The Baker

by Paul Hond

  “Where the fuck we at?” said Rob, confused by the darkened houses, the trees.

  Nelson felt his heart beating deep in his coat. “Make a right at the stop sign,” he said. “Then a left.”

  Hawk said, “I never smoked no white-boy weed. Shit prob’ly got strychnine on it.”

  “Yeah,” said Rob. “White boys be smokin’ any damn thing. Jus’ bring us back some Twinkies, Slim.”

  Nelson’s remark about the weed was, of course, a lie, but it was the only way to get Chuckie to take him over there. Dropping by Crumb’s was essential, he’d decided, a way to impress the guys with his worldliness and at the same time gain respite from their violence. And Crumb: he’d have something to think about, finding Nelson at his doorstep with some serious niggas waiting in a car. Now that Crumb was his temporary boss—an incredible and even humiliating development—Nelson felt driven to such a display, thinking too that a little intimidation might go a long way in the event of a dispute in the workplace.

  Hawk said, “Yo—can we come in too? I never seen no white people house.”

  Chuckie glanced in the rearview. Rob shifted his weight.

  “Naw,” said Nelson, sensing a conspiracy growing around him. In a way, he felt as protective of the Lerner house as he did of his own. He appealed to Hawk. “Y’all got to hang back.” He said this in a hushed tone, jerking his head to indicate the thugs in the front seat, hoping to flatter Hawk’s sense of leadership. “Be better if I go in alone.”

  “Why?” said Hawk, not getting it. “They prejudice?”

  Nelson cursed under his breath.

  “Who prejudice?” said Rob.

  “Nobody,” said Nelson. “Yo, stop here.”

  Hawk said, “Little Man says he got to go in alone.” It was a command.

  “Shit,” said Rob, but he didn’t go any further.

  Chuckie Banks eyed Nelson in the rearview. “Make it fast, then, Truck-Drivin’ Man.”

  Nelson dared, in his drunkenness, and with his sense of Hawk in his corner, to challenge Chuckie’s gaze. “A’ight, then, Chuck,” he said, watching in fascination as Chuckie finally blinked and looked away. His scalp tingled with a fantastic terror.

  He got out of the car and walked up the small hill to the steps leading to Ben’s front door, looking back a few times to make sure no one made a move.

  Steam rose from the canned chicken soup that Ben had overcooked on the stove top. For the first time in his life he was left completely alone, and the sensation of freedom was so great that he was exhausted by it, unable to think of anything extraordinary to do beyond blasting the gas jets in a rage of solitude. He couldn’t even think of a place to go to in the car; under any other circumstances he might have picked up Nelson and just driven around, maybe gotten some beer, but now that he was technically Nelson’s boss, he wasn’t too sure if that would be proper.

  He could hear the hum of the refrigerator, the swish of distant traffic, the creaking of the house’s bones.

  He looked at the clock. Mickey would be somewhere over the Atlantic by now. What if the plane were to go down? They hadn’t even shaken hands. Ben felt he ought to have learned something from Emi’s death. He’d never told his mother he loved her—she was always in motion, too fleet for such clinging words—and besides, he’d always thought that familial love was understood, and that to express it in words was as silly as praying aloud, as though you wouldn’t be heard otherwise.

  Now he wished he had said something specific to both parents, or that they had said something to him.

  He took his dishes to the sink and let them crash. Tomorrow, Thanksgiving, would be his first real day on the job. Tonight, the bakers would be hard at work on all the pies and cakes that had been ordered, and customers would have until four o’clock tomorrow afternoon to pick them up and purchase other last-minute items. Ben decided against dropping by the bakery in the wee hours to throw his weight around, though certainly it was his prerogative. He’d take the “hands-off” approach for now.

  He went up to his room. It was after eleven, he was tired, and a little anxious about tomorrow. He’d brought home some papers to review for the purpose of familiarizing himself with the ledgers, thinking he could enter the data into his computer and crunch some numbers. Tomorrow, then.

  He sat on his bed and was about to kick off his shoes when he heard a noise coming from downstairs. He stood up and listened. What was it? He grabbed the gun from under his pillow. There had been some break-ins lately in the area, you couldn’t be too careful. Then he heard it again: a distinct rapping on the front door: three military knocks. Was it the police? He looked at the gun, confused. Was it Shirley Finkle?

