A Bad Man

15

Shortly after Warden’s Assembly, Feldman was notified that he had been elected to the Crime Club. The notification came in the form of a note from the warden:

Your name has been placed in nomination for membership in the Crime Club. Lest you get any funny ideas about your popularity, let me tell you right now that I do the nominating and the electing. I nominate and elect people to the Camera Club, the Model Airplane Club, the Literary Club — all the clubs. That’s what it means to have power, Feldman. Also I have made you president of the Crime Club; you will conduct your first meeting this Tuesday week. (Room 14, W. wing, 7 o’clock. Sharp!)

Your Warden,

Warden Fisher

P.S. The other members do not know that you have been accepted as a member or that you are their president, so you will have to wrest your leadership from the incumbent. He is a man that the others have nicknamed “God,” and you will have no difficulty recognizing him, as the underside of his tongue is tattooed. (It is my understanding that his armpits are also tattooed, so it’s my guess that he probably isn’t ticklish.)

Feldman decided to ask for Official Respite, making his request formally, in a document witnessed by a guard from another cellblock (he had to waste a permission slip and a pass) and by a prisoner in sick bay (another permission slip, another pass). In his petition he asked the Director of Prison Labors that he be permitted to absent himself from the canteen during a portion of the workday on which the Crime Club was to meet.

He wanted the extra time because the warden had underscored the necessity of being punctual, but the terms of Respite were difficult: three hours of labor for every one of Respite, the labor to be accomplished in shops in which the Respiter was a stranger. What made the conditions even harder was that mistakes were to be paid for on a strict retail basis. Thus, if a Respiter were to fudge, say, a license plate, he was charged the full sum the state would have received for the perfect plate. Moreover, this sum was repayable only in work — again, exclusively in shops in which the prisoner had had no experience — at a rate just one third the convict’s already low rate of pay. An inept man could conceivably add months to the end of his sentence by accepting even one hour of Respite.

Feldman worried fitfully about his decision, changing his mind at least a dozen times. He considered the other avenues open to him — Warden’s Desk, for example, a prisoner’s single opportunity to petition the warden directly. But because no “sweat”—the prisoners’ term for intense effort, the cost to him of favors — was attached to it, it was unreliable. A refusal at the level of Warden’s Desk was binding, and Feldman rejected this option. Nor could he see how he might have resorted to simple absenteeism from the canteen, even if he had been willing to accept the additional day tacked on to his sentence. An absentee was required to “freeze” within one hundred yards of the area where he had declared his absenteeism. As a last resort, he considered the Buddy System. The term was misleading. It meant that any prisoner could at any time ask for and have a privilege belonging to another prisoner, but since favors could not be paid back in kind, the borrower became, in effect, the lender’s slave. Here was a loophole big enough to drive the entire system through. “Only show restraint,” Feldman had urged the convicts in the informal discussion groups on prison regulations. “Give the privilege and ask for nothing in return. Don’t make a slave of the borrower. Then when anyone needs something, he can have it with immunity.” They had agreed in theory, though some scoffed and called him Red, but in practice, the temptation to assert power when it was so infrequently available was always too great. So he was forced at last to ask for Respite. (Nor, once the decision was made, did he easily determine how many hours of Respite to ask for, rejecting the three that would probably serve, to settle finally on the five which if they did not serve could only mean that fate and circumstance had been against him from the start.)

After his written request he was called up before the Respite Officer (a revolving role, but always taken by some minor functionary — usually a cook, or one of the tuckpointers in constant service around the prison — to dramatize, Feldman suposed, the absolutely rigid and binding force of the Respite obligation). The “sweat” was again explained to him, and he indicated that he understood and even, as part of the ceremony, asked a few questions so that there could be no objection later that he had been railroaded. Then he raised his hand to take his solemn oath.

