Red Baker (18 page)

She caught me up short on that. I had completely forgotten about it, what with all the excitement concerning Dog and practically being thrown out of my home.

“God, I’m sorry,” I said. “I really wanted to do it. It’s just been hell around here. Dog has been acting nuts, and my kid, Ace, he needed to see me. Crystal, I don’t know what to say. I just want to see you soon.”

There was a long silence, and she cried some more. I could picture her, lying there alone in her bedroom in her little apartment down on Pratt Street overlooking the harbor.

Underneath her quilt, with her cat, Alfie, lying at her feet. Her short boy’s hair and her big green eyes and all curled up like a kid.

I loved her then, more than I ever had.

“Crys,” I said. “Listen, I could come down and see you on Tuesday night. I could stay real late, and we could go get those crabs, and drink some beer, and make a night of it.”

“No, Red, I don’t think so.”

“Crystal,” I said. “We’ll hear your new records and turn down the lights. Just the two of us.”

“Red, you idiot, I can’t stand this. You hear me? I love you, and I can’t take this anymore.”

She never said that before then, and it felt like someone had turned a warm shower on my face.

“Red, I wanted to tell you in person. I hate to say important things over the telephone, but you might as well know, I don’t think I’m going to be around much longer.”

“What do you mean, honey?” I said, feeling cold and fearful.

“I’m leaving. I’m moving to Miami.”

“Miami?” I said. “You can’t do that.”

“Why shouldn’t I? What’s keeping me here?”

“Honey,” I said. “You got friends here, people who care about you. Down there you don’t know anybody. That’s a bad town. Full of crazy mental-patient Cubans Castro sent over on the Looney Boat. They got drug wars down there too. I read in the papers just the other day that they had to hire a bunch of new ice cream trucks and convert them to morgues, just so they could scrape the cocaine dealers up off the street.”

She laughed a little at me and then sounded like she was starting to cry again.

“That’s why I shouldn’t move? You came up with every reason except the one I wanted to hear.”

“All right,” I said, breathing hard now. “I love you, Crystal … Goddamn it, I can’t stand it if you leave.”

“You don’t mean it,” she said in her little girl voice.

“Don’t tell me I don’t mean it,” I said, raising my voice and then dropping it again.

“What about Wanda and your son, Ace?”

“What about them?” I asked, stalling.

“What about them? Are you ready to leave Wanda for me?”

“Crystal, they’re my family. They need me.”

“Red Baker, Old-fashioned Guy,” Crystal said.

“Yeah, in some ways I am. But Crys …”

“Well, you weren’t so old-fashioned the first night we met at the Paradise. You wanted to jump on my bones the first second we met, and when I refused you told me I was acting like a prude. You remember all that talk, Red. ‘Don’t let a good moment like this go by, Crystal. Think of all the people who are afraid of life and miss out.’”

“Crystal,” I said. “I don’t remember all that. I only know I mean what I just said, I love you, honey. You can’t leave Baltimore.”

“Oh, Red, I don’t know. I don’t know if I can believe you anymore. That’s the worst of it. It’s not waiting around, it’s that I might have been wrong about you. That you might be a liar like all the others.”

When she said that I sagged against the couch, just as though somebody had punched me hard in the gut. Could lovers read each other’s minds?

Maybe it was true. Maybe I was no good. Maybe I had fallen that far. And if she left, if she left me, that proved it, didn’t it? It was another reason to never let her go.

“Crys, you know that’s not true. You know it.”

“I
used
to know it, Red.”

I heard a bed squeak upstairs. I looked across the darkened room at the chest of drawers with the gleaming, moonlit artificial fruit on the top.

“Crys, I got to go. I’m tied up for three days, but I’ll come see you Thursday night, all right?”

“Sure, Red,” she said, but her voice was flat, like she was already talking to somebody she used to know.

“Believe me, Crystal, I love you, I do.”

“I love you, Red. I always will,” she said, and then she hung up.

My heart was beating wildly. I heard another shuffle from upstairs, then Wanda’s voice.

“Red? Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” I said, gripping the edge of the couch. “Just couldn’t sleep. Had a drink of juice.”

“You better come up to bed. You have to get up in four hours.”

“Sure, honey,” I said. “I’ll be right up. You go back to sleep now.”

I heard her sliding back to the bed. The sound of her slippers over the rug, like an old woman.

