The Ink Truck

by William Kennedy

  She fussed over the drinks at Stanley’s antique liquor cabinet, then passed them out, jiggled across to an old mohair chair and sat down carelessly.

  “You fellows think you’re the only writers in the world,” Stanley said, “but you know I’ve done a bit myself. I wrote a song, didn’t I, Miss Blue?”

  From his desk he took a box of Christmas cards and handed one to Bailey. “My private stock,” he said.

  On the front, surrounded by holly leaves, was a photo of Stanley in old-fashioned clothes, leafing through the Police Gazette, and beneath the photo Stanley’s noel: “Happy Holididdle.” Inside were two pages of sheet music, a parody of “Peggy O’Neill.”

  “Show him how it goes, Miss Blue.”

  She stood up, and in a little girl’s voice unlike the deep, resonant moo sounds Bailey remembered from a few hours before, she sang:

  Peggy O’Neill

  Was a girl you could feel

  Any part,

  Any place,

  Any time …

  The words grew filthy, and Miss Blue teased herself with her hands to render them more explicit. Then she shook herself and did a bump and a little-girl curtsy before sitting down to Stanley’s polite applause. Again Bailey was sexed. But thoughts of the pacifier weakened his interest.

  “That’s the cutest tune, Stanley,” Miss Blue said.

  “You see, there’s talent everywhere, Bailey. Miss Blue has the biggest talent in the company. I’m trying to get her into show business.”

  “She gets to you,” Bailey admitted. Proud, Miss Blue wiggled.

  “I’m glad to see you’re relaxed,” Stanley said. “It knots me up when people are tense. Why don’t you unravel? Tell me about yourself. I don’t want to be your enemy. Do you really think you can win this strike?”

  “I don’t have much of a meaning for win these days, but I know what lose means.”

  “It’s gone to pieces, Bailey. You think we’ll put up with stuff like last night?”

  “You think we’ll never make a breakthrough.”

  “Never,” said Stanley, “is too long to talk about. Let’s say I don’t see it.”

  “Then why bargain with us?”

  “It’s something to do.”

  “I suppose this should discourage me.”

  “And it doesn’t?”

  “No.”

  “Bailey, you really depress me. I’m offering you a way out. A simple apology to show you’re sincere, and I’ll put you back to work with a fat raise. We’ll all forget about the past. Is that asking so much? Is that cutting out your heart?”

  Bailey giggled, then nodded. The drink Miss Blue had made was a double, and suddenly it reached him. Being in the enemy camp was reassuring. Stanley was no more of a threat to reason than he’d ever been. Still a pitchman for the company’s medicine show, even with the same old pitch.

  “Do you have a family?” he asked Bailey. But before Bailey could respond, Stanley babbled on.

  “My mother was an honest-to-god genius on the lute.” He pointed to the instrument on the wall. “Rare music from a rare person. She got it from her father. He made his money in land, furs, timber, oil and steel, but he never slipped up on his culture. He played a mean madrigal.” Stanley waved his arms around the room. “All this stuff was my mother’s. The furniture, the glasses.” He looked back at the lute and pretended to strum it, but he only looked like a guitar player to Bailey.

  “Mothers are wonderful, aren’t they?”

  “It’s hard to overrate their function,” Bailey said.

  “You see, Bailey? It doesn’t take much to be friendly. A little common ground, that’s all. A thing as elementary as parents. Parents are important. Did you have parents, Miss Blue?”

  “My father gave my mother nine new tires one Christmas,” she said. “She put five on the car and four under the bed.”

  “She put four under the bed,” Bailey repeated, creating an impact on Miss Blue. She pushed her lower lip at him.

  “Why don’t you forget that Guild stuff,” Stanley said. “Come back to the company, and we’ll have a great time. You’ll get to congress a lot.” He gestured with open hand toward Miss Blue.

  “I’m afraid it’s out of the question,” Bailey said.

  Stanley’s tongue darted in and out of his mouth. The tendons in his neck tightened spastically.

  “You say no?”

  Bailey nodded.

  “The first time I open my heart to one of you lousy cruds, and you say no?”

  “You really hate us.”

