Red Baker

by Robert Ward

  What if, when I was applying for a job, I got like Ralph and said, “Hi, I’m Red Baker, ahummmmmmmada hummmmmmmmmada hummmmmmmmmada,” and I couldn’t stop?

  That thought sent cold chills through me, and I huddled up in the old terry-cloth robe, an act that usually settled me down. But it’s a funny thing about terry cloth. You get yourself a fireplace, and a dog named Chief, and a good shot of Wild Turk, and your terry cloth, and it will seem like the damndest, coziest material on earth. But here, sitting in the drafty bedroom, my skin clammy with the fears, suddenly that terry cloth seemed cheap and threadbare and like everything else in my life—lousy, secondhand, something only an out-of-work bum would wear.

  Suddenly I couldn’t stand having it on me. It was the damndest thing, and I am ashamed to tell you these feelings, which I would ordinarily associate with a lunatic.

  But it was me, Red Baker, who felt this way, and I knew the longer I stayed in that bedroom the closer I was going to come to heading down the booby hatch, so I threw on my street clothes, rushed down the steps, and set out looking for work.

  I drove my old Chevy down Aliceanna Street toward Fells Point and stopped in front of Ruby’s Play Lounge. Ruby was a black-haired, big-breasted woman who I’d known longer than Wanda. The truth is she and I used to do some parking out by Loch Raven Reservoir back when I was at Patterson. We’d long since stopped that kind of thing, but I knew she still liked me some, and since her husband, Jim, had died of a tumor last year, I figured she might need some help running her bar.

  There is no place lonelier than a bar at ten in the morning. Only two old rummies sitting there at the counter, sipping their Four Roses and mumbling things to each other about Johnny Unitas and the Colts.

  “I’ll tell you if ‘ey jest got Johnny U to play for ‘em again, ‘ey would never leave town.”

  “You said it. Get him and Raymond Berry. I’m telling you. ‘Ey was great! Greatest combination of all time.”

  I looked at Ruby standing behind her bar, polishing the gold-edged mirror she’d put up. Behind me there were seven or eight dinner tables, with white tablecloths and flowers. It was a simple place, but she ran it decently.

  At the bar was Ed Farmer, a milkman I know. He was telling Ruby about his new part-time occupation.

  “Ruby, I tell you I started doing hair?”

  “Hair?” Ruby said, catching my reflection in the mirror. “You’re doing hair? Ed, I didn’t know you were gay.”

  Ed Farmer’s face puffed up like he’d been bit by one of them puff adders you see on “Wild Kingdom.”

  “It ain’t like that. Goddamn it, Red, did you hear that?”

  “Hell, Ed,” I said, “it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Some of the greatest men in history were that way.”

  “Goddamn,” Ed yelled, pounding his fist on the bar so hard that the two old rummies down at the end almost fell off their stools.

  “I am not a goddamned queer and never have been. In fact, I’m not even learning on women. I’m learning to cut hair on the dead.”

  “Hell,” Ruby said, winking at me. “That must be easy. You don’t even have to do the back.”

  This cracked me up, the first decent laugh I’d had in a week, but Ed didn’t find it that amusing.

  “Look here, it’s a responsibility. You got the deceased’s parents and family to face.”

  “Yeah,” Ruby said, “I can see it now. ‘Hey, my granny don’t look like no Liberace.’”

  “Well hell,” Ed Farmer said. “You don’t respect nothing. What do you do that’s so great?”

  “Well, one thing I don’t do is cut no corpse’s hair. You can’t even ask ‘em how they want it done. What kind of hairdressing is that?”

  “Yeah, and they only come one time,” I said. “How do you know they even like what you do?”

  Ed Farmer took a deep breath, tossed off a shot, and shook his head.

  “A couple of wiseasses,” he said. “Well, how come you’re not working if you’re so damned smart, Baker?”

  “Hey, I’m retired. Won the lottery, didn’t you hear?”

  “Smartass,” Ed Farmer said. “World run by smartasses.”

