The Ink Truck

by William Kennedy

  “Now Popkin and Jarvis don’t know what to do,” Irma said. “Deek’s broken bones are too heroic to argue with.”

  “What about the ink truck?” Bailey asked. “Did it come back?”

  “Yesterday afternoon.”

  “What did Jarvis and Popkin do?”

  “They sent all the pickets home.”

  By the third day on the job the randomness of his rummage through time faded, and Bailey focused on individual subjects. The gypsies took on a fascination, and after poring over the old papers, historical accounts of the city and books of gypsy history and lore, he turned up a newspaper account from 1866, contained in a twelve-volume potpourri of historical data of the city and indexed under “Gypsie Event.”

  Two men gave information to the police yesterday that a corn doctor who called himself Tercero Ascensor demonstrated a new corn medicine to John Muldowney and Michael Burns in the Dingle Bar. The pair removed their shoes and the doctor painted their feet with a sticky substance. While they waited for their feet to dry, the corn doctor took Muldowney’s hat and Burns’s coat and the shoes of both, and leaving his own tattered things on the floor he departed at such a rapid speed that the men with the sticky feet were unable to lay hands upon him. After hearing the man’s description, Police Sergeant Cahill asserted that the man was surely a gypsie, very likely from the nomadic band that has camped at the south edge of the city for the past four days. A Spanish merchant on Fox Avenue advised Sergeant Cahill that Tercero Ascensor in Spanish translates as Third Elevator, which led the sergeant to proclaim that the name was surely a pseudonym.

  Using Irma’s notes on what the gypsies had said as they wailed and danced in the hospital corridor, Bailey discovered the words to be from the language of the Zincali gypsies of Spain. Their tongue had been systematized by an Englishman who lived among them in the early nineteenth century. “Meripen pa busne” Bailey found to mean “Death to the gentiles” and gentile meant any nongypsy. The gypsy chant translated:

  Death to the gentiles, Holy God.

  Dung for the gentiles, Holy God.

  Cut off their genitals, Holy God.

  And the words “querela nasula,” which Mr. Joe had uttered at the close of the great gypsy curse, Bailey found to be a request that the evil eye of god be cast on the victim. But in spite of all this ominous knowledge, Bailey sensed that if there was a god, then he had certainly incurred divine favor by burning the building and indirectly causing the death of the old woman. It was never his intention to kill. And yet indirect disaster was god’s favored style. By this reasoning Bailey felt he had performed an unpunishable, godlike deed.

  At the end of a week in the library’s silence Bailey saw precisely how imprisoned he was by his own history, his own psychological cell structure. He had often talked of mutation but never felt it possible. Yet you died from being unable to change. You believed profoundly in the stupidity of glory and perished from its absence. Otherness. You denied the power of whole areas of life that you found unworthy, and slowly they smothered you with their presence. Otherness. When Irma whispered to him on the way to the hospital: “Why did you run to that clubbing?” he had whispered back: “That’s all there really is.” Run to the glory of the club. Otherness. In Fobie’s one night to break a depression he talked to a young woman with a virginal, unspoiled mouth, a benign, maiden-of-the-flowers smile, a face like an apple blossom. In his six-beer euphoria he delivered a monologue of hope to her based purely on intuition. The world was like her. There was no one in it who could not understand him; none who could reject him once his lucidity prevailed. It was like speaking to a beautiful day, and when he took her home he dared not touch her lest he break the spell. A week later he found she was an apprentice slut who had only wanted transportation from bar to door. She told his dreams to a crowd of scabs at the bar. When he confronted her she said to him: “Jerk, what do you want from me, kind words?”

  Precisely. The grand folly of otherness.

  But now, perceiving such folly, he resolved to kick the habit. The Guild was otherness: an unreal dream that had no possibility of being realized. It was hopelessness. It was a hideous, recurring death he would die no more. Newer, flashier and much more hopeful deaths in the possible world, in the world of here and now (touch it, taste it) awaited him. Retired hero, he had the right to choose his death.

  So good-bye, old paint.

  I’m out to find a horse of a different color.

