The Ink Truck Page 23

  “Will you give two quarts of blood to the company?” Stanley asked Reilly.

  “If I give two quarts I’ll die.”

  “That’s not the point. Will you give or won’t you?”

  “I’d like to a lot, but I don’t think so.”

  “A conciliatory answer, said Stanley. “And you, Morelli, will you donate one of your testicles to our Ball Bank?”

  “Not me. I need all my strength.”

  “Another understandable refusal. But, gentlemen, your answers are without magic. Step out please.”

  “We can’t move.”

  “Squeeze downward and crawl between the legs.”

  The men obeyed Stanley. When they emerged on hands and knees a servant tied them together with rope. Stanley chased them up the stairs to the platform, touching their nakedness with the prod to keep them moving. Once up, two more servants grabbed them and threw them on top of the hot stones, where they exploded with faint pops like penny firecrackers. Bailey croaked a protest, but none came.

  He heard Grace shriek again, then saw her slither up from the mob like a worm of toothpaste and crawl, kick and scratch her way across the heads of the crowd, clutching at hair and shoulders, gouging flesh with her nails and drawing blood, swimming on a sea of bodies. Almost to the edge of the mob she went limp. Stanley drew the prod along her thigh and levitated her. She floated outward at the tip of the prod; then when Stanley withdrew it she fell to the floor. Stanley laughed. Bailey craned to see Grace but saw only a thousand fragments, like the dusty clay of a shattered Etruscan wine jar.

  Stanley stepped over it and touched Smith on the forehead, stunning him like a cow struck with a sledgehammer. “Now here,” he said, “is a fellow with a center. He makes no pretense at morality or love. He is the tyrant supreme, from crib to coffin, the total self. And here is a man,” he said, turning to Bailey and jabbing Bailey’s stomach with the prod (Bailey felt the hand of omnipotence punch him in the solar plexus; breath left him; he was puny), “whose cry is death before dishonor. And yet he has committed arson, he has stolen, lied, calumniated me and my associates, abandoned his wife, committed violence on strangers who sought only to work for their daily bread. Who knows what other black deeds he can claim? I find them incompatible, these two men, this disciple of enlightened self-interest and this pawn of private grace. Let gladiatorial combat engage them. What say you?”

  The mob sent up a cheer and thumbed-up Stanley’s idea. His prod curled around Bailey’s neck, drew him out of the crowd magnetically, then lifted Smith out the same way. Smith smiled and said hello to Bailey. Bailey’s hostility toward him fled and he tried to return the smile but could not; then was glad he could not. Glopping it up again, Bailey. The loser’s pattern again, Bailey: that all-embracing allegiance to anybody who gives the proper signal. Victim of the open mind again, Bailey: When all things matter, nothing matters and single goals go awash in a sargasso of weed, muck and clutter. Here was the handle that made him usable, like the bathroom plunger that is dipped in and out of corruption or stands at dry attention in a corner until the works clog and further use is called for. Utilitarian Bailey. Enough corruption now, Bailey.

  “I can see,” said Stanley, “that these sluggards need a little push.”

  He tore off his pigtail and football helmet and pulled on a wolf’s head, then ran howling up the platform stairs. He rose to the ceiling like a helium balloon and from there uttered soft wolf curses that could not be understood but whose meaning could not be misread. Smith looked up at Stanley and smiled, enjoying the curses. Bailey touched Smith’s shoulder, and as he turned, Bailey swung, his fist a bag of feathers grazing Smith’s chin, a wet sponge. Smith’s smile faded, and he moved with slow, dancing movements toward Bailey. Bailey threw a left, and the horseshoe in the feathers clipped Smith’s wooden chin. Crack, went the punch, and Bailey followed through, ending like a southpaw pitcher after the pitch. He fell forward in a slow-motion skydive and skidded along the floor into Irma’s lovely leg. Sliding home. He could hear hallways of laughter, stomping and whistling on the roof. All the world was light and cool and the thing he had hit was gone and forgotten and only Irma was in his eye, his life. He touched her skin and laughed. He righted himself. For agelong minutes he sat and saw nothing but Irma, knowing neither where he was nor where he’d been. He heard Stanley’s voice, saw him with lute in hand sitting on the platform, singing. “An old Elizabethan lyric my Mommy taught me,” he explained. And he sang: “Keep the rabble randy and they’ll never ask for candy …” When he finished he spoke to the crowd in oratorical tone: “… lonely souls who need contact … who die thirsting for the touch of a kind hand on their secret parts … false substitutes for joy … joy worship aroused in your groins … spell of togetherness … washed away shame … joy will roll the wheels over your filthy enemy … horrid blackness of your old fears … no such thing as filth … no such thing as evil … glory be to joy!”

