The Ink Truck

by William Kennedy

  “Don’t leave,” Jarvis said. “I want to show you something.”

  He left the playroom and ran up the stairs two at a time. He was back quickly with a large book.

  “Look this over,” he said. “It’s my pride and joy.”

  Bailey flipped through the book, a fifteen-dollar volume of photos showing an Australian golf professional named Barley Boy Benson instructing the reader in the use of golf clubs. The book was autographed by someone named Fred J. Selby with the notation: “To Jarvis, with best regards for better golf and all sorts of other improvement.” Bailey hunted for Selby’s name among the book’s credits and found him to be the layout artist. Bailey was still turning pages when Jarvis bounced in with four volumes of Speedwriting Self-Taught and dumped them in Bailey’s lap.

  “I went through all these,” he said.

  On top of them he put a wooden shield-shaped plaque inscribed on its lacquered brass front: “To Claude Jarvis, this American Legion School Award for the year 1939, for demonstrating those outstanding qualities of scholarship, leadership and gymnastic ability that have made this nation great.”

  “I got that for graduation from P.S. 28. You see what it says?” He pointed to the word “leadership.” “Now what do you think of old Jarvis, eh?”

  “Frankly,” Bailey said, “I don’t know what to think.”

  “You’re not impressed, eh?”

  From his wallet he took a yellowed newspaper clipping of a head-and-shoulders photo of W. C. Fields.

  “My father told him to go to hell once in a Third Avenue bar back in nineteen-thirty-three when nobody had a dime. My father was a tough baby, and you better believe that. He took no shit from nobody.”

  Jarvis was trembling, and Bailey noticed his arms for the first time. They were puffy, as were the lymph-gland areas of his throat. His wrists and the backs of his hands were also white and puffy, as if a fluid had inflated them. Yet Jarvis did not look fat to Bailey; merely bloated, puncturable. He held the Fields clipping in front of Bailey’s face long after Bailey had stopped looking at it.

  “Nothing impresses you, does it, Bailey?”

  “It’s interesting the way you revere your father. Nice.”

  “He was a giant in his time. A giant.”

  “I take it he’s dead.”

  “Who knows where the hell he is?”

  “What ails you, Jarvis? Get to the point.”

  “What’s your rush? What are you, in a big rush?”

  “I’m trying to figure it out.”

  “You tell me I stink, and you’re trying to figure it out.”

  “I never said you stank.”

  “I saw you whispering to people at the meeting. What am I, a deefy?”

  “I never said you stank at the meeting.”

  “I suppose nobody told you anything about my wife either, and that you never passed it along to anybody else.”

  “You told me all I know. The first you mentioned her was the night she borrowed the dog.”

  “Right. And you blabbed it all over.”

  “You’re wrong, Jarvis. I told no one. Why should I?”

  “I sicked the cops on her anyway, so what the hell, I told them what she was doing. I warned her to quit makin’ those movies. I saw them. I watched them through the window the night she took the dog and gave him the crabs. He never had the crabs before. He got them from her and her mixed friends. They were ruining my dog on me, but they won’t do it no more. I was a hell of a lot smarter than she gave me credit for. She didn’t even want me to go into the chicken game when we got married. But I sent myself through correspondence school running that game. Twenty-five bucks if you could pull the half-cut head off a chicken with one yank. Ten bucks if it took two, and a five if the heads were droopers others had a go at. I learned algebra and advanced spelling on that dough, but after a while I couldn’t stand the stink of chicken blood. And I was fed up being out in the country with all them apple-knockers and shit kickers. That’s when I got on at the newspaper. I worked up from copy boy to assistant-Thursday-night news editor. Not bad, eh? I know what you reporters think of copy-desk guys, but I’ll tell you this, fella,” and he raised his middle finger in front of Bailey’s nose, “you’re nothing but an electronic-age Barney Google, you and your neurosurgeons and psychiatrists and all the tranquilizers that blow you up like a hog’s bladder. I’ll tell you right now, you’ll never get back in the Guild.”