Soon we would both be there. Old and broke, Ace gone off somewhere—but not college, because I didn’t have the money to send him—the three of us like flies you swat on the screen door in summer.

And Crystal gone too …

Gone to that white beach and crashing ocean surf, singing “Misty” to men with money.

• • •

The next day all hell broke loose, and the thing is I should have seen it coming. I hadn’t slept better talking to Crystal; instead I just laid there staring at the ceiling, thinking about how things had come down.

At seven I was flat out, and the only way I was going to keep it going was to take a Dr. Raines’s white, something I had avoided since the night of Ace’s recital.

The pill came on fast, taking me up for a hard-edged, rough ride, and I knew within fifteen minutes that I had to stay away from people. Meaning everybody.

But that’s the evil in Dr. Raines’s pills. Even when you know you’re going around the bend, you can’t help yourself. You want to talk to people, even if it’s just to cut them up.

I started on Ace at the breakfast table when he mentioned he needed money for his music teacher, Joe Lawrence.

“He’ll get it when I get ready to pay it,” I said, ripping a piece of toast in half and stuffing it into my mouth.

“Hey,” Ace said, “we owe the guy three back payments. He’s not a millionaire, you know.”

“Yeah, well tell him he can come over here and pick his money off our tree out back … Hell, we got so much to spare, tell him to bring friends.”

“God, Dad, what’sa matter with you? He gave me the lessons. We owe him.”

“Red,” Wanda said as she slid an omelette onto my plate, “Joe Lawrence has to eat too. He’s got a right to ask.”

“Yeah, I know that,” I said, turning on her. “I’m not a goddamned moron, you know?”

“Hey, nobody said you were,” Ace said. “I mean, it’s embarrassing for me to go in there and ask him to keep giving me lessons when I don’t pay him.”

“Is that right?” I said, suddenly thinking of Crystal leaving for Miami. I had an exact mental image of her behind the wheel of a U-Haul and driving down the highway, leaving me standing there in the snow.

“You think you got problems? You think that’s embarrassing? How about working like a nigger every fucking day down at the parking lot? You think that’s a party?”

“I know, Dad,” Ace said. “It’s just that I’m worried about losing Joe. He told me that if we didn’t pay soon, he’d have to drop me.”

“He did?” I said, jumping up from the table, though I knew I was acting like a fool. But Dr. Raines was sending electricity through my veins. I didn’t want to hold it back any longer. I didn’t want to cool it. Let it come down now. Let it blow down the house, that black poison from my mouth.

“Maybe I ought to go over there and talk to him some. Maybe he wouldn’t be so anxious to drop his best student, the two-faced asshole.”

That sent Ace out of his chair. And I knew it would, God help me, I knew it.

“Great, Dad. Be a big man. Go over and break Joe’s hands why don’t you? That’s just what we need.”

“You think I couldn’t?” I said. “You think I couldn’t? Fucking fancy hot-shit college-boy guitar teacher.”

“Red,” Wanda said, grabbing me by the arm and spinning me around. “What’s wrong with you? He’s a friend of ours.”

“Goddamned whimp,” I said. “Goddamned whimps run the fucking city, whole fucking world, you hear me.”

Ace looked at Wanda and backed off from me.

“You’re crazy, Dad. You’re out of your mind.”

“Yeah,” I said, “I’m crazy … crazy as shit!”

I threw my napkin down on the table, spilling Ace’s glass of juice.

“Now look what you’ve done,” Wanda said. “Goddamn it, Red, get ahold of yourself.”

She was right, I knew it. I had to stop it, but it was too late. The spring had snapped, and I was letting loose my parts all over the house. I could feel my arms pumping full of blood, my eyes exploding, and I wanted to waste it all, don’t look back.

“Fuck Joe Lawrence,” I said. “And the horse he rode in on.”

“Screw you, Dad,” Ace said. “He’s my friend … Yeah, but you’re a big shot. Why don’t you go get drunk, and you and Dog can beat him up. You asshole!”

He turned and walked out of the kitchen, and I wanted to go for him then, turn him around and slap his face, and then suddenly I felt like I had to rip down the shelves we’d so carefully built into the kitchen wall. Rip them down, throw them away. Throw it all away … Burn it, axe it, kill all that’s left.

“Red,” Wanda said. “Did you take one of those goddamned pills?”

I turned and looked at her, wild-eyed. She knew about the pills. Of course, of course she did.

“No,” I said. “What you been doing, spying on me or what?”

