“Red, I don’t want to argue with you. I don’t need a big scene. I know you got fired today. I knew you’d come back like this. I just want you to understand that this is it. It’s over. Ace and I are leaving tomorrow. We’ll be living with Ruth for a while.”
I leaned on the door, shocked by the whiteness of the refrigerator. It looked like a great shining block of ice.
“No way. No way that’s happening.”
“It is, Red. I can’t live like this. Don’t throw a scene. You’ll only hurt Ace.”
I stood still and said nothing but felt the coil of live wire start up in my fingers, shoot through my arms, legs, chest. Felt its beat in my expanding heart.
“No way,” I said. “No way. We’re hanging in there, Wanda.”
“Red,” she said. “We’re through.”
“You got it wrong. I love you, Wanda. I love Ace.”
I had started to sob, and the first tears sent a fury through me.
“I know you do, Red. But it’s not enough. Please, don’t scream and get crazy. I don’t think I can stand it just now.”
“You just walk?”
“No, I been here nineteen years. I don’t just walk. I remember when it meant something.”
“But Ace,” I said. “Ace can’t make it without me.”
She nodded her head, just as calmly as an actress. I knew she had rehearsed this scene for years. She didn’t even need me there to say the lines.
“He loves you, Red, but it’s only because he’s still young and doesn’t know what a liar you are. How little you really care for him.”
“That’s bullshit,” I said. “You’ve said just about enough.”
I moved toward her and saw her eyes get big, and she put her hand to her lovely lips, and then I pushed her back against the stove, saying, “You don’t leave. You don’t pull this shit,” and somehow she fell. Fell and cracked the back of her head, and I saw her slump forward, and I held my breath and called her name softly, and then she was up off the floor like a wild, wounded child, driving right into me, her long nails clawing at my eyes.
“You bastard. You bastard. You threw us away. You bastard.”
She was hitting me then, and I could feel the scratch marks down my cheeks, and I slapped her hard in the face, and then I felt somebody jumping on my back, smashing me in the neck. I turned and threw my elbow back wildly and caught Ace right in the face and knocked him up against the dining room table, and he got up and started to come at me again but then stopped and started crying, and I said, “Son, I’m sorry, I didn’t know …” but it was too late. He looked at me as though he were staring at a corpse. Then he shook his head and walked in the kitchen and helped his mother to a chair.
“We move tomorrow, Red,” Wanda said.
“I didn’t mean it,” I said. “Look, I’ve been trying … You know that.”
“You ever hit me or my mother again, Dad,” Ace said, “I’ll kill you.”
He sounded like me when he said that. They held on to each other, and though I wanted to go to them, I turned and walked into the living room and sat down heavily in the old recliner and didn’t say a word.
• • •
By midmorning they had both moved out. I even offered to help them and kept talking about how I’d come around and check up on them later, but neither of them would hardly talk to me.
Wanda kept moving fast, kept her eyes down to the floor, wouldn’t say a thing. I knew I’d better leave her alone.
But I caught Ace looking at me a couple of times, and when I finally got ahold of him packing in his room, he was shaking and about ready to fall apart.
I leaned in the doorway, looked at him, and felt my hands tremble.
“Damn it, son, you know I love you. You can’t just leave.”
He said nothing but threw his underwear and colored T-shirts into his bag.
“Ace,” I said, my voice cracking. “Listen to what I’m saying, son.”
He stopped then and stared at me, so clear-eyed and in such pain that it was hard to meet his gaze.
“I do listen to you, Dad. I’ve always listened to you. The first thing you taught me was that it’s not what a man says so much as what he does.”
He began putting his T-shirts in the bag again, and I felt as though I was burning up from the inside.
“That’s true, son,” I said.
“I had a game last night, Dad. But you were too busy running around with that whore, Crystal.”
There was an opening in his tone, so I went and sat down on the bed, watched him slowly drop his rolled socks into his grip.
“Look, son. I mean what I said. It
is
what a man does. But sometimes a man doesn’t do the right thing, and if you can see his point of view some … “
He turned away from me, looking out over the backyard at the frozen mulberry tree. Icicles hung from its bowed branches.
“You mean because you got fired? Is that your excuse for everything?”
I didn’t say anything but sat still, trying to calm my breath.
