A Bad Man (2 page)

“Unlock me,” Feldman said.

“Well, I can’t do that,” the deputy said. “The custody code in this state says that any prisoner being transported to the penitentiary must be bound to his custodian at all times. Now you’ve rested enough. You get that suitcase down from there and you come over here.” With both hands he pulled on his harness, and Feldman stumbled and fell to his knees. The grip fell from the washstand against Feldman’s leg.

The deputy undid his trousers and let them fall to the floor. He pushed his drawers down. He sat on the toilet seat, and Feldman was pulled toward him at the level of the man’s stomach.

“What are you looking away for? Don’t you ever move yours? Don’t you look away from me like that. You think you’re better than I am?
Don’t you look away, I said!
”

Feldman turned his head to the deputy. He started to gag.

“Maybe you’re uncomfortable,” the deputy said. “Maybe you’d be more comfortable if you could rest your head in my lap. You uncomfortable?”

“No.” Feldman said. “I’m comfortable.”

“Well, if you’re uncomfortable you just put your head down. And you better not be sick on me. You understand?” Feldman swayed dizzily against the deputy. “Hey,” the deputy said, “I think you like this. I think you think it ain’t so bad. A man gets used to everything. That’ll stand you in good stead where you’re going. That’ll be a point in your favor up there.” Feldman pulled away again.

“Well, I’m done, I guess,” the deputy said in a few moments. “How about you? Do you have to go?”

“No.”

“Don’t be embarrassed now.”

“No,” Feldman said, “I don’t have to.”

At Enden they had to change trains.

“So this is Enden,” Freedman said. “It isn’t much, but I’m glad I saw it. I’ve still got some time before I make my connection back to the city. I’ll walk along with you.”

“Dr. Freedman, it was nice to have your company,” the deputy said. “Say goodbye to him, Feldman. You won’t be seeing your friend for some time.”

“Maybe I’ll come out to visit,” Freedman said.

Freedman and the deputy shook hands.

“Oh, and listen,” Freedman said to the deputy, “don’t forget what I told you. A homunculus. Petrified. Over the heart. A heavy blow in the chest. Tell them.
Tell the convicts
.” He crossed the tracks and walked beside them toward their train. Three cars ahead a porter stood waiting for them. Near the vestibule where they were to board the train, Freedman moved suddenly in front of Feldman and the deputy. He went up on the little metal step and from there to the lower stair of the train and looked up into the vestibule.

“Ah,” he said, “Victman.” He held onto the railing and leaned backwards as Feldman and the deputy came up. “Look, Feldman,” he called, “it’s Victman.”

They had to change trains once more. In the foothills of the great dark mountain range which climbed like tiered chaos to the gray penitentiary. There Victman left them, and Dedman took his place.

In the night Feldman whispered to the deputy. “I have to go,” he said.

“Sure, Feldman, in a minute, when this game is finished.” Dedman and the deputy were playing cards.

“Please,” Feldman said, “now. I have to go.”

“You know the rules. I can’t unlock you. I asked before if you had to go. Have a little patience, please.”

The deputy won the game and sat back comfortably. “Some revenge, Dedman?” he said. “I believe a man is entitled to revenge.” He dealt the cards, and they played for another hour.

Feldman urinated in his suit. The deputy and Dedman watched the darkening, spreading stain.

“That’s more like it,” the deputy said.

2

T
here was an old Packard touring car waiting for them at the station.

The deputy had fallen asleep; Feldman had to wake him. Dedman had disappeared. Before they left the train the deputy unlocked Feldman’s handcuff and the chain that wrapped his wrist. He moved him down the steps and into the back seat of the car. It was very dark.

“You’re where they shoot to kill now, Feldman,” the deputy said.

The driver laughed sourly and the deputy closed Feldman’s door and walked around the car and got into the front seat next to him.

When they had ridden for almost an hour—Feldman could see the tan twist of dirt road as the car’s head lamps swept the sudden inclines and turns of the arbitrary mountain—he asked how far it was to the penitentiary.

“Hell,” the deputy said, “you’ve been in it since the train went through that tunnel just after dark. It’s
all
penitentiary. It’s a whole country of penitentiary we got up here.”

