Red Baker

by Robert Ward

  I slumped back down on the bed and dropped my head to my chest. There was a pain in my neck, and I gasped for air.

  “Red, honey,” she said and reached down to hold me, but I pushed her away in anger, flailing my arms out wildly, striking her shoulder with the back of my hand.

  “Get away from me,” I yelled in a voice I didn’t know.

  “Red, what is it?”

  But I shook my head. “Nothing,” I said. “Nothing.” Then I went downstairs, found my boots, hunting jacket, and snow shovel, and started working on the steps.

  It was getting late, and I had to make it to my new job.

  My job at Harborplace was only half a cut above the parking lot. Sometimes I painted over graffiti and other times I used a hammer and nails, but mostly I went around the docks carrying a stick with a nail on the end of it, picking up greasy waxed paper that the tourists and big shots left on the ground after lunch. People walked by me as though I was invisible, as dead as Dog.

  Wanda never complained, and we even managed to eat lunch together, but I couldn’t stand the shame of it. Once a couple of guys I knew who were still working down Bethlehem Steel came down for an afternoon with their families. One guy named Becker was real nice to me, talked to me as I stood there with my bag and my stick, but I noticed that he only looked at my eyes, and I thought that was exactly how I’d looked at the man with no nose. I’d tried only looking at his eyes and forehead, pretending he wasn’t deformed.

  The thought did something to me, opened up some place in my brain that had never been touched before.

  I was like a cripple now, a war vet, or one of the “unfortunates” they always used to talk about in church. “And don’t forget to help the unfortunates.” It made me a little crazy, but for some reason I didn’t flip out. Instead I just got quiet and began to look around.

  I think it was the third or fourth day there when this happened. I had to work late, so Wanda took the car. I got on the bus, half dead from washing the hallways, smelling all that fastfood grease on my skin (and remembered how it sickened me when Wanda came home smelling of crabs).

  Three black men sat in the back of the half-lit yellow bus, passing a bottle of cheap wine back and forth, and I wanted to go back there and drink with them all the way to the end of the line.

  Half asleep, I thought of Crystal—gone down the highway, her new life with Tony already started. Maybe she was finally singing in some classy Miami club. Or maybe Tony was already gone and she was dancing for some other Vinnie in some new dive.

  I stared half dead out the window at the bright new city, with its huge office buildings all lit up and empty, and suddenly I felt that it was a strange place—not Baltimore at all. What’s more, I suddenly realized that it had been a strange place for a long time now, but because I lived in Highlandtown, because I had my job, my family, and my friends, I hadn’t noticed how much it had all changed. Of course I knew it was different, more built-up, but none of that really affected me or my family. But now for the first time I saw things as they really were. I saw that the city had been pushing me and my friends all along, and we had been so caught up in just staying alive, that we had never once pushed back.

  The bus turned down Broadway and took a left on Eastern Avenue, and then the row houses were on my right and Patterson Park on my left. I thought for a minute that being back in the neighborhood would make me feel better. But it didn’t. Because I knew that it wasn’t just the mill that was shut down. It was everything I had known and loved about Highlandtown since I was a kid, even the streets and houses themselves. Our whole way of life was going to go.

  I knew it the same way I used to know my jump shot was going in. I was that sure.

  I guess I was dazed by these thoughts because after the bus pulled away, I didn’t see them for maybe three seconds.

  But there they were, just behind me in their black Caddy—Frankie with his bandaged-up head, Joey, and in the back seat Vinnie.

  I started to walk fast toward the end of the block, thinking if I could make it to the corner, I could cross and run like hell for the park, but I hadn’t gotten more than a couple of feet, when they squealed up in front of me. Frankie and Joey jumped out of the car, and when I turned to look the other way, I saw Vinnie standing there with a gun.

  I turned back toward Vinnie’s two goons, thinking that if I could get one good punch in, I could bolt through them, and Vinnie wouldn’t have a clear shot.

  But I was dead-tired, and I never even saw it when Frankie bashed me on the side of the head with his gun. I started to go down, but Joey held me up, and then Vinnie kicked me in the balls. I groaned and fell onto the pavement, and somebody else kicked me in the ribs.

  “That’s enough,” Vinnie said.

  He reached down and grabbed me by the hair, and I could smell his tomato-and-sausage breath.

  “This is as good as it’s gonna get, Baker,” he said. “You got three days to gimme back the money. Three days, asshole.”

  “Let me have him,” Frankie said.

  “No,” Vinnie said, “that’s all.”

  “Good night, Red,” he said. He stepped on my left hand as he got into the car.

  In the morning I told Wanda I’d pulled my back out the day before at work. When she left, I called Choo Choo.

  He wasn’t in. “Out in the field,” the woman cop told me.

