The Ink Truck Page 6

  Smith stood up and photographed the gypsies lined against the wall, closed in on the number nailed to Putzina’s door, opened it and photographed through the crack.

  “May I go in?” Irma asked. “I’d like to pay my respects to the queen.”

  Smith shrugged and let her walk ahead of him into the sickroom.

  What Irma could see of Putzina’s ancient, fleshless body was smeared with orange ointment. Her greasy and matted hair, much of it singed, had soiled the pillowcase, and her arms trembled outside the soiled sheet. Her pushed-up face, oily and brown, was without teeth, giving her mouth the shape of half an eggshell. Irma leaned over, and Putzina looked up.

  “I hope you’re not in too much pain,” Irma said. “I know you don’t know me, but I know someone who knows you. Mr. Bailey’s Uncle Melvin. I work with Mr. Bailey, and he says his uncle speaks about you fondly.”

  The old woman gave Irma a long stare.

  “Melvin is a perverted old bastard.”

  “He remembers you lovingly, from what I hear.”

  “He left his Putz. He left me for a cat.”

  “Oh,” said Irma. “I didn’t know.”

  “Busne,” Putzina snarled. She spat at Irma. “Meripen pa busne.”

  Irma turned to Smith, who stood behind her in the doorway, filming the scene.

  “What did she say?” Irma whispered.

  “Meripen pa busne,” Smith said, and he spat in Irma’s eye.

  Irma backed away from the bed just as Putzina sat up and grabbed for her, sensing the old woman wanted to claw away a fistful of her flesh. A plump nurse who had been standing in a corner took Putzina by the shoulders and forced her to lie back. Then the nurse ran from the room. Outside the door Irma gave Smith a dirty look.

  “You should get your pants pressed,” she said.

  “There’s no room in America for vanity,” Smith said, and humming a snatch of tune that seemed to Irma vaguely patriotic, he photographed her as she walked back to the emergency room.

  When Irma told her trio about the gypsies, they insisted on a look, and so one by one she rolled their stretchers into the hallway and elevated their heads with the crank. Smith was on the floor again when the nurse returned on the run with a doctor. The gypsies sat quietly and wailed softly until one old gypsy man with a grassy moustache stood before the sickroom door and rocked in rhythm with the wailing. All the gypsies stood then and rocked. Smith filmed it. The sight of the camera seemed to send one young gypsy girl into a leaping fit. She jumped onto the only bench in the corridor and wailed with both index fingers up her nose. Smith followed her with his camera as she buried her face in her hands, leaped off the bench and prostrated herself. The mustachioed gypsy sat on her buttocks, wailing in his own style, slapping her on the thighs, holding an imaginary set of reins and riding her as if she were a horse.

  The plump nurse came out and spoke to Smith: “You’re her son?”

  “You got it right,” Smith said, photographing the nurse.

  “You’d better come in.”

  “Right,” he said, keeping his camera on her as she re-entered the sickroom. He followed her and closed the door.

  The six gypsies took off their hats and coats and piled them a few feet from the door. Then they circled the pile, mumbling and wailing, the women in a falsetto, the men’s mumbles turning into Spanish-sounding words that echoed what Putzina said to Irma:

  “Get it down,” Bailey called to Irma. And she scribbled what she could get:

  Meripen pa busne,

  Majaro Undebel.

  Ful pa busne,

  Majaro Undebel.

  Chinela janreles busne,

  Majaro Undebel.

  In the pile of clothing Irma discovered a pattern: a catafalque with a built-in corpse. One fur hat was the head, and a buttoned coat, with arms crossed, lay supine atop the other clothes. The gypsies circled it faster, the men clapping, then pausing and clapping again, then leaping little hop-leaps with feet together. As the pace quickened the leaps increased in number, the claps took on a frantic ryhthm and the women’s wails soared into new falsettoed heights. The sickroom door slammed open, ending the dance abruptly. Smith stood in the doorway with the limp body of his mother in his arms. He placed her gently on the catafalque, retrieved his camera from the sickroom and photographed the scene. Slowly, as if they had not previously reached a crescendo, the other six gypsies resumed their dance.

