Red Baker

by Robert Ward

  Then I turned and walked through the wet canvas curtains and out the front door into the cold Baltimore night. The snow was coming down harder now, driving on the wind, and I staggered around behind the Paradise, into the weeds, and hung on to the freezing red drainpipe. My stomach heaved once, and I puked out my guts as the soft snow fell gently on my neck.

  When I was done I slid into the parking lot and looked at my old Chevy as though it were at the far end of a telescope. I weaved crazily over the hard gravel, hearing the rocks crunch under my heavy boots.

  I put the car in reverse and thought of Crystal waiting in there for me, remembered dimly some big promise I’d made about hanging around after the show, but it was no use, because I had to move.

  I was filled with some strange new happiness that shot through me like a live hot coil of steel. It made me jerk and strut like a painted puppet.

  I couldn’t wait. Not for Crystal. Not for anyone. I couldn’t wait ever again for anything.

  I had to move, go places, make new friends.

  God help those who got in my way.

  • • •

  I staggered everywhere that night. Up and down Broadway, in and out of Bertha’s, and Ruby’s, and Ledbetter’s, and the Acropolis, where I fell in love with Athena the Belly Dancer, knew that we were right for each other, knew it as sure as I knew my own face, and forgot it by the third drink.

  There were friends everywhere, new friends, great and fast friends, hands clasped, and people pounding my back, and songs sung, and promises made, and a little black man named Shorty who was my sidekick and told me as we weaved down the snow-filled, booze-lit street that he “loved me like a brother, and if you fall down I won’t roll you, Red, roll most white mutherfuckers, but not you, Red.” And I thanked him and told him I wanted to introduce him to Vinnie, he had to meet Vinnie, the man with all the answers. “Vinnie who, Red?” he said as we fell into Johnny Jack’s Circus and watched a businessman try and climb the neon-pink stage to get at a fifty-five-year-old hooker named Lana Parr. “Vinnie who, Red? Where does the man live?”

  “Everywhere,” I said. “He lives everyfuckingwhere, but I didn’t know it until tonight. You see that?”

  “What’s his gig, Red?”

  “He don’t work. He gives you and me the answers,” I said, and then I fell down in the bar, but the bar floor turned icy and cold, and when I opened my dead, burned-down eyes, I was in the gutter out in the blowing, burning ice storm. Shorty was still there, holding my head in his hands and saying, “Red, man, you shouldn’t get this way.”

  He helped me to my feet; then it was fading on me, all the new-found happiness, all the bright thoughts, and all that was left was shame and fear and anger rising from my stomach to my chest, like some belching blast of heat.

  And then I was hanging over the Chevy’s steering wheel like my old man with his cataracts, sideswiping parked cars in the pink-gray dawn and finally finding a parking space a block away from home.

  A walk down Aliceanna Street, past the row houses, past the Formstone fronts, and the marble steps, and the screen doors with Olde English initials on them, and the Sun papers in their frozen plastic sacks, lying there like ticking bombs.

  And then into my own house, so fucked and frozen, fumbling with the locks. Trying to move quietly, get upstairs to my bed, all the great thoughts of the night just one long revolting blur of colors.

  Maybe Vinnie was right. Maybe I had become Dog. But he had never understood what happened to him.

  Not that I understood this shit.

  Instead of going right upstairs, I fell back for a second on the old black-and-white couch, and I could feel the shapes of things. The way the shag rug was like a dead animal beneath my feet, the way the television reflected a weird, distorted image of me, my big hands hanging between my long, wobbly legs. The way the house smelled, tight and closed and dusty, the way a plant hanging in the dining room looked like a crawling, unknown thing.

  And then Wanda’s voice coming not from upstairs at all but from the kitchen, where of course she had been sitting for hours.

  “Red, is that you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “Yeah, oh yeah.”

  “Can you make it into the kitchen?”

  “Sure.”

  I rolled off the couch, half kneeling, then stood straight up and walked by the plant to meet her gaze. She sat at the kitchen table in her pink robe, her hair down, combed and clean. Her eyes were soft, forgiving in a final way.