“I, Leo Feldman, understand the nature…of the contract…that I have entered…into here,” he repeated, in the familiar halting rhythm of all tandemly sworn oaths. “I understand the obligations imposed on me by accepting Respite and deriving the benefits…thereof…I undertake to pay back…fifteen hours of duty…to be worked out…however…the Director of Prison Labors…sees fit…but in some capacity…foreign to…and differing in kind from all my past performances. I further concede…my willingness…to pay back to the state…for all my mistakes…resulting in loss of revenues…at the fixed retail price…through labors…again foreign to past performances…and recompensed”—here the Respite Officer slowed down the pace of the oath“”at…one third…my…nor…mal…dai…ly…rate…Now,” he concluded, “I accept Respite”

He was impressed by how deep an oath could go, and had an impression of commitment extensive as the root of a tooth. He had given his word, and recognized for the first time the serious implications of having a word to give. It was as if he and all men walked around always under bond, a burden of treacherous feasance. It struck him, too, that such obligation was onesided, the dangerous cutting edge toward himself.

And all this simply to guarantee that on the following Tuesday there would be time enough to obtain a permission slip to get a pass to go to the west wing for the meeting of the Crime Club.

It was possible that he might have done without his elaborate preparations, that things would have gone smoothly, but he had lost his nerve in a way, though another kind of nerve had taken its place. Here he was, spending permission slips, passes, Respite, taking on tiers of obligation, confronting a jeopardy of consequences that he could not possibly foresee. It was like living in a boom town whose primitive facilities and difficulties with supply forced the prices of even those ordinary commodities one took for granted to skyrocket mercilessly — like paying two dollars for toothpaste or five for milk. Necessity made for a sort of obligatory sportiness.

So he had the Certificate of Respite in the breast pocket of the blue fool suit. He touched it at least a hundred times that Tuesday. After lunch he did not return to work in the canteen, but went back to his cell to wait for the pencil man. Disappointingly the man didn’t question what he was doing in his cell — despite himself, Feldman was itching to show him his certificate — and after getting his permission slip, he brought it to the Fink to trade it for a pass.

He was relieved when the Fink, one of his enemies, questioned the legitimacy of the slip and had him taken back under guard to check it. The pencil man had left on a break, and they had to wait for an hour and a half.

“Yes, this is all right,” the pencil man told the guard, glancing casually at the slip, when he returned.

Feldman was brought back to the Fink, who searched his face for signs of triumph. It’s good I planned ahead, Feldman thought. It’s good I had the foresight to anticipate all this.

He was disturbed, however, that he took no real pleasure in his justification. For one thing, he couldn’t be sure that the Fink had really doubted him. Perhaps he had been pretending merely to cause him trouble. But wasn’t trouble exactly what he wanted? he wondered. And then, saddened, he realized that if it was, he had been trapped into wanting it by the warden. What of the generosity he had seen in his thriftless preparations? Wasn’t that all undermined if he wanted to use up all the security-to-spare that he had purchased by asking for five hours of Respite when three would probably have served? It was difficult to know which was better — gratefulness for things gone smoothly, or delight that his pains had been really necessary. Had the warden intended all this? Feldman was numb. He suspected it had been the warden’s objective to bring him to just this state of stymied feelings. Call the police, he thought wearily. I’ve been robbed.

With the pass to the west wing secured, he went to dinner at five and still had time to return to his cell for a half-hour’s rest before starting for the meeting. He was exhausted, but so worried that his precautions had stripped him of the energies he would need that evening that he saw it was useless to try to rest. He set out for the Crime Club.

He was early, but several members were already there and he wondered if they had had to make the same preparations. They — many, like himself, wore special clothes; he supposed these were bad men, and he thought Flair, thought Style—herded together on folding chairs in a strange, tight grouping. Feldman went up to the small stage at the front of the room where they were stacked and took one down, feeling curiously depleted. It seemed odd to him that no one had attempted to make rows or to line up the chairs around the walls. The members were bunched together in a random arrangement, so that despite the fact that it was still early and probably not everyone was there yet, the room seemed crowded.

As others came, they went up to the stack of chairs and continued the odd pattern Feldman had observed. The back of one chair was at an oblique angle to Feldman’s shoulder; another began to describe a rough arc a couple of inches to the right and slightly forward of his stomach; someone else sat facing him, so that their knees touched. It was like coming to life in a Cubist sketch. This is some bunch, he thought sorrowfully, guessing the implications of the seating arrangements.

“Who the hell are you?” asked the convict facing him.

Feldman moved his chair a few inches, bumping into one behind him and feeling what was almost certainly an ear against the back of his neck. “Excuse me,” Feldman said, but the convict ignored him.

