie O’Toole, weren’t you? Weren’t you?’

  “‘Who, Ace?’

  “‘You know who. A certain cute little blond hash-slinger with big blue eyes over at Joe’s all-nighter.’

  “‘Come on, Ace. But that reminds me, now that you mention it, what are you doing out here in the hall this time of night?’