Red Baker

by Robert Ward

  And I had. I had let all of them down.

  Ruth was tight-lipped, and Wanda stood with her arms folded, and then finally, after what seemed like a long, terrible hour, we walked out of the church and caught a cab going home.

  • • •

  “Hey,” I said when we got to the house. “Let’s make some hot chocolate and maybe pop some popcorn and watch a little tube.” Ace looked at me and shook his head.

  “Nah, Dad, I got to get up early tomorrow for school. Got to study my history and then get some sleep. See you tomorrow.”

  I went over to hug him, but he gave a little wave of his hand and went up the steps real fast.

  Wanda sat on the couch and stared at the TV, though there was nothing on. That made me so nervous I turned it on and stared directly at the face of Ted Koppel, the news guy with the wig. She took one look at it and walked upstairs, slowly, not so much as blinking at me when she left.

  I sat there staring at soundless Ted for as long as I could, and then I got up and turned him off. He was still out there in the world somewhere, being serious, but I couldn’t use the world’s sorrows to relax me tonight.

  Instead I went upstairs, expecting Wanda to be crumpled on the bed, still dressed in her church clothes.

  Instead, when I opened the bedroom door she was standing there in this short little Chinese robe that came just about halfway down her thighs. She had combed her long blond hair straight back, and she turned and looked at me with bright green eyes and her rich full lips. Except for the worry lines in her forehead, she looked as young and slender and hot as when I first met her back at Patterson years ago.

  I looked at her thighs, and I realized that they weren’t so bad at all. She’d always been able to lose weight just like that, and now she looked young and slender, and suddenly she smiled at me in a way that took away my breath.

  It caught me off guard, but then women always have.

  This was Wanda, Wanda who could drink me under the table when we were younger, Wanda who once leaped out of a speeding car when she found out I was fooling around with another girl and damn near broke her collar bone, Wanda who drove every boy in the school half crazy … Now she turned around, not facing me, staring at herself in the full-length mirror.

  “I don’t look that bad, do I, Red?” she said.

  “No,” I said, barely able to get my breath. Her legs were strong and long, and I thought of the way they felt wrapped around my back. And how I couldn’t throw that away.

  She turned back to me and smiled. She knew she had surprised me again.

  “I’ve been thinking, Red, thinking a lot. I was going to give you a long speech, but I don’t think I need to anymore. I’m tired of hearing my own voice. Just look at me a minute, Red.”

  She pulled the black silk rope, opening the Chinese robe, and I stared at her beautiful breasts, at her rounded, full nipples, at her stomach, which was still flat. Flatter than mine.

  “What do you see?” she said, smiling at me.

  “I don’t know what you mean?” I was paralyzed.

  “I’ll tell you what you see, Red. You see nothing. You forget how it used to be. I almost forgot it myself until lately. Then I started working out, looking at myself again. I was like those girls you ran around with once. I was young and tight all over, but I’m still not bad … even with the goddamned crab-meat smell sticking to me and thirty-six years and being a mother, which I sometimes get so goddamned sick of I could die. Even with all that I’m not so bad, am I, Red? I can see it in your face. You’re turned on … Well, let me tell you something, you aren’t the only one. When Ace and I walk out of here, it won’t be that bad. You hear me? There’s plenty of guys that would like to have Ace for a son, you hear me? Plenty of them that wouldn’t have to chase after Crystal Lewis down at the Paradise when they had me at home.”

  I stood there staring at her. She smiled at me, and in her fury and anger she seemed years younger, like another woman entirely. I wanted to go slap her in the face, the words hurt me so badly, and yet I was paralyzed because she understood where I lived, understood it only too well.

  “Am I making you mad, Red?” she said, laughing a little and running her hand through her blond hair. “Too bad. Just like it was too bad you couldn’t make it to Ace’s recital tonight.”

  “Wanda, I’m sorry … I didn’t mean it.”

