Searches & Seizures Read online

  Searches & Seizures

  Stanley Elkin

  “I began this collection of short novels with no idea that this was what I was doing. Having just finished a full-size novel, The Dick Gibson Show, I thought it would be good to write a short story, something I had not attempted since 1964. I am a slow writer, and a nervous one, and the story I started I worked at diligently but without conviction for three months. Then a friend told me an anecdote about a friend of his who maintains a sort of zoo for his own amusement, whereupon I abandoned the story and undertook to write The Making of Ashenden. It got longer than I had expected, and when I finished it I saw that I had written a novella.

  “But I was hooked; I had enjoyed writing the novella, enjoyed (I’m talking now about the writer’s always minimal pleasure) writing at that length more than at any other. Hence, when an interviewer asked me about my next book, on the spur of the moment I told him I was working on a collection of novellas. I wasn’t, but as soon as I said it I knew it was something I really wanted to do.

  “The second to be written was The Condominium and, sadly, it was inspired by my attendance at the funeral of an aunt I loved very much. The events in the story have nothing to do with my aunt, but as I sat shivah in the bungalow in New Jersey where I had spent my summers when I was a boy, I found myself brooding about the relationship between the houses people live in and their bodies.

  “The third story was The Bailbondsman. It was written in London, and it came to me virtually all at once when I saw the word “bailbondsman” in a sentence in a book; for some reason the word—I mean the word—frightened me, as it still does.

  “Since this is a collection of novellas, I tried, once I knew what I was doing, to link the stories thematically—or, to be more precise, to link them through some sort of thematic progression, which explains my decision to arrange them as I have here. Thus, all three stories have certain characteristics in common. In each case the protagonist is a bachelor (at one time I had thought of calling the collection Eligible Men), and each is concerned in one way or another—though very differently—with death. Images recur from story to story, though these images are intended to shift their meanings with their contexts.

  Go, little book…”

  —STANLEY ELKIN

  One for Phil and one for Bernie and one for Molly

  Contents

  The Bailbondsman

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  The Making of Ashenden

  The Condominium

  A Biography of Stanley Elkin

  The Bailbondsman

  1.

  THIS BUCK NIGGER comes running up calling my name. “Mist’ Main, Mist’ Main,” he’s yelling. He looks familiar but I can’t place him, so right there’s my clue. Because I know everybody I have had dealings with, their names and faces, their heights and weights, each identifying characteristic, every wart and all pimples, perfect pitch for human shape and their voices in my head like catchy tunes. What a witness I would make, a police artist’s dream with my eye for detail, the crease of their gloves and the shine on their shoes like so many square inches of masterpiece in an art historian’s noggin. Not “male Caucasian, mid-twenties, sandy hair and slightly built, five foot ten inches and between 130 and 135 pounds.” That’s given, that’s understood; I do that like the guess-your-age-and-weight man at the fair. But the weave of his trousers and the pinch of his hat, which hole he buckles his belt and the wave in his hair like the force number on the Beaufort scale. A marksman’s eye for his pupils and its length to a fraction of the cuff rolled back on his sweater. I have by heart the wrinkles on his trousers and know the condition of his heels like a butcher his fillets. Everything. The roller coaster of his flies when he sits, where his hands get dirty, which teeth need attention, the sunsets on his fingernails. Everything.

  “Mist’ Main, Mist’ Main.”

  But I forget. When it’s finished I forget, chuck it in the mind’s wastebasket as you’d throw away a phone number in your wallet when it no longer has meaning. Well, what am I? The rogues’ gallery? A computer bank? Must I walk around with sin like a stuffed nose? Of course I forget. But something familiar, tip-of-your-tongue, like at least you recognize the number is your own handwriting.

  “Mist’ Main?”

  So what does it cost me to be polite? “Dat you, Rastus? Dat you, boy, sho ’nuff?”

  “Mist’ Main, it’s Billy. Billy Basket.”

