The Ink Truck

by William Kennedy

  “I’m hungry.”

  Bailey opened his eyes at that, Stephanie’s voice.

  “God,” Skin said.

  “Where’s the food?”

  “There isn’t any.”

  “What does that mean, there isn’t any?”

  “It means we have no food. God.”

  “Well, we better have food, skinny boy.”

  “We don’t, though.”

  “I bought food.”

  “I know.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Gone.”

  “I don’t remember seeing it go.”

  “That’s true enough. You were probably asleep.”

  “I bought and paid for it.”

  “The eggs were rotten. The coffee was full of bugs. The oranges were dry. The meat was foul and green.”

  “What did you do with it?”

  “I ate it.”

  “That was my food,” Stephanie said. “I only go this way once, and all I got is what I eat, and my friends.”

  “We share on this planet.”

  “I didn’t get my share. Not quite.”

  “I can get you plenty of food,” Bailey said.

  Stephanie yawned and stretched felinely, smiled at Bailey as she spoke to him. “I thought I’d choke when you said Tonya wouldn’t follow through. If there was ever anybody who loved to follow through, it’s her.”

  “I said that on impulse,” Bailey said. Looking at Stephanie, Bailey remembered her rancid odor but could not smell it. Possibly it came from eating green meat.

  “How’s my boy making out?” Stephanie said to Bailey, gesturing at Skin. “Did he convert you yet?”

  “He’s telling me things,” Bailey said. “Why don’t you take my wires off?”

  She stood up and walked close to Bailey.

  “You like to fickydick?” she asked.

  “I’m game,” he said.

  “I only go this way once, and I take all opportunities. It’s rotten. The whole rotten thing is rotten. Everything is rotten. There are worms in the apple, my friend.”

  “There’s truth in what you say,” Bailey said.

  “I’m sick of gypsy stuff,” Stephanie said. “I want elegance. I only go this way once, and what I need is a palace, a castle maybe. Rent some of them big candleholders and live on truffles for two weeks. And drink only wine from grapes squashed by monks’ feet. And two or three surprises in the closet, like you.”

  “Take off my wires,” Bailey said. He tried to make it sound sexy.

  “You can’t do this,” Skin said to her. “I’m not finished with him.”

  “Little boy jealous.”

  “What do you think of an ego like that?” Skin said to Bailey. “She barges into the middle of a spiritual quest with her empty belly and itchy twat and pushes it right into the middle of everything. God. Wouldn’t you think some people’d have the decent manners goats were born with?”

  “Do you have any water?” Bailey asked.

  Stephanie and Skin looked at one another.

  “Don’t look at me,” she said. “I didn’t bring him in.”

  “All he wants is water.”

  “You brought him in, you take care of him. You clean up after him.”

  She lay back on the bed and rolled into a sleeping posture. An oogah sounded, a drummer drummed, a bird chirped. Bailey could conceive of no way out. He could think only of his pain and the futility of expecting humane treatment from Skin and his gypsy crackpot. Death was a clock on the wall that he could not see. But he could hear it tick, knew its hands moved. Death had never been so clear in his mind. He had never been so helpless. Any act might tip the madness the wrong way. He saw Christ in a red canoe about to go over Niagara Falls to his death. Christ stepped out of the canoe to walk on the waters and raised his hands. But signals got mixed and the Falls parted like the Red Sea and Christ hurtled into the black chasm while God’s voice chased him in descent, trailing apologetic static. Bailey looked at Skin, thinking: Screw it; thinking: Thank God I had a thought.

  “God you’re a bore,” Bailey said. “A monumental goddamn bore.”

  “That’s a crummy thing to say.”

  “You and your arhat and your crystalware.”

  “I don’t want to impose myself where I’m not wanted,” Skin said.

  “A toad, that’s what you are. A goddamn boring hoptoad.”

  Stephanie laughed. She rolled off the bed and walked over to Skin. She nuzzled him, kissed his pimples.

  “My bumpy little toad,” she said.

  Skin held her by the buttocks and pressed his cheek into her belly.

