The Ghost in the Gutter

• Chapter 1 Non-Repro Blue
• Chapter 2 Ghost Hand
• Chapter 3 The Syndicate Man
• Chapter 4 Sunday Deadlines
• Chapter 5 India Ink and Bourbon
• Chapter 6 Between the Panels
• Chapter 7 Legacy Lines
• Chapter 8 Newsprint Dust
• Chapter 9 The Drawing Board
• Chapter 10 The Master’s Shadow
• Chapter 11 Halftone Screens
• Chapter 12 Letters to the Editor
• Chapter 13 Punchlines in the Dark
• Chapter 14 The Colorist’s Lament
• Chapter 15 Shrinking Real Estate
• Chapter 16 A Slight Deviation
• Chapter 17 The Morgue File
• Chapter 18 Bleed Through
• Chapter 19 The Four-Panel Cage
• Chapter 20 Editorial Interference
• Chapter 21 The Golden Age Is Dead
• Chapter 22 Breaking the Border
• Chapter 23 Silent Frames
• Chapter 24 The Final Proof
• Chapter 25 Off the Press
• Chapter 26 Above the Fold

The pencil was a Sanford Eagle, hexagonal, painted a faint, medicinal turquoise that tasted like cedar and lead whenever Donald pressed the unsharpened blunt against his lip. It didn’t register on the photostat cameras at the syndicate. You could cover a sheet of two-ply Strathmore bristol with frantic, chicken-scratched geometries, crosshatch a sky until the paper was greasy with waxy pigment, or sketch a hangman’s noose dangling inside a speech balloon, and the plate maker’s lens would look straight through it. The camera only recognized black: thick, unapologetic India ink that sat on the sizing like dried tar. Everything else—the doubts, the rough drafts, the faint guidelines ruling the tops and bottoms of the letters—simply ceased to exist once the negative was burned.

It was mid-October, 1985, and the radiator under the north-facing window of the studio was clanking out a dry, iron heat that smelled faintly of scorched wool. Outside, four stories above 43rd Street, the autumn wind was tearing yellow leaves off the scrawny ginkgo trees and throwing them against the brick wall of the adjoining parking garage. Donald adjusted the articulated arm of his Luxo lamp. The spring gave a dry, metallic squeak, vibrating down into the steel clamp that held it to the tilted drafting table.

On the board lay six pre-cut strips of bristol board, each measuring four inches high by thirteen inches wide. Across the top left corner of each strip, stamped in faded red ink, were the words: BARNABY BUCKLE — DAILY.

Barnaby had been twenty-nine years old since 1938. He was a traveling salesman who sold vacuum sweepers out of the rumble seat of a roadster that hadn't seen a redesign since the Roosevelt administration. In 1944, he had knocked down a German spy behind a hedge in Kent. In 1957, he had accidentally joined an amateur skin-diving club and spent three weeks tangled in kelp. Now, in the year of live-aid concerts and video cassette recorders, he was still wearing a tweed flat cap and high-waisted flannel slacks, squinting through three dots of ink that served as his left eye, his right eye, and the mole between them.

Donald held the blue pencil above the first panel. His thumb was stained around the cuticle with permanent Higgins black, an indelible tattoo earned over eight years of lettering other people's gags, ruling panel borders, and erasing pencil marks until his knuckles burned.

In the center of the first frame, he blocked out Barnaby’s head: a circle three-quarters of an inch wide, sliced into quadrants by two intersecting axes. The vertical axis established the tilt of the cranium; the horizontal gave the horizon of the eyes. Just below the horizontal line, Barnaby’s nose was an unmistakable shape—half a pear, drooping slightly toward an upper lip that had never possessed teeth.

Donald drew the curve smoothly. He knew the radius by heart. It was five-sixteenths of an inch. If he made it three-eighths, Barnaby looked like an Irish boxer with a broken bridge; if he made it a quarter-inch, he looked like a tubercular clerk.

"Watch the crown of the cap, Donnie," said the voice behind him.

Donald did not jump. He had heard the slippers shuffling across the linoleum three minutes ago, dragging the rhythm of an eighty-two-year-old hip that had outlived its socket.

Everett Cole stood in the doorway of the inner office, framed by two floor-to-ceiling filing cabinets whose olive-green enamel was chipped down to the dull gray primer. Everett was wearing a mustard-colored cardigan that had lost its top two buttons, leaving his collar spread wide over an undershirt that had gone the color of skim milk. His right hand was tucked into his cardigan pocket, fingers curled around a glass tumbler that rattled with two cloudy ice cubes.

"I’m watching it, Ev," Donald said, keeping his wrist steady as the blue wax tracked across the paper. "Just laying down the perspective."

Everett drifted closer, his feet whispering against the floor. He smelled of menthol cigarettes, witch hazel, and the sweet, fermented tang of blended whiskey that had been sitting in an open bottle since lunchtime. He stopped two feet behind Donald’s right shoulder, leaning forward just enough that his shadow cut through the cone of warm incandescent light from the Luxo.

