by Paul Hond
Dulac trusted him outright; he’d been impressed by how quickly Mickey learned the basics, and was obviously comfortable enough with the situation to leave Mickey alone, and though he never really commended Mickey on a job well done, he had yet to complain either, which for Dulac was the same as the highest praise. It barely occurred to Mickey that the breads he baked were being purchased, eaten, carried home through Paris streets; he had very little contact with the goings-on upstairs, and when he did think of his bread being wrapped up by Dulac and carried off in the arms of strangers, his heart filled with a strange joy that he quickly, guiltily suppressed. This was meant, he cautioned himself, to be a life of sacrifice. He did not want any distractions.
He listened to the fire. Next to the oven lay a pile of timber—hickory, cherry, apple, a mélange of fresh-cut hardwood that Dulac imported weekly, wood whose sinewy meat Dulac felt imbued the fire with flavor that was passed into the bread. Each morning Mickey loaded the wood into the oven and fired it as Dulac had taught him, with a little kindling and a single match, and each time he felt himself verging on an awful vision—a madman sweating in a charnel house of war, heaving the bones of the slaughtered into the furnace.
Sometimes he would keep the chamber door open and gaze in at the terrible force he had unleashed. It seemed odd, even heretical, that fire could be tamed, that it could be used for the good; he’d only ever known the wild destructiveness of it.
20
Watch your back, Little Man. Ben couldn’t get the words out of his head. Oh, Nelson was out there; of that he was sure. He knew, could feel it. Nelson in the backyard, waiting. Or else out in the front, crouched in the azaleas. Ben pulled the blankets over his head. It was two in the morning. Should he call the cops? Explain what had happened?
The mere suggestion of police involvement seemed to push his fears to the brink of realization; he dared not pick up the phone.
He placed his hand under the pillow and touched the gun, which he’d have to take with him everywhere now. Watch your back meant watch your back. He wasn’t about to take any chances.
He was trapped. How could he go outside? How could he go to the bakery? What was to stop Nelson from showing up here, there, or anywhere?
And yet underneath his terror Ben could feel a relief, could already see the benefits from a business standpoint. Nelson—no sense denying it—had become a liability. Things would run much more smoothly without him. Ben comforted himself with the thought that Nelson had wanted to be fired. Didn’t it make sense? He’d never really been happy at Lerner’s. Maybe, now, he was even grateful. Wasn’t it just possible?
Ben decided to walk to the bakery around four or five o’clock (the coast would be clear by then, he thought), and load the van with whatever he needed for the day’s deliveries, using some of yesterday’s bread if enough fresh stuff had yet to be baked. Then he would drive to a secret, far-off spot where Nelson would never go, maybe sleep in the van for a couple of hours before calling Shirley Finkle to ask her if she would give Morris a hand behind the counter (on several occasions she’d offered to help out, and though he’d refused her each time, Ben knew she’d be happy to finally get the nod). Then he’d make his deliveries; and by afternoon, with any luck, he’d have thought of a further way to elude Nelson.
The initial plan went off smoothly. He arrived at the bakery at five and gave each of his men a warm pat on the back, hoping vaguely to elicit their loyalties in the event of a showdown on the bakery floor, though he didn’t really expect that Nelson would be rash enough to try anything there, with so many potential witnesses around. Still, it made him feel better to imagine that the bakers were behind him. He collected what he needed for deliveries and drove out twenty or more miles, out into the county’s vanishing farmland.
He parked on the side of a back road and watched the sun rise through bare black trees. The air outside was sharp and cold and full of earth, the sky soft with the first lavender light. On the other side of the road he could make out a long, white wooden fence, a hill of pasture, a farmhouse, a barn. Something in this landscape filled him with longing. He knew that the eggs and grains that were delivered to the bakery came from factory farms that in no way resembled this one, but for some reason he felt a need to make the connection; it was the same feeling he’d had at the shore, when they’d gone to scatter Emi’s ashes—that desire to immerse himself in the eternal: the sea, the sky: a yearning to be both fathered and mothered, protected, to be held close to a beating heart.