  “I failed Stanley again,” he said.

  “Don’t you worry,” Stephanie said. “There’ll be other times.”

  “The wires,” Bailey screamed. “Take off the goddamn wires!” He kicked the arm of the sofa with both feet, knocking it loose from the frame.

  “Now look what you’ve done,” Skin said.

  He picked up the broken sofa arm and studied its raw wood and torn mohair. He raised it over his head and brought it down on Bailey’s stomach. A dog barked. A car started. As Bailey passed into unconsciousness, a telephone rang. Was it a real telephone? Skin would say yes.

  “Good mor-ning!”

  The greeting was a song but Bailey again awoke in darkness, smelling after-shave lotion. Then suddenly the room was in full light, a female’s bedroom, a young woman in a negligee carrying a breakfast tray toward him. His body ached and his stomach region was aflame with pain. His hands were in front of him for the first time since he’d left the hospital and his wrists bandaged with gauze and adhesive. But he was hand cuffed. He raised the bedclothes and discovered himself in royal-blue silken pajamas. His ankles were also manacled, and like his wrists, had been treated. He touched his cheek, discovering new pain in his arms, found himself smooth-shaven and knew the shaving-lotion odor was on his face.

  “My, do you look different,” the young woman said. “Deliciously bully.”

  She put the tray on a bedside table, readjusted the bedclothes and fluffed and propped the pillow behind him. She helped him sit up and put the tray across his lap.

  “Am I supposed to eat in handcuffs?”

  “Can’t you manage? They seem to give you some leeway. It’s better than having them behind your back, isn’t it?”

  “That’s true enough.”

  “You don’t seem to know me.”

  “Miss Blue, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, you do. How nice.”

  He knew her as a company secretary, one of a long line of Stanley’s concubines. She wore her hair blond, cut like a poodle. She dressed in miniskirts and cornucopian sweaters and she waddled.

  “Why am I here?” Bailey asked her.

  “Mr. Smith dropped you by and asked me to fix your cuts. I must say you were a mess. The things men get themselves into.”

  “Smith, you say? Did he tell you to put me in cuffs?”

  “That was my idea,” Miss Blue said, and she winked. “He said you were a maniac and I didn’t want to get attacked. At least not right away.”

  “What else did Smith say?”

  “Not much. He was with that young boy with the pimples who cried all the while he was here. He wasn’t at all the sort of person Mr. Smith usually brings me, but then neither are you.”

  “Is this your bed I’m in?”

  She nodded and winked again. Bailey drank the orange juice from the tray, holding the glass with both hands and studying the transparent section of Miss Blue’s negligee. Then, with wrists crossed and using only one hand, he ate boiled eggs, toast, marmalade, coffee. Miss Blue followed his movements with a relish equivalent to his own appreciation of the food.

  “Does Stanley know I’m here?”

  “I couldn’t care less,” she said, an answer Bailey thought evasive.

  “Did you shave me? Bandage me? Dress me up?”

  “You are some yummy thing,” Miss Blue said, nodding and winking.
>
  “I don’t know why I didn’t wake up.”

  “I kept chloroforming you. I knew you needed the sleep.”

  “And the handcuffs? You always keep two pair around the house?”

  “A guard from the company gave them to me. I’ve done him a few favors.” She winked. “A girl needs all the tools she can get.”

  “Of course you wouldn’t think of taking them off me.”

  “If you’d do me a favor.”

  “Anything.”

  “I want you to help me with my pacifier.”

  “Let’s get at it. What’s a pacifier?”

  “Something Mr. Smith helped me build.”

  “You seem to be close to Smith.”

  “Not really clo-ose,” she said, winking. “He’s not much of anything, really. A kind of neuter, if you know what I mean. But he can get anything done, and I do mean anything.” She winked again. “After all, Stanley isn’t as young as he used to be, though he has his moments.” She ran her hand under the bedclothes, inside Bailey’s pajamas and massaged his thickness between thumb and forefinger.

  “Is that what you call the pacifier?” Bailey said.

