The Baker

by Paul Hond

  Ben stood there, as if awaiting the answer to that very question. His chest rose. He was biting his lip.

  “It all happened very fast,” Mickey said. “There was no time to act.”

  Ben said nothing; he was building to tears. Mickey reached out his hand.

  “Where is she?” Ben said.

  “She’s at the morgue.”

  “Can I see her?”

  “I don’t think so, Benjie.” Mickey took a step forward.

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” Mickey said. His nostrils flared, his teeth clenched, the whole face working to hold together. He would not tell Ben where she was shot; if asked, he would tell him the heart.

  Ben nodded for a moment, took a deep breath; then he turned away, and his entire body convulsed. “Goddammit!” he said through his teeth, as if cursing himself for losing control. He hugged himself, teeth chattering. “Damn it!”

  Mickey swallowed hard and approached his son.

  “No!” Ben said.

  “Benjie.”

  “I want to be alone!”

  Mickey stopped. He was an arm’s length away.

  “Leave me alone!” Ben shouted. “Go away!” He threw himself onto the bed, his face mashed against the pillow: like his mother, he couldn’t bear to be seen out of sorts. “Go!” he said, his voice muffled. “I want to be alone!”

  Though he thought he understood, Mickey was stung by the words. It was personal, he feared. The idea was too much for him. Rejection. He backed unsteadily into the hall and found the banister with a blind hand. Grief wheezed in his lungs, and he halted for a moment on one of the top steps before slowly making his way down.

  It’s not my fault, he told himself. I didn’t kill her. They did. In cold blood they killed her. Killed her! And for what?

  He found himself in the middle of the swaying living room. The bastards! The animals! Joe was right—he’d been right all along. For nothing they’d shoot. For nothing!

  Mickey raised his fists, spun, looked for a target. His vision was blurred. If only that son of a bitch were standing right here, right in front of him! He’d murder him with one blow! He’d murder ten of them, twenty! Bring ‘em on! Bring on every murdering little devil in the whole goddamned city!

  He faced the basement door—the door to Emi’s studio, to her life. Her violin still down there. The music silenced forever.

  It was against that silence as much as anything that Mickey let out a yell and swung with his right: the fist disappeared, the arm was swallowed up to the elbow. A clean hole. Mickey felt no pain.

  “Animals!” he cried. “Animals!” He swung again with his left: another hole. “I’ll kill you, you bastards! I’ll kill you!”

  He felt himself being restrained. Joe, Buddy. They held him back. Mickey swooned at their touch; he barely struggled. There was nothing left.

  “Come on,” Joe said. “Come on back and sit down. That a boy.”

  9

  It was the kind of day that takes on its own shape, that dislodges itself from the stone path of days and rises above it, like the day of a great storm, or the eve of war. There was a heady sense of lawlessness; it was a final day of sorts, a day when money didn’t matter, when you could walk in the middle of the street, when shops were deserted. Ben sat on his bed. His grief (or no: his disbelief, his shock; the prelude to grief), which had seized him the moment he heard the news—it had been more of a reflex than something thoroughly felt, like a shriek for the pain that is anticipated at the sight of one’s blood—had receded for the moment in favor of a great swell of excitement over the strange textures that were growing in and around the house: the smell of coffee, the sound of voices down in the kitchen—Joe Blank, Buddy Grossman, Morris, Shirley Finkle from next door—the urgent cry of the telephone, the reporters and camera crews milling on the sidewalk; it was the day of emergency, the day without limits. His father half-drunk, sleepless, smashing things downstairs in an extraordinary fit of rage, restrained by the other men and now calm as if shot with tranquilizers and conducting himself over the phone—to the police, to the staff at the bakery (Ben had heard him leave a brief message with Donna, telling Nelson not to come in to work, which made Ben jealous, he’d wanted to break the news to Nelson in some dramatic way), to close friends of Emi who had read the account in the morning paper—with quiet, admirable control. There was a sense of purpose, of mission. The house had been transformed into a kind of command post. Ben preferred to let the atmosphere flow up like smoke and reach him in his bed rather than hurl himself into the flames by going downstairs. Despite his excitement, he felt extremely shy; he knew he’d be watched, studied. Emi’s face would assert itself in his own. He had a responsibility to that likeness, he felt; he must keep himself withdrawn, separate. He had gained a mysterious fame.