  I went down the cellar and avoided looking at the walls. I went to the liquor cabinet, got out the bottle of Wild Turkey, and took three quick shots.

  I hadn’t had much to drink since Christmas Eve, and the liquor hit me fast, giving me a sense of confidence. To be honest, I should say “false sense of confidence,” but for what I was going to do, I’d need all the help I could get.

  I took the bottle upstairs, paced the floor, then called Choo Choo again.

  “Detective Gerard is out on a case. He picked up your message. I’m sure he’ll get back to you.”

  I was sure he wouldn’t.

  I wanted to work up a hatred for him, but it wasn’t in me. He’d held up his end as well as he could, but when Dog died on the Mona Lisa Parking Lot, there was never any doubt Vinnie would come looking for me.

  Who else would pull a job like that with Dog? Little Jackie Gardner?

  The thought made me laugh out loud. Laugh in a way that was crazy, not my voice at all, but Dog’s, laughing through me.

  I had another drink, then went up to the attic. I turned over the packing crate and watched all the Styrofoam packing balls roll across the floor. Then I reached into the bottom and pulled out my gun.

  I sat down in an old broken rocker and held the gun in my hand. My ribs ached, and I thought two fingers in my left hand might be broken.

  But my right hand was fine. I took another drink, then went quickly down the steps, grabbed my coat, and left the house.

  • • •

  I wiped the snow off Weaver’s window and looked inside the crab house. A couple of businessmen were surprised when I knocked on the glass. They glanced up but didn’t like what they saw and quickly looked back down at their plates.

  Finally I caught Wanda’s eye, but she looked so startled by my appearance that she almost dropped her tray of food.

  She nodded to me slowly, and I walked away from the window fast, putting my hands into my pockets and curling my right one around the gun.

  The snow came swirling around me and around the ships tied up at the dock. It covered over everything with a clean whiteness so that it was impossible to tell where the land ended and the water began.

  Across the way it swirled around the window of the new World Trade Center, and I could see people looking out the windows at it, office workers trapped inside, wondering if they were going to make it home.

  I wiped the snow off the bench by the dock and sat down. The concrete was cold on my ass, and I began to shiver, but I sat there anyway, staring at the old tourist boat, the Port Welcome. Dog and I had gone out on that boat during Senior Prom We
ek with Carol and Wanda, twenty-two years ago. I remembered the blue and green party lights on deck, the sound of the Van Dykes, this black rhythm-and-blues band playing “Annie Had A Baby,” and all of us dancing under the Chesapeake moon.

  I shut my eyes and shook my head, and then I felt Wanda’s hand on my shoulder.

  “Red, what are you doing here? Are you all right?”

  I looked up at her kind face through the swirling snow and reached up and cupped her cheek in my hand.

  She sat down next to me and I pulled her close.

  “Wanda,” I said, “I want you and Ace to leave town.”

  She jerked away from me as if I’d hit her in the face.

  “Why, Red?” she said.

  “It’s Vinnie,” I said, looking out at the harbor. “He thinks I stole his money. He’s not going to let it go.”

  “Oh yeah?” she said.

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out the gun.

  “What’s that for?”

  I’d expected her to gasp, to slap my face or in some way lose control, but she was cool.

  “There’s no other way,” I said.

  She stared at me for a long time.

  “Red, you have to say it.”

  “Say what?”

  She said nothing but wiped the flakes of snow from my eyes.

  “Tell me.”

  “It was supposed to be a walk,” I said. “I thought it would get us through.”

  “Oh Red,” she said.

  “I keep seeing Dog’s face, Wanda. I keep hearing him scream.”

  Then I told her all of it, how Choo Choo set it up, how he gave me his word that Vinnie couldn’t get back.

  I was surprised how little time it took to tell. Only a few sentences really. In the first one Dog was alive, and in the last one he was dead.

  Wanda stared at me and then back at the restaurant, where a waitress in a brown dress was standing at the door.

  “Wanda, are you all right?”

  Wanda turned and waved at her. The woman lingered a second and went back inside.

  “So now you go after Vinnie?” she said.

  “I don’t see any other way.”

  “Red,” she said, “you do that and you’re just like him. There’s no difference. But I know you, hon. You’re a good man. You can’t hide from that.”

  The words stunned me, made me feel as though I had altogether lost my way.

  “You’ve got to leave, Wanda. Take Ace and go. I’ve got to settle this. You see that?”

  “No,” she said, “I don’t see it. I don’t see Ace and I going anywhere without you. Do you think I came back here in order to leave?”

  “You knew?”

  “Vinnie won’t hurt Ace or me. He always liked me in school.”

  “What?” I was shocked by the vanity in her voice.

