A Bad Man by Stanley Elkin Page B

thoughts. It did not provide for the splendid half and quarter measures of freedom—executive toys and committees and the heft of a paperweight in the palm of your hand and the rest.
    Suddenly Feldman stood up and dropped his trousers and went to the toilet between the two cots. He squatted on it and strained and stared at Lurie. The man continued to rub the bars. Feldman might have been doing nothing more private or offensive than biting his nails. I don’t know, he thought, this would have cleared them out back at the office. He sat hopelessly, beginning, despite himself, to nod as Lurie talked.
    “Cancer,” Lurie was saying, “the big one. That’s what they finally diagnosed. After all that time. So he’s finally lying there—my cellmate—in the infirmary. They ain’t doing nothing to clean it out of him. Too late, they told him. What do these guys care? You know something? This is a guy that always worried about himself. He kept up. He used to drive me nuts with his grousing. You know those seven danger signals they’re always talking about? My friend had a match cover that listed them, and he had four out of the seven. Four out of the seven danger signals, when only one’s enough. He went to the infirmary each time he’d get a new danger signal, but they didn’t know it was cancer until his third danger signal. That’s the kind of doctor they got over there in that infirmary. He’s laying there now. Last week a guy on infirmary crew fucked up and got thrown in solitary, and Dean fixed it so I could clean my friend’s room. It tore me up. He was a strong guy, my friend. He’s nothing now. He told me he’s up to six of the seven danger signals. He laughed about it.”
    Feldman flushed the toilet.
    “Listen,” Lurie said, “if you’re sick you probably don’t feel like getting the bars over your window. You can do it later, or—I’ll tell you what—I’ll come back sometime when your cell is open and do it for you myself.”
    Suddenly, irrationally, Feldman was moved. “Thank you,” he said. He wanted to cry. I’m crazy, he thought. They’ve driven me crazy.
    “No, it’s nothing,” Lurie said. “You can see yourself what a difference it makes.”
    “It’s very nice,” Feldman said. “I’ve got the shiniest bars in my cellblock.”
    “It makes a difference.”
    “It certainly does.”
    “I enjoyed talking to you,” Lurie said.”
    “I enjoyed talking to you .”
    “It’s a terrible thing to say, but it makes the day go faster when I run into a sick con.”
    Feldman nodded.
    “This ain’t fun,” Lurie said.
    “No,” Feldman said.
    “Scrubbing’s no deal.”
    “No,” Feldman said, “I guess not.”
    “Even when you got a crew chief like Dean.”
    The man folded his rag and pushed it up the sleeve of his sweat suit, where it lay on the thick ridge of muscle along his big forearms like the handkerchief of a gentlewoman. “Everybody’s got troubles,” he said.
    Feldman decided to eat his lunch with the men.
    Tables with large black numbers painted on their tops were assigned them, and twice each month everyone was given a new number corresponding to one of the tables. They had to carry this number with them and show it to the dining-hall official if he asked to see it. The men had their special friends, of course, and sometimes moved beside them regardless of their assigned numbers. It was a major offense if they could not justify their seating, but they often took the risk. The dining-hall official moved arbitrarily among the tables, spot-checking.
    Feldman, studying the men as they took their trays and moved silently to seats, could tell, just as surely as the dining-hall official, from the gestures and nudges and shufflings, which men were falsifying their assignments. It was queer how men properly assigned to a place noiselessly submitted to those who would force them in turn to seek false positions. To break silence if one was being pushed away from one’s proper