The Ink Truck Read online

  Irma sat down by Shirley and held her hand.

  “Those things happen to everybody,” Irma said.

  “No. It’s G-g-god. He hates us.”

  “No, no,” Irma said. “It’s happened to me. I was walking along the street one day and a man I never saw before came up and hit me on the head with his umbrella and told me to move over to the other side of the street.”

  Shirley looked at Irma, studied her.

  “You’ve got d-d-dark hair. He p-p-probably thought you were me.”

  The lost laughter of infancy was a phrase Bailey had read somewhere so long ago that he could not remember its source. But he had read it at an impressionable moment, for it stayed in his mind. Bailey made up other phrases: the death of an innocent face. The corruption of adolescent wisdom.

  “Stop sweeping, goddamn it. Stop sweeping,” Bailey said.

  When he put the broom down, Rosenthal knew he would quit the Guild at last.

  “I’m leaving the Guild,” he said.

  “Leaving me alone?” Irma asked. “You may not know, but they’ve suspended Bailey.”

  Rosenthal listened as Irma briefly recounted the events leading to the suspension. Now he didn’t know what to do. As he listened, he realized that Bailey had been out of the Guild for months. He had been on his own since the day he quit as negotiator. He went through the motions, going along with an idea that no longer had any validity for him. But Bailey could live anywhere, under any flag, and it wouldn’t change him. He would always be Bailey, nobody’s servant.

  Rosenthal picked up the broom. Work is a distraction.

  When he put the broom down, Bailey knew Rosenthal would quit the Guild. He had to quit now, for it had at last come all the way home to him. Rosenthal was one of the few heroes in Bailey’s life, and Bailey felt he knew precisely how Rosenthal would behave. He would exile himself to a place where there would be a minimum of companylike influence. He would devote himself to something with a dutiful concern that in time would become passionate. Bailey could not say what that would be, for Rosenthal could not say what it would be. But having found one world wanting, he would seek another one, a smaller one, as closely resembling the dream of the first one as possible.

  But he would never recover from his wounds.

  He would always be heroic.

  When he saw Bailey staring at him after he picked up the broom again, Rosenthal stared back at Bailey. Something would always be possible for Bailey. He might even rebuild the Guild, stronger than it was even on the first night of the strike. He might even become a mythical figure in the Guild. Bailey was capable of great deeds. He was radical and talented, and for such men something good is always possible until they die. With himself, Rosenthal felt such possibility was remote. He did not accept it as a fact, but only sensed its truth. He also sensed that he had believed too long. In what? There was no what; because it was not an objective thing. It was his attitude toward all things. He did not resist elements foreign to himself. Bailey understood what to reject, what to keep. There was a chance for the salvation of such men. They kept themselves in a condition that always permitted something new to happen to them.

  I tried too hard to get along.

  I’m tired now.

  Bailey is not as tired as I am.

  Given the right frame of mind, Irma could cry over items in a mail-order catalog. Yet often when she cried she had an impulse to smile. For what moved her to tears was usually something so valuable that she had already experienced joy from it; and the smile would be the memory of that.

  “I think we should clean this place up,” she said. “I’ll start on the mattress and the bedclothes. Bailey, why don’t you use some of the boards to nail up the windows. And fix that damn swinging door.”

  To Irma, men who went through their lives saying only “I want” didn’t really want at all. They were the men who professed love too quickly, who came too quickly, who gave gifts because they expected gifts. But they didn’t “want” at all. They needed. They were addicted to the sop of every day. They had no grandeur like Bailey, like Rosenthal. So many people believed all work was holy, that one kind of work was as holy as the next. But that wasn’t true at all. There were men who worked, and there were holy men who did holy work. Bailey and Rosenthal were holy men. God help them. They’re going to die from such holiness.

  If Bailey could have heard Irma think such thoughts, “Shit,” he would have said.

  Knowing the context, Irma would have called that a holy comment.

  “You know we’re pushovers,” Bailey said.

