Red Baker (9 page)

“Why are you thanking me?” I said, stroking her cheek.

“Because,” she said softly. “I know you didn’t want to do that. I just had to have it, that’s all.”

“I did too want to do it,” I said.

“You don’t have to lie. I know you didn’t want to. But it’s all right. Did you enjoy it just a little?”

“Hey,” I said. “I loved it. You know I’ve always loved it with you. Remember down the Magothy on the company picnics?”

She smiled then and looked younger, and for the first time I knew I had faked my way through.

“Red,” she said, climbing off of me. “Don’t hurt me, Red, okay?”

“How? What are you talking about?”

“You know, with those girls you and Dog run around with. Don’t let me catch you, Red, okay?”

“Hey,” I said. “You’re crazy. I love you, Wanda. You’re my girl.”

“Really, Red. You sure?”

“Hell yes.” I kissed her on the nose, and she smiled.

“I better get dinner now,” she said, climbing off and pulling up her pants.

“I know I don’t look good, Red, but I’m going on a diet. I’m going to exercise. And jog with Carol.”

“You look fine the way you are,” I said, drawing her to me and hugging her. For the first time I felt her flesh, her own smells.

“Red,” she said, “I have to tell you something. When I heard about Billy today … well, I got so worried. You’d never … “

I kissed her on the forehead and shook my head.

“No way.”

“I don’t mean do what he did, Red. I mean, you’d never go back into … you know … you wouldn’t try anything crazy to get money, would you?”

“Hey, I’m done with that shit. I don’t like jails a whole lot. They got these hard beds, and they don’t have any good-looking women come home and make love to you.”

She smiled at that and held me close.

“I do love you,” she said. “I’m a damned fool for it, but that’s the way it is.”

I kissed her again and held her close to me.

“You’re my baby, Wanda. You always will be.”

“I better get us some dinner, hon.”

Her voice was ten years younger, and she swayed softly as she walked out of the room.

• • •

I couldn’t sleep for shit. I had started drinking, even though I swore to Wanda that I would lay off. I tried to for a while, but the daily grind of going out there in the rat drizzle or the snow, walking the narrow streets, running down leads for work that disappeared as soon as I showed up … well, it just started wearing me down, and in the mornings I would break one of Dr. Raines’s white pills in half, pop it, knowing that it would only give me about five hours of feeling cocky and confident before it made me feel like there was a little man inside my head pulling the skin tight around my eyes.

Sweat poured off of my forehead, down my armpits, speed sweat, and my heart would start missing beats, and I’d have to throw down a couple of Wild Turkeys just to knock it back.

The booze helped at first, but by nighttime I’d be into full-scale weirdness, thinking that I was hearing messages from the television set, my eyes darting across the room whenever Wanda looked me in the eyes.

And I continued to give Ace shit, though I love that boy more than my own fucked-up, burned-down life.

Gave him a hard time about his homework, when he was a B-plus student. “Why aren’t you getting A’s?” Me, a goddamned straight-C student, and made a big deal about not playing his guitar seriously. I nailed him if he missed a night of practice. Or, even when he
did
practice, for playing the same shit over and over, which I knew he had to do to get it down right.

At night I’d put Wanda in bed, and I’d come back down to the cellar, sit there in the knotty pine basement, and start thinking strange thoughts, like the knots in the wood were eyes, all of them staring at me. I didn’t know whose eye, maybe God’s, watching what a complete asshole I was, not able to get any work. Walking from door to door, sweating even though it was freezing out, coming on with my shit-eating grin, and him watching me the whole time from up above, laughing at me like some gangster in “The Untouchables.”

God with big lips and hard black eyes, just laughing at me with this great mocking growl.

• • •

My mom, Dot, saw to it that I got a full plate of religion, hustling me off to church every Sunday, enrolling me in vacation Bible school in the summertime. And for a while I tried to get with the program the way the preacher laid it down, because the old lady kept saying, “You’ll see, honey. It’s such a consolation when you get old. Such a consolation.” That was just another lie—because the eternal-life part of it never took with me. Maybe they gave my portion of that to some other kid. What I remember is a Sunday school teacher named Mr. Hart sticking his face into mine and saying, “The thought is as bad as the deed. You even think about something evil, you better fall on your knees and beg Jesus to forgive you, ‘cause he hears every word you say, and if your thoughts are impure, when you die you will never be rejoined with your mother and father in eternal life. No, you will burn for untold centuries in the black pits of hell.” I remember sitting on a wood chair, staring out at the birds sitting on the telephone wires, wishing to hell I was up there with them and could fly the hell out of here.

