Red Baker (24 page)

A
s 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.