by Robert Ward
On nights like that I’d sit straight up and let out a cry that would wake Wanda, make her hold on to my waist and pull me back down.
I started taking some of the money and buying a pint of Maryland rye. Wild Turkey was too damned expensive, so I fell back on the booze I’d started with as a kid, that oversweet rotgut that burned holes in your stomach.
All day trapped down there, eight hours a day, taking shit from my own neighbors, some of whom were guys who once looked up to me and felt both bad and superior to me at the same time.
“Hey, Red, playing any ball lately?”
“Hey, Red, can you hurry with my car, I got these theatre tickets.”
“Baker, what the hell were you doing up there, jerking off in my car?”
And me and Leroy answering politely, smiling, taking it all in like it was a joke. When all the time I wanted to bust heads, break ass, take their BMW’s and Volvos and smash them into the ramps, break off doors, and stick burning rags into their gasoline tanks and watch them blow the hell into a million pieces as they headed out into the slush-covered streets.
I don’t know when it was, maybe the third week, when I started getting the shakes in the daytime as well. Leroy noticed it though, and one day when we were eating lunch in the miserable, freezing-cold office, he smiled at me and shook his head.
“You’re a good ball player, Red, you know why?”
“No, you tell me.”
“ ‘Cause you play the game in here.” He pointed to his head. “I watch you, you one step ahead of the other guys, moving without the ball, setting up your shots.”
“Yeah,” I said. My right arm had started to jerk in the bicep, and I had become embarrassed by that and didn’t want him to see.
“Red, you mind if I say something?”
“No, man.”
“You got to do the same thing here, you see? You got to be one step ahead of the mutherfuckers. You got to see that they don’t even really know what chu about. They just like their cars, man, these people. I mean, they machines, mostly out of whack, needing work. You look at ‘em like that, see, out-of-control machines, you can laugh it through.”
“Is that how you do it?” I said, eating my egg salad and reaching into my hunting jacket for my rotgut.
“You bet … Ain’t no fucking machine going to make no toy out of me. I got basketball to play this summer. We got a new kid coming out. Vertical leap about forty-two inches … Make Dominique Wilkins get tired, man, you know?”
I looked at him there, sitting across from me, smiling, and suddenly I felt that I was going to start crying. It made me so fucking furious that I got up and locked myself in the men’s room, turned on the water real loud, and then smashed both my fists against the sink over and over, until the bottom of my hand was raw and red.
When I was done, I went back outside. Leroy looked at me dead on.
“You cool?”
“Yeah. Thanks, Leroy.”
We slapped five, and somehow that day went a little better. I could feel the rage in me burn a little less bright.
But I also knew that it would take less than nothing to turn it up again. I wasn’t long for that place. I didn’t know what I might do, how bad I might hurt somebody. Red Baker, an out-of-control machine.
But even the worst of times aren’t all bad.
Some days at home I managed to keep it together, and Wanda and Ace and I would be like we used to. Kidding around, going out to Patterson Park to take a walk, Ace and me passing a football, or some nights down the cellar, pulling out my old Gibson F-hole guitar and playing some country duets, with Ace doing the leads and singing high harmonies. Wanda would sit there on the steps watching us, smiling, and I knew that I had to hang on, that we’d get through this somehow.
And yet I dreamed of Crystal. Only now it wasn’t us on the highway to Florida, but she and I jerking around in that twisting, turning cavern of a parking lot, in a car that ran by itself, no brakes, no steering, smashing into the concrete walls, Crystal burying her head in my lap.
And I worried about Dog too, who called up from his bed at his house and who was convinced I was pissed at him, which was partially true. Not that I wanted to be, but maybe I’d strapped on all I could take for now, didn’t know how to deal with his madness, the wild light in his green eyes.
But I owed him too much to stay away for long. Loved him too deeply to not give it a shot. So one dead-black night I sucked it in, hit myself up with a good belt or two of Four Roses, and made it around the block to his house on Foster Avenue.