“It’s four miles from where we are now to the second wall,” the driver said.

In twenty minutes Feldman saw a ring of lights, towers, walls.

“That’s her,” the deputy said.

The car stopped. Feldman guessed they had come to a gate, though he could see no passage through the solid wall.

“Out,” the deputy said. “Nothing wider than a man gets through that wall. There’s no back-of-the-laundry-truck escapes around here.”

The driver opened a metal door, and they walked single file, Feldman in the middle, through a sort of narrow ceilingless passageway that curved and angled every few feet. Along the wide tops of the walls strolled men with rifles. Feldman looked up at them. “Head down, you,” a guard called. Every hundred feet or so was another metal door, which opened as they came to it.

“Maximum security,” the deputy said.

“Maximum insecurity,” said the driver.

They came to a final door, which opened onto a big yard lighted with stands of arc lamps, bright as an infield. Across from him, about two hundred yards away, in an area not affected by the lights, he could see the outlines of buildings like the silhouette of city skylines in old comic strips. They took him to one of these buildings—all stone; he could see no joints; it was as though the building had been sculpted out of solid rock—and the deputy prodded him up the stairs.

“You’ll have your interview with the warden here,” the deputy said.

Feldman looked at his wrist for marks that might have been left by the chain. He was certain the deputy had abused him, that the business of the suitcase had been his own invention. There was something in the Constitution about cruel and unusual punishment. There was a slight redness about his left wrist but no swelling. He was a little disappointed. If he got the chance—he would study the warden carefully; didn’t they have to be college graduates?—he would report the deputy anyway.

They took him to an office on the second floor.

Feldman was surprised. For all the apparent solidness of the outside of the building, the inside seemed extremely vulnerable. There was a lot of wood. He could smell furniture polish. The old, oiled stairs creaked as they climbed them. It was like the inside of an old public school. There were even drinking fountains in the hall.

“You wait here,” the deputy said. He opened a door—it could have been to the principal’s office; Feldman looked for the American flag—and pushed him inside.

“The warden doesn’t want anyone around when he talks to a con,” the deputy said. “I’m sacking out. The driver’s your guard now. He’ll be right outside.” He closed the door and left the room. Feldman waited a few minutes and opened the door. A few things the driver had said made him think he might be approachable.

The driver was sitting in a chair, a machine gun in his lap. “I’m no friend of yours,” he said. “Get back in there.”

Feldman sat down to wait. I’m probably on television, he thought. They’re watching me this minute. Strangely, he felt more comfortable. If everything was just a strategy he could deal with them. Just don’t let them touch me, he thought. He fell asleep. Let them watch me sleep, he dreamed.

When he woke up he expected to see the warden standing over him. It was not impossible, he felt, that the warden could even turn out to be the deputy. But when he opened his eyes no one was there, and he knew that there were no one-way mirrors, no hidden microphones, and was more frightened than at any time since he had been arrested. I’m in trouble, he thought, I’m really in trouble.

He began to pray.

“Troublemaker,” he prayed, “keep me alive. Things are done that mustn’t be done to me. Have a heart. If the question is can I take it, the answer is no. Regularity is what I know best. I have contributed to the world’s gloom, I acknowledge that. But I have always picked on victims. Victims are used to it. Irregularity is what
they
know best. They don’t even feel it. I feel it. It gives me the creeps.”

He finished his prayer, and still seated, looked around the office. It was past midnight. He might have hours to wait yet. “You wait here,” the deputy had said. Was it a stratagem? They file you paper-thin with expectation and anxiety. I expect nothing. I’ll take what comes. He folded his arms across his chest, trying to look detached. It would be best, he thought, if he could sleep again. A sleeping man had a terrific advantage in a contest of this sort. It would invariably rattle whoever came to shake him awake. “You see what I think of you?” a sleeping man said to the shaker.

But he wasn’t sleepy. He was too cold. It’s the altitude, Feldman thought. At night you need a coat up here even in summer. He looked down at his suit and stroked his sleeve. It was lucky he believed in appearances. (“A
heavy
material,” he had told the buyer. “In this heat?” “What should I wear in that courtroom, a luau shirt?”) A man of conservative, executive substance, silver-templed, and tan for a Jew. Never split a Republican ticket in my life, gentlemen.

