W
hen Dog left me off in front of our row house on Aliceanna Street, I suddenly had an attack of the Red Baker Special Express Guilts. Began feeling all clammy and wet, like old cardboard left out in the sleet and snow. I mean, what was I doing hanging out there at the bar, seeing Crystal, when I should have been home taking care of my family, figuring out our next move?
Like a high school jerk I stuck a piece of gum in my mouth so Wanda wouldn’t smell the booze and then spat it out on the street, remembering that Wanda knew the only time I chewed gum was when I was drinking hard whiskey. Maybe that was the whole problem, I thought, as I looked in the window and saw her arranging some daisies she’d just bought. You want someone to know you, to share your every secret, someone who you can fill up the lonely mortal space with, and then after they do, you feel all empty and hollowed out. They steal your secrets, they know the fear under your charms. You’re whittled right down to the bone.
So you go out in the street, where you can kid yourself that you’re a different man, acting out a new part with a stranger.
The thought of all that, plus losing the job, made me want to head down the street to Slap’s Tavern, but I made it into the house and tried for an optimistic smile.
“Hi,” she said in that flat tone of voice she used when she had been hurt or disappointed. “Where have
you
been?”
“Well,” I said, taking off my wet coat and hanging it on the wood peg by the stairs, “I could lie and tell you I was visiting sick orphans down at the Children’s Hospital or reading to the blind over at Church Home Hospital, but the truth is I just came from the Paradise, where Dog and I celebrated the losing of our jobs with a few beers.”
“I see,” she said, turning her back to me and going on with the flower arranging.
“Where’s Ace?” I said.
“He’s down in the basement talking on the telephone. We’ve been waiting to have dinner.”
“Hell, I’m sorry.”
“I know,” she said, and she sounded goddamned exhausted. I wanted to come over and hug her and tell her that I really meant it, I
was
sorry, but there didn’t seem to be any way of pulling that off just now.
“I already know about the layoff, Red. We knew it was coming, and I guess I half expected you to be late, but you could have called.”
“I’m sorry, Wanda. Look, it’s been a tough day.”
“Yeah,” she said, “I know it has, but you still should have called.”
I shrugged and rubbed my jaw, trying to figure out how to move past this, to tell her what I wanted to say, when Ace came into the room, spinning his basketball on his index finger.
“Hey, Dad, look at this.”
He spun it hard and then let it slide from finger to finger, still keeping it going. Wanda and I stood there looking at him, and she couldn’t help but smile.
“I could never do this until today,” he said. “I mean, I couldn’t even do it on one finger, and now it’s easy to do it on all five.”
“Hell, kid, I played ball for twenty years and still can’t do it at all.”
“That’s okay,” he laughed. “You can’t stop my drive shot anymore either.”
He began to dribble the ball toward me, and Wanda jumped out of the way, sitting down on the blue couch as Ace faked to his left, then his right.
“You’ll never make it to the door, kid.”
“The only way you can stop me is to foul. Old guy!”
He gave me a little shoulder fake and a stutter step, while Wanda yelled, “Watch out for the lamp, Red. No dribbling in the house,” and then I dodged for the ball, missed, and he would have been by me for sure except for the last-ditch Red Baker defense, the Fatherly Hug. I grabbed him, and the ball squirted free, bouncing onto the shag rug and knocking over the picture of Wanda’s mother, Ruth, which sat on the end table next to the couch.
“You lunatics,” Wanda cried, but she was laughing with us. “Look what you’ve done to Ruth.”
“Nothing time ain’t done worse,” I said, quoting the words of Buck, my old man five years’ dead.
“Red!” Wanda said. “That’s no way to talk in front of Ace.”
“Yeah,” Ace said, “you’re going to screw up all my values, Dad.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Next thing you know the kid will be a teenaged alcoholic.”
“No, glue sniffer,” Ace said. “Or ludes. I’ll get into ludes and hang out on the waterfront, bumming dimes.”
“No way,” Wanda said, smiling at both of us and looking about ten years younger. “You’ll do nothing of the kind.”
“What the hell?” I said. “This boy’s talking like a regular loon-a-tick.”
I grabbed him again and wrestled him down to the floor. He was bigger than me, but I still had the upper-body strength on him.
“Now you two cut that out this second. Red, you get upstairs and get yourself cleaned off, and Ace, you come out here and help me set the table.”
“Okay, Mom,” Ace said. He picked up the ashtray with “Yellowstone National Park” on it, passed his hand over it, and made it disappear.
“Ace?” Wanda said. “Don’t do that. You’ll break the ashtray.”
