Red Baker (16 page)

“Yeah,” I said. “But from where I’m sitting, having your job looks pretty good, Choo.”

“I guess it does, Red, I guess it does. It all depends which side of the street you’re on. Like the geniuses say, it’s all relative. I got my debts, I got my alimony, I got my child support, and I like to live maybe a little higher than I should. The way I figure it, you’re here for a short time, you know, what with all the shit in the air and the heart attacks and the goddamned poisons in the food, you might as well make the best of it.”

By now he had gotten me my second drink, and I was starting to feel kind of warm toward old Choo Choo. Alter all, we did play ball together, and really, he wasn’t the worst of guys.

“Listen, Red, I hear you’re working over at the parking lot. That must be tough.”

“It ain’t so bad, Choo Choo.”

Choo Choo smiled and shook his head.

“That’s why you’re a good man, Red, you don’t bitch and complain a lot. That’s why you got a good rep. You’re a man people can depend on. They did a damned stupid thing letting you go down the mill.”

“Yeah,” I said, downing the drink. I don’t know why, maybe all the tension in the day, but those two drinks hit me hard. I never have been a big drinker anyway, but right then I was beginning to feel very relaxed. And maybe a little sorry for myself too.

“Twelve years down the fucking drain,” I said to the table as much as to him.

“It ain’t right,” Choo Choo said. “Puts a strain on a man. And you with such a great kid. I hear he’s going to be the best guitar player in the state.”

“Yeah,” I said, “if we can afford to get him into Peabody. They got these scholarships, but they tell me he could only get a partial one. Still, way too much money.”

“Yeah, but Peabody, that’s the best, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I want him to go to the best.”

Drink number three had come from old Slap One-Eye, and I was already halfway through it and working on my third beer. I still couldn’t understand why I was feeling so loaded, then it came to me—I had taken a little of Dr. Raines’s pill that afternoon, right before I got off work, figuring it would get me up to talk to Dog.

“Red, listen, I know how you feel about me,” Choo Choo said, “but I’m a friend of yours. You should know that.”

“Hey, I know that.”

“No, don’t bullshit me. You think I’m bad news. But we all got our problems. Listen, I got something you should consider. If you don’t want to hear about it, though, you just say so and we’ll drop it. Because I like you, and I don’t want to jeopardize our friendship. But this is a good thing. Nobody gets hurt, and the people that lose, well, maybe they deserve to.”

I could feel my heart pumping faster again. I remembered the times Dog, Choo Choo, and I had pulled a couple of small jobs when we were kids. Nauronski’s Candy Store, which got us sixty bucks. And the Music Mart, where we mainly took records. The Little Tavern and then the job at Sears, which messed up my record.

“Look, Choo Choo, I appreciate the drinks and the offer, but I can’t do anything that would screw up my family, man. It’s not the same as when we were kids, you know? I mean, my son, if anything went wrong, it would kill him. You hear me?”

Choo Choo nodded his head and reached into his bag of cheese curls. A couple dropped on his lap, and he swept them away onto the floor into a puddle of cold shoe water.

“I hear you, Red. But I know how it’s been for you. Christmas is coming up too. This is a walk, I mean it. And we could net maybe fifteen.”

“Fifteen hundred?” I asked.

“Thou, Red. There’s one more guy, so we’re talking a minimum of five thou apiece. We’re talking maybe an hour. Minimum danger. I cased it already. A walk.”

When I heard that, my mouth got dry. I drank down my beer and called for another drink and tossed that one back, and then I was drunk, tired, and tingling in my hands.

“I need to know in two weeks, Red. That’s all. You got plenty of time. If you’re interested, call me at the station, we meet here, and we’ll run it down.”

“Who’s the third guy?” I asked.

“You in?”

I wondered if he could hear my heart beating. It was that loud in my ears.

“No,” I said.

“I’m sorry to hear that, Red, but I’m a determined man. There’s other guys I could get. They’d be lined up for this, but the reason I haven’t ever been nailed, and don’t plan on being, is I only work with guys I trust. You call me if you’re in, okay, Red?”

