I had heard stories about my father from my aunts over in Dawson Springs, and from other people around town when I used to run away from home. Town was Princeton, Kentucky. Garnet Baker was the talk of the town when he was around, people said. Women would swoon at the sight of him just walking down the street. And if he stopped to look into a woman’s eyes, her panties automatically fell to her ankles under their own power. I figured maybe that was exaggerating a little, but I got the point.
He was a boyishly handsome man with enough charm to melt the heart of any girl in town. He was also a blackguard, people said, and a drunk. When I met him in later years he was still charming and handsome, and still a blackguard and a drunk. But with all his charm and good looks women forgave him no matter what he did. He was staying with a woman in Chicago when I met him. She was a telephone operator, had a good steady job, which was a good thing, the job, because when Garnet was home from the sea, which he was most of the time—he shipped out as a worker on merchant ships sailing the Great Lakes—when he was home he spent most of his time in bars. When he ran out of money he ran a tab, and to pay the tab he wrote a bad check. But the bartenders knew him and let him run a tab and let him pay with a bad check simply because he was so handsome and charming—that and the fact that they knew with certainty that his old lady would be around once a month to pick up his bad checks and pay his tabs. She always did.
And while I was there this school girl, a young college girl, kept calling the house screaming threats at him for fathering her child under the false pretense that he was a lonely single merchant marine and captain of his own ship, so on and so forth, until he got her in bed sufficiently to knock her up and then he was gone. My father just laughed charmingly and said it wasn’t so, and his wife believed him, for she had no other choice.
My father must have wrote hundreds of bad checks in his time on earth, but they say he never spent a day in jail for it because there was always a woman around to pay them off.
Well, at thirteen-years of age my brother looked just like him. But I guess he didn’t inherit any of his bad genes, only his good ones. I got all the bad ones. Well, almost all; I never liked to drink much, that was the only bad one I didn’t get stuck with.
And my brother grew up to be both handsome and charming. I didn’t. I was a skinny gangling teenager with a homely face who became a skinny gangling adult with a homely face. And I had none of my father’s charm.
But to show you how crazy things turn out in real life, my brother became a Baptist minister and used his good looks and charm to draw people into his church in increasing numbers. His sermons were presented in a compelling voice filled with deep conviction, not the kick-ass hell-fire ranting of many preachers in those days. And when his sermons ended, a disproportionate number of women, young and old, instead of dropping their drawers, as would have been their fate had it been Garnet Baker doing the talking, dropped to their knees and accepted Jesus Christ as their Savior.
When he was still going to school he courted and married one of the prettiest and smartest girls in the whole county, one of the Askew sisters, Mary. Or maybe she courted him, I don’t know anything about that time in his life because I was in prison, but throughout life they stayed together and every time I got out of prison he had a bigger church and a bigger car and a bigger house.
And he liked to sing, man how he liked to sing. Every time I got out of prison and went to visit him we’d go over to his church and up into his hide-away, where he’d break out an old acoustic guitar and I’d play and he’d sing, mostly gospel songs, and we’d have a good old time.
And one night when I was playing guitar in a bar in Hopkinsville, him and Bobby Askew, Mary’s brother, came down to the bar to hear me play. There was just me and a saxophone player and neither of us could sing, so once in a while we would invite somebody out of the audience to sing a song after they got drunk enough to sing. So for a while me and my partner played some saxophone music and then when the crowd started getting noisy we invited our first volunteer to sing a song.
He did, a country song of course because this was mostly a country bar, and when he was finished, with a lot of hooting from his buddies, another one stood up and then another.
All this time my brother, Jackie—well, now he was called R.D., Reverend R.D. Baker—all this time him and Bobby Askew were sitting there at a table sipping quietly on Coca Colas, but I saw the excitement in his, my brother’s eyes, and the way he squirmed and leaned forward, and I knew without a doubt that he wanted to sing, so I invited him up. He pretended embarrassment at first but allowed himself to be coaxed and he took the microphone with a big “aw shucks” grin.