  Ben placed the gun in his pocket and went downstairs to the door. He looked through the peephole. It was Nelson.

  Ben hesitated in his surprise, then opened the door before he was sure he wanted to.

  “Breadcrumb,” said Nelson. He was wearing a dark hooded sweatshirt and an oversized black ski jacket; his face was mostly obscured.

  “Hey,” Ben said. “How’d you get here?” He then noticed a car idling in the street.

  “Got my boys with me,” said Nelson. “Whatchoo doin’?”

  Ben shrugged. “Just getting ready for bed.” He thought he smelled liquor. “Got to get up early and open the bakery.” There were at least two people in the car, he saw. The orange tip of a cigarette bounced in the dark.

  “Can I come in?” said Nelson. His eyes appeared bloodshot and jaundiced in the porch light. “Never did see the inside of your house.” He turned and made a signal to the car.

  Ben stood aside as Nelson entered.

  “We was just drivin’ around,” Nelson said. He stopped and looked at the furniture, the walls, hands deep in his coat pockets.

  Ben closed the door, locked it.

  “Your own castle,” said Nelson.

  “For a little while anyway.”

  Nelson nodded at what he saw. “You the king now,” he said. It sounded somewhere between accusation and suggestive reminder. “You got the power.”

  Ben’s palms were moist. “It’s only temporary,” he said. “Things’ll be pretty much the same.” He meant it as reassurance, that there’d be no radical changes, but Nelson seemed to take it as notice that there’d be no benefits.

  “Don’t tell me you gettin’ all serious now,” he said.

  “Hell no,” Ben said, and laughed. But he wasn’t sure what Nelson expected. Deliveries still had to be made, after all.

  “Maybe you can give me a raise, then.”

  Ben laughed, hoping it was a joke, or to turn it into one if it wasn’t. “I’m not that powerful,” he said. His shoulders twitched. “Want something to eat?”

  “Got any pastry food?”

  “Naw,” said Ben. “Want some soup?”

  Nelson shook his head. He stepped back and looked thoughtfully at the wooden balusters of the staircase, which seemed to lead to golden places in his imagination. But the house could not be said to be opulent, even by Nelson’s standards: what might pass for pricey antiques were simply old pieces left by Mickey’s parents, their value incidental.

  Ben glanced at the window, fearing that Nelson’s friends might come to the door.

  Nelson turned to him, his eyes now drawn to the bulge in Ben’s pocket. Ben covered it with his hand.

  Nelson laughed; his eyes became purple-rimmed slits.

  Ben tried to laugh with him.

  “Armed and dangerous,” said Nelson.

  Ben blushed. “People don’t usually knock on my door at eleven at night,” he said. “Better safe than sorry.”

  “Hey,” said Nelson, shrugging immensely, arms out at his sides. “That’s what I’m sayin’.”

  Ben wondered if Nelson was carrying his.

  Nelson dropped his arms and turned, surveying the room more aggressively: the antique lamps, the glass swan and bronze mortar and pestle on the coffee table, the antique barometer on the wall above the televisi
on and the series of Japanese watercolors (a robed woman on a bridge, mountains and sea behind her) that Emi had brought home one year, her only contribution to the room. Nelson stalked, ogled, tasted with his eyes, his nose, his tiny ears.

  “What’s in there?” he demanded, nodding toward the basement door, which was boarded up with plywood where Mickey had punched it in.

  “It’s my mother’s practice studio.”

  Nelson rubbed his chin. The reference to the dead seemed to subdue him, and Ben saw an opportunity to draw out his sympathy.

  “Want to see it?” Ben said. He went to the door and turned the knob. He hadn’t seen the studio since Emi’s death, but he’d have to pass through it sooner or later because the laundry room was down there, and now he wondered if he wanted Nelson to come with him because he was afraid to go down alone.

  He opened the door slowly. He could see that Nelson was hesitant, which boosted his own courage. He motioned with his head and went down; in a moment he heard Nelson’s steps behind him.

  If Emi had been practicing, Ben would not have dared enter the space like this—she saw her practice sessions as metamorphic events, matters of extreme privacy. She wanted to create the impression of spontaneous perfection; the hours and hours of practice were a matter almost of shame, and she wished to close everyone and everything off from them.