“I said, ‘Who the hell are you?’”the first prisoner repeated.

Rather than answer, Feldman reached inside his jacket to pull out the warden’s letter. The man unfolded the paper and read it. “This is a Certificate of Respite,” he said.

Feldman looked at it again. Already the five hours were up, and he had a heavy, sudden sense of uselessness. The official seals flared obsoletely on the certificate like great gilded nipples.

“All right,” a voice announced, “it’s seven o’clock. I call this meeting of the Crime Club to order.”

In the close quarters it was difficult to know who spoke. The voice might have been tough and husky, but was marred by a faint lisp and, at the other, deeper end of the man’s speech, a difficulty with l’s and r’s. The result was a peculiar effect of retardation, of the frictionless speech of monsters in films. The tattooed underside of the tongue, Feldman remembered. My God, it’s God.

“Old business?” the voice asked. “All right. New business?”

“I have new business,” Feldman said. He had decided to assert himself at once.

“Who’s that? Who’s there?” the voice asked, and Feldman saw a man stand up not far from him. Seated, he caught a quick glimpse of the flowered underside of the man’s tongue.

Feldman rose. “I have new business,” he repeated.

“State your new business.” The man was huge. He looked like all the dock-wallopers and bodyguards who had ever lived.

“You’re out of order,” Feldman said. “I’m the new president of this club.”

“Who the hell are you?”

It was disconcerting to Feldman not to be known here. Troublesome as his notoriety had been in the other parts of the prison, he had always been able to take from it a kind of reassurance, reading the prisoners’ contempt (and perhaps fear) almost — he knew this was insane — as a sign of their culture. Now their ignorance of him deepened his impression that they were corrupt. There was no telling what such men might do. As yet, however, he had no real fear of violence, taking comfort from the man’s very size, trusting in a big man’s admiration for order and due process.

“My name is Feldman,” he said.

“Credentials,” the incumbent said calmly.

“I have credentials.” He took out the warden’s letter and read it to them, leaving out the postscript.

“Check the signature, Forger.”

The man seated at Feldman’s knees held out his hand and took the letter. “It’s legit,” he said after examining it.

“I have a letter saying I’m the new president too,” one of the other convicts said.

“Sure you do,” said a man on the outer edges of the circle. (They formed a rough circle, Feldman saw now.) “We all have letters like it. As the son of a bitch says himself, he’s the one does the nominating and electing.” The men laughed.

“That’s right,” Feldman said. “That’s right. You all would have similar letters.”

“It’s a goddamned banana republic, we got so many presidents,” someone else said.

“What are we going to do?” Feldman asked.

“What the hell,” the big convict shrugged. “You be the president.” He sat down.

“Installation of officers,” a convict called mechanically. “Let’s get on with it.”

They swore Feldman in at once, the outgoing president administering an oath that he seemed to compose as he went along. (It wasn’t a bad oath, Feldman thought, considering it had been made up on the spur of the moment.)

“Well, what do we do now?” Feldman asked. None of the men said anything. “Old business?” he asked, remembering the formula of the past president (not, despite appearances, a bad officer, all things considered). He tried “New business?” with the same results, then looked around the room at the Crime Club membership. “Let’s steal something,” he suggested, giggling. He stared out at them for a few more minutes and then sat down, no longer uncomfortable. Gradually he felt even more at ease, and despite the physical closeness in the room, he began to grow sleepy and once or twice actually caught himself nodding. He wondered what they were doing over at the Model Airplane Club.

