Searches & Seizures (2 page)

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.

But I am merely a bailbondsman. I spring you, something neutral in the freedom I sell. At least you won’t be cornholed, or beaten by the guards, or have to eat the civic slime. For the time being and the duration of due process you’re your own man still, and may it serve you better than it did before.
For the time being.
Yes, I am chained to the calendar. I live by it. What your watch is to you my calendar is to me. As it happens, I got calendars all over the place, tools of the trade. I get them from garages (French maids in satin uniforms, their bloomers like white carnations), funeral directors (Audubon prints, Niagara Falls), banks (kids with fishing poles, covered bridges in New England), the Hong Kong tailors (panoramas of the harbor), insurance companies (views of downtown Hartford); from trucking firms and liquor stores and laundries. I hang them all in my shop, a storefront across from Cincinnati police headquarters. What views I have! Not a window in the place—the Venetian blinds, always drawn, across the width of the shop—but everywhere I look nature in its green abundance and staggering formations. You’ve come a long way from Phoenicia. But I
don’t
look. All I see are the numbers like seven columns of sums, the red Sundays like a bankrupt’s homework and the glowing, feverish holidays, New Year’s, Washington’s birthday, clean March, April, June and August. May’s flush Memorial Day and July’s gaudy Fourth and all the burning rest. I note who’s to appear where, circle when they show and the case is closed, and make a thick arrow where I’m disappointed. My calendars are like maps and I am secretary to the year itself, up on all its appointments.

The shop looks as if it had once been something else—the source of its own calendars, perhaps, like a liquor store or a real-estate office. It never was. It was always what it is now. Like the sixteen other bondsmen’s offices in the three blocks around police headquarters and the municipal and federal courts. Your bailbond architecture is storefront gypsy, nigger church. The city has a referendum coming up next year, a proposal for a bond issue that would provide a new civic courts complex on some cleared land near the stadium. If it passes I’ll have to move—a nomad still—and if I can’t buy out the small one-man grocery I got my eye on, what I put up will look just like this place, a replica like a little tourist attraction. I wouldn’t feel comfortable writing a bond in one of those chrome and naugahyde bank manager places with their big notched-leaf plants and their clear aquariums with cruising iridescent fish. I need wooden desk from the high school teacher’s office, a broken set of unmatched folding card-table chairs, squat black telephones, a pencil sharpener on the lintel of the window, green metal wastebaskets, dirty linoleum, walls that will take the nails to hold my calendars and a bare floor that can stand up to my small, heavy safe. I need a toilet and washstand in something that used to be a closet, the scaly ceiling and the cheap glass ashtrays, plugs for space heaters and a transom over the front door like the place where they put the old air-conditioning unit in a barbershop. And a place for my arsenal. (I’m armed. I have what the cops have: pistols, mace, a helmet, handcuffs, a rifle, a cosh, even a bulletproof vest.) And shelves, of course, for my library of statutes from those three quarters of the fifty states where bailbonding is still legal. Like a clinic for the poor, something crummy and vaguely volunteer in the air. And tough.

And this is what
I
seem to look like. Mid-fifties, a hairline like a tattered flag, and something in my mug placid and vicious, some kinky catered lust perhaps, used two times a month, say on fourteen-year-old black chicks, my cock moon-pulled, tidal-torn, and you think here’s a guy that turns the tables on those girls, who produces not the fifty he’s promised but the fiver that will not even cover their expenses, and a boot in the blackbird’s ass if she whines, power and cynicism planted there on my municipal kisser and in my eyes that puts me beyond law or retribution or redress, the mien of the mean, the phiz of the respectably ferocious, like a hunter who drinks sour mash. I look professional, you see, a cross between a railroad conductor and a deputy sheriff. You’d expect to see yourself fun-housed in my sunglasses. This is the look of me, the reputation I propagate with my cliché of a face, my death’s pan, the features actually trained into the face. Because the truth is your hood looks up to the impassive: he loves the anesthetized look of the deputy, the sober cosmetics of the hanging judge. Give the public what it wants; the customer is always right. Yes, and business never better. No complaints. Let them scream law and order, yell crime in the streets like the tocsin of a leper. Our times—here’s to ’em. Here’s to the complicated trade routes of the drug traffic, to micro-dot tabs of LSD, to folks’ vengeant itchiness as the discrepancies bloom apace and injustices shake the earth like underground faults. Here’s to moonshots and the confusion of priorities. To TV in the ghetto and ads in the glossies and whatever engines that raise expectations like the hard-on, and drive men up one wall and down the other. To hard times and our golden age of blood!

I’m in the corridor of municipal court by 8:30 each morning, a half-hour before the judge begins to process everybody who was arrested the day before. The old hallway smells of disinfectant, though I can no longer smell it, haven’t smelled it for years, or tasted anything for years either—the twin senses reamed out long ago by ammonia, C-N, all the dirt poisons (I do not taste the liquor I stand the lawyers to, or feel its warmth, though I go
ah,
smack my lips, applaud on my belly my pantomimed thirst) steaming in pails, the heavy, old-fashioned wringers colorless as the pails themselves, as the bleached gray mops and handles.

I see my colleagues, the other bondsmen. They confer with lawyers, approach relatives, those sad-ass poor who huddle there each morning, the faces changed daily but somehow the same, the questions the same, the complaints, the whiny tales of wages docked, not appreciating their small holiday, their kids wild in the hallway and the guards tolerant. (Can they chip marble or leave marks on such tough city property?) There’s no smoking but the Phoenician smokes, not tasting it though his cough seems to betray its effects—I seem marked for lung cancer—like some novice at the beach who does not feel the sun which that night will sear him, turning him red as those useless days on my calendars.

Though I’m here at 8:30, by detaching myself from any single lawyer or group of relatives, by drifting around the hallway from clutch to clutch, I manage somehow to seem to have arrived later than the rest, to make a series of entrances, the spurious authority of the regular on me, the old-timer. It’s only here that I smoke, where no one else may. (I fixed the guard. Years ago I started to give him a hundred bucks a year for the dispensation. I take it off my taxes, a business expense, the cigarettes too.) I move about the crowded corridor, size up the still invisible prisoners by the impression their families make on me, kibitzing one and all, determining in advance whose business to seek out, whose to renounce. I like to see family there because that means roots, strong community ties, and cuts down the risk that a guy will skip, though
too
much depth on the bench is no good. A good mix is what I like best—a brother or brother-in-law there with the wife, maybe a first cousin. A solitary parent is good, even a girl friend if she’s attractive, one or two kids if they’re well behaved. I also take in the lawyer, culling the shyster from the bespoke, the man who’s already on the case—or even better, the guy on retainer, who doesn’t come downtown often. He’s the fellow I nod at, making my bid like a dealer at auctions, though I’m more amiable with the others. I come on strongest with my fellow bondsmen, distracting them, though from time to time there’s real business to discuss, something so big we have to split the bond. But standing in no one place very long, getting a feel for what I want by floating around like a guy at a party casing possibility.