"He looks like he’s leaning into a gale," Everett muttered. He tapped the paper with a fingernail that was thick and ambered like an old guitar pick. "Barnaby doesn't fight the wind, Donnie. He’s an amiable cuss. The wind blows, he lets it push him. The bag does the fighting."

Donald let his breath out through his nose. He picked up his kneaded rubber eraser, pinched it into a wedge, and pressed it to the paper. The blue lead lifted, but not entirely; it left behind a faint dent in the soft vellum surface.

"The script said he was in a hurry," Donald said, pointing with the butt of the pencil to the yellow legal pad taped to the corner of the board.

The pad contained three sentences, written in Everett’s spindly, trembling longhand: Panel 1: Barnaby hurries down street with sweeper. Panel 2: Sees neighbor lady raking yard. Panel 3: Tells her sweeper picks up leaves too. Panel 4: Sweeper blows leaves back into her face. Barnaby: 'Guess it needs an oil change!'

Everett squinted at his own handwriting, his eyebrows two wild tufts of white hair that curled toward his nose like sea oats. "That’s a good one," he murmured, nodding slowly. "That’s a solid gag. People hate leaves. Leaves are a universal nuisance. You don't have to explain leaves to a subscriber in Des Moines."

"No, sir."

"They don't have to know what kind of tree it is. A leaf is a leaf. Just make 'em look like maple. Oak looks like laundry."

Everett reached down and touched the edge of the bristol board with his thumb, checking the grain. The skin of his knuckles was spotted with purple petechiae, thin as tissue paper. For fifty years, those hands had produced six dailies and a full-page Sunday, five thousand two hundred panels a year, without missing a deadline for the Spanish flu, the second World War, or his first wife’s funeral in 1961. But over the last two years, the tremor in the right wrist had stopped being a morning shake that could be cured by four ounces of rye and a fried egg; it had turned into an unpredictable, rhythmic twitch that sent steel pen nibs gouging through the paper like tiny plows.

"The linework in the third panel," Everett said, his eyes wandering to the middle of the strip. "Keep the lady simple. Don't go giving her one of those modern hairdos. No perms. Just a bun. A nice, motherly bun. Like the woman on the baking soda box."

"The lady from the baking soda box hasn't had a bun since 1968, Ev."

"Then she’s out of style," the old man said flatly. "Good drawing isn't about style, Donnie. It’s about clarity. You draw a stove, a man in Duluth knows he can fry bacon on it. You draw a telephone, he knows which end goes to his ear. The world out there is full of clever bastards who can draw a foot with seven toes and make the art school girls swoon, but they can't make a dog look like it wants a bone."

Everett turned his head toward the front window, where the traffic on 43rd Street gave off a muffled, wet hiss. A sanitation truck groaned down below, its hydraulic arms squealing as it hoisted an iron dumpster. The floor under the drawing board hummed in sympathetic vibration.

"Are you going to ink it tonight?" Everett asked.

"I’ll pencil the batch before five," Donald said. "If I start the inking by six, I can have them dry and in the Federal Express bag before the drop-off at eight. The courier comes to the lobby at eight-fifteen."

"Federal Express," Everett spat the words out like he had found a bug in his soup. "A dollar a minute to move a piece of paper three hundred miles. We used to put the flats on the five o'clock train to Philadelphia. Conductor took the pouch for two packs of Luckies. The boy was waiting at the terminal in 30th Street with a bicycle. The plates were cast by dawn. Now everybody’s in a goddamned panic. What are they doing with all the minutes they save?"

"They’re watching television," Donald said.

"Idiots," Everett said, but there was no bite in it. The energy was already draining out of him, his shoulders settling back into the stoop that had curved his spine into the shape of a question mark. He took a sip from his glass, the ice cubes clinking dull against the rim. "The syndicate called this morning."

Donald kept his eyes on the paper, but his fingers tightened on the Sanford Eagle. "Marcus?"

"His assistant. Some girl from Vassar who sounds like she’s talking through a mouthful of paper clips. Wanted to know if we were going to address the space shuttle."

"The shuttle?"

"Barnaby should be proud of American technology, she says. Says the syndicate’s research shows the young demographics like high-tech themes. Computers. Satellites." Everett let out a short, wet snort through his teeth. "I told her Barnaby still has a crank on his car because a battery is a luxury item. I told her if Barnaby went up in a rocket, the only thing he’d have to sell would be dehydrated cabbage to the Russians."

"What did she say?"

"She said Mr. Marcus would like to schedule a lunch next Thursday." Everett paused, looking down at Donald’s shoulder. His face, reflected in the small makeup mirror taped to the window frame, looked crumpled and gray. "I don't eat lunch in midtown anymore. The restaurants are too dark. You can't see what you’re chewing, and everybody’s wearing those yellow neckties."