It was strange, another of the endless rituals and counterrituals he had met with here. Some time ago he had begun to think that he saw a design. It had to do with the nullifying of energies, as though the warden’s final intention were to keep the men quiet by having them perceive just what Feldman was slowly perceiving, that they were caught up in a treadmill rhythm of opposing impulses. It seemed too simple a theory perhaps for the elaborateness of the rules and ceremonies, but he was relieved by its very simplicity. It humanized the warden. Not that it made him kinder or easier to get along with, but it stripped away some of the mystery. If the mystery was unearned he was glad to know it. And now, hoping that they knew it too, he felt suddenly closer to his fellow convicts. Surely they shared his perceptions and accepted them. (After all, they all stood to gain from passivity, stood to gain from the saltpetered food and the worked-off violence and the deflection of their intentions. Let us all take the cold shower together, he thought. Let everyone behave: no prison breaks, no complaints about the food, no misspelled petitions for the redress of grievances.) Expansive, he felt not their good will, but the clubby chill of their sophistication. Their discreet indifference was attractive. Something could be said for superior sales resistance, for sulk and moroseness of spirit, and suddenly he felt like congratulating them and being congratulated by them. “We’ll pull through,” he would have said, “it’s not so bad.” Before he could speak, however — and why, anyway, did he want to? why had he tried to comfort his personnel that time in the soiled back rooms of his department store? what had he meant to tell them? why did he still feel a necessity to respond? was his own sales resistance not so superior after all? — he heard a stirring of the chairs and someone rising.

“I’ll tell you something about crime,” a convict said, startling him with the unexpectedness of his speech. “It’s too indoorsy. Why’s your average con doing time today? Shit, look at the terms used to describe him: he’s a breaker and enterer; he’s a second-story man; he’s on the inside, he says of his jail, behind the walls. It’s all inside jobs, I tell you. What’s his own term for the world but the outside? Never Chicago, never Detroit.

“His pallor. His plans made in pool halls! All that messing with locks, that struggle with safes. And rape! Breaking, entering and the airtight case.

“What, I ask you, is the highest act of crime? The one that takes the most planning, the greatest research and preparation? It’s the bank robbery — the bank robbery! All that snuggling in cozy vaults down among the safe-deposit boxes. He asks for it. Your crook asks for it. He loves his handcuffs, worships his bars, his restraints. Give him balls and chain, give him ringbolts, straw in a dungeon give him. And don’t talk to me about escape. That’s all it is, my dears — talk. Why, these jails couldn’t hold us a minute if we really believed in escape. Twenty to one? Thirty? Fifty to one? One hundred to one in many places. What odds are we waiting for? It’s a sickness. Most of your crime is a sickness.

“I became a sluice robber, and I remained outdoors. I breathed real air in my lungs. And the sun. Three years I’ve been here, and I’ve still a piece of my tan. That’s how deep it burns you. The bones themselves are browned by now. And there was never any skulking, any stooping, any crawling. And I never hid in hallways or crouched behind the stairs.

“The troughs I robbed, like great wooden Babels up the mountain. The tumbling nuggets, oh, that skittery wealth. It wasn’t robbery. You couldn’t call it robbery. Just a man on a line on a mountain with sense enough to reach. And first on line too. First. To cut the theft if there was one, and give a sporting target. (I was caught on a mountain.) All I ever needed was to make a fist. I made tools of my palms — as God intended — found a use for my opposing thumbs. God’s will in a handful, you guys. (And testing always my prehensileness, growing a grasp.) Palming more than magicians palm, then basketball players.”

His eyes shone, glittered with memory. Feldman felt he should say something, call for order. Though no one made a sound, it was as if there had been a sudden displacement of passion in the room, like the pressure of the first thighs against a barricade.

“Nevada is right,” a convict said.

“He’s wrong.”

“No, he’s right. Only he’s got too narrow a sense of it. I’m a rustler — horses, cattle. The feel of flesh is what I like, the mass of beast. All that muscle. All that meat. Like an appointment at the source of things. It was nothing for me to steal a hundred tons, two hundred, three. Think of the weight of such a theft.”

“Booty is bulk and bulk booty,” a convict heckled.

“The nostrils,” the rustler said, raising his voice above their laughter, “that wild gristle. The rheumy eyes, their mucky silts. Those dreadful genitals and those steamy hides.”

“I don’t understand any of that,” another prisoner said quietly, “but if it’s the wide-open spaces that Nevada was talking about, or that Tex here meant when he said he agreed with him, I can see the reasoning.”

“I’m a poacher,” a prisoner said. “In my time I’ve fished other men’s rivers and killed the deer in other men’s woods. There’s nothing beats nature, men. I’m a bit of a squatter too. I’ve done some squatting. I nick myself off a piece of their land, and they never miss it, don’t know it’s gone.”

