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Authors: Robert Ward

Tags: #FICTION / Urban Life, #FICTION / Crime

Red Baker (6 page)

BOOK: Red Baker
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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.”

I began to sweat a little then. I looked behind him at the high window which looked out on one of the three big buildings. Through their windows I could see people that looked like great hunched birds working away, moving slowly, bent in half as if they were in a dull, steady pain. I thought of my dream and felt the back of my throat get dry.

“What
did
happen to your basketball career, Red?”

“Nothing much. I wasn’t good enough to play pro.”

He stopped and opened his eyes like one of those Japanese actors they got on public television.

“Red Baker not good enough? I don’t remember it that way. It seemed to me you were always being touted as the best player Maryland produced in twenty years. I always wondered why you didn’t go to college on a scholarship.”

“I was married, had a kid,” I said.

“Yes, I know,” he said, walking back and forth. “I’m aware of that. But a man of your talents … they’d make excuses for a player like that. They would have probably given the newlyweds a house of their own.”

I was starting to get uneasy. I didn’t mind all the sarcasm, but he was leading me somewhere.

“Look, Pete, I don’t see what this has to do with me getting a job, if there
is
a job.”

He picked up a paperweight, one with Harborplace in a snowstorm inside of it. He shook it up and watched the snow settle on the small trapped city.

“I think it might have a great deal to do with it. It seems to me that I remember something about you and your friend, what was his name, the big, stupid one … Dog? Yes, I remember something about you losing your chance to get a basketball scholarship because of some holdup you were involved in. Isn’t that correct?”

I sat still and put my hands in my lap. I took deep breaths and told myself to do nothing, to say nothing. Get it under control, Red, because I wanted to go for him now. I wanted to take his head and bash it with the paperweight a few times.

“There was no holdup,” I said.

“No? That’s not how I remember it, Red. This is no joking business I’m speaking of. If I hire someone who was in trouble with the law, there could be serious repercussions. People might think I didn’t live up to the position of trust and authority the company has chosen to hand over to me.”

I kept my breathing regular, looked him straight in the eye.

“I need work, Pete.”

“Well, Red, I would be less than honest if I didn’t tell you there is a job. It’s in the stuffing division. Eight dollars an hour. But I’d have to know more about this … incident … before I could recommend that you be hired.”

“I was eighteen years old, Pete. It was nothing.”

“If it was nothing … why did you spend two years in the Maryland State Training School for Boys?”

“I was only there for seven months,” I said. I sat perfectly still and looked at him. He was like a long white slug, staring down at me, still working his soft jaw with his flabby hand.

“I’d have to hear the story, Red, before I could recommend you.”

I looked down at my soaked feet and back up at the gray sky, which pressed down on the building like a great lead shield.

“It was a gag. Me and Dog, we were drunk one night, just out tooling around in his old Buick, and we decided for a laugh to rob the Little Tavern. It was just a joke. We went in and told them to put up their hands. We didn’t even take the goddamned money. We just stole all the hamburgers and sodas in the place and gave ‘em out on the street.”

His face lit up now, and his tongue curled around his lips. He rubbed his stomach like he was trying to trim off the fat.

“Did you use a
gun?”
he said in a high-pitched voice.

“Yeah, but without bullets. It was a gag.”

“A gun,” he said. He seemed to be off somewhere by himself, in one of his Pete Porter fantasies.

But he snapped back out of it quickly.

“That’s all that happened? That’s not the way I heard it. I heard you were involved in some other robberies.
Real
ones. I mean, I don’t imagine they send boys to the state correctional institution for that kind of prank.”

“You heard wrong,” I said, and there was menace in my voice. He had finally drawn it out of me. In another minute I was going to be across the desk.

“Red
Baker,” he said, almost singing the words. “Redddd Bakkkkker. Well, I’ll tell you what, Red, I’m going to have to give this some thought. Yes, I’m going to have to give this some
careful
consideration.”

“You are?”

He turned and smiled at me slowly. “Don’t you approve of my methods? What do you think this is, Baker, high school?”

I didn’t say anything. I knew he hadn’t wanted to say that. He was enjoying playing the big man, but it had slipped out anyway.

“There’s no job, is there?” I said suddenly, knowing it as sure as I know steel. It caught him off guard, and he gave a nervous little laugh.

“As a matter of fact, no, there isn’t,” he said with a look of surprise on his face. Then he started to laugh. A long, high whistle.

BOOK: Red Baker
4.39Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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