The Ink Truck

by William Kennedy

  “I’m looking for Mr. Smith,” she said. “He’s one of the gypsies.” The guard looked at her and dragged on his cigar, then blew a smoke ring at her.

  “She says she’s looking for Smith,” he said to the driver, who smiled. Then both men looked ahead through the windshield.

  “Well, have you seen him? Do you know where I can find him? Or any of the gypsies?”

  The driver raced the motor, drowning out some of her words.

  “If you can’t tell me about Smith and the gypsies, maybe you’ll be able to give me Stanley’s home phone number.”

  Both guards killed their smiles. The driver shoved the shift lever into reverse and backed across the yard with a screech of tires. He nosed the car around, flicked on the headlights and began moving toward Irma, who was already in motion, running toward Rosenthal. The guard stopped only a few feet away as Rosenthal pulled in at the curb, his car door swinging open, and yanked Irma inside.

  His arm was on her shoulder as he sped off, and the thought came to him: There is trial and error in all relationships. Have courage. Sometimes we draw strength from one another. We don’t always bleed one another dry, and the trick is caution. But no matter how cautious he might be, he knew there were stumbling blocks in any new relationship with Irma. They were blocks he had stepped over all his life, never picking them up. He seemed in puberty again, groping to understand his animality. He held Irma’s arm as if it were a fragile vase. He was oddly awed that after such violence he was able to concentrate only on her. He could see a great deal of her left thigh the way she was sitting, and he eyed it without turning his head.

  “You saved my life,” Irma told him.

  “That’s a fringe benefit from Guild membership. I’d let nonmembers and scabs make it on their own.”

  “Everything suddenly seems different,” she said, “like we all died and went nowhere.”

  “Don’t dwell on death. You’re all right. Bailey’ll be all right too.”

  “Says who?”

  “I’m going to call Stanley.”

  “You don’t know his number. You’ll never get through.”

  “I’ll call the company.”

  He parked by a drugstore and Irma followed him to the phone booth. He left the booth door open so she could hear.

  “This is Mr. Rosenthal from the Guild,” he told the company operator. “I want to speak to Stanley.”

  “He’s gone for the day.”

  “Connect me with his home then. This is life or death.”

  “I am unable to do that. Sorry.”

  “Will you see he gets a message then?”

  “That’s what I’m here for, bozo.”

  “All right. Tell Stanley that I know the gypsies have abducted my friend Bailey, and that I will consider it a holy crusade to avenge through Stanley any harm done to Bailey. Tell Stanley I would therefore massacre all of his relatives and desecrate their graves at the earliest opportunity. Tell him that I would blow up his house and car, poison his pets and destroy all that he owns in the world. And when done with that I would seek him out and strangle him slowly over a twenty-four- or perhaps forty-eight-hour period. Do you have that?”

  Silence.

  “I say, do you have that?”

  “To be sure,” came the operator’s abstracted whisper.

  “Excellent,” Rosenthal. “And so good night. And thirty.”

  Irma took his arm when he came out of the booth, kissed his cheek.

  The difference between Bailey and Rosenthal, Irma thought, is that Bailey confronts the flow of life by running into the middle of it. Rosenthal waits for it to wet his foot. But they both swim in it. Lovely, she thought, feeling great warmth toward Rosenthal. But when he leaned toward her, moved his hands past the gearshift, stopped briefly on the tan leather seat and then bounced onto the inside of her thigh, she frowned and lifted the hand away.

  “What the hell,” she said, “don’t you even inquire?”

  “Does Bailey?”

  “Ah ha, you fiend.”

  “Fair’s fair.”

  “I’m not attracted to you, Rosy. Not bedwise.”

  “I’m exceptionally well hung.”

  “Medical science may be interested.”

  “I’ve always thought you were desirable.”

  “That’s lovely, and nice for my ego, but what’s the point? Twenty minutes in the back seat to bleed your bioemotional need? Then what?”

  “I hadn’t carried it beyond a beginning.”

