The Ink Truck

by William Kennedy

  Bailey listened solemnly. Slowly he saddened. The corners of his mouth turned down. His eyes squinted. His lips parted in a bawl. He fell to his knees, grabbed Stanley’s hand and clasped it in his own. He looked up imploringly.

  “Please, Massuh Stanley, don’ hurt this chile no mo’.”

  Photographers snapped the scene wildly. As guards pulled him off Stanley, Bailey leaped up and in a deep-throated, Jolsonesque voice he sang, gesticulating with all the melodrama of minstrelsy:

  They always, always pick on me,

  They never, ever let me be,

  I’m so very lonesome, awfully sad,

  It’s a long time since I’ve been glad,

  But I know what I’ll do by and by,

  I’ll eat some worms and then I’ll die,

  And when I’m gone you wait and see,

  They’ll all be sorry that they picked on me.

  He finished on bended knee, then leaped around like a crazed gorilla, scratching himself under the armpits with loose-jointed arms, hopping on both feet, then rocking on one foot, then the other, ape fashion, his jaw thrust into a prognathous, simian gape. He made ape sounds for the newsmen: “Ugga ugga ooga ugga, eee-eee-eee.” The photographers climbed over one another to record Bailey’s performance, which had drawn the largest crowd of the strike to the periphery of his tent area. Finished, Bailey reassumed his solemnity. He picked his blanket up from where he’d thrown it and wrapped it around his shoulders.

  “Stanley,” he said, “I can’t tell you what a continuing inspiration you are to me.” He walked through the crowd to the corner. By the time he returned, Stanley, the guards and the newsmen were gone.

  Stanley permitted no news of the confrontation to appear in the company newspaper. But competing papers printed pictures and amusing texts, and the TV news shows all showed Bailey’s song and dance to their viewers. One effect was unexpected. By mid-evening, four ex-Guildsmen who had dropped out of the strike months before had formed a small picket line against the company, across the street from Bailey’s tent.

  By noon of the next day the picket line numbered ten. Bailey knew them all, not all personal friends of the past, but all reasonable, commonsense men who had left the Guild fight for survival reasons. Eight of the ten had gone on to other jobs, but two still worked for the company, and their jobs would either terminate or be jeopardized by this action. Bailey shook hands with all the men. They congratulated him. The two admitted their time with the company was about over anyway and that they were acting out of shame for early defection. One already had a new job lined up.

  A disc jockey took up Bailey’s fight, and his teen-age listeners gathered at the corner after school to cheer a hero. They sang high-school and college anthems and rock tunes to keep their own interest high. A peanut vendor set up shop in his pushcart on the corner and on his second day sold hastily and crudely painted Bailey Balloons on the side. Television and radio stations touched on hour-to-hour developments. The teen-agers sang a chant: “Bailey’s Hungry,” which as Bailey listened to it took on the properties of a foreign phrase. He heard it as Bale Esungri, Bay Lesungri, Bailee Sungree. As the young people chanted, Bailey began to twitch his arm and leg muscles to their rhythm. Soon he forgot his hunger; and twitching at full speed to the now mystical phrase, he relished the tempo and the ambiguity of what seemed to be his deepest truth.

  The sixth day turned furiously cold. The weatherman predicted subzero weather for the evening. Bailey had weakened, the turning point being his song and dance, which sapped his reserve strength. He walked less, especially as it grew colder, and spent more time lying down in the tent. It was the last day he would have the tent, and he faced the impossible problem of surviving outdoor in killing weather, without food, without shelter and in a seriously weakened condition. It seemed incredible to him, as he fought the pains in his stomach, that MacSwiney had lived for seventy-four days without food, even if the British did put glucose in his water without his knowledge. It seemed incredible that professional hunger strikers fasted even forty days and forty nights.

  As it began to snow Bailey saw Smith arriving and he equated the two. Walking with Smith were the two men in fedoras whom Bailey remembered from the hospital: Clubber Reilly and Fats Morelli, whose father came to America from Naples with two barrels of olive oil. They moved among the pickets, staring at each man on the line. Smith wore total black: a peaked cap, like a gas-station attendant might wear, black boots, black turtleneck sweater, tight-fitting black hip-length jacket, black gloves, dark glasses and still in his ear, the gold earring.

