A Bad Man

10

A short time after his monthly physical Feldman received a note from the warden:

Your weight is good, your lungs are clear, your specimen sparkles like a trout stream. But slow down. I tell you for your own good. You’re too nervous. You’ll never make it. The doctor is very concerned, and so am I. I’m no killer — that’s your department. I’m just a custodian, a sort of curator, and it grieves my collector heart if I have to lose one of you guys. You’re terrified. Of what? Of what, Feldman? You make your own problems. If I thought it was guilt — guilt’s good, guilt’s healthy, but your kind of guilt isn’t honest. It doesn’t do anybody any good. It’s diffused, unfocused. Anyway, slow down, play ball, calm down. Life is ordinary, Feldman.

Fisher

P.S. Here are the basic rules of this place. I’ll just sketch them in for you. I won’t be very particular, because you’re probably already familiar with the particular stuff. (We have an expression: “You bad men can’t see the ropes for the loopholes.”)

1. Lights out at 10 o’clock. The day begins (adjusted, of course, to seasonal dawn) at 6:30. That means you can get eight and a half hours’ sleep if you work it right. Bankers don’t get that much, ship’s captains don’t. Guys who have lumberyards in Ohio get less. Actually, it’s an hour more of sack time — this is supported by many sociological studies — than is put in by the average U.S. citizen. Penologists are beginning to think that a greater sleepload is a very important factor in rehabilitation, an aggressive dream life being a major element in holding down violence. (Also, if it’s carried over into the outside would, it gives you jerks less man-hours on the streets.)

2. Keep a neat cell. There’s no real complaint here.

3. Silence at meals. Sit at your assigned table. There’s no real complaint here.

4. You already know the mechanics of permission slips and passes and so forth, so I won’t go into that here except to say that it’s to a man’s benefit to learn to live with nuisance. Accustom yourself to it. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for an annoyed man to enter into Heaven.

5. Work. THIS IS MOST IMPORTANT! I can’t emphasize this too much. Develop a good work ethic. The most difficult thing you will have to face up to here is the problem of sharpening your work ethic in the absence of a profit motive. But this is very important. I assure you, Feldman, if you can overcome your qualms in this area the world will absolutely open up for you. You will begin to understand how ordinary life is. What do you need here that isn’t provided? Food? We give you food. Shelter ditto. Likewise plumbing. If you need an operation or an aspirin tablet, ask and it shall be given. What’s left? Movies? We show subsistence-level movies once a week. Live with an edge on. I don’t say suffer. Repress, repress. Have Spartan sensibilities. Be always a little uncomfortable. Then, when pain comes — and how often does it come? real pain is very rare — it won’t matter so much. I’ve already said more than is necessary. (I don’t owe you anything.) Work hard at your job. You’re in the canteen. These men have a limited amount of money to spend. Still, you’re a merchandiser. See what you can do to improve business in your department. Let’s make that more positive. I want to see improvement over last month’s figures, or else!

6. Sex. There’s no complaint here. I’m no prude. I don’t know what your tastes are and I don’t want to know. What’s okay by consenting adults is okay by me.

7. Free time. This is up to you. You can read, play sports, work in the model shop — whatever. It’s a good idea, however, to make a friend. Many of the men here develop lasting relationships that enrich their lives. Now I know that you’ve been listening to several of these men recently and letting them tell you about their troubles. All I can say is, that isn’t exactly what I mean. You were selfish there, Feldman. You did that out of morbid, unhealthy curiosity and to achieve a basis of comparison for your own comfort. That must stop. (Some of them were putting you on, anyway.) Life is ordinary. Mine is, his is, yours is. I could give you literally hundreds of examples that come readily to mind, but right here on my desk now is the file of Rudolph Held. Held is in this prison for arson. (You’ve probably seen him. Rudy’s the trusty who runs the projector.) Now you might think that arson is a sick, dramatic, extraordinary crime, and for some perhaps it is, but Rudy gets no hard-ons from setting fires. He doesn’t wet his pants when he hears a siren. Rudy’s a looter. He starts a fire and is there on the scene when it takes. He’s always been very athletic, fast, a champion sprinter in high school, and a superb broken-field runner. However, Rudy didn’t have the opportunity of going on to college to develop these interests. He might conceivably have been offered athletic scholarships, but his father died when he was very young — of a perfectly ordinary coronary — and he had to remain with his mother and support her. Actually, he didn’t even finish high school, need was so pressing. Well, this was the Depression, and there wasn’t much work available for a boy like Rudy. He found a job delivering groceries in a wealthy part of town, but then his mother became ill — these things happen — and he needed extra money for an operation. He remembered those wealthy homes and the valuable things he had seen in them. What was more natural for a loyal, dutiful boy than to think of stealing them in order to obtain money for his mom’s operation? But how could a kid delivering groceries, limited mostly to the kitchen, grab anything of value? He knew he’d have to go back at night, to break and to enter. In a wealthy home there are always plenty of people around — servants, guests. It was too risky. (Again, self-preservation is a perfectly normal, ordinary motivation in human beings.) If it was to do himself or his mother any good he had to find some sure-fire way of getting into these homes and stealing the stuff. He asked himself: under what conditions will it seem normal to force your way into a home that is not your own? And the answer came — perfectly rational, perfectly normal: when that house is on fire and it looks like you’re going in to save someone! So Rudy would start a fire and then bust through a window and go in and take what he needed. He made so much noise he was actually responsible for saving many lives, and then, with his God-given talent for broken-field running — and what’s more natural than making use of your talents? — he’d dodge around in the flames and burning rooms, grabbing up whatever he needed. So you see? When you understand the background, there’s a reason for everything. Nothing is strange. Consecutive, the world is consecutive. It’s rational. Life is ordinary.