  Smith shot pictures from above, standing on a chair; he lay on the floor beside his mother and shot upward into the circle of dancing faces. He stood and photographed Putzina, beginning with her feet and traversing her length, past her criscrossed legs up to her stomach, where her hands lay flat, index fingers pointing at each other, past her invisible breasts and then to her face and stringy hair that was wet from the ultimate sweat. The men clapped faster, leaped higher, the wailing now at scream pitch. Nurses made feeble, failing efforts to halt the dance. The women pulled at their hair between claps and leaps, and the men beat their chests with both hands. They clawed their faces, and blood flowed from the scratches. Doctors, patients, nurses jammed the hallway; old people in wheelchairs, in casts, supported by canes and crutches, nightrobed, barefoot: They all gawked.

  The self-scratching became competitive among the women. They tore open their blouses and dresses at the neck and raked the skin of their breasts. As they shook themselves the blood flew, speckling the floor and walls and even the ceiling. One woman marked Putzina’s face with her drippings, and Smith howled, dropped his camera, pushed the woman out of the circle and blotted the dead face with his coat sleeve, then his handkerchief. The gypsies watched mutely as he knelt and smoothed his mother’s hair, ran his thumbs over her eyebrows, then faced Irma and the three stretchers.

  Two men in overcoats and fedoras with brims turned down all around pushed through the gawkers. Smith rose slowly, staring at Bailey. He threw his arms in the air, arched his back like a cheerleader and yelled: “Slow, busne, it will be slow,” simultaneously taking a knife from his coat pocket and flicking open its blade. He started for Bailey, knife held like a lance. The men in hats grabbed his arms, and one rapped him with a blackjack. The knife clattered across the corridor and he fell. The men lifted him, two male gypsies lifted Putzina, and the rest snatched up the clothes and camera. In swift procession they strode down the corridor, ignoring protesting doctors and nurses who threatened, then pleaded for them to return the body. But they pushed through the swinging doors and were gone.

  “The knife,” Bailey said to Irma.

  She found it in the shadows. As Bailey studied it, finding no black fluid, Irma saw that like Smith’s gold earring it bore Ted Williams’ signature on one side, the fleur-de-lis on the other. Built into it were a removable toothpick, a corkscrew and a nail file; and the smaller blade, near where it hinged, was usable as a bottle opener.

  The pain in Rosenthal’s knee receded under the power of a pill; also under the anesthetic of gypsy distraction and under the concentration of absurdities that danced holes in his brain with their jackass hooves. Seeing Jarvis come down the hallway sent his dancers into a wild jig, but also brought Rosenthal a sensation of comfort. He always knew Jarvis was inept as a leader, rather above average in ineptitude. Yet Jarvis still held a power over him. Are you a sheep, Rosenthal? No. I have wielded power over others and understand the process. The first time was when he helped run a machine-shop tool room in late adolescence and controlled the tools of master mechanics. He was much like Jarvis then. You want inside micrometers, do you? Well, they’re not here. Wait awhile. And you. Where’s your check? No tools without a check. Two-inch reamer? Broken. Wait. Just wait. He did not withhold tools any more than Jarvis withheld meaningful direction from the Guild. Neither he nor Jarvis could be held responsible for the complex needs of others. But of course they were. The mechanics had cursed him, just as Guildsmen cursed Jarvis, for being inadequate; for the role was contemptible. And of course, he was a duty figure still. His w
ife demanded it of him. The Guild demanded it. He demanded it of himself. Yet the duty had nothing to do with his deepest needs. It was merely therapeutic; about as relevant as hair collecting. But as long as he kept busy, then the failure of all Guild effort would seem only temporary.

  The comfort from Jarvis’ oncoming presence was like that: an illusion that nothing had changed and that there was a chance still. What, after all, is more unsettling than the breakup of the club? Yet he dreamed of change, dreamed of running the Guild himself, with Jarvis out of the way. It would be a slow process to rebuild, for the Guild was as burned out as the gypsy storefront. But there was a foundation, and block by block it could rise. Slowly, yes. Excruciatingly, perhaps. But it could rise.

  A nurse wheeled Deek toward the X-ray room. Jarvis stopped and watched him go. Then he clomped up to Bailey’s and Rosenthal’s stretchers. His face was drawn and sunken, product of collapse: All my teeth fell out early. His eyes, Rosenthal thought, were clear pools of ink eradicator. Life would make no mark they wouldn’t remove. Or was that being unjust to old Jar? Hopeless sap. He deserves better too.

