Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [103]
But he was wrong; his record at Quentin was good and they considered him a good parole risk. So he left San Quentin absolutely determined not to go back, as much for their sake as his. Because that strange, awful place had actually tried to help him. They, it, had treated him as a man whenever Custody would let them, and tried to find a way to reach him through the layers of hardness, and where they failed they at least tried, and whether it was San Quentin or Billy Lancing that had reformed Jack was a moot point: he was reformed. He came out wanting to make something of his life.
There was a job waiting for him in a bakery on Union Street, near Fillmore. The building was set back from the street, and out in front on its own sidewalk were little marble-topped tables and wire chairs beneath a striped awning. Three trimmed acacia trees completed the decor, and there was a boy in a white jacket to wait on the tables and sell baked goods from the glass counter inside. The proprietor always sat on a high stool behind the cash register; he was a small man, usually dressed in a gray suit and vest, with a plump, pallid face, receding hair, an amused mouth, and blank, colorless eyes. His name was Saul Markowitz, and he opened the bakery each morning at six promptly by wearily pulling back the grating and unrolling the awning, and at that hour his best customers were the servants of the rich of Pacific Heights, who would come in for a quick cup of caffé Wien and a hot croissant; fresh, hot croissants were the specialty of the shop, and the servants would pick up a foil-lined box of them to take back to their people. Also at that hour there might be a few from all-night parties, drunk, sitting at the little tables eating their croissants and pouring brandy into their coffee, talking the brittle patter of people who don’t have anything to do with themselves. Saul Markowitz knew most of his customers by name, including the servants; he addressed them, joked with them, and kept his eyes remote. Many of his customers thought he was contemptuous of them, but they came back anyway.
Saul Markowitz often recruited his bakery help from San Quentin; they would come, work, be with him for a few weeks or months, and then move on. He would always get another. Jack could not understand at first what it was Mr. Markowitz wanted of him. He knew that Mr. Markowitz had a reputation for a special kind of wit: perhaps hiring ex-convicts was witty. Mr. Markowitz had been asked by Herb Caen why he had named his bakery “Rosenbloom’s” and had answered, according to the item in the column, “Who’d come to a place called `Markowitz’s?”’
But Jack was glad for the job and grateful to Saul Markowitz; he worked hard and made no trouble. There were two bakers, and Jack was the helper. He wore a white tee shirt, white duck trousers, and a white apron, and most of the time his face was smeared with a mixture of sweat and fine flour. He hauled sacks of flour around, greased pans and put them in the oven and pulled them out, stocked the display shelves, washed pots and trays, and stuffed himself with baked goods. It was a good job, hard hot work and fair pay, but after a while the smell of the place sickened him, especially when he would have to bend deep into the lard barrel and get the last handfuls of dead white lard from the bottom. The bakers were a pair of noncommittal types whose only conversation, aside from giving orders and cursing, was about union matters. They did not appear to have any life outside the bakery. They left Jack alone and he left them alone.
No one at all, in fact, paid any attention to him. He