  Then I understood.

  “You came back to protect me? Wanda, you don’t understand.”

  “But I do, Red,” she said. “I know you’re what Ace and I got. When I left you, it about killed me. I won’t throw you away, you hear me. And you won’t talk like this again.”

  She reached down and took the gun out of my hand. She looked at it for a long time as the snow covered her face and hair, making her look like a graveyard angel. Then she stood up and walked away from me.

  Stunned, I followed her. When she reached the end of the pier, she dropped the gun into the water. It sank right away.

  She turned to me.

  “Red, can you get the money?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then do it. We’re leaving Baltimore.”

  She stared at me, so serious and strong that I could only nod my head. Then she walked past me by the bare trees, through the snow, and back to work.

  As I write this, the sun is coming up over the desert. Wanda is working as a secretary for the university in El Paso, and Ace is going to the local high school, where he’s starring on the Thunderbirds basketball team. Me, I got a job through my friend Terry O’Connell making metal detectors for stores and airports. Helping the world be safe from the bad guys who take what they need.

  All my life I’ve lived by the water. Worked with Dog on the harbor, spent every vacation down the ocean, or crabbing in the Chesapeake Bay.

  I never thought I could survive without the sound of lapping water nearby, without being able to smell the salt air.

  Here on the desert outside El Paso, it’s dry, burning dry, the sun boring into you like it’s got some kind of score to settle. The cactus, the tumbleweeds, the cows and chickens in the Mexican backyards—all of them are parched, walking in circles as if they’re trying to quench an unending thirst.

  At first I didn’t think I could stand it.

  But I’m making it. For myself and my family.

  It won’t ever be easy. I hate my job checking the parts as they roll off the assembly line. It’s work for a robot, and by next year they’ll probably have one.

  Which is why I’m going to computer school. Classes begin in two weeks, and just thinking about it makes me want to take a drink. But I haven’t yet, and I don’t think I’ll start. If Ace can handle it, so can I. He misses his friends back in the neighborhood, misses Patterson Park worse than I do. But he doesn’t bitch about it, and he’s playing ball, showing these southwestern boys how we do it in Baltimore. Averaging fourteen a game and nine rebounds.

  Wanda misses home too, but she loves working over at the university.

  So we’re going to make it.

  But sometimes I find myself feeling strange. On a good night I walk out on the desert, look up at the millions of stars, and think I can see Dog’s face. Or see his shadow just beyond the next dark cactus.

  Or hear his voice laughing at me, feel him punching me on the arm.

  When that happens out here, in the terrible dry heat, I take off my shirt and walk for miles at a time. Walk under the round, yellow moon and brilliant white stars, and then I hear Doggie’s voice, his great laugh, and I begin to run fast, faster, and the sweat pours off my face and chest, and something explodes within me, some love and terror too, for my family, for Wanda’s strangeness, for old Dog, my dear, dead friend.

  And when I stop, with my chest pounding, the dust blowing up behind me, it’s almost like I know something.

  Something about friends and what sets one man apart from another. Not brains or money but what he will risk for love.

  In his dim way, Dog loved me well. He lived to protect me, so I might live better for both of us.

  But what gets me sometimes is what Wanda said to me that last day at Weaver’s.

  Am I the same kind of guy as Vinnie or Choo Choo? Or am I the good man my wife and son know and love?

  Maybe that’s what I’m doing out here. Like old Job after all. Living through the heat to find out.

  Is there something out there, watching, judging, the stars mere knotholes from which some haunted face peers through?

  Is Dog out there now too, watching with his fierce, tender eyes?

  I still can’t say.

  But I know this:

  When I stop running and stand there among the cactus and tumbleweeds, I sometimes climb up on the great rock a mile or so behind our house. I light a cigarette and watch the smoke trail upward through the desert moonlight, and I think of Baltimore and Dog. I feel his spirit, the spirit of our whole dying neighborhood, deep inside me, and sometimes I laugh out loud.

  Then I stare down the flat desert path and see the blue lights from our kitchen shining through the night. I flick the cigarette out into the dirt, jump to the dry ground. And begin my long, tough run toward home.

  Tyrus Books, a division of F+W Media, publishes crime and dark literary fiction—offering books from exciting new voices and established, well-loved authors. Centering on deeply provocative and universal human experiences, Tyrus Books is a leader in its genre.

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  Copyright © 1985 by Robert Ward

  Cover images 123rf.com/©Laurin Rinder

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  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction.

  Any similarities to people or places, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  eISBN 10: 1-4405-3389-X

  eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-3389-1

  This work has been previously published in print format by:

  The Dial Press

  an imprint of Doubleday & Company, Inc.

  Print ISBN: 0-385-19538-9