He shut his eyes, and as the morning grew and the grass and fence posts gained a roseate light, Ben felt himself become enclosed, if only for a moment, in the immense pink paws of the world. When he opened his eyes he saw that the light had spread bluish white, like the milk of the cows that were now standing motionless in the pasture. He wished he wasn’t alone. He wished his father would come back.
He drove back into town and stopped at a pay phone. Shirley Finkle, as he expected, was ready for action, claiming she knew the bakery like the back of her hand, that she could work the counter with her eyes closed.
At around noon he headed over to Seven Pines, wondering, not too seriously, if Nelson were somewhere on the grounds, waiting in ambush.
He parked the van by the service entrance, suddenly nervous about speaking to Jay Rattner, who, as Ben entered, could be seen raging through a fog of steam and smoke, men in white paper hats chopping and dicing twice as quickly in his wake. Rattner: alive and well and unaffected; business as usual.
Rattner: twenty-six, gourd-nosed, balding in mysterious patterns, his big keg-wrestling body gone soft and pear-shaped in the confines of what Ben imagined to be a lonely apartment decorated with mementos of fraternity pranks and famous beer blowouts. There would be posters, framed beach photos (Rattner tanned, fit, tennis-handsome, but with the first beery signs gathering ominously at his drawstrings), rented video tapes on the coffee table, maybe an aquarium. A hairy bathroom smelling of a strong, male-animal piss, a shipwreck of dishes in the kitchen sink.
Rattner, Ben knew, began working at Seven Pines as a busboy ten years ago. He stayed on as a waiter all through college, where he studied something like hotel management; a prodigy of sorts, he was offered the lucrative position of banquet manager upon graduating. Money, power, responsibility, prestige. That was Seven Pines. But now he looked miserable, beleaguered, a petty administrator in a rumpled shirt and tie, a colonial magistrate among savages. The kitchen staff, if they weren’t humorless, would be capable of enjoying him, especially on those rare occasions when he tried to prove himself a man of the people, loosening his tie to talk sports and women with the guys, peppering his speech with street terms that came off like bad dance moves. No: Rattner would be loved by no one, not by the hundreds of club members who paid him to make their affairs and luncheons flawless, nor by the men who toiled in the steam and slosh of the kitchen and bore the brunt of his frustration.
From across the kitchen Rattner spotted Ben and headed toward him, a look of anxiety and anger in his close-set eyes.
“Did you get my message yesterday?” he said.
“Yes,” said Ben. “What happened?”
“What happened?” Rattner laughed like a child imitating a machine gun. “Your delivery man told me he was going to blow my fucking brains out, that’s what happened.”
Ben shivered in his coat. Had Nelson really gone that far? Ben steeled himself: Let it be Rattner, he thought. Rattner instead of me. He said, “What did you do to tick him off?”
“Ha!” Rattner seemed outraged by the question. He grabbed the pen and clipboard from Ben’s hand and signed his name violently on the delivery memo. “What did I do to tick him off? He’s a fucking psychopath! He threatened my life, for Christ’s sake. I’d call the police if I thought it would do any good.” He shoved the clipboard and pen into Ben’s chest. “Are you defending him or what?”
Ben looked down at the signature. The paper was ripped.
“Huh, Lerner? Bec
ause I don’t need this bullshit. Okay? This has been going on for months. Months! I told your father about it, but I guess he didn’t think it was that important. And now you. Like father, like son. It’s no wonder he left you in charge. The man obviously doesn’t care about his business. It’s all a fucking joke!”
Ben took a breath; in the wind of Rattner’s bluster he felt a sudden homicidal bond with Nelson, a bond intensified by the regrettable fact of their breach. He squared his shoulders and said, with a faint note of accusation, “Nelson doesn’t work for me anymore.” Just hearing the words brought the emotions to his throat.
Rattner blinked. “You mean—you fired him?”
“Yes,” said Ben. He had to struggle to say nothing else.
Rattner stood there for a moment, then hit himself in the forehead. “Great. That’s just fucking great!” He looked up at the ceiling, laughed, then, taking tiny steps, made a small circle, repeatedly striking his head.
