The Ink Truck Read online

  “So do you see where we stand? You don’t. I can tell by the question mark on your forehead. But don’t feel bad. Don’t count the pomegranate seeds as a means of discovering the riddle of the royal fruit. If you’ve got the time and the stomach, I suggest you stick around, stay at the edge of our world for a few more hours. We’ve got an adventure in mind for tonight, and maybe that will illuminate something for you. Transcendence is a sticky business, not given to mathematical purity. Join the onlookers. Watch the Guildsmen. See how they run. At the very least you’ll be entertained.”

  Once in the Guild room, Bailey had the compulsion to leave; once out, to return. Six o’clock. Two hours until the ink truck’s scheduled arrival, hour and a half until the pin-pulling technologist met him again at Fobie’s. As he walked, the snow began. Grand. Black on white. Black pool spoiling sweet whiteness. Bailey walked toward the company and stood across the street from where he estimated the ink truck would park, where the ink would gush out of the truck spigot, splash into a widening black puddle, rise to sidewalk level and move sluggishly down the gutter toward the sewer. Pool of blackness, blood flowing. More than a gesture. Orgasm of doom. Climax of a dream.

  Why did Bailey’s dreams turn to garbage? Garbage that stank only in his own nose. Not a great stink, not an unbearable stink, not a stink Bailey would die from. Was it because all dreams were timid dreams? Dreams that shook no foundations, diverted no rivers? Not grand enough to survive the garbage fate? Timid Bailey, you once talked of dynamite on Stanley’s doorstep, but you talked of it uncapped. You fought the scabs, whipped them and sent them off with tucked tails. Establish the meaning of that. You picketed until your knees gave out. Establish the validity of such loyalty. You outlasted almost everyone and if you survive you will outlast the rest. Chart the route of your perseverance to indicate where you began, how long you traveled, where you are now. What does this traveling mean?

  Only the black vision comforted Bailey.

  When he heard a door open behind him he turned, saw Smith the gypsy standing in the doorway of the storefront across from the newspaper. For a month the gypsies had occupied the store, owned by the company and for years used only for stockpiling of newsprint in times of emergency. Seven gypsies lived in a trailer behind the store, led by Putzina, the presumed queen. The gypsies had descended on the storefront suddenly, without reason, bringing back the unknown past to Bailey. Six of the gypsies he did not know, but Putzina was a romantic figure out of his Uncle Melvin’s life. Though his uncle never spoke of the woman, relatives recounted the legend: that Melvin and Putzina were the family’s conjugal low point: a tug captain and his gypsy scum.

  Smith, Putzina’s son, watched Bailey now, hand in trouser pocket, mole eyes questioning Bailey’s presence in front of the store. Few approached the store since the gypsies arrived; only company people who went in bunches to have their fortunes told by Putzina at lunch hour. And since a half-frozen Negro youth had been found unconscious in the snow beneath a gypsy window, ankles and wrists bound with wire, unwilling to explain why he was there or what had happened to him, terrified to be asked about it, the cautious walked on the opposite side of the street.

  When the gypsies first arrived, Smith worked four days as a news photographer; but the company fired him for pawning an enlarger. After that no gypsies were allowed in the main building. They worked out of the storefront as company menials: janitors’ helpers, snow shovelers, garbage carriers. Also they watched Guildsmen, reported their movements to the company.

  Bailey stared at Smith with an easy eye, without fear of his mystery. Then he walked toward the door and faced the gypsy, their noses inches apart, Smith’s bald head agleam, a pendant earring motionless in his left ear. Bailey’s eyes leaped from baldness to earring to mole eyes to pucker mouth. Smith took his hand from his pocket, a knife in it. He opened the large blade with his thumbnail and held it like a torch, the blade pointing at the ceiling. Bailey raised his right hand slowly to the same position and doubled his fist. His left hand rose to the defense of his stomach. Bailey saw figures moving behind Smith, but his eye fixed on the blade. A trickle of black fluid ran slowly down from the tip, as if it had been dipped in the ink Bailey had just envisioned in the gutter across the street. Bailey wanted to believe it was oil, but it had a deep, shining blackness unlike even the filthiest of oils. As Bailey watched the trickle, Smith slammed the door and pulled down the shade. Bailey drew back his fist to smash the glass, but held the blow, wondering whether his fantasy had gone wild.