Though we lived in almost identical red brick row houses, Dog’s is different in that he has an iron sculpture of a dog screwed into his front door. Wanda made it for him for Christmas two years ago, and Doggie loved it to death. It’s a little corny if you want my opinion, but Dog smiled and shook his head happily every time he opened the door. Unlike me, it doesn’t take confusion to make Dog feel alive.
Our houses are decorated differently too. We have mostly old furniture, granted, but Wanda has a way of making everything seem homey and comfortable. Carol, bless her soul, has never had the homemaker’s touch. So when she wanted to fix up the house, she just went over to Sears and bought all this blond Danish Modern stuff, the kind that shines out at you. Dog didn’t like it worth a damn, said it looked like the kind of stuff you saw in porno flicks, but Carol said that it was all the rage in New York City, and what did Dog know about the art of interior decoration anyway? So there they had it—couches, chairs, coffee table, bedroom set, all of it hard blond and sending out these dentist-office glares at you.
It was unpleasant to sit in Dog’s living room on the best of days, and this was a hell of a long way from that. Doggie’s ribs were still bandaged—I know about rib injuries from football, and when they’re bad you just pray to God you don’t develop a cough—his hair was messed up, he wore his faded, old Colt T-shirt (number 19), had a can of National Boh in his big right hand. He was surrounded on his yellow couch by both his girls, Lisa and Kathy, and all three of them were staring at a TV cartoon cat with a menacing grin on its wide black face.
“Well, it’s almost four-thirty,” Lisa said. “And we are turning this trash off so we can watch Lana Turner in Imitation of Life.”
Kathy crawled over Dog, who shook his head at me and rolled his eyes.
“No, we’re not,” she said in a singsong voice. “We’re watching cartoons.”
“I am not going to waste my time arguing with you,” Lisa said, standing up and heading for the television. “I have to watch Lana because she’s a great movie star and I intend to learn all I can from her.”
“Daddydaddy,” Kathy wailed, “she always gets her way.”
She threw herself down on Dog’s lap, her shoulder hitting his ribs. Doggie groaned but managed a laugh and patted her head.
“Seems to me you already watched enough of them cartoons. You ought to go work on your coloring a little. Or read that book … Black Beauty. “
“But the Roadrunner’s coming on,” Kathy said.
“The Roadrunner is an imbecile,” Lisa announced, switching channels.
“Don’t you talk about the Roadrunner that way, you … you orange-headed creep!”
“Now calm down,” Dog said, looking over at me and rolling his eyes.
“You wish you had hair as beautiful as mine,” Lisa said, running her hand over her recently peroxided locks. She had attempted to turn her brown hair into gorgeous technicolor blond like Lana, but it had come out sort of dried out, like orange weeds in an old, parking lot.
“Ha,” Kathy said, “some joke … Orange-headed creeeeeeep!”
“That’s about enough of that, you two,” Dog said in a soft, firm voice. “Lisa gets to watch Lana Turner today, but tonight Kathy can see whatever she wants for an hour. That’s the deal.”
“Oh great,” Lisa said. “We’ll have to watch about a million hours of ‘Family Feud,’ which is the dumbest show of all time. Next to the Roadrunner!”
“I don’t want to hear any more out of either of you,” Dog said. “I mean it now!”
Lisa sighed and sat down heavily next to her father.
“I just have one thing to say, and that is I hate this house, I hate this street, I hate this city, and as soon as I am of legal age I’m going to take a bus directly to Hollywood, California.”
“Now that’s enough!” Dog said loudly. He’d begun to sweat, and his breath came hard. “You don’t go around bad-mouthing your hometown. Balmere, Maryland, is the finest city in this country. We’re second to none. Ain’t that right, Red?”
“Damn straight,” I said.
“Come on down the cellar,” he said. “Cooler down there. Been trying to fix our old fan.”