Donald laid down the blue pencil and reached for the lead holder loaded with an HB graphite core. "Did Marcus say anything about the contract?"

Everett didn't answer right away. He walked back toward the green filing cabinets, his slippers scuffing the floor with a rhythmic shuck-shuck. He stopped at the shelf where his reference files were kept—hundreds of yellowed cardboard folders marked HATS, MEN'S, 1930-1940; AUTOS, COMMERCIAL; DOGS, SMALL; FURNITURE, PARLOR.

"The contract is standard," Everett said to the back of the filing cabinet. "They own the trademark, Donnie. They’ve owned it since Hearst bought out the old Ledger syndicate in thirty-two. But they don't own the hand. A feature is the man who draws it. You can't replace the hand."

Donald looked down at his own right hand, palm up on the clean white surface of the desk. The calluses were in the right places: the hard, yellow pad on the middle knuckle where the pen barrel rubbed; the flat, leathery cushion on the outer edge of the palm that rode the surface of the paper like the heel of an iron. He had the same size hand as Everett, though his fingers were longer, the joints cleaner, unthickened by the gout that made the old man’s knuckles look like walnuts.

"Marcus knows about the hand, Ev," Donald said quietly.

"Marcus knows about balance sheets," Everett snapped. "His father knew about newspapers. His father was a man who could smell a bad half-tone from the hall. This one has an MBA from Syracuse. He thinks a comic strip is just a box you put around an advertisement for Sears Roebuck."

The old man reached up and pulled a folder down from the cabinet: SWEEPERS, EARLY MODEL. He blew the gray fluff off the top edge, sending a cloud of lint into the light.

"Just make the leaf gag work," Everett said, his voice dropping into that weary, flat register that meant he was done talking for the afternoon. "Don't get tricky with the angles. Keep the horizon line low. Give the background some weight—two clapboard houses and a picket fence. People like fences. It gives them a sense that property is being maintained."

"Yes, Ev."

"I’m going to lay down. My shoulder’s barking."

"I’ll leave the flats on the light table when I’m done."

"Don't turn the heat off when you go," Everett said, already halfway through the door to his back room, where a green vinyl cot stood between two stacks of bound volumes of the New York Journal-American. "The pipes in the hall start to hum if the pressure drops. Sounds like an accordion with a hole in the bellows."

The door clicked shut. The latch was brass, worn bright where fifty years of thumbs had depressed the lever. Through the frosted glass panel, Donald could see the yellow rectangle of light stay on for thirty seconds, then vanish as Everett switched off the lamp by his cot.

Donald sat alone in the pool of light.

The silence in the fourth-floor room was heavy, smelling of vinegar from the photostat fluid in the sink down the hall and the distinct, oily odor of the floor wax that the building’s Polish super spread twice a month. On the corner of the desk, Donald’s mug of coffee had gone cold, a gray skin wrinkling across its surface.

He picked up the Sanford Eagle again.

Panel one.

He ruled the panel borders with a three-sided architect’s scale and an 0.5-millimeter technical pen. The lines had to be precisely one-sixteenth of an inch thick. Not thin like the work of the younger guys who were doing those college-campus strips with the talking animals, but heavy enough to hold back the grey ink of the newspaper’s printing press when the web offset ran at twenty-five thousand impressions an hour. A border wasn't just a line; it was a retaining wall. It kept the world of Barnaby Buckle from spilling into the used car ads and the obituaries.

He sketched Barnaby’s shoes. They were square-toed, with heavy welts and four crosshatched lines across the vamp to indicate the cracking leather of a man who walked five miles of sidewalk every day. Donald drew them without looking at a model sheet. He didn't need the model sheet; the model sheet had been drawn by Everett in 1941, pinned to the wall with two yellowing thumb tacks, its corners curled into tight cylinders like dry birch bark.

Donald knew every trick of the trade. If you drew Barnaby from the rear, you gave his coat three wrinkles at the small of the back to show that his spine was curved under the weight of his sample case. If he was surprised, his hat didn't just fly off; it hovered an inch and a half above his head, accompanied by three little radiating lines that the old syndicate men called "whiz-marks." If he was running, his back foot became an elongated blur, an oval of speed lines that dissolved into the dirt of the sidewalk.

Donald drew the sweeper. It was an upright model, a heavy cylinder of cast aluminum with a black canvas bag that swelled behind the handle like a goose’s crop. He knew how to shade the chrome: two parallel stripes of pure white left open between fields of solid black, with a tiny cluster of stippled dots where the curve caught the overhead sun.

His hand moved with an unthinking, machine-like speed. He had been doing this for eight years. Four years at the Art Students League, three years drawing diagrams of lawnmower carburetors for an industrial trade catalog in Newark, and then Everett’s ad in the back of the Guild Reporter: ASSISTANT WANTED. Traditional strip. Clean line. Knowledge of dry-brush essential. Apply in person with portfolio.