  He picked up his milk bottles and clanged noisily toward the door, leaving Ruby and myself pounding the bar and laughing a little too hard. I mean, it wasn’t that funny.

  “Pretty rough on old Ed,” I said, after a while.

  “He’s so damned dumb,” Ruby laughed, “I can’t help myself. Every time he comes in here I say to myself, ‘Now this time treat him with some respect,’ but then he starts in bragging about what a great provider he is, how some people don’t want to work and all that other bullshit, and I just can’t resist giving it to him.”

  I smiled at her, and she smiled back, and I thought of how we used to be, young and driving out in the country, the only worry whether we were going to beat Dunbar in basketball.

  “You need a beer, Red?”

  “Well, maybe one.”

  “Things pretty hard, Red?”

  “Yeah. In fact, that’s why I come to see you. I was wondering if maybe you had a job. I mean, I can make drinks or help out … anything.”

  She sighed and gave me the beer and then put her hand over mine. It was rough, scratchy, almost as raw as my own.

  “Red, you need a little loan or something, I could come up with something. You know that. But, hon, I just had to let Steve the night kid go. To tell you the truth, what with the cutbacks, I don’t see how I’m going to make it through the winter. I got a plan, though. Before the money Jim left me runs out. Got a place all picked out.”

  She reached down under the bar and showed me a folder of a place called Deltona, Florida.

  “I’m heading down that way by this summer, maybe sooner, Red. You can get you a Spanish-hacienda-type home down there for about thirty-five thousand dollars. Real nice and right on a lake. I know a little bar down there for sale. People down there got money too, Red.”

  I took a sip of my beer and looked at the folder. It had blue skies and palm trees and a young couple water-skiing and looking at each other like they were birthday cake.

  I thought of Crystal and me down there. The thought ached through me, and I suddenly wanted to see her so bad, tell her I loved her and that we should leave now, just take off, head down the highway until we got to the land where the sun never quit.

  Crystal and me in the moonlight, cutting through a midnight, black-water lagoon. Our boat nosing through the lily pads.

  “Red, hon, you want another beer?”

  “What? Oh no … I don’t think so, Ruby. You really moving to Florida?”

  “I don’t know, Red. To tell you the truth, it scares hell out of me. I grew up here. I know everybody, but there’s nothing left, Red. You can’t live on memories.”

  “I know we don’t see each other much, Ruby, but … well, I like knowing you’re here. I mean … hell, you know what I mean.”

  She smiled at me softly, then leaned over the bar and kissed me on the cheek.

  “You’re a good man, Red Baker,” she said. “I shoulda never let you go.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just smiled and told her I’d see her before she left and headed back out into the sleet and wind and snow.

  • • •

  For three hours I drove around Highlandtown, past the old boarded-up National Brewery and up and down Broadway, past the Circus Movie Theatre, which was playing a picture called Behind the Green Door, where I used to go see my serials like Gangbusters, and The Rocket Man, and Gene Autry in The Phantom Empire, and along with them would be two or three Woody Woodpeckers or Looney Tunes, and then a double feature. Saw my first 3-D movie in that picture house, Bwana Devil. Now it’s all horny sailors from off the Greek ships down on Pratt Street, with newspapers on their laps.

  And in the old days all of those pictures, serials, cartoons, and double features cost thirteen cents. 1948. When I was five years old.

  This was Broadway,
and on Easter people would march down this street past the Johns Hopkins Hospital, and they’d be dressed in their finest clothes, and the Navy and Marine color guard would lead the parade.

  Now it was nothing but bars for artists and lawyers and a bunch of dead-assed stores, and not one of them needed help. I did hear from Jim Halenski that they might be hiring up at the soap factory, so I hustled over there and waited for an hour, waited in a gray room with one chair in it and the smell of old soap leaking from the walls. When they finally did come out they told me they’d cut back 34 percent of their work force. There wasn’t even any point in filling out the papers.