Ben watched him, fascinated by his terror. It hadn’t occurred to him that by firing Nelson he would bring others into his own sphere of danger. He had expected Rattner to cheer. He said, “I thought you’d be happy.”
“Happy?” said Rattner. “Happy? Now he’ll really want to get me!”
“Don’t worry,” said Ben, more to himself. For a moment he considered what it would mean to enter into some sort of alliance with Rattner. He tried to think of a way to open that discussion, knowing Rattner might already be suspicious of him. Carefully he said, “I don’t think Nelson’s very happy with me either,” but it came out sounding too much like an appeal, and he quickly placed his hands behind his back, as if to withdraw the offer before it could be rejected. Then, as he watched Rattner process his words, he feared just the opposite response—feared a quaking Rattner latching on to him, bumbling, panicking, then betraying him at a critical moment.
A crooked smile formed on Rattner’s lips. “He’s not happy with you either?” he said, lifting the box of bread. “Good.”
Fear shot up Ben’s spine. Rattner was now backing away.
“Maybe,” Rattner called, “he’ll get you instead.”
Ben completed the rest of his deliveries in a daze. As he drove back to the bakery, he kept seeing black male figures that may or may not have been Nelson—at bus stops, walking across parking lots, in the backseats of cars. The closer he got to the bakery the more the van seemed to stand out, so that by the time he reached the lot he felt as though he were inside a parade float. He had to remind himself that it was broad daylight, that there were people around. He walked slowly from the van to the bakery doors, his hand on the gun in his pocket. Danger seemed to demand slowness: he might have been walking past a phalanx of growling dogs. Upon reaching the door he resisted the temptation to rush in; instead, he paused, his back to the lot. He counted silently to ten, rushing the last few numbers. Then he opened the door.
Shirley and Morris looked up at him. There was one customer at the counter, a black woman in a purple dress and a long red coat. She turned to him.
Ben’s hand froze in his pocket. It was Donna Childs.
Dulac had informed him that it was the day before Christmas, but this meant little to Mickey, other than that the shop would be closed tomorrow. For now, he was eager to get on with the business of baking his last batch before the holiday. Most of baking, he’d learned, was in the waiting, but as a baker, the broad intervals of time no longer taunted and tortured him, as they had years ago, watching his father bake at the house. Waiting was now part of what he did. The sculptor, Mickey considered, did not sit around bored while his clay baked in the oven; he dreamed about his next piece. Mickey found himself thinking of ways to improve his next batch, small experiments he might perform with time and temperature and measurements. Sometimes he would take up the razor blade and create new patterns with which to score the bread by tracing them in the air: cat’s whiskers, stars, diamonds, suns.
Baking had taught him another thing: how to give up control. He thought of this each time he surrendered a raw lump of dough to the hearth: the bread belonged to the fire now. Only a small percentage of bread-making occurred in the oven, he reminded himself, and so it seemed to him that he was in fact more a maker than a baker, though of course Dulac would argue that he was now many things: botanist, chemist, philosopher, artist.
Mickey fired the oven and stripped down to his boxers. The flour-dusted stones were cool under his bare feet. He wrestled a gobbet of dough to the table and began massaging it, using Dulac’s technique. The first few times he’d done this he’d thought of Glazer’s training table, the working of muscles, but lately he was getting other ideas. This could be woman. Thighs, buttocks. Deep, soulful flesh. He pressed and kneaded, using his hips. The hour was buried in darkness. He rolled the flesh, parted it, folded it over, pressed it into itself. It tensed, relaxed, grew fragrant with its pleasure. It stretched, gaining glutinous muscle, then contracted into a shuddering, swollen mound.
When he cut the dough into pieces and gave it over to the fire, it was very nearly a human sacrifice.
Slowly, the room filled with the smell of baked bread.
Mickey licked splotches of flour from his arms. He paced the floor, his skin getting warm. He sucked in his stomach, rolled his shoulders, held his fists to his temples and threw some soft jabs at a phantom opponent. He could taste yeast in his gums.