  “Creampuffs,” said Rosenthal.

  “Moderates,” said Bailey, “always lose the revolution after they win it.”

  “We didn’t win.”

  Bailey saw a black flower blossom in his mind. He stepped on it.

  “I do believe I’ll quit. I’ll tidy things up for Jarvis before I do. But it’s pointless to go on.”

  “Jarvis will miss your humility,” Bailey said.

  “My humility is a pose. Denying it is part of the pose. Mentioning the denial is another part. You should see that. I’d rather have your values.”

  Bailey grunted. Values. He had long ago contracted the disease of the open mind. So many unimportant things sat inside his brain alongside everything truly important, all claiming equal attention. He smiled that anyone could think this constituted a set of values.

  “L-l-l-look at him laugh at you,” Shirley Rosenthal said to her husband. She pointed at Bailey. “He’s d-d-death, that’s what he is.”

  When Bailey made no response, Rosenthal suspected guilt was taking him over. Possibly he’ll think I’m bitter toward him too as a result of the fire and its consequences. He shouldn’t have mentioned Bailey’s part in the fire to Shirley. She didn’t know how to read it. She couldn’t link it to all that went before, both in the Guild and in Bailey.

  Yet as Rosenthal looked at his destroyed home, he could not entirely blame an evolutionary cause. A single act brought this about, and as he had that thought, he felt anger deep within. All easy explanations, all the forgive-and-forget platitudes, all the brotherly tissue of commitment and resistance seemed like assuagements of a harsh truth.

  Goddamn you, Bailey. Why did you do this to me?

  He grabbed Bailey by the shoulder.

  “She’s not herself,” he said. “Don’t pay any attention.”

  “What she said isn’t true,” Irma said.

  “Of course not,” Rosenthal said.

  The four of them worked through the evening, and by midnight the house was sealed off from the weather. Tables and certain chairs had been pieced together as if by blind, insane carpenters. Furniture had been broadly stitched and covered haphazardly with cloth of any sort, and the bed reconstituted. Irma bought food and cooked it, and Bailey repaired light fixtures. From neighbors and friends dishes and glasses were borrowed. Rosenthal went to the Salvation Army and bought two shirts for fifty cents and a blouse and skirt for Shirley for a dollar. Bailey promised clean socks, and Irma pledged underwear.

  Something in Bailey wanted to take him away from the filthy destruction of Rosenthal’s life, but a stronger force held him fast. He should have collapsed hours before, considering his physical low point, and he did not really understand why he hadn’t. There truly are times, he thought, when the will does not betray the best part of us.

  By two A.M. life in its essenials had been restored.

  They entered Irma’s apartment quietly at three o’clock and Bailey collapsed on the sofa. For the first time Irma saw the bandages on his ankles that Miss Blue had applied. When she asked Bailey about them he said they’d done it at the hospital. Irma said she didn’t remember seeing them at the hospital. Bailey shrugged, closed his eyes.

  “Do you want a drink?” she asked, and he nodded.

  She fixed two bourbons on the rocks, then went to her bedroom to hang up her coat. She came out, still holding the coat.

  “My mattress is gon
e,” she said.

  “Your mattress,” Bailey said.

  “Why would anybody take my mattress?”

  “Maybe your sister sent it to the laundry?”

  “My mattress is none of her business.”

  She went to Francie’s room. Bailey heard low rumblings of speech.

  “She thinks I’m drunk,” Irma said. “She smelled the whiskey.”

  “Did they take your springs?”

  “No, just the mattress.”

  “Well, gypsies have to sleep too.”

  “Not in my bed they don’t.”

  “Buck up. There’s still the couch.” He squeezed himself closer to the back of the couch, patted the available space with his hand.

  “My sister would be scandalized.”

