He was still thinking he might just make it when the warden spoke. “But he’s kidding,” the warden said.
“I’m not,” Feldman said. “I swear it.”
“He is. He made it all up.”
“I meant it. I meant it all.”
“He’s selling you a bill of goods,” the warden said.
“We didn’t believe him, Warden,” a convict said.
“It’s true,” Feldman said.
“Objection not sustained,” the warden said sweetly. “Contempt of court,” he added, smiling.
Here was justice, Feldman thought, watching him. The man’s dapper, discreet power seemed to be on him like a form of joy. He had never seemed so charming; he had the look of one unarmed, a sort of chairless, whipless, unpistoled lion-tamer rakishness, or of a general in civvies.
“Take him,” Feldman shouted suddenly. “Take him!”
But they hadn’t understood. Only the warden knew what he had said. “That will do, Leo,” he said softly. “Now then, men, where do we stand? Thus far I’ve been able to keep this quiet, but it’s Thursday morning already, and if the court doesn’t finish its work soon I may have to put out a cover story. It’s a good thing I came in when I did. He had you going there. Well, brief me, please.”
“We’ve heard the evidence, Warden,” a convict said.
“What, all of it? About his family?”
“Yes sir.”
“About Victman?”
“Yes sir.”
“Freedman?”
“Yes sir.”
“You’ve heard the evidence, and he’s still alive?” the warden said cheerfully. “Have you heard about Dedman then?”
“Not about Dedman, sir. No, sir.”
“Well then, that explains it. Tell us about Dedman, Feldman.”
“A man can’t be made to testify against himself,” Feldman said.
The warden considered him for a moment. “All right,” he said. “I’m Warden Fisher, the fisher of bad men. I make the rules, and what happens here happens because I make it happen or because I let it happen. You’re innocent. I declare it a standoff and direct these men to ignore whatever they may have heard up to now. Feldman’s innocent. I whitewash his history and make good all the bad checks drawn on his character. He stands or falls on Dedman. Is that fair, Feldman?”
Feldman stared at him.
“Good. Then it’s a deal. We shall have all of it, however. You must give us all of it. All right then. Attention, everyone. Feldman gives us Dedman.” The warden, who had been standing, now sat down on a cot. He folded his arms across his chest and looked up impassively, waiting for him to explain what was inexplicable.
Feldman began.
“I had a friend,” he said. “Leonard Dedman.”
“No one met your boat, Feldman. No one met your boat, you said.”
“No. This was after…He wouldn’t have met it. It was after I decided we could be friends.”
“You decided?”
“Yes. I used to watch them. Boys. In the towns where I lived. I wasn’t envious, you understand. It was strange to me. I grew up in small towns where boys tossed pebbles at each other’s windows, where they imitated the sounds of birds, made signals.” He spoke as before. There was no other way now. “I’d been in their rooms and seen them cross-legged on the bed, browsing possessions, scholars of toy, touching the gifts with a curious peace. Solaced with balls, getting their heft, rolling them off with a wave of the hand. Examining guns and aiming at space, squeezing the trigger and blowing their breath down the barrel as if to clear it — death’s light housekeeping. The model airplanes, the ships and cars and toy soldiers — calmed by all the bright lead effigies of the dangerous world snug in their palms. Borrowing, trading, and a major greed. I understood this. But afterwards, after the trades, an amnesty of self, a queer quiet when the playing began. Using the toys, to be sure, but something else, something undeclared but binding—”
“Dedman. Feldman, Dedman.”
“But binding. It was honor. In the fields, running, exercising—”
“Dedman, Feldman. Feldman, Dedman.”
“—the honor still there. And even in their angers, their roughnesses, there were those who were sure to be each other’s allies, doing favors in a fight, passionate to cheer or console, committed as seconds in old-timey duels. A balance in the world like a struck bargain.
“It was curious to me how they knew whom to select, how they chose up their sides so that there were teams within teams, natural combinations, feats of friendship beyond athletics, a construct of amities. One boy, in practice, who always threw a particular other boy the ball without being asked. And no one left out, not even myself, though when I had the ball I never knew who to throw it to, and had to choose, and sometimes threw it away.
“Or secrets. They told secrets, each day trusting the other with a shame or a plot, trading these as they had their toys.
“How did they know? How? This was the thing I didn’t understand. How they made up their minds whom to like. It had nothing to do with talents, and even less with qualities, or the loved gifted and the loved good would have had it all. It was a Noah’s Ark of regard.
“Was it love? Was friendship love?”
“Dedman, damnit. Damnit, Dedman. Get to Dedman. Get to the part where you betrayed him.”
“I met Dedman in the city when I came there a few years after my father died,” Feldman said. “He was my age and had come from the West. Like myself he had no family. We lived next door to each other in the same rooming house and sometimes ate our meals together. He had been a student, but he’d had to drop out because he had no money. He never had a talent for money. All the time we knew each other, I became richer and richer and he remained the same.”
“But you gave him money,” the warden said.
“Yes. To start up businesses. Dedman’s businesses. They always failed.”
“Yes,” the warden said.
“It was Dedman who proposed our friendship,” Feldman said. “He asked for it formally. It was a wonder he didn’t go down on his knees.”
“Was Dedman queer?” Bisch asked.
“Yes. He was queer. But not in the way you mean. He was queer. ‘We should be friends,’ he said, ‘us birds of a feather. We should take pledges, slice flesh and brush bloods. Two people like us, like the last left alive, no kin in the kit.’
“‘Too sad, Dedman,’ I told him. ‘Too serious, kid. It’s your America’
“‘It’s their America.’
“He felt it did Dedman, his condition a guilt. With a whine for a war cry he assaulted my camp. A poet he was, and two poems he had. Feldman was Dedman’s, and Dedman was Feldman’s. He rhymed our lives, orphan for orphan and hick for hick, and what he made of the city we’d found, I won’t even say. And the rooming house, of course. He told me it was significant that we sometimes chose the same restaurant and picked the same soup. (But he had no sense about money, and what I did for budget he did for hunger.) Each evening a courting, petitions, a woo, his reasons my roses and chocolates. ‘And what have you got to trade?’ I asked him. ‘And show me your toys,’ I said. But Dedman’s dowry was the lack of one. ‘Bankruptcy, Dedman,’ I warned him. ‘Love flies out the window when the wolf comes in the door.’
“About this time I had come on the spoor of my fate. A jobber I was in those days — small-time, of course, just riding the fads and making a go. But getting first clues about a better class of merchandise. Brand names and top grade, first cut and choice and prime. Founded 1780. (This was my dream.) Aspirations of the pushcart heart, stirrings — I have not been unstirred — in the spieler’s soul. (Grand pianos are grand. Peddler. Old clothesman. Alley cat!) Riddled with need I was, hunting a piece of the action like a grapple of grail. ‘Shit on the shoddy,’ I declared to the roomers, and scorning thread-barrenness, gave up the place. I found an apartment, and what do you think?