  He lay back on the blankets, trying to make sense of his reaction to the news—his need to be alone, his dread of his father’s touch. Mickey had been there, had seen it; he was like a man returned from a dark continent, a carrier of experience, of disease, leper and prophet both, a man transformed in unknowable ways. He’d been destroyed and remade in an instant, a monster of assembled parts now jolted to life, mumbling unintelligibly and holding out his arms, taking his first tentative steps, a creature powerful yet weak, seeking life, the life of his son, wanting comfort, contact—it had been too much. Ben could not bear to see his father this way, so broken; he felt even more for him than he did for his mother, whom, after all, he could not see, and whose absence from the world (she was to be cremated, he’d overheard) seemed but the logical extension of those protracted absences and quarantines by which he’d come to know her best, much as a child comes to know, even intimately, an unseen animal: the prints in the mud, the foods which, set out, have been eaten or ignored; the peculiar musk; the strong, thrilling sense of its nearness. Such beings were already so close to the spirit world that, should all evidence of their life vanish, it would still be difficult to imagine them dead.

  Ben supposed the news had yet to sink in, otherwise he’d be beating his chest like Mickey, screaming bloody murder. Or maybe Mickey’s violence had robbed him of his own, had forced him into a more moderate role; in fact Mickey’s temper had inspired calm in everyone. Still, Ben could envision himself in a courtroom, lunging at the defendant and stabbing him through the heart or neck with some crude instrument he’d smuggled past security. And though such thoughts helped soothe his unformed anger, helped massage it into something more manageable, he couldn’t help but think he was lacking a normal thirst for revenge, if for no other reason than that he believed, deep down, that his mother was less to be pitied than blamed.

  The idea stunned him. Like a drug, shock had drawn him into the darkness of his own mind. Emi had failed him since the day he was born, he realized, so much so that he could feel her death as a personal attack, the final assault on his longing for her; and when he dared to try to correct this seemingly wayward thought, he arrived at the even more disturbing conclusion that for her neglect, her selfishness, she’d gotten what she’d deserved; and that he himself, in a way unleashed by his own secret wishes, had been unspeakably avenged.

  He fully expected a lightning bolt to crash through the roof and strike him between the eyes for these thoughts, and when he found himself alive a moment later he pledged a deep remorse. Still, he couldn’t escape the feeling that there was a certain ruthless logic to her death, that the configuration of the family had been hewn to its essence: Emi reduced to crumbs of powdery rock as father and son emerged from the rubble, chiseled fine and bold as the divine figures peering from the acanthus and vines of the frieze that lined the main corridor of the Wurther. Ben recalled going there with his father on Saturdays to have lunch with Emi in the courtyard during her break between classes; it was like visiting a sick person, one confined to an institution. Emi would complain about her students, the weather, her own progress, apologizing along the way for not being able to spend more time with them
. Always, Ben noted, she would avoid him in subtle ways, as though to hide from him her disappointment that he was not like the other kids he’d seen in the halls attached to their mothers’ hands: a prodigy, or even gifted, or even remotely musical.

  He wiped a tear from his cheek. He wondered if he was making excuses, trying to avoid what he knew must be his duty as a son: to rant, to whip himself into a froth of murderous rage. What would Nelson do, he wondered, if it had happened to him? What would anyone do? Ben felt ashamed in his failure, and could only imagine that it must be cowardice. Nelson would go out and look for the culprits himself, never mind that he had no idea who they were. Ben determined to work himself into a proper frenzy. He pictured it: his parents walking, the assailants lurking, the crisscross of dark streets; and, sure enough, as the unwitting couple walked into a trap no shouts could undo, his hands began to tremble, and his heart raced as though hoping to catch up with them, stop them, turn them back from the fate that awaited them in the very next moment—

  Horrified, Ben sprang up and grabbed his basketball from the floor of his closet, his thoughts hurling themselves away from the vision like a madman who has looked upon God.