The hour subsided: darkness wearied under the weight of a new light. Mickey could feel it.
He slid in the peel, removed the brown loaves from the oven and deposited them on the rack to cool. Heat bathed him, but he felt a sudden, bracing bodily chill; looking down, he saw that his prick had escaped from the vent of his shorts and was now swaying to and fro, like some instrument for measuring spiritual presence.
Mickey was shocked: he’d forgotten how big the thing could get. It looked electric. His gripped it in his hand to keep it from moving. His palm was warm.
Without thinking he grabbed one of the loaves and tore off a small chunk. Steam rambled out. He placed his hands around the hips of the bread and held it in front of him. His legs trembled.
He entered slowly. The heat inside made him shiver. Walls of wheat collapsed, ripped. Guiding the brown hips, he eased further in, until he could feel the hard crust against his belly.
He closed his eyes and threw back his head. He thrust and squeezed, causing scales of crust to flake off and fall to the stones.
Donna, he thought. He could see her.
His fingers had dug through the cracked skin. His arms bulged. Pungent yeasty smells rose up and spread throughout the room.
He backed his lover against the wall and pummeled. Crumbs spilled. He arched his back, and with a silent gasp felt himself dissolve.
Why was she here? What did she want? Ben hadn’t seen her since before his mother’s death, and if he had ever longed for her during those rough few days afterwards, he felt himself shrink back at the sight of her now, though in fact he was moving forward, smiling. “Miss Donna,” he said in a voice to match the smile, and his hand shot out in front of him in a burlesque of corporate surprise: she might have been a client.
Her gloved hand communicated nothing. Ben kept up his smile, hoping it would sway her agenda, which he did not suppose friendly.
“May I talk to you?” she said.
Ben swallowed: it was as if a high school principal had showed up in his home. Morris and Shirley looked on with glum expressions.
“Sure,” said Ben. “Come this way.” He led her to the back, aware that Morris and Shirley were following him with their eyes. There was no doubt who was in charge here. Ben cursed both his uncle and his neighbor, and grasped at the thought that in Donna’s presence no real harm could come to him.
Once in the office, Donna pulled off her black gloves by the fingers. “He doesn’t know I’m here,” she said. She wore red nail polish and matching lipstick. She said, “I came by myself.” Her rose-scented perfume was heavy with suggestions of rende
zvous. Ben felt a lover’s dread: what if Nelson came in? He looked at Donna—the perfume, the glossy lipstick, the removal of her gloves—and threw his trust into her experience. He asked her to have a seat, then watched as she delicately lowered herself into the same chair from which Nelson had taken his dismissal. She held her handbag on her lap.
Ben sat behind his desk, hoping to regain something of the authority that her scent seemed intent on denying him. “Well,” he said, fingering a pen. He tapped it on the desktop. “What can I do for you?”
Donna sighed. “I know you must be busy,” she said, “and I don’t want to take too much of your time.”
“Not at all,” said Ben. Her reverence gratified him, eased him into a sense of paternal command: the desk now seemed a broad extension of his own body, a war chest filled with benevolent holiday promise. He rested his hands on the surface of it.
Donna looked down at her handbag. “Nelson told me a month ago that your father went away on a trip,” she said, “and that the very next day you gave him a promotion.”
Promotion. Ben was moved by this reminder of Nelson’s gratitude. “Yes,” he said.
Donna continued as though reciting a prepared speech. “I know that he’s been very excited about it. But yesterday he came home early. I knew he was upset. I asked him what happened, but he wouldn’t say a word—just changed his clothes and went out the door. He didn’t come home last night, and I haven’t seen him today.”
Ben nodded, suppressing the mean little hope that Nelson had run away, or else—better!—that something bad had happened to him. But Donna didn’t seem that concerned; Ben got the idea that maybe this wasn’t the first time Nelson had pulled this sort of thing.
“I was hoping,” said Donna, “that you could tell me what happened.”
Ben cleared his throat. What could he possibly say? How could he tell her that he fired her son? “I think,” he said, “that he just decided it was time to move on.” And wasn’t that true, in a way? Hadn’t he given Nelson a choice?