The Baker

by Paul Hond

  “I’m tellin’ you, Crumb,” Nelson was saying. “Your father gonna take care of you.”

  Ben knew Nelson was saying this not only out of his own worst fears—Ben getting ahead, leaving him behind—but in hopes that, by prophesying so bright a future for Ben, he might jinx it; and yet it was the very hint of fear in Nelson’s voice that gave Ben even the remotest faith that such a miracle as Mickey “taking care” of him could happen: a faith so fragile that he felt a need to change the subject before the hope faded and disappeared. “Forget about me,” he said. “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “What do you want to do? Drive the van the rest of your life?”

  “Hell, no,” said Nelson. “You crazy?”

  Ben said nothing. Sometimes he wished Nelson were out of the picture so that he himself could drive the van and prove himself to Mickey on a simpler level. But Mickey didn’t seem to want him to drive the van.

  “You wouldn’t understand,” said Nelson. “You got a mentality of money. I know you, Crumb. See now, with me, it’s different. I’m not stuck on material things. I just want my own little piece. Enough to grow my own food. Live off the soil.”

  “My mother used to talk like that—how everybody should just be satisfied with their own little piece.” Ben recalled how Emi had failed to come upstairs to see his game last night, when she’d said she would. “She wanted to overthrow the government in France.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. I think the idea was to assemble a people’s army. You know—working people. With guns.”

  “Guns?” said Nelson. “You mean like this?” He reached down into the pocket of his sweatshirt and pulled out what appeared to be a real handgun.

  Ben tried to be calm. “Nice,” he said, but his blood was racing.

  “Go ahead. Hold it.”

  Ben felt a rush of fear and fascination, a kind of juvenile sexual dread. He’d never seen a real gun before.

  He took it in his hand. Small, meaningful weight; the very weight, it seemed, of a human life. “Where’d you get it?”

  Nelson smirked, shook his head.

  Ben pointed the gun at the windshield.

  “Keep that shit down,” said Nelson. “And don’t say nothin’ to Bread.”

  Ben lowered the gun. “You think I would?”

  “I don’t know sometimes, bro.”

  “Shit.”

  Nelson laughed. Ben laughed too: he knew Nelson trusted him. It felt good to be trusted. Sometimes it seemed like it was him and Nelson against the whole world.

  “Is it loaded?” Ben said.

  Nelson laughed. “About as loaded as you are, Crumb.” He held out his hand.

  Ben gave it back. For a moment he thought about what it might be like to go on a cross-country crime spree in the van. Him and Nelson. Robbing stores, getting rich. Like a movie. He could feel the gun’s warm weight lingering in his hand.

  The van entered a narrow, hilly road. Ben looked out the window—fluffy clouds coming apart like bread, robins falling across the white rind of sky. The trees that lined the road were speckled and feathered with gold, red, pumpkin-orange. The doors of houses were decorated with cardboard skeletons, ghosts.

  They passed through the gates of the Seven Pines Country Club.

  Ben recalled that his mother had given a concert there once. It had all come out of Mickey’s connection to Jay Rattner, the banquet manager. Emi hadn’t wanted to do it—she had her opinions about country clubs and their members—but finally she gave in (the pay must have been pretty good), and performed the Paganini Caprices. Of all the composers that Ben had been exposed to over the years, it was Paganini (“Pags,” Mickey called him, like he was a ballplayer) who made the greatest impression. The diabolical speed of the notes was exciting enough, but when you considered that he was suspected in his time of being in league with Satan (and listening to his music you could understand why) it tinged your pleasure with an intimation of evil. The club members, Emi recalled with a smile afterwards, had been a little shaken up.

  Nelson drove through the low valley of the soft green hills of the golf course toward the back of the main dining hall, where there were garbage bins and disabled golf carts and foul milky smells.

  “Can I take in the rolls?” Ben said.

  Nelson looked at him. “Why?”

  Ben shrugged. “I’m bored.”