  “No, of course you didn’t, Red. But it doesn’t matter a hell of a lot any more what you mean or don’t mean. What matters is what you do. And you do nothing. You’ve lost your guts, and I’ve begun to hate you, you hear me. I’m an old-fashioned girl. I get used to you abusing me. All the women in my time are like that, but when you abuse Ace, when you show up drunk and looking like a bum, then I say fuck you, you hear me …? Fuck you and your goddamned, two-bit, asshole friends … You bastard!”

  I thought she was going to run after me, but all this was delivered in a flat tone of voice, as if she were talking to a ghost.

  “Wanda,” I said. “I’m sorry, baby. You got to believe me. I’m sorry.”

  She smiled at me.

  “Good old Wanda, huh, Red? She’ll always understand.”

  She ran her hand over her breast, something she used to do when we were first married, something so bold that I felt myself getting excited, and I moved toward her. Then she let the robe slide to the floor.

  “Wanda, come here.”

  She smiled again and stepped back so I could see her back and ass in the mirror.

  “You don’t want me, Red. You don’t want Ace or me. You want to live with Dog. You and him being boys forever. Well, maybe you’ll get your chance real soon.”

  The tears came down her face, and she tossed the hair out of her eyes, and then I was on her, wrapping my arms around her, kissing her shoulders, smelling her natural sweet skin.

  “Wanda,” I said. “You can’t leave. You can’t … I love you … Goddamn it.”

  “Red,” she said, “fuck me. Fuck me one more time.”

  So I did. I took her there on the bed, lying across it, and she dug her fingernails into my back and bit my shoulder as I rammed my cock into her, and it was like it had been at the Benjie’s Drive-in all those years ago, when I couldn’t get enough of her and thought about her all day in class, dreamt of her breasts and her neck and the way she cried out when she came. She turned over, and I fucked her up the ass, and she reached back and pulled my hair hard, and I bit her neck and she screamed out, “Red Red. I want it. Come on, Red,” and then finally we were both spent and lay there as the globe lights came on in the cold, wet street.

  When we were finished she looked at me and smiled with that sexy corner-of-the-mouth grin that had always excited me in the past.

  “I won’t be here much longer, Red,” she said. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “Don’t say that. I love you and Ace, and you know it.”

  She shook her head, putting her long, strong legs over my own.

  “I used to think that, Red. I used to think you were better than the rest of them, but it isn’t true. You’ve just got more charm, but that’s not enough anymore. Not for me or Ace.”

  “Goddamn it, that’s a lie,” I said. I wanted to slap her, bite through her skin. She lay there in bed, looking at me, wrapped in my arms, half laughing, mocking me, and half crying. And I was amazed. I hadn’t known how much of her there was or how strong a spell she still held on me.

  • • •

  Finally she fell asleep, but I lay there awake for a long time. Her words had stung me badly, I could feel the welts rising inside my chest and arms. Was I like the rest of them? All charm and bullshit?

  Long after Wanda had fallen asleep I lay there, my heart pounding, thinking how it is a man knows he believes certain things, but he slips a little here and slips a little there, and eventually he looks the same but he’s not even a man at all. He’s just a liar, and that means he’s nothing, and I tried to turn that over in my head—was it true, was I just a l
iar, and how could I be anybody at all anyway, with no job and working at the parking lot …? It didn’t seem possible, and then this terrible sadness came over me, and I figured that there was somebody I once was, young and pretty damned good, and this guy, this other guy believed in the future and loved his wife and kid and took them out on walks and bought his wife flowers and his son toys and came home after work and fixed the house and thought about having more kids and getting a better job at the mill, and then he began to see it all slip away. But he thought that it was still all outside of him, that even if the mill was going under, and even if he hung out with the guys too much, and even if he started whoring around and doing drugs, and all the rest, even if he was doing all that shit, underneath he was the same guy. It was like being on vacation from himself.