  Bailey was shelving books with their backs to the wall, pages facing out from the shelf, when Irma discovered what he was doing. She said nothing, turned their backs out, followed him as he worked. “A book improperly shelved is a book lost,” he said aloud. She made a note of shelf areas where he was working, planning to return and reshelve the books properly. Bailey was ignoring the decimal system, putting biography on biology shelves, fiction under finance, drama under dogs. Somewhere his brain was functioning, but oddly. He spoke soundlessly to the darkness of the unused stacks. When the wagons were empty he returned repeatedly to the old newspaper files. Irma spent her days looking after him from afar.

  From the rear of the stacks as Bailey stared into their darkness, a birdlike voice whose consciousness had been eavesdropping on Bailey’s reverie, spoke squeaky words to him:

  VOICE:

  As to the old way of life, Bailey old man, what will you do with it?

  BAILEY:

  I’m glad you asked me that. What I plan to do is shred it, stomp it, beat it, cheat it, disembowel it, screw it to the wall and murder it at least once. Also I’ll probably flay it, feed its drying pus lumps to the snakes, cremate it, bury it, canonize it, apotheosize it, blaspheme and deny it, unearth it and violate its remains. Then I’ll prescribe its bones and dust for use as wolf bane, shoe polish, fertility reducer and suggest it to friends for combating toothache, menstrual pain, diaper rash, epilepsy, narcolepsy, psoriasis, satyriasis, impotence, acne and hot nuts. As an optional use, any sinews should make swell dental floss. When springtime comes I plan to grow it in a flowerpot, smoke its leaves, sniff its stalk, chew its roots and inject the leftover juice into my armpits as a permanent deodorant. I also have high hopes for it as a dandruff renewer.

  VOICE:

  I suppose all this will help you discover something.

  BAILEY:

  You bet. All secrets of the hidden past. The history of lost Guildsmen. The precise location of the golden seeds. How navels are formed. The purpose of the appendix and the mosquito. Plus certain truths about political, religious, artistic and racial causes. Nietzsche generalized that all good things approach their goals crookedly, and so for very crooked reasons I’ll put his idea to the test.

  VOICE:

  How do you think people will react when they see that you’ve discarded the old way?

  BAILEY:

  They’re sure to find it wonderful, sad, fitting, terrible, stupid, grotesque, absurd, egocentric, hilarious and meaningless. They’ll pass the funeral home and shrug. They’ll buy new iceboxes and toilet seats, new spectacles and trusses, new corsets and jocks, new toupees and contact lenses. The old way will lie in state, in repose, corrupting quietly as they pass. They won’t cry.

  VOICE:

  And while you’re waiting for all this to happen?

  BAILEY:

  I’m glad you asked me that. I plan to write a series of apparently incomprehensible columns to illustrate my apparently incomprehensible thought. You’re welcome to read my first one if you like. I call it:

  HEED GOKKI

  Our men derived inadequate dignity and a coarsened suavity when their adversaries expected them to be equanimous to an inferior horse. The method, like that of the dead-fish fashion, turned increasingly to a pollution of the lakes. Swimmers objected from several of the wagons. Fishermen coiled their crystal sifters, excited beyond fear of Gokki, the great unknowable. Many of them refused to leave the bedrolls. But by nightfall the men had infiltrated into the area with consummate arrogance, encouraging
the weary and the filthy to contain their hunger. No one wanted to be forced to eat the uneven ground. The great hordes moved their wheels to disengage. But be it rough hump or furrowing the bay leaves, whatever it would be—the wagon tools and frying pans clanked throughout the night. Instincts slid from side to side among the group’s elders, regardless of their allegiance.

  Nevertheless, some hostile adolescents, as the mood continued around our fire, kept their places. Disorder prevailed, in and out of minds. The night chattering of the birds was followed by the silence of the young selves, drinking wildly, excitedly, soundlessly. One of the boys invited the fishermen to share.