“Red, I’m telling you, don’t go into work like this. Go back to bed … Red, listen to me.”

“Don’t worry about me, Wanda,” I said. “I can handle it. I can handle all the shit they got to give.”

“Red, you’re sweating. God, Red, look at you.”

I turned toward her and looked at her, and the pill lifted me out of myself, and I saw her there in front of me like a stranger. A ghost boarder in my home of strangers.

“Good-bye,” I said, laughing. “See you after I get back from the office.”

“Red, wait.”

But I was headed for the door. There was something turning inside me, something old and savage, a hand gripping a throat. It didn’t much matter whose.

I had to walk three blocks through the slush and could feel myself losing control, all of the pressures beating against me from the inside as though there were a cage of screaming monkeys trapped inside my body, trying to punch their way through the bars.

I was only a block away from the lot when I saw Dog. He was standing on the corner with Jackie Gardner, Jackie with his long, thin hair combed straight back like greasy pasta. Wearing his short leather jacket and old high-top tennis shoes, and Dog there in his ancient N-1 jacket, his arms wrapped around the lamppost. Just for a second, with the pill working inside of me, making everything shuttery and blazing bright, just for a second it was like we were all kids again, standing on the corner, laughing and getting ready to go off to a dance up at Patterson Park, just three young neighborhood guys hitting the streets …

Then I saw the bandage on the other side of Dog’s head, his two-day stubble, and the gone look in his smile. Jackie Gardner stumbled against him and gave his little sad laugh. Jackie Gardner, who I hadn’t seen since he told me about Billy Bramdowski.

Dog brought out the bottle of Maryland Rye to his lips. Some of the liquor dribbled down his chin.

“Hey, Red,” he said. “Hey, babe, what’s happening?”

“Dogger,” I said, trying to cool myself down. But my voice sounded like an old, scratched 78.

“Hey, look who it isn’t,” Jackie Gardner said. “You come along the right time, Red. Just the right time.”

He took the bottle and thrust it in front of him, smiling with one side of his thin mouth. One of his teeth was missing, and he gave that tired little laugh again.

“None for me, boys,” I said, trying to sound casual but suddenly wanting that liquor more than breath.

“What’s the matter, Red, you too fucking good to drink with us?” Dog said, putting his big hand on Jackie Gardner’s shoulder.

“Too fucking good,” Jackie Gardner said. “The guy is too fucking good.”

“Hey, I’m on my way to work, okay?”

“Yeah,” Dog said, “don’t want to get caught drinking and driving.”

Jackie Gardner hesitated a second while that seeped into his brain, then he opened his thin mouth and let out a little belch of a laugh.

“Drinking and fucking driving on the fucking parking lot. Fucking funny, man, that is fucking funny.”

“Yeah, you guys are a riot,” I said. “Too bad Ted Mack ain’t on the tube anymore.”

Jackie hesitated again and slapped his knee.

“Ted Mack … Ted Fucking Mack.”

He opened his mouth and squeezed up his slitty eyes as though he were in convulsions, but no sound came out.

“Look, I gotta go. Glad to see you up, Doggie.”

Dog looked at me dead-faced, and for a moment I got ready to take a shot in the back of the neck as I went by. But he let me pass. When I was ten feet away, though, I heard him say, “See you later, Jackie. I gotta talk to Red a minute.” Then he was calling my name and walking toward me fast.

“Hey,” Jackie Gardner said, “we going pussy hunting downa block or what?”

But Dog didn’t answer him, and I saw Jackie open both his arms and then slowly slide down the lamppost, holding his bottle with both hands.

“Jackie’s looking good,” I said to Dog, which wasn’t what I wanted to say at all.

“Hey, since when do you put down Jackie Gardner? He’s a pal.”

Dog stood there next to me, looking down on me as though he wanted to hug me or break my face.

“He’s a good guy, ‘at’s the truth,” Dog said. Then he grabbed my collar and shook me hard.

“Dog, Dog, hold on.”

“Red,” he said. “You think I’m a piece of shit out here, right?”

“No, Dog, just take it easy … Let go of me.”

He turned me around and stared down at the freezing sidewalk.

“You want to know why I’m out here drinking like a goddamned bum?”

“Yeah, if you want to tell me.”

“It’s Carol, man. She’s definitely fucking Dickie Nellis. But little Dickie’s going to lose his dick, you hear me?”