The Baker

by Paul Hond

  The snow had melted: the garden was nothing but a long bed of mud. It was the sweetest smell in the world, Mickey thought, and with the sun on his shoulders and the sky a deep blue with puffs of clouds that mimicked the cloud-shaped loaves of snow still in evidence on some lawns, there was every reason—even in late December —to feel giddy with anticipation of spring.

  He struck the ground. It was good to come out over the course of the winter and pay attention to the soil, to chop it, turn it. Of course, the planting wouldn’t be the same this year—he and Emi had made a ritual of it, and it seemed almost a sacrilege to plant anything without her. Still, he looked forward to the work, to the harvest, to those muggy days of summer bright with hidden color among the vines.

  The mud wasn’t very thick; at the attack of the shovel it crumbled and broke into little dry clods.

  Maybe Benjie would help him plant this year. They could build the oven, brick by brick, and then plant the food that would eventually be offered there. But then he cautioned himself against hoping for too much.

  He turned around to face the house, almost expecting Ben to be standing at the door, watching him. But the door was a blank on account of the sun, as were the windows. And yet Benjie was in there, cleaning up. Mickey could hear it: the tinkle of dishes, of cabinet doors.

  He could smell the bread.

  A sound caused him to turn. A man was in the alley, walking toward him. His hands were in the pockets of his oversized coat; his face was obscured by a large hood. Mickey’s heart stopped for a moment—this one looked like a character—but then he saw the face and realized that it was Nelson. His initial wild hope was that Nelson had been sent by Donna armed with some hopeful message, but then he remembered having invited him to stop by. Mickey waved to him.

  But something was wrong; Mickey recalled what Ben had said to him yesterday, on the bakery lot, about Nelson having threatened Jay Rattner. Mickey had forgotten about it—there’d been so many other things on his mind—but now the idea worried him.

  Nelson entered through the gate. “Hey, Mr. Lerner,” he said. He stood just a few feet from Mickey. “I’ve got something for you.” His right hand dug deep in the coat pocket.

  What was it? Nelson came closer to him, the one hand still digging while the other reached out to clasp Mickey’s shoulder as if in greeting.

  A voice called out: “Don’t!”

  Mickey turned. Ben stood on the porch, pointing what looked to be a toy gun, and the next thing Mickey knew there was a loud pop and Nelson dove to the ground, and then another pop that kicked up some mud just a foot from where Nelson lay, and Mickey shouted his son’s name, this was no joke, no toy, it was real, Christ it was real, and Ben froze, and as Mickey dropped to his knees beside Nelson, who was motionless, he could feel—was he imagining it?—a pain in his gut, a burning; and when he looked down he saw that there was a stain on his sweatshirt.

  “Shit,” he muttered. The stain grew. Mickey wasn’t sure if he should fall forward or just sit there and stare.

  He covered the spot with his hand. The burning got worse.

  Nelson breathed. His eyes were closed, his hands covered his head. On the ground by his feet, Mickey noticed, were several packets of seeds from the Green Garden Nursery. “I didn’t come here to hurt anybody,” Nelson said.

  “Put the gun down,” Mickey told his son. There’d be time for questions later, he thought. Or maybe there wouldn’t.

  “Dad.” Ben approached, staring openmouthed, the gun dangling in his hand. “No.”

  Mickey grimaced. “We’d better turn off the oven,” he said, “and get me to the hospital.”

  26

  The bullet had passed through the colon, causing among other things a flood of contaminating waste to escape into his bloodstream. As soon as he arrived at the emergency room he was rushed into surgery.

  Bleeding freely and painlessly in the car (they had decided not to wait for an ambulance), Mickey had had his doubts. To die now would not have surprised him in the least. Why else should he have gone through so much, learned so much, if not to have it all pulled from underneath him? Why shouldn’t he be robbed of the next twenty or so years of his life, during which he could have used his experience, his wisdom, his love, to make something, even a small thing, better than what it had been?

