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Authors: Richard Bachman

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BOOK: Blaze
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Chapter 6

W
HEN
B
LAZE GOT UP
the next morning, snow had piled in drifts all the way to the eaves of the shack and the fire was out. His bladder contracted the second his feet hit the floor. He hurried to the bathroom on the balls of his feet, wincing and blowing out little puffs of white vapor. His urine arched in a high-pressure flow for perhaps thirty seconds, then slowly faded. He sighed, shook off, broke wind.

Much bigger wind was screaming and whooping around the house. The pines outside the kitchen window were dipping and swaying. To Blaze they looked like thin women at a funeral.

He dressed, opened the back door, and fought his way around to the woodpile under the south eaves. The driveway was completely gone. Visibility was down to five feet, maybe less. It exhilarated him. The grainy slap of the snow on his face exhilarated him.

The wood was solid chunks of oak. He gathered a huge armful, pausing only to stomp his feet before going back in. He made up the fire with his coat on. Then he filled the coffee pot. He carried two cups to the table.

He paused, frowning. He had forgotten something.

The money! He had never counted the money.

He started into the other room. George's voice froze him. George was in the bathroom.

“Asshole.”

“George, I—”

“George, I'm an asshole. Can you say that?”

“I—”

“No. Say George, I'm the asshole who forgot to wear the stocking.”

“I got the m—”


Say
it.”

“George, I'm the asshole. I forgot.”

“Forgot what?”

“Forgot to wear the stocking.”

“Now say all of it.”

“George, I'm the asshole who forgot to wear the stocking.”

“Now say this. Say George, I'm the asshole who wants to get caught.”

“No! That ain't true! That's a lie, George!”

“It's the truth is what it is. You want to get caught and go to Shawshank and work in the laundry. That's the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. That's the truth on a stick. You're bull-simple.
That's
the truth.”

“No, George. It ain't. I promise.”

“I'm going away.”

“No!” Panic seemed to stop his breath. It was like the sleeve of the flannel shirt his old man had crammed down his throat once to stop him bawling. “Don't, I forgot, I'm a dummy, without you I'll never remember what to buy—”

“You have a nice time, Blazer,” George said, and although his voice was still coming from the bathroom, now it seemed to be fading. “You have a good time getting caught. Have a good time doing time and ironing those sheets.”

“I'll do everything you tell me. I won't fuck up again.”

There was a long pause. Blaze thought George was gone. “Maybe I'll be back. But I don't think so.”

“George! George?”

The coffee was boiling. He poured one cup and went into the bedroom. The brown sack with the money in it was under George's side of the mattress. He shook it out on the sheet, which he kept forgetting to change. It had been on for the whole three months George had been dead.

There was two hundred and sixty dollars from the little mom-n-pop. Another eighty from the college-boy's wallet. More than enough to buy…

What? What was he supposed to buy?

Diapers. That was the ticket. If you were going to snatch a baby, you had to have diapers. Other stuff, too. But he couldn't remember the other stuff.

“What was it besides diapers, George?” He said it with an air of off-hand casualness, hoping to surprise George into speech. But George didn't take the bait.

Maybe I'll be back. But I don't think so.

He put the money back in the brown bag and exchanged the college kid's wallet for his own, which was battered and scuffed and full of nicks. His own wallet held two greasy dollar bills, a faded Kodak of his old man and old lady with their arms around each other, and a photo-booth shot of him and his only real buddy from Hetton House, John Cheltzman. There was also his lucky Kennedy half-dollar, an old bill for a muffler (that had been when he and George had been running that big bad Pontiac Bonneville), and a folded-over Polaroid.

George was looking out of the Polaroid and smiling. Squinting a little, because the sun had been in his eyes. He was wearing jeans and workman's boots. His hat was twisted around to the left, like he always wore it. George said that was the good-luck side.

They worked a lot of gags, and most of them—the best of them—were easy to work. Some depended on misdirection, some on greed, and some on fear. They were what George called short cons. And he called the gags that depended on fear “short con heart-stoppers.”

“I like the simple shit,” George said. “Why do I like the simple shit, Blaze?”