  “Well, goddamn it,” she said, suddenly angered, “carry it beyond. Don’t just sit there sending out feelers that make sense only inside your head. Find out what’s in my head, why don’t you? Establish my reality. You think I hang around just to relieve your glands?”

  But when he dipped his eyes, she thought: Poor Rosy, sulking now. Inside his cape. Under his feather. He never hated himself in all the Guild times. Failure couldn’t do that to him. Will he despise himself now for insulting a lady? And guessing wrong?

  “I’m not insulted,” Irma said. “I really am flattered. I didn’t mean to yell.”

  “I’m not very good at seduction,” Rosenthal said. “I got bashful as I grew older. You wouldn’t have known me in college. I used to take off my pants in public for a gag.” He paused. “You’re the only one I’ve told that to in twenty years.”

  “I’m flattered again.”

  “I could tell you things.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Last year when we needed money I got a part-time job as the Easter Bunny. My wife doesn’t know that either.”

  “Don’t confess everything. You don’t have to win me over. You and Bailey are the best men in the world. It just happens that it’s Bailey who turns me on.”

  “Bailey said I was a fool, but he’s the fool. He makes himself ridiculous. He doesn’t care how people see him. He probably wouldn’t mind if they saw him dressed like the Easter Bunny.”

  “You’ve got Bailey pegged,” Irma said, pulling her skirt over her knees.

  Demons danced. They cackled out of a hellish haze that reeked of rotten eggs and animal dung. Up from dead regions they flew and burrowed, over the haze, through it. Faces turned into bats, bodies into flying corpses. Arms became penises with pitchfork heads. Bats turned into flying vaginas. The laughter of the demons belched out of cavernous throats while a choir of maggots chanted the Dies Irae in squeaky celebration of happy evil. Locusts swarmed over the maggots and devoured them, then turned into flecks of salt. A dragon with a cow face licked the flecks away with a smoking tongue. The booming voice of god zagged through walls of smoke, falling on the ears of demons like thunderbolts. The god-words made no sense. God spoke in static. The demons laughed louder. The locusts and maggots returned, crawling, flying, dancing with joy.

  Bailey knew he was dead.

  He opened his eyes to see the demons more clearly. Always he sought to give shape to the shapeless, dust his spooks with the ashes of his fear. Given shape, they assumed substance. Bailey feared few things of substance.

  Faces watched him: blubber lips under the old man’s moustache; gold teeth flashing in the flicker of light; and nippled beads the size of cherries hanging to the waist of the long-nosed, sensual young woman: that dancer. The child (Bailey took him for a deaf mute) seemed to hear nothing through his large ears. His mouth shaped sounds but made none. Beside the child Smith sat, and beside Smith the gold-smiling woman who might have been fifty. She was the only one who smiled.

  Bailey knew he was not dead. Not yet. He saw the gypsies by the light of the kerosene lantern which sat on a half-box. Smith stood when he saw Bailey’s eyes open, paced, kicked the hay on the floor. They were all in the barn, which was as empty of useful objects as the store had been. Snow fell inside the barn, through the broken roof and onto the warped floorboards. But they all sat beneath the empty hayloft, and no snow touched them. Bailey’s head throbbed from the beating and from the final blow that had darkened his mind. The pai
n in his body seemed general, so many places had he been struck. And now he shivered on the floor without coat, hat or muffler. The two men who had attacked Smith in the corridor had taken Bailey by surprise near the X-ray room. They had gagged him, trussed him swiftly at knifepoint, and then dragged and carried him out a fire exit to the car where Smith, conscious by then, was waiting. Immobile in the car between Smith and the old gypsy man, Bailey wondered: Is this the last ride? Will my life end like a cheap movie? The smiling gypsy woman drove, the child and the dancer in the front seat beside her. They drove out of the city and onto a dirt road that led to the desolate farmhouse and barn, both so empty, so tipped by time and weather that the sides of both had sagged with rot. The buildings were a century and a half old: small, primitive, the beginnings of fertility gone to a natural, weed-choked death. He knew approximately where he was: in the city still, but on the edge of wild, hilly land that in the time of the early immigration had been called Cabbageville.