  He’d closed his eyes and held the dish towel to his wound as Nelson next to him in the backseat and Ben behind the wheel argued as to why all of this had happened, Mickey ascertaining feebly and with wavering concentration that Nelson had given Ben the gun for protection just after Emi’s death, and that Ben, what with Rattner’s story ringing in his ears, had thought Nelson had come to do harm, and so to save his father had fired in a panic and with bad aim, Nelson meanwhile ducking for cover, Nelson who with a new job had simply come to hand out plant seed and say hello.

  Mickey felt woozy. Inside him there was a bullet. And this bullet was the seed of dying: it wouldn’t grow, but it would bring all the life that enclosed it folding inward to shrink upon its heat. And yet as he slumped over the burning hole, pressing the towel against it, he felt, too, that he’d been implanted with something else—a difficult sort of love, well-intentioned yet errant, the clumsy, reckless yearning of the young.

  They’d gone in and cut out the damaged section of intestine and then put the two new ends back together. They did a lavage and recovered the bullet, which was handed over to the police crime lab for tests. Later, in the course of vomiting on his sheets in the blinding white recovery room, Mickey had been told by the surgeon, a handsome young man from India with black eyes, that he was a lucky son of a gun, no pun intended, and to expect among other things a nifty scar from his sternum all the way down to below the navel.

  They’d be watching for abscesses, infection. Pills he would have to take, antibiotics, like it or not. The painkillers were optional, but Mickey was quick to see as how one or two might be helpful. The best thing was that he wouldn’t have to worry about one of those colostomy tubes—they’d sewn him right back together just as clean as you’d like. Still, a bowel movement was nothing to look forward to. It would be a long time, months perhaps, before he could sit on the toilet and enjoy.

  He woke up from an unnaturally long sleep that had been brought on, he was sure, by the goddamned pills. Morris was seated next to him, reading the paper.

  “How long have I been here?” said Mickey.

  “A couple of days,” Morris said. “You’ll be out in another week, maybe less, if you start doing what you’re told.” Then, like a father: “If you get a better attitude.”

  “My attitude’s fine,” said Mickey. He stared for a long while at the ceiling.

  It was a nice room, as hospital rooms went, large and private, in fact it was the deluxe room on the floor. Everyone should have a room like this, Mickey reflected. Of course, he was paying good money for it. A big color TV projected down on him, and through a doorway was another room with a sofa and chairs and another television. Ben had slept on the sofa every night since the surgery: he ran the bakery by day, and, afterwards, he came here.

  A lot had happened over last day or two. There’d been a whole to-do over the gun, the police were involved, and Mickey in his fresh bandages had called Detective Flemke from the bedside phone the minute he was wheeled there from the recovery room and groggily told him what happened, stressing that it was purely an accident, that these were both good kids, even saying that Nelson was practically a son to him (and in his postoperative stupor it did not seem an exaggeration), and that with all the grief they’d endured already, to say nothing of his own uncertain condition, the last thing his family needed was legal trouble.

  Flemke coughed into the phone and then indicated that they, the police, would have to question Nelson about the gun, which of course could lead to some problems for Nelson—“No way around that,” Flemke said—and problems for Ben too, if it turned out the gun could be traced to any crimes for which Ben or Nelson could be a suspect
. Mickey moaned at this news. “But,” said Flemke, “if the story’s as clean as you say, then your son might be looking at a little probation or community service,” and then he coughed again and added, “or if he’s lucky, maybe even not that,” which Mickey in his delirium took as a wink, that Flemke would possibly pull some strings on his behalf.

  But it was Nelson who was most lucky. Ben had explained it all to Mickey on the phone: as Nelson had no previous criminal record, and was cooperative and well-spoken and employed, the police were inclined to accept his story, which was that, in order to protect himself from neighborhood thugs, he’d bought the gun off a local dope fiend named Withers, who wasn’t unknown to the police, and who, when the cops found him thin and dying in a city shelter, told them not only that he’d sold a gun to Nelson, but that he’d done other things, great things, that might also be of interest to law enforcement.

