The Ink Truck

by William Kennedy

  “We never needed the Guild. It was always just a name we called ourselves.”

  “Sure. Do you want me to walk with you awhile?”

  “You’ve got other problems. A house to fix. A nervous wife. I don’t want to complicate anybody’s life anymore.”

  “I’ll walk awhile.”

  “He’s not eating, you know,” Irma told Rosenthal.

  Bailey shrugged when Rosenthal looked at him.

  “A kamikaze?”

  “Not quite in that league,” Bailey said.

  “It’s a great idea,” Rosenthal said. “I wonder why none of us ever thought of it before.”

  “We didn’t have to,” Bailey said, as Rosenthal fell in beside him and walked in step with him toward the corner.

  By seven o’clock a small crowd was rooted at the corner, watching Bailey, Irma and Rosenthal from a distance of half a block. Four guards had joined the company’s outside patrol, six altogether now, all sitting in two cars parked in the company lot. The lights of Fobie’s beer signs came on. In an upstairs window of the company a uniform guard stood in silhouette against the dim light of a hallway. A taxi pulled up in front of the three strikers and Deek got out, on crutches. He left the taxi door open behind him and the driver waited.

  “I heard you were up to something,” Deek said. “My old man says all the company wheels are spinning. They can’t figure it out.”

  “Same old strike,” Bailey said.

  “But with a twist,” said Deek. “I always underestimate the Guild.”

  “You can’t really underestimate the Guild,” Irma said.

  “Is it true none of you ate all day?”

  “Just him,” Irma said, slapping Bailey’s shoulder. “He’s the one with the stomach that doesn’t bark back at its master.”

  “I brought three sandwiches,” Deek said. “I thought you’d all run out of money.” He leaned on his crutches and fumbled in his pocket for the plastic-wrapped sandwiches. He offered them to Bailey, who shook his head.

  “I’ll take them,” Irma said. “We’re hungry, even if he isn’t.” She gave two to Rosenthal, kept one.

  “I don’t get it,” Deek said.

  “He thinks he’s on a hunger strike, that’s all,” Irma said. “And poor soul, he probably is.”

  “I didn’t mean to yell at you yesterday,” Deek told Bailey.

  “Now don’t get reverential,” Irma said. “You’ll make him nervous and he might eat something.”

  They all stood then without anything obvious to say. Bailey smiled and walked toward the corner. A policeman stood apart from the small crowd now, a new addition.

  “I think I’ll stick around awhile and watch what happens,” Deek said. He paid the taxi and sent it away.

  “Be my guest,” Irma said and gave Deek the backless chair. Rosenthal took a bite of the sandwich and Irma turned up her collar against the cold that was beginning to point out that this was not really spring at all, but genuine February.

  “If they see you eating,” Deek told Rosenthal, “that crowd’ll think Bailey’s eating too.”

  Rosenthal stuffed the sandwich in his pocket. The lump in his mouth felt like a pool ball. He chewed secretly and swallowed suddenly.

  “You catch on quick,” Irma told Deek, studying his face, noting all over again how gorgeous he was.

  “Where will you sleep?” Irma asked Bailey.

  “I’ve been wondering about that.”

  “This is the wrong time of the year for a hunger strike,” Rosenthal said. “Nobody stays out in the cold to watch. And without a crowd you’ve got no witnesses. And therefore no credibility.”

  “What do you do if it snows?” Deek asked.

  “Or dips below zero?” Irma added.

  “Those are problems,” Bailey said.

  “Don’t be so goddamn cavalier,” Irma told him. “What the hell are we supposed to do while you fly off your branch after this thing? Sit around and watch your blood coagulate into red ice cubes? You don’t even have a used match to keep warm by.”

  “And you didn’t drink anything today either,” Rosenthal said.

  “Dusty ice cubes,” Irma said.

  “Do we know anybody with a tent?” Bailey wondered. “A tent might stave off some of the elements, keep out a little bit of wind.”

  “I had a pup tent I stole from the Army,” Rosenthal said, “but the rats ate it.”

