The Ink Truck

by William Kennedy

  “What’s the big cockamamie idea,” Deek said, “parking trucks in the middle of the cockamamie street?”

  The stillness of an instant: all sound gone from around Bailey, his shoulders epauleted with new snow, his neck wet from it, a halo caught in the crown of his black hat. He gripped the twisted car bumper and knelt with one knee on the street. Rosenthal was an upright shadow, the guards silhouettes of belligerence behind him, and Deek was screaming at the ink-truck driver like a voiceless figure in a dream. He did not feel the ground wet beneath him, nor the bumper cold in his gloveless hand. He stared at the bull’s-eye of black, the outer circle of gray on the white floor of the street beneath the truck.

  Drippings.

  There were no petcocks, no gauges, no spigots, no knobs, no ratchets, no panels, no bolts, no bevelings, no teeth, no doors, no caps, no rotators, no pin: only a smooth sheet of steel which covered the entire rear of the truck, hinged at one side, padlocked stoutly at the other.

  From an unseen source inside the steel sheet, ink dripped, only one drip since this instant began, but it caught his eye. It had soaked outward into the snow in concentric circles, black into gray into white. At the center, where it fell, where it had fallen for all the time that the ink truck was parked, the ebony blackness shone up like the eye of a devil. Transfixed by the spot, he stared into timelessness and the futility of his deeds. Why did he rely on others? Why did he yield to the seduction of impossible dreams? He knew he was better than his failures, but in the center of himself a seed burst and a black flower bloomed. Did only the seeds of new abominations lurk beneath the crust?

  Another drop.

  It might have fallen onto the tip of Smith’s upraised knife. Challenge unanswered. Dare undared. When the company (was it Stanley?) hired the gypsies, Guildsmen shrank inside their fear, fell away. The gypsies stood their sullen watch in front of private homes. Who can live under the hostile eye? Who can live under the upraised knife? There were a few, and Bailey was one. The driven Bailey. But what did it mean to live eye to eye with the sallow, the sullen, the silent face? What did it mean to dream, only dream, of black rivers? Another timid dream out of an innocent, bygone Bailey age. Now the devil’s eye looked at Bailey and drew him out of innocence. Behold my blackness. Let it seep in and nourish the black flower. Change your ways, Bailey. Make your mark, Bailey. You thought you were done with piss-ant behavior, but you fooled yourself again. You covered yourself. Look at your hat Bailey. See the halo. See how much whiteness still hovers over you. Burn it, Bailey. Burn the whiteness. You see now the abominations that only wait to be born in you. Seek the abominable, Bailey. Burn the abominable, Bailey. O most abominable Bailey, burn, burn, burn.

  In marijuana clarity Deek once leaped over his father’s head from a standing position. Barely touching the ground, he leaped back again, then forward, until he was leaping twice as high as his father. He leaped over his house, then back. He leaped over his block, his neighborhood. With exultation he was readying a leap over the city, but he hesitated too long, and everything changed. No temporizing now. In front of the company garage at the edge of the yard he heard himself yelling at the truck driver and at the guard, who said nothing but watched with his hand on his smooth, brown club. Deek wore no hat, as did Bailey, but what did that matter? He took the measure of the guard, felt equal. The guard had no gun. Deek was not playing to the gathering crowd, but so many faces buoyed him, protected him. In his suede jacket and with Levi’s tucked into ski boots, he knew his uniform was correct for the task at hand. Nothing cumbersome, the foot a weapon. Also he looked as he should: tight, formed, knowing.

  “You guys think you own the road.”

  “Okay, sonny,” the guard said. “Move that car.”

  Behind Deek the garage door went up. He looked into the black interior, saw a form receding, oil cans along the wall. A siren. The police at last. Time running away.

  “Let him move the truck.”

  The club touched his suede chest, and he pushed it away, stepping back. It rose again on the hinge of the guard’s fingers, and he stepped back again, cocked his arm in the shadows. When the police car whined to a halt he did not look. Keep your eye on the ball. But the guard looked toward the police, and the tension went out of Deek’s half-raised arm, his fingers began to uncurl. He then felt an arm tighten around his neck, pulling him into the darkness.