  Or go along with him for a while? “Billy Basket, you old field hand, you fuckin’ cotton chopper, you. How you doin’, muthah? Gimme skin, gimme five, put ’er there, my man.” He sticks out his paw but I don’t take it. I don’t shake hands. I will handcuff myself to anyone regardless of race, creed or color because that’s business, but I won’t shake hands. I dislike holding men.

  “I seen you cross the hall and I wanted to tell you hello and thank you.”

  Court is about to be convened. “Sure thing,” I say, “see you later, alligator.”

  “Don’t you remember me? You went my bail last year. You believed in me when they said I done that rape.”

  “Yeah, sure. I try to see the good side in everybody. Now I remember.” I do. “Couldn’t place you there for a minute. Now I see the size of the cock on you it all comes back. You guys are really hung, you know that? Like pictures, like drapes in palaces. See you, kid. Next time you get into trouble. Now you know the way.”

  I take off. Basket calls after me. “I wanted you to know in case you missed it in the papers,” he says as I slip into the courtroom, “they found the guy who done it. They cleared my name. I was innocent all along, just like you believed.”

  Innocent? Guilty? What difference does it make? Six of one, half dozen of the other. As a matter of fact, innocence is bad for business, a pain in the ass. Stuff the jails I say, crowd them. Shove in the innocent with the guilty. I don’t want to see educational programs in the pens, I don’t want to know from rehabilitation. That shit knocks down recidivism. Shorter sentences, that’s something else, a different story entirely. Shorter sentences are good for business. That gets ’em back on the streets again, the villains and stickup guys. That’s what we call turnover, and I’m all for it. Billy Basket is making me late for the hearings. I might not get a good seat. Adams or Klein or Fetterman will be over the prospects I’ve spotted like the muggers.

  “Go, go,” I tell him. “The sun’s shining, the parks are full of white girls with their heads on the grass and their skirts hiked. Near bushes they lie, tanning their titties. What the hell you doing here, you dark fool? Go. Run, Spot! Run in the park!”

  I’m Alexander Main the Bailbondsman. I go surety. Generous as a godfather or an uncle in films, each day paying out pledge like a rope in the sea, flying my streamers of confidence. Like the bunting of anniversary my cracking pennants of assurance. Dealing in signature, notary’s round Braille, in triplicates engaged, fair copy, dotted line where my penciled x’s (never omitted: there, levitating like a phenomenon, a chipper fragment of askew alphabet above those two and a half inches of devastating dots at the bottom of the contract, drawing the attention, rubbing their noses in it, even the hard guys and two-time losers, even the saboteurs, and people finally out of aliases who haven’t used their real names in years—who can barely remember them but who use them now, you can bet) pull their names like trumps. Signed, sealed and deliverance.

  I love a contract like the devil, admire the tall paper and the small print—I mean the print, the lawful shapes and stately content. Forget word games, secret clause, forget hidden meaning and ambiguity, all those dense thickets of type where the fast ones lie like lost balls. Your forest-for-the-trees crap is myth, the sucker’s special
pleading. I’ll fuck you in letters nine feet high if I’ve a mind. I beat no one with loophole. Everything spelled out, all clear, aboveboard as chessmen: truth in advertising and a language even the dishonest understand. No, I’m talking the look of the instrument, texture, watermark, the silk flourish of the bright ribbon, the legend perfected centuries (I’ll tell you in a moment about the Phoenicians), the beautiful formulas simple as pie, old-fashioned quid pro quo like a recipe in the family generations. My conditions classic and my terms terminal. Listen, I haven’t much law—though what I have is on my side, binding as clay, advantage to the house—but am as at home in replevin, debenture and gage as someone on his own toilet seat with the door closed and the house empty. I have mainpernor, bottomry, caution and hypothecation the way others might have a second language. I have always lived by casus foederis; do the same and we’ll never tangle assholes.

