“What?” said the lawyer. “Don’t worry, he isn’t going anywhere. Hey,” said the lawyer, “Baxter, pay the man.” And Baxter, the lawyer’s friend and fellow townsman, handed Lester Adams $7.50 for which Lester didn’t even thank him, so concerned was he that not only could he not place the lawyer and the lawyer’s friend, but couldn’t even remember Baxter now that he knew his name.
It was all over in a few minutes; Baxter and the lawyer left the building and Adams was standing there with one hundred and seven dollars and fifty cents. He was so confused by now that he couldn’t move, and others approached him — all asking, it seemed, to borrow money. Under no obligation to these new borrowers since none claimed kinship with him, he was still too good-natured and too timid to have to tell them that he himself had no money and so he refused no one, and when he left the courthouse that day he had not only the hundred found dollars but eighty-four additional dollars that the new borrowers had pressed on him!
Now Lester Adams was no dope. He knew a good thing when he saw one, and though he did not understand what had happened he understood that there had been a misunderstanding. When the corridors finally cleared, he approached one of the policemen and told him the story from the beginning and asked him if he could make anything out of it. The policeman couldn’t stop laughing for fifteen minutes, but when he finally did he explained it all to Adams, careful to omit nothing, not the most trivial detail, since the cop felt that only the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, could drive home to the farmer what an outrageous hick he was, and this, meant as cruelty, was the best lesson anyone could ever have had about the ins and outs of bailbondery.
“I’ll be damned,” Adams said to all the policeman had told him, “I’ll be goddamned. That’s some business! Why, I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts that in a wicked city like Cincinnati there’s always some feller or other in trouble.” With some of his one hundred eighty-four dollars he hired a private tutor, and inside two months he had not only improved his reading skills but could read and understand the most complicated legal documents, and inside three he was licensed by the State of Ohio to set himself up in the bailbond business, and by the fourth he had already had to go out after Baxter, the original borrower, shoot him in the leg, and bring him back by force to the courthouse to stand trial as best he could on one leg. In the years since he had killed eleven men, was no longer a hick and could tell stories of depravity that curled hair.
Taciturn still, yet his imagination so greased by daily contact with the surreal that over the years his character had seemed to turn itself inside out as you would reverse trousers to sew their seams, it was Lester Adams who opened the conference. “They’re killing us, gentlemen. The social scientists and New Left coalitions and civil libertarians. The Supreme Court — and don’t kid yourselves, the Burger Court not only is not all that different from the Warren Court but in certain respects is even more dangerous, because where the Warren guys merely built up the rights of the indigent, this so-called conservative crew is inventing rights for the fat cats. Anybody here who wouldn’t rather go bail for the president of GM than Pete the Tramp? All that’s happened is that now they have a legacy. With a legacy these strict constructionists are going to wall up our assholes. History is stubborn; once its mind is made up it’s made up. Compassion is an historical inevitability and we have no better chance of bringing back laissez-faire than we do public whippings.
“So they’re killing us. The 1966 Federal Bail Reform Act which gave federal courts the discretion to act as their own bondsmen and accept a ten-percent bond up front has already put us out of kidnapping, skyjackings and political assassinations. It’s put us out of bank stickups where the robbers have crossed state lines. It’s pushed us off antitrust, and it’s going to take the big antipollution cases that are coming up right out of our fucking mouths. Crime, gentlemen, is increasingly political. It’s thrown us out of the more apocalyptic riots and raised the bridge on espionage — which admittedly has never been big for us — and it has the potential to squeeze us out of narcotics, to say nothing of the new pattern of conspiracy prosecutions which I see emerging. With all these grass-roots Legal Defense Funds, this could have been the most lucrative fiddle of all.
“Mark my words. As crime turns increasingly against the state and the people get the wind up, all that’s going to be left for us poor bastards are the petty thieves, wife beaters and dog poisoners. The chicken stealers — that’s our meat. Vagrants. Shit, colleagues, even abortion’s legal today. Five and dime, gentlemen, penny ante times, a métier of small potatoes like a little Ireland. In fact, there’s some doubt in my mind that even this will be permitted us. As heart wins the battle of history and bail commissions throughout the length and breadth of the land each day secure releases for ‘good risks,’ we’re going to be left with only the two- and three-time losers. You’d do better to take a flier in a Bronx uranium mine. We’re dead ducks, fellows, law’s dirty old men.”
“We know all that,” Barney Fetterman said. “We know all that. What do we do?”
Ted Caccerone stood up. He had a Coca-Cola in his hand. There was A-1 sauce on the side of his mouth, and crumbs from the open-faced bun on which his London broil had lain. “We undersell. We cut our fee to seven and a half percent.”
“A gas war,” Art Klein said, “we’ll have a fucking gas war.”
“We won’t be so quick to shoot,” Paulie Shannon said. “Somebody jumps bail on us we bring him back alive, we talk him down like an expert in the control tower, we come on like social workers, we change our hard-guy image.”
“We take turns at the courthouse, we draw a number, stand on line, everything courteous. We get rules, choreography. Like in gin rummy the dealer gives the other guy first shot at the face card.”
“Who’s in?” Adams asked.
“I am,” said Shannon.
“Me too,” said Klein.
“It’ll have to be worked out,” Ted Caccerone said, “but I guess I can go along.”
“Something has to be done, that’s for sure,” Walter Mexico said. “Some sort of committee ought to study some of these suggestions we’ve been hearing, formalize them, and then we can put it to a vote.”
“Would you chair such a committee?” Adams asked.
“Sure, why not?”
“Where’s the Phoenician?” Barney Fetterman said.
“It’s got to be rationalized,” C. M. Smith said. “Blunt the competition, is that what we’re saying?”
“Just about,” said Lester Adams.
“Lapels shouldn’t come off in our fingers in the corridor, is that the idea? Okay, who’s going to be on the committee?”
“We’re the committee,” Adams said, “this is the committee.”
“Where’s that Phoenician?”
“We don’t jump the gun,” said Paulie Shannon, “we pool our resources. I think it’s the only way. I’m glad this is your thinking. I think a lot’s been accomplished today.”
“But we’ve all got to commit ourselves to this, that’s the important thing. Otherwise it’s no good. We’ve got to behave like brothers. Where’s that goddamn Phoenician?”
“That fucker. He’s off beating our time.”
“He plays Sooner with us we’ll wipe him.”
“Where is the son of a bitch?”
3
Alexander nods to the guard. The old man frowns, bored as ever. Main notes his shoes, the heavy, cumbersome shoe shape like some pure idea of foot in a child’s drawing. The broad black leather facing, a taut vault of hide, a sausage, all its tensions resolved as if ribbed by steel or some hideous flush fist of foot. The shine speaks for itself. There is discipline in it, duty, and he wonders if there is a changing room somewhere where the men polish these stout casings, get them that lusterless, evenly faded black that has no equivalent in nature.