  The ball. Ben held it, spun it slowly in his hands, appreciating its perfect roundness, which for some reason struck him as poignant and even miraculous. He gazed into it as though it were a crystal ball in which he could see every memory: the diamond-shaped patterns of veins on her hands; the half-moon of a face as she read a book that glowed like coal under her bedroom lamp; those times when she’d hugged him and kissed him and said things that made him think, in that moment, that she really did love him and care about him, that she was sorry for not being more of a mother to him but that she knew he understood and though he might not forgive her she loved him just the same and if something happened to him she would be devastated and how could she not love him when he was her own son, but of course she loved him, and she was sorry, and she was sorry, and maybe one day things would be different and they would spend time together, maybe when he was older, yes, maybe he could come to Europe with her, or New York, and they could have dinner in a restaurant and talk and get to know one another and discover themselves in one another and celebrate their new understanding and walk down the street and laugh and be like other mothers and sons who walked down the street and laughed, or didn’t laugh, but who walked together and were comfortable and natural and could even be proud.

  His tears dripped from his chin onto the rough orange skin of the ball, where they gleamed in the morning light. He brought the ball to his chest and embraced it for a long while.

  His breathing relaxed, but the rage would not let go. He’d brought it forth by effort, had given it life. It was a beating, a chant, a command to act. And he would act, he vowed. He would.

  He put on his sweats, laced up his sneakers. He needed air. Needed to run, jump. Fly.

  He went downstairs and quietly let himself out through the front door. No one saw him; even the reporters had dispersed.

  He ran to the bus stop and caught the number 7. There were plenty of seats. He put the hood of his sweatshirt over his head, kept the ball locked between his knees. All the homeboys on the bus were watching him.

  Ben felt exalted by his ordeal; his loss, so violent, had put him on equal footing with any of these punks. In a way, he had become one of them. They could sense it, too; they knew not to fuck with him. He sniffed, twitched his shoulders. His hands were pink starfish on the ball.

  Row houses, billboards, liquor stores. Bars, sub shops. Discount clothing outlets. Trash in the streets, the alleys. Brown leaves.

  People got on, got off.

  Ben hunched over the ball like an addict. His baby. His big round baby. No one was going to get near him. He’d already paid.

  The stop to Nelson’s house came up. Ben rang the bell, stepped off the bus. He stood alone on the corner, wondering why he had come down here. He felt drawn somehow, like an animal to water. The killer, he reflected, had most likely been born in this very element. Was that it? A need to zero in on something, to approach the source? To immerse himself in whatever had destroyed his mother?

  He walked toward Nelson’s house, the ball under his arm.

  Niggas on the corner with murder in their eyes.

  Don’t look, he told himself. Just keep walking.

  Yo—lemme see that ball. Yo!

  He walked faster. His destination was in sight.

  Yo, Money! Voice getting smaller. Yo, whassup?

  Maybe Donna would be there. He hoped she was. He didn’t know what they would say to each other, but he believed he could gain or discover something just by being near her. He wanted to be held.

  He reached the door, knocked. Tried to look natural.

  The door opened. A little girl looked up at him. Then two younger boys appeared behind her. Their eyes were wide.

  “Hi,” Ben said. “Is Nelson home?” He wondered if these were the kids whose drawings hung on the refrigerator.

  The boys crowded near the girl. One held a doll of a green cartoon dinosaur, popular five years ago. The other put a thumb in his mouth. The girl saw this and slapped his hand so that the thumb fell out. Then she looked at Ben and said, “He’s coming back.” She must have been seven or eight years old, the boys four or five. There was a sense of even more children beyond them, deep in the house.

  Ben held the basketball out to the thumb-sucker. The boy stepped back, reinserted the thumb.

  The girl rolled her eyes, stomped her foot, then grabbed the boy’s arm and dragged him forward.

  Ben spun the ball on his finger. “Is Miss Donna home?” he said.

  The girl shook her head.

  “Where is she?”