“I don’t see any ashtray,” Ace said. “You see it, Dad?”
“What ashtray?”
“You two are going to drive me crazy.”
“You mean that ashtray sitting over here?” Ace said, picking up the ashtray from the end table.
“I don’t believe he did that,” Wanda said. “You ought to get into the movies, Ace. You’re getting real good with that magic.”
“I just hope he’s that good with his studies,” I said.
“Don’t worry, Dad, I’m tearing up the books. Got a fifty in a math test today.”
“Ace,” Wanda said, “you didn’t.”
Ace smiled and shook his head. “I forgot a few points. Got an eighty-five. I’m doing okay.”
Wanda shook her head, and I took the opportunity and reached over and squeezed her hand. I thought she might jerk it away, but she held on to me tight and smiled again.
“Now go get cleaned up, Red. I got a roast in the oven.”
“Okay, okay …”
I started up the steps and looked down on them standing there in the living room, smiling at one another, and suddenly I felt this thrill pass through me. Not like the one I had with Crystal. Something deeper that brought tears to my eyes.
They were mine, my wife and child. The thought amazed me, like I’d been given a bright gift. There was no way I could let them down.
I sat in the bath, letting the hot water soak into me, trying not to think of what lay ahead—the unemployment lines, the agonies of looking for work. Just be cool, lay back, take it one step at a time.
I was half asleep in a blue daze, staring at the white tiles and dreaming of that sunshine highway with me and Crystal on it again, when Wanda came into the room.
“I need to talk to you, Red,” she said, sitting down on the toilet seat with the pink, fuzzy cover on it.
“I kind of figured this was coming,” I said, shutting my eyes.
“Red, I’m not here to attack you. I don’t really care about tonight. I know how bad you feel, but there’s just something I’ve been thinking about. Stuff I’ve got to say to you.”
I looked up at the mirror and the blue plastic shower curtain with white whales on it, and suddenly it seemed like I was in a hospital somewhere, being talked to by a doctor who was about to tell me how long I had left.
“All right,” I said. “Shoot.”
“Well, it’s just this. We’ve been through hard times before, and I’ve always stuck by you, but I don’t plan on going through any more craziness. I don’t want this to sound like a threat, Red. I’m just trying to state some facts, because I’ve been thinking a lot about all this since that time you ended up in jail for driving down the Pulaski Highway the wrong way.”
“Hey,” I said, looking down at the water, which was red-gray from the dust on my skin. “That wasn’t my fault. I was with Dog and Henry, and they were in the car ahead of me, and they got lost in the rain and fog and headed down there on the wrong side of the divider. I was only following them, you know what I mean?”
“Red,” Wanda said in this calm way she has, which scares the shit out of me because I know she means business. “Red, we went all through that, and you don’t have to explain it, any of it. All I’m saying is this. I’ve worked hard for this family, and I’ll work for the rest of our lives, but if you go off half-cocked this time, drinking with Dog, and going on the dope, and turning down jobs, and running around, well, then I am going to take Ace and I am going to move to Ruth’s. Do you understand?”
“Come on,” I said. “It’s been a hard enough day, you know? I don’t need to hear about my family walking out on me too.”
“I didn’t say I’d walk out on you, Red. You know that. You could be down to selling apples on the street and I would never leave you if you showed some pride in it, but I won’t be here to see you destroy yourself, and Ace.”
“Who said anything about me destroying myself?” I said. “Is that all the faith you’ve got in me? You think I’m a crazy man?”
“No, I don’t, Red. I think you’re the best man I’ve ever met. But I’m thirty-seven years old. I can’t go through all the dramas anymore. Coming down to the hospital to see you in the emergency room? That’s over with for me.”
“Okay,” I said, taking her arm and pulling her up next to the tub. “Don’t you worry. I’m going to get over to the unemployment tomorrow, and I’m going to take the first job they can find me, and I’ll stick with it until this thing blows over. No sweat.”
“All right, Red … You know what, you ole sweetheart … you know what kills me? Every time you tell me this stuff, I believe it. Even now. But don’t disappoint me again, hon. ‘Cause if you screw it up this time, I don’t think I can go round anymore.”
She spoke so softly, so sadly that I knew she was dead serious. And suddenly all thoughts of Crystal and being a footloose kid just vanished from my head. I held her close to me and kissed her on the cheek and then on the lips.
“There’s something I want to say,” I said. “I’ve screwed up a lot, Wanda, and I know it. But don’t think I take you and Ace lightly.