  Well, it’s the blood. I had a cousin a usurer, an uncle in storm windows. An aunt bought up second mortgages, bad paper. Crap artists the lot, dealing in misunderstanding, leading folks on like bad daddies walking backwards in water with their hands out to kids wading inches beyond their reach. Not me, but we’ve something in common: that we take people’s word, I suppose, so long as it’s in triplicate. But not my style finally the cancerously compounding interest with repossession at the end of the rainbow. Hit them up front, I say, and be done with it. Not for me the jumped car and crossed wire, the hot shot at dawn or midnight. I eschew schlock, fingerprints on the screen of the burned-out TV, the old man’s greasy veronica where he’s dozed in the wing chair, all that wall-to-wall with its thinned nap where the weight’s come down like the lawn mowers of time. To hell with merchandise, houses surrendered after they’ve been lived in seventeen years. Junk, jetsam. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I have no sense of smell, except for the stinks I imagine in my head.

  The Phoenicians. Lebanon and Syria now, Phoenicia that was. My people—I am Phoenician—wrote the first bailbond. (It’s “Ba’al” incidentally, from the Hebrew, not “bail.”) The notion that the system began in medieval England is false. What happened was that the Crusaders brought the practice back with them from the desert. Phoenician justice was swift: a trial immediately followed arrest; the suspect was taken before the judge or Lord (the Ba’al), evidence was heard and the man was punished or went free. But once a foreigner was arrested, a Canaanite. The charge was he’d fired a crop. The man denied it and said he had witnesses, relatives who had returned to Canaan and could prove that he’d had nothing to do with it. They would swear, he said, that he’d been with them miles from the scene at the time. Well, it would take time to get word back to Canaan that we were holding one of their lads. A messenger would have to be sent. A three-day camel trek, another few days to find the relatives and convince them to return, another three-day camel trek (“trek” is a Phoenician word; “track” comes from it, “race track,” “railroad track”) to get back, ten or eleven days in all. Now, there were no jails in Phoenicia. The concept of captivity didn’t come in until much later, a Hellenic idea. Where do you keep a guy like that, a guy accused of setting fire to an entire crop? Do you take him to your tent, an alleged incendiary? A man who might have burned fields, what could he do with canvas? There was no jail, only justice. If your eye offended they plucked it out, if your kick they tore your leg off. So where do you put a fellow up who claims he’s innocent?

  Like all great ideas the answer is simple. You don’t. This was a nomadic people, this was a people lived in a sandbox like somebody else would live in Pennsylvania—gill-less they were, tough, with a horned, spiky skin that took the sunburn and converted it to energy, maybe even into water itself, adaptive, resourceful, shagging the evolutionary moment like a fly ball—whose very beasts, you’ll remember, went without water thirty and forty days, a people who invented oasis. You think not? You think maybe God spread a little golf course in the desert like a prayer rug? You think? Invented oasis. The process is lost, all gone now the old techniques, but probably using the sand itself, working in the medium of sand. Sand and lenses. Taking a camel’s eye, say, and the desert’s own hot sun and igniting the sands, focusing, burning them molten, turning them liquid, making them water, seasoning them with their own piss and the camel’s blood. Planting seeds, maybe shooting off into the mess, stirring it at night when it cooled. More piss, more blood. Resourceful, resourceful, sand and water alchemists, collecting whatever rain there was, oiling it with their sweat, conservationists of the bleak, minding the broth, getting it going, one green shoot by one green shoot, nursing each, growing a world. Maybe I exaggerate—I’m proud of my people—but something like that.

  So let the kid go, this Canaanite, resourceful and Semitic as themselves. Just because he could be guilty, the elders reasoned, it wasn’t a good idea to have him around. He might, out of spite, put out their oasis. But make sure he comes back. Take something of value. His rings, say, or his animals. Turn this bad apple and good scout back out into the desert with fair warning, fixing him with that stare which had fired the sands. “All right. Ten days. Come back or we fetch you.”

  “Hey, Phoenician,” a lawyer calls, “over here.” It’s Farb. He’s standing with a white male, aged thirty-three or -four, well dressed and very nervous. It can’t amount to much, but in my business you don’t cut a lawyer. I pat Farb’s shoulder.

  “Shoplifting, right?”

  “How about that Phoenician?” Farb says. “Does he know a thing or two?”

  “She never did anything like this,” the guy says. “We even have a charge account at the store.”

  “Who’s up? Cooper?”

