The Ink Truck

by William Kennedy

  “We’ll vote on what to do,” Smith said, and pulled the others into a huddle. Skin stood apart, staring at Bailey, who caught none of the gypsy whispering. When they broke from the huddle they circled him. Mr. Joe waved his arms over Bailey’s head, mumbling inaudibly as the others stood with heads bowed. Then Mr. Joe spoke slowly and clearly, and with a sense of high delight:

  “Majaro undebel, may he die with pain. May he die regretting he ever lived. May he die reaching for water. May he die slowly, as a snail moves, suffering many sicknesses. May his children be imbeciles. May his stick fail ever to rise. May chancres grow on it. May his sack of stones become boulders. May his teeth turn to cinders. May great itching hives drive him to madness. May food be sour on his tongue and wine bitter in his mouth. May all women deceive him and all men betray him. May the spirit of his mother forget him. May the wrath of the just god give him raging fevers. May the hollow of his bowels burn with an endless itch. May his bladder leak. May his kidneys explode. May his bones break in many places. May his blood grow watery. May his eyes weaken. May the pox cover his body with running sores. May his brain be stricken to simple whiteness. May fungus grow in his throat. May his urine burn like flaming acid. May cancers grow in his belly and lungs. May lice infest his hair. May his body stink. May his toenails grow inward. May his loves turn to dust. May his works be spoiled by time as well as men. May he never finish another task. May he fail in all things. May he wander forever in his mind, finding nothing. May every foul evil of the earth crawl on his life like vicious worms and smother this killer of mothers in putrid garbage.”

  The gypsies all spat on Bailey and threw hay dust on the spittle. Then they circled him again.

  “May the good god grant us these wishes. Querela Nasula. Majaro Undebel.”

  As they backed away from Bailey Skin asked them: “Are you through?”

  “For the moment,” Smith said.

  “Then I’ll take him,” Skin said.

  “Don’t take him too far,” Smith said.

  “Help me with him, Stephanie,” said Skin.

  The girl and Skin carried him to Skin’s car and put him in the back seat. He moved to let his head rest against the window, the wires again cutting into his wrists, his ankles. He knew the absurdity of his position, of everything that had happened to him, and of his own behavior most of all. But it was not untypical. In the midst of great endeavors of the past he would suddenly find himself picking lint from the rug. He was like the flowers that grew in the yard of his childhood. The Stupids. They grew with roots partly exposed, vulnerable. They grew tall and blossomed, healthy and beautiful. And in the midst of bloom they fell over, their blossoms top-heavy, and they died groveling. Yes, Bailey thought, I am as absurd as the Stupids. But I am not groveling yet. Down, but not dead. Not yet.

  The thought buoyed him and he felt a swelling in his chest that he diagnosed as growing pains of the spirit. Trouble, if it doesn’t kill you, strengthens you. No noble boob now. Beaten almost to death, covered with blood, hay dust, gypsy spit and kiddie pee, Bailey smiled. As the car began to move, he claimed victory.

  He awoke in a dark room, remembering nothing of how he arrived, assuming his body had succumbed at last to hospital drugs and exhaustion. Through a window he saw tall city buildings with scattered lights in upper stories and long-dead flowers standing upright in a whiskey bottle, silhouetted against the moonlight. It was still snowing. He was still bound with the wire and lying on a sofa. His arms and shoulders ached with a pain more pervasive than he had ever known, his head throbbed as if nails had been driven into his skull and the swellings in his legs where Smith had kicked him had fused with the pain of his ankles. He felt his legs had been stripped of skin and that his flesh, macerated in its own blood, lay open to receive the infections of a polluted sky.