  For half an hour after Bailey left the Guild room Deek sat in silence across the table from Rosenthal, listening to the repetitive announcement of a doughnut party, coming to understand, from Rosenthal’s tone and the workings of his eyes, the consistently negative response from the other end of the line. Knowing nothing of what eight o’clock would bring only stoked his imagination. These two men seemed capable of mad deeds. He thought of the Molly Maguires and the Wobblies that he knew from history books, and all the labor strife that belonged to times long gone. Neither the dapper seediness of Rosenthal nor the hulking, erudite wildness of Bailey fit any image of workingmen that Deek ever had. His father, with an expanding belly and a thumping heart, had eased himself out of such concerns, if concerns they had ever been, at a young age and had opted for the quiet life of a deskbound salesman.

  Anarchy was not in Deek as it was in others of his generation. He craved the rising of his own blood in willful deed: the overwakefulness of heroic action. He did not know Bailey yet, but he sensed that Bailey knew of such things. To be that was to be a horned and toothy beast in a wild field of gazelles.

  Rosenthal feared new violence. He understood Bailey’s mood and Jarvis’ plan only too well, an absurd intersection. He never doubted that the motorcade would descend into hand-to-hand combat, for which Guildsmen were unarmed, unequal. He watched the snow, wishful that it would mount to such heights that the motorcade would be impossible. But there was not enough time for such a wish to be realized. It would only be deep enough to enrich the hazard of wild driving. Rosenthal feared the inequity of the violence. The guards had behaved like wild dogs ever since Bailey broke the nose of one with an elbow jab, and Matsu, the Japanese photographer, almost killed another with a karate chop to the windpipe. Matsu lost an eye in the beating two brutes gave him the week after that incident. They bulled into his flat and dragged him to the yard, where neighbors heard his screams and pulled him off a garbage pile. No one blamed Matsu for leaving the city. The police took a neutral position on the incident, as they’d done throughout the strike, considering it a double dose of pox. They favored the Guild only once, after a guard broke Bailey’s left shoulder with a clubbing. They clubbed the guard in retaliation, for Bailey was a man they cared about. He wrote often in his column about shorter hours, better pay for cops.

  Bailey bent his head to listen.

  “If it’s a Mack, the overflow is regulated by a petcock that sits up behind the temperature gauge. On the Internationals there’s no petcock. You got a small tube that angles out from the top spigot. But that’s only for overflow. The pin is under the belly of the tank. It looks like a doorknob on the Macks, and on some of the Internationals it’s got a mushroom top. This you turn clockwise, except on the GM jobs, when it’s counterclockwise. And on them it’s more like a screwdriver handle with ridges in it, and you got to turn it, then pull. It’s got a ratchet inside, so you got to get it just right or it won’t come out. Except on the Macks, where there’s no ratchet, but there is a sliding panel like a bolt, and you got to shift that back, or up on some models. If it’s a White truck, then you got to open the overflow spigot before the pin can come out. The petcock serves as a secondary control that locks the pin in. The ratchet on this one is beveled, so you got to swing it up to the left a little before you get the teeth just right; then you pull and the thing pops out halfway and you slide it up. That’s on late models. On the early ones it’s got no pin at all and you need a seven-eighths-in
ch Phillips-head wrench to give it at least three turns. Then it opens out like a door, and you reach under and turn the rotator …”

  Bailey nodded.

  At ten minutes to the ink-truck hour Rosenthal considered calling Fobie’s to remind Bailey of the duty. But Bailey would know the time. He would be contemptuous of being nudged. Rosenthal worried over Bailey and all his talk of bombs. He saw him as an aristocrat of the spirit living in an era when aristocrats were lined up at the guillotine. Better to be a little more compliant. What good is a headless spirit? But who could reason with Bailey?

