Red Baker

by Robert Ward

  “Damn straight,” I said. “I threw him a little swing pass, and he was headed downfield and three tackles were coming up on him. He just gave them a little bit of his leg, and he was gone. Doggie was some runner.”

  “All he does is drink now.”

  “Hell too,” I said, “he’s still in pretty good shape. He’s just got a lot of worries, that’s all. You shouldn’t underestimate the Dog.”

  “Sure,” Ace said. But I could tell he wasn’t sure about Dog. It pissed me off a little bit because I know what a sweet and gentle guy the Dog is. I remember him pitching in around my house to help my old man when his heart was bad, without ever having to be asked.

  “You play hard today,” I said.

  “You ought to come out, Dad … I’ll bet we could beat you men if we tried.”

  “No way,” I said.

  “What’s the matter, scared?” Ace said.

  He laughed, and I gave him two left jabs to the shoulder. Then he hugged me and headed down the backyard steps to the alley and his friend Spence’s house.

  I sat down at the table, and in spite of everything I had to smile. Just seeing him dress up in that uniform, going up to play the same neighborhood game that I played so many years ago, gave me such pleasure. I could feel like we were part of something bigger than ourselves, our own small histories and traditions. Maybe it’s corny, but seeing Ace in his uniform made me feel like I loved the whole damned city.

  I guess I sat there at the table for quite a while, thinking about my kid (Wanda being out shopping with Carol), when I finally made my mind up to go watch him play. I pulled on my boots and walked out into the backyard. But I hadn’t even made it down to our gate yet when something hit me in the arm. An ice ball.

  I turned fast and saw Doggie hiding behind a telephone pole. He was laughing, sticking his head out like he was a kid.

  “Red Baker’s a whimp,” he shouted.

  I smiled and reached down into the snow as fast as I could, but he had another one aimed directly at me, and it burst with a hell of an impact on my shoulder, some of the cold ice spraying down my neck.

  “You son of a bitch,” I said, packing a hard one.

  Dog came out from behind the pole, fired another one high over my head, and ran down the alley.

  “All right, Doggie,” I said. “You’ve had it now.”

  I started laughing like a kid and running after him. He was always faster than me, but he slipped on the ice, and I was gaining on him. I let go a snowball that got him on the back, just as he turned around the corner. I dug my boots in the alley snow and felt about a thousand pounds of fear and pain float out of me. I was fifteen again, chasing Doggie down the crazy street.

  “I’m going to get your ass, Donahue,” I shouted, feeling foolish but not caring who the hell heard.

  But when I turned the corner he had stopped, not ten feet away, and looked at me with a strange smile on his face. His hands were stretched out, the picture of innocence.

  “No weapons, Red,” he smiled.

  “What the hell’s going on?”

  Then I knew, but it was too late. Out from behind one trash can came Jimmy Silanski, and from another one Eddie Brandt, and another one Paul Wizniewski, and Chuck Mason and they all had snowballs in their hands.

  “Ambush,” they yelled, and I turned and began running like hell while snowballs went whizzing by my head, landing on my back, and splattering on my coat. I tried to turn to make a stand down by Wilenski’s house, but there was a storm of snowballs hitting me in the chest, arms, face. I finally looked around at them all, drunk and laughing so hard they could hardly stand, and I tried like hell to fire back at them, but they were collapsing now, everybody pointing at me and holding their stomachs.

  “Did that work or did that work?” Dog said, tears streaming down his face.

  I looked around at them all. Every one of them an out-of-work father, come round to get me to go up and see the kids play.

  “You sons of bitches,” I said, laughing and punching Dog’s arm. “I woulda never thought you were capable of anything so low.”

  Dog laughed and put his arm around my shoulder.

  “The Dog is a sly one,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “He has many unseen tricks.”

  He smiled and hugged me, and I felt such a warmth with him and all the other guys there that it brought tears to my eyes.

  “Hell,” I said, “let’s get us a drink of whiskey at my place and then go see the kids.”

  • • •

  “Shhh,” Dog said, as he led us through the trees toward the park. “I think it’s halftime … Yeah, be quiet. Goddamn it, Red, don’t drop the bottle.”