  He searched the darkness, saw a chair, a bed, and on it a human form. Skin. He tried to reach the wire on his wrists with the fingers that Mr. Joe had stepped on, tested the wire for looseness because the flesh it had broken and the bones it had rubbed could not convey such a message. He bent his knees and fingered the wire on his ankles but found nothing but smooth coilings, no twist he might untwist, only wire, and wet flesh. He quit trying and swung his legs off the sofa, thrust his torso to a sitting position. He saw another human form then, on the floor along the wall. Stephanie. Balancing himself with fingers on the sofa arm, Bailey thrust his body upward, feeling the wire gouge his wrists again, but he fell back. He slid slowly to the floor and began to move forward on his buttocks, slowly and quietly, discovering new pain in his hips. He reached the door and with back against the wall, hands as suction cups, he raised himself. Noiselessly he turned the knob, and when the door opened he saw he was at the end of a long hallway in which the dimmest of light came up from a lower landing. He saw the stairway at the far end and hopped toward it. But he lost his balance and fell into a cardboard box half full of orange peels, meat scraps, coffee grounds, eggshells.

  “Where you goin’?”

  When he did not move he was moved, rolled onto his back, caught under the ribs and tugged. Skin wore a blue work-shirt and jeans. Bailey stared at his cowlicks of dirty blond hair, at the pimples on his face, his neck, his arms, his ears. Skin dumped him back on the sofa and lit a candle on the table beside the dead flowers. From under the bed he pulled a tape recorder and turned it on. Sounds Bailey could not always recognize came from the machine: a prolonged buzzing, a fizzing, a rush of water, familiar street noises, the whee of auto wheels, footsteps and horns.

  “I take it you’re not going to unwire me,” Bailey said.

  “If I did that you’d leave.”

  “Do you see what the wire is doing to my ankles and wrists?”

  “You won’t die. You’re tough. I’ve studied you.”

  An airplane landed, another took off. Maybe. A coffeepot perked.

  “You like my sounds? They’re the sounds of life.”

  “Is that what they are? I don’t recognize some.”

  “You’ve got to listen a long time, like anything else. Do you think they’re real?”

  “They’re real sounds. What time is it?”

  Skin looked out the window. Something exploded. A rocket? A dynamite charge? A glass broke. Metal struck metal.

  “I can’t tell by the moon from here. Since I moved I don’t know which way is west.”

  “Do you have any whiskey?”

  “I don’t drink whiskey anymore. What about my sounds?”

  Someone typed. Someone hammered. Bailey listened. A door opened, creaked, closed.

  “What I mean is, that was a real door.”

  “Was it?”

  “Just because the door’s not here doesn’t mean it’s not real.”

  “So you’re onto reality.”

  “I’m a student of humanity.”

  “My heart takes wings. Have you got any aspirin? I tell you, I’m in pain. What does your humanity say to my bloody wrists and ankles?”

  Skin pushed a chair close to the sofa and talked into Bailey’s face. Someone chewed corn flakes or potato chips. Birds’ wings flapped, or a hundred bats flew. Skin stank like sour sneakers.

  “I know blood,” Skin said. “I’ve been inside my own body. Plenty of times I got to the threshold of perceiving my blood before I crossed over. First I saw the blood in my throat and I started to dissolve. I got scared and wouldn’t go over. Then I saw a girl floating in a bathtub full of blood and I chickened out again. But when I saw my blood cells I liked them, so I walked through my veins and found a Tibetan monster that started to eat me. I kind of liked that too, but I knew it was only an illusion. Finally I turned red and was in the middle of my heart. It threw me around with every beat, like a tympani gone crazy. After a while I got the knack, like learning how to go with a trampoline.”

  “So my blood doesn’t mean much after that.”

  “Pictures of ripe tomatoes get to me. And I got some twinges studying your ankles and wrists. That�
��s really raw meat.”

  “Why don’t you help me? Or have you got something else in mind?”

  “Don’t rush it, dad. I want to talk to you about your body. How is it now?”

  “It hurts.”

  “Think you can get outside it? Step out of it like a space suit?”

  “It’d be a pleasure.”

  “Try it, dad. Contemplate. Close your eyes and watch the pineal gland between them. It turns purple. Keep watching, see how you turn into a single thought. When you do that, you can get outside yourself.”