He had a good voice, my brother, and a lot of country charm. We knew a couple of country songs, me and him, and when he was through with them the crowd kept asking for more, so he allowed himself to be coaxed into singing another one and then another. My brother liked to sing so much that when he got started good it was hard to stop him, so when we ran out of country songs that we both knew, he asked if he could sing a gospel song, they were easy to play and sing, the old time gospel songs, so I said sure why not. The crowd was probably too drunk by now to know the difference anyway. So he sang a gospel song, and then another. And the crowd joined in singing right along with him. And the drunker they got the louder they sang, and my brother’s strong voice soared above them all.
Once, while this was going on, the owner of the bar stuck his head in the door and listened for a minute, and then he told the bartender, a stereotype floozy blonde he was shacking up with in a trailer out back, he told her to tell me to stop playing religious songs in his bar. Which I didn’t. I wouldn’t have stopped if he’d held a shotgun to my head—not that I cared all that much about religion, but there was something going on here deeper than that. I touched my brother’s soul that night. Or maybe my soul touched his, I don’t know, but there was something going on.
It wasn’t a battle between good and evil or anything like that, not a shoot-out between God and the devil, it was more like a search for something, like maybe the good and the bad curiously and cautiously discovering each other for the first time, like two dogs sniffing, maybe, or two souls groping in the dark feeling each other’s presence but unable to see in the darkness, and then touching, the good and the bad, the first time touching, first the foot and then the ankle and the leg and the knee and then the sudden recognition of the missing half of each other, the good and the bad, two single strands of DNA that after all the feeling and searching discovered each other in the dark and suddenly embraced each other, wound around each other and made a perfect double-helix. My brother and me. The good and the bad. I touched my brother’s soul that night. And I loved him.
I can’t say he had the same experience. He was having too much fun. And I can’t say it ever happened again.
Before I left the bar that night the owner fired me and the saxophone player, but neither of us gave a ding dong for it had been an old-time drunken revival meeting, if there is such a thing.
The Reverend R.D. Baker wound up as the pastor of maybe the biggest Baptist church in Chicago. I never saw it. I just heard from my mother what a grand church it was. And he, my brother, travelled to Jerusalem and wrote a book and populated half the earth with his kids and grandkids, most of them sturdy Christians, with some of them becoming missionaries and carrying the gospel deep into faraway lands.
And somewhere along the line the new Baker Clan disowned me.
I don’t blame them for that. I never did anything to any of them but I guess my life of crime was an embarrassment to the family, and I accepted that. Besides, it never mattered one way or the other whether they disowned me or not, for you can’t disown something you never owned to begin with. Jackie was my brother and the blood of our father ran through our veins, the good and the bad.
Anyway, shortly after I turned sixteen I had the urge to play a guitar. So a neighbor had an old flattop guitar broke all to pieces, but the neck was
still good and it had three strings left on it, so I took a notion to make me a guitar out of that. The neighbor gave it to me, the guitar, and I took it home and hid it in the chicken house and during the day when Zeb went to work and my chores were finished I made me a guitar. How was I to know that the plywood I used to make the new body was the very expensive plywood Zeb Hackney was saving for something special that he intended to build out of it?
When I finished my guitar I hid in the chicken house and plucked on it till I halfway learned to play a few tunes on it. I must have lost track of time one day for I was still plucking on it when Zeb came home from work. He caught me, must have heard me when he came around the house to go in the back door. Well the chicken house door opened and there he was, looking straight at me. And that was the day he set me free.
He looked at that guitar, and then looked in the corner where his new plywood used to be leaning up against the wall and then his face started turning red and he looked at that guitar again and his face turned redder still. And then he said something and I said something and he snatched that guitar out of my hand and raised it over his head and said he ought to break it over my head and that pissed me off.
