A Bad Man (44 page)

“Well?” one of them said. The voice was loud, as if to make up for the rule of silence in the dining hall. Its surly clarity frightened him. “Well? What is it?”

Panicking, Feldman threw himself at once upon their mercy. “I did this bad thing and that bad thing,” he said, raising his voice. “One bad thing and then another. Then I found Christ, and Christ saved me.”

“All right, stow it,” another of his table partners said, coming forward. “These are the ground rules. Court’s in session till a verdict, but we’ve got to be out here in three days. These are the cover stories: an epidemic’s broken out, and they had to shut us off from the rest of the prison. There’s a riot up here, and the warden’s closed off the area until it can be brought under control. We took no hostages except a few trusties, so the strategy is to starve us out. Neither story will be used unless it’s absolutely necessary. We stand to lose if it is. Somebody kicks back at the capital, and Warden has to throw them a few heads. It’s a risk all around, but if we’re out in three, nobody has to know anything. Let’s get on with it.”

“Get his cot for him,” the librarian said.

“Somebody get Feldman’s cot up here,” the sluice robber said. “Jesus Christ, why wasn’t that ready?”

“All right, no sweat. It takes a minute. He can stand for a minute, can’t he?” the Fink said.

“Check,” said the first table partner. “More ground rules. You ever sit in on a kangaroo court, Feldman?”

“No sir.”

“Well, it ain’t anything difficult about it. We try you. And either we find you guilty or we don’t. We make up our mind on the evidence. You remember your other trial, don’t you?”

“Yes sir.”

“Well, think about that one. That’ll give you an idea. Except we ain’t lawyers, so since you ain’t being prosecuted by lawyers, you ain’t entitled to a lawyer to defend you. You defend yourself as best you can. Any man here wants to speak up for you, he can. Questions?”

“Rather an objection.”

“Pretty early for an objection.”

“Well, it’s just that you say anyone who wishes to speak up for me can.”

“That’s correct.”

“Yes. But don’t you get parole credit for bringing me to trial?”

“What’s in it for us ain’t your business. You wouldn’t be here this evening if you’d minded your business.”

“I simply wished to point out that though you say you’re willing to hear testimony in my behalf, there’s nothing in it for anybody who might want to give it.”

“What’s your question?”

“That’s an objection, a demurrer.”

“Pretty early for an objection, too soon for a demurrer. If you have a question I’ll hear it.”

“May I have a change of venue?”

“No.”

“No more questions,” Feldman said.

“Now about punishment,” the man continued. “The law in this state don’t provide for capital punishment anymore, but we don’t provide for anything but. If we find you guilty we kill you. One of the intramural boxers has been practicing on a tackling dummy with a knife sewn inside it and suspended just about where that little thingummy lies on your heart. He punches like a surgeon this guy, like a butcher. He can trim your fats or slip a bone from your flesh like you’d pull one feather from a pillow. He cuts the cloth now five slams out of seven and says he’d have an even better batting average on flesh. The infirmary would put it down as a natural death.”

His cot arrived and was placed in the center of the rough circle. “Go ahead, lie down if you want,” one of the men who had brought it said gently. Several other cots had been lined up along the rear wall, and many of the men were already seated on them. A few were sprawled full length. Looking behind him, Feldman saw that many of the convicts had blankets and were spreading them out on the stone floor. He glanced at his cot but could not bring himself even to sit on it.

“I’d like to suggest that justice might be better served if everyone sat up straight,” he said.

“Feldman’s right,” the librarian said. “Everybody lying down sit up straight.”

It was a small point, but he had won it.

His trial began, and Feldman saw that it was to be no more formal than the introductory proceedings had been. Several men were again lying down on their cots. At times it was difficult to hear what was being said for the conversation and laughter of the convicts behind him or, for that matter, even of some of the major figures in the trial. Feldman himself had long since sat down on his cot. He was bothered, too, by the fact that he was the only one who made an effort to employ a legal vocabulary. It became literally
his
trial.