  “My father’s got a tent,” Deek said. “He used it on fishing trips until he got allergic to fish. It’s rolled up in our cellar. If you come with me,” he said to Rosenthal, “we can get it. There’s a kerosene lantern and a cot too.”

  “God really does watch out for sparrows,” Irma said. “Not to mention cuckoos.”

  With help, Bailey pitched the tent in the vacant lot beside the burned building. Then he sat on the cot, keeping the tent flap open so he was visible to the crowd at the corner. Rosenthal expressed his concern to the policeman that Bailey be protected from public nuisances and from possible attacks by vindictive guards or company loyalists. The word of Bailey’s actions had spread and as Rosenthal talked to the officer two cars stopped in front of the tent. Their occupants watched a few minutes, then moved on. The policeman gave Rosenthal bored and perfunctory assurance that he would maintain law and order. At eleven o’clock Rosenthal sent Irma and Deek home and went to Fobie’s. He ate the half-eaten sandwich, then the whole one, plus four whiskeys. The crowd in Fobie’s talked of nothing but Bailey: what a madman, idiot, jerk, creep, nut, fool and stoop. But with big balls. A scab raised doubts about his not eating but Rosenthal stared him down and the scab changed the subject. When Rosenthal returned to the tent Bailey was under the blanket with the lantern burning, his arms outside the blanket, his face in full view, asleep. Rosenthal sat on the backless chair and waited for three A.M., when Deek would spell him. At seven A.M. Irma would take over.

  Walking through the snowstorm with a compelling but vague purpose, Bailey arrived late at the trolley stop. A hero wearing the Great Medal was waiting with a cap of snow and a bottle of brandy. “Bailey’s the name,” Bailey told the hero, so he wouldn’t be embarrassed by not knowing. But the hero knew, shook his hand, clapped him on the back. “Lazarus wasn’t worth a doodley squat after the big boy revived him,” the hero said. “He was used to being dead, and there he was famous, just for being alive like everybody else. It killed him, you know. He could never live up to living just to live up to living and so on.” Bailey and the hero then boarded the trolley, which was packed with inquisitive passengers who rubbernecked in the aisles to get a look at the hero and the newcomer. The two sat together at the front and Bailey shook hands with another bemedaled hero, heavily clothed, dignified and riding backward. “He’s putting on the Vercingetorix suit this year,” the first hero told the second one. “Being crucified or buried alive isn’t as nasty as it’s cracked up to be,” said the second hero. “But can you imagine being trampled to death by crickets?” Bailey’s impulse at that moment was to swing from strap to strap to show how apelike he could be. But instead he took a long drink of brandy. “Vercingetorix was a good sport about it, all right,” said the second hero. “Hope you’ll weather it.” Then the two heroes toasted Bailey, each raising the bottle in turn, in salute, then staring at him with sorrowful eyes. Bailey sat quite still, sweating and trembling.

  Bailey stepped off the trolley alone and entered the house of the triumphal figure, gray-haired nobleman of the indomitable spirit. He passed through the kitchen, where middle-aged maids and chefs in starched black-and-white aprons prepared dinner. The smell of cooking produced an appetite in him that nagged. On a table near the stove stood a giant grasshopper, its body half again the size of Bailey’s head. Upon scrutiny it proved to be a great vegetable, akin in texture to a carrot. It had been scraped by the maids and like a peeled potato was turning gray from exposure. Bailey, smelling its hideous raw odor, happily left the monster and walked toward the enormous front room, its walls lined wi
th books and adorned with honors, its furniture covered by soft purple cushions. Before he spoke to the nobleman, noises drew Bailey out the front door to the street, where a crowd of frantic youths carrying unintelligible banners talked of strikes, of economic and social revolution, but in mixed tongues. They clamored to make their meanings clear to each other and to Bailey, but he caught none of it and after an hour or more he returned to the nobleman’s living room. Dinner was being served in a formal manner on an antique dining-room table that gleamed with polished silver, elegant china and a great silver bowl out of which the nobleman filled the soup plates. The grasshopper had been sliced into small pieces, all of which Bailey devoured. He told the nobleman that without a doubt it was the most delicious soup he had ever eaten and that he regretted staying in the street so long when such a delicacy as this awaited him. The nobleman’s wife said this pleased them greatly and that most guests spat the soup onto the rug after the first mouthful. Bailey ate it piggishly, enjoying his own eccentric taste.