Donald had walked into this room with twelve samples of political cartoons that looked like Herblock on an off day, and Everett hadn't even looked at the faces. He had turned the pages over, inspected the backs of the sheets to see how heavily Donald’s hand pressed the paper, and then pointed to the window.

"Draw me an umbrella," Everett had said. "Open. Rain coming from the north-northeast. Thirty-knot wind."

Donald had drawn it in forty seconds with a round-nib Gillott 170. Everett had looked at the umbrella, picked up an ink eraser, rubbed out the tip of the ferrule, and drawn it back in with two strokes of a sable brush.

"You make the point too sharp, Donnie," the old man had said. "A customer sees a point like that, he thinks about getting his eye put out. He doesn't think about staying dry. You start on Monday. Fifty dollars a week, and you keep the inkwells filled."

That was 1977. Now it was eighty dollars a week and the syndicate sent the checks directly to Everett’s account at Chemical Bank on 42nd. Donald got his thirty percent in cash every second Friday, pulled from a green vinyl bank pouch that Everett kept behind the old city directories.

Donald finished the pencil layout for the fourth panel.

The neighbor lady—Mrs. Higgins, she had been Mrs. Higgins since Everett’s second wife died—stood with her hands on her hips, her face a mask of round-mouthed dismay. The sweeper had backfired. A cone of black dots—spattered with a dry toothbrush over a paper stencil—erupted from the exhaust vent, plastering her apron with leaves. Barnaby was leaning on the chrome handle, his right hand tipping his cap in that timeless, bovine apology that had made middle-aged men chuckle over their toast during the Truman administration.

Donald dropped the pencil. It rolled into the groove at the base of the board and stopped against an open box of razor blades.

He stood up, his spine cracking with three dry pops that sounded like firecrackers in an empty alley. He walked across the room to the heavy cast-iron light table that Everett had hauled out of the old Sun building when it folded in 1950. The glass was thick, green-edged plate, scratched by forty years of razor knives and covered with old masking tape that had baked into brown, brittle glue under the heat of the fluorescent tubes.

Donald reached under the skirt of the table and clicked the toggle. Two forty-watt bulbs flickered, hummed, and settled into a cold, greenish-white glow.

He went to the small drawer where the fresh supplies were kept. In the back, behind the boxes of thumb tacks and the rolls of drafting tape, was a flat manila folder without a label. Donald pulled it out and laid it on the light table.

Inside were four sheets of plate-finish bristol, cut to the same thirteen-inch length as the Barnaby strips, but without the red syndicate stamp.

Donald turned off the overhead Luxo lamp. The studio dropped into cold shadow, lit only by the green rectangle of the light box.

On the top sheet, there were no four-panel borders. There was only a single, large frame that filled the page from edge to edge, bleeding off the paper on the top and right sides. Inside the frame, a young man was sitting on the edge of an unmade mattress in a room that looked very much like Donald’s own tenement on 10th Avenue. The window showed a brick wall, but the brick wasn't rendered in the neat, mechanical rows that Everett demanded. It was broken, decayed, the mortar dripping down the courses like old fat. Through the window, the neon sign of a pawnshop cut through the diagonal rain: three balls rendered in stark, jagged pools of solid black that swallowed the bottom half of the figure’s face.

The lines were thin, nervous, broken. They looked like they had been scratched into the paper with a rusty needle rather than drawn with an expensive red sable brush. There were no "whiz-marks." There was no humor. There was only the weight of the rain, the gray light coming through the grime on the glass, and the small, dark silhouette of a portable radio sitting on a milk crate by the bed.

Donald picked up a crow-quill pen from his own rack—a tiny, flexible nib that could produce a line no thicker than an eyelash if you held your hand light enough. He dipped it into a bottle of Pelikan drawing ink, blacker and thinner than the Higgins that Everett favored.

He held the nib an inch above the figure’s shoulder.

His hand was completely still. Not a trace of the tremor that had begun to plague Everett’s fingers. His fingers were young, twenty-eight years old, full of grease and muscle. He could draw an eyelash that would make a printmaker weep. He could lay down a tone of sixty lines to the inch using nothing but his thumb and a steel ruler.

He touched the metal to the bristol. A drop of black blossomed into the paper, drawn into the fibers by the suction of the dry vellum.

"Donnie?"

The voice came through the frosted glass, muffled and dry.

Donald didn't move. The nib stayed poised on the page, the ink still wet, reflecting the green light of the tube below.

"Donnie, you still out there?"

Donald slipped the manila folder under a stack of old Sunday color proofs, his movements smooth and silent. He clicked off the light table. The studio plunged back into the gray, autumnal gloom that seeped through the north window.

"Yeah, Ev," Donald said, his voice level. "I’m here. Just getting the ink out."

