A Bad Man

3

Feldman’s cell was ten feet wide and a dozen deep, about the size of the room in his father’s house when he was a boy. This struck him at once, and since he noticed that the cells varied in dimension, and even in their basic shapes, he wondered if perhaps this information had not also been in his records, and if putting him there had not been meant as some subtle lesson.

When he knew him better he asked his cellmate, a man named Bisch, what his room had been like as a child.

“Like a kitchen,” Bisch said. “I slept by the stove.” The man was tall — Feldman thought of him at first as a mountaineer — with grayish bushy hair that tufted up from his temples. Everything he did he did slowly, moving deliberately to tasks with the loose moodiness of an athlete stepping up to a mark. He had great pulling-and-tearing power in his long dark hands. Feldman was afraid of him. A strangler, he thought, a chopper, a choker.

Bisch had not even looked up, though he was awake, when Feldman was brought in, or when, moments later, Feldman urinated, splashing loudly, in the lidless toilet. They were awake together for hours that night, and though Feldman coughed and shivered, catching cold, the man said nothing.

Maybe there’s a ritual, Feldman thought. Maybe a new prisoner is supposed to introduce himself and announce his crime. “Feldman’s the name, favors the game,” he said to himself experimentally. “Feldman, not guilty. Machine error.”

It was, at first, like being in a hospital. What they all had in common was not their crime or their back luck or their contempt. Being locked up was their mutual disease, but because he was the most recent arrival he thought of himself as the sickest, the one with the greatest distance to travel to recovery, the most to lose. It did not matter that many of these men would never, as he would in a year, see the outside again. They were used to it. To judge by appearances, they were habitual criminals or men for whom being inside a prison was somehow a relief. Later he would look for the one called Pop, the one whom age made spotless, harmless, a saint by weary default of health and ego. Who volunteered to remain there always, who would be dangerous only if let loose, and then just long enough to get back, who would plan his last crime against society with the precision of a scientist and the knowledge of a Blackstone or a Coke, who knew even as he picked the lock or jimmied the window just how long he’d get, where to go till they caught him — only enjoying that much freedom, the two weeks like a sailor’s shore leave it would take to catch him. Nervous even in the local jail, wondering as he awaited trial if he had done enough to discount their mercy, their solicitude for his white hairs, his years, and calm only when pronounced guilty, and serene only back in the penitentiary. There was no such man.

He did not really wonder very much about the other men, however. He gave them his thoughts when he was with them in the dining hall or as he watched them from his cell, exercising in the prison yard — because of his cold they allowed him to remain inside, though he saw no doctor — but most of the time he could think of no one but himself, again like a man coming into a hospital.

As he began to feel better — now he was counterfeiting his cough — he worried about what to do with his time. During the daily hour of free time, he left his cell to see the library, as he had gone, too, to the swimming pool and gymnasium and crafts hall, as he had gone to all the facilities, hearing of them and finding them greedily, as on ocean liners he had taken his preliminary inspections of the ship, going into each of its salons and bays, only to decide, finally, on lunch in his cabin, or to sit for long hours in a deck chair.

He recalled his initial tours of their grounds when his son was a small boy and they had first moved to their house in the private suburb. In the back, set a good distance from the house and closed in by a low wall, was a large patio. One night Lilly had made supper out there — big steaks like great meaty South Americas, long fat cobs of corn, potatoes like brown, warm rocks, pale yellow butter, sour cream, rye bread, deep wet lakes of cream soda. Afterwards she went back into the house to do the dishes.

Feldman laid down along the wide top of one of the patio walls and stared up at the just dark sky. One bright star blazed directly above him.

“Come here, Billy,” he said to his son. The boy came and Feldman touched his cheek. “Bring Daddy a pillow from the house,” he said. When his son came back with the pillow, Feldman pulled him up on his stomach. “I’ll be your pillow.” He pulled him gently along his body. “Be careful,” he said, “don’t hurt me with your head.” Billy snuggled against Feldman. “Let’s look up at the night sky,” Feldman said. “I’ll give you all the stars you can count.”

The boy counted four pale stars and the bright one Feldman had seen when he first lay down.

“No you don’t,” Feldman said, “that bright one is mine.”

“You said I could have all of them,” Billy said.

“Not the bright one.”

“What makes that star so bright?”

“It’s closer.” He thought about light years.

“Is that one Mars?”

“Mars is a planet,” Feldman said. “It’s red.”

“I can’t see it.”

“It’s not out yet.” Feldman had never seen Mars.

“What’s a planet? Is a planet a star?”

