Free Red Baker by Robert Ward

to get on over there soon. Might be something to tide you over.”
    “Jesus,” I said. “That place …”
    “I know, Red. I wish to hell I could give you some work here, but you look at this place. It’s a tomb in here. I can’t give this stuff away, and you know when people ain’t eating seafood, they ain’t eating.”
    I nodded and sucked out the last oyster, all covered with horseradish and cocktail sauce. It tasted so damned good that it picked my spirits up just enough to get out on the street again.
    “Good luck, Red. You’ll find something.”
    I shut the door and started walking across the street to my car when I heard something in the alley. I looked back in the twilight at the trash cans and soaked cardboard boxes and didn’t see anything. Then I heard it again, a low moan.
    Slowly I walked back there, looked to my right and left, knowing that it could be a trick, that any second I might get a knife in my ribs.
    I saw what it was.
    A man, maybe seven or eight years younger than me, lying in a pool of his own vomit. Next to him was some rotgut wine, and he waved his left arm at me as if he wanted me to come closer.
    I didn’t know what to do because the shock of seeing him made me stand still for some time.
    He didn’t have a nose. Just a pinched-up little scar and maybe half of one nostril.
    “Think I’m ugly?” he said.
    “No,” I lied. He was the ugliest man I’d ever seen.
    “Got it shot off in ‘Nam,” he said, and then he gave a small, cackling laugh that was close to a scream.
    I don’t know what it was, spending all that time roaming up and down the streets, hearing about Ruby leaving, but I suddenly couldn’t stand it, and it occurred to me that he was me and I him … and I wanted to do something for him, wanted to pick him up out of there, get him to a hospital. But when I walked closer I saw he had a knife.
    “You get near me you going to get the darkness,” he said.
    And then he began to laugh again, and stab weakly out into the winter snow, and I backed out of there, feeling the oysters sloshing around inside of me and wanting to throw up. I leaned on the brick wall for a second and looked back in the alley again and could see his torn boots and his raw, bare legs. Then I staggered back across the street and got in my car.
    The mattress factory was like a building I saw in a nightmare once. I was running down a narrow cobblestoned street, and I was being chased by someone; worse, I think it might have been a friend, a friend with a knife, and I kept wanting to explain to him that he didn’t have it right, I hadn’t betrayed him, I was his friend forever, but I knew he wouldn’t listen. He was coming after me, and my only hope was to get away. But up ahead of me was this building, big and square, with a million tiny windows, all of them covered over with black soot, and inside were things like people but with animal snouts and squidlike suckers coming off of their faces.
    It was death from the friend or death inside the box.
    I woke up and stayed alive.
    But this wasn’t any dream. This was Shawland. Outside was a big blue-and-white billboard of a blonde in a negligee sleeping with her eyes closed on her mattress. She was fifty feet tall above me, floating there above the snow like a sleeping angel. Underneath her was the potholed parking lot, leading up to the boxy building with the windows that looked like poked-out eyes. I thought of no-nose lying there in the alley.
    I thought he had come in the night and sliced out the sight from those windows, from all who worked in that gray, filthy, soot-stained place.
    I don’t know how I got him and the factory mixed up, but I thought of him as I pushed open the filthy glass door and walked all the way down the gray endless hallway, by glass-partitioned booths that looked like places where doctors came to see if you were gone enough to work there.
    There was a smell in that place too, like burned flesh, and puddles of water all