  “Red, I don’t want to argue with you. I don’t need a big scene. I know you got fired today. I knew you’d come back like this. I just want you to understand that this is it. It’s over. Ace and I are leaving tomorrow. We’ll be living with Ruth for a while.”

  I leaned on the door, shocked by the whiteness of the refrigerator. It looked like a great shining block of ice.

  “No way. No way that’s happening.”

  “It is, Red. I can’t live like this. Don’t throw a scene. You’ll only hurt Ace.”

  I stood still and said nothing but felt the coil of live wire start up in my fingers, shoot through my arms, legs, chest. Felt its beat in my expanding heart.

  “No way,” I said. “No way. We’re hanging in there, Wanda.”

  “Red,” she said. “We’re through.”

  “You got it wrong. I love you, Wanda. I love Ace.”

  I had started to sob, and the first tears sent a fury through me.

  “I know you do, Red. But it’s not enough. Please, don’t scream and get crazy. I don’t think I can stand it just now.”

  “You just walk?”

  “No, I been here nineteen years. I don’t just walk. I remember when it meant something.”

  “But Ace,” I said. “Ace can’t make it without me.”

  She nodded her head, just as calmly as an actress. I knew she had rehearsed this scene for years. She didn’t even need me there to say the lines.

  “He loves you, Red, but it’s only because he’s still young and doesn’t know what a liar you are. How little you really care for him.”

  “That’s bullshit,” I said. “You’ve said just about enough.”

  I moved toward her and saw her eyes get big, and she put her hand to her lovely lips, and then I pushed her back against the stove, saying, “You don’t leave. You don’t pull this shit,” and somehow she fell. Fell and cracked the back of her head, and I saw her slump forward, and I held my breath and called her name softly, and then she was up off the floor like a wild, wounded child, driving right into me, her long nails clawing at my eyes.

  “You bastard. You bastard. You threw us away. You bastard.”

  She was hitting me then, and I could feel the scratch marks down my cheeks, and I slapped her hard in the face, and then I felt somebody jumping on my back, smashing me in the neck. I turned and threw my elbow back wildly and caught Ace right in the face and knocked him up against the dining room table, and he got up and started to come at me again but then stopped and started crying, and I said, “Son, I’m sorry, I didn’t know …” but it was too late. He looked at me as though he were staring at a corpse. Then he shook his head and walked in the kitchen and helped his mother to a chair.

  “We move tomorrow, Red,” Wanda said.

  “I didn’t mean it,” I said. “Look, I’ve been trying … You know that.”

  “You ever hit me or my mother again, Dad,” Ace said, “I’ll kill you.”

  He sounded like me when he said that. They held on to each other, and though I wanted to go to them, I turned and walked into the living room and sat down heavily in the old recliner and didn’t say a word.

  • • •

  By midmorning they had both moved out. I even offered to help them and kept talking about how I’d come around and check up on them later, but neither of them would hardly talk to me.

  Wanda kept moving fast, kept her eyes down to the floor, wouldn’t say a thing. I knew I’d bette
r leave her alone.

  But I caught Ace looking at me a couple of times, and when I finally got ahold of him packing in his room, he was shaking and about ready to fall apart.

  I leaned in the doorway, looked at him, and felt my hands tremble.

  “Damn it, son, you know I love you. You can’t just leave.”

  He said nothing but threw his underwear and colored T-shirts into his bag.

  “Ace,” I said, my voice cracking. “Listen to what I’m saying, son.”

  He stopped then and stared at me, so clear-eyed and in such pain that it was hard to meet his gaze.

  “I do listen to you, Dad. I’ve always listened to you. The first thing you taught me was that it’s not what a man says so much as what he does.”

  He began putting his T-shirts in the bag again, and I felt as though I was burning up from the inside.

  “That’s true, son,” I said.

  “I had a game last night, Dad. But you were too busy running around with that whore, Crystal.”

  There was an opening in his tone, so I went and sat down on the bed, watched him slowly drop his rolled socks into his grip.