  The old man and Smith had pulled Bailey out of the car, his head and torso aching even then from the beating by the guards. Smith slammed the car door and in almost the same motion punched Bailey in the stomach, then about the head. The old man delivered the blow to the temple that sent Bailey to his knees, onto his face, and into blackness.

  In the phantasmagoria that stank and danced, fading now as the light of kerosene chased the fog, Bailey sensed a beginning, an ending. Never before had he been so helpless: bound with wire hand and foot and alone amid vengeful, violent gypsies. The time of the early strike, when he was one with hundreds, when those hundreds knew there were hundreds more of like mind waiting, even eager to lend aid, comfort, money, food, even blood to brother or sister in trouble, seemed like a paleozoic age away with only fossilized memories to remind him of a reality that once was, or purported to be. He could count on nothing now to help him. Help might come, but as from a comet: out of nowhere, unsought, unexpected. Also, it might not come. He could die as meaninglessly as a bug dies, having lived only to procreate. And he had not even done that. Outdone by a bug. And done in by his own hand. For he knew he had brought himself to this situation. It was he who brought on the gypsies. They descended like a mysterious plague after he twice outraged the company on successive days, first loosening the brake, kicking away the wheel blocks and watching a newsprint-loaded trailer truck roll back and smash away a section of company wall; and again, in the disguise of a delivery man, parking a rented truck in front of the building, carrying a parcel past the door and elevator guards, pressing forward for personal delivery of the package to Mr. Klopp, the advertising manager, leaving it by the elevator door in the advertising office, one end of the parcel loose enough to permit the eventual, curious emergence of its contents: a male skunk; and thereafter storing up the legends of that day’s chaos and evacuation to warm his heart in arctic times to come.

  He smiled now, remembering, and saw Smith scowling. Gypsy. Counterforce from Stanley. His own counterforce in his mind, the fire, flaming in his cortex. Smith paced while the others sat on the shelf that might once have been a farmer’s workbench before the farm had failed of its promise.

  “I want to know did anyone actually see him,” Smith said. “Did anyone see anything at all, is what I want to know.”

  The boy formed a soundless word. The others did not speak and paid the boy no attention.

  “Does anyone doubt that he did it before we go on? Tonya, do you?”

  Smiling through her metallic mouth, Tonya revealed nothing.

  “Mr. Joe?”

  The old man shook his head. “Busne,” he said.

  “Stephanie?”

  The dancer looked at Bailey, staring into his eyes for a clue to the liar’s mask. Bailey had admitted nothing, even as Smith was hitting him beside the car and screaming with every blow: “Killer of mothers. What part of your hell is reserved for killers of mothers?” How would they interpret his silence? Would it mitigate?

  “Well, Stephanie?”

  “I’ve watched him,” she said. “He’s not a coward. And Putzina killed herself.”

  “Shit,” said Smith.

  “Putzina died in his fire,” Mr. Joe said. “I heard her curse the Guild people. She named him, cursed him.”

  “Putzina cursed everyone,” Stephanie said.

  “Killer of mothers,” Smith said.

  “Busne,” said Mr. Joe.

  Tonya leaped down from her perch, laughing, and came toward Bailey with heavy, wrinkled breasts swinging loose in her dress beneath her open coat. She pushed her face close to his, stroked his cheek with her fingertips, stroked lightly with her nails. Then she dug the nails into his cheek and raked it, drawing blood. She laughed hysterically and pulled her coat tight, sat down. Mr. Joe tapped the boy on the shoulder and spoke: “Mutra, Pito.”

  The child opened his pants and pointed his spray at Bailey’s chest, but as the fountain spouted, Bailey pushed the boy with his feet; Pito, a rotating geyser, wet the legs of the others. Mr. Joe slapped the child, who collapsed in his own puddle, eyes collapsing too but without a tear or sound. Mr. Joe walked behind Bailey and stepped on his fingers, twisting the toe of his shoe to grind them into the hay.