  “Don’t be so conceited.”

  “A bit aggressive of you, I’d say.”

  “Don’t you like aggressive women?”

  “Only if they’re really women.”

  “Oh, I’m a woman, all right, can’t you tell?”

  “It’s easy to be deceived.”

  Miss Blue stood and dropped her nightgown, revealing pearly breasts the size of cantaloupes. Body paint had made bull’s-eyes of her nipples, and above them was a message:

  which radiated in blue tattoo toward Bailey. Across her stomach another tattoo stared, luring Bailey like a button-nosed, spade-bearded lady, one tattooed eye wide, the other bellyfolded to a wink as Miss Blue bent a knee in relaxation.

  “I suppose you wonder where I got the tattoos.”

  “Don’t feel you have to explain.”

  “Everybody has their little quirks. That’s what makes life interesting, I think.”

  “I couldn’t agree more. Take off my handcuffs.”

  “All in good time, Rodney.”

  “Bailey’s the name.”

  “I call all my intimate friends Rodney. It’s such a picturesque name.”

  “You do have little quirks.”

  “It’s just I’m being the real me. Ever since high school I’ve understood that if I wasn’t me, why then I was nothing at all. My mother was a bearded lady in the circus and she had a thing going with the tattooed man. But I’d never have dreamed of getting tattooed if I hadn’t run across the little old tattoo artist near the high school. He was about seventy and he paid fifty cents a look and a dollar a slurp and used to sit us young girls on this old shoeshine stand in the back of his tattoo parlor. He had hair on his fingers up near the nails, which he chewed. His tongue was about a yard long. But we didn’t mind because we were just young kids out for fun and profit. He was fun too, for a while, but I never really got excited. You know, oo-oo-oo kind of excited. So after graduation I went with a clown who had eyes for me, but nothing happened until he wore his clown suit, and that got me. Then there was a divinity student, a police sergeant, an Eagle Scout, a pastry chef, two ushers and six sailors and even though my excitement never happened, I knew I had a thing for uniforms. I began to read a lot, all porn of course, because I knew reading would help me get at my essence. I remember reading a beautiful thing about Theodora of Rome. What a woman! They said she wished she had a fourth altar on which to pour the libations of love. I never forgot that, though for myself, none of the altars ever make much difference. Most things in this world just don’t have enough passion in them. But then one night I was having a go with a Canadian Mountie and I was so bored I started to read a kid’s book I found on the bus and suddenly visions of Rodney the tattoo man and Rodney the Eagle Scout and Rodney the two ushers and Rodney the six sailors all loomed up in front of me. I figured it was the combination of uniform, book and memory, and I knew I was onto something. If I could just get the right combination, just once, I might really find out who I was. So I kept on with street cleaners and elevator operators and mailmen and bellhops and Pinkertons for just months. Would you believe I never came near that feeling again? Oh, it was fun, don’t get me wrong. Even when it’s bad it’s still pretty good. But you know, don’t you, that without that extra something, that sand, that twinkle, that life is just terribly, terribly ordinary? Anyway, I bumped into Mr. Smith one day at the company lunch counter, and before I knew it he was up here filling me up with new ideas. I tried, you know, to coax him into something, but he said he couldn’t because of his upbringing, which I thought was nice. Which of us, really, lives by his principles that way? He said he only liked to watch. That’s why he built the machine and got me the pizzle. He had an awful time finding one. Just nobody stocks them. Would you like to see it?”

  She let go of Bailey and from a closet shelf took down a small mahogany chest with a green velvet lining. She displayed its contents across outstretched palms for Bailey’s scrutiny.

  “It’s been cured or pickled or something,” she said. “It can’t go bad or get meaty.”

  “Is this the pacifier?”

  “Just a small part. Would you like to see the rest?”

  “I wouldn’t miss it.”

  “You’ll have to get into costume. That’s my rule.”

  “What about the handcuffs?”

  “You keep your bargain, I’ll keep mine. I’m a person that keeps their word.”

  “I’m no welcher either,” Bailey said.