I nodded my head and finished the last whiskey and beer, and then a worse panic overtook me.

“Holy shit,” I said. “What time is it?”

“Lemme see. I got seven forty-five.”

“Christ, I got to get to Ace’s recital tonight. He’s got this jazz band at the school, and I have to make it. Jesus, if I don’t, I’m a dead man.”

“Where’s he playing?”

“Over at St. Bart’s, you know. Christ, that’s thirty minutes away by cab, and with the goddamned snow, there’s no way.”

“Yeah,” Choo Choo said. “You could maybe get there by cab at say … nine.”

I jumped out of my seat, drunk and shaking.

“Shit,” I said. “I’m fucked.”

Choo Choo smiled and got up too. He looked over at Slap, who shook his head. Choo Choo hadn’t picked up a tab in this lifetime.

“You’re going to be there by eight-fifteen, partner,” he said. “Let’s go.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Hey, Red,” Choo Choo said, “what are friends for?”

• • •

Then we were swirling through the narrow row-house streets, the siren blasting and the red light flashing, me drunk and afraid and hating Choo Choo for roping me into goddamned Slap’s in the first place and half loving him for riding like a bat out of hell so I might just possibly make Ace’s part of the program. As the snow came down in bigger and bigger flakes and Choo’s cruiser fishtailed around the corners, smashing into the back ends of parked cars and narrowly missing people crossing the street at Broadway, I gave up a little, silent, drunken prayer that Ace’s band wouldn’t go on first.

But on top of all my worries, I have to admit that it was exciting being in the car with crazy, big-lipped Choo Choo, hearing the police radio reports and watching all the cars pull over to let us by.

“Son of a bitch, ain’t this it?” Choo Choo said, stepping down on the pedal even though the streets were getting to be pure glass.

“Jesus, watch out for that kid,” I said.

“No problem, Red,” he said, as cool as he could be and power gliding that baby right past this teenager whose mouth hung open in pure terror.

“Reminds me of the old days, Red. Remember the drag strip out there by Westport? That’s what I always wanted to be, you know? A stock car guy. Man, let me be old Fireball Roberts booming around Daytona. That’s the life. Only became a cop ‘cause it seemed like the next most exciting thing after I got married. See, shoulda gone with my first instinct, ‘cause now Martha is living in Syracuse and I’m stuck here on the force. Got to go with what you’re best at, Red. You know that?”

“Right,” I said, looking at the clock on the dash. Eight-thirteen and we were still five blocks away. Long blocks, filled with cars stalling, horns honking, but old Choo Choo didn’t even seem to notice. He hit the siren even louder, sending shock waves through my eardrums, and when we got to the gridlock he just took that son of a bitch up on the curb and drove half tilted over, screeching and sliding and fishtailing his way until the street was open again in front of us, and then, somehow, seventeen minutes later there we were, sitting half turned around in the street at St. Bart’s.

By this time I was in such a daze and so loaded I could barely walk.

“You getting out or what?” he said. He was laughing now, and so was I, a wild, crazy laugh, which I had no more control over than Dog did his.

“Jesus, thanks, man. I’ll see you.”

“Call me soon, Red,” he said. “We’re a real good team. I’d come in with you, but I got a feeling Wanda might not like it too much.”

“Thanks again,” I said, pumping his hand, and then I was out the door, falling down in the street, right in a puddle of slush, so my whole front was soaked and old Choo Choo was laughing at me so hard he could hardly breathe.

He turned the cruiser around in mid street, gave me one more blast of the siren, and pulled away.

I
opened the big wooden doors to St. Bart’s, pulling my plaid shirt out of my pants at the same time. It was going to look bad coming to my son’s recital dressed like a wino, but I figured it was better than looking like I just pissed myself.