You’re the most important thing in my life. That kid has got talents … I want him to keep taking his music lessons, I want him to go to basketball camp out at College Park this summer. And I want you to be able to do what you want. I’m going to get us money, babe, you can count on it.”
She smiled, and I kissed her cheek. “God, you smell good,” I said, meaning it too.
But she splashed me and pulled away. “Red, there’s something else I have to tell you. I got my old job back down at Weaver’s Crab House. I start Monday waiting tables.”
“Honey, you don’t have to do that. You should get to stay home.”
“I don’t mind, Red. I been home too much lately.”
I knew this was a flat-out lie. Wanda had lately learned how to do screen painting, which is a Baltimore art form, painting cows and waterfalls on screens. People put them in the windows, breaks up the brick in the neighborhood. She’d gotten real good at it too, even had a write-up in the Sun papers. All her life she had wanted to be good, really good at something, and this was it. I knew how much she hated to give up her time to wait on lawyers who wanted to drink beer and eat crabs. But I also knew we wouldn’t make it for long without the money.
“Goddamn, Wanda,” I said, holding her close to me. “You know I love you, honey. Nothing’s going to change that. I won’t let it.”
I smelled her sweet, lovely skin and lifted a silent prayer to the heavens.
“Please, God, if you’re up there at all, don’t let me fuck up again.”
T
he next morning was cold and gray, and the snow had turned into a mush which fell from the sky like old grits. Dog came by in his pickup so we could head on down to the pissant humiliations of the unemployment line. I was already feeling the grimness overtaking me as I stared out of the window. The right windshield wiper wasn’t working smoothly, and every time that sucker swept back and forth it made a squeaking sound that cut through my eardrums and made my temples ache. But if I wasn’t looking like Mr. Snappy, Dog had gone me five degrees better. He hadn’t bothered to comb his hair, which stood out in clumps on his head and made him look like one of those punk rockers. His breath was so bad it could have melted the dashboard, and he wore the exact same work shirt he had had on the day before, which had given yesterday’s mill odors a chance to really bark right out at you. Though it was only eight-thirty in the morning, he already had the Jack Daniel’s in his hand, and when we hit the potholes and mush humps in the road, the booze would dribble down his chin as if he were one of those old-bag booze rummies you see down on the Block.
I wanted to say something, maybe suggest he head on home and take a shower and shave, put a little Brylcreem in his hair, but I was too damned low myself to have to play cheerleader to him. Besides, he wouldn’t have done it anyway. You could tell the way he was going about the whole thing that the entire purpose of this getup was to make it impossible for him to get a new job. In his heart he was still counting on the mill to reopen. And I couldn’t blame him much. It’s a hard, cold thing to have to change jobs at forty. No matter what you say the night before, you keep hoping some miracle will fall from the sky like a streaking yellow comet and that when you awaken things will be all right, the plant open again and your sweaty, clammy fear and fury will be just a cheap bad dream.
You might as well dream of being sixteen again, heading down to Ocean City in your ‘49 Ford, a case of National Boh and all the hard crabs you can eat sitting in the backseat.
So I could understand how the Dog was feeling that morning. But damn it all, I wanted the boy to at least act like we had a shot at pulling this thing off. Instead he said next to nothing as he stared straight ahead at the gray, ratty streets, and finally I broke the silence myself.
“Listen, son, hang in there. We’re going to get us jobs soon enough. The way I hear it, they got some real big-shot positions down there for us. I mean, we’re talking serious stuff. Movie stars and talk-show hosts and president of Spam … the thing is they got so many good jobs it can confuse a man just hearing about ‘em all.”
I figured this would lighten the Dog up, but it was no go. He hadn’t even heard me.
“What it is, is I can’t stand this shit,” Dog said, slamming the heel of his hand on the steering wheel.
He took a long pull on the Jack Daniel’s bottle and sighed deeply. I watched him from the corner of my eye and could see him sliding down, way down into the blue hole where friendly voices could never reach him.
And when we finally turned the corner to Madison and saw the line waiting in the slate sleet, I almost fell right through the world with Dog.
There were at least a hundred guys standing there with their collars pulled up, some with baseball hats on, some wearing parkas or yellow rubber rain hoods. Most of them were standing stock-still, not even talking, and for a brief second I got the feeling that I was looking at a photograph I’d seen in night school of the Great Depression. It was just like a soup line. And then somebody would sort of bounce around a little, a kind of halfhearted warm-up jog, like they were waiting to run back a kickoff. But there sure as hell wasn’t any ball on this field of concrete.
“Do you believe this shit?” Dog said softly under his breath. “Can you fucking believe it?”