The latch clicked, and Everett’s head appeared in the opening of the door. In the half-light, his white hair stood out like thistle down against the dark hallway behind him. He didn't have his glasses on; his eyes were small, watery pockets of gray skin that blinked against the faint illumination from the street.

"I thought I heard someone talking," Everett said.

"Just the radio down at the garage," Donald said. "They’ve got the ballgame on."

Everett nodded slowly, though there was no ballgame in October on a Tuesday afternoon, not at four o'clock. His hand lingered on the edge of the door frame, his fingers tapping three times against the varnished pine.

"Don't forget the shoes," the old man said softly. "The welts on the soles. People look at the shoes, Donnie. If a man’s shoes are honest, they’ll forgive him almost anything."

"I know, Ev," Donald said. "Double-row stitching. Heavy heels."

"That’s it," Everett said, and his face retreated into the dark of the bedroom. The door stayed open an inch, just enough for the sound of his breathing to reach the drafting table—slow, dry, and regular, like the sound of an iron wheel turning in sand.

Donald sat back down on his stool. He took the bottle of Higgins, shook it until the lead ball inside clicked against the glass, and set it in the circular cutout on his taboret. He picked up the No. 2 brush—the one Everett had given him four years ago, its red handle worn down to the bare white birch where his fingers rested—and dipped it until the belly was full.

He looked at the second panel. Barnaby was leaning over the hedge, his face wide with an idiot smile that had survived the Blitz, the Korean War, the death of three syndicates, and four different presidents.

The brush hit the paper with a tiny, wet hiss.

Donald pulled the stroke down, curving it around the jawline, keeping the line fat and black, just like it had been in the funny papers when his father was a boy, just like it would be tomorrow, so long as the presses had grease and the trains ran south to Philadelphia before the sun came up.

The ink dried dull, losing its oily sheen as the gum arabic settled into the tooth of the paper. By a quarter past seven, the smell of Higgins had colonized the room, competing only with the stale dregs of Donald’s Maxwell House and the faint, sulfurous draft puffing from the radiator valve. Donald laid down his Winsor & Newton Series 7, its kolinsky hairs cleaned with cold water and shaped to a point against the pad of his tongue. He blotted the final panel with a strip of gray felt, leaned back until his stool shrieked in protest, and surveyed the week’s work.

Six days of Barnaby. Six little dramas, three to four panels each, totaling twenty-one boxes of an America that existed nowhere outside of Everett Cole’s memory and eighty-seven daily syndication contracts.

In Tuesday’s strip, Barnaby demonstrated the sweeper’s attachments to an irascible butcher whose string of sausages got swallowed by the nozzle. On Wednesday, Barnaby mistook a modern art sculpture for a pile of discarded scrap metal and tried to haul it off in his rumble seat. Thursday was a pure pantomime: Barnaby struggling against a sudden squall, his umbrella turning inside out to resemble an enormous black tulip, his bowler hat pinning a dog to a fire hydrant. Friday and Saturday were setup and payoff for a recurring domestic spat between Barnaby and his landlady, Mrs. Gable, over the electrical bill run up by his vacuum testing.

Every line belonged to Everett Cole, but not a single molecule of the carbon had passed beneath the old man’s skin.

Donald picked up an eraser shield—a thin sheet of flexible stainless steel pierced with oblong slots, stars, and teardrops—and placed it over the third panel of the Saturday daily. He took a hard Eberhard Faber typewriter eraser, the kind impregnated with abrasive pumice, and scrubbed out a rogue fleck of ink that had drifted into the gutter between panels three and four. The gutter was sacred territory. It was three-eighths of an inch of virgin white paper that separated the punchline from the setup. A stray drop of ink in the gutter was like an actor tripping over the footlights into the orchestra pit; it shattered the illusion that these cardboard figures lived in a self-contained world where bills never came due and vacuum cleaners lasted for thirty-five years without a blown belt.

Donald dusted away the rubber crumbs with a soft horsehair brush. He picked up the six finished strips by their margins, stacked them flush against the steel lip of the drafting table, and carried them to the far corner of the room.

The light box sat beneath a framed photograph from 1954: Everett at the National Cartoonists Society dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria, standing between Rube Goldberg and Milton Caniff. Everett was forty years younger then, grinning with teeth that were still his own, a highball glass held waist-high like a shield, wearing a white dinner jacket that fit him across the chest. Goldberg had drawn a tiny, impossible corkscrew machine on the margin of the photo in faded fountain-pen ink, inscribed To Ev, who makes sweeping look like honest labor.

Donald slid the first daily onto the glass. From the small wooden drawer beneath the light table, he pulled a slip of stiff tracing paper, yellowed with age and translucent as greaseproof sandwich wrap.

Taped to the tracing paper was Everett’s signature.