St. Bart’s is this old, huge Catholic church with high arches and fantastic stained-glass windows and little concrete statues of saints all down the side where the devotional candles are. In the middle are these long rows of pews, and from my distorted and half-crazed perspective it looked like the pews went on forever. Up front, where the priest did his hocus-pocus, they had cleared things away, and there was a band of students and some older guys, one of whom, Joe, was Ace’s music teacher in school. Everything was a great blur to me, and I stood in the back for a few seconds trying to get my focus right, to see if I could spot Ace in the band.

When I finally was able to see through the musty, half-yellow light, I saw that Ace wasn’t up there, and of course I then went into a deeper panic thinking that his group had already played. I took my deep breaths and tried to think of some halfway decent-sounding lies about having to talk to Dog, but I knew that Wanda would check up and find out I’d left there in plenty of time to make it here, and before I could come up with anything else, Wanda was turning and staring at me through her glasses with her dead-faced you’ve-done-it-again expression. The worst part was that she was way up front and had saved me a seat, so I had to tiptoe up the aisle, covered with slush from head to toe like some slime monster from the horror flicks.

I heard people giggling and laughing, and I could hardly blame them, because I must have looked like the original Big Foot of Baltimore. But I kept on creeping and the band kept playing, and I finally squeezed in, dripping water all over people as I went.

“He’s on later, right?” I said with as hopeful a voice as I could muster.

Wanda turned and gave me her grim mouth, thin lips pursed tightly together, and her eyes narrowed to tiny slits of light.

“Christ, I’m sorry,” I said. “There was a problem over at the lot. Some guy lost his car keys and we had to get a locksmith, and I had to get back there because the other guys didn’t know what to do.”

“Sure,” she whispered to me. “If you don’t have the decency to come to your only son’s recital on time, at least don’t ruin it for the rest of these people by lying all the way through it.”

“Hey,” I said in as small a voice as I could, “it’s the truth. Anyway, I didn’t miss him yet, right? He hasn’t played, has he?”

“Shut up, Red, for God’s sake,” said a voice. This wasn’t Wanda but Ruth, her mother, who lived three blocks away and who I avoided at all times like the plague. I hadn’t even seen her sitting next to Wanda, I had been so intent on getting seated, so now I had to give a sweet little smile, which didn’t fool her at all.

“He played in the opening song,” Wanda said, looking straight ahead, “but he’s on for two more. So you can hear him and then tell him about all your problems at the car lot.”

I was still drunk as hell, and I was freezing to boot from the cold water all down my pants, but I figured I deserved that; hell, I deserved whatever she threw at me, even Ruth being there, because I had been such a jerk with Choo Choo.

So I sat stock-still and listened to the jazz band playing something by John Coltrane, a great favorite of Ace’s.

People say that rednecks hate Negro music and only like country and western, but this isn’t true a little bit. I like all kinds of stuff, especially good old groups like the Rolling Stones, but this modern jazz stuff always makes me feel stupid.

It always starts with something recognizable and then seems to go off into outer space, and I guess the idea is to take you on a “Cosmic Journey into the Realms of the Musical Stratosphere,” as the black jazz DJ once put it on Ace’s portable radio.

The thing is, it’s not that I don’t like it, so much as I am afraid of it. I mean it, and after all that’s happened to me, I might as well just tell the truth.

I fear the Musical Stratosphere. For me, earth is about as much as I can handle, what with the Dog turning into a madman, and Choo Choo offering me deals, and Crystal waiting for me to call her. And thinking about the parking lot and how I got to go back there tomorrow, and the horrible number that is going to go down after the concert, and turning forty. See what I need is a music that sort of keeps me hanging in there.

Maybe it just comes down to I am too old for the Musical Fucking Stratosphere, and that’s that.

Anyway, the whole thought of being sent out there with no handgrips just makes me nervous as hell.

But Ace, he’s young, and he’s not afraid, and he’s got this ear for stuff that his daddy never understood, and who the hell knows where he got it, which is one of the only nice surprises about living, that your son or daughter suddenly becomes this other person with these talents and tastes that you don’t have, and you can kind of say, “Well, I did all that shit so they could go on and hook up with the Musical Stratosphere, even if I can’t.”