  Then Bailey passed into a valley of wider consciousness, heard Stanley again talking, but mockingly now. He saw Stanley standing over the supine Smith with prod pointed at Smith’s belly.

  “… because you told me to wear it,” Smith was saying.

  “How could a mere man like me tell Jesus what to do? How could Jesus let somebody knock him down?”

  “Quit saying I’m Jesus,” Smith said. “I’m an American.”

  Stanley touched him with the prod. Smith squealed and wriggled backward, was shocked flat, wriggled again, was shocked again.

  “Tell us, Mr. Jesus, how do you like your joy?”

  But Smith couldn’t talk. His mouth lay open, his eyes globes of animal terror. As he began to lose control of his bladder Stanley pressed the prod against his’ crotch. Smith slithered helplessly away, leaving a trail of water. It was then that Bailey grabbed Irma’s pistol. Fully conscious, as he heard the first scream, that he was dooming Irma as well as himself, he squeezed the trigger.

  When all else fails there is always another failure. As the hammer snapped, the ancient pistol exploded in Bailey’s hand, destroying only the mood, shocking his bones and searing his flesh. Guards leaped on him and in minutes he, Irma and Smith were dragged to the front door and thrown into the frigid night. Some moments later their clothes came cascading after them. Still aflame from the hellish heat of the room, they scarcely felt the cold. They dressed on the steps under the light of the entranceway, Smith still in his wig and beard. He tagged along as Bailey and Irma walked through the parking lot.

  “Give a fellow a lift?” he asked.

  “Delighted,” Bailey said. But then he remembered he had no car. He held Irma’s arm and they walked toward the trolley stop.

  “Why did you change your name, Smith?” Bailey asked. “Do you always sell out to the highest bidder?”

  “Do you like girls or just girls’ mattresses?” Irma asked him. But Smith gave no answer until they had all boarded the trolley.

  “I’m all alone,” he said. He explained he couldn’t control the other gypsies after he’d yielded to Stanley in the barn. Stephanie went off with Skin and never came back, and then one night while Smith was out of the trailer, Mr. Joe, Tonya and Pito drove off and left him.

  “I had to put all my trust in Stanley,” Smith said with some bitterness in his eyes.

  Bailey studied the little man, whose head was again bald. The wig pocketed? Perhaps. Bailey wondered how he could ever have felt that this sad little man was totally evil. Smith began to make small, sobby noises.

  “Don’t feel bad,” Bailey told him. “You’ve just ruined your gypsy talent, that’s all. You’re corrupt, not evil.”

  “I don’t know how to get along with people,” Smith said. He slid to the floor, drawing the attention of the motorman, whose hat, Bailey noticed, looked oddly like a Pilgrim bonnet. “Is he drunk?” the motorman asked. “No drunks allowed in the New World.”

  “He’s just corrupt,” Bailey said.

  “We need that type,” said the moto
rman.

  Bailey picked Smith up and set him straight in the seat. Smith recalled for them how he’d lived in a secret room behind a coal bin for eight years to avoid the draft during and after World War Two. Putzina cared for him, and Stephanie, his cousin, soothed him sexually. A rat bite infected him, and he lost his hair. The darkness weakened his sight so that he assumed the Army would reject him. Putzina took him to the draft board when he at last came up into the world, and the examiners rejected him as unfit, even before the eye test.

  “I could’ve done that years before,” he said.

  “You’ve had an ugly life,” Bailey said. “I’m sorry for you.”

  “Misericordia,” Smith said, and then, smiling ecstatically, he wet his pants.

  The motorman saw this and left his throttle. He booted Smith and sent him sprawling. Bailey took advantage of the moment, grabbed Irma’s hand, and together they leaped off the moving trolley and ran home through the tall grass in slow motion.

  Bailey’s room and a half seemed cell-like as a prospect, so they went to Irma’s apartment and fell on Francie’s bed in weary sleep. The doorbell wakened him, but not Irma. Two men dressed in black, with white shirts and four-in-hand black ties, stood at the door smiling at him.

