Red Baker (23 page)

Both of them looked up at me. Carol’s eyes were red, and her mascara ran down her cheeks.

“Guy I know. Slipped off the goddamned loading dock down the Boh plant and broke his neck.”

“Calling here so late at night?” Wanda asked.

“Yeah, the poor guy couldn’t sleep. He said he’d called every friend he had. Guess I’m at the end of the list. Sounded a little loaded. You know the old ‘drink and dial’ deal.”

“Dog used to do that,” Carol said.

“Dog,” I said. “Old Doggie.”

“Red,” Carol said. “There’s something else I have to know. I was going to ask you without Wanda around, but I don’t think that’s fair. We’ve all been close for so long, and I don’t want to do anything that would change that. I know Dog would want it that way.”

“Damn straight,” I said, feeling numbed.

“Were you with Dog the night he tried that fool robbery?”

I looked her straight in the eye and then I kind of dramatically switched my gaze to Wanda.

“No,” I said. “He didn’t tell me a damned thing about it. He must have planned it with one of the other boys, Carol. You know I tried to get Doggie to go down to Meyer Clinic, and he threw me out of the house. He was real mad at me. Hell, we were like brothers. In a month or two it would have all blown over and he’d have been telling me what he was up to again, but for now he was hanging out with a lot of guys. It could have been any one of them, I don’t know who. Maybe the cops’ll find out.”

I said all this real even, in a soft supervisor’s voice.

Carol looked at me for quite a while and then nodded her head.

“I believe you, Red. Like Dog always said, you wouldn’t bullshit about the important things.”

“That’s true,” I said.

I looked at Wanda, who had avoided this question like the plague and whose whole face seemed to relax with my answer.

“A lot of people in the neighborhood think it
was
you,” Carol said.

“A lot of people are wrong,” I said. “They’re the same jerks that think the Colts are staying in Baltimore. Believe what I tell you, Carol, it’s the truth.”

“Okay, Red,” she said. “You were his best friend. And I’m glad you got a job.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Trashuman. Wanda’s going to disown me.”

“You know that’s not true,” Wanda said. “And besides, it’s only temporary.”

“Sure,” I said.

Then I heard it. A loud popping sound from upstairs. I could feel my whole body grow tense. The gun was hid up there in the attic. I’d kept it just in case Vinnie didn’t know he was boxed in.

“Ace,” I called, my voice breaking, “what’s going on up there?”

There was no answer, but a second later I heard one of the girls shriek.

“What the hell?” I said. “Hey, Ace, what are you doing?”

“It’s all right, Red, they’re just playing,” Wanda said.

“Yeah, sure,” I said. “But I’m getting tired, you know? I could use a little less noise.”

I got up, tried to be cool, but both girls were shrieking now.

“Ace!” they yelled. “Ace!”

I wanted to take the steps five at a time, but I kept it under control and walked up there, sweat breaking out on my forehead.

“Oh God,” I said silently, “not Ace. Not Ace. I know it was wrong, but not Ace.”

I walked straight to the attic stairs.

“Ace,” I called. “You all right, son?”

There was no answer. Just the sound of the rock-jazz group blasting away.

“Ace,” I said. “Ace?”

The door opened to his bedroom, and Lisa looked out.

She looked white-faced and scared.

“Mr. Baker,” she said.

“What, honey?” I asked. “What is it?”

“Ace,” she said.

“God, what?”

She smiled a little, and the color came back into her face.

“He made this balloon appear in my ear, and then he blew it up,” she said. “It scared the hell out of me. Ace is a magician—you know that, Mr. Baker. He can do all sorts of tricks. We might go to Hollywood together. Be like Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire.”

I sagged against the rose-colored wallpaper as Ace popped his head out of the bedroom door.

“Hey,” he said, “you want to see a trick? I got about fifteen new ones I worked on while we were visiting Grandma’s.”

“No, I think I’ve had about enough tricks for one night,” I said.

“Aw come on, Dad,” Ace said, smiling in that way I could never resist. “Just a couple. I need an assistant. To amaze and entertain our guests.”

I could see he was doing it for them. That’s how he is, my kid.

“Come on, Dad,” he said, bowing like old Mandrake himself. “Step right this way to Ace Baker’s Magic Parlor and be prepared for the fantastic, the mystical, and the marvelous. If you dare!”

“I could use a little of that,” I said. Then I scraped myself off the wall and walked toward Ace and Dog’s squealing, laughing girls, who waited for me in that small, crowded room.

I
t snowed for the next few days, big wet flakes that covered over all the potholes on the block, snowed over the dead mills, and the Paradise, where I didn’t go anymore. Snowed over the white marble steps on our street so fast that even though I got them clean in the morning and laid down salt, they were covered over again in the afternoon.

I got up with Wanda now, and as I looked out the window on Aliceanna Street, I would think about the way Dog and I used to take our sleds to Patterson Park and slide down the hills in between the low-hanging, snow-bent trees, our whole life caught up in that one moment of pure speed, nothing else mattering but shifting the weight, seeing through the great mass of snowflakes, and at the last possible second making the cut that kept us from going out into the car-filled street. Then falling off our sleds on our backs and throwing snow up in the air, Dog giving out yells of pure pleasure and me feeling, even in all that cold, warm and contented, a pure happiness which would make me smile for reasons I could never name.

But now, as Wanda got up and looked at me with sleep in her eyes, I found myself turning away from her, looking quickly out the windows into the street.

“What are you looking at?” I said as she put on her robe.

“I was just thinking how tired you must be, Red. You were up and down all night. Is something wrong?”

“No,” I snapped. “Why does something have to be wrong?”

She put her left hand on her hip and stared at me, then slowly shook her head.

I was about to say something about the snow, how I had to get down there and work on the steps, when I saw them. There across the street were five tombstones staring at me. White tombstones standing in front of five icy doors. I let out a cry, gripped the dresser’s edge.

“Red, what is it?” Wanda said.

I blinked and looked again. Not tombstones at all, just the way the snow had piled on the stoops across the street, all white and shiny, like marble slabs.

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.

M
y 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.

I
n 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 Week 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.