  No one expected Zorquila to do what he did. And when Magor leaped away from the fire as in the old days, emulating Gokki and thus in pursuit of lovely self, the youths touched each other—cautiously alert, spreading out, crying, loving it all because snapside around them was alive. Zorquila, squatting, grew angrier. I had seen him angry before, cooking barn swallows with his Lumbena pride in being young and new. The horses were impassive, like several dog faces. There was a constant threat of action. Magor’s face whitened with tense dust at the newness while his whipsnaps and his pockmarks called endless attention to his ostentatious sucking of Gokki’s peculiar (but inimitable) stoicism. He swaggered with several drops of gray liquid. Old. The same. Superiority bulged in his trouser pockets. It smelled of Gokki’s whipping (that ritual) and it turned our stomachs. His smirk broadened, habit from jail, throwing a challenge to Zorquila and the others. Zorquila stood and drew his kespar. Then began the bundle wheeling and the shimbo throwing, the wrestling and the stomping. Contests were drawn up, over, between and across his gaping mouth. Children and young girls stared from the wagon slits. All shifting pursuits waned as the sun began to rise. The shimbos were pulled out. Zorquila retrieved his kespar. Magor’s blood was gone. Gokki the unknowable had made his message plain: Remain unchanged, perish.

  VOICE:

  It’s a problem.

  BAILEY:

  We’re all victims of our own matrix, that’s the problem; and it could be solved if there were only a matrix mart. But since there isn’t, certain radical measures are called for. I’ve concluded that the only way out is not only freedom from history, but from future glory lusting as well. Other men have rid themselves of the worst of vices. They’ve plucked out their own eyes, cut off their own hands, even become autocastrates and submissive lobotomites to get beyond desire. The Guild, after all, is eradicable. It’s only an idea, the climax of a particular, historical kind of behavior. One chooses to work as a Guildsman as one chose knighthood or asceticism in the Middle Ages. The quality of the man, of course, dictates the achievement. Pigs don’t have wings. Eagles don’t snuffle in garbage. And I do wonder about my own niche, but without conclusion. All I can say is that my steadfast illusions in this time have become far more compelling than most of my shifting realities, and I’d like to take this opportunity to curse all those who have helped me reach this inverted pinnacle.

  VOICE:

  Beyond this cursing of your influences, how do you plan to get rid of the future?

  BAILEY:

  First I plan to move steadily forward into the blackness, where I know I’m quite certain to perish. But even as that final moment nears, I nevertheless feel pressed upon to pursue the light, follow the dream, chase the will-o’-the-wisp, trap the unicorn, capture the golden fleece, clutch the grail and in all ways solve the riddle of What, How and Why, which does not speak very well for my ability to wreak substantial change upon myself. Yet there I will be, perversely united at last with the filthy dogmatists who tell us all to visit Paris and find out for ourselves that there is no Eiffel Tower. And as I grow faint, as I curse my desiccating blood, my shriveling flesh and diminishing consciousness, I will see ahead at the center of the darkness the slavering jaws of the Monster of Infinite Eyes, and I will know my fate. But once inside the monster’s maw, I plan to toss my last grenade into the depths of its large intestine, and when the blast sounds and the black blood flows out through the cavernous wound, I’ll start to slide on that flowing river of life-giving grease, out past the scabless gap. And then I’ll stand, bloodied up from tooth holes and digestive acids, I suppose; but if the plan works, bloody well cleansed as well. I’ll stand, then, into one of those ruby days; one of those new and brilliantly ruby days; one of those arrival days. At least that’s the plan.

  “An incident of the cholera occurred in this city a few days since,” Bailey read, “which for several reasons we think worth recording. Among the households which have been entered and stricken by the fatal disease was that of Mr. Peter Hangley, a worthy Irishman, who has long been employed by the commissioner of streets. His wife, a warmhearted, motherly woman, was taken with the cholera and died and was buried Thursday last. Next, a lovely little daughter, seven years of age, was taken sick, and she too died. The father applied to Alderman Wingate for a coffin but for some cause its delivery was postponed for an hour or two. During this time Mr. Hangley returned home, and the supposed dead child stretched forth her arms with the exclamation, ‘Oh, Father! I have been to Heaven, and it is a beautiful place!’ After the surprise and the excitement, she gave a relation of what she had seen, as she expressed it, ‘in Heaven.’ She saw her mother taking care of little children, many of whom the mother called by name, and among them were the four children of Uncle Martin Hangley and three children of Uncle Chauncey Casey. ‘Aunt Maymie is not there now,’ said the child, ‘but she will be tomorrow.’

  “‘But,’ said an older sister, ‘it cannot be so, dearest, for there are but two of Uncle Chauncey’s children dead.’