  “My father was a hotshot union boss,” Stanley said. “A penny-squeezing son of a bitch. He tormented my beautiful mother a million ways. Whenever she tried to practice her lute, he’d play his Al Jolson records. She’d cook Chateaubriand, and he’d insist on fish-head soup. You want me to like unions? Kill me, I wouldn’t eat fish-head soup. I got where I am without fish heads, or Al Jolson either. I spit on the Guild.”

  Bailey knew Stanley’s moods from long hours at the negotiating table. He was near the edge, it was obvious. Bailey smiled, quietly, displaying even more control than he felt. Slowly he stared down Stanley and turned his own smile into a chuckle. He walked across the room sloshing his ice cubes, drawing Stanley’s and Miss Blue’s total attention, and poured himself a new drink. Casually, softly, he began to speak.

  “Stanley,” he said, “I spit on your spit.”

  He jiggled his ice cubes under Stanley’s nose.

  “I spit on your spit, because you don’t know anything about the Guild. You never worked twenty years to teach yourself everything there was to know about how to do a thing. You never read all the books so that the only thing that surprised you anymore was your own imagination, and you never learned to value that, use it, wash and polish it until it was the shiniest imagination on the block. And you never put it to work and saw it work out your ears and your eyes and your mouth and your fingers and all your body situations. You never talked to people on doorsteps and deathbeds and in jails and got them to spill their guts, and you never learned how to talk to pool-room punks and professor punks or how to figure out how each was a punk and each wasn’t. And you never learned how to con bishops and mayors and writers and whores and blacks and whites and spicks and dicks and loonies and goonies and all there was to con and deal and be with, for that’s what the con is, to be with a man and have him know you know what he’s all about and get him to tell you about his life and his loves and his faults, which is the trick, to get him to tell you where he’s weakest. As a con man you’re a joke, Stanley. You bring me in here to con me, and you don’t even know where to begin. You never learned that trick, which is the basic tool, because it’s not in you and never will be and nobody can put it in you. You’ll never even know how much there is to know, because the trick is untranslatable and nontransferable. You learn it on days when the sun rises in your eyeballs. Stanley, you’re a fig.”

  Stanley’s darting tongue betrayed his agitation.

  “A fig, eh? A fig. Well, don’t you worry. My mother taught me to see through people. She knew about people, my mother did.” He pulled Miss Blue to her feet, sat in her chair and yanked her onto his lap. “She gave me everything. Everything a mother could give. Even when I had polio at fifteen and couldn’t make it to the joy house by myself, Mommy took me in a taxi and waited for me so I wouldn’t lose out.” He rubbed Miss Blue’s left thigh, inside and out, with both hands.

  “Stanley,” Bailey said, “you’re nothing but a screwy old symbiont. Didn’t your mother ever give you a hint? Didn’t your biologist ever tell you?”

  Bailey laughed at his own idea, chromatic mockery to Stanley.

  “I’ll mother you,” Stanley said as he pushed Miss Blue off his lap, “talking to my son that way.”

  “You poor old symbiont,” Bailey said. “It’s not even your fault.”

  “You call my baby a symbiont?” Stanley yelled. “I’ll show you what my son thinks of the Guild.” He dashed acro
ss the room to the liquor cabinet and pulled out a jar full of odd, slimy growths floating in liquid.

  “Fungus,” he said. “Pickled fungus. I keep it to remember what the Guild is. A filthy fungus. Here’s what Stanley and Mommy think of the Guild.” He threw the jar against the wall, shattering it. He leaped up and down on the fungus.

  “Putrid parasite,” he said, grinding it with heel and sole.

  “Don’t cut your tootie, honeypot,” Miss Blue told him.

  Bailey picked the apology off Stanley’s desk, put it back in his pocket and left the office. Over Stanley’s shoulder Miss Blue waved good-bye to him and winked. Miss Bohen thumbed her nose at him while he waited for the elevator.

  Bailey walked out of the building and across the street to his car in the parking lot. His keys were gone from the ignition but he carried a second set. He pressed the starter button. Nothing happened. He got out and opened the hood, to find the motor gone.

  “You the owner of this heap?” a lot attendant asked.

  “I am.”

  “It’s parked wrong. You gotta move it. It’s takin’ up three spots.”

  “I’d be glad to move it. Do you have my motor?” Bailey pointed under the hood. The attendant looked.