  “I have no intention of getting back in.”

  “No intention my petunia. You couldn’t get laid in Omaha. You’re no more gonna get back than Barney Google. What do you take me for, eh? Goo-goo-googly? Eh? Eh?”

  “Get the coats, Irma.”

  “Don’t leave,” Jarvis yelled. He fell on his knees, groveling at Bailey’s shoes. “Please don’t leave.”

  “You should get help.”

  Jarvis looked up at Irma, who had both hands in her muff.

  “You and your knockers,” he said to her. His face was astream with tears.

  “You’re in ghastly shape, Jarvis,” Irma told him.

  “It’s all over,” he said with a great sigh. “The strike’s all over.”

  “Who said so?” Bailey asked.

  Jarvis took an envelope from his shirt pocket and handed it to Bailey, then broke into a mighty sob. The dalmatian stood, sat, gave a yelp. The envelope was addressed to Jarvis at the Guild room. Bailey took a stiff, engraved announcement card from the envelope and read:

  You Are Cordially Invited to Attend

  an

  END OF THE STRIKE PARTY

  To celebrate the occasion of the meeting of minds of management and labor, and on said occasion to partake of cocktails, dinner and a special Scandinavian entertainment.

  The invitation was signed by Stanley and directed the invited guest to an address Bailey knew to be Stanley’s home.

  “I’m not sure I totally understand this,” Bailey said to Jarvis, who was on the floor, still awash in tears.

  “He’s mocking us,” Jarvis said. “I didn’t know he’d do this.”

  “So let him mock. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “You don’t get it,” Jarvis said. “He invited all of us along with company people.”

  “Is that why you’re all upset? Forget it, Jar. It means nothing. One side can’t simply declare the war over.”

  Jarvis broke into a new cataclysm of sobbing, wetting the floor with his tears. He pounded his forehead on the floor as he cried.

  “What is it, Jarvis? What’s got you?”

  “There’s a cover letter with it,” he said, amid snivels.

  “Cover letter?”

  Jarvis pounded his head until blood began to stream from his forehead. Bailey and Irma watched in silence. Then Bailey grabbed Jarvis and leaned him against the wall.

  “The letter says the Guild agrees the strike is over,” Jarvis said, exhausted, gasping. “Popkin signed for the International, and I signed as president of the local.” Then Jarvis’ face collapsed into babyish grief. Bailey let go of him, and he fell between his own knees. Irma and Bailey looked at one another in silence; then they started up the steps. Jarvis grabbed Irma’s ankle with one hand.

  “I love the Guild,” he said. “I love Bailey. I love you too, Irma, not to mention Rosenthal. I always loved everybody and everything. You won’t believe this, but it’s true. It’s a deep fondness for all creation.”

  Irma pulled her leg away, and Jarvis lost his balance and fell forward on his chin. He lay flat and pounded the floor with his fist and cried uncontrollably. The dalmatian licked his ear, sat, yelped, rose.

  When Bailey first stepped aboard the ancient trolley, clad in the formless robes of his hopeless faith (not a conventional faith, of course; religion was his ho-ho; but he enjoyed the hair-shirt quality of the robe’s inner lining, enjoyed its itch, its tickle), he saw Irma and Rosenthal sitting apart from each other, facing front, riding in silence, and he was comforted. He would have company on hi
s pilgrimage. The three of them would ride to the stop at Our Lady of the Aberration. There they would all get off and wait for the nun with no face to escort them to the quadrangle, where they would watch the inmates joining with God and other exalted social powers, having their aberrations whipped out of them at the stocks and the pillory. Along the walls of the courtyard, monks and other disciples of omnipotence would be kneeling, having grown to be part of the brick walls and floor of the quadrangle, their knees, shoulders and elbows an extension of the inanimate clay, a perfect union of busy and lethargic molecules. The monks’ and disciples’ faces would have grown wild with brambles. The sun would make their eyes glisten, and their hair would turn green with soft rains, while the winter snows cracked their bones and the winds eroded them like rocks into sand. The three visitors would watch these things from the walls of the institution, and Rosenthal would, of necessity, wear a funny hat that would signify his Jewishness. Nuns would thus be careful not to utter Christian phrases in his presence. The three would watch the proceedings without comment for several months, unmoving, transfixed by their awareness of the external and internal forces of a vocation. Punishment would greatly exceed the misdeeds performed while the aberrations had run free in the inmates. Prayer for their salvation would greatly exceed its need. The men and women in the stocks, at the pillory, would, in lucid moments, comprehend their own natures, but around them the behavior of others would contribute to personal confusion. The relevance of torture and prayer to the deepest part of their natures would be apparent to all but themselves. At the conclusion of their time at the institution, which would be at the moment of the hauling away of the first dead inmate in a donkey cart, Rosenthal, Irma and Bailey would once again board the trolley and continue riding separately. As the trolley approached the cliff, Bailey would climb out the window, stand atop the moving car, and with instinctive timing, dive into the dry rocks below, assured that great waves would break deeply on the rocks before he struck his head.

