The Baker

by Paul Hond

  “I don’t know. Somewhere near water. A gas station. It’s a long-distance call.”

  Nelson sensed trouble. “You a’ight?”

  “Yeah. We just dumped my mother’s ashes.”

  Nelson’s heart sped up. Ben sounded lost, scared. Nelson pressed a finger to his ear to blot out the noisy shouts of the children. “So what now?”

  No answer.

  “Crumb.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where’s Bread?”

  “We should drive out this way some time.”

  “Where’s Bread?”

  “Taking a piss,” Ben said. “Here he comes now. I have to go.”

  “Yo, Crumb.”

  The line went dead.

  Nelson hung up. He wasn’t sure what to think. Was Crumb in trouble?

  No, he thought; the boy was just shaken up. Just finished scattering his mother’s ashes.

  Nelson shook his head in wonder. He was moved by the call, and astonished to find himself an actor in such a notorious drama. He was a part of history, branded forever on the memory of the day. And yet the intimacy implied in a roadside phone call—perhaps even more than Ben’s having come to him the morning after the shooting—unnerved him; he hadn’t supposed they were this close, and now it occurred to him that he’d offered the gun the other day not so much out of friendship as in fear of it: it had been a way to put something between them, something blunt and cold and impersonal. But now he could see as how it may have been taken as hot, intimate. Suddenly, Nelson was unsure of his own motives. Was it because Ben’s mother had been shot by a black kid, and he felt he needed to compensate the Lerners on behalf of the whole damn race? But no: that was crazy. At bottom, he supposed, he had been genuinely concerned for Ben’s safety: he had seemed so unprotected.

  Nelson wished he could do something more to help, to ease the Lerners’ pain. He’d been following the case in the paper and had even fantasized about apprehending the killer himself and winning Bread’s praise. Bread, who was probably a little ill-disposed toward blacks at the moment. Understandable, Nelson thought. Understandable.

  Well, at least Mama had sent those flowers yesterday. Nelson thought a card would have sufficed—flowers would wither, die—but he was so grateful to find Mama on the better end of the transaction that he didn’t argue. Still, it seemed impossible that something like this could happen to the Lerners, or that he himself should end up at such close range to their suffering. It was like he was a part of them.

  He ran up to his room, angry and confused over these new emotions. He felt like he might cry. But he didn’t.

  He thought of his friends. Hawk, Rob, Chuckie Banks; they didn’t know anyone like the Lerners. Nelson felt himself in possession of a secret treasure.

  He looked at his plants, feeling more tender toward them than usual. In a way, they were his closest friends. His only friends. Well, Crumb was a friend. But he wondered about the others. If nothing else, he thought, they looked out for him. Hawk especially. He’d given Nelson that .25 semi, the one that Crumb was now carrying, and could probably get him another one if Nelson just said the word. Nelson had accepted that gun reluctantly, considering it not so much a thank-you for past favors as prepayment for some bad future one. Hawk had a way of casually inducing debt. A smile, a flash of gold. Nelson had never been too comfortable with the arrangement.

  He sat next to his African violets and stroked the leaves. Maybe it was time to cut some leaves and start more plants—you could do that by placing the leaf stem in a dish of stones and water. Nelson had found that you could use the parent leaf two and three times and produce dozens of crops. Make a whole damn family. He’d given most of his plants away to relatives, for birthdays and holidays. Lately, though, he’d been considering selling them on the street somewhere, out in the suburbs. Maybe he’d take the bus to the Green Garden Nursery, check on some other plants. Amaryllis maybe. He wished he had space for a garden. A few times, driving the van, he’d stopped by Bread’s house and checked out his yard. Lilies, tulips, marigold. Oriental poppy. Azalea. Fat white hydrangea.

  Vegetables, too.

  Nelson wondered what kind of garden he could make, if he had all that space.

  Sometimes, Nelson wondered about the inside of the house. What was it like? He’d never seen it, of course. Never been invited.

  He dipped his finger in the bowl of water that he kept on the sill. The idea was to make sure it was at room temperature before pouring it into the soil—cold water caused leaf spots, he’d found.

