The bartender, a heavyset guy with a big nose, asked him if he was ready for another. Baker put his hand over the top of the glass and said that he was good. The bartender went down the stick and asked the jokers if they wanted another round. They said they did and went back to their conversation.
“Hey, you ever been to Wardman Park?”
“When it was the Sheraton Park, I did.”
“I’m going to an affair down there on Saturday night. A wedding reception, in that Cotillion Room they got.”
“Yeah?”
“I haven’t been there in years. But I got, like, a history in that place.”
“What kinda history?”
“It’s of a sexual nature.”
“This again.”
“I’m sayin, I scored my first make-out there when I was fifteen years old.”
“Where, in the men’s room?”
The bartender prepared their drinks.
Baker thought of the photograph of the man he had seen in the newspaper. He remembered the boy at the trial. Blond, soft-spoken, so filled with remorse. The lucky one who ran away. He didn’t look anything like that boy anymore. Gray hair, nicely dressed, distinguished. Wouldn’t he be surprised to meet his old friend Charles?
“Hey, pal, can we buy you a beer?”
Baker turned his head. It was one of the white dudes, short guy with a Jew boy-looking Afro. Baker had been in and out of the world for many years, but he felt certain that whites had given up on that tired look a long time ago.
“I’m about to get up on outta here,” said Baker in a friendly way. “Thank you, though.”
In his previous life, he might have pulled back on his jacket to show the little dude the grip of a pistol coming out the waistband of his slacks. A visual reply to his kind offer with a glimpse at something that said “I ain’t thirsty.” That was the old Charles Baker. Not that he didn’t like to fuck with people now and again. But he wasn’t about to take an automatic fall for carrying a firearm.
Time was, he carried a gun regular and cared less than nothing about the consequences. Used to be, back when he was staying with a woman he knew, over there in the high forties, off Nannie Helen Burroughs in Northeast, he’d get up in the morning, drop a pistol into his pocket, head out the door, and go to work. Walk the streets until he came up on people who looked to be weak, older females and men he could punk, then take them off for what they had. He fancied himself a beautiful, strong animal, like one of those cheetahs walking out on the plain. Going to work natural, doing what hunters did.
That was before his most recent stay in prison. In the federal facility in Pennsylvania, toward the end of that last long stretch, he had crossed over into old. Sure, he had lifted weights and done the usual push-ups in his cell. He continued to look men in the eye and he walked tall. But no doubt, age had come up on him and it had slowed him some. Upon his release, his plan was no plan, as it had been many times before, but now the lack of a road map scared him. He realized that the physicality and fearlessness of his youth would no longer carry him in the world. He had no desire to live straight, but he could read a mirror and see that his strategy had to change. He would become a manager. Use his wiles and charm to make others do what he had grown too old to do himself.
He’d need to find some young ones and put them to work. Wasn’t hard to rope in the pups. Though his rep had died with those who were gone or incarcerated, anyone could look into his hazel eyes, drained of light, and see that he was real. Not in the sentimental way that graying uncles and tired rappers were afforded the OG tag. Real.
Baker’s cell, a disposable, sounded.
“Yeah, where you at?” said Baker.
“Comin up on you,” said the white boy, Cody.
Baker closed the phone.
A black Mercury Marauder pulled up out front of Leo’s. Charles Baker dropped beer money and a meager tip on the bar and walked out into the last of the day’s light. He crossed the sidewalk, stepping around one of those do-good types leading a dog out the Humane Society offices, and got into the spacious backseat of the car.
Deon Brown sat under the wheel of the Mercury. Cody Kruger was beside him. Deon looked in the rearview, and Baker studied his eyes. He had taken his pill, which was good.
“Go, boy,” said Baker.
Deon pulled off the curb, swung the Marauder around in the middle of Georgia, and headed south.
Latrice Brown owned a duplex row house in Manor Park, a middle-class neighborhood east of Georgia near the Fourth District police station. She stood in her second-floor bedroom, beside the window that gave onto a view of Peabody Street, looking down at the curb where her son, Deon, his friend Cody, and Charles Baker were stepping out of Deon’s car. Looking at Charles, she heard that voice in her head, which was her begging, saying, Please, let him be kind.
She worked for the Department of Labor as an administrative assistant. She had come from a strong family with roots in Southeast. She had held her government job for nearly twenty years, attended church regularly, did not smoke cigarettes or reefer, drank moderately, and had been a good mother to Deon and his older sister, La Juanda, now married and gone. Everything was right about her but one thing: she had always hooked up with bad men. Many women were attracted to reckless men in their youth. Most outgrew this attraction and learned, but La Trice Brown never had.
Deon’s father was dead, shot in the face for who knew what many years back at a house party in Baltimore. La Juanda’s father was a two-month error, a hustler she’d dropped off at the bus station in the way that soiled clothing got dumped at a homeless shelter. Charles Baker was La Trice’s latest mistake.
To be fair, he had seemed like a good man, a knight even, when they met. La Trice’s grandmother L’Annette had checked in permanently to the nursing home in Penn-Branch, suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s and plain old age. When La Trice visited, she would sometimes speak with Mr. Baker, one of the cleaning men. Though there was something about him that suggested a kind of hard edge, he was always polite and asked after her grandmother, telling her that he would make sure “the old girl” was comfortable when he was on shift.
He was older than her by ten years, but attractive, with a shaved head and greenish eyes that reminded her of that movie star who played the pimp with the golden heart. To her, the scar on his face did not ruin him, but instead gave him character. He had told her straight-up that he had made some bad decisions in his life and was currently on paper. Her reply was that she believed in redemption and second chances. That was her again, being blind.
La Trice had bought her grandmother a small bottle of good perfume as a birthday gift, and one day, while sitting in the room with her, noticed it was not on the dresser where Miss L’Annette kept her precious things. She mentioned this to Mr. Baker, who said he’d look into the matter. The next time La Trice visited, the perfume bottle was back on the dresser. She found Mr. Baker pushing a mop and bucket down the hall.
“Was it you?” said La Trice.
“I took care of it,” said Mr. Baker. “One of the nurses, Haitian gal, thought she was slick. She ain’t gonna take nothing from grandmoms again.”