  I giggled madly and picked up the Jack Daniel’s and handed it to Jimmy, who was so loaded he was hanging off a pine bough.

  “The Patterson Park devils will swoop down and attack!” he said, tripping and falling into me.

  I began to laugh wildly, and all the other men began choking back their giggles.

  Dog stopped and looked at us with a great seriousness.

  “All right, men. Everybody have their snowballs?”

  “Check.”

  “Okay … When I give the signal, I want you to pound across that field. When I raise my hands we attack. Are you ready?”

  “I got to take a piss, general,” Eddie Brandt said.

  We all began to laugh again, but Dog shook his big head.

  “Save it. All right, let’s go.”

  Dog led us toward the Chinese Pagoda in the park. The kids were just on the other side of it, sitting around.

  “Hey,” Eddie Brandt’s kid yelled. “It’s our dads.”

  “Yeah,” Bobby Mason said. “Let’s challenge ‘em!”

  “Okay, men,” Dog said. “Charrrrrrrrge!”

  “They’ve got snowballs!” Jimmy Silanski, Jr., said.

  “Ahhhhhhhhhhh,” we yelled, slipping, drunk, throwing and falling down on one another, and getting up again. The football team was so astonished that for a second they didn’t respond at all, and our snowballs hit them in a great, dense volley.

  But they weren’t long to catch on, and soon I was in the middle of the wildest snowball battle I’d had since I was a kid. I saw Ace making them as fast as he could and laughing wildly at me. He was firing his low, hard ice balls, which hurt like hell when they hit my back. I saw two boys team up on Dog, and I picked up a huge lump of snow and broke it over their heads. They fell to the ground, and one of them grabbed my legs, and then Eddie Brandt and Ace and two other boys piled on top of me. Dog tried to pull them off, but they tackled him too, and then some of the other men joined in and we were all rolling, head over heels along the fifty yard line, and there was shrieking and snow in my mouth, and somebody yelling “Don’t break the whiskey, hell, don’t break the whiskey,” and I hit my head on the frozen ground, and felt the hand around my neck, and threw people off only to have two or three more jump back on, and I knew then that I would be sore the next day, but I didn’t care at all, because this was the way I wanted it to stay, all tangled up with my friends and my kid, and all of us young and free and crazy on Saturday afternoon.

  But suddenly in the middle of this wild-assed good time I heard a siren in the not-so-far distance, and when I managed to throw Ace off a little, I looked up and saw a black detective car screaming toward us. It stopped only a few feet away, and everybody got kind of quiet, and some of the men hid their bottles like they were fifteen again and might get taken in for drinking without cards.

  The door to the cop car opened and out stepped Choo Choo Gerard. He was dressed in a tweed overcoat and had on a pair of expensive leather boots.

  Behind him, still in the car, was Blazek, the guy they called “The Animal,” Ed Blazek. I could see his mean round eyes focusing in on me. There was no love lost between us from long ago, when he hated me for taking away Wanda.

  “Well, now ain’t this something,” Choo Choo said. “I get a call there’s a gang fight in Patter
son Park … and look what we have here.”

  “Sorry, Choo,” I said. He spent too much money, and the word was he wasn’t the straightest cop on the force, but me and Dog and Choo Choo went all the way back to high school. He’d stood up for local guys in court.

  “Well, all I want to know is who is winning this match? You aren’t letting these old dudes kick your asses, are you?”

  The kids smiled and shook their heads.

  “No way,” they said. “No way.”

  “Hey, Officer Gerard, you want to help the men? It’s the only way they’re going to win.”

  Choo Choo smiled and looked back at Blazek, who sat stock-still with his big arms crossed in front of him.

  “No way, I know better than to deal with you guys.”

  “All right,” Ace said, laughing and reaching for the snow.

  “Hell,” I said. “You kids win. We’re wiped out.”

  The kids gave up a great roar with that one, and Dog picked up the football.

  “Go out for one, Ace,” he said. “I believe this old arm is as good as it ever was.”

  Ace smiled and went long, and Dog cocked his arm and threw him a perfect spiral thirty-five yards downfield.