I was shocked to see Dog’s workshop. Ordinarily he had a place for everything—hammers, saws, files, screwdrivers. He took a hell of a lot of pride in being handy and in the perfect order of his workshop, but now tools were lying around everywhere. Saws sitting in the corner in his old overstuffed chair, hammers lying in sawdust piles on the floor. Bent nails lying on top of the old, dead radio.
“Looks like a cyclone hit this place,” I said.
“Yeah, I just haven’t had the energy,” he said.
Doggie shrugged, then picked up the old Air Kool fan and started unscrewing the back. His hand trembled a bit, and I pulled the bottle out of my pocket.
“Want a hit?”
“Yeah.”
He took it and wiped off the cap with his hand, and suddenly I remembered him making the same gesture when we were both bright-faced kids over at Patterson Park. The sun shining, a baseball bat in Dog’s hand, and an Orioles cap on his head. Wiping off the quart bottle of water, drinking from it, and passing it around.
“Any luck looking for work, Red?”
“You didn’t hear I was parking cars?”
“Oh yeah, I guess Carol mentioned it. Good future in that.”
He went back to work, taking the grill off the fan, and sweat poured down his face.
“Just temporary. Gets me out of the house.”
“Well, I ain’t doing it,” Dog said. “And I don’t guess I’m going to goddamned computer school either. That’s what I heard down the union hall the other day. They’re maybe planning to send some guys … the smart guys … to computer school, ‘cause it looks like the steel mill isn’t going to open again.”
As he spoke his voice got tense, and suddenly he stopped working on the fan and sat down on top of it.
“Gimme that bottle again, will you, Red?”
“Sure.”
He took another long pull and shook his head.
“You know, Red, I’m sorry about the other night. I just went crazy, I guess. I been thinking about it … I can’t quite figure it out. Suddenly, I just couldn’t take any more of Vinnie’s shit, you know?”
“Yeah, I know.”
“I’ll tell you what, staying home’s getting to me too … and I got something else on my mind. You keep a secret?”
“Come on, who you talking to?”
He dropped his head down, and I saw the sweat pour off his thick, hairy neck.
“It’s Carol. I think she’s screwing this guy over to the Big Burger. Dickie Nellis, the night manager. She’s been coming home late, him driving her. When I asked her about it, she says they’re taking inventory. It’s inventory all right, you know what I mean.”
I took a hit of the booze myself. Dog picked up a ball peen hammer from the workbench and began to swing it back and forth between his legs, bouncing it off the fan’s grill.
“Hey,” I said. “You’re going to break that if you don’t watch it.”
“That ain’t all I’m going to break. I swear, Red, if I find them together, I’ll kill them both. No bullshit.”
I walked around the room, the hammer clanging on the fan echoing in my head.
“Dog,” I said, “will you stop that for a minute?”
“Sure.”
He dropped the hammer on the floor and looked at me with such a sadness that I wanted to put my arm around him.
“Look, Doggie, we been friends all our life. Not just you and me, but Carol and Wanda too. I just know she isn’t dicking around on you. She isn’t like that.”
“You don’t really know what people are like,” Dog said. “You think you do, but they find ways to turn it around on you. Down at the job, here at home, it’s all the same thing. You can’t count on nothing anymore.”
“Doggie,” I said. “Look, I’m worried about you. You’re not yourself. I mean going nuts like that with Vinnie and now suspecting Carol … Look, maybe you ought to go down there to Meyer Clinic and talk to one of the … guys down there.”
Dog’s eyes widened, and he stood straight up, like I’d sent an electric current through him.
“You mean talk to a headshrinker? What the hell you talking about, Red? There ain’t nothing wrong with me that getting my job back wouldn’t cure. You know what it’s like staying home with the girls every day, like some damned cleaning woman? God help me, I love those two more than anything in this world, but just today I thought if they have one more fight, just one more, I’m going to slap their faces, both of ‘em. And I have never so much as laid a hand on either of them.”
“But that’s what I mean,” I said, “you’re upset … you’re not yourself … “
“Goddamn your ass, Red, I thought you’d understand. It’s not my head, it’s my goddamned life … They’ve taken away what I love, Red, and I’m going outta my skull. I ain’t no genius like you. I’m a steel man. That’s it. Period. That’s what I do.”