“No,” I said. “It’s not my excuse. I don’t have an excuse for missing your game. And I can’t explain to you about Crystal either. Things happen sometimes to a man, things he didn’t count on, like getting older, like being broke, and if they hadn’t happened all together, or at a certain time, he would have handled them better … but just now …”
My voice trailed off, and I dropped my head. I didn’t want to cry in front of him, didn’t want to beg.
When I finally got myself collected enough to look up, Ace was crying and shaking his head.
“I know it’s hard for you, Dad. But it’s hard on Mom too, and she hangs in there.”
I wanted so badly to reach out to him, to take him in my arms like I did when he was a kid, pat his head and tell him it was going to be all right.
“Dad,” he said, the tears streaming down his face. “You used to be
somebody
in this neighborhood. Look at you now.”
“Ace,” I said, but I didn’t know what else to say. Was I supposed to tell him I had become nothing because of the parking lot. Because of the gray hairs in my head, because of the fears that set a man straight up in bed at five in the morning?
“And last night. You hit me and Mom. I never thought you could He cried quietly, and I reached out for his arm, but he snapped it back and grabbed his suitcase off the bed. He started on an end run around me, and when I got up quickly he jerked as though I were going to hit him again. The fear in his eyes tore through me, and I backed away.
Slowly, I reached out to him and squeezed his shoulder.
“I know you got to go now, son,” I said. “But I’m going to get all this taken care of. I mean it. We’re going to all be a family again, Ace. I swear that to you.”
He shut his eyes and nodded his head, and I pulled him to me and felt his whole body shudder.
“Ace,” I said. “God, I’ll make it up to you, son.”
He clung to me then, like a little boy, saying, “Dad, Dad,” over and over again, and then he stopped and pushed me away.
“Dad, I got to go. Mom can’t make it alone. She needs me.”
“I know,” I said.
He walked past me then and quickly down the steps. I heard Wanda say something about getting a trunk, then I went to the window and saw them piling their luggage into Ruth’s car. The snow was falling on them both, covering them up. Ace walked around the side of the car and opened the door for his mother. Then he turned and looked up at me. His eyes were blank, hollow now, as though he were beyond tears.
Then he walked around the driver’s side, got in, and slowly they drove away.
I don’t know a fancy way to put it. Just that it killed me.
• • •
Except that I wasn’t dead. In fact I felt too alive, like a screaming note held on the guitar. For a week I walked through the house, staring at the dying hanging plant, opening and shutting the refrigerator to get my beer, tossing down my whiskey by 10
A.M.
I would sit in a chair and try to think which way to go, where to look next for a job, but the electric fear and strangeness of all things familiar kept me prisoner in the house. Nothing looked or felt the same without them there. The smallest memory—Ace spinning his ball or Wanda smiling at me from the backyard while she hung out the wash—was like a surgeon’s scalpel digging into my brain and heart.
I avoided listening to the radio at all or any of my old records for fear they would start the memory machine rolling out of control. I grew wary of Ace’s room, shut it off, and avoided even looking at the door itself as I walked down the stairs.
The cellar of my house was a haunted place. All those eyes down there, watching me, judging me, and when I tried to get out of my own head, by calling Dog, his alcoholic babble would frighten me into hanging up.
I tried calling Ruth two or three times, but Wanda wouldn’t talk to me. And Ace was always out. I wanted badly to go up to basketball, take him aside, and win him over, but I didn’t dare it for fear of what I might do if he resisted.
So for the first week I stayed home, watching television, getting loaded until I was senseless. Afraid to go out to look for a job and not knowing where to go in any case.
At last I started up on unemployment again, but by the middle of the week most of the check was gone for booze.
By the eighth day I no longer moved from the bedroom. I woke up, reached for what was left of last night’s bottle, and lay there in the stinking dirty sheets, watching “The Honeymooners,” “Let’s Make a Deal,” “Leave It to Beaver,” “General Hospital,” anything that came on.
I say “watched them,” but that doesn’t really get it because they were really nothing more than part of my dreams. Staying there in bed for twelve and sixteen hours at a time, I never really woke up at all but lost myself in dreams of my youth, games I scored baskets in against Southern, and days walking Ace in the park, and Wanda and I making love out in the country by Pretty Boy Dam. Then when the memories would start to fade and I would realize the house was empty, that down there on the table there was nothing but a bowl of waxed fruit, I would fade into the TV shows, look at those old, comfortable characters, and pretend to myself that it wasn’t any different now. Ralph Kramden and Ward Cleaver and Monty Hall and me, all the same guys, in the same room, with the wrinkled bedclothes, the twisted sheets, the quilt thrown on the floor.