“Kentucky, you piker, you make me ashamed,” a fourth man said. “I’m a sooner. I steal land. Vast tracts in Alaska. In Hawaii vast tracts. Land, steal land. I jump the gun and beat the bell and move before the whistle. I’ve made a living out of always being offside, and I tell you there’s nothing like it. The race is always to the swift.”

“I know about that,” said a fifth convict. “I trespass too. But deeper than you boys. Down, deep down in the mines. I jump other men’s claims. I move in and take over. It’s work, but rewarding. I hate the sluice robber. He’s meager. I tell him to his face.”

I’m in Hell, Feldman thought. I’m the president of Hell. How had he ever imagined these men to be indifferent?

“Well, you’re all out of touch, it seems to me. You live in the past. The mines are played out. There’s detergent in the rivers and streams. Tourists in the forests pose the bears. Myself, I’m an artist.” The forger was speaking. “There’s got to be some art to crime. It’s show biz. Catch me with a gun? The rough stuff is out. Jazz and pizzazz are what’s wanted today. Me, I forge license plates. I’m a sort of a sculptor.”

“He’s right.”

“He’s wrong.”

“No, he’s right. I dress up as a cop. I impersonate dames.”

“I make my own moon.”

“I fake petitions, a nickel a name. A dime for addresses. It’s very satisfying to make up people and where they live. Listen to this: Wilma Welfing Pearsall, 7614 Carboy Street, Marples, Ohio. Jerome Loss, Rural Route Two, Clegg, New York. Ed and Naomi Baird, Apartment 404, the Sinclair Apartments, 16 °Clipton Drive, Archer Hills, Oregon. I don’t mess with the zip code. Federal offense.”

“I give false measure,” a convict said.

“And I was a dentist who short-changed on teeth. I’d water the silver, adulterate gold. Delicious my fillings; they’d melt in your mouth.”

“I worked for a real estate firm. I seeded treasure in vacant lots for the suckers to see. I buried coins and statues and place settings for twelve — that sort of thing.”

A very small convict stood up. “I made the stock certificates that the con men sell,” he said. “Suitable for framing, they were. On a thin parchment, very expensive. The paper around the borders like the rough edges of the pages in old novels. Painstaking. I tore it myself. And a seal like a sunset or a harvest moon. A great wheel of a seal. Very official. Barbed at the circumference, the full three hundred sixty degrees.

“And the types. Hand-lettered. Glorious stuff: roman, italic, old-style roman, old-style italic. Cursive and minion. Sans serif, nonpareil. Brevier, bourgeois, and brilliant and canon. Columbian, English, excelsior too. And what we call the stones: diamond and pearl and agate. And primer I did. And great primer. Pica, of course, and small pica and double pica, and double-small pica as well. And much of this, you understand, in condensed and even extra-condensed. (To discourage the reading, I guess. I didn’t ask questions.) Only the great fictive companies themselves in extra-bold black letter. But almost illegible. Like a sketch of chop suey.

“But what I liked best were the pictures I drew. Spidery, thin as a watermark, of old engines, old cars. And a hotel in St. Paul, Minnesota, I took off a soap wrapper. And a factory after the one on the box of Shredded Wheat.” He sighed.

“Yes,” said a distinguished-looking convict. “I know the feeling. I was a quack. I worked with machines. I had an electrodynathermy machine, a honey. And an adgitronic nucleosiscope, cost me two thousand dollars. Also a honey. And I had this vibrating wooden box with insets for the patient’s hands. He’d wear coated rubber gloves and press down hard for fifteen minutes at a time for an advanced cancer. Less for something not so serious.

“I loved to watch the colored lights. There was no special sequence. I liked to hear the hum it made, the whiz and whir, the crackles, and crepitations and thuds. I don’t see the harm. I did a lot of good and may even have effected some cures, I think.”

“He’s wrong.”

“No, he’s right. Doc’s right.”

“He’s wrong. Two thousand dollars for a piece of equipment? Seeding all those miles of vacant lot? I don’t care how shallow a man buries that stuff, it’s backbreaking work. Or all those hours over a draughtsman’s board. Just take a look at the glasses that guy wears, not to mention the condition of his lungs from breathing those inks.