  When the window would not yield to his push, Bailey smashed it with his fist, then hid behind the snowcapped hedges, determined to do what he would do even if someone answered the crash. But no one came, and he unlocked the window, crawled inside. The shades were all down; yet he lighted only a moving circle of floor as he stepped carefully across the room. Willful. Abomination. He wanted first to see what they did in this room.

  He moved along the walls, finding wooden chairs, an empty table; in a corner a waist-high pile of newspapers. He found Putzina’s crystal ball, not even a ball; just a half-round magnifying glass set into a hollowed-out piece of wood and draped with a purple rag. The white eye of his flashlight stared doubly out of the glass, and his own hand rose up from its depths as he moved the light closer. He edged around the entire room, seeing only filthy walls, unpainted floorboards, and he whispered to himself: “They work with nothing at all.”

  He felt the wet rag in his pocket, soaking through his coat, his pants, dampening his flesh even though he had wrapped it in a newspaper. He took it out now, smelling its power. It had taken him almost five freezing minutes to wet it through, dipping its loose twists into the open carburetor of a car in the shadows of the parking lot, then pulling the linkage until the ejaculated spray had saturated it.

  Now, he thought, you are giving it back to them in a way they’ll understand. Now you have changed. You are done with empty works. Master of the Order of the Black Flower. Company of one.

  The pile was neat. He lit the match.

  The policeman had told Rosenthal twice to get out of the car. Twice he did not move. The third time the policeman said only: “Out or I drag you out.”

  Rosenthal, with a great show of pain, slid across the seat away from the policeman’s face, toward the sidewalk. Jarvis hummed frantically under his coat. And where was Bailey? And his pin man? Rosenthal had seen Deek in the garage doorway, then when he looked again he was gone. Now a police tow truck had backed up, a policeman hooking a chain to Deek’s bumper. How would Mr. Dad explain this to the company in the morning? A guard hovered as Rosenthal slid off the edge of the seat and dropped his feet into the snow. Rosenthal stood, leaned, slid along the outside of the rear door as the guard slammed the front door. Leaning with one arm on the car roof, Rosenthal edged back toward the front end and looked at the damage. He bent over, saw the smashed area and realized only then that his knee was seriously hurt. It gave way then and he fell on his side in the snow. The walkie-talkie slipped out and lay in front of his face. Jarvis. Old Jarvis. He pressed the button.

  “I wonder if you have any instructions,” he said softly into the radio.

  “You see that kid by the corner?” came Jarvis’ voice.

  Rosenthal looked at the newsboy, who was selling the first edition to the crowd with great success.

  “I see him.”

  “Put a picket on him,” Jarvis said.

  Rosenthal put Jarvis back in his pocket and sat up. There were no pickets anywhere. Even the picket captain had fled. The tow truck backed up to Rosenthal’s car and lifted its rear end, pulled it to the parking lot and left it. Deek’s car was already off the street. So was Bailey’s. Rosenthal was in control of his knee but content to sit in the snow. Then Bailey broke through the crowd and came over with his hand out. They walked slowly to the corner.

  “Is Jarvis coming down? Is he sending any help?”

  “I’ll ask,” Rosenthal said. He pressed the button again. “We could use reinforcements, Jarvis. Did anybody show up?”

  But no answer came, and when they looked up at the Guild room window where Jarvis ha
d been standing, he was not in sight.

  “He’s gone,” Rosenthal said.

  “You suppose he went to dinner?”

  “It’s possible, but he usually eats earlier than this.”

  “He may have had a late lunch.”

  “Not Jarvis. What happened to your friend who knew about ink-truck pins?”

  “Weasled out. Did you notice the fire?”

  Rosenthal turned to see the gypsy storefront in flames, guards running toward it. A policeman called for fire apparatus on the tow truck’s radio.

  “I wonder how that happened,” Rosenthal said.

  The mob increased as the fire engines arrived. Firemen hosed the flames as Bailey and Rosenthal watched silently from across the street. Rosenthal knew; knew from Bailey’s curious smile, and silence. A vision of the penitentiary loomed.