“Not many moving parts,” Blaze said.

“Correct-a-roonie! Not many moving parts.”

In the best of the short con heart-stoppers, George dressed up in clothes he called “a little past sharp” and then toured some Boston bars he knew about. These weren't gay bars and they weren't straight bars. George called them “gray bars.” And the mark always picked George up. George never had to make a move. Blaze had pondered this once or twice (in his ponderous way), but had never come to any conclusion about it.

George had a nose for the closet queers and AC/DC swingers who went out once or twice a month with their wedding rings tucked away in their wallets. The wholesalers on their way up, the insurance men, the school administrators, the bright young bank executives. George said they had a smell. And he was kind to them. He helped them along when they were shy and couldn't find the right words. Then he'd say he was staying at a good hotel. Not a great hotel, but a good one. A safe one.

It was the Imperial, not far from Chinatown. George and Blaze had a deal going with the second shift desk-man and the bell-captain. The room they used might change, but it was always at the end of the hall, and never too close to another occupied room.

Blaze sat in the lobby from three to eleven, wearing clothes he wouldn't be caught dead in on the street. His hair always gleamed with oil. He read comic-books while waiting for George. He was never aware of passing time.

The true indicator of George's genius was that when he and the mark came in, the mark hardly ever looked nervous. Eager, but not nervous. Blaze gave them fifteen minutes, then went up.

“Never think about it as coming in the room,” George said. “Think of it as going onstage. The only one who don't know it's showtime is the mark.”

Blaze always used his key and walked onstage saying his first line: “Hank, darling, I'm so glad to be back.” Then he got mad, which he did passably well, although probably not up to Hollywood standards: “Jesus, no! I'll kill him! Kill him!”

At that he would heave his three hundred-pound bulk at the bed, where the mark quivered in horror, by that time usually wearing only his socks. George would throw himself between the mark and his raging “boyfriend” at the last moment. A flimsy barrier at best, the mark would think. If he was capable of thinking. And the soap opera was on.

George: “Dana, listen to me—this isn't what it seems.”

Blaze: “I'm gonna kill him! Get out of my way and let me kill him! I'm gonna throw him out the window!”

(Terrified squeals from the marks—there had been eight or ten in all.)

George: “Please, let me tell you.”

Blaze: “I'm gonna rip his balls off!”

(The mark begins to plead for his life and his sexual equipment, not necessarily in that order.)

George: “No, you're not. You're going to go quietly down to the lobby and wait for me.”

At this point, Blaze would make another lunge for the mark. George would restrain him—barely. Blaze would then tear the wallet from the mark's pants.

Blaze: “I got your name and address, bitch! I'm gonna call your wife!”

At this point, most marks forgot about their lives
and
their sexual equipment and began to concentrate on their sacred honor and neighborhood standing instead. Blaze found this strange, but it seemed always to be true. More truth was to be found in a mark's wallet. The mark would tell George he was Bill Smith, from New Rochelle. He was, of course, Dan Donahue, from Brookline.

The play, meanwhile, resumed; the show had to go on.

George: “Go downstairs, Dana—be a dear and go downstairs.”

Blaze: “No!”

George: “Go downstairs or I will never speak to you again. I am sick of your tantrums and your possessiveness. I mean it!”

At this point Blaze would go, clutching the wallet to his breast, muttering threats, and making baleful eye-contact with the mark.

As soon as the door closed, the mark was all over George. He had to have his wallet back. He would do anything to get his wallet back. The money didn't matter, but the identification did. If Sally found out…and Junior! Oh God, think of little Junior…

George soothed the mark. He was good at this part. Perhaps, he would say, Dana could be reasoned with. In fact, Dana could almost certainly be reasoned with. He just needed a few minutes to cool down, and then for George to talk to him alone. To reason with him. And pet him a little, the big lunk.

Blaze, of course, was not in the lobby. Blaze was in a room on the second floor. When George went down there, they would count the take. Their worst score was forty-three dollars. Their best, taken from the executive of a large food-chain, was five hundred and fifty.