  “Animal,” Stephanie screamed; too loudly, Bailey thought. Where did all her human quality suddenly bubble from? Hadn’t she danced wildly at Putzina’s door? A schizo, perhaps. He wouldn’t fight it. She knelt by Bailey and with her flowered skirt dried the blood from his scratches, the tears of pain from his cheeks. He felt the only reason he did not pass out from the pain was the injection they’d given him at the hospital to quiet his other tremors. He sensed his fingers must be bleeding but he could not only not see them, he could not even feel them individually. He felt only pain as behind his back Stephanie leaned over to his hands and sucked the injured fingers, cleaned Mr. Joe’s dirt out of the bleeding scratches, patted them with her red flowers. Bailey thought she smelled like faintly rancid meat.

  “Thank you,” he said to her. “I take you for an angel.”

  The door creaked, opened. Bailey saw the lantern first, then the man. As he stepped into the barn, the snow dancing in cyclonic patterns, Bailey recognized Skin, the traitor. It wasn’t correct to call him a traitor, for that implied a switching of allegiances, and Skin had no allegiances to which he could be traitorous. Still, he had switched sides physically, active turncoat, the only Guildsman to have done that. Many had gone back to work for the company out of economic desperation, or having been otherwise subverted. But only Skin had left the Guild to work against it. Bailey, watching Skin close the door, did not see Smith’s foot coming. The kick caught the calf of his right leg, then the left. The kicks spun him on his hip.

  “Killer of mothers,” Smith said.

  “Kill him, and you’re on your own,” Skin said in a flat, boyish voice. “I bring that advice from Stanley. Kill him, and you’ll have Stanley to deal with. Stanley says don’t hurt him. Stanley has other plans for him. Stanley wants him back in one piece.”

  The news strengthened Bailey. But was he yet safe from imminent death? Watching Smith pace like a beast, he knew the potentiality for irrational violence. How deep did Smith’s sense of self-preservation go? Did he fear Stanley? Was he a mother-lover extraordinary? Would he die for her corpse?

  “Where did you come from?” Smith asked Skin.

  “Stanley told me to find you. He heard you’d taken him, so I came here. Where else do you ever take anybody?”

  Stephanie, still sitting behind Bailey on the floor, leaned toward him and whispered in his ear: “I’m a third-generation gypsy. I don’t think like the others.”

  “You. Get away from him,” Skin said to Stephanie, his tone suddenly harsh. Stephanie stood and patted Bailey’s hair, stroked its waves, tousled it with her fingers as she would the hair on a dog’s neck. He did not mind her smell at all now. He wanted it. But he lost the comfort of that, the smell of a friendly body, when she sat on the workbench. He raised his nose, tried to smell her ac
ross the distance of those few feet, but the smell of the hay, wet from the snow that came through the roof, overpowered her odor.

  “I wanted him to die slowly,” Smith said. “Take his life away piece by piece. Make him suffer the way my mother suffered. And now you say we can do nothing with him?”

  “Stanley says that,” Skin said.

  “There are things we can do,” Mr. Joe said. “Nasula.”

  “Eeeeee,” squealed Tonya. “Nasula.” She leaped down and hugged Mr. Joe. Smith sneered, and Tonya stuck out her tongue in retaliation, then waggled her half-naked old breasts at Smith, who turned away in disgust. Tonya turned her back on him, threw up her skirt and thrust her naked buttocks at him.

  “Gypsy women are great cockteasers,” Bailey said. “But they don’t follow through.”

  Everyone stared at him, struck silent. He knew it was an absurd thing to say. With his life in the balance, gratuitously insulting the matron of the group, however batty she might be, was the act of a deranged man. But even as these thoughts sped through his mind, Bailey spoke again. “Gypsy women steal anything. They even take out the bottoms of copper pots and put in papier mâché. Most gypsies are filthy swine who eat carrion. Half of them are cannibals.”

  Smith’s foot came out of the silence and caught Bailey under the chin, sent him reeling backward. Sitting still, he had almost forgotten the pain of the wires on his legs and wrists, but now they dug into his flesh as he rolled. He looked at the raw and bleeding ankles and imagined his wrists to be far worse. While he lay still, the mute gypsy boy urinated his last drops on Bailey’s shoes. Tonya patted the child on the head.