  I went out to the parking lot and sat behind the wheel of the car for a long time and thought again of calling Crystal. Fuck it, call her now, take off, get the hell out. I was forty years old. Maybe Wanda and Ace and I could throw a special party in the city dump, shoot and eat rats.

  Oh, I knew I was falling prey to unmanly and unhealthy self-pity, so I kept moving, and after I had been turned down at Sunny Surplus and Bo Jangles’ Biscuits I stopped by Smitty’s Clam Bar, which is in the new market in the middle of Pratt Street. I have known Smitty since we were kids. He was a tall, thin boy with long hair when we were kids, wore it DA style and had hot rods. Now he was a stooped, thin guy with a few strands of hair left and hands that were cut a thousand times from opening his raw oysters and clams. Like Ruby, he was glad to see me, and before I could say anything he had stuck half a dozen fresh oysters in front of me and some hot sauce.

  “Listen, Red, I did hear of one job might be open. It’s over at Shaw’s Mattress Factory. Yeah, you ought to get on over there soon. Might be something to tide you over.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “That place …”

  “I know, Red. I wish to hell I could give you some work here, but you look at this place. It’s a tomb in here. I can’t give this stuff away, and you know when people ain’t eating seafood, they ain’t eating.”

  I nodded and sucked out the last oyster, all covered with horseradish and cocktail sauce. It tasted so damned good that it picked my spirits up just enough to get out on the street again.

  “Good luck, Red. You’ll find something.”

  I shut the door and started walking across the street to my car when I heard something in the alley. I looked back in the twilight at the trash cans and soaked cardboard boxes and didn’t see anything. Then I heard it again, a low moan.

  Slowly I walked back there, looked to my right and left, knowing that it could be a trick, that any second I might get a knife in my ribs.

  I saw what it was.

  A man, maybe seven or eight years younger than me, lying in a pool of his own vomit. Next to him was some rotgut wine, and he waved his left arm at me as if he wanted me to come closer.

  I didn’t know what to do because the shock of seeing him made me stand still for some time.

  He didn’t have a nose. Just a pinched-up little scar and maybe half of one nostril.

  “Think I’m ugly?” he said.

  “No,” I lied. He was the ugliest man I’d ever seen.

  “Got it shot off in ‘Nam,” he said, and then he gave a small, cackling laugh that was close to a scream.

  I don’t know what it was, spending all that time roaming up and down the streets, hearing about Ruby leaving, but I suddenly couldn’t stand it, and it occurred to me that he was me and I him … and I wanted to do something for him, wanted to pick him up out of there, get him to a hospital. But when I walked closer I saw he had a knife.

  “You get near me you going to get the darkness,” he said.

  And then he began to laugh again, and stab weakly out into the winter snow, and I backed out of there, feeling the oysters sloshing around inside of me and wanting to throw up. I leaned on the brick wall for a second and looked back in the alley again and could see his torn boots and his raw, bare legs. Then I staggered back across the street and got in my car.

  The mattress factory was like a building I saw in a nightmare once. I was running down a narrow cobblestoned street, and I was being chased by someone; worse, I think it might have been a friend, a friend with a knife, and I kept wanting to explain to him that he didn’t have it right, I hadn’t betrayed him, I was his friend forever, but I knew he wouldn’t listen. He was coming after me, and my only hope was to get away. But up ahead of me was this building, big and square, with a million tiny windows, all of them covered over with black soot, and inside were things like people but with animal snouts and squidlike suckers coming off of their faces.

  It was death from the friend or death inside the box.

  I woke up and stayed alive.

  But this wasn’t any dream. This was Shawland. Outside was a big blue-and-white billboard of a blonde in a negligee sleeping with her eyes closed on her mattress. She was fifty feet tall above me, floating there above the snow like a sleeping angel. Underneath her was the potholed parking lot, leading up to the boxy building with the windows that looked like poked-out eyes. I thought of no-nose lying there in the alley.

  I thought he had come in the night and sliced out the sight from those windows, from all who worked in that gray, filthy, soot-stained place.