  “Ooo,” said Miss Blue.

  She put her treasure box on the bed and pulled Bailey to a standing position, then cut his pajamas away with a scissors.

  “Don’t move now,” she said, and rummaged again in the closet. She came toward him with a white cloak that hung from his shoulders to the floor.

  “Now the headpiece,” she said, and from the closest shelf took a bull mask with large, curved horns. Bailey felt it, found it rubbery.

  “Let me see you,” Miss Blue said, and slipped it over his head. Looking through the eye holes, Bailey saw Miss Blue in what seemed to be the beginning of a swoon.

  “Oo-oo,” she said. “Ooo-ooo.”

  She took his hand and shuffled slowly beside him to the living room. He thought of what he must look like in the bull getup and felt absurd beyond words, but helpless to change anything; more helpless than he’d been with Skin, for at least he could argue with Skin. There was no argument possible with Miss Blue. He felt debased through ridiculousness and failed to understand how early wisdom, early promise, early glory, could have gone so cockeyed. But then possibility went in both directions, did it not? For every realm of glory, wasn’t there a parallel universe of the grotesque? This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased. But what if Jesus had gone the other way with Mary Magdalene? What would he have come to? But that was unreal. Forget that. The bull costume was real, oh yes. Another silly event in a silly cosmos, and Bailey, one of the silliest of molecular structures. Bailey thought: An absurd self is a hated self; and he considered the possibility of a conspiracy to reduce him to an absurd condition.

  Miss Blue pulled a drawstring which parted a set of wall drapes, then tugged a knob, pulling an elaborate wooden construction out from the wall.

  “Isn’t it something?” she asked.

  “I’ll say.”

  “It’s got two parts. The toro machine and the cow frame. You play toro, and guess who I play.”

  Bailey raised his headdress for a better look at the machine, but Miss Blue pulled it down again.

  “Mustn’t break the mood,” she said. She dashed to the bedroom and returned wearing a cow headdress and clutching the pizzle.

  “Now I put this on toro first,” she said, and by means of a leather strap she fastened the pizzle to a small rod on the front of the toro machine. “I call this gadget my connecting r
odney,” she explained with a wink. She draped Bailey’s cloak behind him over the toro’s barrel-shaped torso, then strapped him onto the front of the apparatus, the toro seat, so that he remained in a restful but standing position. He felt like the decorative prow of a ship. The pizzle protruded with formidable girth and length at his knee level.

  “Comfy?” Miss Blue asked.

  “No, but don’t fret. Just get on with it.”

  Every muscle in his body ached, his head still pained. He took comfort that his wounds were closed, their rawness a physical torture but no longer a mental one. Pollution would have to find other entrances. But had it already found one? How deadly a pollution was the vision of oneself as absurd? Now he was convinced that Stanley’s order had dropped him into this mechanized insanity. Yielding to the marathon galumph of Miss Blue, a man could lose his balance, begin to grow wild hair on his gums, break wind erratically. Once stability began to wane, the whole system of equilibrium could blow out. Stanley, thought Bailey, you are a diabolical fiend, but I’m on to you.

  “Get ready,” Miss Blue said. “Move your feet up and down on the pedals when I say go.” Bailey pressed and felt them give and rise like player-piano pedals, activating gears which moved the pizzle back and forth. Miss Blue swept the rug off the floor, a brown and white cowhide, and flung it over the cow frame, then climbed backward into the back end of the frame and past the dangling tow-rope tail. She reclined at about a thirty-degree angle, pushed her legs into delivery-room-style knee rests and switched on a small light over her head. She took a book from a wall compartment and asked Bailey: “Are you ready?”

  “I suppose you’d call it that.”

  “Bully,” she said. “You are a good sport.”

  She pressed a button, and a foam-rubber mitt rose suddenly from beneath Bailey and cradled his extension. Simultaneously the toro machine began to move forward. Miss Blue loosed one long cry in basso tones: “Moooooo.” Then she pulled a lever and the cow’s tail flew up like a pump handle.