  “Cooper,” Farb says, “Cooper, I think.”

  “He’ll fix your wife’s bond at five hundred,” I tell the man. He’s biting his nails. “You can make that. What do you need me?”

  “He doesn’t want it on his record that he put up collateral with a court,” Farb says.

  “You got kids?”

  “A son.”

  “Seven years old, eight?”

  “He’s nine.”

  “Your wife’s people, they’re alive?”

  “Yes, but…”

  “They live in Cincinnati?”

  “They’re divorced. I don’t understand what…”

  “He’s determining the risk,” Farb explains.

  “What risk? I’m good for the money. What do I look like?”

  “Everybody’s got a good suit, sonny. They come to court like they’re sitting for portraits in banks.”

  “Don’t get excited,” Farb counsels his client, “answer his questions. There’s nothing personal.”

  “There’s everything personal,” I say. “She got siblings, your wife? A brother she’s close to?”

  “There’s a sister in California, but I don’t…”

  “They write letters, they call long distance? Presents, does your sister-in-law send the kid presents? Does she remember his birthday?”

  “Usually. I think so. Yes, usually.”

  “I’ll ride the river with you, a bridge over troubled waters. My fee is ten percent of the bond. Like show business, like your wife was a movie star instead of a shoplifter. I take the fifty up front. You got fifty bucks? Yes? Done. I’ll see you when Cooper sets the bail. Take this form meanwhile. Fill in the blanks as if you were your wife, and have her sign where I’ve penciled the x.”

  “Thanks, Phoenician,” Farb says.

  “Rudy, you used to be a big shot, Rudy. The syndicate you had, ax murderers.”

  “I’m slowing down, Phoenician. Doctor’s orders.”

  It’s true. He looks shitty. I recall talk. He’s been to the hospital for tests. “Rudy, I appreciate your business, but you’ve got to specialize. The way you’re going with this nickel-and-dime we’ll both starve. I’ll give you a tip. In the next year the big thing in crime will be ripping off the guys who collect for insurance companies in the bad neighborhoods. That’s the new action, Rudy, that’s the wave
of the future. It’s going to be bigger than cab drivers. If you like I’ll put the word out that Rudy Farb is the best defender of debit-man murderers in the city. The kids will come running, they’ll pay your retainer in loose change they took from the body. Think it over, Rudy, think it over, kid. See you in court.”

  So I’m Alexander Main, the Phoenician Bailbondsman, other men’s difficulties my heritage. Alexander Main the Ba’albondsman, doing his duty by the generations and loving it, thriving on the idea of freedom which is my money in the bank, which is my element as the sand was my ancestors’.

  So give the Phoenician your murderer, your rapist, your petty thief yearning to breathe free. Give him your stickup guy and embezzler, your juvenile delinquent and car robber. Give him your subversives and menslaughterers. I like dealing with the public.

  Yes, and the private too. Tell me. If a man climbs his bathroom scale in the morning and the dial spins, settling finally on his weight, and then suddenly he shivers, say, or barks his morning hack and jiggles the scale and the dial goes spinning again though his feet have never left the scale, jerking a few pounds more or a few less, I ask you this: does that man in those few seconds weigh more? Less? Has he become momentarily weightless? This is philosophy. Do saints have more rights than ordinary men? Which is more important, Arcturus or Jupiter? Do people living in Nome, Alaska, get less out of life than Parisians? The Phoenician loves his philosophy, is charmed by the sharp propositions that precede the thick texts and weighty arguments. As for the rest, the proofs that win, the arduous, numbing connections—I have no patience, or perhaps the equipment is wanting. But the examples, ah! I’ve a weakness for example, a sweet tooth for instance and all the gossip inherent in idea. A joke better than a story, an hypothesis richer than a case. I’m queer for conditions, I say, a scientist distracted by personality. Farmer Brown has an apple, Farmer Jones a pear. If a pear has a sixth more market value than an apple, how much apple must Farmer Brown give to eat a quarter of Farmer Jones’ pear? The Phoenician loves such problems. Make it figs and he’ll hug you.