  “Worms,” Smith said from the curbstone, where he stood watching Reilly and Morelli moving among the pickets. “Nothing but worms.”

  The henchmen grunted and laughed.

  “A can of worms,” Morelli said.

  “A bag of worms,” said Reilly.

  “Worms on parade,” Smith said.

  Reilly bumped a picket off the sidewalk. Then Morelli did the same. The picketers resumed their place, ignoring the assaults. From across the street Deek, sitting watch with Bailey, heard Smith’s voice and recognized it. Bailey saw the gypsy intrusion but kept walking, knowing himself incapable of giving physical aid to the picketers. Never in his life had he felt so weak, so helpless. The cold was inside him now, the blanket useless in such temperatures. As he turned to walk back to his tent he saw Smith and henchmen crossing the street toward him. He stopped by Deek’s chair, the snow falling heavily, already a white veneer on the street.

  “Worms,” said Smith. “More worms over here.”

  “Going out there is no other,” Bailey said. “Returning there is no trace. That’s an old saying, Smith. Have you considered the possibility of leaving no trace?”

  “Don’t waste words on that bird,” Deek said, and he swung one of his crutches like a scythe, hitting Smith at the back of the knees and sending him to a kneeling position. Deek jabbed the crutch into Smith’s stomach, raised it quickly and ripped Smith’s lip and nose. Smith fell back, stunned, as Reilly and Morelli moved in on Deek and beat him with blackjack and fists. The corner policeman came running as Bailey grabbed Morelli’s throat and threw him into the gutter. The policeman pulled Reilly off the unconscious Deek, whose head was split and bleeding. Smith rose sluggishly, his mouth running with blood. In that instant, conscious that this was total disaster, the collapse of all plans, the ruin of hope, Bailey looked past Smith’s shoulder to see the ink truck backing slowly into the driveway.

  When Bailey reached the point called Penultimo Trolley, he started walking alone on the boardwalk. He walked past old men whose lips and noses had turned blue from the thinness of the air. He walked past dudes and dappers who tipped the hotdog-stand clerk with twenty-dollar bills. He walked past the cringers, the clever women with sweet hair, the homegrown midgets and the professional nix-nucklers. The boardwalk began to climb a hill after that and walking became difficult. Bailey wheezed, tempted by the rollercoaster and the merry-go-round. But he pushed on upgrade past the reviewing stand, where the judges with stopwatches clocked his time. He was faltering badly, he knew. They smiled knowingly as he passed and he caught each of their faint clickings as they drew their mathematical borders around him.

  At the famine pound he saw children enter carrying the corpse of a playmate on a crude stretcher made of giraffe leg bones and stitched mouse hide. A janitor of the pound yanked a bawling infant out of the arms of a woman who had sat down on the road and died. The janitor stepped over a bony dead man who stared into the sun, and he placed the infant on a window ledge away from the dogs that ran loose, eating the dead. A child with a huge head, swollen belly and cracked skin spoke to Bailey from beside a fire where his mother was cooking a meal of leaves and bark.

  “What is the relationship of art to life?” the child asked.

  Bailey’s eyes exploded and his blood boiled. His tongue fell into the dust and when he tried to pick it up his fingers separated at every joint. He stood upright and walked f
orward to meet the imperceptibly advancing black cloud of locusts.