  “‘Yes, I saw three of them in Heaven,’ said the child, ‘and dear Mother was taking care of them. All were dressed in white, all were very happy and playing. Oh, it was beautiful there. I shall go again Sunday next at four o’clock!’

  “Mr. Peter Hangley informed Alderman Wingate that the child was not dead, and when the alderman, in company with Dr. Morrison, visited the house, the little girl told them the same story. And while they were present a message came from Uncle Chauncey giving information of the death of another Casey child and inviting the Hangleys to attend the funeral.…”

  Bailey peered up from the 1832 newspaper, his eyes watering from the strain of reading the small and faded print. Pigs were coming slowly through the aisle toward him, snuffing the dry air of the stacks. Oink. One of them snuffed at his trouser leg. Oink, oinggg. The sound seemed a signal. Other pigs came into the aisle, two, four, eight. He climbed to the second shelf, above the level of their backs. More came, crowding in until the aisle was full. He could not step down now without stepping on slimy pig backs. He edged along the shelves, pushing the bound volumes gently to gain a foothold, holding the edge of a high, dusty shelf with his hands, straddling the pigs. At the end of the aisle when straddling was no longer possible, when jumping down was still impossible because the pigs had clogged the main aisle also, he went hand over hand along the end of the shelf to the next aisle, feet dangling. He found the next aisle full. Also the next. Oink. He moved to an aisle where only two pigs wandered and he leaped down and sprinted toward the darkened rear of the stacks, where he had heard the birdlike voice. Behind him he heard: Oinggg. He turned the corner away from pig voices, heard pig steps coming toward him. He ran into the total darkness of the stacks, beyond where he had ever gone. He felt for a switch but found none. He climbed the shelves to touch the bulb but found none. He moved into ever deeper darkness, imagining irrationally that he would soon be in a corner where exit would not be possible. Behind him, some distance now, he heard: Oingg. He was outdistancing them. They would not chase him into the darkness. But though they came no closer (he estimated there were hundreds), they did not leave. They stayed in the area of light. He, in darkness, was only vaguely certain of the way he had come. He had made so many turns that he could not say now where the elevators were. Surely he could not reach them without confronting the pigs, and th
is he had no urge to do. The pigs had run down cats and dogs in the street, trampled them, eaten them. Four thousand were loose in the city streets, increasing by a thousand a year. He knew this from the old newspaper accounts. It had been a Dutch privilege to let the hogs run, and the city council was careful how it impinged on such tradition. Debate continued in the council: Should the pigs roam and be allowed to eat the garbage in the street, or should they be penned? Pork fattened on street garbage was not good food, one councilman insisted. But doctors reported that hogs are the best scavengers, and their running loose is beneficial to the city. The hogs would shrivel if penned, and the swine were the food of the poor. Penning them would also inflict disease on the owners. No. Let’s collect our garbage with men, not pigs, said one councilman. But the council defeated the confining motion 188 to eight. And so the pigs ran loose.

  One slip, Bailey knew, a fall into the midst, and they would do the same to him as they did to the street garbage, to the dogs and the cats: trample him, devour his face. Blood would whet their fevers, and they would rip him out of his clothing, gnaw away his flesh, crack his bones with their teeth, lick up his blood.

  He receded into a new corner and saw along the wall a line of light. He moved toward it, touched the wall, then a door, pushed it and stepped into what he took, because of the overcast, to be the waning light of the day. But he had lost track of time and could not be sure. The overcast was almost a fog, and the air had an acrid smell when he swallowed it. He had left his coat in the library, but he did not need it. The day was unseasonably warm, in the nineties, he guessed. Yet he could see no sun. He walked down a slight hill, and when he looked back he could no longer see the library, so shrouded in the pall of fog was the hill. He walked on a planked sidewalk and was swept backward by a stream of people coming at him from the city gate. He sidestepped and let them pass, counting about forty, all of them in a great hurry, none of them giving him more than a glance, all of them drifting away from one another as they moved farther from the gate. Their clothing was different from his own; the streets were dirt paths. When he saw a horse and rider coming toward him, rider with a white mask covering all of his face but eyes and forehead, he knew something had changed in his perception of events, that he was in a primitive stage of life. The faces of the people who had almost run him down with their haste were familiar to him, but he placed none of them. It seems, he thought, that I have done a clever thing in reaching this place.