I
don’t know which day it was I dropped the bottle of booze as I fell back into my sleep. But when I awoke I had to take a piss so badly I leaped out of the bed and stepped onto two pieces of glass. The pain shot through me so deeply that it startled me back to life. I looked down at the old hook rug and saw the blood seeping into the floor. I saw the widening red stain and thought of Billy Bramdowski, and then I reached down and picked up the glass and pressed it against my wrist hard, until blood began to squirt out and run down my fingers.
Then I remembered Billy Bramdowski’s kid, with Billy’s brains all over the garden trowel.
I stared at my room, at the six or seven glasses I’d brought up from the kitchen and the balled Kleenex which hadn’t made it to the trash can. At my face in the mirror, heavy, jowled, with a four-day gray-and-black beard. My eyes hollowed out, blackened beneath like some zombie from a horror movie.
The blood kept pouring from my feet, making sticky, thick pools between my toes. I sat down on the bed, ripped a piece of sheet off, and began pulling out the glass.
An hour later I was bandaged up, in my Chevy, and on my way down to the Paradise. It was wrong, but Crystal was the only one left. And if I didn’t move from the bedroom, it might have been Ace who found me lying across the bed.
She wasn’t there when I arrived, only Henry sitting at the bar, staring into one of his subs.
“Hi ya, Red,” he said. “What’s happening?”
“Doing real good, Henry. How about yourself?”
“Well, I don’t know. Still working down Mona Lisa Pizza. About killing myself. Vinnie’s putting more stuff in there … all kinds of sculptures and stuff from Rome … got him a beer garden, getting ready for this summer. It’s hard, but I ain’t complaining. They gimme all the free pizza I can eat. Got this one called a Roman Pizza … There’s mozzarella and anchovies and … “
She came in then, through the back door, but she wasn’t alone. There was a young guy with her, with curly black hair and a face like an Italian movie star. He had a tattoo of an anchor on his arm, and a good, strong build. She didn’t see me but slipped into “our” booth with him.
Behind me Henry droned on about the pizza, but I just sat there, stunned.
Crystal hugged and kissed the dark-skinned guy, and he ran his long fingers through her hair and kissed her on the ear.
Then she reached down and rubbed her hand on his leg, and I felt myself getting down from the bar.
Henry saw me and suddenly grabbed my wrist.
“Don’t, Red, you don’t need any more trouble.”
I looked at Henry’s sad, lopsided face and saw something decent and bright behind his clown’s jowls.
I nodded to him and just stood there while the dark-skinned guy kissed Crystal again, walked around past me and out the door. As she waved good-bye to him she saw me, and her hand froze in the air.
“Red, you want to drink one with me?” Henry said. “I got some money.”
“No, thanks,” I said. “I’m going to talk to Crystal.”
“You sure?”
I smiled at him and boxed his ear.
“You’re a good ole boy, Hen. Thanks. I’m okay.”
He smiled faintly and looked down at his sub.
I walked around the bar, not knowing quite how to hold my body.
“Hi,” I said, trying to keep my voice down.
“Hello, Red,” she said in a small, hoarse voice. She was pulling off being cool and calm pretty well except for her fingers, which she drummed on the table.
“Mind if I sit down?”
“Sure.”
I slid in across from her and stared at her green cat’s eyes, at her sweet smooth skin and her lovely open mouth.
“Who was he?” I said.
“Tony. A friend of mine.”
“Looks like a real good friend.”
She smiled sadly then and ran her right hand back through her short hair. It was a gesture I loved, and it cut me down, blunted my anger.
“Red, I have something to tell you.”
“Yeah?”
“Tony and I are going to Miami together. He runs a charter boat down there, and he has some friends in the hotel business. He’s going to get me a singing job at the Hilton.”
“When are you leaving?”
“Two days. I was going to call you tonight.”
“Oh. Thanks.”
She looked straight at me, her mouth tightly drawn now, and her green eyes were flat, half closed.
“I couldn’t wait forever, Red. I loved you, but that was finished the night you took me out in the car and left me here.”