  “I lost track of Deek,” Rosenthal said.

  “A game kid,” Bailey said. “I like his style.”

  The womb must be like this, Deek thought, doubled into the fetal position, swinging helplessly in the air inside the bag of darkness. When they pulled him into the garage and closed the door, the guard drove the wind out of him with two blows of the club and tied his hands and feet with wire.

  “Who is he?” the guard asked.

  The man with the earring who grabbed him from behind spoke as he wound the wire around.

  “I don’t know him, but he was with them all day. New blood from outside is my guess.”

  They bound his hands over his groin and held them fast with wire around his thighs. Then they shoved him into the burlap sack and hoisted him high. Only the taillights of a company truck illuminated the area while they worked, but inside the bag Deek could see no light at all. He made no sound when the first blow landed. The bag spun. The second blow curved around his back. A hose. Another slammed across his face. He felt the welts rising as he spun, tasted blood. He thought they would kill him, but for what? He would get them if he didn’t die. He had seen both their faces. He buried his bloody face away from the new blows. No, I won’t die from this, he thought.

  “Now,” he heard, and the bag plummeted to the floor, but from what height, Deek did not have a chance to guess.

  Rosenthal saw the garage door open and stared at it, only a fraction of the interior blackness visible from where he stood. But he did not see Deek rolled into the snow of the company yard, for at that instant he heard the woman’s shriek and looked back to the fire to see Putzina in her long skirt, her bandanna around her head, running across the crisscross of fire hoses, through the axed door with its broken glass and into the building. A fireman screamed at her, ran to grab her skirt, but she was inside. He turned a twisted mouth to the others on the sidewalk who had been as helpless as he in stopping her. Less than a minute, Rosenthal guessed, and she came running as she had gone, but with her coat, her bandanna, her skirt flaming. The fireman clutched her to his black rubber coat, threw her into the pile of snow in front of the building and smothered her body with his own. In her hands she held a newspaper, folded like a fish wrapper. She beat out its flaming edges on the snow in which she lay. Even from across the street Rosenthal could recognize the money as it flew out with each new thwack of the paper on the snow.

  “That old woman,” Bailey said.

  Rosenthal heard the garage door close and only then saw Deek’s crumpled body. He nudged Bailey and they ran to Deek, hovered over him.

  “I think one of my legs is broken,” Deek said. Blood oozed from his forehead, his cheeks, his swollen lips.

  Bailey shook his head. “I don’t know what to do about this,” he said.

  “There’s nothing to be done,” said Rosenthal. “Just get him to a hospital.”

  “We blocked the bugger for a little bit,” Deek said.

  “They won’t forget us for a while,” Rosenthal told Deek.

  Bailey stared at Deek’s bloody face. “Garbage,” he said.

  Rosenthal looked up to see that the truck had been moved to the inner wall of the company yard. Its driver stood beside the truck’s spigot, monitoring the flow of ink into the press room. Bailey threw off his hat and like a goaded bull, head down, charged across the yard and butted the back of a guard who stood beside the driver. As the guard went down, two others converged on Bailey with clubs, and when he went limp they dragged him to the sidewalk and dropped him face down in the snow. Rosenthal pillowed Deek’s head with Bailey’s hat and limped toward Bailey. As he dragged him toward his car, Irma ran out of the crowd, and together they lifted Bailey into the back seat. The front wall of the burning building collapsed into a river of slush. Deek grunted with pain as they carried him to the car and laid him on the floor. Irma sat with her feet straddling Deek’s chest, Bailey’s head in her lap, blotting his blood with her bright orange scarf.

  Bailey opened his eyes and looked up at her.

  “The trouble with richly endowed women like yourself,” he said, “is that they lack a sense of humor about life.”

  “Shut up and quit bleeding,” Irma said.

  As Rosenthal drove, the bent fender rubbed against the tire, humming like a giant fly suffering an insecticidal death. Yet it was not without its musical quality and as Bailey regained full consciousness near the hospital, it was a fit orchestration for the banal thoughts that passed through his head.