  He watered the plants with care. In a couple of days, he would go back to work.

  It made him nervous, the idea of facing Bread, who he feared would be changed beyond recognition. Nelson felt helpless. What if Bread turned against him because of all this? The thought terrified him. All he could do, he decided, was drive the van, make his deliveries. Do his job. No more bullshit, he told himself. He’d do his job better than he’d ever done it in his life.

  10

  As the investigation entered its third week, Mickey decided to shave and reopen the bakery, thinking that in doing something positive—something that didn’t involve pacing the floors of his house in foul-smelling pajamas, or pausing before the colorful waterfall of clothes in Emi’s closet to bathe despairingly in their fading perfume; that didn’t involve burning his dinner each night so that every pot in the kitchen was now coated with a black skin in whose charred layers lay a record of the cook’s mind adrift; that didn’t involve, above all, the constant replaying of the image of Emi’s bloodied face in his hands—in doing something, even if that meant just pressing on and doing what he’d always done, perhaps, then, he could make the wheels of justice turn that much faster and he’d be able to begin putting this ordeal behind him.

  Not that he thought an arrest would rescue him from his misery—only time might do that—but, in a way, it was the one thing to which he had to look forward, a kind of vague promise of deliverance whose daily unfulfillment had become a growing source of agitation. Lesser expectations centered around the ashes; Mickey had contacted the police down at the shore and asked them to be on the lookout for a small container of ashes washed up on the beach, intimating that he’d gone out the legally required five miles in a friend’s boat. The deputy told him that such an object might travel miles away, far out of their jurisdiction; it might even end up on the other side of the world. Mickey thought to drive back there and comb the beach himself, or contact the Coast Guard. It was another key to his own freedom, he thought, his own release, to retrieve that box and open it, but somehow it all seemed pointless in the end.

  And so he concentrated on his work. Business was slow for the first few days, either because everyone assumed the store would be closed for a while longer, or because many customers, some of whom had known Mickey for years, were too nervous to face him. It was odd, this relationship between merchant and customer; at times friendly and familiar, it was liable to go frightfully awkward at a time like this, and Mickey—who down through the years had always been one to offer a word of sympathy to new widows and widowers who had finally begun to resume their routines, of which a trip to the Lerner Bakery was an integral part—did not expect the same brand of condolence in return. It wasn’t so much the spectacular nature of Emi’s death that tortured dialogue and turned people shyly away from one another, but rather, the roles to which they were bound. There had been, Mickey understood, a breach of contract; he was, after all, a community stalwart, and in some ways a paternal figure, inasmuch as he was a kind of provider; he wasn’t supposed to be hit by tragedy, no more than by lightning. The flowers and cards that had accumulated on the dining-room table were very touching, but their bestowal seemed to earn the senders the right to avoid the bakery until the cloud of discomfort finally lifted; and Mickey could only hope they hadn’t, in the interim, taken their business elsewhere.

  But it wasn’t just the customers; it was Benjie as well. Father and son were also loath to face eac
h other; they, too, were unsure of the rules and boundaries of the relationship; they, too, were afflicted with shame. The two of them had been laid bare, like two players on a stage whose richly detailed backdrop has been suddenly pulled away. Without Emi there to provide perspective, identity, they were left with nothing but their naked selves, so that Mickey’s own lackluster person, kept half-hidden for so many years in the shadow of his wife’s career, was now left cruelly exposed.

  This was Mickey’s state of mind when he’d agreed to play cards with Joe and Buddy Grossman. “It’ll be like old times,” Joe had told him, forgetting, or seeming to forget, that Mickey had quit the game in the first place precisely because it had gotten old and stale. Old times. Hadn’t it been Joe who had warned him about courting the past, going down to Percy Street and so forth? No matter: Mickey was too weak to fight; he’d surrender to them, he decided, sink back into the old fraternity, back to the card games on Wednesday nights, the table at Chen’s Garden. They were waiting for him, had been waiting for years. Now he was coming home.