He sat back down on the fan and stared at me with a little smile on his face.
“You got a lot of fucking nerve, Red. Coming over here telling me I should talk to some goddamn headshrinker. Who the hell are you anyway? How many times I pull your ass out of a fight? How many times I seen you drunk as hell? Who the fuck you think you are talking to me like that?”
“But this seems different to me …”
“Yeah, ‘cause it’s me. If it’s you, it’s okay. I think you better get outta here now.”
“Hey, Doggie, don’t take it like that.”
“That’s how it was said, and that’s how I’m taking it … Go on home. I mean it now.”
“I’ll come around in a couple of days, maybe you’ll feel better.”
“Don’t,” Dog said. “I don’t need no help from you.”
It wasn’t any use, I could see that. So I turned, went up the steps and outside into the snow.
• • •
Out on the street the slush was starting to come down again, and I walked down Dog’s block under the big, pink, blinking sign for Sardino’s Subs, and I felt as though the sleet and drizzle and gray slime was going right through my skin, filling me up from the inside. I wanted to rip out one of those marble steps in front of me and hurl it in Sardino’s window. I didn’t know why.
I wanted to go back and kill Dog. Crush a pillow in his face and put him out of his misery. Throwing me out on the fucking slush-covered streets. But that feeling went by fast, and then I was overcome with a kind of mood swing myself (maybe this shit was catching). I just felt cold and empty, and my chest was tight, and my hair was matted to my head, and I felt dizzy too, very dizzy, like I was having some goddamned heart attack.
There was something I was supposed to do, I knew it. It was lying there in the back of my head, but everything was swirling too quick, everything was too drenched and cold and dead for me to be able to pluck it out of the whirlpool.
I took a right and saw Slap Horton’s bar and started for it, but I stopped and took a deep breath.
“Take it easy. Take it easy,” I said to myself, talking out loud just to hear a voice.
“Hey, Red, what you trying to do, catch pneumonia?”
I looked at Horton’s black doorway and saw Choo Choo Gerard leaning there smiling, a toothpick between his teeth. I always do my best to avo
id Choo Choo, but just then I was never so glad to see him in my life.
The one thing about Choo Choo, you see, was he was consistent. You could depend on him to be a cheerful slime.
“Get in here, man, I’ll buy you a drink.”
“Right,” I said, knowing “wrong” was the right answer.
But a few minutes later I was sitting at a table with him, drinking Jack Daniel’s with a tall National Bohemian beer back, and I could feel the tension and fear and rage draining out of me. My neck muscles started to unbunch, and my fingers got a little heat back in them. I was so relieved to be away from the goddamned car lot, and Dog, that I let myself forget Choo Choo’s games.
“So, Red,” he said, “can you believe the Colts are gonna leave town? That mutherfucking Irsay!”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s a shame.”
“Goddamn criminal is what it is,” Choo Choo said. “Just when Kush had them playing better too. They weren’t lying down. They’re going to be back in the playoffs soon. But in Indianapolis. Damn, I can’t believe it. Remember when they had Unitas? Now that was the team.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Ole Johnny U.”
“Yeah,” Choo Choo said. “We had fun going to the games in them days. Dog and me and you. I tell you the truth, I miss going to games with you guys. We ought to be better pals, Red.”
“Hey, you know how it is. Wives, kids … “
“Yeah, and work. Time waits for no man, huh, Red? You know, when you got that nice job in the mill, I thought, well, that’s one thing he can always depend on, steel. But these days, I guess even steel is shit, you know? I might have the only job in the world they’re going to need for good. But it gets you down, working with low-scale guys like Blazek, though this is strictly between me and you. Plus, the pay ain’t shit. Cops in New York City, they live like fucking kings compared to us. We deal with the germs all day long, and they pay us dick. It ain’t right.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But from where I’m sitting, having your job looks pretty good, Choo.”