Searches & Seizures (5 page)

“Yes, sir.”

“We would rather be a banker in a fine suit. We would rather conduct discreet business over drinks at the club. Heart to heart, man to man, gentlemen’s agreements and a handshake between friends. We would prefer silver at our temples and a portrait in oils in the marble lobby.
But…
”

Even Crainpool gets the benefit of my colorful rhythms. This is what is distasteful, not the high hand and the strong arm. The rhetoric. To be laconic, taciturn, the quiet type. To speak modestly and thank my clients for their custom. Nothing can make up for this, not the viciousness or the seamy excitements or my collective, licey knowledge of the world. Boy oh boy, what goes on. My thoughts explode in words. I tell Crainpool.

“Do you know, Mr. Crainpool, the progress of the liver fluke through a cow’s intestine to a human being?
That’s
a picture. The trematode worm forms itself in shit, is discharged in a cow’s stool. It can’t crawl, it can’t fly. All its mobility is concentrated toward one end, the act of boring. So, good nature’s corkscrew that it is, it infiltrates the foundation of a blade of grass. Everything else in the cow pat dies off—every microbe, every virus. Just the flatworm, rising out of its matrix of shit like a befouled Phoenix to nest in the basement of a single blade of grass, only that survives. Even the cow moves on, wants distance between its manure and its lunch. Well, the rains come, the sun shines, the grass grows. The fluke hasn’t hurt it; it’s only along for the ride. Till finally it’s at the top, which is the only part of the grass that the sheep will touch—his heart of artichoke and palm. A connoisseur, the sheep. And that’s all that that trematode has been waiting for, some nasty radar in him that Reveres his logy instincts and tells him the sheep are coming, the sheep are coming. Lying in ambush all that time till the grass is high enough to munch. Then the paralyzed little creature goes crazy. It hasn’t stirred its ass all the while it’s been on the grass, mind, but now suddenly it leaps out of its wheelchair and walks, runs, does fucking triples, commandos the sheep’s liver, where it’s wanted to be all along, you see. Swimming the mile, doing the decathlon, dancing, dining, diamonds shining, making right for the liver, riding there like an act of vengeance, like a bronco-buster, spoiling the sheep’s piss, poisoning the ground the sick sheep shits. Only now it’s metamorphosed, now it’s some viper butterfly to sting the heels of the barefoot kid on one of those fucking calendars of ours. Nature’s nasty marathon, its stations of the cross and inside job.

“And the same with people. What the liver fluke can do man can do. The fix is in, takes two to tango, all crime’s a cooperation. This I wanted to see. I’ve seen it, show me something else. Phooey. A Phoenician’s phooey on it all.”

Crainpool listens and nods, but his eyes are glazing. Not much interested in the overview, my Mr. Crainpool, not much feeling for the morphology of our business.

I dreamed of Oyp and Glyp again last night. Perhaps I should tell Crainpool. Would cheer him up. Well, I won’t, don’t. Bother Crainpool’s moods. I’ll be his Nature as Nature is mine. Ah, Nature, who can send us so many dreams, which do you choose? Do we dream of feasts? Three-star Michelin picnics on a checkered cloth on soft, spongy zoysia, wicker work baskets with wine in linen and gorgeous chicken sandwiches on a windless day? Of beautiful women yielding to us in lovely water, or riding behind us bareback on horses in splendid country? Do we hear wit in our sleep, or does Nature deposit millions in our account or furnish our houses as we would wish them? Does She show us new colors or sound new notes or whisper good news? Would She grant us a view of the stars close up, or entertain us with the contemplation of beasts? Where is there to be found in dreams new masterpieces to study or even the slow motion of the ordinary cinema? No. She is too niggardly, gives us rag-shop, rubbish, engineers trivial enigma we forget on rising. Better altogether to leave us dreamless—but no, not Nature. She sends us Oyp and Glyp. I can’t really remember where they were in my dream, but it was someplace high, I think, mountains (though the view was not spectacular), above Nature’s three-mile limit, smug, warm behind their beards—they do not have beards in life; they’d grown them there, though these were matted ice and hair, an awful aspic. I saw them from below. (I was not even with them.) Such heights no place for a Phoenician; God gave us men to match our mountains. Oyp and Glyp. They’re alive. Alive and loose and flouting my extraditionary will. But there’s my comfort if the dream speaks true. They are still together, and to find one is to find both. It wasn’t so with Evans, it wasn’t so with Stern, it wasn’t so with Trace. The Phoenician’s scattered, his Diaspora’d enemies drifting outward like the universe. It took years to find them. I put them together like a collection.