  “We missed you,” Rosenthal told him. “I tried to get you on the radio.”

  “I must have been in the bathroom.”

  “I looked for you after the fray too. We could have used a hand, as you can see.”

  “My wife called. She wanted to borrow the dog.”

  “How’s your wife?”

  “The hell with her.”

  “How’s everything else then?”

  “We’re in trouble. Stanley called. He’s marked us for removal.”

  “Like urban blight?”

  Bailey lay with his eyes closed, hands on his belly like a corpse.

  “Tell him about Putzina,” Bailey said.

  “She just died,” Rosenthal said. He told Jarvis of the gypsy ritual and Smith’s attack, showed him Smith’s knife. Jarvis opened the blade, picked his teeth with the toothpick, cleaned his left thumbnail with the nail file.

  “Let me check this out,” he said. “This doesn’t look like a gypsy weapon to me. I’ll have it researched. I’m suspicious of it.”

  The nurse who had wheeled Deek away returned with an empty stretcher. Deek’s leg was broken, she said, and he’d be admitted. Now they would check Bailey.

  “Here I go to the picture show,” Bailey said.

  “If Stanley presses for arson charges,” Jarvis told Rosenthal and Irma, “he says the police will want to talk to all of us.”

  “Who said it was arson?” Irma asked.

  “Nobody yet.”

  “There’s the birds who slugged Smith,” Rosenthal said.

  Jarvis walked down the hall toward the hatted men for a better look, but when he neared them they went out the door.

  “You call them gypsies?” Jarvis asked Rosenthal. “They’re company guards. One is Fats Morelli. We used to bowl together. He used a fingertip grip. His father came to America from Naples with two barrels of olive oil. The other one’s Clubber Reilly. He was our milkman years ago. Lived with his mother up on Goat Hill. He kept leaving skim milk when what we wanted was buttermilk. Or sometimes we’d ask for the regular milk and he’d leave heavy cream.”

  “Never mind the irrelevancies,” Rosenthal said.

  “These are specifics. Did you know that the old woman had two thousand smackeroonies wrapped in that newspaper?”

  “I didn’t know the amount.”

  “We’ll have this out,” Jarvis said. “You guys put on a lousy motorcade.”

  “I could use a sandwich,” Irma said.

  “I’ve got to go get the dog and feed him,” Jarvis said. “We’ll meet tomorrow at two o’clock. You all better be there.”

  Irma went for sandwiches at the hospital coffee shop. She brought one for Deek, but he was asleep under a sedative. When she went back to the emergency room Rosenthal was gone. She found him at the X-ray room with no broken bones. She went back up for his clothes and found Bailey’s clothes too, but no Bailey.

  Rosenthal stood up from his stretcher and fastened his black cape, then tipped his Tyrolean hat at a jaunty angle.

  “Bailey is playing hide and seek,” he said.

  “Nobody in emergency’s seen him,” Irma said.

  “I got his chart here,” the X-ray attendant said, “and there’s the stretcher he came down on. But when I got ready to take him he was gone.”

  “Did you see any strange-looking people around?” Irma asked.

  “Everybody looks strange in this joint,” he said. “Take him, for instance.” He gestured at the dashing Rosenthal.

  They checked the admitting office, emergency again, but Bailey was not in the hospital. As they stepped out into the snowy night Rosenthal looked at Irma.

  “Welcome,” he said, “to dry gulch.”

  As Irma took his arm and they picked their way over the slippery slush, Rosenthal tried to form an action plan, but could not. How to rescue Bailey when you could not say with certainty that he required rescuing, that he had not done something outlandish on his own? Sudden departures were hardly new to the Bailey style. Yet there was a portentous quality about this one. There was absence of his allegiance to the continuity of a Guild moment. It was un-Baileyesque not to see things through to the conclusion.

  Irma’s arm distracted Rosenthal.

  Irma saw two winter birds fly to the shelter of a ledge beneath the eaves of the hospital. Swiftly she recapitulated her recurring dream: the flock of blackbirds landing on the fence that protected the plowed field, the beginning of a sudden snowfall as harbinger of a wave of frigid air; the temperature swiftly dropping seventy-five degrees and blast-freezing the blackbirds to their perch, inside their coverlets of snow; television news cameramen coming to photograph the phenomenon of hundreds of birds frozen to the fence; commentators marveling at the scene; thousands of curiosity seekers passing by. Only Irma noticed the few winter birds that flew over the scene and perched on the limb of an apple tree, studying the curious as well as the corpses.