  The men were due at eight o’clock. At seven, Mickey planted his elbows on the bakery counter and gazed out the window. Not a customer in sight. Morris, observing that business was slow, had gone home an hour ago, leaving Mickey alone to wait for the return of the van. Since reopening, Mickey had yet to stick around for Nelson’s arrival, preferring to close up shop an hour or two early just to dodge any contact. It was strange: he found himself avoiding Nelson just as he was avoiding his own son, and in contrast to his prior position he now encouraged Ben to join Nelson in the van—“You can’t sit around the house all day,” he’d told him—which enabled Ben to receive the van keys afterward in Mickey’s stead and lock them up in the register. Thus Mickey could avoid both boys all day; and when he considered that Ben was, as per his father’s orders, reporting home promptly each evening, he could relax in the knowledge—the hope, really—that the boys weren’t quite as close as they’d been before the shooting.

  Not that Mickey would have needed to order Benjie to come right home; in a way, Emi’s murder had proven Mickey’s point about the danger of certain neighborhoods, and Ben seemed to be heeding the message. Still, Mickey felt bad about his own treatment of Nelson, and though he refused to believe it was in any way tied to the murder, to some need to connect Nelson to the animals who had killed his wife—a desire, maybe, to give the entire hoodlum element a face—he couldn’t deny the bitter taste he got at the very sight of his delivery man, who seemed in his own way as reluctant to face his boss (could it be, again, that shyness toward the bereaved?) as his boss was to face him. Mickey reflected that the mutual aversion must have something to do with the clumsy paternal overtures he’d been making of late—the boxing hints, the attempts at locker-room banter. It was as if the charitable element of this had been somehow exposed; as if, in a well-intentioned way, he had led Nelson on, flexing his fatherly muscles, and had now abruptly withdrawn himself. Hit by tragedy, Mickey had been recalled to the basic components of his life, the near and simple things for which one becomes thankful in moments of crisis and then, a little later, examines and assesses and weighs at the expense of all else. Mickey hoped that Nelson understood, and that he could maybe view Ben as a sort of emissary, dispatched with goodwill from his father’s high and generous office.

  Mickey turned his thoughts to the evening at hand. He’d better get home, he thought, set things up. He couldn’t help but feel a little giddy at the prospect of entertaining again. Chips, drinks, the smoke from Joe’s cigarettes, the loud, brash talk, the jokes, the laughter; it would be like the old days, and was that really so bad, after all?

  It took but a minute to close the store, and another ten or so to walk home. That gave him plenty of time to get washed up, clear the kitchen table and fill a few bowls with the pretzels and chips and gumdrops that he’d bought the day before.

  The company arrived together: Joe, Buddy and Sam Rudin, a shady character whom Mickey had met years ago at Joe’s daughter’s bas mitzvah. Now, as then, he wore a gold chain around his thick, tanned neck, and the same black hairs clogged his ears and nostrils. He’d taken a two-year vacation in Pennsylvania not too long ago for loan-sharking, and it was generally agreed that he lent a sort of harmless flair of the underworld to any occasion. And indeed, the kitchen had been transformed by his presence: the table, arrayed with playing cards and ashtrays, had taken on an aspect of legend, like a photograph of a meal over which a famous crime had been hatched.

  Straight poker was the game. Mickey dealt. It was good to hold a crisp deck of cards in his hands, and he dealt them slowly, savoring the feel of their edges, the tight pack of the cut, the snap and whisper of the two-handed shuffle and the way they glided when flicked across a smooth surface. At last he had gained a measure of control; but as soon as the cards were gathered up and studied by twitchy eyes, Mickey knew that his part was over, that the evening he had merely launched would now assume its own shape and rhythm, and that the conversation—Mickey was helpless to stop it—would soon land, like some pregnant insect, on the frail-stemmed topic of Emi’s murder.

  But he was wrong; there was, instead, a strenuous effort to avoid the subject, an effort facilitated by a sip of beer, a meaningless rearrangement of cards; and it was obvious, too, that Rudin had been briefed beforehand: it seemed he was afraid to speak at all, lest he invoke in any way the memory of the deceased. Mickey recalled a more talkative man.