  Except up the Sunday school they used to say “by your acts ye shall be judged,” and I have never forgotten that.

  And my acts now were pretty much those of a no-good bum.

  But it wasn’t only your acts, was it? A man dreamed things and felt things and wanted to be good. That had to count for something.

  But maybe it only counted to him. Maybe only he knew, and so the Bible was right. It was your acts you should be judged by.

  Except it was all well and good to come on with noble stuff like that if you were a priest or somebody who had the inside track with Jesus. Me, I was a steel man without a job and no goddamned money. What kind of good acts was I likely to pull off even if I wasn’t such a fuckup?

  I thought of Choo Choo and the fifteen thousand dollars.

  I got up out of bed and walked to the window and looked out at white, snow-covered Aliceanna Street, and it was real pretty, all covered over, and I thought if I were a kid tomorrow I’d go sledding over in Patterson Park.

  But tomorrow I’d be back down in the white-walled, dead-ass, cold garage, water leaking out of the pipes, guys screaming at me about their goddamned theatre tickets, and I wouldn’t be one step closer to getting my life together than I was now.

  Still, I had to try. I loved my wife and kid. Wanda was wrong about that. I was a selfish bastard and a fuckup, but I couldn’t take it if they left.

  I had to try to keep it going.

  I owed it to them, and to Doggie too. Yeah, he had thrown me out, but he wasn’t going to get rid of me that easily.

  These were my people, and I was stronger than most of them. Damn, I had always known it, and I wasn’t going to just sink.

  I’d get another job, and I’d really start spending time with my family. I’d keep it together somehow.

  And then, right in the middle of this new resolve and all these warm thoughts of Wanda and Ace, right on the spot I started thinking about Crystal’s tight little ass and the way she looked out on the parking lot the other night, and God how I wanted her.

  I lay back down in my bed and tried not to think of her and how she too was threatening to leave me. And goddamn, I couldn’t stand that either. I needed her, the way she made me feel.

  That was the trouble again. I needed everything at once, and I shut my eyes and sent up a little prayer to a God who might or might not be hanging out there above the row houses, and I said, “Let me do right, and keep those I love, and not want everything in Baltimore.”

  • • •

  For the next two weeks or so I kept a tight rein on myself. I knew things around the house were right on the edge of exploding and that it would take both Wanda and Ace one hell of a long time to forgive me for screwing up at his recital.

  I stopped worrying about getting back on unemployment and tried to forget about the steel mill altogether. I told myself that for now I was a car attendant, that there was nothing shameful in it, that it was just a temporary thing, and I’d handle it like a pro.

  I even gave myself little pep talks in the morning, cornball stuff like “Okay, Red, so you’re a parking lot attendant. Well, you son of a bitch, you’re going to be the best goddamned parking lot attendant in Baltimore.”

  Then I’d nod to myself in the mirror and head off down the cold, snow-blown streets to the garage.

  But God, just seeing the garage entrance, dark and underneath the ground, like a mouth waiting to swallow you up. I thought of Jonah every time I went in there … down in the belly of the whale, freezing my butt off, with only Leroy for company. Some days, driving the cars around the ramps, I’d begin to think that I was trapped in a maze, and that I’d never get out but go down lower and lower, and down at the bottom something was waiting for me I couldn’t name.

  When that would happen my heart would race, and my head would get light, and though it was cold, the hot flashes would start me sweating right through my flannel shirt. And I’d silently pray, “Don’t let me die down here, God. Don’t let me, please.” And then I’d look around and realize that maybe I was two stories down, and I’d think of Vinnie putting me down the sewer, and the idea that God and Vinnie were partners came into my head, and I was ashamed of it and hoped He wasn’t watching me and didn’t know … A man’s not really responsible for what thoughts come into his head, is he?

  I thought that they had put me down the sewer as a child and they had let me come up, Vinnie and God, let me come up for a hell of a long time, just to trick me into thinking that I was out of there forever. But now, at forty, when a man wants to start thinking about his future and preparing himself for his older years, they had put me back down it again, only this time … this time, it was for good.