“No. Get in and get out. That’s what I say. Who needs all those props? Sure there’s satisfaction in the artist’s life, but we live in a practical world. Profit margins and overhead and cost per unit have got to be thought about. My money’s on the middleman. I’m a suborner myself. I can give you statistics. It costs me anywhere from five hundred to twenty-five thousand dollars to fix a judge today, depending, of course, on the offense and the defendant’s prospects of being convicted. All right, let’s take a closer look. We’ll take a relatively modest case: a white kid accused of a car theft. A first offense, and the kid’s from a nice middle-class family, say. It costs three thousand dollars to get that boy off. Of that three thousand I take home a grand, the judge fifteen hundred, and the rest is divided up between the officers of the court and expert witnesses like the social worker or the arresting officer. Notice that the judge gets more than I do. That’s important. I do that on purpose. And I’m pretty careful to let him know it too. Something like the same principle holds for the law clerks and the others. I know the judge’s unlisted number. That isn’t the point. I could reach him direct. The thing is, I try to implicate as many people as I can. I bring in the middlemen. If a conspiracy is wide enough no one gets hurt.”

“Me, I’m a fence. I receive stolen goods I might never see. I buy up a thousand transistor radios and never lay eyes on a single one. I don’t want to see it. I make a few phone calls, tell the trucks where to go.”

“Did you ever hear of champerty?” another man asked. “That’s what I do. I’m a party to law suits that don’t concern me. I bankroll a plaintiff. I buy him his x-rays. We split on the judgment. Some grievances I invent, I make up offenses. It goes back before Coke, the old common law.”

Feldman wondered why he had thought he should call for order before. There had been order. It was as ordered in here as a pageant or masque. Even the chairs made a circle.

“Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum,” a man said.

“The chair recognizes the pirate,” Feldman mumbled. Pegleg’s wrong, he thought. No, he’s right. He’s wrong and he’s right.

A prisoner rose and spoke of hijacking the big rigs, of ambush at crossroads and hazardous tailgating through the mountains, broadside duels on dangerous turns at sixty miles an hour. Another agreed and told of how he put up false lights in treacherous waters to lure the shipping and then scavenged the wrecked vessels. A third was a rumrunner, a fourth the leader of bandits in caves in the hills who stole from the tourists. There was a bartender who worked for a ring of white slavers on the waterfront. He slipped Mickey Finns into the girls’ drinks. He showed how he winked a signal to a man at the jukebox when they collapsed on the stool. The appeal, they agreed, was in the strategy, the sense of maneuver, of logistics, the idea of government itself perhaps, some rich, loyal, aggressive joy taken in gangs and bands and mobs and rings.

A sour-looking convict got up to speak. “Crimes of anger,” he said. “Crimes of rage. What else is motivated? Give me spiters, men with grudges.” He told of barns he had burned, ricks he had put to the torch, the pets of enemies he had poisoned.

A young man stood up. He rolled the fairies, he said. He beat up the drunks. Another beat his wife and children. Someone else exhumed the dead; “I hate the lousy dead,” he said.

A man rose shyly. “I tried to kill myself and botched it. Suicide’s against the law, you know, although you don’t hear much about them putting a failed suicide in jail. I guess I’m an exception — an example to people. The psychiatrist says I probably didn’t really want to die if I couldn’t make it stick, but that’s not true. I want to die, I think, but that’s beside the point. What attracts me is the violence, the prose of the notes I leave behind, the halting syntax and the confessions and the passionate accusations. But even that isn’t the real point. It’s the other thing, the violence. I love the feel of the gun butt, the hard, quilted iron. The handles of knives too. Clubs. Whips. There’s a packed solidity in weapons, a center of gravity. You get a sense of lumps of power in your hands. The force is terrific. A hangman’s knot in a rope — like a full gorge — is the same. And poison. Discreet. The pills seem to weigh eighty pounds. And then there’s the pain you feel. All that power to inflict injury, and all that capacity to absorb it. That’s all there is. You know?”

“I bugger sheep,” a man said. “I give it to sows and dogs. How do you like that? A man and his dog. I ride horseback on the bridle path in the park, and I come in my pants. What do you think about that? How low can a man get?”

Then there was a reckless driver, and another man whose pilot’s license had been taken away because he had buzzed his own home for three hours, until he was out of gas and had to make a forced landing on a ballfield where his own kid was playing.