  “This is it,” Ben said, arriving at the bottom of the stairs. The room was even more spare than he remembered: a music stand (it still held the score on which she’d been working), a chair, a bookcase filled with CDs and manuscripts and music books, and, in a corner, a small metal desk. The violin, which would have netted twice what Mickey had gotten for her car, had been put away for safekeeping. But basically the room looked untouched; there was a morbid sense of preservation in all of it, as of expectations that she might return.

  Nelson entered the space as though it were hallowed ground, and Ben could see, in the glaze of Nelson’s eyes, a few dim flickers of compassion. Ben was encouraged by this, but there was still the sour stench of alcohol and the car waiting outside and the unworldly quality of Nelson’s presence.

  “It’s like a tomb,” Nelson said. He looked at the score on the music stand but did not touch it. “When the Egyptians made mummies,” he said, “they put a person’s favorite things in the tomb. They believed the things would go with the person to the next world.”

  “Uh-huh.” Ben didn’t really trust anything Nelson said, especially when he tried to act all educated. And yet he could feel threatened by the possibility that Nelson might know more things than him.

  “I know about Egypt,” said Nelson. Under his vast hood he seemed like an oracle. “They put bread in the tombs of the pharaohs.”

  “Bread? What the fuck for?”

  “Bread shaped to look like animals,” Nelson said. “And pyramids. Egyptians invented bread.”

  “You think they invented everything.”

  “Most things. It’s a fact.”

  “But they weren’t black,” said Ben. “Not like you.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “You probably think they invented basketball too.”

  “No. I invented ball, nigga.”

  “Yeah? So what happened?”

  Nelson sniffed. “I told you. The scouts was watchin’ me. High school.” He sniffed again.

  “Then you got hurt.”

  “Yeah.” He looked Ben in the eye. “I got hurt.”

  Ben felt a tingle of fear. They’d been through this before, Nelson elusive and mysterious, but now he seemed ready to tell, and Ben prepared himself for the biggest lie yet; he firmed his jaw so as not to betray his doubt, knowing that this was a direct challenge, an arrow aimed at the heart of their friendship. A test. “What happened?” he said.

  Nelson’s mouth twisted into a half-smile, the toughness of which was slackened by the wet, drunken fatness of the lower lip. He then reached down near his belt, and Ben’s heart jumped, but Nelson only pulled up his sweatshirt over his skin, revealing, to Ben’s astonishment, a long, sickle-shaped scar that curved from his popcorn-shaped navel to his pectoral. No wonder he never took his shirt off on the courts, Ben thought. The scar tissue was a few shades lighter than his skin, a mix of rose and purple and the milky translucence of ice, and was raised weltlike.

  “What happened?” Ben said.

  “I got cut,” said Nelson, running a finger along the ridge, a note of elation in his voice, as if he knew he’d been doubted all along, and that every claim he’d ever made would now have to be reexamined in a new light. “I was walkin’ home from a game, no shirt on, lookin’ like I’m motherfuckin’ homeless and shit, and these three Walbrook niggas come up and ask me for money. Like I got it. Then one of them pulls this blade.” He shook his head. “Next thing I know, I’m cut wide open.”

  Ben stared.

  “Lost half my blood,” Nelson said. “Had to sleep on my back for a year. Couldn’t play ball, nothin’.”

  “Damn,” said Ben. He couldn’t stop staring.

  “My mother said God and the angels gave me this mark so they could find me better. When the bandages came off she cried, and when she stopped crying she said, ‘Now you got proud flesh.’ ”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s the skin around a cut—flesh that swells up. That’s why it’s called proud.”

  Ben nodded. He wanted to touch it, but Nelson dropped his sweatshirt.

  A car horn sounded.

  “That’s mine,” said Nelson. He seemed strangely vulnerable now. “Got to go.”

  Ben led the way upstairs. When he reached the top step he was startled by another horn blast. Nelson was still on the staircase, pulling himself up slowly.

  Ben went to the front door and opened it, but did not look out at the car. Nelson was coming toward him, hands in his pockets, craning his neck for one last look at the room.