  I don’t know how I got him and the factory mixed up, but I thought of him as I pushed open the filthy glass door and walked all the way down the gray endless hallway, by glass-partitioned booths that looked like places where doctors came to see if you were gone enough to work there.

  There was a smell in that place too, like burned flesh, and puddles of water all over the floor, and I thought of death by electrocution.

  Right before I got to the big steel EMPLOYMENT OFFICE DOOR, I stopped, took out my comb and slicked back my hair, and told myself to be ready. Look sharp, stand tall. Be a good imitation of Red Baker.

  Then I walked inside. The secretary was a fat woman who was sipping a diet soda and reading a book called Fury’s Passion. She wore a green dress with a ruffled collar that came up to her double chin. On the collar there was a sparkly, cheap turtle pin with rhinestones in its shell.

  I gave her my name and told her I was looking for work. She gave me one of those Bible school smiles and looked back at her book.

  “Mr. Porter will be back in a minute,” she said, not looking up. “He just went down to the canteen. You can fill out this application while you’re waiting. And please stand back from my desk. You’re dripping all over my lunch.”

  I looked down and saw a brown paper bag sitting on the edge of the desk. I had gotten it wet. I moved back fast, trying for my friendly, boy-next-door smile. She didn’t go for it.

  I picked up the application papers and started filling out the forms with the Bic pen she handed me. It was nearly out of ink, and every other letter was faded and unreadable, making it look like I couldn’t spell. I bore down twice as hard, but it was no good, and I had to ask her for another one.

  “Some people applying for work would have thought to bring their own pens,” she said. “That happens to be the last one. All the others have been took.”

  Her voice was like the lead paint chipping off the walls.

  I finished writing out my application as best I could, and then her switchboard lit up.

  “Mr. Porter, there is someone here to see you. Yes, a man who claims to be looking for work.”

  I could feel my adrenaline level pumping through me. I wanted to rip her paperback book in half, but I figured she already expected that of me.

  “You may go back now,” she said.

  I nodded and made my way through the long gray halls to the employment counselor.

  His door was shut when I got there, so I rapped on it and he told me to come inside.

  When I walked through the door I stared at Peter Porter, a boy who was known as “Mange” Porter at Patterson. Of all the boys I had known in all my years at school, Peter Porter was the biggest whimp.

  “Well, well, Red Baker,” he said in a whistling yodel, looking up at me from behind his desk. “I don�
��t believe it. Laid you off down at Larmel, huh?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Good to see you, Peter.”

  He smiled at me with his little yellow teeth and ran his left hand down his caved-in chest and then over his belly. He wasn’t fat exactly—in fact, mostly he was thin—but he always had this beer gut. Your skinny-fat guy. He’d been the biggest suckass to all the teachers and had reported Dog for cheating once in math class.

  They’d made him head of the safety patrol. I remembered him lurking in the halls, waiting to see if you were going to try and skip out early on Friday afternoon.

  I remembered him getting caught jerking off in the boys’ room.

  I tried to recall if I had been hard on him, but it had been so long. He was the kind of person you forgot existed the second they left your line of vision.

  “So what brings you to Shaw’s?” he said in that same high, sticky voice I recalled from school. He took off his black glasses and tapped them on his wrist.

  “I’m looking for work, Peter,” I said. “I heard you have some jobs open.”

  “Well, isn’t that interesting?” he said. “I mean, don’t you find this an amazing turn of events?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Just the fact that you’re asking me for a job.”

  I shrugged and said nothing.

  He got up, then rubbed his hand over his stomach and ran it around his jaw, like he was having some deep thoughts.

  “Well, I find it an amazing coincidence.” He whistled.

  “Listen, Pete,” I said, “I’m looking for work. I mean, I’d like to know if there’s a job open or not.”

  He turned and stared at me, rubbing his right hand on his elbow and putting his left on his jaw, like The Thinker.

  “I guess you would like to know about work. I thought at one time you were going to be a professional basketball player. That’s what they said. Red Baker—boyhood hero.”