You’ll be getting another examination in a month. If you’re no better then, stronger measures will have to be taken.

Fisher

Sure it’s ordinary, Feldman thought, awakened the next morning by the flash of sun on the bright mirror surfaces of the bars Lurie had shined. Sure it’s ordinary, he thought, plunging his arm deep into the toilet bowl to polish it. He looked up and down the long line of cells. Men sat on the sides of their cots, their shoulders slumped, their heads in their hands. Sure it is.

“Good morning, fellas,” he said to the cellblock at large, to the murderers and robbers of banks, “how’d you sleep?”

“Stow it, big mouth,” warned a convict in another cell. “Watch your step, pig creep. Fuck with me and I’ll get you on your way through the foundry to deposit the chits. I’ll crack your skull with a shovel and stuff your body into furnace six.”

“These things happen,” Feldman said.

He would give the warden his way. When in jail, he thought. It was a matter of indifference to him. Life was ordinary. Only what happens to you, he thought, not entirely clear what he meant. Then he thought: My crime, one of them, was that I thought the world itself was happening to me. And when it didn’t, I tried to make it happen. Ah, he thought, like the other bad man — like Mix.

That warden, he thought, shuddering, he’ll pull me apart. The thing to do is to play ball. The warden was a great man. As great a man as he had encountered. As great as his father. Greater. To use his health like that, to scare him into docility! The man used the character of the opposition. To fright he applied fear, to greed dreams of surfeit, to courage (the complicated possibilities of his system of silence in the dining hall) encouragement. It was important to know what he thought of you. Feldman remembered his file. What was in it? Ed Slipper had let him down. Slipper had been in the infirmary nine days. Had the warden anything to do with that? Incommunicado. When he was there for his physical, Feldman had bribed an orderly to get a report on him.

Higher purposes. He was all higher purposes, the warden. Feldman knew that, and the warden knew he knew. That probably explained the warden’s note, the explanations that explained nothing, the warden’s fear that Feldman was on to something. (Sure, fear. The son of a bitch was on the run. You didn’t understand fear that well without having known a fair amount of it yourself. You couldn’t manipulate greed unless you’d been there.) Then — he had come a long way today — this: he’s one too. The warden. He’s a bad man too!

Maybe. Higher purposes. Nobody understood the prison. Rules, exceptions to rules. The world as tightrope. Feldman didn’t know. Does he want me to understand? Does he not want me to understand?

Anyway, okay. The warden said be calm. He’d be calm. He was calm. There were certain dentists you could trust. They said, “This won’t hurt you,” and it didn’t. That was no guarantee you wouldn’t die from pain on the way home, but you knew you were safe just then. That’s how he felt. Safer, for the time being at least, than at any time since he’d come. That’s why he had spoken out his greeting like that. He was pretty happy. What couldn’t he do now that he was safe for a while?

“Bisch,” he told his cellmate, “watch my smoke.”

The first thing he did was to get Wall’s power of attorney. Then he got Flesh’s. Sky’s was more difficult. “Authority isn’t authority until it’s deputed,” Feldman said. “Responsibility doesn’t mean anything until it’s delegated.”

“I’m in charge of the operation,” Manfred Sky said sullenly.

“I know that, Manfred. I know that. Listen to me a minute. Did you ever see a general?”

“What is this? Why rake over the past? Just because I once sold phony Prisoner-of-War Insurance—”

Feldman had forgotten about the man’s war experience. He didn’t believe for a minute in Sky’s sore spot, but understood that it was fashionable just then in the prison for bad men to assume long, penitent faces, to “make warden’s mouths,” as the phrase had it. (He had thought it a chink in the warden’s armor when he realized that the man would settle for insincerity, but he had been quickly straightened out about that in Warden’s Assembly. “Forms, gentlemen,” the warden had roared over the convicts’ forced applause and cheers, “civilization is forms.” There was even some talk that the warden would soon reinstitute an experimental measure that had been abandoned shortly before Feldman’s arrival. When the practice was in force, a convict encountering a guard in the corridor had to greet the guard formally, inquire after his health, and his family’s if he had one. Then the guard had to do the same for the convict. Each was required to offer some minor complaint, some small concern — these didn’t have to be real — for the other to be solicitous about. The system had been discontinued, Feldman understood, because the prisoners were helpless to project a believable insincerity.)