“Will there be any special instructions for me today, sir?”

“Do your accounts. Update your inventory. Bookkeep me my criminals. Advance the calendars. Mullins has run out of postponements. We can pull off November now.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Destroy it. Don’t just leave it lying about as you did October.”

“No, sir.”

“I want November off my walls and out of here.”

“I’m rather fond,” Crainpool says slyly, “of the angler in hip boots. He looks like my brother.”

“Sure, kid, take it.” I think Crainpool keeps a scrapbook of the pictures on my calendars. That angler doesn’t look like his brother. He has no brother. I think Crainpool associates the pictures with the month’s crimes in some mnemonic way. November would be a rapist and three car thieves, a pair of armed assaults, a little breaking and entering, a dangerous driver and a berk who threw away a suitcase of traffic tickets. Crainpool’s Wanted poster Americana. Perhaps he’s right, perhaps there’s more connection than I’ve thought about between the pictures on those calendars and the life of crime. “It’s all yours, sirrah, a fringe benefit.”

“Yes, sir, thank you.”

“Stay by the phones, it’s a telethon. When that cop calls, tell him I’m at the jail. Have him leave a message with Lou who the guy is I’m supposed to see.”

“Sir?”

“Yes, Mr. Crainpool?”

“Shouldn’t you take the call yourself? The officer might be reluctant to pass on such information through a fellow policeman.”

“Reluctant? You forget the liver fluke, sir. Where would the liver fluke be if he attended the cow’s compunction or the sheep’s scruple? Screw his sensibilities and reluctances. I’m down at the jail.” I take my hat and go out. The little bakery bell tinkles pleasantly and I smile. I have made my joyful noise in the world.

The jailhouse is two miles from municipal court—a big reason for that referendum next year—and I call there regularly. I like the idea of having places to be to conduct my business. I have the route salesman’s heart. It gets me outside. There are many such places: the jail (and its interview rooms where I consult with my clients), the courthouse, police headquarters, various law offices, the chambers of certain judges, even the main post office (one of the best ways to trace a jumper is to keep in touch with the postal authorities; sooner or later some of them send in one of those change-of-address cards requesting that their mail be redirected to a particular P.O. box in a distant city), the homes and apartments of their relatives, and, when I’m on the road tracing these mugs, the world itself. I don’t drive—I know how but I don’t—and always take public transportation (you might spot someone you’re looking for or overhear something you need to know; you can’t do this in a closed car).

The jailhouse is my favorite. It relaxes me to go there. There’s a lot of shit and sycophancy in this business. It’s “Yes, Your Honor” and “No, Your Honor” even when the guy is on your payroll. The lawyers are worse; they think we’re scum. I keep half the town’s lawyers in booze, but have yet to be invited to have a drink with one. I always send a nice present when their kids get married but have never been within goddamn hailing distance of one of those weddings. So the jail relaxes me. It’s all cops there. Cops and robbers. And though I’m as deferential to the guards as I am to the biggest judge or hot-shot pol, somehow I don’t mind so much.

It’s a big facility, eleven stories high with rough gray stone and bars so black and thick you can make them out even on the top story, law and order’s parallel lines. I love the jail. It’s a building which constantly hums, murmurs, the cons at the windows of the lower floors ragging the pedestrians or shouting obscenities across the areaway to the women’s block. And the woman shouting back, soliciting Johns from the eighth floor. The invitations and promises tumbling all that way somehow lose their viciousness, space moderating the human voice. It’s as though they were all outside at recess and the rest of us indoors with flus and colds.