  Rosenthal was used to failure. He knew how to deal with it, roll over and up again. But Bailey fanned the breeze, flailing at it. Bailey the magic balloon. Knock him down, see him pop up again twice his old size. Bailey, thought Rosenthal, stop behaving like a balloon. You know what happens to balloons.

  Jarvis’ voice crackled through the walkie-talkie: “Eight minutes to Yuma.”

  Rosenthal acknowledged: “Eight minutes. Yuma.”

  Jarvis spoke from the roof. He stayed out of the Guild room, sensitive to the insolence of his subordinates. He would direct the start of the motorcade from the roof via the walkie-talkie, which Rosenthal would carry. Then when it began he would leave the roof, direct operations from the window of the empty Guild room.

  Deek wanted to ask the significance of Yuma. He wanted to know why there was a sign on the wall above the mimeograph machine that read: DON’T SIT HERE. He wanted to know why Rosenthal spent two hours calling people on the phone and why nobody came. He wanted to know what a doughnut party was, where Bailey was, why Jarvis stayed on the roof in such cold weather, and what happened to bring things to such confusion. Deek was full of questions he did not feel he should ask.

  Bailey arrived precisely at eight o’clock, sat in the chair and stared at the bulletin board. Then he got up and took a ukulele from a shelf in the closet behind Rosenthal’s desk, and stripped it of its cloth case. He ragged a few chords, then softly sang three old songs of the Irish rebellion: “Nell Flaherty’s Drake,” “Kevin Barry,” “By the Rising of the Moon.”

  Wretched, sentimental bosh, Rosenthal thought. Beautiful, thought Deek. On the roof Jarvis heard the music and spat. Bailey finished the song and laid the ukulele on a chair. He took off his cossack hat and put it beside the uke, knelt and raised his hands prayerfully.

  “Salvation must come from the pooka,” he said, and solemnly chanted:

  Now we go to motorcade

  Pride of pookas on parade,

  If we wake before we die,

  Pooka, pooka, pooka pie.

  Rosenthal brewed a cup of instant coffee for Bailey, who took it and stared at the wall.

  “Is he all right?” Deek whispered to Rosenthal.

  Since he had no answer, Rosenthal ignored the question.

  A long, motionless silence was broken by Jarvis, again on the walkie-talkie, his voice wrapped in static, but booming through in ominous monotone.

  “Prepare the motorcade.”

  “I remind you there are only two of us,” Rosenthal said. “None of the members have shown up. That leaves us with only two cars.”

  “The orders,” Jarvis said with uninflected purpose, “are prepare the motorcade.”

  “A two-car motorcade?”

  “A one-car motorcade if necessary.”

  “And if there are no cars?”

  “Who are you—Mr. Question Mark? Get moving.”

  Rosenthal walked to the window and looked toward the company yard, where the ink truck’s black hood was visible. Bailey put on his hat. Deek stood, to find his leg asleep, lurched and collapsed on Bailey’s ukulele. His knee shattered its box and its strings went limp.

  “Garbage,” said Bailey. He held the dead uke aloft by its broken neck, then carried it outside and shoved it into an old snowbank until it disappeared. Rosenthal steered the aerial of his radio through the doorway, and Deek followed, pushing into his corduroy coat, pocketing his glasses.

  “What should I do?” Deek asked as they walked down the hill toward the company yard.

  “Stand clear,” said Rosenthal.

  Bailey stood on the corner watching the four hired pickets approach. Rosenthal came up behind him, and Deek crossed the street, leaned against a phone pole.

  “Join the line,” Jarvis advised. “Study the lay of things.”

  Rosenthal and Bailey stayed in the shadowy corner. Just before the line about-faced at the corner, Rosenthal signaled with his eye to the picket captain, a hireling, that the plan was under way. The rear of the ink truck was blocked from view by two guards who stood by it with folded arms. Bailey, his collar up to hide his face, searched the empty street for his specialist, finding only a newsboy, no more than ten, who stood beside a pile of first editions of the newspaper, protecting them from the heavy, wet snow with a piece of canvas. He offered a paper to the pickets each time they passed him. Bailey admired his insolence.