  “Look, son. I mean what I said. It is what a man does. But sometimes a man doesn’t do the right thing, and if you can see his point of view some … “

  He turned away from me, looking out over the backyard at the frozen mulberry tree. Icicles hung from its bowed branches.

  “You mean because you got fired? Is that your excuse for everything?”

  I didn’t say anything but sat still, trying to calm my breath.

  “No,” I said. “It’s not my excuse. I don’t have an excuse for missing your game. And I can’t explain to you about Crystal either. Things happen sometimes to a man, things he didn’t count on, like getting older, like being broke, and if they hadn’t happened all together, or at a certain time, he would have handled them better … but just now …”

  My voice trailed off, and I dropped my head. I didn’t want to cry in front of him, didn’t want to beg.

  When I finally got myself collected enough to look up, Ace was crying and shaking his head.

  “I know it’s hard for you, Dad. But it’s hard on Mom too, and she hangs in there.”

  I wanted so badly to reach out to him, to take him in my arms like I did when he was a kid, pat his head and tell him it was going to be all right.

  “Dad,” he said, the tears streaming down his face. “You used to be somebody in this neighborhood. Look at you now.”

  “Ace,” I said, but I didn’t know what else to say. Was I supposed to tell him I had become nothing because of the parking lot. Because of the gray hairs in my head, because of the fears that set a man straight up in bed at five in the morning?

  “And last night. You hit me and Mom. I never thought you could He cried quietly, and I reached out for his arm, but he snapped it back and grabbed his suitcase off the bed. He started on an end run around me, and when I got up quickly he jerked as though I were going to hit him again. The fear in his eyes tore through me, and I backed away.

  Slowly, I reached out to him and squeezed his shoulder.

  “I know you got to go now, son,” I said. “But I’m going to get all this taken care of. I mean it. We’re going to all be a family again, Ace. I swear that to you.”

  He shut his eyes and nodded his head, and I pulled him to me and felt his whole body shudder.

  “Ace,” I said. “God, I’ll make it up to you, son.”

  He clung to me then, like a little boy, saying, “Dad, Dad,” over and over again, and then he stopped and pushed me away.

  “Dad, I got to go. Mom can’t make it alone. She needs me.”

  “I know,” I said.

  He walked past me then and quickly down the steps. I heard Wanda say something about getting a trunk, then I went to the window and saw them piling their luggage into Ruth’s car. The snow was falling on them both, covering them up. Ace walked around the side of the car and opened the door for his mother. Then he turned and looked up at me. His eyes were blank, hollow now, as though he were beyond tears.

  Then he walked around the driver’s side, got in, and slowly they drove away.

  I don’t know a fancy way to put it. Just that it killed me.

  • • •

  Except that I wasn’t dead. In fact I felt too alive, like a screaming note held on the guitar. For a week I walked through the house, staring at the dying hanging plant, opening and shutting the refrigerator to get my beer, tossing down my whiskey by 10 A.M. I would sit in a chair and try to think which way to go, where to look next for a job, but the electric fear and strangeness of all things familiar kept me prisoner in the house. Nothing looked or felt the same without them there. The smallest memory—Ace spinning his ball or Wanda smiling at me from the backyard while she hung out the wash—was like a surgeon’s scalpel digging into my brain and heart.

  I avoided listening to the radio at all or any of my old records for fear they would start the memory machine rolling out of control. I grew wary of Ace’s room, shut it off, and avoided even looking at the door itself as I walked down the stairs.

  The cellar of my house was a haunted place. All those eyes down there, watching me, judging me, and when I tried to get out of my own head, by calling Dog, his alcoholic babble would frighten me into hanging up.

  I tried calling Ruth two or three times, but Wanda wouldn’t talk to me. And Ace was always out. I wanted badly to go up to basketball, take him aside, and win him over, but I didn’t dare it for fear of what I might do if he resisted.

  So for the first week I stayed home, watching television, getting loaded until I was senseless. Afraid to go out to look for a job and not knowing where to go in any case.