“Crys,” I said, my voice breaking. “I’m alone now. My family’s gone.”
She picked up her drink and sipped it slowly. Then gently she put it down and held my hand.
“Red,” she said. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t lie to me now. I want to remember you as a guy who maybe promised more than he could deliver … but who was a lot of fun. That’s not the worst way to remember somebody. You lie to me again here, and I’ll start thinking of you as just another bum.”
“You think I lied all those nights we were together? You think I don’t care about you?”
I reached over and grabbed her arm, but like Ace she jerked away from me.
“Red, don’t try and get by on your charm. You know what my daddy used to say—’Walk out while the music’s still playing.’ Let’s leave it at that, hon.”
“I love you, Crystal. You know that.”
She shut her eyes, and a tear came down her face.
“I got to go on now, Red. Just like old times, huh? I go up and dance, and you slip out. Maybe that’s how I’ll remember you best, Red. The guy who was always sliding out the door.”
“Crystal, things have changed. I need you, baby.”
She shook her head and patted the back of my hand.
“You’ll get them back, Red. You can’t make it without your wife and Ace. Now get out of here before I cry and fuck up my makeup.”
She got up and walked away, and looking at her straight, strong back and great legs, and thinking of all the fun we used to have and all our good nights together and how they were finished, made me almost get up and go after her.
But then I remembered Wanda and Ace out there in the snow, packing things into the car, and the way I felt every time either of them walked into the room, and I knew finally that she was right. Without them, though I’d fought against believing it all my life, I was nothing.
I could live without Crystal, although there, just now, watching her go, thinking of her with Tony, it almost seemed unbearable.
But she was right, just as Ace and Wanda were.
I had become nothing, a liar, a nobody.
I had hurt them all, and I’d hurt Crystal too with all my lies and bullshit about us going off to Florida together.
I looked up at her dancing to “Satisfaction” and then, corny gesture though it was, I raised my glass to her and smiled.
She smiled back at me, the tears rolling down her face, and then she strutted toward the other end of the platform. A drunken college kid yelled, “Oh, Crystal, do what you do, baby!” I took one last look at her and headed for the door.
It wasn’t until I got to my car that I began to shake, and then I couldn’t stop until I’d taken three good hits of rye and held on to the steering wheel like it was a life vest.
Wanda and Ace gone. Crystal gone. Dog, damned near crazy.
Was it all me? Was it my fault? Couldn’t any of them see that I had to have money again? There was no chance at doing good, straightening out, no shot at anything unless I had the money to try it.
I started the engine, backed out, and then stopped at a snow-covered phone booth in front of Bud’s Bait and Tackle Shop with its boarded-up windows and the old crayoned sign
LIVE BAIT
half eaten away in the window.
When I got the unemployment office, I had to wait fifteen minutes and keep popping coins into the slot, but finally Miss Motown came on. The booze was pumping through me, and I stammered and slurred my words.
“This is Red Baker. Just called to see if you had anything?”
“Mr. Baker, well as you know, I’m not supposed to discuss this kind of thing over the phone, but I do have something. I think Mr. Hardy discussed it with you. The maintenance job at Harborplace?”
“You mean the trash collector’s job?” I said, suddenly wanting to smash the phone against the window.
“Maintenance, Mr. Baker. It includes grass cutting and painting too. It’s a pleasant job when the winter breaks, and after all, it’s not permanent.”
“Okay,” I said. “What’s it pay?”
“Well, I can’t discuss that now, but it’s considerably more than unemployment. Are you interested?”
“When do I start?”
“The first of the year. That’s about two weeks.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Does that mean you’ll take it?”
“That’s what it means.”
“Excellent. I think you’ll enjoy it.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Smart career move. Forty-year-old trashman.”
“It would help if you could take the job with a positive attitude, Mr. Baker.”
“I’m working on it,” I said.
I hung up the phone and leaned against the glass for two minutes. Then I found another dime in my pocket and dialed again.
“Hello, fifth precinct.”
“Choo Choo,” I said.
“Red, that you?”
“Yeah, what you doing for dinner tonight?”
“Well, let me look at my busy calendar. Says here I’m having it with you, maybe eight o’clock at Hausner’s. How’s that sound?”
“Sounds fine,” I said.
“That’s good, Red. I always say we don’t see enough of each other.”