It had been traced from an original master executed in 1962, back when the old man’s arm could still slash a feather-edge baseline with a single flick of an Esterbrook 314 relief pen. The flourish on the capital E curled like an iron banister; the crossed t’s formed a single, unbroken horizontal sword that sliced clean across the surname, ending in a defiant downward jab. It was bold, aristocratic, and completely counterfeit.

Donald lined up the bottom right corner of the fourth panel with the top edge of the tracing paper. He clipped the strip down with two brass bulldog clamps. Through the vellum, the ghost signature hovered in the lower-right margin, right next to the tire of Barnaby’s coupe.

He picked up the Speedball B-6 nib, dipped it into the black lake of the Higgins jar, and wiped the belly once against the lip to shed the excess weight.

He held his breath. This was the part that made his stomach knot every Tuesday night. Drawing the trees, the cars, the pear-shaped nose, the checkered trousers—all of that was tradecraft, mere mimicry that any competent hack out of the Art Students League could manage with three months of practice. But the signature was the legal tender. It was the stamp that turned six sheets of eleven-by-fourteen cardboard into a negotiable security worth eight hundred dollars from the syndicate’s disbursing office.

He set the point to the paper. He didn't use his fingers; he used his shoulder. You couldn't draw Everett’s signature from the wrist. If you drew it from the wrist, the line developed microscopic hesitations—tiny, nervous hiccups that betrayed the presence of an imposter. You had to lock your wrist, stiffen your elbow, and let the entire weight of your upper arm sweep the nib through the curve.

E-v-e-r-e-t-t.

The nib scratched across the rag fibers. The ink flowed thick, raising a slight welt on the paper.

C-o-l-e.

He paused for half a second, lifted the nib, centered it two millimeters above the lowercase letters, and slashed the sword-stroke from left to right. The crossbar thinned out at the end, terminating in that familiar, vicious little hook.

Donald let his breath out. He examined the work under the cold white glare of the fluorescent tube.

It was perfect. It was more Everett Cole than Everett Cole could manage on his best morning. If you laid it over the 1962 original, the lines would register within a hair’s breadth. An editor at the syndicate, glancing down through a cloud of cigarette smoke while signing off on the proofs, wouldn't look twice. The ghost had done his work. The name belonged to the legend; the sweat belonged to Donald; and the check would belong to Chemical Bank.

Donald repeated the ritual five more times. By the sixth strip, his forearm was tight, the muscles burning along the ulna. He cleaned the nib with a square of flannel, dropped it back into the chipped ceramic teacup that held his tools, and carried the six flats to the drying rack by the window.

The door to the bedroom opened with a soft, dry moan.

Everett stood in the frame, leaning heavily on the jamb with his left shoulder. He had taken off his cardigan and put on a navy-blue bathrobe made of thin wool that had moth holes along the hem. His thin, white shins emerged from the bottom like birch poles stuck into gray flannel slippers.

"You finish 'em?" Everett asked. His voice was thick with sleep, his eyes swollen behind the thick lenses of his reading glasses.

"Done," Donald said. "Just waiting on the ink to set before I slip 'em into the mailer."

Everett shuffled forward, his hand sliding along the edge of the filing cabinets for support. He didn't look at the drawings. He knew what they looked like. He had seen them in his mind’s eye thirty years ago, and nothing had changed since then except the price of newsprint and the size of the Sunday supplements. He stopped by the light table, squinted down at the white surface, and picked up the tracing paper.

He looked at his own name, floating there on the yellowed parchment like an ex-voto left in a chapel.

"The crossbar," Everett murmured. "You got it a little high on Thursday's."

Donald swallowed. "I checked the model."

"I know what the model looks like, Donnie. I made the model. The crossbar belongs three millimeters lower, right through the throat of the l. When you put it high like that, it looks like an exclamation point. I don't use exclamation points. Exclamation points are for hacks who don't know how to write a punchline. If the drawing is funny, you don't need to shout at the reader."

"Yes, Ev."

Everett dropped the tracing paper back onto the table. He reached out with his right hand—the one that stayed mostly buried in his pocket these days—and held it out in front of him. In the green light of the fluorescent tube, the hand looked dead. The knuckles were swollen into pale knots, the skin stretched so thin across the tendons that Donald could trace the blue path of the radial vein back into the sleeve of the bathrobe.

The hand was trembling. It wasn't a violent shake; it was a rhythmic, five-cycle-per-second vibration, like the idle of a worn-out refrigerator compressor. The middle finger twitched downward every few beats, a nervous tap that would have driven an ink nib an eighth of an inch through the bristol.

Everett watched the hand as if it belonged to an uninvited guest who had sat down at his table and refused to leave.

"The doctor in Jackson Heights gave me some pills," Everett said, his voice flat, devoid of self-pity. "Little orange things. Made my mouth taste like copper pennies. Stopped the shaking for about two hours, then my tongue swelled up so big I couldn't chew a saltine. I threw 'em down the toilet."