“Did you ever see a general?” Feldman repeated. “Did he carry an M-one? Was he issued a trenching tool? Did he, except on formal occasions, wear as many ribbons as his driver, say? Manfred, I’ve seen a general. I sat with one across a conference table when the store was promoting defense bonds for the government. He had assistants — captains, majors, a full colonel. Manfred, those junior officers looked Toyland next to this fellow. Do you understand? West Point cadets, senior prom, Flirtation Walk. They looked like men who had never done anything more military than hold a sword above some R.O.T.C. lieutenant and his pretty bride. But that general, that general was a dream of power! In a khaki uniform, very plain, unribboned, almost a business suit. He deputed his messkit, Manfred, he delegated his knapsack. Just the stars on each shoulder like awry stick pins, like something in a brown firmament. He looked like the United States sitting there. He never opened his mouth. This was a complicated thing. I had lawyers from my staff; he had his judge-advocate people. I was asking concessions for the space. Many things had to be worked out. Decisions. He never said a word. With the eyes, everything with the eyes. He never made a sound. Well, that’s an exaggeration. I was sitting across from him and I heard this faint hum. Like a generator or a transformer. Oh, the power in that man. Don’t kid yourself, Manfred. He was in charge of his operation too.”

“Wow,” Manfred Sky said.

“I ask for your power of attorney, Manfred. Give me your hand on this.”

“Why? What’s in it for you?”

“Me?” Feldman said, “I’m a workhorse, Manfred, a grind. Feldman the fetcher, the rough and tumbler. This is true, Manfred. I have no executive gifts. I haven’t the gift of silence. Hear how I talk. It’s a failing.”

Flesh and Walls were listening. Feldman had simply promised them he would do their work.

“How about it, Manfred?”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“Look, Flesh, look, Walls. Look at Manfred. With the eyes, everything with the eyes.”

“Well, I don’t know,” Manfred said.

“What would you say to a bribe, Sky?”

“Done,” Sky said.

Then Feldman took down the chewing-gum displays. Walls, who had taken some trouble with the arrangement of these, objected. “Wait,” Feldman told him, “you’ll see.”

He cleared away the toothpaste tubes. He had Flesh hide the cigarettes, and he removed the shaving creams and aerosol deodorants. He stood back critically and looked at the shelves. “My God,” he said, “the candy!”

“Wait, I’ll get it,” Walls said.

“Never mind,” Feldman said, “I will.”

He took away the famous kinds and allowed those he had never heard of to remain. He was very discriminating. There were seventeen boxes of Licorice Brittle, two dozen tubes of Flower Balls. Rose, Gardenia, Gray Orchid, Pine — some of the other flavors. He gave prominent space to some curious unwrapped bars of hardened confectioners’ sugar. They had precisely the texture and taste of the candy sockets that support the candles on a child’s birthday cake. They had jelly centers. Not by bread alone, Feldman thought.

He opened the soft-drink cooler and peered inside. He removed the Coke and Pepsi Cola and 7Up and all the fruit flavors except guava. He held up a bottle of bright mauvish liquid. There was no label. He read the cap. “Fleer’s,” it said. Hits the spot, Feldman thought, and returned it to the cooler.

Then he picked through the tray of combs, leaving out only the wide, eight- and ten-inch ones and removing all the tightly toothed pocket combs. These he placed in a large cardboard box into which he had already put writing paper, packets of envelopes, ball-point pens and all the number-two pencils. He covered the box and shoved it under the counter out of sight. He found a single box of number four hard-lead pencils, and these he built in a rectangular construction on the top of the counter.

He discovered some shoetrees, which he hung on a tall revolving razor-blade stand from which he had first removed all the double-edged blades. (He allowed a few packages of odd-shaped injector blades to be displayed.) He arranged the greeting cards, first transferring to the cardboard box all those cards whose messages of sympathy or celebration seemed rather ordinary. He was left with a small, curious assortment: “Get Well Soon, Stepmother”; “Bon Voyage, Cousin Pat”; “Best Wishes for the April Primary”; “Too Bad Your Dog Was Run Over”; “Welcome Back to Civilian Life, General”; “Congratulations, Comrade, on the Success of Your Strike!”

He took away all the Kleenex and white pocket handkerchiefs, substituting five carefully folded floral-pattern babushkas the men sent as gifts. There were other gift items: three travelling clocks, a portable iron and several umbrellas. Then, in a massive ziggurat, he arranged six dozen bottles of suntan lotion that had arrived yesterday by mistake. He stood back to appraise what he had done. “How do you like it?” he asked Manfred. Sky stared at him.