“Tonight,” I said and hung up the phone.
My stomach was burning and my knees were weak. I sucked in my breath. It was just a dinner, after all. I was just going to hear what work he had in mind.
• • •
I got to Hausner’s ten till eight and took a seat at a corner table the waitress said was reserved for Choo Choo. I had been coming to this place all my life and never saw a table reserved before. I ordered a shot of whiskey and a Boh back and told myself for the hundredth time that it was only a meeting … I could walk anytime.
All around me people were eating crab cakes, drinking beer, and admiring the paintings. The walls of Hausner’s are covered with great art. Stuff like
The Blue Boy,
which is one of Wanda’s favorites, and pictures of girls carrying milk cans through green fields someplace in Europe. And one Wanda and Ace and I all liked of a boy, a dog, and a waterfall. I stared at that painting now as the peroxided blond waitress, Daisy, brought me my shot. I tried to put myself in there with the kid, feeling the mud coming up between my toes, the hot sun on my head, knowing I could just drop my rod and reel and jump in the bright pond. It would be fine to be there.
Better than shaking hands with Choo Choo, who was suddenly at my table, wearing his black raincoat, with the collar turned up, his black hair combed straight back on his head, making him look like Sylvester Stallone or somebody who thinks he can box.
“Red,” he said, hanging the coat on a hook behind our table. “How you doing, babe?”
“How do you think?”
“Yeah, well in every cloud, as they say. Believe me, I know about how tough it can be. You never know who to trust anymore.”
“Listen,” I said, leaning over the table. “I appreciate you laying out for dinner, but aren’t we being a little obvious?”
Choo Choo smiled at that, then turned and waved Daisy to our table.
“I’ll have a shot of Jack Daniel’s. You okay, Red?”
“Yeah. Never felt better.”
“That’s good, hon,” the waitress said. “Sooo many people sick from ‘es weather. My own mother has a sick headache all day long. I’m getting the nuns to say a prayer for her.”
Choo Choo winked at me and smiled up at big, wide-faced Daisy.
“You do that,” Choo Choo said. “Stick with the faith, hon.”
Daisy smiled as if he’d performed magic, and I suddenly thought, “This is how it works. The war is fought between the Vinnie’s and the Choo Choo’s. I’m just a soldier.” The thought made me feel clear-headed, stopped my hands from shaking.
“What were you saying, Red?”
“About this place. Isn’t it a little obvious, you and me being seen together?”
“That’s just the point, Red,” Choo Choo smiled. “I’m your alibi. Everybody knows that you and me are pals. So we’re establishing ourselves right here tonight, a couple of pals having dinner. The night of the job, you and me and Blazek and another guy, Bill Donaldson, are playing poker at my place. You see how we have it figured? I got three citations for bravery in action, and Blazek has himself a couple. Nobody in the precinct is going to doubt a word we say.”
“I don’t know if that makes me feel better or worse,” I said, staring at Choo Choo’s blue tie with the Baltimore Colts horseshoes on it. “I mean, are you figuring we’re going to
need
alibis?”
“Red, Red, relax. I’m just making sure every inch of this thing is covered. There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that anything is going to go wrong. It’s like I told you before, it’s a walk.”
“Okay, but the problem is I don’t trust Blazek to know this shit.”
“Hey, I’m not saying he’s a wild fan of yours. But this is professional. He does what I tell him to, for more reasons than one. I’m not going into details, but you don’t have a thing in the world to worry about when it comes to him. I own the boy.”
Choo Choo smiled and took his drink from Daisy.
“You figure on owning me too?”
Choo Choo laughed out loud at that.
“Red, your whole problem is you don’t trust your friends. I would never put you in a position like that. I want to work with you because you’re a class guy, and I know you won’t fuck up. Come on, take it easy, and let’s have some dinner.”
I nodded my head and ordered imperial crab, coleslaw, and stewed tomatoes, the best meal I’d had in six months, but when it came I could barely touch the stuff. I was that spooked. Still, I made an effort to eat. I didn’t want Choo Choo getting the idea I couldn’t pull this off.
“There’s one more question that occurs to me before you lay this out. If Blazek and Donaldson are covering for me, how much do we have to pay them?”
“Let me worry about that too,” Choo Cho said, smiling and eating his fried oysters. “Damn, this
is
good food. Come on, Red, dig in.”