The door opened and Feldman looked up. A man stood in the doorway for a moment and then moved behind the desk and sat down. He had some papers with him which he examined as if they contained information with which he was already familiar, using them easily but with a certain disappointment.

Feldman watched the warden, if this
was
the warden. (Already he had begun to do what all strangers in new situations do—attribute to others exalted rank, seeing in each comfortable face an executive, a person of importance.) He was a man of about Feldman’s age, perhaps a little younger. Feldman guessed they were the same height, though the warden was not as heavy. What struck him most was the man’s face. It seemed conventional, not unintelligent so much as not intelligent. It was, even at midnight, smooth—not recently shaved, just smooth—as though lacking the vitality to grow hair. Its ruddiness could probably be accounted for by the heavy sun striking at this altitude through the thin atmosphere. He might have been one of the salesmen who called at his store. Feldman had hoped, he realized now, for someone mysterious, a little magical. He saw, looking at the warden’s face, that it would be a long year.

“Is it all right with you if I open a window? It’s a little stuffy in here,” the man said.

“I’m cold,” Feldman said.

“I’m sorry,” the warden said, getting up. “I have to open the window.” He opened it and came around the front of the desk to where Feldman was sitting.

“Mr. Feldman,” he said, “I’m Warden Fisher, a fisher of bad men.”

Feldman stood up to shake hands. The warden turned away and went back to stand by the open window.

“Be seated, please,” the warden said. “In this first interview I like to get the man’s justification.”

“Sir?”

“Why are you here?”

“They say I’m guilty.”

“Are you?”

Feldman answered carefully. There was some question of an appeal, of getting his case reopened. Probably there was a tape recorder going someplace. The warden was trying to disarm him. “No, of course not,” he said, undisarmed.

The warden smiled. “I’ve never had an affirmative answer to that question.” Feldman, disarmed, at one with all the robbers, bums, murderers and liars in the place, felt he needed an initiative.

“You may want me to put this in writing later,” he said, “but I feel I have certain legitimate complaints about the way I was treated coming up here.”

The warden frowned, but Feldman went on. He explained about his watch and the money. Telling it, he knew he sounded like a fool. He didn’t mind. It added, he felt, to an impression of innocence. “I have reason to suspect, too, that the deputy took money from certain enemies of mine in exchange for showing me off to them in my humiliation.”

The warden nodded. “Go on,” he said.

Feldman felt the warden was bored by the story, but he couldn’t stop. When he came to the part about the toilet he tried to get outrage into his voice. Somehow it sounded spurious. He finished lamely with an allusion to the final proddings and shoves.

“Is there anything else?” the warden asked.

“No sir,” Feldman said.

“Do you have any proof? Would Dedman or Freedman or Victman testify to any of this?”

Feldman admitted they probably wouldn’t. “I’m not lying though,” he added helplessly.”

The warden opened a second window. “The deputy’s a pig,” he said suddenly. “He ought to be in prison. Without proof, however—”

Feldman shrugged sympathetically.

“He ought to be in prison too, I mean,” the warden said, turning to Feldman.

“I’m innocent,” Feldman said mechanically.

“All right,” the warden said, “that’s enough.”

It was. He regretted having spoken. He didn’t know what it was tonight. Every action he had taken had been ultimately cooperative. It was a consequence of being on the defensive. Feldman knew how easy it was to accuse. That was the trick the warden had been playing on him. He had to assert himself before it was too late. If he had the nerve it would be a good idea to push the warden, to run behind his desk and sit in his chair. Then he seized on the idea of silence. To speak, even to speak in accusation was, in a way, to fawn. Let the warden make the mistakes, he thought. Mum’s the word. He folded his arms.

“It’s easy for me to believe you’ve been wronged,” the warden was saying. A trap. Shut up. Forewarned is forearmed. “There are enough bad men in the world. We all have our turn as their victims.”

Not me, Feldman thought.

“What I want to know,” the warden said, “is what you’ve done.”