The canteen opened for an hour and five minutes in the afternoon. (The scheduling of canteen hours was among the more complicated arrangements at the prison. This was Thursday. On Thursday those men who hadn’t taken their free hour at ten in the morning on Monday could take it with an increment of five minutes at two-thirty in the afternoon.)

A convict holding an envelope came up to the wire cage behind which Feldman was waiting. “Give me a stamp,” he said.

“Certainly,” Feldman said. He took a special-delivery stamp from the special drawer he had prepared and slipped it to the man through the opening in the cage. “Thirty cents, please,” he said politely.

“Not this,” the man said, “a stamp. A regular stamp. A nickel stamp.”

“All out,” Feldman explained.

“What do you mean all out? I want to send a letter.”

Feldman glanced down at the stamp the convict had just returned to him. “They deliver it any hour of the day or night with this,” he said. “This is one of the best stamps there is.”

“I don’t want it delivered any hour of the day or night. It’s a letter to my mother. I say I’m feeling fine and that I’m glad Uncle had a nice time in Philadelphia.”

Feldman nodded sympathetically.

“Look,” the man said, “have you got an air-mail stamp? I’ll send it air-mail.”

“All out,” Feldman said. He considered the problem for a minute. “I know,” he said suddenly. “Do you know anyone in Europe?”

“Why?”

“Well, if you know someone in Europe, I could sell you an overseas air letter for eleven cents. You write your mother the air letter, and your pal in Europe redirects it to your mom. If he does it right away, she’ll have it in under two weeks.”

“I don’t know nobody in Europe,” the man said.

“Asia. These air letters go to Asia too. It takes a little longer, but—”

“I never been to Asia. I don’t know nobody in Asia. Just give me the goddamned special-delivery.”

“Coming right up,” Feldman said sweetly.

The next customer, a young man, wanted a stamp too. He was holding some documents. They looked important. Probably they were legal forms he was sending to his lawyer.

Feldman shook his head sadly. “I’ve only got this cent-and-a-quarter precanceled job for nonprofit organizations,” he said.

The young man made some private calculations. “Well, give me seven of them. That’d make more than the eight cents it costs for an air-mail.”

“Gee, I’ve got only one left. There’s not much call for them.”

“What would happen if I put a cent-and-a-quarter stamp on this?”

“You’d have to send it open, unsealed,” Feldman said expertly. “It goes surface mail. Rail, bus, that sort of thing.”

“These are important confidential papers,” the convict said. “My appeal rides on this.”

“Uh huh,” Feldman said.

“They have to go out today.”

“Do you know anybody in Europe?”

Finally the man had to take his chances. He stuffed the papers into the envelope and started to lick it.

“Unh unh, unh uhn,” Feldman warned, waving his finger.

“I forgot,” the man said. He handed the unsealed envelope to Feldman reluctantly, anxious and very doubtful. Feldman dropped it cheerfully into the mailbag.

“How about a drink?” Feldman asked. “To relax you.”

“All right,” the convict said. “A Coke.”

“All out. Here,” Feldman said, “try this. Just got in a shipment. A new taste sensation.” He extended an open bottle of the mauve soda pop.

The young man took a few swallows. “It tastes like bubble gum,” he said.

“That’s what they’re drinking today,” Feldman said. “The kids. They’re doing the twist and drinking bubble-gum soda.”

“Yeah.”

“Say,” Feldman said, “if that appeal comes through, you’ll be getting out soon.”

The young man looked troubled again. “Maybe you’d better give me back my letter,” he said. “Maybe my friend has a stamp.”

“You kidding” Feldman said. “You kidding me? That’s a federal rap, buddy. Me tamper with the mails? I’m not sticking my hand into that mail bag. What, are you kidding? That’s federal.”

“Well, let me back there. I’ll do it.”

“I can’t,” Feldman said. “You never heard of an accessory? Forty-two percent of the guys in here are accessories. Besides, I can’t let unauthorized personnel back here. That would be an infraction of prison decorum. Jesus, the Feds would want me, and the warden would want me too.”

“Well, what about me?” the convict said. “I already committed a federal offense.”

“You did?”

“I’m not a nonprofit organization,” the man said gloomily.

“I didn’t hear that,” Feldman said. “You never said it, and I didn’t hear it.” He looked at Sky and Flesh and Walls. “You guys are witnesses. I didn’t know. To me he looked nonprofit.” He turned back to the young man. “Look, relax. Try to see the bright side. Maybe the papers won’t fall out. Maybe the transportation strike will be over soon. They’re not too far apart. The President is sending an arbitrator in a private plane. As soon as the fog lifts. If your appeal goes through you’ll be out soon.”

“In a few months,” the young man said doubtfully.