  Bailey shrugged again and closed his eyes. He was thinking of how he could raise two thousand dollars to get Rosenthal back on his feet when Irma put the light out and lifted the half-finished drink out of his hand. In the matter of an instant he had a flash dream of his Uncle Melvin and his Uncle Melvin’s money, riding along together on the back of a cat. The dream passed, and he thought of it in a way which startled him. It had a reality that could not be contravened, could not be dismissed as something insubstantial. A man could act on dreams as he acted upon thought. A man could act upon delusions as he acted upon dreams. They would have only a private validity. No one would be able to accept them; but neither could anyone negate them. Bailey acted out of motives which no one seemed to understand or accept. His life was not a dream, not a delusion, only like them in result. He toyed with these notions, coming to no conclusion, for Irma curled her body around his, kissed his eyes and whispered into his ear: “Good night.”

  Bailey heard the door slam and felt Irma fly off the couch and away from him. Bailey blinked, saw her standing in the bathroom doorway talking to her sister, sister covered by housecoat, Irma’s own roundness shining through the rear end of her negligee. The sisters screamed at each other in whispers Bailey could not understand. He turned his body toward the back of the sofa, closed his ears. The door slammed and Irma was again by his side.

  “She’s furious.”

  “You said she’d be scandalized.”

  “That’s just a phrase. She’s furious because I use mine and she doesn’t use hers.”

  “Use your what?”

  “My freedom.”

  “Oh ho.”

  Bailey and Irma waited until Francie had dressed and left before they arose fully to the new day. Irma felt this day would surely be the end of a complete phase of her life. With Bailey out of the Guild it would not be the same; not just the loss of that face or even of that spirit. It wasn’t just the Bailey charisma, certainly not his big crotch that had pulled her back from the brink for so long. It was the Bailey vision. If Bailey couldn’t see it, then very probably it wasn’t there. It was like a belief in oracles, in priests and philosophers, in anybody who has the word and tells it. Bailey the Jesus. Bailey the Buddha, Bailey the magician. To Irma.

  They went together to Bailey’s to collect a bit of his gear, a few shirts. Irma would stay outside. They saw the crowd on the stoop of his apartment house as they rounded the corner. Bailey edged into the mob, mostly children and a few women, and peered among shoulders and necks. He pushed into the center of it and disappeared. Then came the yelling, the screaming, the windmilling of arms, and the crowd broke. Children stepped back to watch. A woman clutching a shirt ran across the street. Bailey chased her and tugged the shirt away. Then he chased another woman with a pair of shoes and got them. The children scattered when he came back to the stoop. He bent over a pile of cartons, and as Irma approached she saw him holding a topless box half-full of trinkets: cufflinks, medals, money clips, tiepins, a pearl-handled jackknife, an Army patch, foreign coins.

  “I don’t even know what’s missing,” he said, staring into the box. “I’ll probably never know.”

  Spilling out of the cartons were other Bailey belongings: underwear, ties, an Army fatigue jacket with corporal stripes, and papers: a chaotic strew of papers.

  “Is it all yours?”

  Bailey nodded. He stacked the papers without attention to orderly sequence and stuffed the contents of two boxes into two others and threw the empties on the sidewalk.

  “What does it mean?” Irma asked.

  “Grace. She was in that kind of mood.”

  “Maybe it was Smith. Maybe you ought to go up and see if Grace is all right.”

  “She’s all right. See her in the window?”

  Irma sat on the stoop by the boxes while Bailey went inside. In the apartment he found Grace still by the window, looking down at the street. She did not look up when he entered.

  “Who’s the floozy?”

  Bailey didn’t answer, didn’t enter all the way, didn’t close the door. He stood with his hand on the knob.

  “You didn’t have to throw the stuff on the stoop. I would have gotten it out.”

  “You would have gotten it out. You would have gotten it out.”

  “Has anybody been bothering you? Visitors? Phone calls?”

  “So you’re worried, eh? You know what you can do with your worry?”

  “You can’t reach me with that talk.”

  “Reach you, ha. Reach you, ha.”

  “Why don’t you call your mother. Go down home for a few days until you get reorganized.”

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “I won’t be coming back unless there’s an emergency.”