  Bailey walked toward the newspaper plant, Irma tucked away in her apartment. He drifted, feeling less concern for the dying Guild than he had ever felt, yet stung by his own failure to truly mark the earth with his signature. Then, as he approached the plant his eyes seemed to trick him. Was that another ink truck parked in front of the plant? No people now, no headlights, no traffic, no snow. But it was a truck. He stopped, took stock of his drive. Would he slip beneath the truck now if he could? Would he somehow, come what may, find a way to color the earth with the ink, a way to bleed the tank of its bloody blackness? He judged himself, stood quietly and wondered: Do I have the strength? The perseverance? Am I prepared for another clubbing? He walked slowly and cautiously to the corner, certain that he would act, fearful of being premature. The truck, he saw, had a flat front-left tire. Then he saw that it was different from the other ink truck. He read the lettering: not an ink truck at all. An oil truck. No driver, no guards, probably no oil, cargo already deposited. But perhaps not. He could investigate, spill what oil was left. But on what whiteness? The snow had gone gray: slushed and sooted. Optimum reduced one notch. And as he thought of it, spilling oil was very unlike spilling ink. Absence of ebony. Difference in consistency. Reduction in indelibility. Oh, no. No greaser, Bailey. He hawked an oyster of phlegm, arced it toward the oil truck. Ebony is the color of my true love’s hair.

  He walked across the street to the burned building, stared at the remains of his deed: charred wood, broken shingles, nothing where something had been. Part of a chair stuck up from the remains. Bailey tugged it free, a backless seat with uneven legs, scorched and blistered. He sat. He studied the embers. And around him the power of his thought slowly disintegrated the exterior universe.

  “Okay there, bud.”

  Bailey heard this but didn’t turn.

  “Okay, bud. You hear me?”

  Bailey turned to see a company guard. New man. Mutual unacquaintance.

  “You can’t sit here.”

  “Why not?”

  “You been here all night, they tell me.”

  “I bother nobody.”

  “We don’t like loiterers, transients, vagrants, indigents, insolvents or bums.”

  “I’m none of those. I’m on strike.”

  “Strike? The strike’s all over.”

  “Not quite.”

  “You see any pickets around anyplace?”

  “Wouldn’t you call me a picket?”

  “They pulled all the pickets off.”

  “Nobody pulled me off.”

  “I think you better get movin’.”

  “And I think you’re out of order. Call a cop. See if he’ll arrest a picket.”

  “Pickets got to keep walkin’.”

  “Then I’ll walk. First up, then down.”

  “We’ll check you out, buddy boy. We’ll check out that snotty nose of yours.”