“What have you done about your shoes?” Feldman asked.

“What shoes?”

“Your shoes,” Feldman said. “That you came in with.”

“I don’t know. They took them away.”

“Well, certainly they did. They hold them down in wardrobe for when you get out. Were they new?”

“I don’t remember. Yes. I got them just before I was framed.”

“I see.”

“They were Italian.”

“I see.”

“They didn’t have laces.”

“Oh?”

“They had these little gold zippers.”

“They sound very nice,” Feldman said.

“They were comfortable. Very light,” he said wistfully.

“Soft leather,” Feldman said.

“Yeah. Very soft.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Why? They were very comfortable.”

“No, I mean soft leather collapses. It doesn’t hold its shape.”

“Oh.”

“Shoetrees would save them,” Feldman said. “Of course the wardrobe guard doesn’t tell you that when he takes your shoes. Sure, he’s looking out for himself. He tries to save himself a little work. What does the wardrobe guard care? A man gets out and his shoes are shot. It’s a goddamn fucking pity.”

The young man pulled on his soda. When Feldman hooked his finger at him he leaned forward.

“Get a pair of shoetrees,” Feldman said confidentially. “What is it, a three-dollar investment? If you’re talking about the style I think you’re talking about, you’d be protecting something worth many times more.”

“They cost twenty-five bucks.”

“There, you see?” Feldman’s face became very serious. “Save your shoes,” he said slowly. He might have been a dentist warning schoolchildren about their teeth. He reached behind his back, detached a shoetree from the razor-blade stand, brought it around his body quickly and slapped it with a smart, ringing clap into his palm. Startled, the young man jumped back. Feldman’s eyes were closed. “What is it preserves in this world that decays? Where age always withers and time’s never stayed?” The young man stared at him. Feldman opened his eyes. “What, friend, do the ancients say makes perfect?”

The convict shook his head.

“Come on,” Feldman said, “this is basic. What do the ancients say makes perfect? Practice, that’s what. Practice. Practice does. Do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do. Practice. ‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.’ ‘How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?’ Practice, pal, makes perfect, pal. Practice! Habituality conquers reality. See the athlete: every muscle a maneuver. Unused, things collapse. Occupancy is a life principle. What else explains the growth of the caretaker industry in this country? They leave rangers in the forests in the wintertime. Use. Use use! Who’s talking about your creepy zippered dago shoes? This is life I’m talking about, friend, character I’m pushing for three dollar bills. Your shoes need practice. Let my shoetrees walk your shoes! Stuff them with my proxy feet and let them run around down there!” He shoved the shoetree into the young man’s hand.

“Leather dehydrates. Did you take chemistry? Did they tell you that in chemistry? The shoetree you hold in your hand has been treated with a thin emollient possessing exactly the consistency and molecular structure of human foot oil. Save your shoes! Save them!”

“But they’re locked up. How could I get them into the shoes now?”

“The guard,” Feldman said.

“He’d never let me.”

Feldman reached behind him. “Slip him this candy and wink.” He forced a bar of the confectioners’ sugar into the young man’s other hand.

When Feldman had finished with him the young man had spent three dollars seventy-six and a quarter cents in prison chits. It was a goddamned shopping spree, Harold Flesh said. He had never seen anything like it.

It went on like that for days. Feldman sold things in half-dozens that had never been sold before at all. He pushed the number-four pencils, and when the men discovered that these produced unsatisfactory, almost invisible lines, he sold them ink into which they could dip their pencils like old-fashioned pens. He had luck, too, with the flower balls, which was the only thing that could neutralize the taste of the guava soda. The mauve soda neutralized the taste of the flower balls. Only the suntan lotion neutralized the taste of the mauve soda.

He told the men that the difference between success and failure lay in education.

“I know,” one said, “I’m taking a course for college credit.”

“College credit? College? Don’t kid me.”

“I am. European Literature in Translation.”

“Then why are you here? It’s Saturday afternoon. Why ain’t you at the game? Where’s your pledge pin? Who’s your date for the big dance?”

“Are you calling me a liar?”

“I’m calling you a fool,” Feldman said. “Tell me, Professor, what is the capital of South Dakota, please? Which is smaller, the subtrahend or the minuend? Give me the words of ‘The Pledge of Allegiance.’”

“What are you talking about?”

“Fifth grade,” Feldman said.

“Hey—”

“Hey, hey,” Feldman said. “What’s the matter? You never heard of the formative years?”

“The formative years?”

“Sure the formative years. Of course the formative years. It makes me sore the way you guys are taken for a ride. Why are you here now, do you suppose? Because you stole a car, pointed a gun, beat up a grocer? You’re here now because you had lousy formative years. Malformative years is what you had. I won’t fool you — you’re a grown man. What’s done is done. I can’t make you nine years old again, but I can give you a tip. Listen to me, college boy. The only education that counts is the education you get in those formative years. The difference between you and the squares is that the squares know ‘The Pledge of Allegiance.’ Imagine someone pointing a gun who can tell you the capital of Iowa.”