• • •
We stood out in the line, getting gray sleet down our collars, blowing steam on one another, and cursing for two hours, rats waiting for cheese. But for all of that it was nothing compared to the unemployment office itself. They tell me the steel mill is depressing, what with the big machines booming, the smell of burning steel, and the heat that cuts through your skin and leaves iron filings in your pores. But I’ll take a life sentence there anytime compared to the green-walled, gray-metal-desked room, with brown-suited little Negroes and blue-haired, age-spotted ladies who sit behind those desks and stare up at you as if you were a lifer down Jessups Prison coming up for parole.
We stood just inside the door, waiting to get up to the first plateau, a gray metal desk behind which was a skinny black lady with her hair waxed to her head by maybe forty cans of Spray Net. She had dips and whirls and bobs going, kind of looked like one of the Supremes. I got to thinking of her as Miss Motown and told Dog that, but once again he was lost on me, his eyes bulging out of his head, his body tense, coiled.
“Man, I gotta get out of this place,” he said. He looked around the room, his eyes never landing on anything but darting like dots in video games.
“Place reminds me of a troopship in Nam. Same fucking green walls. I still remember the day we was overrun, got the shit blown out of my leg, fell down in one of those ditches with water in it and these blue flowers. They say you can’t drown in a bathtub, but I could hardly get myself out of there in time. Head down, this hole in my leg, and those floating blue flowers that stuck to my body. Finally I made it to the pool’s edge, and I musta fallen asleep. Next thing I know I wake up and I’m staring at these puke-green walls. Peeling paint, and they told me the choppers got me out, but I couldn’t stand looking at them walls. You could see the bumps of the concrete in it … Fucking crazy, right, Red?”
“No, you were shot.”
“But they told me, this doc, that the green was there because it was restful. Made me want to puke, nothing restful about it. Then I remembered the night we got busted, Red, they took us down to the lockup, same fucking walls. You hang around long enough, green walls going to get your ass!”
“Hey, take it easy, Dog. No use harping on it. We got a few more hours to go yet.”
But what he had said had gotten to me some now. All that metal, all these slumped-over guys, some of them trying to talk and act casual like this wasn’t a big deal. They weren’t the worst, though. The worst were the guys in the lines to the left. These were the unskilled workers’ lines. The Motown lady’s whole job was to process you through and then to decide which line you belonged in, skilled or unskilled. If you got put in the unskilled, it looked like the shock of it made you age twenty years in a minute. There were guys there so droopy, so wasted that they looked like they were going to ship them out back behind Big Burger, grind them up, and use them in the special sauce.
Dead-eyed guys. Bent-backed guys.
Guys with the shirts hanging off of them, so they looked like store manikins you see down at Ralph’s Menswear on Broadway. You know the kind, a dummy with an arm fallen off, and a two-tone acetone shirt, and pants made out of polyester, look like they’re made to start fires, and under this sad-assed display dope words are scratched in by Mr. Ralph, the fashion expert, which say
MISTER SHARP DRESSER. Or HIGH SPIRITS. Or OUT ON THE TOWN.
I told myself no matter what, I wasn’t going to let Miss Motown send me over to the unskilled department. I’d goofed on that before and got offered a new career stuffing newspapers with the Sunday supplements along with junkies and Thunderbird winos from down on Pratt Street.
Not today. No way.
“Hey, you guys,” a voice suddenly called out. Dog and I looked up in front of the dead line, and there was fat Henry Hollister. We hadn’t seen him before because he had had his three-hundred-pound carcass spread out on the floor.
“How’s it going, fat man,” Dog said, laughing a little and poking me in the ribs. Just seeing Henry always cheered Dog up.
He looked a hell of a lot like Curly in the Three Stooges, and he had the same sweet stupidity. As a kid he was often the gang’s mascot, making dumb jokes about how fat he was, like pretending he was a dirigible and running around with his arms outstretched, yelling whoom, whoom! And pulling stunts like mooning the couples who were parked out at the reservoir. He had guts though, got to be one hell of a football tackle in high school, and both Doggie and I have always had a soft spot for the old boy.
“Doing real good, boys,” Henry yelled. “Might get me a job selling donuts at Harborplace. Boy, will that be temptation.”
He rubbed his round, soft stomach with a circular motion like he was helping all those little round donuts to roll on through there, and Dog and I cracked up.