  “Commence motorcade,” came Jarvis’ voice from beneath Rosenthal’s overcoat. Rosenthal touched Bailey’s arm, and together they walked across the street, past the gypsy store and toward the dark parking lot.

  “They won’t even notice our two cars,” Rosenthal said.

  “They’ll notice us,” Bailey said. “But I’ve got to find somebody first.” He told Rosenthal his plan to pull the ink-truck pin. Rosenthal listened, excited by Bailey’s picture of a river of ink.

  “I’ll block the back end of the truck,” Rosenthal said.

  Deek, who had followed them to the parking lot, stood by politely, waiting to be noticed.

  “I want to help, whatever you’re going to do,” he said.

  “Do you have a car?” Rosenthal asked.

  “My father’s.”

  “You can block the front end of the truck then. Park down by the corner, facing the truck. When Bailey signals with his lights, nose in front of the truck, but don’t get out of your car. The guards might get violent. If they ask you to move, stall, and if they threaten you, move, then come back and park a different way. But don’t fight guards or cops. This isn’t your trouble.”

  “It’s all right. I like you guys.”

  He shook hands with Bailey and Rosenthal.

  “Up the Guild,” he said, and ran off.

  Bailey drove down the block toward Fobie’s to find his man and Rosenthal waited in his car with motor running, lights off, watching the ink truck and waiting for the driver to come out of the building. He expected more elaborate preparations, for the company certainly knew something was up. But the guard remained at four, a smug number.

  Bailey left his motor running and peered through Fobie’s window. The specialist was alone at the end of the bar. Bailey went in, grabbed his arm.

  “Ready.”

  The truck driver gave him a glazed look.

  “What’s this worth to you, pal?”

  Bailey drank the trucker’s beer and pulled him by the arm out the door.

  “You’re a volunteer,” Bailey told him on the sidewalk. But the trucker wagged a finger in Bailey’s face.

  “Fifty now or no action.”

  Bailey grabbed him by the collar and coattail and dunked him head first into a snowbank, grabbed his ankles, shoved him deeper in.

  When Rosenthal saw the ink-truck driver come out, he flicked on his lights. No time for Bailey. He dimmed the lights twice as a signal to Deek, who might or might not be watching, and with wheels spinning in the deepening snow he sped toward the truck. He braked to a skid and guided the car into the truck’s rear bumper, then slumped over the wheel. Two guards were quickly at his window, whispering. Rosenthal’s head pained from a whiplash and his knee hurt where it had hit the dashboard. But he did not move. He heard another car stop, a door slam, and then Bailey’s voice.

  “Is he hurt? Did you bother to find out?”

  But Rosenthal knew the guards never replied directly to the public. Bailey opened the door.

  “He looks like a victim
of pooka,” Bailey told the guards. “Do you know what that means?”

  No answer.

  “I didn’t think you knew.”

  Bailey raised Rosenthal’s head, eased him into a restful position.

  “This man has pooka dust all over him. Call an ambulance.”

  “He’s a fake,” one guard said. “It’s a trick. They’re strikers.”

  “The pooka one looks familiar,” another guard said.

  Rosenthal heard Jarvis signaling on the intercom, humming the Guild theme song: “Whistle While You Work.” Jarvis hummed because he couldn’t whistle. Rosenthal pulled his coat tighter to muffle the sound. No time for Jarvis. An ambulance, if it arrived, would clutter the street further, give Bailey’s specialist time to get at the pin. A guard grabbed Rosenthal’s wrist and tugged. Rosenthal smiled, screamed painfully.

  When Deek saw Bailey angle in at the side of the truck he gunned his own motor and with tires all but tractionless on the wet snow, he spun slowly across the intersection and nosed into the front of the truck. He saw Rosenthal sitting as if dead in his car, Bailey bent over the rear of the ink truck, inspecting the damage to Rosenthal’s front end. Deek leaped out of the car as the ink-truck driver left the cab of the truck and came toward him.