“You know, you’re right.”

“Of course I’m right. Go back, go back. Learn what everybody learned that you didn’t learn. There’s a program for men who didn’t complete grammar school. Sign up for that. It’ll be your reformative years. Here,” Feldman said, “you’ll need paste. There’s no time to lose. Here’s blunt scissors. Take notebook paper. A ruler. Here’s crayons. Here’s gummed reinforcements.”

In a week all that was left was what Feldman had hidden. Gradually he began to reintroduce cigarettes, books of matches, edible candy, the toiletries. These he let Flesh and Walls and Sky sell.

“You hate these guys,” Flesh said.

“No,” Feldman said. It was true. He loved a good customer. Feldman himself was sometimes an easy mark for a good salesman. The formative years, he thought.

“It’s as though they had to spend money,” Sky said.

“That’s right. That’s right, Sky.” Feldman felt expansive. Without fear, the mood of his safety still on him, he had begun to miss his life, to feel a sort of homesickness for the habit of being Feldman. He was tempted to talk to them as he had sometimes talked to his employees. (Gradually he had begun to think of the three as his employees. Criminals. The best staff he had ever put together.) “Anticipate the consequences of desire, and you’ll be rich. All things are links in a chain. All the things there are. Objects take their being from other objects. A salesman knows. This is the great incest of the marketplace.” This was the way he spoke to his employees — after hours, the store closed, before a weekend perhaps, or a holiday. There was something military about it. He might have been an officer who had just brought his men through a great battle. There had been blood. Money and blood. All shoptalk, all expertise had a quality of battle about it, of exultation in the escape from danger. Something was always at stake, every moment you lived. No one could ever really afford to tell the truth. Even after hours, when the store was closed. But sometimes the truth was so good you couldn’t keep it to yourself.

“Unless he’s enormously wealthy a man puts out just about what he takes in. Some people get behind and a few rare ones get ahead, but for the most part accounts balance. This is so no matter what a man earns. There’s something humorous about the plight of some young fellow struggling to get along on five thousand a year still struggling to get along on fifteen thousand a year ten years later. It’s because desire’s built into the human heart. Like the vena cava or the left ventricle. It’s there from the beginning. You never catch up. When I found this out I wanted to be in on the action. I asked myself: if all things are links in a chain, what must I do to control the chain itself? The answer was clear. I must own a department store! Did you know that in England, where they were invented, they used to be called ‘universal stores’? So that’s what I worked for, because the possibilities are unlimited in universal stores. There’s everything to sell.

“I’m telling you what’s what. That’s usually a mistake, but I don’t see right now how it can hurt me. I’ll surprise you. I’ve always been very fond of my employees. The boss usually is. He loves a man who works for him, who furthers his ends…

“What was I talking about? Yes. I like to wait on trade myself. Sometimes I try to see how far I can take a customer, if I can wrap him in the chain. Once a woman came to buy some gloves when I was behind the glove counter with my buyer. She spent four thousand dollars and had been on every floor in the store and in almost every department before she left. Admittedly that was unusual. The woman was wealthy and had almost no sales resistance, but wealthy or not, she got in over her head. That’s the test.

“Listen, it’s like odds and evens, men and women, Yin and Yang. I discovered — I had help, my father was moving toward this before he died — that there are casual items and resultant items. An object can be both, but usually it’s one or the other. Ice cream is casual because it generates thirst. But chewing gum is resultant. That’s why they put it by the cashier’s counter in an ice cream parlor. A hammer is resultant, but a two-by-four is casual as hell.”

“Tables and chairs,” Flesh said.

“That’s only the beginning,” Feldman said. “Cloths for the tables and silver for the cloths and plates for the silver and bowls for the plates and soup for the bowls and napkins for the soup and rings for the napkins.”

Ed Slipper was standing outside the cage of the canteen, watching.

“And what for the rings?” Manfred Sky asked.

“Fingers for the rings,” Feldman said, and stepped outside to greet Slipper. “You’re out of the infirmary,” he said. “I’m glad to see you.”

It was the first time he had seen the old man in daylight, and he felt doubts. When he had gone to his room to bribe him with the chocolate cherries, he had seemed in the dark commendably greedy, someone who could be dealt with. Now the light clarified the old man’s age, stunted his appetite, and he seemed in his infirmity a wanderer, someone loose, virtuous as the sick are virtuous. Feldman wondered if he had made a bad deal, if Slipper even remembered what the deal had been.

“I have something for you,” Ed Slipper said. “You have to come.”

Feldman was surprised to discover he was disappointed. He had sought an advantage, but since then he had not felt the need for it. He had been comfortable recently. Suppose the warden had sent the old man. If so, he was no longer safe, he was being threatened again. Something was always at stake.