  “Naw,” said Nelson. He turned off the engine. “That’s my job.” He hopped out of the van, took out the large box of rolls from the back and strode proudly to the doors, an employed man.

  “Shit,” Ben said.

  The keys were still in the ignition. Ben slid over to Nelson’s seat. The cushion was warm. He placed his hands on the wheel and gazed straight ahead, imagining that he was going a hundred miles an hour on a highway, a gun between his legs. He could feel the speed in his nostrils, his skull. No one could catch him.

  When Nelson came back out, Ben smiled through the window and tooted the horn.

  But Nelson didn’t look happy; he was shaking his head as he opened the van door. “Jay Rattner out of line,” he said. “Talkin’ ‘bout how the rolls ain’t fresh. Like it’s my fault and shit.”

  “Fuck him,” said Ben. “Smoke the motherfucker.”

  “Wish I could,” said Nelson. “Come on, move your bony ass.”

  Ben slid over to the passenger seat, but the thrill of the steering wheel, like that of the gun, remained hot in his palms, a new and important toy that had been wrested from him.

  5

  Mickey sat at the desk of his enclosed office and stared through the glass window at the large kitchen of his bakery, trying to ease his worries over David Shaw’s party. He hadn’t been to one of Shaw’s functions in years, and though he’d been delighted by Emi’s invitation, he was beginning to sweat at the thought of having to make conversation. What would they ask him? What were the current topics?

  Mickey stared harder, as if hoping to find inspiration in the massive equipment by which he earned his living. The oven and mixers were silent now; they would not heave to life until ten, when his nocturnal staff of bakers would carry out their tasks under the sleepy eye of Lazarus, who was paid to observe, to make sure everything was being done in compliance with religious guidelines that Mickey himself could never understand.

  Sometimes it made him a little uneasy to think that Lazarus and the bakers were working here while he and the rest of the world were asleep. Not that he didn’t trust them; he did. Maybe it was just that old sense of things going on without him, behind his back.

  He was about to begin putting his desk in order when Morris poked his head in the door.

  “It’s a stampede,” Morris said. His glasses were crooked on his nose.

  Mickey sighed. “I’ll be there in a second.”

  He stood up and straightened his shirt. The truth was, he reveled in these moments; he liked the idea of making an appearance, enjoyed the image of the owner emerging from the mysterious importance of the back of the store to lend a hand, to set things right.

  But as soon as he arrived behind the counter, the fantasy died. Mickey watched as a dozen frail, bundled gremlins created their usual havoc: they touched and squeezed the breads and squawked their criticisms, waved their money and rummaged through the boxes like a peasantry whose government has just collapsed.

  “Nobody is getting served until we have a little order,” Mickey said. “Is that clear?”

  No one paid attention. Tugging wars broke out over the few remaining loaves; there hung over the scene an eerie suggestion of hip injuries and lawsuits.

  “That’s it!” said a shriveled man in a long black coat who seemed to be sinking into his crinkled white beard. “No more challah!”

  All eyes turned to Mickey.

  “What, Mr. Siegel?” Mickey said carefully. “You can’t make do with a pumpernickel this week?”

  “Pumpernickel? I should say the blessing over a pumpernickel?�
��

  “It’s fresh.”

  A hush fell over the place.

  “Fresh?” said Mr. Siegel. A moral tension filled the air.

  Mickey said, “Baked this morning—and half-price for your trouble, how’s that?”

  Mr. Siegel pulled out his wallet. “Gimme two,” he said discreetly, and there followed behind him a loud chorus of gimmes. Siegel looked over his shoulder with contempt.

  Morris, who had been witnessing all this from beside the bread slicer, braced himself as Mickey lifted a box onto the counter. One molasses-colored loaf after the next was dispensed, and a well-behaved line formed at the register. Those who had swiped the last challahs were now obliged to maintain an air of dignity; they held their braided bread close to their breasts, frowning upon those who would compromise the Sabbath.