  A couple of kids gave out with “whoasssss,” and then somebody yelled, “Men against kids … yeah,” and the men, holding their beer guts and taking one more good sip of Jack Daniel’s, started calling for the ball and running out for passes.

  I looked over at Choo Choo, who was laughing like hell. He had a good, kind laugh, which made it easier for him to run his numbers.

  “Hey, great to see you, Red. Don’t worry about this. A couple of old people over the other side of the park thought they were witnessing some urban blight.”

  I laughed and shook my head.

  “How are you doing, Red?” Choo Choo said.

  “Hanging in there.”

  “Yeah? Well, look, maybe we ought to talk, huh? Like to see more of you.”

  “Sure, Choo,” I said.

  “Gimme a call sometime, Red. Great kid you got there. Got a real future.”

  Blazek stuck his head outside of the car. “Hey, Choo Choo, let’s leave these turkeys and go get some lunch, what you say?”

  “Sure,” Choo Choo said, winking at me. “Think you can beat those kids?”

  “You know it,” I said.

  “Okay, Red, score one for me, and let’s get together soon.”

  “Right, Choo,” I said.

  Then I ran back out on the field, and Dog threw me one of his perfect long passes. Ace ran toward it, leaped, but I managed to tip it away from him and made a hell of a two-fingered catch.

  “All right, Mr. Baker!” Jimmy Silanski, Jr., yelled. “All right.”

  “Let’s choose it up,” somebody yelled.

  “Yeah, let’s go.”

  • • •

  The rest of the day is like a great, boozy blur now. The men against the boys, like every Saturday I could recall long ago. And it was an even game too, Ace leading his team with his passing and Dog making a fantastic tipped-ball interception and faking out four of their defenders to weave and slide his way toward the winning touchdown. When the dark had settled on the field, we were all freezing cold and numb, but there wasn’t one complaint from anyone, man or boy. This was the way it had always been in Highlandtown, and in spite of all that we had to face, on that day our neighborhood was connected, one generation to another, and it felt good and filled me with joy.

  • • •

  Now when I hear the cars slowing down on the dark street, I remember that day at the park with a kind of supernatural brightness, a picture with a fiery glow around it, and it lets me forget for a second just what might come down and how the world became as strange to me as it is to a beggar.

  I remember how it was, feeling connected to all of them, knowing I wasn’t alone in the world but part of Dog and Carol and their kids Lisa and Kathy, as well as Wanda and Ace. And when I sit here by the white lace curtains, staring out at the strange, alien moon, I recall a lot of days filled with the blood and muscle of friendship. Mostly times when we were younger, first married, and the kids were small, and Dog and Carol would come over the house on weekends, and we’d pull out a case of Boh, and fry up some oysters, and maybe play our oldies records underneath the red, yellow, and blue party lights Wanda and me would string up in the backyard. We’d sit out there in those green metal lawn chairs Ruth gave us, and under the bright moon we’d see the fires of the steel mill burning red and blue, the colors soaring above the flat rooftops from the south. Soon we’d be dancing, holding each other close while the kids played in the sandbox, or we’d do four-part harmonies on “Get a Job” or “In the Still of the Night,” and afterward everything would be peacefully quiet, except the sounds of the crickets in the tomato garden down at the far end of our brand-new chain-link fence. And after the song we would all smile and feel the invisible rope which bound us together in something that must be like love. And then the lightning bugs would come out and dance through the black night air, their yellow, gentle lights making these beautiful patterns all around us, and I knew I was there, in the place I was meant to be, home.

  But it’s hard to hang on to these memories after all that has happened, hard now and, to be honest, hard even two days after the snowball fight, because that very next Monday I was faced with the same stomach-grinding facts—no job, not knowing where to look, my temples pounding and stomach churning just thinking of hitting the snow-slushed streets.

  Maybe it was that day, yes, it probably was, that I started to slide, though at the time I told myself I was just lying in bed a little longer, waiting for Wanda and Ace getting ready to go off to work and school.

  Up until that day I had been getting up with them, trying to keep everybody’s spirits up, telling the kid that he was going to do great on his English test and assuring Wanda I’d get the food on the way back from the union hall or job hunting. But every day cost me, every day without work wore me down and made me think of Crystal and the open highway, every morning sitting alone in the house made me want to reach a little quicker for the bottle just to dull the ache.