  The girl shrugged. Ben figured maybe they didn’t know her as Miss Donna.

  The boys appeared hypnotized by the spinning ball.

  The girl said, “He’s home.”

  Ben turned around. Nelson was standing by the curb.

  The children disappeared into the house.

  Ben faced his friend. “Wanna shoot around?” he said. A crazy smile escaped. He held out the ball.

  Nelson approached him cautiously. “What you doin’ here?”

  Ben shrugged. “Felt like playing some ball.”

  Nelson looked him over. “Shouldn’t you be at your house?”

  Ben spun the ball on his finger.

  Nelson sniffed. “How you get down?”

  “Bus.”

  Nelson stroked his chin.

  Ben bounced the ball.

  Nelson looked around like he was nervous about being seen. “So where’s your father at?” he said.

  “Home.” The ball hit Ben’s foot, bounced away from him.

  Nelson picked it up.

  Ben wiped his nose with his sleeve.

  Nelson said, “Come on.”

  Ben followed him into the house.

  The kids—four of them now—peered around a corner.

  “Get back in the kitchen and stay there,” Nelson said. “Or the big crazy white man gonna get you.”

  The kids ran squealing.

  Ben smiled, then bit his lip and shivered.

  Nelson was still looking at where the kids had been. “I heard all about it,” he said. “My mother woke my ass up and told me what happened. I was like damn.” He shook his head. “We opened up the paper, and there it was. That shit is fucked up, son. Fucked up.” He shook his head more rapidly; he was having trouble with this meeting. Ben felt bad for him. Nelson recovered himself and looked at Ben’s chest. “Hope they find them niggas.”

  “They will,” said Ben.

  Nelson put the ball in Ben’s hands. “You better get home.”

  Ben wanted to ask where Donna was, but for some reason he couldn’t. He knew that if she were to walk through that door he would fall into her arms.

  “And better watch your back on the way to the bus,” Nelson said. “Niggas’ll kill you for that ball. Them shoes, too.”
r />   Ben looked out the window.

  “Leave the ball,” said Nelson.

  “No.” Ben held it tighter. He wanted kindness, a hand on his shoulder. Anything. He looked imploringly at Nelson. Couldn’t somebody help him?

  “Breadcrumb.” Nelson reached into his pocket. “Take this with you.” He was holding the gun.

  Ben’s scalp tingled. There was a moment of recognition: Ben felt his mother’s murder pass through him. The gun seemed to be connected to it, connected to all shootings; it was every gun ever made, yet somehow meant especially for him: his hand went out. “Thanks,” he said. The gun pulsed in his grip, too powerful for him.

  “Put that shit away,” said Nelson, watching for the kids.

  Without thinking, Ben dropped it into his pocket. His heart beat like a ball dribbled close to the ground. “It’s—loaded?”

  Nelson looked askance. “Yeah. So don’t be stupid.”

  Ben scratched his head. Things were moving too fast for him. “How come you want to get rid of it?” he said. He laughed. “You shoot someone?”

  “Don’t even play like that, Crumb.”

  Ben had hardly realized what he’d said; it must have sounded like he was linking Nelson to the murder. But he hadn’t even been thinking of Emi.

  “Sorry,” Ben said. He felt for the bulge in his pocket. “What I meant was—you got another one?”

  “Don’t worry about me. Just get your ass on home.”

  Ben sniffed and looked down at his feet. Then he felt Nelson’s hand on the back of his neck.

  “You a’ight?” Nelson said.

  Ben shrugged. “I guess.”

  “I’ll see you later then.” The hand fell away. “A’ight?”

  “Yeah.” Ben raised his fist, tapped it against Nelson’s. Yes: they were brothers. Sometimes, Ben could feel himself rising to what he imagined was Nelson’s highest ideal; under Nelson’s eye he could attain a rare grace, a style, so that while he wanted to beg Nelson to let him dwell a little longer amid the shrine of photographs and splotched walls and sweet smell of dried laundry and children squealing in the sun-struck kitchen, he was bound instead to straighten his spine and walk out of there without another word, his fist half-raised, the slightest hint of street injury in his step.