  Conscious of more blood, more guilt, of the central core of himself that demanded sacrificial offerings, that conspired against peace, sanity and the sweet beauty of resignation, Bailey ran past the policeman who was handcuffing bodies in the street. He leaped onto the runningboard of the old truck, yanked open the door and stunned the driver with a backhanded chop to the windpipe. He grabbed the key from the ignition switch and took a quick look at the dashboard for dials and switches that would simplify his task; but he understood none of them. Out then, door slammed, keys thrown into vacant lot, he fell to his stomach and rolled under-the truck, coming face up to the heavy black rubber hose that ran from the underbelly to the back end of the tank. He reached for it, burning his wrist on the muffler. He pulled the hose and it gave, inches. A foot. He tugged, and it gave another foot. And another. Hands scrambled after his clothing, trying to pull him. He kicked at them and pulled furiously at the hose, which gave a bit more on its spool. A club struck his left knee. He pulled, raised his right leg into the hose’s U-shape now, pressed with all his waning strength. And the hose loosened, end in sight, uncaught from the notch that held it. He grabbed the nozzle, twisted it, saw the ink come: a dribble, then a trickle. A club struck his arm, his right ankle; a hand grabbed his hair and pulled. He fixed his eyes on the end of the hose to see the gushing, then felt himself moving away from it, being pulled backward by the collar of his coat. No gushing came. The trickle became a dribble, then droplets. The hose and the ink had blackened his hands, stained his coat, his trousers, but most of it had fallen onto the ground, onto the new snow in which he had rolled, which he had packed. He wrenched his head sideways for a last glance before the hands had him entirely out from under the truck, and he saw that small puddle of ink breaking already, coursing through the new snow in tiny rivulets toward the gutter, toward the sewer. He gave no resistance then as the guards hauled him to his feet, jammed him against the back of the truck. And as a club rammed deep into his empty belly, as a fist flattened his nose, as he felt himself falling forward, he could not help breaking into a soundless, private, utterly internal but inescapably joyous giggle.

  ROWDY IS OUSTED AS LAST TROLLEY GOES CLANG, CLANG

  AND THE BOON IS ON THE SPOON

  If he says, What’s going on? and you say, How do you mean? Where? And he says, Why, all over. Then tell him, Sam, I want you to know I don’t know any more about it than you do. By God, Sam, I know less. Believe me, if you mean the trouble, if you mean people with money and others without and people with time and others without and others with good liquor and others without and others with fine places to sleep and others without, believe me I don’t understand it. If you mean, even, one man and one woman, together, married or not married or in love or not in love, let me apologize. If I’ve given the impression that I’m one who knows or one who would be apt to know, I didn’t mean to. I don’t know. I can’t make head or tail of it.

  —WILLIAM SAROYAN

  “For My Part I’ll Smoke a Good Ten Cent Cigar”

  Having reached an end to noxiousness, Bailey raised his head above the unconscious level. Success sat on his chest, a female dwarf with button ears. He felt more pain. Always pain. They always, always pick on me. He thought of Deek’s bloodied head. They always, always pick on Deek. Smith’s bloodied face. Smith had his bad days too. Irma nowhere in the room. Blue room. Blue for boys. Surrounded by old elegance. A moneyed nook. It’s all over now Baby Blue. Ah, true, Baby Blue, ah, true. There is an ending to endings also, a climax to climaxes. If he sat up, something else would begin. A new adventure? A dream? His head ached even as he budged it. But he must move on, mustn’t he? All that is human, said Gibbon, must retrograde if it does not advance. Good advice. But, said Aesop, never trust the advice of a man in difficulties. In that case, Bailey wondered, should I continue to listen to myself?

  Rosenthal found his wife, Shirley, sitting in the bathroom on the side of their cracked bathtub, naked but dry, the tub filled up to the crack with clean water. “I love a hot bath,” Shirley told her husband. He put his fingers in the water and found it cold. When he told her he was going to the party she slid into the tub and soaped her elbows and knees. When Rosenthal turned on the hot water for her she cried. To calm her he said he would take her to the party.

  Irma spent an hour calling hospitals, the police, besieging guards, company operators, invoking saints, virgins, ethics, mystical holiness, common decency and human tears for a scrap of information leading to the whereabouts of the victim, the principal, the umbilical connection, the vaginal scream suppressor, the hero, the giant, the maniacal moloch of love.

  Stanley, having lent digital aid to Miss Blue in her needful moment, washed his hands to the wrist line, dried them on a pink towel embroidered with rosebuds in the shape of an S, clipped a white carnation from an arrangement beneath the mirror next to his bedroom door and pinned it to his lapel. He huffed up his chest, shrugged up his shoulderpads, glanced back at the momentarily spent Blue sadness and descended to inquire about the food, the wine.

  By request of Stanley, Clubber Reilly approached the party, driving his five-year-old Volkswagen, still chagrined by the three hours spent in jail and by the need for having bail posted by a company attorney whose disapproval of the case could not have been more obvious, and wondering: Wasn’t it my duty to break that punk’s head?