  He awoke making slavering, hungry sounds with his mouth, which embarrassed him when he realized what he was doing. He sat up into the dawn, finding Irma asleep on the chair, leaning against the edge of the tent, cocooned in slacks, coat, blanket and head wrapper. And he loved her. He crouched low and edged past her and walked to the corner in the warm morning. He counted the hours since he’d eaten anything: sixty: a full day with nothing eaten even before he’d begun to consider the hunger strike, then a day and a half on the line. He already felt freakish. The mass of people would mock him. With the main strike all but forgotten by the public, little heeded by the press, abandoned even by the men who once were Guildsmen, a hunger strike seemed essentially a personal statement. Yet as he considered this, it seemed the only recourse left to him once a collective statement was made impossible. Would he hunger even to the threshold of death? Was this passivity, this abnegation, the statement he wanted to make? The more he thought of it the more absurd abnegation became. But how more absurd would abnegation begun, then abandoned, be?

  By the afternoon of the second day the crowds were again gathering, watching, thinning to a few, then fattening again, the majority young people. Deek stood on the corner and talked with them, orating periodically on the purpose of Bailey’s strike, as Deek understood it. The purpose, he said, was to destroy all that the company stood for, overthrow the Establishment and all its traditions, uproot false values and impose genuine values, to develop a truly humane relationship between management and labor, master and slave, capitalist and radical, Gog, Magog and the heavenly host, ins and outs, haves and have-nots, good and evil, rich guys and cheapskates, smart guys and dopes, cats and mice, artist and philistine, angel and devil, fink and funk, hump and lump, sump and dump, bump and frump. People failed to understand the mockery of Stanley inherent in Deek’s comments, the hero worship of Bailey, or the free-form language patterns. People failed to understand that Deek was beginning to render his own message, not Bailey’s. People failed to understand that Deek was truly of the opinion that he was serving Bailey’s best interests when in fact he was distorting Bailey’s ideas, serving his own interests, gaining status with his peers. Girls in the crowd sought to mother him, inquired about his broken leg and autographed his cast. Young men asked where he went to school, where he worked. All wanted to know how he knew Bailey. Deek was able to provide endless anecdotal remarks to satisfy the hunger of everyone. When he ran out of facts, he watched Bailey, and his imagination was stirred. He lied eloquently for the cause.

  At four o’clock a television news crew arrived at the corner. They photographed the crowd, then Bailey walking. Then they photographed the tent, and only when the shooting was well along did a newsman approach Bailey for an interview. Bailey stood in front of the tent and answered readily, but with weariness in his tone.

  “Our viewers are curious what you’re doing, Mr. Bailey.”

  “I’m walking up and down here.”

  “Why, may we ask?”

  “Because they won’t let me sit still.”

  “Who won’t?”

  “The guards, the police, the law, the American concept of success, the power, the glory.”

  “I’d like to get a bit more specific. Are you on a hunger strike right this minute?”

  “I haven’t eaten in about sixty-eight hours.”

  “Would you say this constituted a hunger strike?”

  “Not worth mentioning yet. I’m just a hungry striker at this point.”

  “Do you plan to eat today or tomorrow?”

  “Probably not.”

  “What would make you eat?”

  “I suppose if I got really hungry.”

  “Guild spokesmen say what you’re doing has nothing whatever to do with the Guild strike.”

  “I’d say it’s got something to do with it.”

  “How long do you plan to hold out here?”

  “Until it stops serving a purpose.”

  “What purpose is that?”

  “Hard to say. Subliminal, actually. But also it’s in a useful tradition. Preserves the mood while we wait for insight.”

  “Into what?”

  “The purpose of the strike.”

  “Now, as I get this, you’re striking to find out why you’re striking. Is that it?”

  “More or less.”

  “Do you expect any outside support?”

  “I have three friends who spend time with me.”

  “Is that all?”

  “I think it’s rather a lot.”

  “But can you really hope to change the course of events with this kind of approach?”

