A Bad Man (36 page)

“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.

16

F
eldman invented the basement by accident, a great serendipity. But afterwards nothing was an accident. He meant every word, every move. So, in a way, the flukishness could be written off. It can almost be said there was nothing accidental about it.

When he had rejected the developer, that kind guy, that gentle jerk and nonbarbarian, he was pretty blue there for a while. He didn’t know where to turn. Very low. Rock-bottom. Feldman, the felled man. Who found himself—what, so down was he, was accidental about this?—in the basement of his store. On holy chthonic ground. And there one day in the record department, scolding a kid who had undone the perfect plastic envelope in which the album had been sealed, he was approached by a nervous young man in a tweed overcoat. “Excuse me,” said the young man. “I’m looking for a record.”

Feldman was about to tell him to ask the clerk—do you
see
how low, how miserable?—when something about the young man made him stop. His manner, apparently halting, was not really timid at all. It was as if his shyness had been assumed as a courtesy. Feldman listened. “Do you have the records of Mildred Eve?” he asked. Was
that
all? Feldman wondered. He went to the catalog to look her up, but she wasn’t listed. “She wouldn’t be in the catalog,” the young man said. “She sings party songs.”

Feldman called his distributor. “Why haven’t you been sending me the Mildred Eve records? Do you know how many sales I’ve lost because I don’t have them?”

“Mildred Eve?” the distributor said. “She sings filth. Her stuff is sold under the counter.”

Feldman ordered all her releases and put them on top of the counter. He had the records played on the stereo equipment so that they could be heard all over the basement.

A strange thing happened. Whether because of the music or for some other reason, the tone of the store gradually changed. This was his sense of it, at any rate. There began to appear in the basement certain listless men who seemed to be on lunch breaks, well dressed enough, and carrying briefcases, many of them, but giving off an impression of loitering. There were boys too, wiry and underweight, who seemed to have stepped from morning movies at the downtown theaters. They strolled the aisles of his basement, the rolled sleeves of their tee shirts making pockets for their cigarettes, and dropped their butts without stepping on them. The women seemed to have changed too, to have become faintly aimless, like people killing time in bus stations.

His first thought was sales. He kept a careful check on the figures, lest the new music—he attributed the changes to this—should wind up costing him money. His research, however, did not indicate that the basement was doing less business, although, and this might be something to look into, the
kinds
of things that people bought seemed to have changed considerably. Formerly, his basement had done a substantial business in family dry goods. The back-to-school sales and the volume in sportswear (a little out-moded, perhaps, the basement of Feldman’s store being a place where a sort of mercantile sediment tended to collect; it was, for example, one of the few places left in America where a man might still purchase hobby jeans, or fur-collared car coats) had been among the most impressive operations in the city, and almost by themselves brought in enough profit to justify the existence of the basement. Now, however, domestic clothing gradually ceased to move at all, and housewares fell off. But these losses were made up for by a sharp increase in the sale of fetishistic automobile accessories, stereo phonographs, color television, transistor radios and, in the basement’s small Toy department, those miniature roulette wheels and baccarat decks and dice cages that had once done little but collect dust. His personnel were hard put to maintain supplies, and Feldman had, over the long-distance telephone, to wheedle and lean heavily on old relationships, reminding more than one jobber of forgotten favors. The record department itself was apparently unaffected. Mildred Eve’s records did well, of course, once people learned that Feldman was offering them at list price—a fiction, since there was no list on her recordings—but fell off a little when the other stores began to feature them.

Feldman could not get over the feeling that the basement had metamorphosed. This was all the more dramatic when he realized that in the main store nothing had changed at all. That is, business there continued to fall off, but at a rate so imperceptible that apparently nothing could be done. Feldman wrote it off as his personal lean years and had no energy—audacity? it took audacity to go against the whim of God—to try to change it. Instead, he concentrated on the basement: what could be made of the strange changes he sensed? how could he capitalize? he wondered, staring at the people down there, observing each with a commanding curiosity as if they were foreigners wrapped in saris or the queer robes of chieftains.

One of the strangest things he noticed was the peculiar decorum of his personnel. Perhaps it was owing to his frequent presence (something was up, they may have thought, and been put on their guard), but their dignity—they could have been salesmen in Tiffany’s—was jarring when contrasted to the rather blowsy bearing of the customers. He played with the idea of finding more lively types elsewhere in the store to change places with them, and experimentally he brought down some glad-hander from his hardware department. But observing the fellow in action, he was astonished that his presence was somehow even more jarring than that of the solemn salesman he had replaced. Hurriedly he had the hearty, peppy Hardware man reexchange places with the solemn salesman. Somehow, discrepancy or no, the serious man seemed more at home, better for the counter and more appropriate, than the flashy fellow from upstairs.