  “We’re not responsible for articles left in the car that get lost or stolen,” he said.

  Bailey retrieved his keys from the ignition switch, smiled cordially at the attendant and walked back to the Guild room.

  Irma sat in her corner chair in the Guild room waiting for Bailey, telling herself it was right for him to apologize to Stanley. But no amount of reassurance, no amount of Bailey’s addiction to the democratic principle, could prevent her from viewing his act as the most abject humiliation in the history of Bailey. But if she could not correct it, she could accept. She closed her eyes and thought of acceptance forms, and of herself signing them. In the corner of each form she signed she also wrote in script that no one could read: I really don’t accept.

  Jarvis answered the phone when it rang. Almost immediately Irma knew Rosenthal was calling, for Jarvis had glee in his voice as he recounted the decision of the membership.

  “You’ve got personal problems?” Jarvis said. “The Guild is falling down and blowing up, and you want me to listen to your personal problems?”

  Jarvis put the phone down and called Irma.

  “He wants a shoulder to cry on,” Jarvis said to her.

  “You missed the show our leaders put on,” Irma told Rosenthal. “Lucky you.”

  “Bailey signed the apology, I hear,” he said.

  “He did. Are you going to?”

  “No. Not likely.”

  “I’m glad. Bailey shouldn’t have either.”

  “I might have. I probably would have. But we had an invasion here. In the house. Vandals. Smith and his crowd, I suppose. No. I really couldn’t apologize after this.”

  “What did they do? Are you hurt?”

  “No, not hurt. You’d have to see it.”

  “Is it awful? Anything I can do?”

  “Come and take a look and maybe something will suggest itself. Bring Bailey if you find him.”

  “I’ll find him.”

  Minutes later when Bailey walked through the Guild room door, Irma was ready to scream at him, shame him, slap him, kick him for his stupidity, for his betrayal of all things human in the name of some empty principle. But she had no chance. He went straight to Jarvis and gave him the apology back, first scratching out his signature.

  “Stanley is out of his tree,” Bailey told Jarvis. “You can’t apologize to a man who’s out of his tree.”

  Jarvis stared at the apology, not comprehending. Irma could see how the neat little package he and Popkin had tied was coming undone. He looked at Bailey with dog eyes.

  “That means you’re suspended.”

  “I understand that,” Bailey said.

  “What a whangdoodle you turned out to be.” Jarvis put his head down on the desk and stared sideways at the wall.

  “Don’t take it so hard,” Bailey told him.

  “We’ll never get lunch privileges back now,” Jarvis said.

  “Call Popkin,” Bailey said. “Tell him things didn’t work out. He’ll understand.”

  “No he won’t,” Jarvis said. “He’ll yell at me.”

  “Yell back.”

  Jarvis raised his head.

  “Would you go see Stanley again tomorrow?”

  “No,” Bailey said. “I’m afraid not,” and Jarvis put his head down again.

  “We’ve got to go see Rosenthal,” Irma said to Bailey, slipping her arm into his. “He’s got some serious problems.”

  “I should call Grace,” Bailey said. “She doesn’t know whether I’m dead or alive. I haven’t been home since yesterday noon.”

  Irma let go of his arm, and he dialed his home number.

  “Grace?”

  “Is that you, you son of a bitch? You been with your whores all night? Don’t think you can come back here and give me the clap.” She hung up.

  Bailey eased the receiver into its cradle and looked at Irma.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  But he didn’t move. He looked around the room at the empty space where the bulletin board used to be. He looked at his chair. He looked at the photograph of the first night of the strike. Irma thought she might weep, watching him. O departures! O wrenchings! But then she saw he was going to speak.

  “Bailey says good-bye,” he finally said. “Bailey stands here and thinks nostalgic thoughts. And then Bailey tells that spirit of the good old days: ‘Spirit, you haven’t got a hair on your ass if you think nostalgia will get Bailey.’”

  He pulled Irma out the front door. Jarvis did not raise his head.

  Rosenthal knew that he had done this himself. When you are in a war, even a guerrilla war, even a passive war of attrition, the enemy respects only force and he shows his respect with counterforce. Why shouldn’t Rosenthal have expected this, and worse?

  He swept the sawdust.