  Bailey stood up from the chair and stretched, then walked up and down in front of the burned house. The guard crossed the street and entered the company building. By the clock in the company lunchroom Bailey saw it was eight-thirty. The morning was warm, almost springlike, a thaw. He walked the stiffness out of his legs, the cold out of his feet. He did not need gloves, and his throat was not cold with the collar unbuttoned. He watched the bosses arrive, the ex-Guildsmen, the scabs. He did not hate them, or fear them, or need anything about them. Yet they all judged him. His resentment of this, his unformed yearning to alter that judgment, disturbed him. And beyond that he was growing hungry. He kept walking; that was the important thing; and soon the hunger seemed unimportant. There would be time to eat later; now he would just walk and wait for what he felt was going to happen, what surely must happen.

  By lunchtime company people in twos and threes were watching Bailey. None spoke, none came near him. He walked without a picket sign, talking, gesturing to no one. By one o’clock company windows were dotted with faces. The faces would appear, see that he was still walking, then recede to be replaced by other faces.

  At two o’clock Jarvis turned the corner and came toward Bailey with obvious purpose. He seemed neater to Bailey without his overshoes and muffler, his hat on top of his head instead of smothering his ears; sartorial mutation: a slob in adversity, in defeat a dude.

  “I’d like to know what you’re doing,” Jarvis said.

  “I’m walking up and down.”

  “What for?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “We’re not picketing out here anymore.”

  “It’s a good place to picket, though, Jar.”

  “We don’t think so.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “The Guild.”

  “That lets me out. I’m not in the Guild.”

  “Then why the heck are you picketing?”

  “Because I’m on strike.”

  “You can’t picket if you’re not in the Guild.”

  “Are you in the Guild, Jarvis?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then why aren’t you picketing?”

  “Popkin says you shouldn’t picket. He’s really out of sorts.”

  “Who’s Popkin?”

  “Come on. You know who Popkin is. He’s from Guild headquarters.”

  “I’m not in the Guild, I tell you.”

  “Popkin says he’s near a settlement with the company, and you’ll only mess it all up.”

  “What are the terms of the settlement?”

  “He won’t tell me.”

  “As a Guildsman, don’t you feel left out?”

  “I’ll ask him again. But meantime what’ll I tell him you’re doing out here?”

  “Tell him I’m walking up and down.”

  By four o’clock workers on the company truck dock began calling out to Bailey: “Quittin’ time … strike’s over … pickets go home.…” He stopped and stared at them. They stood amid a few bundles of newspaper wrapped with wire, undistributed morning editions. The dock was otherwise empty, all trucks on the street, and the young pap
er boys an audience for the mockery of Bailey by the workers.

  “Are you nuts?” one worker yelled.

  Bailey stared back at the men, who fell silent. The smiles died on the newsboys’ faces. “Aaaaaaah,” said one worker after a long, silent interlude; and he turned away. Others milled about, and the newsboys talked to one another. Bailey resumed walking until Irma arrived.

  “What in the world are you up to?”

  “I’m walking up and down.”

  “Popkin just reopened the Guild room, and he’s got Jarvis running around like a dog with distemper. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Popkin has a way with Jarvis.”

  “He had to cancel his press conference. He was going to announce a settlement until you screwed it all up.”

  “If you see Popkin, tell him if he calls a press conference so will I. If he and Stanley can privately declare this strike settled, I can declare it unsettled, just as privately.”

  “Have you been here all night long?”

  “Since I left you.”

  “I’ll bet you haven’t eaten.”

  “I’m not hungry now. I was this morning.”

  “I’ll go get you a sandwich.”

  “No, don’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t want to eat.”

  “Is this part of the plan?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been thinking odd things.”

  “Don’t be a jerk. All it’ll get you is an empty stomach.”

  “You could be right.”

  “I’ll go down to Fobie’s and get you a roast-beef sandwich and coffee.”

  “No.”

  Irma was sitting on the backless chair watching Bailey walk when Rosenthal arrived at five o’clock, hat jaunty, no cape.

  “The word’s around that you’ve started a strike of your own.”

  “Is that what they’re saying? I’d say it was still everybody’s strike.”

  “You’re crazy, of course.”

  “I didn’t expect you to fight me. Above all.”

  “You’re out of the Guild. I’m out. I thought we’d finally gotten some sense.”

  “Fuck sense.”

  “Ah.”