“I bugger sheep,” a man said. “I give it to sows and dogs. How do you like that? A man and his dog. I ride horseback on the bridle path in the park, and I come in my pants. What do you think about that? How low can a man get?”
Then there was a reckless driver, and another man whose pilot’s license had been taken away because he had buzzed his own home for three hours, until he was out of gas and had to make a forced landing on a ballfield where his own kid was playing.
One last convict stood up. “I shouldn’t be here at all,” he said. “What I did was an accident. It couldn’t be helped.
“I was a laborer. I had a job in this factory in my hometown. We made switches for an outfit that turned out radios and television sets. Half the people in town worked there, maybe more. Then the home office decided to close down the plant. It wasn’t economical, they said, to have the switches made in a place a thousand miles away. They relocated the engineers and a few of the foremen and let the rest of us go. There wasn’t any work in town. I did odd jobs, but everybody was doing odd jobs. All the men. The competition was fierce. I had my family to support. We all did. It got to where I wouldn’t lend my tools to my own neighbor for fear he’d find some way to use them that would do me out of a day’s work. And I couldn’t borrow his paintbrushes. I only wanted to touch up the woodwork, thinking maybe I could sell my house, but he figured different. He thought I had this paint job somewhere. He begged me to tell.
“We lived like that six months. A summer, a fall. And always the money getting harder and harder, and the kids so hungry you could see their hunger happening. Then, in the winter, I heard there was work a hundred miles away. A plant was hiring and I figured to go. I saved for the gas and couldn’t make it, and had to beg it off a guy I knew in the one station in town still open. Out on the highway? He gave it to me and I was all set to go, and a storm come up. A terrible storm. The worst I’ve seen. It rained so you couldn’t see to drive, and my wipers was bad. I waited for it to stop, but it didn’t. Three hours later it hadn’t let up. And they was only hiring for five days. One had passed when I heard, three more while I looked for the gas. I only had hours. I had to try.
“So I drove in the rain. Maybe ten miles an hour, and it come down harder, and even harder. I couldn’t see, it was as if I was blindfold. And straining my eyes. I had to pull up. I had to stop. I moved to the shoulder and waited again. Lord, I was tired. Up before dawn. Straining my eyes. Worried like that. Lord, I was tired. But I didn’t dare close my eyes. If I slept and it stopped? So I waited and watched. Two hours, three. And I prayed: God, make it stop. Make it stop, please.
“Then all of a sudden it did. It stopped, it was over. Do you know what I saw? What I saw up ahead? It was clear. It was dry. It hadn’t rained there at all.
“I started my car and got stuck in the mud. I heaved it and hauled, I pulled it away. With my rage, with my strain, I was tired as hell. As weary I think as a man’s ever been. I got in the car and stepped on the gas. Two hours I had before the plant closed. My God, how I drove, how I flew down the road. But my tiredness grew, enormous it was. And just for a second I rested my eyes—
“The accident happened but ten miles from town. Doing eighty and ninety, the witnesses said. I swerved from my lane and hit them broadside. His family was killed, but I was thrown clear. How does that happen? Was it my prayer?
“I landed unconscious, or maybe asleep, but here is the miracle: I woke up refreshed! Mind clear, alert, fresh as a daisy, I guess you could say. And only for minutes had I been out.
“I saw what had happened and sent for the cops. I waited and helped, but there was nothing to do. A baby, a daughter, a wife and a son. The father alive but damaged real bad. Crippled for life and can’t move his arms. Can’t pass his water or chew his own food.
“He sued me, of course. Took me to court. I had no insurance or he would have been rich.
“Well, that’s about it, but there is something else. Refreshed, I keep thinking, I came to refreshed. After the guilt, after the grief. After all that, the fear that I felt, the being in trouble and down on my luck, there’s still something else. The impact, the bang, the damage I did. The crippling, the terror, the spilling of life. The joy I keep feeling, the excitement, delight. The sense that I have of some final deed done. The cleanness I feel, the absence of stain.”
The convict sat down, and the rest of the prisoners were silent.
“He’s right,” one said at last.
“Yes,” murmured another.
“Yes,” still another added, “he’s right.”
“He’s right, he’s right.” They took up the call.
“He’s right,” said the poacher. “He’s right,” said the fence. “He’s right,” said the ghoul. “He’s right,” said the quack and the man who set fires for spite. “He’s right,” the hijacker agreed and the man who screwed pigs.
President Feldman rose and they all looked toward him. “No,” he said. “He’s wrong.” He told them about his basement.
16
Feldman invented the basement by accident, a great serendipity. But afterwards nothing was an accident. He meant every word, every move. So, in a way, the flukishness could be written off. It can almost be said there was nothing accidental about it.
When he had rejected the developer, that kind guy, that gentle jerk and nonbarbarian, he was pretty blue there for a while. He didn’t know where to turn. Very low. Rock-bottom. Feldman, the felled man. Who found himself — what, so down was he, was accidental about this? — in the basement of his store. On holy chthonic ground. And there one day in the record department, scolding a kid who had undone the perfect plastic envelope in which the album had been sealed, he was approached by a nervous young man in a tweed overcoat. “Excuse me,” said the young man. “I’m looking for a record.”
Feldman was about to tell him to ask the clerk — do you see how low, how miserable? — when something about the young man made him stop. His manner, apparently halting, was not really timid at all. It was as if his shyness had been assumed as a courtesy. Feldman listened. “Do you have the records of Mildred Eve?” he asked. Was that all? Feldman wondered. He went to the catalog to look her up, but she wasn’t listed. “She wouldn’t be in the catalog,” the young man said. “She sings party songs.”
Feldman called his distributor. “Why haven’t you been sending me the Mildred Eve records? Do you know how many sales I’ve lost because I don’t have them?”
“Mildred Eve?” the distributor said. “She sings filth. Her stuff is sold under the counter.”
Feldman ordered all her releases and put them on top of the counter. He had the records played on the stereo equipment so that they could be heard all over the basement.
A strange thing happened. Whether because of the music or for some other reason, the tone of the store gradually changed. This was his sense of it, at any rate. There began to appear in the basement certain listless men who seemed to be on lunch breaks, well dressed enough, and carrying briefcases, many of them, but giving off an impression of loitering. There were boys too, wiry and underweight, who seemed to have stepped from morning movies at the downtown theaters. They strolled the aisles of his basement, the rolled sleeves of their tee shirts making pockets for their cigarettes, and dropped their butts without stepping on them. The women seemed to have changed too, to have become faintly aimless, like people killing time in bus stations.