Beginners Page 10

  “Hello,” he said. “Who is this? Hello! Hello!” The line went dead. “He hung up,” Howard said. “Whoever it was.”

  “It was him,” she said. “That bastard. I’d like to kill him,” she said. “I’d like to shoot him and watch him kick,” she said.

  “Ann, my God,” he said.

  “Could you hear anything?” she said. “In the background? A noise, machinery, something humming?”

  “Nothing, really. Nothing like that,” he said. “There wasn’t much time. I think there was some radio music. Yes, there was a radio going, that’s all I could tell. I don’t know what in God’s name is going on,” he said.

  She shook her head. “If I could, could get, my hands, on him.” It came to her then. She knew who it was. Scotty, the cake, the telephone number. She pushed the chair away from the table and got up. “Drive me down to the shopping center,” she said. “Howard.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “The shopping center. I know who it is who’s calling now. I know who it is. It’s the baker, the son-of-a-bitching baker, Howard. I had him bake a cake for Scotty’s birthday. That’s who’s calling, that’s who has the number and keeps calling us. To harass us about that cake. The baker, that bastard.”

  They drove out to the shopping center. The sky was clear and stars were out. It was cold, and they ran the heater in the car. They parked in front of the bakery. All of the shops and stores were closed, but there were still cars at the far end of the lot in front of the twin cinemas. The bakery windows were dark, but when they looked through the glass they could see a light in the back room and, now and then, a big man in an apron moving in and out of the white, even light. Through the glass she could see the display cases and some little tables with chairs. She tried the door. She rapped on the glass. But if the baker heard them he gave no sign. He didn’t look in their direction.

  They drove around behind the bakery and parked. They got out of the car. There was a lighted window too high up for them to see inside. A sign near the back door said, “The Pantry Bakery, Special Orders.” She could hear faintly a radio playing inside and something—an oven door?—creaking as it was pulled down. She knocked on the door and waited. Then she knocked again, louder. The radio was turned down and there was a scraping sound now, the distinct sound of something, a drawer, being pulled open and then closed.

  The door was unlocked and opened. The baker stood in the light and peered out at them. “I’m closed for business,” he said. “What do you want at this hour? It’s midnight. Are you drunk or something?”

  She stepped into the light that fell through the open door, and he blinked his heavy eyelids as he recognized her. “It’s you,” he said.

  “It’s me,” she said. “Scotty’s mother. This is Scotty’s father. We’d like to come in.”

  The baker said, “I’m busy now. I have work to do.”

  She had stepped inside the doorway anyway. Howard came in behind her. The baker had moved back. “It smells like a bakery in here. Doesn’t it smell like a bakery in here, Howard?”

  “What do you want?” the baker said. “Maybe you want your cake? That’s it, you decided you wanted your cake. You did order a cake, didn’t you?”

  “You’re pretty smart for a baker,” she said. “Howard, this is the man who’s been calling us. This is the baker man.” She clenched her fists. She stared at him fiercely. There was a deep burning inside her, an anger that made her feel larger than herself, larger than either of these men.

  “Just a minute here,” the baker said. “You want to pick up your three-day-old cake? That it? I don’t want to argue with you, lady. There it sits over there, getting stale. I’ll give it to you for half of what I quoted you. No, you want it? You can have it. It’s no good to me, no good to anyone now. It cost me time and money to make that cake. If you want it, okay, if you don’t, that’s okay too. Just forget it and go. I have to get back to work.” He looked at them and rolled his tongue behind his teeth.

  “More cakes,” she said. She knew she was in control of it, of what was increasing her. She was calm.

  “Lady, I work sixteen hours a day in this place to earn a living,” the baker said. He wiped his hands on his apron. “I work night and day in here, trying to make ends meet.” A look crossed Ann’s face that made the baker move back and say, “No trouble, now.” He reached to the counter and picked up a rolling pin with his right hand and began to tap-tap it against the palm of his other hand. “You want the cake or not? I have to get back to work. Bakers work at night,” he said again. His eyes were small, mean looking, she thought, nearly lost in the bristly flesh around his cheeks. His neck around the collar of his T-shirt was thick with fat.