And damn, if this kid couldn’t.

Because soon after I got there his group came on, and it too was made up of part students and part teachers, but Ace was clearly the kid they were featuring, and they played something called “Green Dolphin Street” first, which I had heard Ace practicing and which is still in the lower part of the Musical Stratosphere as far as I’m concerned. Because I could follow it, sort of, and by God my boy could play. Up and down the scale, and here a soft patch, like green grass in western Maryland, and there a kind of floating bit, like clouds over Beaver Dam, and then this faster part, a duet with the horns, which sounded really fine, kind of trading off things, playing the same notes, really “cooking” (as Ace says), and Ace has this look on his face like he’s just soaring around, and then once near the end he looked right at me, and he smiled, and I don’t know what happened to me, maybe I really was getting as crazed as the Dog, because I started crying, just a little, but it was all I could do not to break out in this great, gasping sob. I felt so proud and full of love and terrified … I had to suck it back, take these little breaths, and grit my teeth, and I wanted to take Wanda’s hand so badly, and finally I did, but just as I knew she would, she pulled away from me, so I had to sit there and watch and keep myself in check.

And that was hard because he was so beautiful up there, played like an angel, but not soft. No, he was strong and tender at the same time, and he was off out there in whatever lovely and scary space he had chosen for himself, filling the great black holes with music, and I had never been so proud or so in love with him in my life.

He was my son, and nothing I had ever done in my whole life, including playing basketball, was as good as what he was doing right there in St. Bart’s Church, and I felt like it was a miracle, a real miracle, and I didn’t care if I was wet anymore, or cold. I was still shaking, but it wasn’t from the weather, it was from love and admiration for Ace.

• • •

The trouble was that everybody was so damned mad at me that I couldn’t just run up to him afterward and throw my arms around him like I wanted to. No, instead I had to act like Humble Joe and let Wanda and Ruth go up first and hug and kiss him, while I stayed in the rear, dripping wet, hair matted to my face, literally twiddling my thumbs and feeling like a fool. Which was fair enough, since that’s what I had acted like. All the other mothers and fathers, some of whom I knew, kept away from me, like I was some kind of plug-ugly who’d just happened to stumble in here hoping he’d cash in on the powdered donuts at the end of the show. A guy I knew from down Bethlehem, Paul O’Brien, who was still working, looked me up and down and smiled one of those some-assholes-never-learn smiles, which made me want to grab the son of a bitch, run him outside, and stick his head down in the street mush.

But I only nodded back to him and kept my eyes on Ace, who was accepting congratulations from Father Mulligan, the short, toupee-wearing priest. Finally, when the crowd had thinned out some, I walked over to Ace.

“God, Dad, what happened to you? You have a car wreck or something?”

“No, just slipped on the ice trying to get here, son. Couldn’t get the car started and had to get a ride. Old Choo Choo got me here fast, the siren was blasting … you shoulda seen us.”

None of which I wanted to say. I wanted to tell him how he had it, how he was on his way, and how I’d get him there somehow. Somehow I’d get him off of Aliceanna Street to places where people could hear him play, because he was that good, and I was proud of him and loved him more than my own life.

But I was able to say nothing more, and Ace gave me that curious smile, the one I’d been seeing too much of lately. Like he didn’t believe me, like he was just starting to know what a liar I was.

“Well, I’m just glad you made it, Dad. I hope you liked it.”

There was something cool and distant in his voice, and I thought this kid is fifteen and I got to be straight with him.

“I loved it, son,” I said. “I really did, and don’t you worry, you’re going to get to go to Peabody or wherever else you want.”

“Sure, Dad,” Ace said, smiling, and the disbelief in his voice just about killed me.