I came up off that stool with fire in my blood, the first time I had ever stood up to him, and I said, “No you won’t.” And I meant it. When I was sixteen I stood six-foot tall, I just wasn’t very wide, but right then I was ready to fight and he must have seen it in my eyes. I thought for a minute he was going to brain me with that guitar. He was as mad as me. But I think he was surprised that I was standing there like that, and maybe that gave him time to think about what he was doing, for he suddenly turned around and went out the door without another word, carrying my guitar with him. He wasn’t afraid of me, I knew that, so I knew that wasn’t the end of it when he walked out the door.
And it wasn’t. After a few minutes I stepped out the door myself. My mother was coming across the back yard toward me. She had a serious look on her face. Zeb was nowhere in sight.
When we met she told me Zeb had gone down to Doyle Hodge’s and told her to tell me I’d better be gone when he got back, simple as that, I’d better be gone.
So I left. I remember the time very well. It was about three o’clock in the afternoon on an early Spring day, with about five hours of daylight left. And I was about thirteen miles from town and had no money or food or clothes when I left. And my mother didn’t seem worried about that at all. I guess she knew I’d make it all right, that I’d find food and I’d sleep somewhere. There was nothing she could do about it anyway. She had simply accepted Zeb’s order as law, and that’s what it was in Hackney Land. If you were sixteen-years old and you stood up to Zeb Hackney you had to go. So my mother told me to write to her, and that’s about all she said.
So I went. And she was already back in the house before I was out of sight. I know because I turned around to look.
Oh well. I turned back and went down the dirt road with a bounce in my step, the happiest sixteen-year-old boy in the world. Zeb Hackney had set me free.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Something was in the air on Alcatraz Island that morning as we gathered on the yard for our morning smoke before work call. The sun came up just like it always did, and the sky was clear, with only a few white puffy clouds scattered like peacefully grazing sheep high above. And the water in the bay was calm. But the seagulls floating overhead were watchful, for something was in the air.
A brief puff of wind, just a breeze really, stirred up a dust devil that swirled away across the yard like a tiny whirlwind and died peacefully against the far wall. And the western sky far beyond the Golden Gate Bridge was empty of any threat of a coming storm. But the guard in the tower looked around uneasily, not alarmed, just uneasy.
Me, I saw all this and noted it in my mind, heightened awareness of things to come making me more observant of everything in my sight. I moseyed over to the bleachers and stood waiting, my thumbs tucked into my belt like a cowboy waiting for a showdown. It was a Zane Grey day.
I waited.
On the far end of the yard stood Roy Drake huddled with a couple of his buddies, talking it up, talking about me, pumping up their nuts, probably.
“See me on the yard in the morning.” That’s what Roy Drake had hollered up to me from his cell the night before. “See me on the Yard.” Which meant he’d worked up his courage enough to challenge me to a fight. I’d embarrassed him in front of his buddies in the mess hall the evening before, came down on him hard when I heard him bad-mouthing Jack Waites and Fat Duncan, for they were both in the hole again and therefore unable to defend themselves against such talk.
“You wouldn’t say that if they were out here, asshole,” I’d spoken up from the next table. I guess he didn’t know I could hear him, because he turned around with a surprised look on his face and stared at me. “Yes, I was talking to you,” I said. “You wouldn’t say that to their face.”
He finally found his tongue. “Hey, I wasn’t talking to you—you got no business butting in my conversation.” And he turned back around as if that was the end of it, and I guess I should have let it go, but I didn’t. He had a couple of new buddies, guys who’d just come in, and he was trying to impress them or something, but he’d bad-mouthed the wrong people with me around, for Jack Waites and Fat Duncan were good people and I wasn’t about to let their names be dragged in the dirt. So I said, “Roy Drake, you’re a liar and a coward and you know it, and if you get up from that table I’ll whip your ass right here in the mess hall right now.” And I meant it.
“I’m not going to fight you in the mess hall right in front of the guards,” he said, but he didn’t have any baritone left in his voice, so I knew he wasn’t going to do anything, for he was a liar and a coward.