  “We’re looking for a room,” one said, a man with a round, open face. He looked like a coin to Bailey.

  “Did you ask the superintendent?”

  They both nodded and smiled.

  “What did he tell you?”

  “He said there weren’t any.”

  “That sounds conclusive as hell.”

  They said nothing, merely smiled.

  “Try the apartment house across the street,” Bailey said.

  They smiled but didn’t move. Their hats sat straight on their heads. It was obvious to Bailey they didn’t know how to wear hats. He waited for them to react to his suggestion. They only smiled.

  “I’m Elder Wimple,” said the coin-faced man. “And this is Elder Biscomb.”

  Bailey smiled. His turn.

  “Do you know anything about the Mormon religion?”

  “Not much,” Bailey said, unable to concentrate on anything but his overwhelming desire to sleep.

  Elder Wimple took a book from his coat, the Book of Mormon, he explained, translated from golden plates by Joseph Smith. Were they selling it? Well, fifty cents, but that wasn’t the point. Mormonism was the point. The elder began reading to Bailey of Jesus, things written a hundred years before Jesus was born, written by a prophet in America who prefigured the miracles, the agonies of Christ.

  “I’m not a religious person,” Bailey said.

  Elder Wimple read on.

  “I don’t believe in that,” Bailey interrupted. “You’re wasting your time on me. It sounds nice, but I don’t believe in that or anything else. God is strictly possibility with me. Possibility, that’s all.”

  Elder Wimple closed his book, and he and Elder Biscomb smiled at Bailey.

  “Remember that we were here and gave the word of Christ, and that you received it,” Elder Wimple said. They went down the hall smiling at one another. Bailey fell back into bed thinking: Everybody’s in the Jesus game; thinking also: Those two birds don’t know anything about hats.

  But he could not go back to sleep. The brief nap before the doorbell rang had reawakened his mind, the effects of the party were still with him, and even though his body coursed with untraceable pain, he knew his vital capacity was at flood level. What besieged him was the need for forward motion, the need to obliterate the failed past. Where does Bailey go now? he wondered. Should he go back to the library and reconstitute his solitude, or was solitude akin to a death wish? There had to be prophetic wisdom somewhere in his head. The old books, the old newspaper files had activated some things. He had changed some things. But he needed to change more, be done with passivity. Useless to play into a Stanley. No point. No reward beyond the private building of spiritual muscles. Ascetic self-indulgence. Not even any joy in that. Only ecstasy for the narcissistic soul. But joy is Stanley’s word. A man could almost buy Stanley’s message unless he knew better. Stanley. Always goes back to Stanley. Forget Stanley. Obliterate Stanley. Leap over Stanley. Disintegrate Stanley. Ah, Bailey, you poor simp. If you could only get some advice. But there were no Bailey specialists, and he always knew it. I have a bad case of fallout, Bailey said to his corner druggist. But while he waited for his prescription to be filled the druggist’s skin fell off.

  He looked at Irma, still sleeping. He stroked her beautiful hair, gently kissed her ears, her neck. She smiled without waking. He thought of making sleepy love to her, then taking a shower with her. They would wash one another, then eat breakfast slowly and carefully. But he could not bring himself to wake her. It was mid-evening, life all turned around. He got up from bed and called Rosenthal.

  “I can’t sleep,” he said.

  “Stanley murdered sleep,” Rosenthal said.

  “You’ve been home long?”

  “Couple of hours. The party went downhill after you left. You’re a bag of tricks.”

  “What did I do?”

  “You hurt Stanley’s feelings. He thought he was being a good host. He never expected anybody to shoot him.”

  “I didn’t shoot him.”

  “Intention counts for something, so he feels like you did. He thought everybody was having fun.”

  “Wouldn’t you say that was an unreal thought?”

  “When it was all over, some people said it was a gas. Shirley claims she had a good time.”

  “How is Grace, and the old man?”

  “Grace scratched the hell out of herself. Black eye too. The old man? He’s a swinger, that fellow.”

  “And Deek?”

  “He made out nicely. At least twice, I’d say.”

  “I need a drink. Badly. Can I persuade you?”

  “What time is it?”

  “Some hours after armageddon, is my best guess.”

  “It’s midnight plus. I can’t see the minute hand.”

  “How about Fobie’s in half an hour?”

  “As you like it,” Rosenthal said.