He turned away from me then, and I thought of how just two years ago anything I told him, any story at all, he believed it, and he looked at me with these great big eyes, like I was Brooks Robinson or something, but now … now it was like he was drifting out there with his music, away from me, and I thought of losing him, how it was going to feel, and I wanted to reach out and grab him and say something that would make it all like it used to be, just one magical moment that would make us father and son, like we were when he was little and I would take him to O’s games, and he’d say, “I bet you could field the ball like Brooks when you played, huh, Dad?” God, I know that was corny, but it killed me to have him know I let him down.

And I had. I had let all of them down.

Ruth was tight-lipped, and Wanda stood with her arms folded, and then finally, after what seemed like a long, terrible hour, we walked out of the church and caught a cab going home.

• • •

“Hey,” I said when we got to the house. “Let’s make some hot chocolate and maybe pop some popcorn and watch a little tube.” Ace looked at me and shook his head.

“Nah, Dad, I got to get up early tomorrow for school. Got to study my history and then get some sleep. See you tomorrow.”

I went over to hug him, but he gave a little wave of his hand and went up the steps real fast.

Wanda sat on the couch and stared at the TV, though there was nothing on. That made me so nervous I turned it on and stared directly at the face of Ted Koppel, the news guy with the wig. She took one look at it and walked upstairs, slowly, not so much as blinking at me when she left.

I sat there staring at soundless Ted for as long as I could, and then I got up and turned him off. He was still out there in the world somewhere, being serious, but I couldn’t use the world’s sorrows to relax me tonight.

Instead I went upstairs, expecting Wanda to be crumpled on the bed, still dressed in her church clothes.

Instead, when I opened the bedroom door she was standing there in this short little Chinese robe that came just about halfway down her thighs. She had combed her long blond hair straight back, and she turned and looked at me with bright green eyes and her rich full lips. Except for the worry lines in her forehead, she looked as young and slender and hot as when I first met her back at Patterson years ago.

I looked at her thighs, and I realized that they weren’t so bad at all. She’d always been able to lose weight just like that, and now she looked young and slender, and suddenly she smiled at me in a way that took away my breath.

It caught me off guard, but then women always have.

This was Wanda, Wanda who could drink me under the table when we were younger, Wanda who once leaped out of a speeding car when she found out I was fooling around with another girl and damn near broke her collar bone, Wanda who drove every boy in the school half crazy … Now she turned around, not facing me, staring at herself in the full-length mirror.

“I don’t look that bad, do I, Red?” she said.

“No,” I said, barely able to get my breath. Her legs were strong and long, and I thought of the way they felt wrapped around my back. And how I couldn’t throw that away.

She turned back to me and smiled. She knew she had surprised me again.

“I’ve been thinking, Red, thinking a lot. I was going to give you a long speech, but I don’t think I need to anymore. I’m tired of hearing my own voice. Just look at me a minute, Red.”

She pulled the black silk rope, opening the Chinese robe, and I stared at her beautiful breasts, at her rounded, full nipples, at her stomach, which was still flat. Flatter than mine.

“What do you see?” she said, smiling at me.

“I don’t know what you mean?” I was paralyzed.

“I’ll tell you what you see, Red. You see nothing. You forget how it used to be. I almost forgot it myself until lately. Then I started working out, looking at myself again. I was like those girls you ran around with once. I was young and tight all over, but I’m still not bad … even with the goddamned crab-meat smell sticking to me and thirty-six years and being a mother, which I sometimes get so goddamned sick of I could die. Even with all that I’m not so bad, am I, Red? I can see it in your face. You’re turned on … Well, let me tell you something, you aren’t the only one. When Ace and I walk out of here, it won’t be that bad. You hear me? There’s plenty of guys that would like to have Ace for a son, you hear me? Plenty of them that wouldn’t have to chase after Crystal Lewis down at the Paradise when they had me at home.”

I stood there staring at her. She smiled at me, and in her fury and anger she seemed years younger, like another woman entirely. I wanted to go slap her in the face, the words hurt me so badly, and yet I was paralyzed because she understood where I lived, understood it only too well.