  “We know bakers work at night,” Ann said. “They make phone calls at night too. You bastard,” she said.

  The baker continued to tap the rolling pin against his hand. He glanced at Howard. “Careful, careful,” he said to them.

  “My boy’s dead,” she said with a cold, even finality. “He was hit by a car Monday afternoon. We’ve been waiting with him until he died. But, of course, you couldn’t be expected to know that, could you? Bakers can’t know everything. Can they, Mr. Baker? But he’s dead. Dead, you bastard.” Just as suddenly as it had welled in her the anger dwindled, gave way to something else, a dizzy feeling of nausea. She leaned against the wooden table that was sprinkled with flour, put her hands over her face and began to cry, her shoulders rocking back and forth. “It isn’t fair,” she said. “It isn’t, isn’t fair.”

  Howard put his hand at the small of her back and looked at the baker. “Shame on you,” Howard said to him. “Shame.”

  The baker put the rolling pin back on the counter. He undid his apron and threw it on the counter. He stood a minute looking at them with a dull, pained look. Then he pulled a chair out from under a card table that held papers and receipts, an adding machine, and a telephone directory. “Please sit down,” he said. “Let me get you a chair,” he said to Howard. “Sit down now, please.” The baker went into the front of the shop and returned with two little wrought-iron chairs. “Please sit down, you people.”

  Ann wiped her eyes and looked at the baker. “I wanted to kill you,” she said. “I wanted you dead.”

  The baker had cleared a space for them at the table. He shoved the adding machine to one side, along with the stacks of notepaper and receipts. He pushed the telephone directory onto the floor, where it landed with a thud. Howard and Ann sat down and pulled their chairs up to the table. The baker sat down too.

  “I don’t blame you,” the baker said, putting his elbows on the table and shaking his head slowly. “First. Let me say how sorry I am. God alone knows how sorry. Listen to me. I’m just a baker. I don’t claim to be anything else. Maybe once, maybe years ago I was a different kind of human being, I’ve forgotten, I don’t know for sure. But I’m not any longer, if I ever was. Now I’m just a baker. That don’t excuse my offense, I know. But I’m deeply sorry. I’m sorry for your son, and I’m sorry for my part in this. Sweet, sweet Jesus,” the baker said. He spread his hands out on the table and turned them over to reveal his palms. “I don’t have any children myself, so I can only imagine what you must be feeling. All I can say to you now is that I’m sorry. Forgive me, if you can,” the baker said. “I’m not an evil man, I don’t think. Not evil, like you said on the phone. You must understand that what it comes down to is I don’t know how to act anymore, it would seem. Please,” the man said, “let me ask you if you can find it in your hearts to forgive me?”

  It was warm in the bakery and Howard stood up from the table and took off his coat. He helped Ann from her coat. The baker looked at them for a minute and then nodded and got up from the table. He went to the oven and turned off some switches. He found cups and poured them coffee from an electric coffeemaker. He put a carton of cream on the table, and a bowl of sugar.

  “You probably need to eat something,” the baker said. “I hope you’ll eat some of my
hot rolls. You have to eat and keep going. Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this,” he said.

  He served them warm cinnamon rolls just out of the oven, the icing still runny. He put butter on the table and knives to spread the butter. Then the baker sat down at the table with them. He waited. He waited until they each took a roll from the platter and began to eat. “It’s good to eat something,” he said, watching them. “There’s more. Eat up. Eat all you want. There’s all the rolls in the world in here.”

  They ate rolls and drank coffee. Ann was suddenly hungry and the rolls were warm and sweet. She ate three of them, which pleased the baker. Then he began to talk. They listened carefully. Although they were tired and in anguish, they listened to what the baker had to say. They nodded when the baker began to speak of loneliness, and the sense of doubt and limitation that had come to him in his middle years. He told them what it was like to be childless all these years. To repeat the days with the ovens endlessly full and endlessly empty. The party food, the celebrations he’d worked over. Icing knuckle-deep. The wedding couples stuck to each other’s arms, hundreds of them, no, thousands by now. Birthdays. Just the candles from all those cakes if you thought you could see them all burning at once. He had a necessary trade. He was a baker. He was glad not to be a florist. It was better to be feeding people. Not giving them something that sat around for a while until it was thrown out. This was a better smell than flowers.