  At Fobie’s Bailey bought six beers from the fat bartender, a new man with tight curly hair, saucer eyes and mean nostrils.

  The purchase reduced Bailey’s funds to twenty cents. He carried the beers to a booth, quaffed three swiftly and sipped a fourth as he waited. Rosenthal arrived at last, hung up his cape and hat and sat across from Bailey.

  “You know,” Bailey told him. “I don’t remember whether phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny or whether ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.”

  “Well, you’re slipping,” Rosenthal said.

  Bailey pushed a beer at him, but Rosenthal shook his head and pushed it back. He signaled the bartender and asked for a glass of Bristol Cream sherry. Bailey looked up at the bartender when he brought the wine.

  “It’s phylogeny that recapitulates ontogeny, isn’t it?” he asked him.

  “Paradigmatically speaking,” the barkeep said. Then he laughed one nasty burst. “That’s a phrase I picked up tending bar in Cambridge. I save it for jerks.”

  “Even barmen hate us,” Bailey said when the man went away.

  “Especially barmen,” Rosenthal said.

  “It wears you down.”

  At the bar a drunken scab sportswriter raised his voice to the barkeep, “You syphilitic son of a bitch.”

  The barkeep’s evil nostrils flared as he reached under the bar for a miniature baseball bat and stroked the scab alongside the ear, knocking him off the barstool. Two other scabs lifted him into the booth behind Bailey. Fobie left his owner’s high chair at the end of the bar and came over to look at the man.

  “He went down like a count,” Fobie said.

  “He’s got a bad mouth,” the barkeep said.

  “He gets it from his mother,” said Fobie.

  “He’s still out,” one scab said.

  “Call him an ambulance,” Fobie said.r />
  Bailey raised his head over the back of the booth and looked into the drunken man’s face.

  “You’re an ambulance,” Bailey said. “You’re a scabby fucking ambulance.”

  “You keep out of it, wise ass,” the barkeep said.

  “How’s that again, Mr. Syphilitic?”

  “Punk dog. I’ll cool you too.”

  He came around the bar with the small bat in his grip, and Bailey and Rosenthal stood to greet him. As he lurched toward Bailey, who began to bob and weave like a boxer, but with arms at sides, Rosenthal hit him. The punch lacked force but it staggered the barkeep and he stepped on himself and fell. Bailey put a foot on his wrist and took away his bat.

  “You win,” he said, looking up from the floor.

  “Too easy,” Bailey said.

  “I can’t afford to get kicked. I just paid four hundred bucks for teeth.”

  Bailey opened the bar door and scaled the bat across to the empty parking lot. He started to come back inside, but Rosenthal had grabbed his clothes and pushed him out onto the sidewalk and up the street.

  “I didn’t finish my beer,” Bailey said.

  The bar door opened behind them and the barman stuck his head out. “Come back again sometime, punk dogs.” He waved a beer bottle like a club.

  “You do make it tough to live in the world;” Rosenthal said, pulling Bailey away by the muffler.

  They walked through the streets with Bailey talking, streaming out the story of Smith, Stanley, drugs, dust and the sweetness of endings with nothing but freedom beyond them, freedom to do everything or nothing or the same again.

  “Ballareebennyohdallydooderrydoy,” Bailey yelled into the night. Then he admitted the yell meant nothing at all, only a sound on the Bailey tongue. He was liberated from so many things that now even language seemed new.

  When they passed Mahar’s flower shop he looked up: “Is it M-a-h-a-r, or is it really M-a-h-e-r, I mean truly. Is it C-o-n-n-a-c-h-t, or is it C-o-n-n-a-u-g-h-t? What’s the precise truth? Do you think Jack Kennedy was the American Parnell? And how about the Pope? You think he’s as dead as God? A gypsy forged the nails that crucified Christ, did you know that? That’s why God hates a whistling woman, because the gypsy’s wife whistled while he made the nails, five nails, the sharpest to pierce his lung, but they only used three because another gypsy stole two as an act of mercy, at least that’s what the gypsies like to believe. That’s why his feet are stuck with only one nail. Gypsies did that; twelfth-century gypsy metalsmiths crossed his feet for the first time to fatten their legend. Amazing that we still talk about it. You can’t get away from Christ. He keeps coming back like a song, like a weed, like a flower, like the springtime. Sweet as the flowers in springtime. Sweet Jesus. And how is your dear old mother, whom we all love so much?”