  “Change the course of events? Not likely. And I think something’s gone wrong with this interview.”

  “Wrong?”

  “It’s flat. Would you mind starting over?”

  “The same questions, you mean?”

  “Precisely.”

  “This is very odd. But would you, again, tell our viewers what you’re doing here?”

  “In terms of the Chinese autograph?”

  “Chinese autograph?”

  “Or about going over the hill to blueberry? Or under the bridge to greenswill?”

  “Are you trying to confuse our viewers, Mr. Bailey?”

  “Bullfighters and portrait painters confuse one another with similar names. Everybody bakes pretty calico muffins neatly, or breaks up the sidewalk, depending on whether or not they can work the oven.”

  “Mr. Bailey, ladies and gentlemen, is now uttering nonsense as we interrogate him here.”

  “Touching the piano keys,” Bailey said, smiling at the camera, “the snorer gorged himself on gorgon juice and sweet williams from under the window seed. Gorgon porgon. Friend to all the world. Sweet violence. Sweeter than all neuroses. And everybody in the pool together crying oil, mud, slime, shit and grease.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Bailey.”

  Bailey stepped off the trolley at the corner where emaciated emissaries would take him to see Alderman Terence MacSwiney, Lord Mayor of Cork. They led him through deserted streets, into the subway entrance and across wobbly boards that spanned the platforms on either side of the long-unused tracks. MacSwiney, his stomach wide between his thighs, sat in a high-backed chair wearing a felt skullcap that had been cut into a kind of crown. He munched apples and cheese, popped chocolate candies into his mouth and drank stout drawn from a monstrous barrel by a short assistant in green elf shoes, a refinement Bailey found excessive.

  “Nothing I can do,” Bailey began, “can have even the slightest meaning compared to your great deed.”

  Bailey felt stupid complimenting the man. It was evident he neither needed nor desired the admiration of others.

  “What I mean to say,” Bailey went on, “is that by comparison to you I’m a cheap pretender.” MacSwiney gave no notice that Bailey was in his presence. He continued to munch and drink.

  “I am utterly without purpose,” Bailey continued. “Nothing can give clear meaning to the
acts I perform, and yet the absence of a cause doesn’t stop me.”

  “Slainte,” said MacSwiney, and he took a long draught.

  “Thank you, sir. But saints shouldn’t toast mortals any more than mortals should worship saints. I think mutual respect is the proper condition. But I do appreciate your toast and hope you enjoy my admiration.”

  “Are you out for seventy-five days to beat my record?”

  “Not at all. I have no wish to die for the cause.”

  “Then either the cause is unworthy or you are.”

  “I’ve always suspected both.”

  “You’re just one of those play actors,” MacSwiney said.

  “Possibly. But I feel I’d act truly, given the chance.”

  “How would you act truly?”

  “I can’t begin to say. But I have faith I’ll recognize the opportunity when it arises.”

  “My advice to you, young man,” MacSwiney said, moving backward through the concrete wall with barrel and elf, “is very simple. Try very hard to …”

  The weather turned cold on the fourth day and Bailey wrapped himself in a blanket as he walked. Stanley, wearing derby hat and Chesterfield overcoat with a yellow rose pinned to the lapel, arrived during the noon hour, flanked by guards and followed by newsmen and photographers. Stanley carried a small box under his arm, which he took in both hands as he greeted Bailey.

  “I bring you a little luncheon music,” Stanley said.

  “You’re more than kind,” said Bailey.

  Stanley lifted the lid on the box and chimelike music played. Bailey recognized the strains of “My time is your time, your time is my time …” The newsmen smiled and Bailey knew a reaction was expected of him. Without it, Stanley would win the skirmish through irony alone.

  “I’m not a difficult man,” Stanley said. “I want you to know you’re perfectly welcome to keep your tent pitched on company property until Saturday at six P.M., the hour of my party. You’ve received an invitation, I trust.”

  “No,” said Bailey. “But then I haven’t been getting mail here.”

  “I’ll be disappointed if you don’t come,” said Stanley. “Also if my guards have to tear down your tent. I hate to be disagreeable.”