The Ink Truck Read online

  “What about the guards? What about the floodlights? You think you can sneak across that yard?”

  “You yellow-bellied pimp,” Bailey said, and hung up again.

  Rosenthal debated whether Bailey would call a third time. He decided he wouldn’t and so began his own calls, musing on what the company man who tapped the phone would make of Bailey’s conversation. Maybe he was used to such talk by this time. The phone had been tapped since the first week of the strike.

  Rosenthal said nothing specific when he called the membership beyond telling them that a doughnut party was planned for eight o’clock. Nobody bothered to refuse. When he dialed Irma’s number he thought of her profile below the neck. Hillocky hummocky.

  “Irma, please.”

  “She’s not here. This is Francie. Who’s calling?”

  “Rosenthal from the Guild.”

  “Irma is no longer in the Guild.”

  “She’s what?”

  “You got good ears.”

  “When is she coming back?”

  “Never. She’s engaged.”

  “To whom?”

  “A tall fellow with nice straight teeth. He works for a living.”

  “You know his name then? We’d like to send congratulations.”

  “Eppis. Mr. Eppis.”

  “From the Eppis Mortuary?”

  “The same,” Francie said. “Now will you birds down there please leave my sister alone? Quit sucking her blood?”

  Rosenthal noted Irma’s resignation in his ledger. She was the 247th defection, leaving only eighteen members. But only Jarvis, Bailey and Rosenthal, with Irma now gone, worked daily in the Guild room. The fifteen others made only sporadic, conscience-stricken appearances; and so for two months hired pickets had marched on the line.

  Rosenthal thought of Irma’s case: Her assignment for two weeks had been to urge funeral directors not to place paid death notices in the newspaper, the eleventh such campaign since the strike started. No doubt she met her undertaker on the phone. It won’t be the same without Irma around, Rosenthal thought, deeply saddened not only by this but by the ever-present thoughts of galloping Guild decay. If this was the sorriest Guild local in all the Judeo-Christian world, and it surely must be, why was he afflicted with duty toward it? When would duty burn itself out? He knew it was the same with Bailey: mired in hope, wedded to a black death. Yet Bailey did not plan to die. He behaved as if revolution were possible and he talked like a madman. Bailey believed in possibility. Not dead yet, Bailey said. And he could smell death, an Irish trick. It came from eating so many rotten potatoes for hundreds of years. The stink of decay was in their nostrils at birth, and nothing fooled a sniffer like that. Mystic Irish. Rosenthal saw Bailey as an innocent warrior. And in self-punishing moments he saw himself as a trained mouse from Hamelin (self-trained was he?) who followed the death piper over the hill to nowhere (piped the tune himself, did he?). Will the secrets of power ever be revealed to the likes of us? Rosenthal wondered.

  Jarvis came down from the roof bundled in his oversize overcoat and knitted cap, the cap smothering his eyebrows and ears, the sleeves of the coat hiding all but the first two joints of his fingers. The buckles on his overshoes jingled as he came.

  “What’s the reconnaissance?” Rosenthal asked him.

  “No news,” Jarvis said.

  “How’s the weather?”

  “It keeps up.”

  “Any birds in the air?”

  “Negative.”

  “It looks like snow.”

  “What does?”

  “The general scene.”

  “You think I give a rap?”

  “Everybody should give a rap about snow.”

  “Not me,” Jarvis said. “I don’t give a rap.”

  Jarvis went to the roof each afternoon and studied the situation in the company yard down the street. The Guild-room window also overlooked the yard but Jarvis preferred the roof. From there he could count the pickets, see whether they were marching all the way to the corner as he always instructed them. Sometimes they turned around three or four feet before the corner, which enraged him. We picket the whole block, he told them.

  From his pocket Jarvis took a sheet of paper and dropped it in front of Rosenthal, his report on the latest negotiations with Stanley, the company’s lawyer-negotiator. Jarvis went back to the roof as Rosenthal read:

  Called Stanley five times before he accepted call. He agrees company should split tuxedo-trouser-and-cummerbund rental costs for reporters who attend formal functions on news assignments. But insists reporters are notorious gravy spillers and must pay for their own dress shirt and jacket. Stanley says pur 57th proposal unacceptable without changes. He refuses to specify which changes. Hinted even with changes he wouldn’t like it.