  “I wonder,” Rosenthal said, “what would happen if we won the strike. Or even if we won just a round.”

  “The sun would stand still in the heavens,” Irma said. “And the whole schmeer would melt.”

  “Bailey is a fixed idea.”

  “So I noticed.”

  “I keep wanting to change his ways, correct him.”

  “You should seek more rewarding work.”

  Rosenthal opened the door of his Mercedes for Irma. As she got in, her skirt went up to mid-thigh. Rosenthal saw, stared perhaps two seconds too long.

  Confronting the possibility of Bailey’s death, Rosenthal also confronted his own. The piper’s tune beckoned. But where did it lead? The odd thing was that it always led back to where it began: concentric life. Here we go round the sameberry bush. Yet what else was there to do? Why hadn’t he or Bailey ever gone on to higher tasks, or even another Guild local, where they could function at least in the old way, the way they functioned before the strike? Ah, that was the question, was it not? It was easy to answer that the old way was the old way, which was true, but a riddle. Rosenthal could conceive of nothing that would improve his present condition. It seemed he had felt that way since the beginning of the strike. Now even winning the strike might not improve anything for him. He might continue to sit in the Guild room each day, working for Jarvis, answering the phone, posting new notices. Habit might dictate what dream once motivated.

  Without lipsticks Irma’s lips were provocative.

  Irma wondered if she really understood what was happening in Rosenthal’s mind. She saw his eyes reflecting apparent boldness of thought, which might or might not become action, and it annoyed her. She did not really blame Rosenthal for his aggression. He had always kept himself in gentlemanly balance. But the nasty animal that growled within all men, that did what it damn well pleased: that, at the moment, was what she despised.

  “What’s your best guess on where he is?” she asked.r />
  “With the gypsies,” Rosenthal said. “Where else?”

  He started the car and pulled slowly out of the hospital parking lot, the gypsy trailer his first destination. Irma crossed her knees, revealing nothing. Rosenthal turned his head at the movement nevertheless. Another habit pattern. Since he had no self-doubt that tried to shake him from his patterns, he assumed they were correct for him, even if they were also ritualistic, seemingly mindless, often absurd and sometimes deadly. His wife wanted him different. Grace wanted Bailey different. Bailey wanted everybody different. People corrected their neighbor in their own image. Yet there was a smugness in himself and in Bailey that seemed to assume that self-correction on certain matters was no longer profitable. The way was fixed for them and they understood its terms. Rosenthal concluded that such understanding might be the beginning of self-sufficiency. But weren’t hermits also self-sufficient? Ah, to be a hermit, now that death is near. How does a hermit fail?

  Irma’s nakedness was now in his mind.

  As they neared the company yard, Irma saw that her preconception of the scene was askew. There was no army of guards as she had anticipated, no cordon of police around the building, no firemen raking over the ashes of the burned storefront. One company car with two uniformed guards in the front seat idled near the spot where the inert Bailey had been dropped into the snow after the beating.

  “We’ll ask them,” she said.

  “Ask them what?”

  “Selected questions.”

  “I don’t think you should.”

  “Their reaction might mean something even if they don’t tell me anything.”

  “That’s freshman talk.”

  She shrugged and smiled, and as Rosenthal’s hand moved toward her in a gesture whose meaning she could not assess with certainty, she slid quickly out of the door and walked toward the guards at quick-pace. The sidewalk now seemed strange, though she had picketed along it for a year, knew all its blemishes. Now it seemed like a path on the moon. Beyond the snow-covered embers of the storefront Irma saw an empty lot, the gypsy trailer gone. Two more subtractions. Where would the gypsies go next? How could Bailey be traced? They might take him anywhere. Across the ocean. To Mexico. There are even gypsies in China, so they say. Life suddenly seemed very odd around her. What if Bailey were gone for good? Nothing was like it had been. Even Rosenthal’s reaching hand had no basis in Rosenthal history. Was Rosy mutating? Odd. Not unpleasant. After so many months of predictable boredom, ridiculous failure, useless violence and futile hope, a bit of mystery amid the verities seemed a gift from oblique gods. She strode up to the side of the guards’ car, whose motor was running, and spoke through a half-open window to the one on the passenger side.