  Bailey closed his eyes to get away from Skin. An alarm clock rang. Or was it a burglar alarm? A fire engine clanged and its siren screamed. Then ploop, the sound of a finger snapped out of a tight mouth, or was it a popped cork? The siren brought back the gypsy store collapsing in slush: chain of causation to the moment. The chain was clear, except for the impetus to set the fire. That devil’s eye? Why succumb to that? Was it the pussy-foot life? And what made him think he lived such a life? Because no one feared him? Because no one worried when Bailey entered a room? A gentleman, Bailey was. Mothers didn’t tuck away their daughters when Bailey arrived. Animals didn’t run from his foot. Always kind. Then why are your hands so scarred from fighting, Bailey? And why so many notches on the dorque, Bailey? Few men have done so much, and so many, unless they made it their career. Bailey, you don’t know what you are. A pussyfoot milquetoast who breaks rocks and noses, bleeds the lady’s heart as he ups and unders. You’re more than you think, less than you wish, Bailey, and you’re something you don’t even understand, for why would you be here otherwise? What is this madman up to? Hatchet job for Stanley?

  Skin had been with the newspaper only a few months when the strike began. Unwashed Phi Beta Kappa, precocious husband whose wife left him for an even filthier figure, he had worked as a police reporter, packaging an existential flower message with every accident story, an approach to the news which quickly earned him pasture in suburbia. There, reporting on sewer district meetings, he drew provocative analogies to Roman aqueducts and subtle Rabelaisian and Chaucerian cloacalisms, none of which reached print. When the strike began he was put on the publicity committee and in the early chaos wrote releases for radio stations which, he found, would broadcast anything. “Jesus Christ is the favorite person of striking Guildsmen, an informal poll revealed today …” Catholic Guildsmen thought it profane to refer to Jesus as a person. Jewish members took exception to the poll’s conclusion. Skin was put back on the picket line.

  In those days Bailey enjoyed the anarchy of Skin’s vision, but anarchy without end palled, and Bailey lost interest. When Skin defected, few sorrowed. His thesis that the Guild was top-heavy with jerks was no longer a revolutionary notion, and his sweatshirt had become unbearably gamy. Caught short on the picket line one afternoon, Skin used the company toilet, where he met Stanley, who was taken with his compulsively spoken anti-Guild views and encouraged his defection. Skin reported the subversion attempt to Jarvis, who made a note of it. Three days later Skin was screaming anti-Guild slogans from the gypsy store: “Radicals are manic-depressives,” he shouted. “Guildsmen are phony lumpen proletariat.” Putzina pulled him inside, and after that he worked behind the scenes.

  “Are you making it, dad? Are you outside yet?”

  Bailey opened his eyes, stared, proving he was making it, then closed them, wondering whether this would tick off the bomb in Skin’s head.

  “Keep focused on the old pineal,” Skin said. “You won’t need a shrink to get out like I did. I know the route and I want to show you, get you arhat status because I like your style, Bailey. You deserve better than that shitty Guild, and you know it. Be an arhat, that’s the answer, and screw the Guild. That’s how you reach for the sun when you live at the bottom of the tarpit. All that violence, Bailey, all that stupid hanging around, that’s not you. You don’t have the talent for it. As a rebel you’re a flop, just like I was. You know there used to be an ogre outside my room but I got past him, bounced over his mind. Then this soft little plastic jackal came at me and I picked him up, watched him squirm in my fist and threw him under the bed. But I couldn’t let him wiggle there on his terms and come at me when I wasn’t ready. So I put him in a shoe box and wrote OM on it and turned up the music and listened to its colors to take away the smelly sound of that jackal. I looked into the corner of my eye and saw the white light, just an edge, but the rest of it was around the corner and I knew that. So with quite a bit of confidence for a man who didn’t used to be able to decide whether to eat his potato or his vegetable first, I moved toward it. And, dad, I knew I was safe, because God loves me. And right away I understood Aztec geometry and what it means when you say paradise is a milk bottle. But what the hell has knowledge got to do with anything? Think about it, dad. Twenty years from now, what will all your Guild wisdom amount to? Will you have figured out how to die in God’s arms? That’s the anthill everybody’s looking for.”

  “Wrong,” Bailey said. “It’s a duplex pad with a built-in altar under a picture window that looks out on Glory City. Two Porsches in every pot, everybody in love with us, name in the papers and a girl friend who wears no panties. You believe in God, I’ll buy old Nietzsch the Peach, that we want to create a world we can kneel to.”

  “Crass, Bailey, crass. That’s beneath you.”

  “Take off the wires.”

