“I’d go down the few thousand feet,” Feldman said.
“You would?”
“To the first house.”
“Ain’t no houses down there.”
“To the first house. Sooner or later I’d come to one. Now then, what would you do?”
“I’d do the same.”
“What would you do when you got to the house?”
“I’d go inside and wait until I thought the fire was out. Then I’d come back.”
“You wouldn’t turn yourself over to the owner and demand that he make a citizen’s arrest?”
“Goddamnit,” Bisch said angrily, “you wouldn’t either. You made that up.”
“Of course I would, Bisch.”
“You wouldn’t. That’s unrealistic.”
“Oh, it is, is it?” Feldman said. “But it’s not unrealistic I suppose when you tell me you’d go around to the main gate and turn yourself in to a guard. That’s not unrealistic. The only difference is one’s a paid enforcer and the other isn’t. Why, your notion of justice is that it’s of concern only to the professional. You don’t care a fig about law and order for its own sake, do you?”
“Wait a minute. I didn’t say that.”
“You as good as said it.”
Bisch was silent. Then, in a low voice, he asked what Feldman meant to do about it. It was a trap: if he said he was going to report him, Bisch would lean on him, but if he told him to forget it, he would be admitting to exactly the sort of indifference Bisch was trying to maneuver him into confessing.
“I haven’t got enough to go on yet,” he told him finally, “but a few more slips like that last one, Bisch, and I’ll have you dead to rights.”
Bisch ground his teeth and glared. It had been a trap, Feldman saw, though Bisch returned to his bunk, accepting defeat.
It was the sort of conversation that was sweeping the prison. For three months — since, in fact, the strange assembly in which Warden Fisher had first articulated his vigilante policy — the talk in the exercise yards, in the shops, in the discussion groups, everywhere the men gathered, had exactly this quality of probing hypothetical situations, fussy as boys challenging each other to spend a billion dollars. Most of it was just “making warden’s mouths,” as even the most pious convicts conceded. The warden himself, overhearing one of their voices raised in virtue when he passed, would respond with a wry smile, knowing as the expression of a parent come into a noisy bedroom now peaceful with the counterfeit deep breathing of sleep. (Assumed zealousness became a source for certain wicked jokes daringly told by one convict to another. One story — Feldman had had to read it in the warden’s column of the prison newspaper — was about a convict serving a short sentence, caught stealing food from the kitchen. Asked what he was up to, he replied, “The cook’s a lifer. I don’t trust him.” He was caught again some months later in the visiting room, making love to the cook’s wife. “How many times do I have to tell you?” he said. “I just don’t trust that damn cook.”)
Hypocrisy flourished and became a sort of virtue, but warden’s mouths or no, the prison rules had never operated so efficiently. It was almost impossible, for example, to find a Fink who would still help you through the loopholes for a few cigarettes, although the new policy had created in effect another loophole. Because the legitimacy of permission slips and passes was seldom questioned now, one began to feel a positive virtue for being grounded in details and honorably fulfilling the small procedures of prison function. Feldman sometimes wondered if this, rather than the announced object of rooting out the bad men, might not actually be in the back of “Warden’s Mind” (a branch of a sort of speculative philosophy among certain prisoners). Despite himself, even Feldman felt a certain pride in knowing the guards knew he was where he was supposed to be. But if the atmosphere was now a little freer and the prisoners had less to fear from the warden and the guards, they had more to fear from each other. The new policy had shifted the tensions from between prisoners and keepers to between kept and kept.
More than once Feldman had tried to get Bisch to suggest that they drop their pursuit of each other, but the man treated these moves as further maneuvers, and always they had to return to their silly game. Feldman had even told Bisch some overzealous convict jokes that he made up himself, but while Bisch laughed, he never offered to tell Feldman any stories of his own, and Feldman, suspecting Bisch might use these jokes against him, decided he couldn’t risk telling him others. Their strategies spiraled.
Only one time, and that to his cost, had Feldman, weary of their duel, spoken forthrightly. Bisch, obviously trying to tempt him into an open declaration of his feelings, had told him that he personally knew of a conspiracy to break jail. “Oh, come on, Bisch,” Feldman had said. “Grow up. If you know about a jailbreak, either blow the whistle on the guys who are planning it or keep it to yourself. Don’t tell me about it. I’ve only got four months before I get out of here. Why would I get involved in something like that?”
“Oh, so you admit it. You want to get out.”
“Well, Jesus, Bisch, of course I want to get out.”
“It doesn’t make any difference at all to you whether you’ve paid your debt to society or not. I’ll remember that one when your time comes.”
“What do you mean ‘when my time comes’?”
“Never mind,” Bisch said, and from his guilty blush Feldman realized he hadn’t been joking. “Never mind,” Bisch repeated, “the important thing is that you’re unregenerate.”
“I’m not unregenerate,” Feldman said.
“Oh ho, sure not.”
“I’m not.”
“Tell it to the Marines.”
“I’m regenerate,” Feldman said.
It was how, he realized finally, he had to speak, and in a way, because he dared not speak otherwise, he was regenerate.
With others, of course, he was equally wary. Even with the bad men Walls and Sky and Flesh, he was cautious, and with Herb Mix, the bad man who attached himself to Feldman in the exercise yard. (Where, Feldman noticed, the bad men continued to jump about erratically, just as he had seen them do that first time from his cell. He himself, concentrating on imitating the more normal walks of the other convicts so as not to call attention to himself, sometimes found the restraint too great, the sheer watchful concentration too difficult, and would often start abruptly forward, making the disturbing movement of a man bolting in sleep.) But bad men had little to hope for from vigilanteeism. The paroles such tactics might bring others would not be given them, and one might have supposed that they would have fewer occasions, since they had less need, to make warden’s mouths. They made them anyway, at least in the canteen when there were convicts to overhear them. At these times Feldman, who had adopted a somewhat different approach with the bad men than the one he took with Bisch, would go about his business, paying no heed to their absurd challenges of him. If pushed too far, he might stop and call out to the convicts in the canteen, “You men see what I’m doing. You’re my witnesses. See me work. See me fill your orders and make change and keep the books and dust the shelves.”
In certain respects, nevertheless, he was a real offender against the new system. An astonishing news item appeared in the prison paper:
NATION’S 2ND OLDEST CONVICT REVEALS BRIBERY PLOT
Ed Slipper, this country’s second oldest living convict now serving time in a federal or state prison, voluntarily disclosed to Warden’s Office Thursday the existence of thirty-two dollars and forty cents in his personal savings account at the prison. Slipper, the last of whose relatives died many years ago, has admitted that up until eight months ago he had no scource of outside income whatever for several years, and that the money has been accumulating in his account due to direct deposits by the business associates of Leo Feldman, a fellow inmate and “bad man” sentenced to one year’s incarceration here.