  As he went out for lunch at Bailey’s house Rosenthal hung the report on the bulletin board atop all the others. Sometimes he hung Jarvis’ reports sideways.

  Grace Bailey, forty turning fifty, opened the door when Rosenthal knocked. She looked at him but said nothing.

  “I’m Rosenthal.”

  “Come in, sit down, he’s out, how do you do?”

  It was Rosenthal’s first visit to the Bailey apartment in all the years he had known Bailey. Among Guildsmen only Matsu, the photographer, had ever been inside: on a night he carried Bailey home drunk. Matsu brought back a tale of furniture piled everywhere and nothing at all in one room but an ashtray of burning incense on the floor. Grace talked to Matsu from behind the half-closed kitchen door, told him she couldn’t come out because she was getting rid of a pooka. Everybody thought Grace sounded like a card.

  Rosenthal looked around the living room, captured immediately by an enormous poster of Mrs. Bailey in a rollerderby costume, coming at the viewer with skates skyward, buttocks forward, about to land with a fracturing thump. Scowling, helmeted skaters in the background moved menacingly forward. Beneath the photo a large printed message suggested:

  DROP IN

  & see

  GROOVY GRACE

  The Toughest Broad on Wheels

  —Queen Of The Camden Bloomer Busters—

  Madison Square Garden

  Tuesday, Dec. 4, 1943

  8 P.M.

  On another wall Rosenthal recognized bits of Bailey’s taste: a magazine cartoon sketch by Ronald Searle of a decapitated James Joyce climbing down the rocks beside the Martello Tower with his eyepatched head under his left arm, clutching his ashplant with his right hand; and above him a screaming hawk flying off with a copy of Ulysses in its claws. Beside the sketch was a framed Playbill from the Abbey Theatre, and below these, three composite photos, each with a head superimposed on Bailey’s torso, the torso recognizable anywhere for it was wrapped in the same checkered sport coat Bailey had worn day and night at the Guild room and the office for the past two years, time out only for semiannual cleanings. (Bailey believed a man ought to have a trademark.) The heads on his torso belonged to a blue pig, a hound with his tongue out and a cross-eyed tiger.

  “So he’s a professional Irisher at home, is he?” Rosenthal said to Grace. “He probably kissed the Blarney Stone.”

  “You can’t knock him to me,” she said. “Tell him what you think. What he does with stuff is his business. That’s his wall.”

  She left Rosenthal abruptly, went to the bedroom and came back with an envelope on which Bailey had written: “My latest column. Please react.”

  “He said to give this to you,” Grace said. “Don’t ask me what it is. I don’t read his things.”

  Bailey’s column had been syndicated in twenty-eight newspapers before the strike began. But focusing on the strike, obsessed with settling it, obsessed with harassing the company, obsessed with every tortured nuance which might lead the Guild back into daylight, he neglected deadlines, missed weeks at a time. Rosenthal could have told him how narrow his vision had grown: How can you expect to sustain reader interest permanently in strike commentary? How can you expect management capital
ists to subsidize propaganda against themselves? Ah, Bailey. Poor bear. To Rosenthal the fear was not that Bailey would crack but that he would shrivel. Rosenthal plopped in the sofa against Bailey’s wall, sensing that sitting under the airborne Grace would bring her wrath down upon him. He opened the envelope and read:

  THIS WRITER HAS A PROBLEM

  I recently received a letter from a reader who claims he has forgotten how to live. “I try to recapture the bright days of past pooka,” my reader writes, “when I felt I was really living. But am so overwhelmed by frustration, uncertainty and the emptiness of all pooka except efforts at exchanging love with those who seem to pooka you and whom you seem to pooka in return, that at length I find myself wallowing in a pool of pity, snuffling up a snoutful like a pig in muck and hosing myself with it, like an elephant pooka bathing pooka pooka. Then from this flows the understanding that the ego is so knotted up with itself that it becomes incapable of extending sympathy, friendship or pooka toward another. Then follows the pooka to apologize for this failing and the wish to explain it away by admitting self-pooka. And all this, oddly, is accompanied by a glorious sense of pooka, for this is life intensified, new pooka. But then it turns black pooka, and you see it as opportunistic, cheap, battening on your own suffering pooka. One then resolves not to pooka oneself, or at least, that being impossible, to keep pooka quiet in the mind and stop using it as a substitute for genuine pooka. Can you help me?”