  “You’d hurt me if I took them off.”

  “No, I wouldn’t hurt you.”

  “I don’t trust anybody not to hurt me,” Skin said. “And, hey, you’re not concentrating. Think about killing that old woman. That’ll help. You’ve got terrifically interesting problems. Just focus on that old lady and don’t let her become anything else. I used to think about an X ray of a snake digesting an X ray of a hamster. Wild. But it got me into the tunnel, dad, all white light, white as the hole in a diamond and going about sixty, and then purple lights on both sides giving me the royal welcome. Two zillion miles up anyway, and no signposts, and I look around and say to myself, okay, this is an interesting place, but where did I come from? I got restless. No action, no God. How do I get back? I drifted and saw little lights away off but couldn’t get there, and then I wondered what I used to be. And, dad, that shook me. Thank God I had a thought. I remembered my body, but I couldn’t find it. Saw it in a closet and took it out but then lost it again. Finally I dove into it and wondered, is this my body? But it didn’t matter. That’s my message, dad. That’s what God taught me up in the void, that bodies don’t matter. And even if this old house is destroyed, that diamond crystal that was floating around up there will still go on and on and on. All the talents, memories, desires that make up the old Skin don’t have anything to do with that diamond crystal. You dig, dad? That made me an arhat. Are you making it?”

  Bailey suffered the irony badly, being lectured on the soul. He’d had a soul and gotten rid of it when Skin was just a sausage. Now he was being tortured into a reacquisition of it under another name. What a laugh. What’s more, Bailey was positive that the underside of Skin’s proselytizing was another of Stanley’s subversion efforts. From the beginning, the Guild leaders had viewed Stanley’s every act as a move by a chess master. But that was romanticizing by boobs. It was only in later months that Stanley truly became devious. He began blatantly, wooing desperate strikers with promises of pay raises to return to work; and though he paid off in pay cuts, they stayed with the company, flip-floppers unwelcome at the Guild, of course. Then he moved with a goon squad and the beatings and shadowings scared a handful of Guildsmen out of town, another few back to the company. Reciprocal terror, the shadowing of scabs holding down key company jobs, neutralized Stanley’s goons and forced him to more subtle measures. He flooded the Guild neighborhood and Fobie’s bar with circulars offering a month-long all-expenses-paid vacation at the Beauty Spot, the company-owned resort in Florida. Two-dozen winter-weary strikers hypocritically grabbed at the free holiday, chuckling at Stanley’s gullibility, and vowing t
o return to the strike with renewed fervor after a rest. But none returned. To a man they rejoined the company ranks, creating the great subversion coup of the strike. But all the Guildsmen agreed that the peak of Stanley’s inventiveness was aimed at a much smaller group, the half-dozen Guild members over sixty-five. Stanley rented an empty office on the floor above the Guild and for two days staged a series of Granny strip shows. Stanley knew his audience. The old men never came back.

  Now he was dueling individually; Bailey the single enemy. But did Stanley really think a raunchy Zen missionary could riddle his commitment? Cut off my head, Bailey thought; that might work. He opened his eyes and saw Skin studying his bloody ankles.

  “You know I might be dying,” Bailey said.

  “Only your body,” Skin said. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll get you to God before that happens. But you’ve got to break the old patterns. I picked up a copy of Freud while I was walking through my blood vessels, and I really had to laugh. ‘Siggie,’ I said, ‘if you only knew.’ I threw the book to my monster and he ate it up. He’d eat anything.”

  Bailey closed his eyes and imagined reading a story in the morning newspaper about the strike being settled, all Guildsmen back on the job with raises and equal chances for advancement, no grievances aroused during the strike to have any validity. Bosses and Guildsmen must be nice, fair, honest with each other. Above the strike story was a photo of Jarvis shaking hands with Stanley, and behind Jarvis stood Rosenthal, Irma and Bailey himself, with smiles that established the invalidity of past trouble. As he dwelled on the photo, Bailey realized he hadn’t changed. Around him the world had changed, but he had not. He had committed certain acts he’d never committed before, but along the walls of his brain the same pictures hung, the same file cabinets stored the same old answers to the same old questions that no one expected to be asked anymore.