A Bad Man (35 page)

“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, 160 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.