And I remember Hart raving on about Job, old Job who got boils and about went mad trying to please God.

The very first time I heard that story it struck me funny.

Old Hart was holding up Job to us as some kind of illustration about how hard we had to try to be holy, but it occurred to me right then that Job was a pure sucker. I knew in my heart that God didn’t give a shit about Job. Or Hart. Or me either.

That if he existed at all, God was nothing more than some Little Italy wise guy spitting down on the gutter from his soft blue heaven.

It killed me, I mean, they were telling me I was supposed to
be
fucking Job, break my ass to do right.

Like Buck used to say, “Don’t piss on my back and tell me it’s raining.”

But the catch was, even though I knew their game and laughed at it, Hart still had me.

Because through his little stories and hymns he had infected me with the idea of goodness.

And once the idea of Christian goodness is there inside you, you can’t shake it, no matter how hard you try. (And what with booze, broads, and drugs, I have given it a pretty good shot.)

Didn’t matter how often you thumbed your nose at it, how many gallons of whiskey you drank, how many pills you took, the Jesus gang had their hooks in you all the same.

Like if you couldn’t find work and support your family, it was because you were no goddamned good.

Even though you told yourself it wasn’t your fault, it was the way things were for everybody, you still believed that if you had done something else, gone that one extra mile for Jesus, maybe you wouldn’t be in this mess right now.

So night after night I would stay up late down the club basement watching reruns of “Star Trek” and “The Untouchables,” the speed sending Jesus on a sprint through my veins and arteries, his pale eyes and matted wet hair wading across my blood, opening doors to the chambers of my heart, and falling through the trapdoors in my brain.

This was torture, nothing short.

I would doze off and then suddenly jerk awake, scared, knowing that tomorrow wasn’t going to be any better but telling myself it wasn’t true. It had to get better, had to, somehow.

And then one night Ace came down. Must have been three-thirty. I had drunk half a bottle of Wild Turkey I kept down in the liquor cabinet.

It had about leveled off the pill, and I was lying there with a half-day growth of beard, spittle coming out the side of my mouth, knowing he was staring at me. Suddenly I wanted to cry out, tell him that I knew what it was, that we had been cursed, that maybe the whole town had been cursed or we would have been somewhere else, somewhere in the sunshine, like Miami or Los Angeles.

But I said nothing, just tried to smile at him a little. He sat on the steps, looking over at me as I lay there half gone in the old rocker. My daddy Buck’s rocker, which still smelled of his Prince Albert.

“Dad, you all right?” he said, putting his knees up and resting his chin on them.

“Fine.”

“You sure, Dad?”

“Yeah.”

“What are you thinking about?”

“Just was thinking about Dog. Worried about him a little. He’s getting crazy on me.”

Ace smiled and scratched behind his ear.

“Dog’s always crazy.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, you know, he’s always getting you in trouble with Mom.”

“Well, I don’t know about …”

“Dad, how come you hang out with Dog so much?”

“He’s my best friend.”

“Yeah, but like you always tell me to be careful who I become friends with.”

“That’s true. You become friends with people without getting to know them a little bit first, well, then it’s hard to get out. You get trapped by how much you care about them. You see that?”

“Is that how it is between you and Dog?”

“Hell no …”

But then it occurred to me that maybe this was true. I had never thought of it before and had given the kid this speech all my life.

I didn’t want to think of it that way and felt myself ready to snarl at him again.

“You have to know more than you do before you can understand Dog and me.”

“Like what?”

He said it softly, not a smartass but really wanting to know.

“Ah hell,” I said. “You don’t want to hear about that.”

“Yes, I do,” he said.

“Weil, then, I guess maybe I could give you one little example.”

Now he was really grinning.

“This happened when I was just a boy. You know I wasn’t always big. That happened sort of like it’s happening to you, all at once. But when I was a little kid and me and my folks were living over on Foster Avenue. I was one of the smallest kids in the neighborhood. And guess who was the biggest?”

“Dog?”

“Nah! He
was
pretty big, yeah … but the biggest, and the meanest, was Vinnie Toriano.”

“Fat Vinnie?”