  Ben gazed at the floor as Nelson walked by. A dangerous heat passed between them, or so it seemed; Ben felt relief when Nelson was beyond him. He looked at Nelson’s back. “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow morning,” he said.

  Nelson stepped outside. “A’ight then, Breadcrumb.” He turned, and the porch light barely illuminated his shrouded face. “Or should I call you Bread now?” The half-smile.

  Ben placed his hand on the inside doorknob and looked at a spot just above Nelson’s eyes. He smiled. “Whatever you prefer,” he said, in a voice touched with the kindness and distance of an employer. He did not recognize it as his own.

  13

  Darkness, above and below; all was sky and ocean, two great depths flooding a night that stretched halfway across the world. The lights in the cabin were soft, like honey aglow, insisting on sleep, but Mickey—blanket on his knees, vodka tonic in hand—remained awake, one of a small number of passengers keeping a kind of priestly watch, as though the safe arrival of the flight depended expressly upon their vigilance. He yawned, sipped his drink. If he fell asleep he might have a nightmare, might shout out and disturb a peace that had taken on an almost religious cast: babies asleep in their mothers’ arms, couples head to shoulder, elegant old people sleeping erect in perfect silence; a congregation of pilgrims, of children of the heavens. Not that he wouldn’t be tended to, of course, comforted, if need be; ever since the swell of the engines had sent the plane speeding down the runway (Mickey gripping the armrests, eyeing the long, flimsy-looking wings), from which it lost contact and climbed slowly, too slowly, into a cold, clear night, leaning now, so that the bowl of the world tipped to the side, spilling out a treasure of tiny pulsating lights that flickered like candles for the dead before the plane straightened out and climbed even higher, now pushing toward the sea, away from land, from light—ever since he’d been seated, really, buckled in for take-off, Mickey had been under the care of a nice-looking stewardess, a girl young enough to be his daughter, who seemed to have recognized in him a certain helplessness the moment he appeared in the aisle: the lone traveler, w
ide eyes blinking in the cold light.

  He set his drink down on the tray. The calm with which he did this concealed his distress. He felt bad for what he’d done to Donna Childs—he hadn’t even paid her the courtesy of a phone call—and could only hope that the damage he’d caused to himself might satisfy what Mickey was sure must be the demands of his wife, who would not, he was certain, have been pleased with the way things had seemed—seemed—to be shaping up between himself and Donna. But this journey would erase all doubt. He was heading to the place of Emi’s birth, her youth, the one place in the world where he felt he could mourn her without distraction, with a purity of spirit.

  But the questions lingered. Handing the bakery over to Ben, for instance—what had it meant? It was a reckless decision at best, and now he could only wonder if he’d done it with the intent of ruining himself, so that he could start his life all over. The idea terrified him. He did not know whether his actions were aimed toward destruction or salvation; the two ends seemed hopelessly interchangeable.

  He lifted his near-empty glass and held it steady to prove to himself that he was in control. The items in his suitcase, the money in his pocket; this was evidence that he wasn’t bent on any ultimate ruin. He’d even brought Flemke’s office number, so that he could keep pace with the investigation. Still, he couldn’t help but feel attracted to the idea that he might have motives hidden even to himself.

  He closed his eyes and slipped almost immediately from consciousness.

  Hours later, he was awakened by a jolt of turbulence; he opened his eyes, and was surprised to find that the plane was absolutely still.

  He looked out the window: they were over land. England, he heard someone say. For a moment Mickey forgot all else. England. Below, a great heap of white clouds lay in the light of dawn: England was completely blotted out by what looked, from above, like the rocky, sculpted surface of an ice planet. Mickey thought of the villagers on the ground, who would never know this beauty, who would look up and see only a vault of gray.

  Europe. I made it, Mickey thought. I did it! He suppressed a giggle, surprised at this burst of excitement and realizing at once that it was unbecoming in a man his age. There were children on this flight who’d made the trip a dozen times, and so any delight he may have secretly enjoyed over this feat of travel was snuffed out by the years it had taken him to get there: his pleasure could only remind him of so much pleasure deferred. He was like a man awakened after a long sleep to a new life, only to realize he had precious little time left to enjoy it. The chatter of passengers taunted him; they had places to go, lives to live. Yet in a certain way, Mickey saw himself as their superior, a man beyond life.