  “Here,” said Morris. “I snuck this in special.” He held up a greasy brown bag with a receipt stapled to it.

  “Uh-huh,” Mickey said dully. He wasn’t hungry. “What time is it?” There was a mellow blue daylight in the window, between the blinds.

  “It’s just after three,” said Morris.

  “Maybe,” said Mickey, “we should call Ben, see if he needs a hand at the store.”

  “He’s been doing fine,” Morris said, a little glumly. “Been doing just fine on his own.”

  There was a pause in which both men silently acknowledged the passing of a torch.

  “Anyhow,” said Morris, “when I was picking up the food I ran into Joe Blank and his wife. They were having lunch.”

  “Lunch?” said Mickey.

  “Place was packed and jammed,” said Morris. “It’s New Year’s Day, ya know.”

  “That right?”

  Morris nodded, an old man sitting alone on a national holiday. Well, not entirely alone. “Happy New Year, Mickey,” Morris said, and pushed the glasses up on his nose.

  And so it was New Year’s. There was a time, a while back, when Mickey would close the store on New Year’s, but when the King holiday was established, he decided to close up on that day instead. You couldn’t have two off days in January, and New Year’s was better for business, what with all the parties. Besides, it gratified him to close on King Day, giving him as it did the feeling that he was striking a blow for racial unity. Morris had other opinions. “Martin Looter King, they ought to call him, all the tumult he caused.” But he enjoyed the time off just the same.

  “Joe Blank asked about you,” Morris was saying. “Asked if you were still overseas.”

  “And?”

  Morris touched his glasses. “I said as far as I knew, that’s where you were.” He looked at Mickey. “Did I do right?”

  “Yes,” said Mickey.

  “He thinks you met a woman.” Morris sat back, his legs arthritically spread. Two rings of pale, ashen flesh showed between his dark socks and the cuffs of his trousers. Mickey could not remember the last time he’d glimpsed his uncle’s private skin. He forgot that the old man had feet, an ass. A stomach.

  “And I told Shirley you went away to the woods for a couple of weeks. A cabin in the woods.”

  “Good,” said Mickey. No one needed to see him like this, he’d decided. Already he’d lost weight. He was weak, tired. He looked like hell.

  How was it possible? Never in his life had he been hospitalized. Never had he missed a day of work on account of illness. He’d prided himself on that, and it depressed him to no end, that his health had been taken from him.

  It seemed a thousand miles away, that beaming health, no, farther, as impossible and far away as Dulac’s cellar. He could not imagine recovering. That he might ever jog again, or bend down in the garden, or lift a rock, or drive a shovel, or press his palms into a fat thigh of dough—it was inconceivable to him. Health was another country. He couldn’t even take a crap without hurting, couldn’t even laugh, for Christ’s sake, without lighting up with pain, and he could at least thank God there was so little to laugh at. Oh, he didn’t mean to make himself sound hopeless; the human body was capable of repairing itself in remarkable ways, and obviously there were many people who had overcome worse conditions. He supposed Emi would understand —she’d been very aware, painfully aware, of being at “the height of her powers,” and almost certainly would have preferred death to a sad decline; and if he himself had quit his first love, boxing, too soon—and any fighter worth his weight in jockstraps would have been delighted to retire on a second round knockout—he feared, now, that he’d arrived, suddenly, on the other side of his prime: not a physical prime, but a spiritual one. It seemed to him that ever since he’d found himself bereft and in agony in the pit of Dulac’s cellar, he had been rising from the bottom toward some high summit of bliss, the height of which, he felt, had been reached, after so many highs and lows, just the other afternoon, with the bread in the oven and the shovel in his hands, his son cleaning up in the kitchen and his nostrils alert to something of April flitting in the air, of the browning crusts of the loaves, of the mud of the flower beds and imaginings of the brick and mortar with which he would build his own temple of fire. Yes; it seemed that his world, while not perfect, while far from complete, had attained, in that moment, a kind of rickety athletic grace, rugged and flawed and beautiful, recalling both the noble musculature of youth and the crackling joints of wisdom getting out of bed, the moment where the best of a person and the best of his life become one, and he stands there waiting patiently for the feeling to pass, hoping that it doesn’t but knowing that it must; and in between this fraction of an instant between hope and knowledge, there lies—imperceptibly, almost—a brief commune with death, a nod, an understanding, never otherwise admitted, that it is only with its permission that we can feel these marvelous things.