But that night when we were locked down he had finally worked up enough courage to challenge me. He just had to save face, I guess. So, oh well.
I moseyed out to the middle of the yard and waited. He was still talking to his little rat-faced buddies. Maybe they were going to gang up on me. That didn’t worry me a lot. The only thing that worried me was that I might grow old waiting. But then a prisoner named Jackolowski, who I barely knew, walked by me and gave me something to worry about. Without stopping he said, “Roy’s got a knife.” And he kept on walking.
Me, I didn’t like knives and I never carried one or even had one stashed. A knife wasn’t necessary in prison, especially not at Alcatraz where you were hardly ever out of sight of a guard, a knife was not necessary as long as you carried yourself right and didn’t fool around with sissies or drugs and always paid your debts—and never ran your mouth to an idiot trying to impress his buddies, like I had.
Oh shit, Roy Drake had a knife and I had no tree to climb. What’s more he, Roy Drake, was walking unhurriedly toward me now and he had one hand in his pocket. And his two little buddies were coming toward me too and they had spread out on each side of Drake and were moving faster than him, so it looked to me like they were going to jump me from the side before he got here, maybe hold me while he stabbed me. Oh shit.
I remember that day well and I’ll admit I was scared shitless. I had underestimated a coward. I had broken a golden rule: Never threaten somebody—if you’re going to do something do it, don’t talk about it. I’d learned that from Al Doolin, but I guess I’d forgot it. And he’d told me never make somebody afraid of you, because a coward can be just as dangerous as anybody if he’s afraid you’re going to do something to him.
Oh well, here they came, cowardly Roy Drake and his little rat-faced new-buddies.
I noticed Jackrabbit over against the wall talking to Forest Tucker. No help there. Mild-mannered Jackrabbit was dangerous on the bridge table, but that’s about all, and old Forest Tucker was almost womanly in his nervousness when it came to violence. I mean I liked the hell out of both of them, they just weren’t hard-heads like me.
Little did I know.
The guard on the wall went back in his tow
er. Seagulls floated like vultures waiting for my death. Heightened awareness. Jackolowski walked past Jackrabbit and Forest Tucker, said something to them and kept on walking. I was aware of all of this, of everything that moved on that yard.
The shop foremen were gathered over by the gate shooting the bull. A lieutenant was with them. They weren’t paying any attention to me. Where was Lieutenant Mitchell, Fat Mitchell? He was nowhere in sight. Maybe he wasn’t working work call today. I’d once seen Fat Mitchell jump all the way over the steam table in the mess hall one day to take a knife away from a black guy who was attacking Little Red—not Little Red Smith who worked in the glove shop, another little redheaded guy who worked in the bakery. They had put a black guy to work in the bakery for the first time in the history of Alcatraz, and the prisoners refused to eat the deserts prepared by the bakery as a result. Little Red had done a lot of talking. Well, during the evening meal this black guy waited at his table until Little Red came into the mess hall and lined up to get his tray and then he got up from his seat and walked up behind Little Red and stabbed him in the back. Before he could stab him again Fat Mitchell was over that steam table and on top of him in about two seconds, had that knife away from him just like that.
Most of the guards who worked at Alcatraz were a different breed from the guards who worked at other prisons. They carried themselves professionally, did their jobs, would not allow a prisoner to disrespect them in any way, nor did they disrespect the prisoners. And they were watchful, always clear-eyed watchful, for they had some bad boys to deal with. And deal with them they did. Me, I had nothing against a guard who did his job as long as he was professional about it and didn’t go out of his way to mess with people. You knew what to expect from a professional. They did their jobs, nothing personal about it. Some of them I liked, like my boss in the glove shop, and Fat Mitchell and a few others. And I wouldn’t mind at all to have a beer with any one of them if I ran into him on the streets. And I’ll have to say that most of the guards who worked at Alcatraz were real men, though I don’t know whether I’d want one of them to marry my sister or anything like that.
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