“How’s the Babe?” I yelled. The Babe was Henry’s girlfriend, a two-hundred-plus former stripper at the Club Peacock. Everybody we knew thought Henry had lost his pea brain when he hooked up with her, but she had turned out to be good for him, or as good as any woman could expect to be, given Henry’s proclivities for long drinking binges and getting fired off jobs. The latter was his specialty. Like most fat people he was sensitive—92 percent of them are sensitive about being fat (and nothing else)—and when some guy would mention his monstrous size in an unfavorable light, he would take to pulling his famous
National Geographic
bull rhino act, trampling the perpetrator of the unkind remark and everything in his stout path. Naturally this gave him a certain reputation at the bars. “You hear who Henry run up on today, crumpled up Leroy Selkirk, put a heel mark on his cheek.” But it didn’t go over extremely well with his employers, who one after the other reluctantly let Henry go. As a result of his deep sensitivities, Henry was just about unemployable, but to look at him standing there waving to Dog and me you would have thought he was John Beresford Tipton getting ready to give away another million bucks to some poor war orphan with big round eyes.
“Me and the Babe doing fine,” he said. “She’s working down McCormick. Come home smelling like spice cake every night. Whewooooooooie!”
Doggie laughed hard and put his arm around me.
“Shit,” he said. “Henry in a donut shop, ain’t that fine?”
“He is a handful,” I said, still laughing.
Dog laughed with me for a minute or two more, then turned away and began itching his scalp so hard I thought he’d rip out his remaining hair.
“Red, this place is really getting to me. I need some air. There’s a coffee truck outside. How about saving my place in line, okay?”
“Sure,” I said. “But we’re getting a little close up for you to be leaving. Once I get there I got to go on through.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be back in plenty of time. You want some coffee?”
“As long as you’re going.”
“Thanks, pardner.”
Dog smiled as if he had been let off a life sentence and headed for the door. When he opened it, I could see the wall outside of twisting, roaring snow.
About forty seconds after he was out of the green-walled room, the line started moving along like there was cancer eating the other end of it. I got down and started fumbling with my drenched, stubbly work boots, pretending that my lace was untied, but a big greasy-haired guy named Al Rourke, with a head like a medicine ball and eyes like they were cut out of a pumpkin, began bitching at me.
“Come on, Baker. Quit the stalling. Dog’s out of line, it’s his problem.”
“Take it easy, Rourke. I’m moving as fast as I can.”
“Well, get on with it. I want to get out of this place.”
Finally there was no holding it back any longer, and I found myself up to the information desk, face-to-face with Miss Motown. Close up her hair looked like sea kelp and smelled like the dissected frog down at Patterson High.
She asked me the essentials—name age address—and then got around to my work.
“Rougher down at Larmel Steel.” I smiled at her. “That’s a skilled position.”
She tilted the maroon, heart-shaped glasses, with the gold-link chains which hung around her neck, and looked at me as if she was checking out a leprosy victim.
“Rougher? I’m sorry, Mr. Baker. That falls under the category of unskilled laborer. You go to the line on the left please.”
“Now wait a minute, Miss …” I looked at her nameplate, which sat on her desk like a big black razor blade. “Maybe you don’t understand just what it is a rougher does. I turn bars of steel that are hotter than hell. I don’t do it right, the steel jumps the track and somebody ends up walking on stumps for the rest of their life. There’s plenty of skill in that, you better believe it.”
She looked at me and touched her hair, which bounced up and down, all one big spring.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Baker. Under our present laws your job is categorized as unskilled work. The line on the left, please!”
“I don’t give a damn about your categories, lady,” I said. “It’s got more goddamn skill than what people do in here, and I’m going to the line on the right.”
“Mr. Baker,” she said in the even, strained tones of a woman who had seen the light when she read the rules, “you’re unskilled or I call the guard. The choice is yours.”
“Yeah, come on, Baker,” Rourke said behind me. “You gonna shit or get offa the pot? There’s other people wanta get home too.”
I turned and looked him in the eye and then past him, searching for the Dog.
“Listen, Rourke, I’ve had a long day. Don’t push your luck, okay?”
“If I was you I’d shut up, Red,” he said, making a fist.
“Why don’t you open your hand, Al, before I stick it up your ass.”
Rourke’s head jerked back as if I’d slapped him, and he narrowed his slitty eyes as thin as paper cuts.
“Mr. Baker, will you please take your card, sign it, and go to the left line?” Miss Motown said.
“You ever sing with Diana Ross?” I said. “You look a lot like the Supremes.”
“Listen, Mr. Baker, either you move or I call the guards. Take your pick.”
I turned back around to Rourke, and there, three feet away, was Dog, his big brown head covered with snow and his mouth hanging open in a surly way as he stared at the space he was supposed to occupy.