  I responded to my reader with two aphorisms: “In wartime, an antitank gun will also blow up a corporal.” And: “Trouble is like a lady’s garter. It will get to you whether you snap it or not.”

  “One must self-suffice,” I added. “Please send word if you discover how.”

  My reader then replied: “Thank you for your pooka. I have discarded pooka pooka pooka and am getting down to some serious pooka pooka. If you ever get out this way stop in for a pooka. Yours truly, Joe the dog.”

  Bailey is mad, Rosenthal thought. Over the line at last. Bailey the believer. Believes in the intensity of others. They will study me with clear eyes, Bailey thinks. They will read me with full attention, no matter how I say it. Bailey the jerk. Rosenthal put the column back in the envelope.

  Grace came out of the kitchen and Rosenthal half-spoke the first word of an empty but congenial thought. But she ignored him and sat in a rocker, staring at the door with eyes abulge, breasts pushing out of her soiled and low-cut baby-blue sheath. He sensed that her face was moving toward the door, that she was willing herself forward. Yet she did not move. Rosenthal sneezed and when he looked back at Grace she had pushed her chair two feet nearer the door. She fluffed her rag-doll hair, crossed and uncrossed her legs, stringy with old muscles. A noise in the hall drove her straight up, fingers rubbing one another. But the noise passed and she sat, only to stand again and lift her skirt, pull up her stocking, readjust her garters, tweak her panty elastic and throw the skirt down again.

  “He’ll see,” she said, and pushed up her breasts with both hands.

  When a key penetrated the lock of the Bailey door, Grace fled to the kitchen. Bailey stood in the doorway, looking at the empty rocker facing the door.

  “You’re late for lunch,” Rosenthal said, “but early for tea.”

  “Is that you, doll?” Grace called. “You caught me in the middle of a casserole. The phone just rang and I thought it was you.”

  Rosenthal didn’t remember the phone ringing since he’d arrived.

  “Who was it?” Bailey asked. “Bernardo?”

  Grace leaned against the kitchen doorframe with shoulder forward, skirt tight against her thighs, outlining what was beneath, a familiar pinup pose. She smiled, androgynous head atop a body reduced from roller-derby plump to emaciated sensual.

  “Bernardo who?” She licked her lips.

  “Bernardo the scrivener. The fellow who wrote you the letter I just got out of the mailbox. Shall I read it?”

  “Not in front of me,” Rosenthal said. “Skip the personal problems.”

  “But this goes well beyond the personal,” Bailey said. “It’s why I wanted you here. The letter is an added dividend, but it’s all part of the scheme.” He read the letter:

  Dearest Bug,

  I yearn for Fridays when you come to the supermarket. I dream of you all day behind the meat counter. I see your loins in every lamb chop. I carve your whatsie and your whosies out of sausage meat, sometimes top round ground. If your dumb husband doesn’t appreciate you, never forget that I do. I will count the days until you round the corner by the ginger ale.

  Your fool and tool,

  Bernardo

  “I don’t know who that bird is,” Grace said. “I don’t know why he writes to me.”

  “This is a wife for you,” Bailey said.

  “Why don’t we have lunch,” Rosenthal said, “and save private problems for some other time?”

  “But this is Mata Hari you see before you,” Bailey said. “My very own Mata Hari. Don’t feel uncomfortable. If you saw it in the movies you’d probably sit through a second show.”

  “He writes me all the time,” Grace said. “What the hell does he mean, comparing me to a lamb chop?”

  “She thinks I can take it seriously,” Bailey said.

  “How’s all your sluts?” Grace asked.

  “This too is part of it,” Bailey said. “One begets the other, you see. Imaginary betrayal into imaginary distrust. The only one who sees it all clearly is my pooka, and Gracie can’t stand him in the house. She thinks he tracks up the walls and ceiling.”

  Bailey opened the bedroom door, looked at the ceiling.

  “No tracks,” he said.