They gave the mark enough time to sweat and make bleak promises to himself.
George
gave the mark time enough. George always knew the right amount. It was amazing. It was like he had a clock in his head, and it was set different for each mark. At last he would return to the first room with the wallet and say that Dana finally listened to reason, but he won't give back the money. George had all he could do to make him give back the credit cards. Sorry.

The mark doesn't gave a tinker's damn about the money. He is thumbing through his wallet feverishly, making sure he still has his driver's license, Blue Cross card, Social Security, pictures. It's all there. Thank God, it's all there. Poorer but wiser, he dresses and creeps away, probably wishing his balls had never dropped in the first place.

During the four years before Blaze took his second fall, this con was the one they fell back on, and it never failed. They never had a bit of trouble from the heat, either. Although not bright, Blaze was a fine actor. George was only the second real friend he had ever had, and it was only necessary to pretend that the mark was trying to persuade George that Blaze was no good. That Blaze was a waste of George's time and talents. That Blaze, in addition to being a dummy, was a busher and a fuck-up. Once Blaze had convinced himself of these things, his rage became genuine. If George had stood aside, Blaze would have broken both of the mark's arms. Maybe killed him.

Now, turning the Polaroid snap over and over in his fingers, Blaze felt empty. He felt like when he looked up in the sky and saw the stars, or a bird on a telephone wire or chimbly with its feathers blowing. George was gone and he was still stupid. He was in a fix and there was no way out.

Unless maybe he could show George he was at least smart enough to get this thing rolling. Unless he could show George he didn't mean to get caught. Which meant what?

Which meant diapers. Diapers and what else? Jesus, what else?

He fell into a doze of thought. He thought all that morning, which passed with snow whooping in its throat.

Chapter 7

H
E WAS AS OUT OF PLACE
in the Baby Shoppe of Hager's Mammoth Department Store as a boulder in a living room. He was wearing his jeans and his workboots with the rawhide laces, a flannel shirt, and a black leather belt with the buckle cinched on the left side—the good-luck side. He had remembered his hat this time, the one with the earflaps, and he carried it in one hand. He was standing in the middle of a mostly pink room that was filled with light. He looked left and there were changing-tables. He looked right and there were carriages. He felt like he'd landed on Planet Baby.

There were many women here. Some had big bellies and some had small babies. Many of the babies were crying and all of the women looked at Blaze cautiously, as if he might go berserk at any moment and begin laying waste to Planet Baby, sending torn cushions and ripped teddy bears flying. A saleslady approached. Blaze was thankful. He had been afraid to speak to anyone. He knew when people were afraid, and he knew where he didn't belong. He was dumb, but not that dumb.

The saleslady asked if he needed help. Blaze said he did. He had been unable to think of everything he needed no matter how hard he tried, and so resorted to the only form of subterfuge with which he was familiar: the con.

“I been out of state,” he said, and bared his teeth at the saleslady in a grin that would have frightened a cougar. The saleslady smiled back bravely. The top of her head almost reached the midpoint of his ribcage. “I just found out my sister-in-law had a kid…a baby…while I was gone, see, and I want to outfit him. The whole works.”

She lit up. “I see. How generous of you. How sweet. What would you like in particular?”

“I don't know. I don't know nothing…anything…about babies.”

“How old is your nephew?”

“Huh?”

“Your sister-in-law's child?”

“Oh! Gotcha! Six months.”

“Isn't that dear.” She twinkled professionally. “What's his name?”

Blaze was stumped for a moment. Then he blurted, “George.”

“Lovely name! From the Greek. It means, ‘to work the earth.'”

“Yeah? That's pretty far out.”

She kept smiling. “Isn't it. Well, what does she have for him now?”

Blaze was ready for this one. “None of the stuff they got now is too good, that's the thing. They're really strapped for cash.”

“I see. So you want to…start from the ground up, as it were.”

“Yeah, you catch.”


Very
generous of you. Well, the place to begin would be at the end of Pooh Avenue, in the Crib Corner. We have some very nice hardwood cribs…”

Blaze was stunned at how much it took to keep one tiny scrap of human being up and running. He had considered his take from the beer-store to be quite respectable, but he left Planet Baby with a nearly flat wallet.