  Fats Morelli, sitting beside Reilly, bailed simultaneously by the unsmiling barrister, touched his throat where Bailey’s fingers had pressed, winced at the swollen, sensitive flesh, considered the kind of revenge he would take on his clownish attacker. But wondering then whether a man starved for six days and still so powerful could be easily taken, Morelli began thinking in terms of a two-man revenge squad.

  Miss Bohen, standing before her mirror, slipped into her best black dress, a solemn number with a tiny, lacy collar. The dress fell over her pipelike body like a cover on a birdcage. She powdered her face, dabbed pale rouge on her protruding cheekbones, added a false bun to her thinning, coal-black hair, screwed into her earlobes the cultured-pearl earrings purchased for her at Bloomingdale’s in 1939 by her third cousin from Elmira whom she met in New York for purposes of visiting the World’s Fair and which also proved to be the only assignation she ever had, dabbed perfume behind her ears and on the front of her dress at the approximate spot where her breasts, had she any, would have come together, stepped one step back from the mirror and smiled.

  Deek was shaken awake, opened his eyes to see a nurse, a pretty vision, telling him he must stay awake, not lapse into a coma, that he must be observed for twelve hours since he might have a brain concussion. But he grew immediately restive, thinking of the action, of Bailey in action, of the action-packed challenge of Stanley. Rest? Immobility? Peace? Time enough for that in decrepitude. He smiled at the pretty vision. He looked around the elegant room. Yellow room. Door there. Antique chair in antique corner. Antique etchings in antique frames. Antique linen on antique bed. He breathed old air, connived how to leap out of the past and into the pretty present. “What time does the party start?” he asked. “Sssshhhhh,” said the pretty nurse.

  Three scabs who since the strike began had risen to positions as editors, all in company with their wives, all in formal dinner clothes, backed out of a suburban garage. The suburban news editor was driving. As he backed into the street he ran over a suburban cat.

  Popkin, his long face contoured with crags and fjords, sat on his rented rowing machine in his hotel room, trying to gauge the precise time from his wristwatch without interrupting his rowing, his fixed regimen: four hundred strokes, plus, today, ten, adding slowly to his muscles. Soon to be five hundred, then seven hundred, then with a gross chest and pulsating biceps, a strutting figure, an attraction. Personal magnetism lies in your desire to improve yourself. Shed ten years from your life. Add six inches to your chest expansion in three months. Lose your paunch. Popkin would eat no bread, no pot
atoes, should they be served at the party.

  Smith, if he sat up quickly or jarred his head, would bleed again from the nose, and so he lay very still on his cot in his room over Stanley’s garage, disturbed not so much over his injury, his lost blood, his ignominious flattening by a man on crutches, but by what the flattening, plus the failure to disrupt the picket line (grown to fifteen following the intrusion) would mean to his new and compelling aspiration: to become personal bodyguard to Stanley. Smith saw Stanley as chief buttress against the wave of evil that was sweeping the city, its people, its churches, its movies, its birds. Inured to ordinary fear, Smith found this anxiety strange, and profoundly disturbing.

  Stephanie wondered what it was a man like Stanley saw in a girl like herself. She was surprised when Smith told her Stanley wanted her at the party and she decided he must like swarthy women. She’d heard of his many mistresses. She put on her lowest-cut blouse, debated whether to wear underwear, decided she would, rather than appear too forward.

  The publisher, the assistant publisher, the general manager, the advertising manager, the circulation manager and the chief bookkeeper, knowing the opinion their wives had of Stanley’s parties, sent regrets that they could not attend his gala evening. One pleaded illness, four previous engagements, the sixth excessive weekend work. All the executives placed great faith in Stanley’s capabilities, his handling of the long strike having established for them the depth of his understanding of social complexities.

  The phone call from Miss Blue did for the captain what no amount of withdrawal, self-pity or cheering talk by others could do: It got him out of bed. Miss Blue conveyed Stanley’s good wishes for the captain’s health, prosperity and long life, extended an invitation to the party, and announced that as an animal lover himself, Stanley hoped the captain would accept the gift of a six-week-old cat, since Stanley understood that the captain’s cat had recently passed away. Paid such attention by strangers, the old man found the invitation irresistible. His sister Rose refused to go, explaining: “The next time I leave this house it’s feet first.” Her grisly outlook cheered the captain, who felt youthful by comparison. As he dressed he tried to recall his last social engagement.