He rose to object, to challenge relevancy, to ask that certain statements be stricken from the record, even though he understood that there was no record. Technicality, however, was his only hope—to get them to acknowledge rules of procedure so that he could maneuver them into violating them and then point out the discrepancies. He knew nothing of law, save its clichés, and was aware that he sounded ridiculous, more ignorant with his smattering of courtroom jargon than even they without it. Seeing himself as parodically professional, single-minded as a vaudeville pedant, he had a momentary hope that he could win them with that. He determined to play the fool and objected more vigorously than ever.

Bisch had risen to report that once, talking in his sleep, Feldman had said that the convicts were despicable. Feldman jumped up to object. “Sirs, Your Honors, Your Magistrates,” he cried.

“What is it?” one asked wearily.

“What is it? What
is
it? Why, sirs, I object, I object, sirs. I do object, on the grounds—yes, I might say literally on the
terras firmas
—that what plaintiff is saying is inadvisable, inadmissible, irrelevant and immaterial. Moreover, as per established precedent in the case of the State of New York versus Dred Scott, and the decision of Justices Driscoll, Wyatt, Jones and Fowler, only Justice Blaine abstaining, handed down in February, 1947, for which you will find the citation in that great state’s
Law Record
, volume four, section seven, article fifty-two, page seven forty-six, right-hand column, lower upper-middle of the second full paragraph: ‘It is unconstitutional, immaterial, irrelevant and inadmissible for evidence to be garnered from statements made in trances, stupors, comas, deliriums, tongues and dreams.’ ‘And
dreams
,’ my sirs and lords, ‘and
dreams
.’ I call your attentions to the sixth item in that little list, my judges, and
your
attentions, gentlemen of the jury, peers, twelve good men and true. ‘And
dreams
,’ it says. ‘Unconstitutional,’ ergo ‘immaterial,’ ergo ‘irrelevant,’ ergo ‘inadmissible.’ Not to be countenanced ergo. Ergo I humbly petition that this is an improper line of testimony and that all that Mr. Bisch has just said be stricken from the record. Throw it out of court, Your Peerlesses. May I come up to the bench for a moment, Your Honors?” Before anyone could answer, he leaped forward and told them all in his loudest voice that he wished to take the stand. Turning quickly toward the rest of the men he saw that they were not amused, but went on anyway. “Raise your right hand.” He raised it. “Do you, Leo Feldman, solemnly swear that what you are about to say is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Say ‘I so solemnly swear it.’” “I so solemnly swear it.” “Now then, proceed.”

“Bisch is lying. I do not despise the convicts. I wanted to be friends with them, but they never let me. They’re stuck up.”

“Sit down, Feldman,” the Fink shouted.

“I have asked for a ruling, Your Honor.”

“What’s that?”

“I have asked for a ruling on Bisch’s testimony, Your Honor, on the basis of the Dred Scott decision of 1947 and the notorious Lindbergh case of 19 and 32 and the famous
cherchez la femme
precedent in the Scopes trial of 1955, only Justice William Jennings Darrow abstaining.”

“Sit down, Feldman,” said one of the two men who had once told Feldman their troubles.

“A decision, please. Patent pending. A ruling, sir. Yes or no, Your Honor.” But the truth was, he didn’t even know which of them was the judge. The people on blankets behind him had taken as much part in the proceedings as any of the men seated on cots. “Overrule or sustain.
Ooh, I hope it’s sustain!
”

“Someone knock that son of a bitch down on his cot.”

A convict reached up from the floor and angrily jerked him backwards. Feldman tumbled down on the man’s blanket and tried to get back up again, but the convict grabbed him by his collar and squeezed his neck. “Stay put, you,” he hissed.

“Only to the cot,” Feldman whispered. “I only mean to get back to my cot.” The man released him, and he crawled wearily back to the cot and lay there on his back, listening to the conversation and testimony go on over his head. It echoed hollowly in the stone room, as in some indoor swimming pool, and he had to concentrate in order to make out the words. Though he resisted sleep, he could not bring himself again to rise, or to play the fool, or even to counter the lies, which were now more frequent and which, in this cold enormous room, ricocheted off the walls like the rumble of cannon.