Some old gal spots me getting off the bus. (Whores must have incredible vision.) “Dey’s dat nice Mr. Bondsman,” she yells. “Hidy, lover. You still got dat golden prick on you? Man got a golden weewee,” she explains to the street.

“Whut you sayin’, fool?
Him?
Ain’ nuthin’ weewee ’bout it. It de Trans’lantic Cable. You kin get J’rus’lem on it. One time I call up Poland, talk to de Prince.”

“Dat de hot line den in dat white man’s pan’s?”

“Yeah, dass ri’, dass it all ri’.”

“If dat so,” another voice adds, “let dat boy get up de vigorish an’ get us all a partner.”

“You means a pardon.”

“Shit, fool, I know what I means. I means a
partner.
I gettin’
tired
dis ole cellmate dey gimme. She ain’ no bad
lookin’
girl, ya unnerstan’, but she got fingernails on her like de railroad spikes. She makin’ my po’ ole hole
bleed.
”

A crowd has gathered in the street to listen. Another face has come to the window and takes the place of the woman who has just spoken. “Dat ain’ blood, honey, dass gism. Dis gal got fo’ty years ub de gism packed up her crack. I jus’ heppin’ her to get it out. She got so much gism we habbin’ us snowball fights up heah.” The men laugh.

I squint against the sun and look up at the women, staring into their eclipse. I can’t recognize them, though I go with whores from time to time. If they know me it’s because I’ve become part of the jail’s unofficial personnel, as the lawyers have. They wouldn’t dare speak this way to the guards, or even to the prison’s cooks and bakers. Nor, I’ve noticed, do they tease each other’s visitors. Only strangers and those of us who can help them.

The girls have had their turn. Now it’s the men’s chance at me. An enormous black face appears at a barred window on the third floor. He sticks his arms through the bars and holds them out in front of him, suddenly turning his head and bending, pressing his ear against the bars as if he’s listening to them. He makes some sort of imaginary adjustment on the bars with the fingers of his right hand, then strums them with his left. He begins to sing in a loud, terrible voice.

“
I got de blooooooz,

I got de blooooooz,

Oh boy oh boy, do I got de blooooooz!

I got de blues in de mornin’

I got de blues in de ebenin’,

I eben got de blues in de afternoooooon.

I got de blooooooz,

I got de mornin’, ebenin’, afternoon blues.

I got de blues in Febr’ary,

I got de blues in fall,

I got de blooooooz on Thursday, April twelfth.
”

A white face appears in the cell next to his. “I’m in a jungle,” he screams. “I’m in a fucking jungle. I’m locked up in a fucking jungle with a bunch of fucking coons. I feel like Dr. David Fucking Livingstone.”

The black man opens his fingers and turns fiercely to the white man. “You made me drop my guitar, you pink-toed bastard. How in hell I supposed to practice without I got a guitar? How they gonna scubber me I ain’t got my twenty-string guitar? It’s useless to me now all busted up on the cement. You think they treat Leadbelly this way?”

“Use your accordion,” someone calls. “Let them discover you on the accordion.” There are many white faces at the windows now.

The singer disappears, returns, thrusts his arms through the bars again and starts to make crazy, waving, squeezing movements.

“
Lady ub Spain, ah adores you,
Lady ub Spain, ah adores you.
”

He breaks off. “It ain’t the same,” he says disconsolately.

“Then take up track!” a prisoner shouts. They laugh.

Below them I applaud. “Very funny, ladies,” I call. “Very amusing, gentlemen.”

“You liked it?”

“Oh, yes. ‘Vastly entertaining dot dot dot.’ ‘Four stars dot dot dot—Alexander Main, Cincinnati bailbondsman.’ You’ve got a big hit, kids. Boffo!”

“You think they’ll hold us over?”

“Months. Years.” I do a two-step, a little shuffle. I break into song:

“
There’s no business like show business,

Like no business I know.