  “You didn’t bring that damn thing back, did you?” Grace ran to the bedroom and inspected it, then the bathroom, the kitchen, behind the sofa and all the chairs, under the table, behind the sketch of James Joyce. “You bastard. If you brought him in …”

  “She doesn’t even know what size he is,” Bailey said, “and yet she hates him.”

  “Are pookas any particular size?”

  “Pookas,” said Bailey, “are how you find them.”

  “I always thought they were invisible.”

  “Only if you can’t see them.”

  “Of course. And is your pooka any particular shape? Like a horse? Or a goat?”

  “More goat than horse,” said Bailey, “but more pig than goat.”

  “We got enough pigs in this house,” Grace said, backing out of the hall closet.

  “Right you are if you think you are,” Bailey said.

  When she leaped at his throat Bailey caught her wrists and held them behind her. She rubbed herself on him, then kissed him with great ferocity. When he let her go they fondled each other and Rosenthal stood up and looked over Bailey’s wall. The Abbey Theatre Playbill was from Saturday, April 12, 1952, for the play “The Money Doesn’t Matter,” When Bailey saw him looking at it he dumped Grace on the sofa.

  “I can’t remember the play,” he said, taking off his overcoat, wadding it and throwing it at her, “but when I found it in the trunk last year the title reached me.” He looked at Grace, who was watching him with moon eyes. “Didn’t it, love?” And Grace nodded.

  “The title spoke for all of us down in that squalid little room. Our jolly commitments to some abstraction or other. They’ll lower us into the grave with it painted on our tombstones: ‘Questing for glory, they died as they lived: dirty and broke. Unemployed agitators attacking the system, all out for number one. They might have had great wealth, but they opted for emotional bunko and the spiritual con. Hot-shit abstractionists. Good riddance.’”

  Bailey was a speechmaker when the spirit moved him; sometimes just a buncombe artist, but always with a smile. Rosenthal now could see only grimness as Bailey leaned against the wall, his green muffler hanging loose, his cossack hat in place.

  “You talk like a man making some kind of marvelous discovery that the stars don’t really twinkle,” Rosenthal said.

 
“Of course. But when you see this thing in others it has a sinister quality. It’s a disease. No question about it. Progressive, often fatal and quite contagious. Even my little pussy cat here”—he stroked Grace’s stringy hair—“had slipped on the goo of an abstraction. It used to be simple with Grace. Throw her a quick one and she survived happily till the next one came along, as it always did. But now she fears she’s losing touch, that feeling is draining out of her like blood dripping from a high-hanging goose. Pretty soon a dry carcass. And a woman like Grace who’s been oiled with the juices of love all her life finds this hard to accept. Topped, tossed, tiddled, it’s not enough for old Grace anymore. The very idea of pleasure has grabbed her, the need to arouse her own desire, and she sinks deeper and deeper into the morass of intellectualized fuckery.”

  “He’s makin’ that stuff up,” Grace said. “Oiled by the juices of love.”

  She tried to sound angry but it was obvious to Rosenthal that talking about it revved up her engine. She rubbed Bailey’s neck, pushed a finger in and out of his ear.

  “The next step for Grace would seem to be sexual fits, but that would be a misreading of the abstraction. That would drag it into the real world, and that isn’t where it leads anybody. It’s led Grace to intrigue. Do you remember that Stanley knew of our last proposal before we called him about it? We suspected a burglar. Recall how the guards anticipated me when I entered the building with the stink bombs? Why go on? I discovered last night at Fobie’s from a scab with mixed loyalties that a gay dog from the company, with an oily telephone manner and a pretense toward roller-derby fanatacism, has been calling Grace and talking to her in romantic obscenities and sports jargon, all the while pumping her for news of the Guild. He’s off that job now, just today. I wanted you to know all this. Verify it.”

  “I never told anything,” Grace said. “It’s a lousy thing to say I did. It’s Bernardo who calls.”

  “I’m on to Bernardo,” Bailey said. “That intrigue is also over.”

  “Intrigue?”

  “He overstayed his welcome.”

  “You take me for granted,” Grace said, pouting. “You think nobody wants my body anymore. I’ll bring Bernardo right into that bedroom and give you double moose horns.”