  This morning I didn’t get up at all. And when they left I lay there, with two rose-printed pillows stacked up under my head, and felt my breath coming hard and a pain in my right side.

  I stared up at the ceiling, at the cracks in the plaster, and thought of Dog over in his house, maybe doing the same thing, and Billy Bramdowski at his house, waiting for the new baby and scared shitless how he was going to pay for it all. And Henry and Babe down at Fells Point, sitting there waiting, and then it seemed like I could look into every home in Highlandtown and Dundalk, and they’d all be the same, the men sitting in their bathrobes, smoking cigarettes, staring at the morning game shows, maybe calling one another to keep their spirits up but having nothing to say, and finally even the sound of their buddies’ voices, so hollowed out and defeated, made them feel more alone, so they stopped calling at all. And sat at white porcelain tables in their crowded kitchens underneath sunburst clocks, listening to the low drone of the TV from the other empty rooms or the radio with its loud-mouthed wake-up Balmere jocks.

  I sat straight up in bed, my chest heaving with short, jerky breaths, and I told myself to get a move on it. I’d been here before, and I knew that late at night and early in the morning were the two most dangerous times. Better by far to keep it rolling, get out in the hustle, where even if it’s tough you got the ability to get mad, to fight back with anger, anything better than sitting stock-still, having ghost visions in cracked-ceiling rooms.

  After I made it to the bathroom I started to get undressed, but found myself feeling a little dizzy, so I sat down on the bed and felt the chill from the windows cutting through my bones. So I put on my old terry-cloth robe, tied it right around me, and rubbed my temples.

  “Hey, it’s going to be all right,” I said out loud, but my voice sounded like it was from somewhere else. And f
rom something else. The mechanical voice of a robot from one of those space pictures like Star Wars.

  I picked up the TV magazine and flipped through the rough pages and saw suddenly that “The Honeymooners” was on. This was something I didn’t want to do, had told myself to avoid at all costs. But suddenly it seemed (and I hate to admit this, it seems so lame) that if I watched a little of it, with good old familiar Ralph and Ed, it would cool me out, almost like talking to an old friend.

  So I switched on the RCA ColorTrak we have on the gold tray with wheels at the end of our bed, and right away I knew the episode. Knew it? Hell, I’d seen it maybe forty times. It was the one where Ed and Ralph buy all these pots and pans and cooking utensils which they decide to advertise on TV. Old Norton is the Chef of the Past, who uses this worthless old-time apple corer, and Ralph is supposed to be the Chef of the Future, using their modern new equipment, and the great scene, the scene that always cracked me up in the past, is when Norton has this chef’s hat on and he’s fumbling with the dull old apple corer and then he says, “Oh Chef of the Future, do you know a modern way to core an apple?” And Ralph, who up to now has been all cocky as hell and ready to knock ‘em dead, Ralph comes on with this new gadget. Only he gets stage fright, and instead of talking he starts mumbling “Ahummmmmmmma hummmmmmmmma hummmmmmmmmada,” and sweat starts pouring down his great fat head, and he flails around like a baby rhino and knocks down the whole set, pots and pans flying everywhere.

  Now, like I say, I’ve seen that show maybe forty times. In fact, it’s one of my all-time favorites, didn’t seem to matter how often I saw it, it always cracked me up. I’m talking about serious laughing, where you’re holding your sides and you can’t breathe right, and this time wasn’t any different. I started laughing the second I recognized the show, and by the time the set was destroyed I was falling backward on the bed, yowling like a madman—only suddenly I couldn’t stop laughing, and then my voice began to sound like the fat lady’s screech at Gwynn Oak Funhouse, the place where Buck and Dot used to take me as a kid, and I saw the fat lady’s mechanical mouth opening and her great, fat, geared jaws and those perfectly even, two-feet-long, filed teeth and the way she rocked back and forth like some crazed priest come to tell you about the everlasting pain of hellfire. And then I made myself stop, holding my chest and feeling like a fool and thanking God I was alone, but then another thought scared me almost as badly.