“There are nine planets,” Feldman said. “Earth is a planet. And Mars. There’s Jupiter, and Saturn. Saturn has rings.” I’ve never been able to see the damn things, Feldman thought irritably. “Uranus is another planet.” He couldn’t think of the names of the other four. Maybe there were just two more. He couldn’t remember. He was pretty sure there weren’t just five. So much for the night sky.

“I tell you what,” Feldman said, “I’ll trade you your four stars for my bright one.”

“All right,” his son said.

“Done,” Feldman said. By this time more stars had appeared.

Feldman counted off eleven. “Those eleven stars are mine,” he said. “Daddy has fifteen, Billy has one.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Look alive then.”

“I’m mixed up,” his son said.

Feldman had hoped that as the sky grew darker one of his stars would outshine his son’s, but it hadn’t happened. He saw that he had to get the bright star back from the kid. “Billy,” he said, “I’ll give you that new star for your star.” There wasn’t any new star, but Feldman pointed vaguely into the heavens.

“No,” Billy said.

“Billy, I think that new star is a planet.”

“How do you know?”

“It looks like a planet.”

Billy looked into the sky.

“All right,” he said.”

“It’s an even trade,” Feldman said. “I get the bright star.”

“All right,” Billy said. After that, Feldman grew tired of the game and made his son get up.

“Billy has no sense of values,” he told his wife later. “He doesn’t have any idea how to do business. I killed him. You can tell him anything.”

It bothered him, however, that he didn’t know anything about the stars except how to trade them. The next week he brought home a high-powered telescope from Cameras, but he never learned how to focus it properly.

He saw at once on his tour of the prison that he would never use the gymnasium or the pool or go back to the crafts hall. But Jesus, he thought, remembering the warmth of his son’s body, what’s a man like me doing in prison?

In the mornings a bell rang at 6:30, and the men had twenty minutes to dress and shave and clean their cells.

His cellmate had told him the first morning that Feldman would have to clean the toilet and that he would do the sink himself.

“Why don’t we draw straws?” Feldman asked cheerfully.

“I already drew straws,” the man said. “You do the crapper.”

It’s my new concern with shit, Feldman thought darkly. Some gesture must have revealed his repugnance, for a man directly across from him stood at the front of his cell, watching as Feldman, still in his blue suit, scrubbed the inside of the bowl, flushing it constantly as he worked. The man said nothing, but Feldman could hear him come forward each morning he kneeled into position above the toilet.

One day Feldman watched as the man cleaned his toilet. That ended it — their caged inefficacy must have seemed as ridiculous to the man as it did to him, as if contempt without the possibility of blows and wounds was too wasteful, too extravagant. Perhaps it was for this reason that though arguments between men in the same cell were frequent and violent, conversations between cells were for the most part gentle. If their impotence taught them tolerance, it taught Feldman that the emotions were the first to go. There was comfort in this. Was that good?

Was it even true? He was still suffering from the warden’s avowal that he was a bad man, his proclaimed nostril knowledge of his soul. (And Feldman was a man used to hatred. There had been competitors, people who worked for him, even some people who had loved him who yielded to hatred at the last. Too many men had bad hearts, ulcers; nail biters and strainers to piss, they wasted their substance, dissipating in envy and worry and grudge everything they had. The Ten Commandments were good hygiene, the Sermon on the Mount an apple a day. Victman was his enemy, Dedman was, Freedman, but was he theirs? He was as indifferent to their loathing as he was to the mechanical blessings of beggars he gave quarters to in the streets.) The warden’s hatred was different. It was the hatred of someone who didn’t have to hate him, hatred that flowed from strength rather than weakness, choice rather than injury, and it was disturbing to him, and confusing.

What was there bad enough to hate? There was nothing. Being uncomfortable maybe. He thought of winded boys in shorts he had seen in the park, racing against themselves, their faces inhuman, distorted, their lungs bursting; of hedge-clippers, mowers of lawns, weekend washers of cars, of husbands and fathers around their own dinner tables on hot summer evenings with their jackets on — of all the volunteers for pain, chippers-in for suffering, tzouris-chasers there were in the world, of all the men and women who out of propriety refused second helpings, other people’s last cigarettes, candy, tips, favors, of every abstainer and ascetic and celibate who celebrated some baseless principle of thinness and hunger and lack. You can have it, Feldman thought, you can have not having.

Yet the certainty of the warden’s contempt was alarming. Forget it, he told himself, the man’s a jerk, a man on a mountain with an upper hand. But he could not see him — in the first week he saw him twice more — without offering up some travesty of surrender, without waving some not understood white flag in his face.

One afternoon the warden stopped by Feldman’s cell. “Why isn’t this man out with the others?” he asked the guard.