One last convict stood up. “I shouldn’t be here at all,” he said. “What I did was an accident. It couldn’t be helped.

“I was a laborer. I had a job in this factory in my hometown. We made switches for an outfit that turned out radios and television sets. Half the people in town worked there, maybe more. Then the home office decided to close down the plant. It wasn’t economical, they said, to have the switches made in a place a thousand miles away. They relocated the engineers and a few of the foremen and let the rest of us go. There wasn’t any work in town. I did odd jobs, but everybody was doing odd jobs. All the men. The competition was fierce. I had my family to support. We all did. It got to where I wouldn’t lend my tools to my own neighbor for fear he’d find some way to use them that would do me out of a day’s work. And I couldn’t borrow his paintbrushes. I only wanted to touch up the woodwork, thinking maybe I could sell my house, but he figured different. He thought I had this paint job somewhere. He begged me to tell.

“We lived like that six months. A summer, a fall. And always the money getting harder and harder, and the kids so hungry you could see their hunger happening. Then, in the winter, I heard there was work a hundred miles away. A plant was hiring and I figured to go. I saved for the gas and couldn’t make it, and had to beg it off a guy I knew in the one station in town still open. Out on the highway? He gave it to me and I was all set to go, and a storm come up. A terrible storm. The worst I’ve seen. It rained so you couldn’t see to drive, and my wipers was bad. I waited for it to stop, but it didn’t. Three hours later it hadn’t let up. And they was only hiring for five days. One had passed when I heard, three more while I looked for the gas. I only had hours. I had to try.

“So I drove in the rain. Maybe ten miles an hour, and it come down harder, and even harder. I couldn’t see, it was as if I was blindfold. And straining my eyes. I had to pull up. I had to stop. I moved to the shoulder and waited again. Lord, I was tired. Up before dawn. Straining my eyes. Worried like that. Lord, I was tired. But I didn’t dare close my eyes. If I slept and it stopped? So I waited and watched. Two hours, three. And I prayed: God, make it stop. Make it stop, please.

“Then all of a sudden it did. It stopped, it was over. Do you know what I saw? What I saw up ahead? It was clear. It was dry. It hadn’t rained there at all.

“I started my car and got stuck in the mud. I heaved it and hauled, I pulled it away. With my rage, with my strain, I was tired as hell. As weary I think as a man’s ever been. I got in the car and stepped on the gas. Two hours I had before the plant closed. My God, how I drove, how I flew down the road. But my tiredness grew, enormous it was. And just for a second I rested my eyes—

“The accident happened but ten miles from town. Doing eighty and ninety, the witnesses said. I swerved from my lane and hit them broadside. His family was killed, but I was thrown clear. How does that happen? Was it my prayer?

“I landed unconscious, or maybe asleep, but here is the miracle: I woke up refreshed! Mind clear, alert, fresh as a daisy, I guess you could say. And only for minutes had I been out.

“I saw what had happened and sent for the cops. I waited and helped, but there was nothing to do. A baby, a daughter, a wife and a son. The father alive but damaged real bad. Crippled for life and can’t move his arms. Can’t pass his water or chew his own food.

“He sued me, of course. Took me to court. I had no insurance or he would have been rich.

“Well, that’s about it, but there is something else. Refreshed, I keep thinking, I came to refreshed. After the guilt, after the grief. After all that, the fear that I felt, the being in trouble and down on my luck, there’s still something else. The impact, the bang, the damage I did. The crippling, the terror, the spilling of life. The joy I keep feeling, the excitement, delight. The sense that I have of some final deed done. The cleanness I feel, the absence of stain.”

The convict sat down, and the rest of the prisoners were silent.

“He’s right,” one said at last.

“Yes,” murmured another.

“Yes,” still another added, “he’s right.”

“He’s right, he’s right.” They took up the call.

“He’s right,” said the poacher. “He’s right,” said the fence. “He’s right,” said the ghoul. “He’s right,” said the quack and the man who set fires for spite. “He’s right,” the hijacker agreed and the man who screwed pigs.

President Feldman rose and they all looked toward him. “No,” he said. “He’s wrong.” He told them about his basement.