"Maybe you should see someone in Manhattan," Donald said. "There’s specialists at Columbia."

"Specialists," Everett snorted. He turned his wrist over, looking at the underside, where an old ink stain was permanently dyed into the calloused skin beneath the thumb. "Specialists want seventy-five dollars just to tell you you're old. I know I'm old. I don't need a diploma on the wall to tell me the machine is running down. My father’s hands went the same way when he was seventy. He was an engraver for the American Bank Note Company. Worked on the greenbacks. By the time he was seventy-two, he couldn't carve the eye on George Washington without making him look like he had a cataract."

The old man lowered his arm, letting it drop against his thigh like a heavy piece of rope.

"The syndicate called back while you were inking," Everett said.

Donald turned from the drying rack, his back stiffening. "Marcus?"

"No. His girl again. Miss Paper-Clips." Everett walked over to the small gas burner set up on top of a low metal credenza, picked up the enameled tin pot, and shook it. It was dry. He set it down with a hollow clatter. "She says the meeting on Thursday isn't just lunch. Marcus wants to talk about the Sunday format. They’re looking at redesigning the color section for the spring."

Donald felt a cold prickle of air against his neck. "What kind of redesign?"

"They’re cutting the page again," Everett said, looking out through the dirty glass toward the neon signs of 8th Avenue. "They’re going from a half-page standard to a third-page vertical. Six panels instead of eight. No drop panels. No throwaway gags for the banner."

"A third?" Donald took a step toward the board. "You can't tell a story in a third. Not a Barnaby story. By the time you get him into the house and introduce the customer, you've only got two panels left for the demonstration and the blow-off."

"They don't want a story, Donnie," Everett said softly. "They want a joke. Fast. In and out. Like a commercial for shaving cream. They say the papers are losing pages to the department store flyers. Macy's buys six pages of glossy color inserts, and the comic section gets squeezed down to eight pages total. They're dropping four strips entirely. The ones with the continuity. Steve Canyon is having trouble. Brenda Starr is hanging on by her teeth. The readers don't want to wait until next Sunday to find out if the plane crashed in the jungle. They want to see a fat man sit on a rake, and then they want to turn to the sports section to see what the Mets did."

Everett turned around, his face half in shadow. The light from the street cast long, vertical bars across his cheeks, making him look like a prisoner staring through an iron grate.

"Did she say who was on the block?" Donald asked.

"She didn't have to say," Everett replied. "Barnaby was in four hundred papers in 1952. We were on the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer color section every Sunday for twenty years. You know how many dailies we got left?"

Donald knew. He checked the syndication sheets every month when the vouchers arrived.

"Eighty-seven," Donald said.

"Eighty-four," Everett corrected. "The paper in Dayton dropped us two weeks ago. Replaced us with that strip about the ginger cat that eats lasagna. The paper in Louisville moved us from the comic page to the classifieds, down between the real estate notices and the help-wanted ads. You ever see a strip printed next to the used car listings? The ink they use on the classifieds is like muddy water. You can't even read the speech balloons. Looks like a fly died in the dialogue."

The old man walked toward Donald’s taboret. His eyes fell on the manila folder sticking out from beneath the stack of Sunday proofs on the light table.

Donald’s chest tightened. He hadn't pushed it in all the way; two inches of the buff paper projected into the light, casting a shadow across the lower shelf.

Everett reached down. His movements were slow, but deliberate. His thick, yellowed thumb caught the edge of the folder and slid it out. He laid it flat on the glass of the light table, beneath the glare of the fluorescent tube.

Donald didn't move. He stood with his arms hanging at his sides, his fingers twitching against the seams of his corduroy trousers. He felt the cold iron of the drafting stool pressing against his hip.

Everett opened the folder.

The drawing inside lay naked under the cold light: the stark, jagged room; the rain cutting through the frame like needles; the young man sitting on the edge of the cot with his shoulders rounded and his face swallowed by black shadow. It was an ugly drawing, viciously rendered, without a single soft curve or an ounce of sentimentality. It was the antithesis of everything Everett Cole had stood for since the day he took his first job at the New York American in 1922.

The old man stared at the paper for a long time. The only sound in the room was the clanking of the radiator and the muffled roar of a bus shifting gears on 42nd Street.

Donald waited for the blast. He waited for the lecture on clarity, on the duty of the artist to provide five minutes of wholesome distraction to the working man, on the arrogance of young men who thought their private miseries were of interest to a family in Iowa. He prepared himself to be called a parasite, an amateur, a boy who didn't understand the responsibility of the syndicate line.

Everett turned the page over.

He inspected the back of the sheet, just as he had done eight years ago during Donald’s interview. He ran his thumb across the reverse side, feeling the raised welts where the crow-quill had cut deep into the Strathmore bristol.