He was convinced there was a clue here, but try as he might, he could get nowhere with it. Increasingly he sent for sales figures—
sent
for them, not daring to leave his vantage point near the solemn salesman, pulling salespeople from behind their counters to get almost hourly totals from the various departments in the basement. These he checked against yesterday’s figures, looking for clues and, because he found none, to see at least if the trends had held. Only two weeks had passed since the young man had asked for the recording, yet he was convinced the trends were genuine, and he had the feeling that here in the basement was the true pulse of the store, the true pulse, perhaps, of the economy itself.

Preoccupied, he had no time for any monkey business at home, and for the first time since his marriage to Lilly, their relationship took on at least the appearance of a normal one. He picked no quarrels, played no games, and at night, exhausted from the day’s labors, simply forgot to invent his lusts. He even lay more easily in the bed, shifting his limbs when they cramped, unrestrictedly turning his pillow, and occasionally rolling over to make an accidental contact with his wife, unthinkable before—and even, occasionally, maintaining it.

Lilly, meanwhile, mistaking distraction for détente, became more natural too: that is, more
un
natural, for her attitude, except for those few times when she openly resisted his domestic games, had always been solicitous and conciliatory. But under the influence of his own apparent relaxation, she too changed. Though she did not fight with him, she became more peckish, expressing her discontents, as if now it might be safe to do so. On the occasion of one of Feldman’s neutral rolls to her side of the bed, she misread his intentions, and thinking he wanted to make love, declined gently. “No, Leo,” she said, “not tonight.” It was the first time she had ever turned down a fuck. Later she herself, dreaming whatever dreams she dreamt, maneuvered herself into his arms, and it was the first time she had ever initiated one. Still preoccupied, he accepted.

The solemn salesman began to appear regularly in his dreams, conducting his transactions (Feldman could not tell what merchandise he sold, though in real life he sold loose cutlery, odd-lot glassware, tumblers and small sets of Melmac such as bachelors buy) with that nonsense dignity Feldman had noticed in the store, at subdued odds with the uneasy, shifty customers.

Still he was unable to account for his effectiveness, until one day—was this only the Thursday after the Monday that he had first noticed the man? was that possible?—happening to be in the old bus depot near his store, where he sometimes ate a solitary lunch at the fountain, he passed through the arcade. A woman was playing a pinball game; another was buying a horoscope from a vending machine. A teen-ager had his driver’s license laminated in plastic, and a Negro with a stocking over his forehead recorded his voice. A soldier took four snapshots of himself for a quarter; and another man peered through a thick, greasy collarlike device at a one-minute dime movie of some ancient stripper. The man at the booth, leaning down from a high stool to dispense change, reminded Feldman of his own salesman.
Of course
, he thought, recognizing the expression at once. And requesting change for his dollar just so he could obtain a closer look, he perceived in himself the same shy shamble, the same odd, crablike sidling of the customers. He felt the two-mindedness of a delicate shame, the ambivalence of a regretted decision freshly made, and thought he sensed what the customers sensed—an uneasy submission of embarrassment to desire. (But what were their reasons? What were his? Just being there? Having to submit to a kind of moral muster before this distant, disapproving godlike man?
Of course!
And since the music, they had not come in any honorable, aggressive pursuit of bargains. Money was no object. It was as if their needs had been subverted, and they had now the aspect of people who knew they had been worked but could not help themselves.)

Feldman installed Foot-Eze machines in the basement. He had heard somewhere about vibrating contour chairs and ordered one. He had a coin device attached—fifteen cents—and learned a great deal from studying the guilty, rapt faces of the women and men who sat in it. He did more than ever with vending machines, positioning a whole bank of them against the unused spaces between his elevators. Here could be bought condoms, combs, lucky coins, magnetic dogs, leaded capsules that behaved like jumping beans—all those nervous little purchases of the lonely and poor. Elsewhere there were scales that told your weight for a penny and your fortune for a dime, and a special machine where you signed your name and wrote key words (“wealth,” “death,” “sex” and “God”) on a sensitized IBM card. For fifty cents the card was processed, and a printed letter analyzed your handwriting and your character. There were machines dispensing term insurance covering every imaginable contingency. (Women bought as much protection as men, children as much as adults.) He installed soundproof booths were people could record their voices, but added a new wrinkle. Inside the booth a phonograph played a one-minute-fifty-second instrumental version of “Golden Earrings.” The words were framed on the wall just above the microphone, and for a dollar the customer could activate the phonograph and sing with the orchestra. (Many, he noticed, spent five, six or even ten dollars rehearsing.) This machine was so successful that almost at once he had to add another and then a third.