“It’s a goddamned banana republic, we got so many presidents,” someone else said.
“What are we going to do?” Feldman asked.
“What the hell,” the big convict shrugged. “You be the president.” He sat down.
“Installation of officers,” a convict called mechanically. “Let’s get on with it.”
They swore Feldman in at once, the outgoing president administering an oath that he seemed to compose as he went along. (It wasn’t a bad oath, Feldman thought, considering it had been made up on the spur of the moment.)
“Well, what do we do now?” Feldman asked. None of the men said anything. “Old business?” he asked, remembering the formula of the past president (not, despite appearances, a bad officer, all things considered). He tried “New business?” with the same results, then looked around the room at the Crime Club membership. “Let’s steal something,” he suggested, giggling. He stared out at them for a few more minutes and then sat down, no longer uncomfortable. Gradually he felt even more at ease, and despite the physical closeness in the room, he began to grow sleepy and once or twice actually caught himself nodding. He wondered what they were doing over at the Model Airplane Club.
It was strange, another of the endless rituals and counterrituals he had met with here. Some time ago he had begun to think that he saw a design. It had to do with the nullifying of energies, as though the warden’s final intention were to keep the men quiet by having them perceive just what Feldman was slowly perceiving, that they were caught up in a treadmill rhythm of opposing impulses. It seemed too simple a theory perhaps for the elaborateness of the rules and ceremonies, but he was relieved by its very simplicity. It humanized the warden. Not that it made him kinder or easier to get along with, but it stripped away some of the mystery. If the mystery was unearned he was glad to know it. And now, hoping that they knew it too, he felt suddenly closer to his fellow convicts. Surely they shared his perceptions and accepted them. (After all, they all stood to gain from passivity, stood to gain from the saltpetered food and the worked-off violence and the deflection of their intentions. Let us all take the cold shower together, he thought. Let everyone behave: no prison breaks, no complaints about the food, no misspelled petitions for the redress of grievances.) Expansive, he felt not their good will, but the clubby chill of their sophistication. Their discreet indifference was attractive. Something could be said for superior sales resistance, for sulk and moroseness of spirit, and suddenly he felt like congratulating them and being congratulated by them. “We’ll pull through,” he would have said, “it’s not so bad.” Before he could speak, however — and why, anyway, did he want to? why had he tried to comfort his personnel that time in the soiled back rooms of his department store? what had he meant to tell them? why did he still feel a necessity to respond? was his own sales resistance not so superior after all? — he heard a stirring of the chairs and someone rising.
“I’ll tell you something about crime,” a convict said, startling him with the unexpectedness of his speech. “It’s too indoorsy. Why’s your average con doing time today? Shit, look at the terms used to describe him: he’s a breaker and enterer; he’s a second-story man; he’s on the inside, he says of his jail, behind the walls. It’s all inside jobs, I tell you. What’s his own term for the world but the outside? Never Chicago, never Detroit.
“His pallor. His plans made in pool halls! All that messing with locks, that struggle with safes. And rape! Breaking, entering and the airtight case.
“What, I ask you, is the highest act of crime? The one that takes the most planning, the greatest research and preparation? It’s the bank robbery — the bank robbery! All that snuggling in cozy vaults down among the safe-deposit boxes. He asks for it. Your crook asks for it. He loves his handcuffs, worships his bars, his restraints. Give him balls and chain, give him ringbolts, straw in a dungeon give him. And don’t talk to me about escape. That’s all it is, my dears — talk. Why, these jails couldn’t hold us a minute if we really believed in escape. Twenty to one? Thirty? Fifty to one? One hundred to one in many places. What odds are we waiting for? It’s a sickness. Most of your crime is a sickness.
“I became a sluice robber, and I remained outdoors. I breathed real air in my lungs. And the sun. Three years I’ve been here, and I’ve still a piece of my tan. That’s how deep it burns you. The bones themselves are browned by now. And there was never any skulking, any stooping, any crawling. And I never hid in hallways or crouched behind the stairs.
“The troughs I robbed, like great wooden Babels up the mountain. The tumbling nuggets, oh, that skittery wealth. It wasn’t robbery. You couldn’t call it robbery. Just a man on a line on a mountain with sense enough to reach. And first on line too. First. To cut the theft if there was one, and give a sporting target. (I was caught on a mountain.) All I ever needed was to make a fist. I made tools of my palms — as God intended — found a use for my opposing thumbs. God’s will in a handful, you guys. (And testing always my prehensileness, growing a grasp.) Palming more than magicians palm, then basketball players.”
His eyes shone, glittered with memory. Feldman felt he should say something, call for order. Though no one made a sound, it was as if there had been a sudden displacement of passion in the room, like the pressure of the first thighs against a barricade.
“Nevada is right,” a convict said.
“He’s wrong.”
“No, he’s right. Only he’s got too narrow a sense of it. I’m a rustler — horses, cattle. The feel of flesh is what I like, the mass of beast. All that muscle. All that meat. Like an appointment at the source of things. It was nothing for me to steal a hundred tons, two hundred, three. Think of the weight of such a theft.”
“Booty is bulk and bulk booty,” a convict heckled.
“The nostrils,” the rustler said, raising his voice above their laughter, “that wild gristle. The rheumy eyes, their mucky silts. Those dreadful genitals and those steamy hides.”
“I don’t understand any of that,” another prisoner said quietly, “but if it’s the wide-open spaces that Nevada was talking about, or that Tex here meant when he said he agreed with him, I can see the reasoning.”
“I’m a poacher,” a prisoner said. “In my time I’ve fished other men’s rivers and killed the deer in other men’s woods. There’s nothing beats nature, men. I’m a bit of a squatter too. I’ve done some squatting. I nick myself off a piece of their land, and they never miss it, don’t know it’s gone.”
“Kentucky, you piker, you make me ashamed,” a fourth man said. “I’m a sooner. I steal land. Vast tracts in Alaska. In Hawaii vast tracts. Land, steal land. I jump the gun and beat the bell and move before the whistle. I’ve made a living out of always being offside, and I tell you there’s nothing like it. The race is always to the swift.”
“I know about that,” said a fifth convict. “I trespass too. But deeper than you boys. Down, deep down in the mines. I jump other men’s claims. I move in and take over. It’s work, but rewarding. I hate the sluice robber. He’s meager. I tell him to his face.”
I’m in Hell, Feldman thought. I’m the president of Hell. How had he ever imagined these men to be indifferent?
“Well, you’re all out of touch, it seems to me. You live in the past. The mines are played out. There’s detergent in the rivers and streams. Tourists in the forests pose the bears. Myself, I’m an artist.” The forger was speaking. “There’s got to be some art to crime. It’s show biz. Catch me with a gun? The rough stuff is out. Jazz and pizzazz are what’s wanted today. Me, I forge license plates. I’m a sort of a sculptor.”