"You're pressing too hard," Everett said. His voice was quiet, almost a whisper. "You're fighting the nib. A crow-quill isn't a chisel, Donnie. You drive it into the sizing like that, the hair-lines are going to bleed when the plate goes to the bath. You’ll get a fuzzy edge on the rain."

Donald stared at him, his mouth slightly open. "Ev..."

Everett turned the drawing back over. He touched the corner of the mattress, where Donald had laid down a dense patch of crosshatching to represent the dirty ticking of the cotton cover.

"The line has weight," Everett said. He squinted, his head cocked to one side like an old bird looking at a worm in the grass. "It’s miserable as hell, but it’s got weight. You can tell that bed smells like sour beer and cheap laundry soap. You can tell the guy sitting on it doesn't have two nickels to rub together."

The old man looked up from the table. His gray eyes, magnified by the lenses of his glasses, met Donald’s with a directness that was almost terrifying.

"Is that what you want to do?" Everett asked.

"I don't know," Donald said, his voice cracking slightly. "It’s just... it’s something else. It’s what things look like outside."

"Things have always looked like that outside," Everett said. "You think midtown was clean in nineteen-thirty-six? You think Tenth Avenue was full of roses and singing birds when I was your age? It was horse manure and coal smoke, and guys with holes in their coats picking through garbage cans behind the restaurants. I knew three fellows who jumped off the Queensboro Bridge before I was thirty. One of 'em was the best letterer in the business. Could do German text with a ruling pen like he was an angel from heaven."

Everett closed the folder with a dry, papery snap.

"People don't read the funny papers to see what Tenth Avenue looks like," he said, tapping the manila cover with his thick knuckle. "They know what Tenth Avenue looks like. They have to live on Tenth Avenue. They pay their three cents—or their thirty-five cents, now that the world has lost its goddamned mind—because they want to believe that somewhere in this country there’s a fellow with an honest face who can't get his sweeper to work, but who's going to get up tomorrow morning and put his clean shirt on anyway."

"Maybe they don't believe it anymore," Donald said. The words came out before he could stop them, blunt and sharp as an uncurved lead.

Everett didn't flinch. He just stood there, looking smaller than he had five minutes before, his bathrobe hanging loose around his frail collarbones.

"They believe it as long as we draw it," Everett said. "The minute we stop drawing it, it stops being true. That’s what the syndicate doesn't understand. That’s what that little bastard Marcus doesn't know. He thinks it’s paper. He thinks it’s an ink contract and a truck route. But it’s the only place left where things don't get worse."

He picked up the stack of Barnaby strips from the drying rack. The ink was dry now, flat and deep black against the vellum. Everett held the six strips together, squaring them with a tap against the board. He didn't look at Donald’s forgery of his name. He didn't have to; he knew it was there, holding the enterprise together for another seven days.

"Get 'em into the pouch," Everett said, handing the strips back to Donald. "The boy downstairs won't wait if you're five minutes late. They got routes now. Computers tell 'em which street to turn on. If you're not on the sidewalk when the truck pulls up, they leave you behind."

"I’ll pack them now," Donald said.

Everett turned back toward the bedroom door. He paused on the threshold, his hand resting on the brass latch that had lost its shine fifty years before Donald was born.

"Donnie," the old man said without looking back.

"Yeah, Ev?"

"The kid on the mattress."

"Yes?"

"Don't give him a radio," Everett said. "If he’s that broke, he hocked the radio two weeks ago. Put an empty milk bottle on the crate. A milk bottle has more weight. It shows he was hungry before he was lonely."

The door clicked shut.

Donald stood alone in the center of the studio. The light from the drafting board threw his long, thin shadow across the floorboards, stretching toward the door like a puddle of ink.

He looked at the yellow legal pad on the taboret. Underneath the notes for the leaf gag, Everett had already scribbled the first line for the following week: Barnaby visits a modern bakery. Sweeper gets stuck in the dough mixer.

Donald took the heavy cardboard mailer from behind the desk. He slipped the six finished strips inside, between two sheets of corrugated cardboard to keep them from bending in the truck. He pulled the red tear-strip on the Federal Express envelope, sealed the flap, and pressed the edges down until the adhesive took hold.

He picked up his coat from the peg behind the door. It was an old wool overcoat, heavy and dark, that he had bought at a thrift store on 8th Avenue three winters ago. As he shrugged his arms into the sleeves, he glanced back at the drawing board.

The Sanford Eagle lay in the groove, its blue lead blunt, its turquoise barrel scarred with teeth marks. Next to it was the crow-quill, dry and clean, its tiny steel tongue reflecting the single bulb of the Luxo lamp like a needle waiting for thread.

Donald turned off the light. The room went dark, save for the green glow of the streetlamp outside the window, which threw the silhouettes of the window muntins across the floor like the bars of a clean, well-ruled cage.

He took the envelope under his arm, opened the heavy oak door, and stepped out into the drafty, sulfur-smelling hall, letting the spring-loaded latch click home behind him.