  Rosenthal: Why are you having such elementary thoughts at this late point? You’re not a bad sort, Rosenthal. You probably deserve better than this, even if you didn’t expect it. You always wanted better for yourself and others at the smallest possible cost to anybody else. A reward for work done, no more. A just recompense. Room to live.

  He swept the sawdust onto the grease that even in this freezing temperature had not congealed.

  Does duty come to this?

  His wife sobbed on into her second hour.

  Grace once accused Bailey of being half-scared of everything. Half-scared: a likely truth: ascribable to himself even when it wasn’t true. As long as there was a doubt in his head about what he did, Bailey could tell himself he was half-scared to carry it off. Self-punishment. Bailey knew Rosenthal had similar thoughts. Rosenthal called himself a duty-coward: Do the imposed duty, hide from freedom of choice. Relegate all doubts to the future.

  Yet Bailey knew both he and Rosenthal did act, they acted with meaning, often with anger. Others saw the acts as hollow, but Bailey knew they were triumphs of a kind, an assertion of the unique self. It was why they both cultivated an image: Bailey and his cossack hat and green muffler; Rosenthal and his cape and Tyrolean feather. This is me, the image said back from the mirror. There was something honest about it. There was Rosenthal’s aged convertible, his taste for elegance. Rosenthal said it was how he fended off the maleficent forces, a flower in the seedy lapel of the spirit: No matter what they take away from me, I’ve still got a little class. But in himself Bailey saw that plus something else, something that said: I’m one hell of a unique event in this world. Anybody can see that from my image. That’s why I do what I do. That’s why, right or wrong, half-scared, heroic or cowardly, I’m me. What I do is right.

  Justification for evil, Bailey thought.

  He stood in Rosenthal’s doorway with Irma, the door on one hinge only. Rosenthal, sweeping the kitchen in his cape, hat, glov
es and rubbers, saw them. But he let the cold house speak to them.

  The wooden kitchen table lay in the corner in a dozen pieces, sawed, then deeply gouged by hammer and chisel, or an ax. All woodwork around doors and windows had been ax-gouged, all windows broken. Broken china was piled beside the table. Kitchen chairs had become kindling wood. Pots and pans had been hammered out of shape or punctured. Walls were smeared with paint and all forms of grease available in the house: cooking oil, butter, lard, drippings, and crankcase oil from the garage had been poured over all floors, all furniture. Overstuffed furniture was sliced dozens of ways, its stuffing strewn on top of the oil. Something like a sledgehammer blow had cracked the kitchen and bathroom sinks and the bathtub. Similar blows had broken the plaster in every wall. Food was emptied into a corner of the kitchen, cans of beans and tomatoes on top of meat and rice and cookies and flour and sugar and vinegar. All food was opened, dumped on the pile and garbage emptied on top of it. Curtains were shredded and rugs cut into zigzag pieces. The TV set was smashed, all mirrors broken, dressers and beds sawed in half or thirds, mattresses sliced and unstuffed, the wire of bed-springs cut in dozens of places, all clothing smeared with grease and paint, all jewelry bent, smashed or unstrung. Each of Rosenthal’s books had been ripped at least in half, covers torn off and floated in the bathtub mixture of water and grease. Windowshades, drapes, oil paintings were slashed.

  “They also hung my wife’s diaphragm on the pencil sharpener,” Rosenthal said, “with a pencil stuck through it.”

  “We deserve it,” Shirley Rosenthal said. She sobbed as she talked, the sobbing having worked its way up and almost out. A small, dark-haired woman with a pinched but pretty face, she sat on a fragment of mattress in the bedroom, wearing her coat, her legs wrapped in a blanket.

  “It’s p-p-punishment for p-p-pride,” she said. “Ha!”

  “Gypsy reprisal is what it is,” Rosenthal said. “And you’re stuttering.”

  “Of c-course I’m st-stuttering. God is against us. I’ve kn-known it for m-m-m-months. Everybody knows it.”

  “Who is everybody?”

  “People. Just p-p-people. I was sitting at a drugstore counter and a w-woman next to me was t-t-tearing paper napkins into strips. I w-w-watched her awhile and she looked at me and threw the napkins in my f-f-face. ‘You’re no good,’ she said. ‘You w-w-wear three sweaters. You’ll never be any g-good.’ She knew. They all know.”