It was like being sick, having to lie there and listen. Like being on a deathbed, and their voices were his symptoms—pain, fever, falling blood count, failing pulse, clots and despondence. Now Feldman understood what he had probably understood even at first, what even the convicts understood or they would have paid more attention to forms: that what he was involved in was not a trial, not even a parody of one—that he was here in a ceremony of denouncement, a process of judgment. The single principle was that he be there with them. It resided in his body, his Feldman frame. If he were to die they would still need that, they would keep it there before them, without movement, without heartbeat, lifeless, to give point to their revilement their hate’s necessary artifact and single technicality.

He knew he slept, through not from dreams. He did not dream, and awoke to the drone of denouncement, recited into the record of their gathering in the passionless, scrupulous tones of arraignment. Nothing was omitted. They laid out his year in the prison in punctilious detail, round-robining grievance like Indians, retailing sins of commission, omission, licking their snubs like wronged wives. He was denounced for food left uneaten on his tray, or for eating too much, denounced for repulsing a homosexual who had taken a fancy to him. Somehow they had found out about his struggle with the retarded Hover in the shower room, and he was denounced for that. Though he had never tried to bribe anyone but Slipper, they invented stories of others, and pictured his every transaction as a sort of graft. It was charged that he did not enjoy the movies. Bisch testified that he resented cleaning out the toilet bowl, and the librarian that he did not read good books. Amazingly, they had been able to reconstruct his masturbatory seizures in solitary confinement. “I work down there,” said the man who had once tried to get him to polish the bars of his cell. “I go down to clean up the place when they let one of these birds out, and I tell you that his mattress was absolutely brittle with dried gizz. You could have snapped it in two if you turned it over. The man’s a pig.” One of the prisoners he had oversold in the canteen testified to his ability to sell, calling it his “power,” as if it were a form of magic. Others confirmed this and cited endless tales of deprivation they had been forced to endure as a result of their purchases, referring to their hardships as if they had been hexes. Harold Flesh told how Feldman had sought their power of attorney; again a great deal was made of the word “power.” It was objected that he did not care who won the athletic competition; that if he had not known that any day spent goofing off in his cell was ultimately to be added on to the end of his sentence, he would have been content to remain there for the entire year. “He was happiest in solitary, I tell you,” the man who had stepped on his heels said. “He was happier asleep than awake, alone than on line in the dining hall, sick than in health.”

It went on in this way for many hours, and Feldman slept more often and more fitfully. Once when he awoke in the still lighted cellblock, expecting to hear again more of their endless, inflectionless charges, he was surprised to discover that save for the heavy breathing of sleeping prisoners, the room was quiet. He sat up, rubbed his eyes and stumbled off to his cell to pee. When he returned, one of the convicts was sitting up on a blanket, staring at him. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“You missed it,” Feldman said. “I just made a brilliant defense and disproved the entire case against me.”

He fell asleep; when he awoke again, the convict to whom he had spoken and who, till now, had had nothing to say was charging him with having been sarcastic.

He could get no grasp on his trail. It swarmed about him, meaningless as the random arc of flies. He had no techniques to use against them—he was power
less
—and found everything about it boring except the outcome. But always his life had been in the present, all his means temporal as the first civil responses to an emergency, and even the outcome had no reality for him now. Had he not been so bored, he might have been gay.

At about noon the next day they had taken up a new tack. They were finished with their denunciation of his antisocial behavior and had started to charge him with what they had read about him in the book of his life.

Except for the snacks that a few had brought with them they had not eaten since yesterday’s evening meal, and their breath had begun to turn foul. Feldman could not stand the taste in his own mouth and went back to his cell for toothpaste. He spread this around in his mouth and rinsed it out. Then, before returning to his trial, he looked out the window. Prisoners in the exercise yard were staring up at him. The guards followed their glances. “How’s it going?” Mix yelled, and a guard raised his rifle and aimed at Feldman’s head.

Back at his trial he felt a little better, and when the prisoner testifying had finished, Feldman stood up. “Excuse me,” he said, “I’d like to make a comment here.”

“What’s your comment?”