  With his guests allied in a kind of cult of sensitivity, Mickey felt even more remote from them, and was plagued with new concerns that he was failing them as a host. What if they were so ill at ease that they decided to never come back? But no, Mickey assured himself, it must be just the opposite, for he was something of a celebrity at the moment, and probably the men felt privileged to be in his presence. Still, it was awfully good of them to rally round him like this, considering how Mickey had more or less turned up his nose at them time and again during the long era of his marriage. He wanted to reward them for their kindness, but before he could think of a way to break the ice, to invite them into his private affairs, Joe Blank barely skimmed the topic by posing an invitation of his own.

  “So,” he said, eyeing Mickey over his cards, “what are you and Benjie doing for Thanksgiving?”

  “Thanksgiving?” Mickey said. “It’s Thanksgiving already?”

  “Thursday.”

  “Jesus.” For Mickey, the holiday had sort of lost its appeal over the years; Emi was hardly ever around during the holiday season, and so the dinners became halfhearted affairs: a small young turkey to feed three or four (Morris occasionally brought some lonely acquaintance), stuffing made from old Lerner bread, and enough Lerner fruitcake to feed a small army. This year it would have been the same—Emi in Paris, concertizing with Shaw, then him and Benjie and Morris.

  “Well, if you’re not doing anything special,” said Joe, “you ought to join us at my place. I got fifteen people.”

  “Thanks,” said Mickey. It made him feel a little like a sympathy case, but he looked forward to being rescued from an intimate holiday dinner with his son. He then remembered that Shirley Finkle had invited them too, last week, and that he’d accepted. Christ, he ought to start writing things down. “I’ll let you know,” he said.

  “I just don’t want you to be alone,” Joe said, and Mickey took this as a soft tap on the shell.

  “Yeah,” Mickey said, opening up some. “Hopefully, by then, they’ll have a suspect, and I’ll be able to digest my food better.”

  Sam Rudin looked up from his cards for the first time all evening, and Buddy Grossman sipped his beer as if to appear only coolly interested.

  “Well,” said Mickey, warming to his audience, “so far, nothing.” He presented the palms of his hands.

  Joe turned to Sam Rudin. “Mickey lost his wife a few weeks ago.”

  “Oh?” said Rudin, eyebrows jumping. Again, it was apparent that he’d already been informed.

  “Sam
’s been down in Florida for the past month,” Joe explained.

  “This is the violinist, the shooting downtown?” Rudin said.

  Joe nodded grimly.

  “Sure I heard of it. Terrible.” Rudin looked at Mickey. “There’s nothing I can say. Terrible.”

  “Yes,” said Mickey, unsure why the men were arranging their stories in this way. What difference did it make if Sam Rudin had been told? Everyone knew. Mickey supposed they didn’t want to give the impression that they’d been talking about him.

  “Don’t worry,” Buddy said. “They’ll catch the bastard. I’d be willing to bet they catch him before the end of the year.”

  “It’s a game of breaks,” Mickey said. “We’ll have to see.”

  “They got a description?” Rudin said.

  “Not really,” Joe said. “Mick was there, ya know.”

  “You were there?” said Rudin.

  Mickey nodded.

  “Imagine that,” Rudin said. He shook his head slowly to his own personal wisdom of the horrid, and seemed to confer upon Mickey a special status, as though he considered his host a fellow traveler in the darker regions of life.

  “But unfortunately,” said Buddy, “he couldn’t get a description. The bastard was wearing a Halloween mask.”

  “Not that it matters,” said Joe. “Who could distinguish a shvartze in the dark? It’s better he had the mask—make him easier to track down.”

  “We’ll see,” Mickey said. He tried to study his hand: two sevens, queen of diamonds, two jacks.

  Rudin shook his head. “Makes you wanna move to Canada. Sweden.”

  “Not me,” said Grossman. “They’ve got socialized medicine. You have to wait a year to see a doctor.”

  “Things are gonna come to a head in this country,” Joe said. “It can’t go on like this. The whites aren’t gonna take it much longer.” It wasn’t clear if he was including himself in this. “It’s gotten to the point where every law-abiding citizen has got to be armed. You ought to consider it, Mick. Tell him, Sammy.”