  Morris performed his job slowly: he’d place the loaf on the slicer, slide the finished product into the plastic bag he had opened with a swipe of his moistened forefinger, tie the excess plastic at the opening into a tight knot, and place the completed order on the counter by the register. At times it appeared that the tempo of his performance was dictated by the looks of the customer he was assisting: he became noticeably slower—“milking the moment,” Mickey called it—while waiting on buxom women, though Morris claimed it was only timely arthritis. In any case, he found that the more attractive the woman, the more impatient she turned out to be. “In a big hurry to get to her next beauty appointment,” he would say into the lingering fog of perfume. Then he would scratch the thick, wild, sea-salt colored hair that some ladies felt gave him an air of laboratory genius.

  “These people want to get home, Morris,” Mickey said, operating the register, “and so do I. I could get things done faster myself.”

  “That’s your uncle you’re talking to,” said Bunny Kirsch, who, despite having recently become eligible for her senior-citizen discount at Lerner’s, was wearing a form-fitting pink jogging suit with gold trim and the name of some French designer emblazoned across the chest. “You should live as long as he has,” she said, “and be half as spry.”

  There was a victorious twinkle in Morris’s eye, which Mickey caught. “If you can’t move faster, Morris, then stay home,” Mickey said with a shrug. “You’re not doing me any favors by being here.”

  “If I thought I was doing you any favors, I wouldn’t be here,” said Morris, blinking behind his glasses at Bunny’s heavy, lopsided breasts. Old age had become a shield from behind which he could fire his shots.

  Mickey shook his head. There was nothing to do about Morris: he was royalty around here. No matter that he, Mickey, kept track of the books, organized the schedules, the shipments, the stock; no matter that his father had started the business single-handedly before Morris—a skeptic and doomsayer until his own private venture in off-track betting was found to carry risks of imprisonment—climbed aboard with all sorts of ideas; no matter that it was now Mickey’s signature on the lease, on the accounts, on the insurance policy; no matter: the soul of the bakery was Morris.

  Sometimes Mickey couldn’t help but think of the not-too-distant future, when Morris would no longer be around. Would the bakery lose its appeal somehow, its charm? And what of his own retirement? Mickey knew he wouldn’t be around long enough to become some sort of elder statesman like Morris. Should he then sell the place? Close it altogether?

  He cautioned himself against getting too excited about the chances of the store remaining in family hands. Ben was slowly learning, and it was probably no secret to anyone that Mickey’s hopes for his son’s education were at odds with his desire to preserve an institution founded by his own father over fifty years before. Sure, Emi had her ideas for the kid’s future, but these seemed to have little to do with reality. Benjie was Benjie, and it didn’t take a genius to see as how his track record in the classroom would, in a couple of years, land him squarely behind the counter of this venerable store.

  The place looked as though it had been picked over by a hundred birds. There was only one customer left—Shirley Finkle, Mickey’s next-door neighbor of thirty-odd years. Mickey hadn’t seen her come in; he wondered how long she had been there.

  She put her loaf of rye on the counter and set out exact change.

  “The way your customers carried on,” she said, moving her hands in her purse, “you’d think there was a blizzard in the forecast.” Her cheeks had been hastily smudged: pink here, orange there, green about the eyes. Nor had she been judicious with her perfume. “So how is everyone, Mickey? How’s Ben?”

  “Ben? Oh, getting by.” Mickey scratched his head.

  “And Emi?”

  “Busy as usual. Just got back from New York.”

  “New York, New York,” said Shirley. “So nice, they named it twice.”

  Mickey fingered some crumbs on the counter. “Yup.”

  “I remember taking the train up to New York to visit my grandparents,” said Shirley. “My grandmother would take me to the market and blow the feathers on the chicken to make sure the tuchis was a nice yellow.” She laughed musingly, then broke off, as though having forgotten what she intended to say. She turned her head to the window. “I saw in the paper that Emi is heading to Gay Pa-ree. Oh, look, it’s dark out already.”