  Was this not the height of being? And yet at the time, squeezing at his purple berry of a wound as the car seemed to hit every bump in the road, he’d been resentful, had thought that in dying now he’d be gypped out of what had seemed to him at that moment a brilliant future; he hadn’t seen the whole picture, hadn’t seen the arc rising to its apex and catching the light. For he had been in the light.

  How good it would have been, to be taken away right then!

  But now, lying helpless on stiff, stale institutional sheets, Mickey felt he had traveled too far, had missed his stop, gone past it and into the gloomy unknown. And with Ben having established himself with flair at the bakery, and having proved himself, at a young age, a sharper, more resourceful businessman than his father—well, what was a man to do? What was left?

  Mickey closed his eyes; he couldn’t bear to look at his uncle, who was sitting there, gazing at the smooth white hands on his lap.

  When he awoke, it was night, or at least early evening. The sky was black; the bedside lamp was on. Morris was still sitting, just as before, only his eyes were closed and his glasses rested on the soft, inconsequential mound at the crotch of his trousers. Yet something was different in the room. It agitated Mickey; it was as if something were missing, or had been replaced. He couldn’t be sure what it was.

  He could smell the dinners being delivered up and down the ward. Mickey had told the nurse from day one that he would not be eating any of this poison. Between Ben and Morris bringing him wonton soup and crab cakes from all the best places, and him not even hungry in the first place—he was getting by mostly on liquids, it was easier on the system—well, he didn’t need their idea of supper, and as far as the painkillers went, they could keep them too. What was a little pain to him? Better to feel something than nothing at all.

  When the meal delivery subsided, Mickey’s nose—and it was the real source of his power now, this nose, it was damn near the only thing that moved on him—picked up on another scent; and when he turned his head he saw, on the nightstand, what at first struck him as a trick of his imagination.

  “Morris,” Mickey called.

  There was no answer.

 
“Morris.”

  Morris opened his eyes, then quickly put on his glasses.

  “Where did those come from?” Mickey said, indicating with his head the striking arrangement of wildflowers in a tall glass vase that must have arrived while they were both asleep. There were stalks of spiky blue delphinium, young golden sunflowers and, most prominently, a fistful of purple-pink heather.

  But even as Morris reached over to pluck the small card from the lip of the vase, Mickey had a strange, uneasy feeling about the identity of the sender.

  Morris held the card a few inches from his glasses and read: “ ‘Heard you had a little gardening accident. Hope these will help you get better.’ ”

  Mickey awaited more. “And?” he said.

  “That’s it,” said Morris.

  “It isn’t signed?”

  Morris looked more closely. He shrugged. “It isn’t signed.”

  “Let me see it,” said Mickey. He reached out. Morris put the card in his hand.

  Mickey looked it over. He was aware of a tingling in his toes. The handwriting itself—a leaning script like blown grass (a feminine hand, he thought, though he was no expert)—gave him a chill, as of a sudden pulsing intimacy. He read the message several times, slowly, uncertain if it was meant to be humorous or cryptic or even threatening, or just plain innocent and warm. It could be read in any of these ways, Mickey thought. And if the flowers gave the words a softness, if they canceled any threat (for a moment he had feared it was Shirley, letting him know she was on to him, that she’d done a little investigating), then the lack of a signature imbued them with something undeniably personal. In that absence of words lay a whole other message entirely, a message that Mickey couldn’t begin to interpret.

  Who else would possibly know that the incident had happened out in the yard? That it happened at all?

  Mickey turned the card over. Written across it was the insignia of the Green Garden Nursery.

  The bandages became lighter; a strength returned to his hands. Yes, he thought: he’d known it all along.