The old man moved away from the canteen and through the corridor into the main part of the facilities wing. The fact that they were in the recreation area added to Feldman’s annoyance. Here were the classrooms, the chapels and dining and assembly halls. The gym was here and the TV rooms. The rooms had an air of having been donated. He looked for the brass plaques citing the givers. He stayed away from this area as much as he could, rarely spending any of his free time here. Indeed, nothing about the prison made him feel more a prisoner than its salons. Watching a movie with a thousand men who had not paid to get in made him feel terrible. He had always been uncomfortable if he could not ask for his money back. His cell, at least, despite its being shared and barred, was his cell; his cot; despite its discomforts, his cot. If anything, the very fact that the cell was locked added to his sense of being in possession there.

“This way,” the old man said. He moved down another corridor, and Feldman followed. They passed a guard, but luckily they were not challenged, for he had forgotten to get a pass. The old man bothered him; he seemed too calm. Sure, Feldman thought, he’s on Warden’s Business. He’s got the flag in his pocket.

They came to a chapel. “Wait,” Slipper said, “I have to sit down a minute.” He pushed open the door and found a seat on a back bench.

“Listen,” Feldman said, “I forgot to get a pass.”

“It’s all right,” Slipper said, “if you see a guard, pray.” He was referring to the privilege of sanctuary which the warden had introduced. If a prisoner could get to a chapel, he could remain there indefinitely — so long as he was praying aloud.

“Maybe I’d better go back and get one,” Feldman said uneasily.

“No,” the old man said, “we’re almost there. We already passed the guard. You don’t need a pass.”

Feldman was positive Slipper was working for the warden. The man had changed. Despite his obvious frailty and need to rest, he seemed very much in control of himself. “I thought for a while you forgot about me,” Feldman said.

“No, I didn’t forget.”

“I thought for a while you had. I gave you six days to get my file.”

“I was in the infirmary, Leo,” Slipper said.

He calls me Leo. “Sure, Ed. How you feeling?”

“Well, you know, I got some bad news when I was in the infirmary.”

Feldman looked at him.

“They took some tests.”

“Yes?”

“I’ve got diabetes.”

Feldman felt relieved. “They can control that,” he said. Perhaps the old man’s manner was only concern for his health.

“Certainly they can. But it means something else.”

“Yes?”

“I’m off the chocolate cherries.”

“Oh.”

“Poison,” the old man said.

“Oh.”

“Rat poison,” the old man said. “I might as well swallow deadly rat poison.”

“I see.”

“I don’t need your five dollars a month. There’s nothing I want to buy except candy, and I want to live more than I want a sweet.”

“That’s right, Feldman thought. Slipper had two obsessions. They conflicted. That warden. “A deal’s a deal,” he said. “It still accumulates.”

“Well,” Ed Slipper said, “I’ll have an estate.”

“You’re still in my debt. You’re still my man,” Feldman said half-heartedly.

“Sure.”

“You don’t seem to mind much, being sick,” Feldman said. “I’m surprised.”

“Well, I got some good news too. I’m the second oldest con now, Leo. I moved up two guys. That bird in Atlanta died in his sleep a week ago, and the fellow in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was sprung when someone made a deathbed confession to his crime.”

That warden, Feldman thought. He knew I went after him with chocolate cherries, and invented chocolate-cherry disease. I exploit obsession; he instills it. “Listen, Ed, I have reason to believe you might not have what they say you have. The night I came to you, the warden—”

“Shh,” Slipper said, “I hear someone.”

“—saw me in the corridor—”

“Shh, it’s the guard.” Ed Slipper fumbled to his knees. “Dearest God, strike down that old bum in Leavenworth in his tracks. Restore my health and hold down the sugar in my blood and urine. Grant me a peaceful, wise old age.” He turned and tugged excitedly at Feldman’s sleeve, pulling him down beside him. “Psst. Pray. Pray!”

Feldman could think of nothing to pray for. He felt immensely stupid, but the old man was poking him in the ribs. “And God bless Mommy,” he suddenly blurted in a loud voice, “and Poppy and Uncle Ned and Aunt Stephanie and Uncle Julius and Cousin Frank and Dr. Bob and Baby Sue.” He reeled off fifty names. Who the hell are these people? he wondered, amazed at himself. Suddenly he was conscious that the old man had stopped praying and was looking at him.

“You got a big family, you know that, Leo?” Slipper said respectfully. Then he began to laugh, and he seemed greedy again. Avarice boomed out of his glee.

“Okay,” Feldman said. “I get it. There was no guard.”

“Leo,” Ed Slipper said, wiping his eyes, “I swear I thought I heard him. Anyway, I knew what you were going to say. The warden warned me, but I saw the results of the tests myself. I got it, Leo. I got it, kid. I think I got it. Anyway, can I take the chance? I want to live. I’m second oldest con in the country now if the warden didn’t lie about that. What would you do in my place?”