  MISSING STRIKER MAY BE VICTIM OF FOUL PLAGUE

  BLACK SPOTS MIGHT BE SORE POINTS

  Characteristic it was of Tom Swift to act calmly in times of stress and danger, and he ran true to form now. Only for an instant did he show any sign of perturbation. Then with calmness and deliberation the young inventor quickly did a number of things to the controls within his reach.

  —VICTOR APPLETON

  Tom Swift and His Undersea Search

  Rosenthal’s knee had grown to half again its size, and so he too lay on a stretcher beside Bailey and Deek, all of them behind a white curtain in a partition of the emergency room. An intern had treated all their visible wounds and now Irma ministered to the three with words and a cold towel, waiting for the nurse to wheel them individually to the X-ray room.

  “Oh, you stupid, stupid people.”

  She pitied the three men on the stretchers: sweet Rosenthal, the new and gorgeous young Deek, and Bailey. She could love them all. Cuddle and coddle them. Pet them. Bring them inside. Smother their trouble with her breasts. Talk to them, listen to them. Such marvelous men who would never grow old because they would never grow up. Bailey was almost thirty-five but he was as young as Deek, really. And Rosenthal, gentle man with an indestructible vanity. No, they wouldn’t age; they would die running, die on top of a woman or with a fist in the face of an enemy. Give up the Guild? Why, she might as well give up God. Give up Bailey? How? Bailey was born under a star. He was born with a caul; he told her that. He was an outlaw now. She knew he set the fire; he was the only one capable of it. But that was because he was always an outlaw. Now others would see what Irma had long known: that most of his character was buried. Bailey the iceberg. Bailey the tree with roots as deep as his leaves were tall.

  “Irma, wipe my forehead,” Bailey said.

  She heard the gypsies arrive before she saw them: humming, wailing softly as they shuffled in behind the stretcher that bore their queen. The ambulance attendants put Putzina in a private room just off the emergency-ward corridor, and in front of the closed door six gypsies took up their vigil. Smith sat nearest the door, a movie camera on his lap.

  The wailing, broken by sudden silences and then begun anew, drew Irma away from her stretcher cases to the doorway, where she watched the tableau. She feared the gypsies as everyone feared their secret ways. Did they really want to be left alone as they said? Smith seemed to contradict that notion. She heard him talking for the benefit of a crowd of scabs one night in Fobie’s. The scabs were admiring his earring, a gold, scimitar-shaped baseball bat that dangled from his right earlobe. Irma saw his eyes shine when he explained that the bat bore the facsi
mile signature of Ted Williams. “Remember the day,” Smith added in glory tones, “when Ted hit the home run and then gave all his fans the finger?”

  Bailey said Smith wasn’t his real name. Bailey knew from his uncle that his true name was Séptimo Ascensor, which meant seventh elevator, but that he changed it to Séptimo Smith because he wanted to be an American.

  The more Irma studied the gypsy grief, the more her fear gave way, the more love burgeoned in her heart for an outcast people. Smith was a repulsive little bald man; she did not want to love him. But she could console him, mother him a little in a moment when his own mother was so gravely hurt. He was all rumples in his ill-fitting suit coat and pants, his shirt long unwashed and his ten-cent-store pretied necktie undone from the collar and hanging down his shirtfront like a broken flower.

  “I hope your mother isn’t too badly hurt,” Irma said.

  Smith did not speak, did not look at her. The gypsies around him stopped their wails.

  “Is that your camera? Do you take movies?”

  He gave her a blank look.

  “I thought you quit the Guild,” he said.

  “I did,” she said, “but only today. How could you know?”

  He wound his camera and photographed Irma from her shoes to her head.

  “You didn’t answer me. And why are you taking pictures?”

  “Channel Eight will do a special if Putzina dies. And there’s a Paris director who’s been after me for years for films of a queen’s funeral. Five thousand if he likes it. Not bad, eh?”

  “You’re pretty cool about it, I’d say. Your own mother and all.”

  “If I get worked up, I get eczema. No sense in making a thing out of it if she doesn’t die. And if she does, well, after all, she’s a queen. She belongs to the world. What a selfish son I’d be if I kept her death all to myself.”