  At last I started up on unemployment again, but by the middle of the week most of the check was gone for booze.

  By the eighth day I no longer moved from the bedroom. I woke up, reached for what was left of last night’s bottle, and lay there in the stinking dirty sheets, watching “The Honeymooners,” “Let’s Make a Deal,” “Leave It to Beaver,” “General Hospital,” anything that came on.

  I say “watched them,” but that doesn’t really get it because they were really nothing more than part of my dreams. Staying there in bed for twelve and sixteen hours at a time, I never really woke up at all but lost myself in dreams of my youth, games I scored baskets in against Southern, and days walking Ace in the park, and Wanda and I making love out in the country by Pretty Boy Dam. Then when the memories would start to fade and I would realize the house was empty, that down there on the table there was nothing but a bowl of waxed fruit, I would fade into the TV shows, look at those old, comfortable characters, and pretend to myself that it wasn’t any different now. Ralph Kramden and Ward Cleaver and Monty Hall and me, all the same guys, in the same room, with the wrinkled bedclothes, the twisted sheets, the quilt thrown on the floor.

  I don’t know which day it was I dropped the bottle of booze as I fell back into my sleep. But when I awoke I had to take a piss so badly I leaped out of the bed and stepped onto two pieces of glass. The pain shot through me so deeply that it startled me back to life. I looked down at the old hook rug and saw the blood seeping into the floor. I saw the widening red stain and thought of Billy Bramdowski, and then I reached down and picked up the glass and pressed it against my wrist hard, until blood began to squirt out and run down my fingers.

  Then I remembered Billy Bramdowski’s kid, with Billy’s brains all over the garden trowel.

  I stared at my room, at the six or seven glasses I’d brought up from the kitchen and the balled Kleenex which hadn’t made it to the trash can. At my face in the mirror, heavy, jowled, with a four-day gray-and-black beard. My eyes hollowed out, blackened beneath like some zombie from a horror movie.

  The blood kept pouring from my feet, making sticky, thick pools between my toes. I sat down on the bed, ripped a piece of sheet off, and began pulling out the glass.

  An hour later
I was bandaged up, in my Chevy, and on my way down to the Paradise. It was wrong, but Crystal was the only one left. And if I didn’t move from the bedroom, it might have been Ace who found me lying across the bed.

  She wasn’t there when I arrived, only Henry sitting at the bar, staring into one of his subs.

  “Hi ya, Red,” he said. “What’s happening?”

  “Doing real good, Henry. How about yourself?”

  “Well, I don’t know. Still working down Mona Lisa Pizza. About killing myself. Vinnie’s putting more stuff in there … all kinds of sculptures and stuff from Rome … got him a beer garden, getting ready for this summer. It’s hard, but I ain’t complaining. They gimme all the free pizza I can eat. Got this one called a Roman Pizza … There’s mozzarella and anchovies and … “

  She came in then, through the back door, but she wasn’t alone. There was a young guy with her, with curly black hair and a face like an Italian movie star. He had a tattoo of an anchor on his arm, and a good, strong build. She didn’t see me but slipped into “our” booth with him.

  Behind me Henry droned on about the pizza, but I just sat there, stunned.

  Crystal hugged and kissed the dark-skinned guy, and he ran his long fingers through her hair and kissed her on the ear.

  Then she reached down and rubbed her hand on his leg, and I felt myself getting down from the bar.

  Henry saw me and suddenly grabbed my wrist.

  “Don’t, Red, you don’t need any more trouble.”

  I looked at Henry’s sad, lopsided face and saw something decent and bright behind his clown’s jowls.

  I nodded to him and just stood there while the dark-skinned guy kissed Crystal again, walked around past me and out the door. As she waved good-bye to him she saw me, and her hand froze in the air.

  “Red, you want to drink one with me?” Henry said. “I got some money.”

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I’m going to talk to Crystal.”

  “You sure?”

  I smiled at him and boxed his ear.

  “You’re a good ole boy, Hen. Thanks. I’m okay.”