  “To be truthful,” said Mickey, “I’ve never been crazy about these junkets of hers. But what do they say? Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

  “Oh?” Shirley made some adjustments to her coat buttons. “Well, that’s the right attitude. People need a break from one another now and then. Maybe I’ll send Gilbert overseas.”

  Morris, wiping down the bread slicer, cleared his throat pointedly.

  “Well,” said Shirley, “I don’t want to keep you gentlemen here all night.” She patted Mickey’s hand; the material of her glove felt unworldly, reptilian. “I just wanted to let you know that I’m having some people over tonight, if you’re not busy.”

  “Yeah?” said Mickey. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had two invitations for an evening.

  “If I had the energy,” Shirley said, “I’d throw a real Halloween party. I tell ya, I must be getting old.”

  Mickey made a face. “Old? What are you, thirty-two?”

  She squeezed his arm and winked at Morris. “You taught him good, Morris—you taught him good!”

  Mickey said, “Don’t flatter him.”

  “Shirley, what’s got six balls and screws you once a week?”

  “Oy! Morris. Should I ask?”

  “The lottery.”

  Shirley giggled in a way that made Mickey wonder if she hadn’t started in a little early with the whiskey sours, or whatever mixed drink it was that Shirley sometimes claimed she could sure use.

  “Well,” said Shirley, patting her chest, “I’d better go get the house in shape. Do you and Emi have plans?”

  “No,” said Mickey. “She went to some get-together or another.” He stopped short of explaining that it was David Shaw’s party, lest Shirley begin to tingle over the celebrity possibilities and ask him twenty questions. “I was planning to join her, or maybe I’ll stay home with Benjie.”

  “Benjie? Doesn’t he have anywhere to go? A party?”

  Mickey shrugged. Was it that unusual for a grown kid to stay home on Halloween?

  “Well, you can bring him over if you want,” said Shirley. “I’ve got plenty of food.” She squinted. “Doesn’t he have any friends?”

  “Sure,” said Mickey, but no names came to mind.

  Shirley took her bread. “Well, Mickey, maybe I’ll see you outside this weekend. Gilbert has a bad back, so I’ll be the one raking the leaves.” She patted the counter. “G’night Morris. The lottery, huh?” Smiling, she moved toward the door.

  Mickey watched through the glass as Shirley crossed the parking lot.

  “A tuchis on her,” said Morris, shaking his head.

  A pair of beams appeared on the lot, coming closer, brighter. Mickey saw that it was the van; the
sight of Ben in the passenger’s seat filled him with a sudden and unexpected joy that faded as soon as the van stopped. Ben emerged while the headlights still shone. Then the beams switched off, and Nelson got out and opened the rear doors.

  As Ben entered the store, Mickey came out from behind the counter. Ben appeared rangier, more shifty than usual; his hands were deep in the pockets of his jacket, and he seemed to be shuffling at an angle. He stopped two feet in front of Mickey. “Trick or treat,” he said.

  Mickey did not meet his son’s eager gaze. “Everything go okay?” he said.

  “No,” said Ben. “Nelson crashed the van and all the bread fell out the back into the middle of the road and got run over.”

  Mickey nodded. He’d play along—for a moment. “Well, that sounds like a busy day. Anything else?”

  “Not really.”

  “Do you think,” said Mickey, “that you accomplished more by driving around in the van with Nelson than you did the other day when you ran the bakery all by yourself?”

  “I think I’d get more accomplished if I drove the van,” Ben said. “I bet I could make twice the deliveries in half the time.”

  Mickey ground his teeth. “That’s Nelson’s job.”

  “I’ll drive for half the pay,” said Ben. He looked over his shoulder at Nelson, who was unloading a box outside. “You can get rid of Nelson and save a lot of money.”

  Mickey scratched his ear. The same idea had crossed his own mind once or twice, and it did please him to think that the kid was maybe developing some good business sense. “That’s fine and well,” Mickey said, “but we’ve already discussed the van a hundred times. Didn’t you enjoy it the other day, running the store on your own?”