“What about my file?”

“Oh sure,” the old man said. “Come on, I’ll show you. That laugh was terrific.”

Feldman stood.

“Better brush your blue suit off,” Ed Slipper said. “Floor’s dirty. You got some dust on your knees.” He was still chuckling.

“Yeah,” Feldman said. “I pray sloppy.” Some shape I’m in, he thought. I make him laugh, the second oldest con in all the prisons. Relax, he told himself, life is ordinary. Nothing happens. “Rested up, old-timer?”

“Oh yes,” Ed Slipper said, “just give me a hand up, please.”

He has a buzzer, Feldman thought. I touch him, ten thousand volts of electricity go through my body. A practical joke. You live, you die. Nothing to it.

He helped the old man up.

“Your file’s just down the hall,” Ed Slipper said, leading Feldman out of the chapel, “come on.”

Feldman felt like someone walking into ambush who knew what was coming but not when. It wasn’t too late to turn back, but somewhere along the way his duty had taken over. He had to see it through to the end now. Comic obligation had to have its way. Life was ordinary. He was going to have to step through some door into a pitch-black room where suddenly the lights would snap on. A thousand killers would be singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” His wife would be there, his son. And at the instant that he started to think: Today is my birthday — all the tenors, two hundred and seventy-five of them, would beat the shit out of him. They would cut out his son’s heart and feed it to him, and he’d have to eat it — they’d have a way of making him. His wife would be doing a striptease under a magenta light. And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Feldman together again. He groaned.

They passed Bisch in the hall. Bisch nodded. “What’s new?” he said.

“What could be new?” Feldman said.

Slipper took Feldman’s arm and guided him to a door. The word “Library” was painted on the milky glass.

“Beyond this one, right?” Feldman said.

“Yes sir,” Slipper said.

You don’t have to call me “sir,” Feldman thought. Not before a big job. “Shall I open it or shall you?” he asked sweetly.

“You open it,” Slipper said.

I am going to blow up, Feldman thought. I am going to explode into a trillion billion fragments, and they will put out a report that I have escaped. There’s going to be a disaster, he thought, looking at the old man’s virtuous face. There’s going to be a disaster, and all I can do is cooperate. And if there is no disaster there will be a disaster. Warden Fisher demands a disaster.

He opened the door. They were in what appeared to be the library. He looked at the book-stuffed shelves. They didn’t have to go to all this trouble, Feldman thought, transferring all those books, alphabetizing the cards, setting up the Dewey decimal system. Or did they use Library of Congress? He would never know now. That would be the problem he took with him to the grave.

“This is it,” Slipper said.

“This is it, right, old-timer?”

“Yep.”

“Yep,” Feldman said, “this is it.”

“Yep.”

“My file, please, Slipper,” Feldman said. He felt like a straight man feeding a line to the second oldest and second funniest banana in all the prisons in all the United States of America and all its territories and possessions. He felt like sticking his fingers into his ears to muffle the explosion of the big laugh.

Slipper marched up to the check-out desk. “The file on Bad Man Feldman,” he told the trusty.

The man looked up at them. Feldman remembered thinking he had the bluest, clearest eyes he had ever seen. “Bad men are on the open shelves,” he said. “Feldman,” he said, underscoring the first letter. “Is that a Ph or an F?”

So, Feldman thought. They use phonetics.

“F,” Ed Slipper said.

“Open shelves, under F,” the trusty said.

Uv course, Feldman thought, whut then? Liphe is ordinary, and the man’s a phool who thinks it’s phancy.

“Come on,” Ed Slipper said. They walked back to the open shelves and there, just as the trusty had said, under F, between a volume entitled Federal Offenses and another called Felons and Felony, were seven copies in high stiff black covers of the book on Feldman. Slipper took down a copy, flipped through the two hundred or so mimeographed pages and then removed the card from the little pocket in the back. “This one’s been checked out five times,” he said, offering it to him.

Feldman shook his head. “I saw the picture.”

Suddenly the door flew open. It was the warden. Two guards were with him. “Guards,” he shouted, “arrest that man!” They rushed up to Feldman and grabbed his arms. “Throw him in solitary confinement,” the warden roared. “I warned you and warned you! I sent you a letter. I explained how you get along. ‘Life is ordinary,’ I told you. But you think you’re an exception. I know what you did at the canteen, how you forced items on the men they didn’t need, bankrupting them, bankrupting poor men. Deliberately twisting what I told you. You’re up to here with passion. Up to here with it. But life is simple, Feldman. Now you’ll see that. Get him away. Get him into solitary. Lock him up in a cage by himself. Now he’ll learn. Now he will. Fuck-up!”

Phuck-up yourself, Feldman thought.