  “Emergency. You won’t be back unless there’s an emergency. A fat lot of shit I give.”

  “You’re swearing, Grace. You see? I think you should call your mother.”

  “Get out of here, whoremonger. You’re pussy-mad, that’s your problem.”

  Bailey stepped out and closed the door. Grace screamed as his right foot touched the first step.

  “Baileeeeeeeeeeee.”

  He knew the tone: plaint. But there was really nothing to do, and his left foot touched the second step down.

  Bailey studied the wreath of crepe beside the doorbell on his uncle’s porch, wondering if it signified the old man’s death, and if so, why he hadn’t heard of it. He finally decided it was entirely possible not to have heard, since anything was possible lately. He pushed the bell.

  “Oh, you,” said his Aunt Rose. “Who told you?”

  She opened the door and turned immediately away. He hadn’t seen her in a year, perhaps more; couldn’t even remember the last occasion. Was it a wake? A funeral? They were the only occasions for family gatherings in the last ten years. Rose always looked the same, with her tidy gray bun the size of a Parker House roll, her little unrouged lips, so tight, so neatly bloodless.

  “Who is she?” Irma asked.

  “My aunt. My uncle’s sister. A sweet lady nut.”

  “She’s crazy about you.”

  Bailey heard his aunt talking to herself as she rustled her skirts toward the kitchen. “Cats” was all he caught. And when he saw his Uncle Melvin in the dining room talking to a bald man in morning clothes he understood that the crepe must be for the only other resident of the house: Potato Flake. Aunt Rose, stirring a pot of chicken soup, raised her cheek for a kiss when Bailey leaned toward her. He introduced Irma as a friend from the Guild.

  “Where’s your wife?”

  “We’ve kind of separated,” Bailey said.

  “I never thought much of roller skaters anyway.”

  “The cat died, I take it.”

  “Poisoned yesterday, and good riddance, I say. I know about cats. They smother sleeping infants. They tear out the eyeballs of corpses and eat them. What kind of pet is that to have around?”

  “After all these years with that cat you can still ask such a question?”

  “I’ll ask it till I die. I know how evil cats are. I’ve read his books. Look here.” She stopped stirring and picked up a book that lay open, face down, on the kitchen table. “Here’s a woman,” she said, ta
pping a page, “who taped up her sleeping husband’s mouth after a red cat crawled out of it. Then when the cat couldn’t get back inside, it disappeared and the husband turned into a blue mouse. What would the old man say to that?”

  Bailey grieved for his aunt. She had lived in an everlasting pout since she discovered that her brother preferred his cat to her. Such estrangement began when the old man, a tugboat captain and a widower, returned home from a river voyage to find that his daughter, her husband, their four children, plus his younger brother who worked as a short-order cook, had been blown up when the gas seeped into the house along an underground pipe and exploded, possibly at the flick of a light switch. Only the cat, which lost an eye in the blast, survived. The captain viewed the cat, a Siamese female, as the spiritual repository of his disintegrated loved ones. Insurance and a settlement from the gas company left him rich. He quit the river and moved into the old family homestead where Rose lived among the relics and memories of a bygone family. The old man devoted his days to stuffing Potato Flake with lobster and cream until its once svelte black-and-tan body turned into a silky butterball. He quit his Queen Putzina then too. For years she had met him at odd junctures along the river and sometimes rode the tug. But he abruptly put her out of his life along with the rest of the world.

  “Was he always a little bit off?” Bailey asked his aunt. “I mean when he was a kid.”

  “Everybody in this family was a little off. Your grandfather used to throw boiled potatoes at trolley cars. Your grandmother wore the largest bustle in the city. She had a rear end like a turkey. Your Uncle Jack used to pull the beards of old Jews till he was damn near eighty. He took many a lickin’ for it but it never stopped him. What else do you want to know?”

  “Who poisoned the cat, was it you?”

  “Don’t think I didn’t think about it. But no. He figures the Italian up the road did it.”