  They had tricked me into thinking I was free.

  But why? What had I done? Was it because I’d screwed around with Crystal? I couldn’t believe that. Was it because I hadn’t been a perfect father? Or that I didn’t go to church anymore?

  Or was it like Job, a test of some kind? And if it was like Job, what was the point of all that I had learned in church school as a kid?

  What kind of a God would put me down here in these cold circular roads which burrowed into the earth, water from the cracks in the pipes dripping on my head?

  What kind of a God would snatch away the job I loved, let Billy Bramdowski, who never hurt any man, blow his brains out in the toolshed? Was he like the gods I read about in high school, those old Aztec lords who were made of gold and bronze and needed human sacrifices?

  Was he hungry again, having eaten Billy’s brains? Maybe now he was calling for mine too?

  Would it be a heart attack down on the Green Level, falling crumpled over some lawyer’s Mercedes?

  Or would he drive me crazier, day after day, down these circular, mazed, underground streets, where the air got as flat and as dead as the eyes of the people who asked for their cars?

  Or would he send people, was he already sending the bastards, to stir up my anger and my pride?

  Like the guy one morning who accused me of stealing the bottle of vodka he left on the backseat?

  “I never took your vodka, mister. I don’t even drink the stuff.”

  “I didn’t say you drank it,” the guy said. He wore a long tan raincoat and horn-rimmed glasses and had a pointed needle nose. He seemed to be sniffing at me as though he couldn’t quite tell if we were both men.

  “Maybe you took it and sold it for a few bucks. Or maybe your black friend over there swiped it.”

  I stared at him, down there on the third level, and thought how easy it would be to grab him by the collar, turn him around, and just run him into the wall. How, just then, I would have enjoyed it more than anything in the world.

  But I kept my peace.

  “No one took your vodka. We don’t steal in here.”

  I spoke with as much calm as I could muster.

  I think he heard me then, because there was a spooked look in his eye. He stared bug-eyed at the white walls, the huge basement, empty, and the only sound that of the dripping pipes. And he nodded and looked away from me, then got in his car and pulled out, blowing the exhaust in my face.

  Or the guy who accused me of putting a dent in his fender, a dent I�
��d seen that morning (there were so many of these bastards that you tried to remember the condition of every car). I had to actually threaten him to get him to leave.

  Leroy saw me flipping again.

  “Hey, man, cool out. Maybe you need a drink.”

  But he was wrong about that. I didn’t need one drink. I needed a hundred drinks, a thousand, nothing less would do. One night at the Paradise could finish me off. I’d be on the road to Florida with Crystal, heading down to those bright sands …

  And late Tuesday, after Wanda and Ace had fallen asleep upstairs, I poured myself a long, stiff drink and dialed Crystal’s number on our living room phone.

  I half hoped she wasn’t home.

  But she was there, half asleep, and when I heard her sweet, smoky voice, groggy and a little scared, a tenderness and warmth cut through me. Emotions so strong they almost brought me to my knees.

  “Crystal, it’s me, honey.”

  “Red? Red, is that you?”

  “Yeah, babe, it’s all right. It’s fine.”

  “You scared me, Red, what time is it?”

  “Three o’clock.”

  “Red, are you in trouble?”

  “No, I’m fine. Just fine.”

  “Where are you, Red?”

  “I’m downstairs at my home,” I said, whispering and looking up toward the stairs.

  “Red, are you crazy? I don’t hear from you since Dog gets beat up, and now you’re calling me from your house? What if Wanda wakes up?”

  “It’s all right. She’s a deep sleeper. I just had to talk to you, that’s all. I miss you, honey.”

  “I miss you too, Red, but I wish you hadn’t called me.”

  “Why, babe?”

  She started to cry a little, and I began rubbing my nose, feeling like such a fool.