  “Here, smell this,” the baker said, breaking open a dark loaf. “It’s a heavy bread, but rich.” They smelled it, then he had them taste it. It had the taste of molasses and coarse grains. They listened to him. They ate what they could. They swallowed the dark bread. It was like daylight under the fluorescent trays of light. They talked on into the early morning, the high pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving.

  Tell the Women We’re Going

  BILL JAMISON had always been close with Jerry Roberts. The two grew up in the south area, near the old fairgrounds, went through grade school and junior high together, and then on to Eisenhower where they took as many of the same classes and teachers as they could manage, wore each other’s shirts and sweaters and pegged pants, and dated or ganged the same girl—whichever came up as a matter of course.

  Summers they took jobs together—swamping peaches, picking cherries, stringing hops, anything they could do that paid a little money to see them through to fall, something where they didn’t have to worry about a boss breathing down their necks every five minutes. Jerry didn’t like to be told what to do. Bill didn’t mind; he liked it that Jerry was the sort of take-charge guy he was. The summer just before their senior year, they chipped in and bought a red ’54 Plymouth for $325. Jerry would keep it a week at a time, then Bill. They were used to sharing things, and it worked out fine for a while.

  But Jerry got married before the end of the first semester, kept the car, and dropped out of school to go to work steady at Robby’s Market. That was the only time there was a strain in their relationship. Bill liked Carol Henderson—he’d known her a couple of years, almost as long as Jerry had—but after Jerry and she got married, things were just never the same between the two friends. He was over there a lot, especially at first—it made him feel older, having married friends—for lunch or dinner, or else late evenings to listen to Elvis Presley, and Bill Haley and the Comets, and there were a couple of Fats Domino records he liked, but it always embarrassed him when Carol and Jerry started kissing and near making out in front of him. Sometimes he’d have to excuse himself and take a walk to Dezorn’s service station to get some Coke because there was only the one bed in the apartment, a hideaway that let down right in the middle of the living room. Other times Jerry and Carol would simply head off in a clumsy leg-hugging walk to the bathroom, and Bill would move to the kitchen and pretend to busy himself looking in the cupboards and refrigerator, trying not to listen.

  So he stopped going over so much; and then June he graduated, took a job at the Darigold Milk plant, and joined the National Guard. In a year he had a milk route of his own and was going steady with Linda Wilson—a good, clean girl. He and Linda dropped in at the Roberts’ once a week or so, drank beer and listened to records. Carol and Linda got along fine. Bill was flattered when Carol said that, confidentially, she thought Linda was “a real person.” Jerry liked Linda too. “She’s a great little chick,” he told Bill.

  When Bill and Linda married, Jerry was best man, of course; and at the reception later at the Donnelly Hotel, it was a little like old times, Jerry and Bill cutting up together and linking arms and tossing off glasses of spiked punch. But once, in the midst of his happiness, Bill looked at Jerry and thought how much older he looked, a lot older than just twenty-two. His hair was beginning to recede, just like his father’s, and he was getting heavy around the hips. He and Carol had two kids, and she was pregnant again. He was still with Robby’s Market, though now an assistant manager. Jerry got drunk at the reception and flirted with both bridesmaids, then tried to start a fight with one of the ushers. Carol had to drive him home before he made a real scene.

  —

  They saw each other every two or three weeks, sometimes oftener, depending on the weather. If the weather was good, like now, they might get together on Sunday at Jerry’s, barbecue hot dogs or hamburgers, and turn all the kids loose in the wading pool Jerry had got for next to nothing from one of the women checkers at the store.