“Yeah. He was the King of the Block, and if you didn’t do what he told you, or gave him any shit, he had some cute tricks.”

Ace’s eyes were getting big, he was wide awake now.

“Like what?” he said, holding on to the railing.

“Slow down,” I told him. “I’m coming to that. You know where the parking garage is now? Well, that used to be a lot with a hill, where we played cowboys and Indians, Civil War, stuff like that … Well, I was over there with the little kids one day and Vinnie comes by. Me and this other little kid, Jimmy Finnegan, were playing ball.”

“How old were you?”

“I guess I was about nine or ten. Anyway, we were playing catch and Vinnie yells over for us to throw him one. I tell Jimmie not to because I had seen this trick before. Vinnie never gives the ball back. He likes to stand there on a weed clump in the hill, just tossing the ball up in the air, over and over … while the little kids beg him to give it back. But it was too late, Jimmie threw it to him, and, sure enough, he smiles at us and says, ‘Thanks, I can use a new ball.’ I just couldn’t stand it that day, so I said, ‘Listen, fat ass, give us the ball back or I’ll get you for it, I swear to God.’”

“You said that?” Ace said.

“Yeah, which shows how smart I was, because it was a hot day and I guess old Vinnie was feeling kind of mean. He came over and grabbed me, and I tried to hit him in the face, but it was no use … He was bigger than me, you know? He picked me up and carried me down the hill there to the corner and got one of his pals to hold me, who just happened to be Joey Capezi, the same boy who works for him now. Then Vinnie puts his big ugly face right near mine and says, ‘You’re going to wish you never opened your big mouth, Baker.’ Then he gets down in the street and pulls the sewer grating up, and with me screaming and kicking, Joey and him stuff me down there and replace the grate … “

“He did that?” Ace said, his eyes getting big.

“Oh yeah. And the whole purpose of this game was to make me cry. Sometimes if you cried he’d let you out. Other times he’d keep you down there anyway. I remember looking down at the sewer pipe—it looked like a huge black mouth—and then he started laughing at me and saying that pretty soon the rats were going to come through the pipes and eat my legs, and Joey opened his mouth, and I could see all his gold fillings, and he nodded and said, ‘Yeah, the rats, Baker, the rats!’ And I knew that if I thought about that I might start to cry, so I looked back at him and I said that I knew all the rats and they were pals of mine … besides, they were better than Vinnie. This really pissed Vinnie off. So he starts spitting on me, and I can’t even duck down, I’m so afraid of the rats, and then he’s telling me that the rain’ll come down the sewer and I’ll drown, and I’m saying to myself, I can float, I can float on the rats … but I won’t let him make me cry, no way … and then he said if I asked him real nice he might let me up, but I wouldn’t do it. I looked at him and said nothing, just stared at him and thought about ways to get even. Thought about setting his house on fire or sneaking up behind him with a piece of rope and gagging him … and I tried putting my hands through the grate to pull myself up, but I couldn’t budge it at all … I was down there, and I heard something then down in the pipes, and I knew it
was
the rats, huge gray rats. I could hear him coming to get me, so I started sort of mumbling, ‘Squirrels, it’s squirrels,’ and Vinnie heard me and started laughing at me and calling me ‘Squirrelly,’ and by now a lot of kids were there, and they were all looking down at me, and it was getting dark, and the gutters were running brown water down on me, and then I looked down into the black sewer and there it was, the goddamned rat staring right at me, its eyes open and red, and I kicked at it as hard as I could, but it dodged out of the way and made a high shrieking sound, while above me I could see Vinnie’s fat gut shaking up and down, and then the other kids started saying he oughta let me up, but he told them to shut up or he’d put some of them down there if they didn’t like it, and he waited until I tried to push the grate up again, and then he stepped on my fingers. I could feel the tears coming down my face, and God I hated him for it. He’d about broke my hand and scared me to death with those rats, but the worst thing was he made me cry like that … So finally Joey and he pulled the grate off and walked off, laughing and calling me ‘Red, the squirrelly son of a bitch,’ and some of the other kids helped me out, dragging me through the goddamned old candy wrappers and wet leaves … I acted like it was no big deal and went home. It wasn’t until I was up in my room that I went nuts. I started ripping my bed to shreds, pounding it and screaming that I was going to kill the son of a bitch … My old man didn’t know what the hell to make of me.”