“He says he’s sick, sir.”

“How are you, Warden?” Feldman asked compulsively.

The warden, of course, turned and walked on without answering.

Then, during Warden’s Rounds, he came into their cellblock again. Feldman, excited, went to the bars to watch him. He noticed that the warden would stop before certain cells but not before others, and he understood at once that the cells he bypassed contained other bad men.

The warden came up to his cell. “How are you getting on?” he asked.

“About the same, sir,” Feldman said hurriedly. “Thank you.”

“I was talking to Bisch,” the warden said, and backed off as if struck.

It’s an act, Feldman thought angrily, it’s an act.

But he was not at all sure that it was.

It had been more than a week, and they hadn’t bothered him. For three days his cold, which had never been bad, was better. One day he stopped his shammed cough. Momentarily he expected word from the officials, a command to appear at one of the prison shops. Perhaps they were waiting until he had his prison clothes. (He still wore his blue suit.) It was possible that they had run out of uniforms — loose, grayish sweat suits — for in the dining room and from his window overlooking the exercise yard he would occasionally spot others who still wore their street clothes too.

So far he had had little contact with the other prisoners. His cellmate continued to ignore him (though from time to time, Feldman caught him eyeing him from his cot), and in the dining hall it was forbidden to speak. It was strange to sit there while food traveled noiselessly about the table: baskets of bread, bowls of scrawny fruit, platters of grayish vegetables and plates of thin, disreputable meat — apparently floating in sourceless, graceless flux, from one prisoner to the other. Initially Feldman was grateful for the enforced silence — he had feared harassment — but after a few days he began to regret it. He himself had been a bully at dinner tables, pushing and pulling conversation out of his guests like an old bored king. In restaurants he picked up checks to pay for the privilege.

Now his fear was that no command would come, and he realized that his overtures to the warden had been probably meant to provoke one. It was surprising to think of, but he had never expected, after his arrest, to be let off. In a way he had actually been anticipating jail. He had missed the army, had never lived in a dormitory. His knowledge of large groups of men had been limited to the locker rooms of country clubs, but even there, in the carpeted corridors and shower rooms, with the tall, colorful bottles of hair oils stacked on the marble washstands like thick liqueurs behind a bar, he had sensed undertones of violence and truth. He did not want camaraderie; he wanted men: to be thrust among them, to see what would happen to him among them, to see what they would be like unencumbered by wives and kids and jobs they cared about — to see, finally, if they would be like himself.

And still he waited — for prison clothes, for Bisch to talk to him, for a command. He spent most of his time lying on his cot alone in his cell — Bisch did not return until evening — and he could not have told himself that night what he had been thinking of that day. He thought, he supposed, of what men think of in the waiting rooms of train stations, or standing in lines, or driving on turnpikes.

He was a man in jail for a crime that technically he had not committed. And that made him a victim. Yet he did not feel like a victim, nor even particularly wronged. He did not find himself, as he supposed many here did, waiting expectantly for communiqués from his lawyers. He did not even particularly believe in his appeal, nor in second chances generally. Though he was a man who usually made first moves, there was a vast inertia in him which made it difficult for him to believe in changes, revolutions, upsettings, rectifications, undoings.

“Nothing doing,” he said aloud. It was as hard to get started on himself as it was to learn about the stars. (He wondered what was written about him in those records they kept.) In this prison, in this small cell no bigger than the rooms where he had slept out his childhood, guilt came as hard as righteousness.

When Feldman was not on his cot or in the dining hall, he was at his window watching the exercise yard. There, in the early afternoon, the men came randomly from the different buildings about the enormous yard to walk beneath the guns of the guards. Most moved about talking quietly in small groups, seemingly conspiratorial clusters. But others — even two floors above, Feldman sensed their ruthless energy — might almost have been men splashing naked in lakes. It excited him to watch them. Frequently one would bolt forward in a sudden passionate run. It was pathetic to see him turned by a wall or have to pull abruptly up as he came near the others. Another might stop where he was to jump violently in place for a few moments. One man was constantly winding up in frantic arcs, but nothing came out of his hand when he threw. And certain others would sink abruptly to their knees as though hit by bullets and then roll about on the ground.

The first time this happened Feldman looked instinctively to the guards who, though they had seen all that Feldman had, continued their careless, placid patrols along the walls. They did not seem to regard as important the sudden screams that tore from the throats of a few of the men like great flags of pain. Only later did Feldman realize that the guards never watched the groups at all, but concentrated instead on the seven or eight he had noticed.

They were, like himself, men in street clothes.

“We’re in business,” Feldman said softly. “Now. Now it comes.”