  Jerry had a comfortable house. He lived in the country on a hill overlooking the Naches River. There were a half-dozen other houses scattered around, but he was by himself, too, compared to in town anyway. He liked his friends to come to his place; it was just too much trouble getting all the kids washed, dressed, and into the car—a red ’68 Chevy hardtop. He and Carol had four kids now, all girls, and Carol was pregnant again. They didn’t think they’d have any more after this one.

  Carol and Linda were in the kitchen washing dishes and straightening up. It was around three in the afternoon. Jerry’s four little girls were playing with Bill’s two boys, down below the house near a corner of the fence. They had a big red plastic ball they kept throwing into the wading pool and, yelling, splashed after. Jerry and Bill sat in reclining lawn chairs on the patio, drinking beer.

  Bill had to do most of the talking—things about people they both knew, the power play going on at the Darigold head office in Portland, about a new four-door Pontiac Catalina he and Linda were thinking of buying.

  Jerry nodded now and then, but most of the time just stared at the clothesline or at the garage. Bill thought he must be depressed, but then he’d noticed Jerry had gotten deep the last year or so. Bill moved in his chair, lighted a cigarette, finally said, “Anything wrong, man?”

  Jerry finished his beer and then mashed the can. He shrugged. “What say we get out for a while? Just drive around a little, stop off and have a beer. Jesus, a guy gets stale just sitting around all his Sundays.”

  “Sounds good to me. Sure. I’ll tell the women we’re going.”

  “By ourselves, remember. By God, no family outing. Say we’re going to have a beer or something. I’ll wait for you in the car. Take my car.”

  They hadn’t done anything together for a long while. They took the Naches River highway out to Gleed, Jerry driving. The day was warm and sunny, and the air blew through the car and felt good on their necks and arms. Jerry was grinning.

  “Where we going?” Bill said. He felt a whole lot better just seeing Jerry brighten up.

  “What say we go out to old Riley’s, shoot a little rotation?”

  “Fine with me. Hey, man, we haven’t done anything like this in a long time.”

  “Guy’s got to get out now and then or he gets stale. Know what I mean?” He looked at Bill. “Can’t be all work and no play. You know what I mean.”

  Bill wasn’t sure. He liked to get out with the guys from the plant for the Friday night bowling league, and he liked to stop off once or twice a week after wo
rk with Jack Broderick and have a few beers, but he liked being at home too. No, he wouldn’t say he felt stale exactly. He looked at his watch.

  “Still standing,” Jerry said, pulling up onto the gravel in front of the Gleed Recreation Center. “Been by here now and then, you know, but I haven’t been inside for a year or so. Just no time anymore.” He spat.

  They went inside, Bill holding the door for Jerry. Jerry punched him lightly in the stomach as he went by.

  “Heeey there! How you boys doing? I haven’t seen you boys around in I don’t know how long. Where you been keeping yourselves?” Riley started around from behind the counter, grinning. He was a heavy bald-headed man wearing a short-sleeved print shirt that hung outside his jeans.

  “Ah, dry up you old coot and give us a couple of Olys,” Jerry said, winking at Bill. “How you been?”

  “Fine, fine, just fine. How you boys doing? Where you been keeping yourselves? You boys getting any on the side? Jerry, the last time I seen you, your old lady was six months pregnant.”

  Jerry stood a minute and blinked his eyes. “How long’s that been, Riley? Has it been that long?”

  “How about the Oly?” Bill said. “Riley, you have one with us.”

  They took stools near the window. Jerry said, “What kind of place is this, Riley, that don’t have any girls on a Sunday afternoon?”

  Riley laughed. “I guess there just ain’t enough to go around, boys.”

  They had five cans of beer each and took two hours to play three games of rotation and two games of snooker. Riley didn’t have anything to do and came around from behind the counter and sat on a stool and talked and watched them play.

  Bill kept looking at his watch, then at Jerry. Finally, he said, “You think we should be going now, Jerry? I mean, what d’you think?”

  “Yeah, okay. Let’s finish this beer, then go.” In a little while Jerry drained his can, mashed it, and then sat there on the stool a minute turning the can in his hand. “See you around, Riley.”