He purchased a Dreamland crib, a Seth Harney cradle, a Happy Hippo highchair, an E-Z Fold changing table, a plastic bath, eight nightshirts, eight pairs of Dri-Day rubber pants, eight Hager's infant undershirts with snaps he couldn't figure out, three fitted sheets that looked like table napkins, three blankets, a set of crib bumpers that were supposed to keep the kid from whamming his brains out if he got restless, a sweater, a hat, bootees, a pair of red shoes with bells on the tongues, two pairs of pants with matching shirts, four pairs of socks that were not big enough to fit over his fingers, a Playtex Nurser set (the plastic liners looked like the bags George used to buy his dope in), a case of stuff called Similac, a case of Junior Fruits, a case of Junior Dinners, a case of Junior Desserts, and one place-setting with the Smurfs on them.

The baby food tasted shitty. He tried it when he got home.

As the bundles piled up in the corner of the Baby Shoppe, the glances of the shy young matrons became longer and more speculative. It became an event, a landmark in memory—the huge, slouching man in woodsman's clothes following the tiny saleslady from place to place, listening, then buying what she told him to buy. The saleslady was Nancy Moldow. She was on commission, and as the afternoon progressed, her eyes took on an almost supernatural glow. Finally the total was rung up and when Blaze counted out the money, Nancy Moldow threw in four boxes of Pampers. “You made my day,” she said. “In fact, you may have made my career in infant sales.”

“Thank you, ma'am,” Blaze said. He was very glad about the Pampers. He had forgotten the diapers after all.

And as he loaded up two shopping carts (a stockboy had the cartons containing the highchair and the crib), Nancy Moldow cried: “Be sure to bring the young man in to have his picture taken!”

“Yes, ma'am,” Blaze mumbled. For some reason a memory of his first mug shot flashed into his mind, and a cop saying,
Now turn sideways and bend your knees again, High-pockets
—
Christ, who grew you so fuckin big?

“The picture is compliments of Hager's!”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Lotta goodies, man,” the stockboy said. He was perhaps twenty, and just getting over his adolescent acne. He wore a little red bowtie. “Where's your car parked?”

“The lot in back,” Blaze said.

He followed the stockboy, who insisted on pushing one of the carts and then complained about how it steered on the packed snow. “They don't salt it down back here, see, and the wheels get packed up. Then the damn carts skid around. You can give your ankles a nasty bite if you don't watch out. Real nasty. I'm not complaining, but…”

Then what are you doing, Sporty?
Blaze could hear George asking.
Eating cat-food out of the dog's bowl?

“This is it,” Blaze said. “This is mine.”

“Yeah, okay. What do you want to put in the trunk? The highchair, the crib, or both?”

Blaze suddenly remembered he didn't have a trunk key.

“Let's put it all in the back.”

The stockboy's eyes widened. “Ah, Jeez, man, I don't think it'll fit. In fact, I'm positive—”

“We can put some in front, too. We can stand that carton with the crib in it in the passenger footwell. I'll rack the seat back.”

“Why not the trunk? Wouldn't that be, like, simpler?”

Blaze thought, vaguely, of starting some story about how the trunk was full of stuff, but the trouble with lies was one always led to another. Soon it was like you were traveling on roads you didn't know. You got lost.
I always tell the truth when I can,
George liked to say.
It's like driving close to home.

So he held up the dupe. “I lost my car-keys,” he said. “Until I find em, all I got is this.”

“Oh,” the stockboy said. He looked at Blaze as though he were dumb, but that was okay; he had been looked at that way before. “Bummer.”

In the end, they got it all in. It took some artful packing, and it was a tight squeeze, but they made it. When Blaze looked into the rearview mirror, he could even see some of the world outside the back window. The carton holding the broken-down changing table cut off the rest of the view.

“Nice car,” said the stockboy. “An oldie but a goodie.”

“Right,” Blaze said. And because it was something George sometimes said, he added: “Gone from the charts, but not from our hearts.” He wondered if the stockboy was waiting for something. It seemed like he was.

“What's she got, a 302?”

“342,” Blaze said automatically.

The stockboy nodded. He still stood there.

From inside the back seat of the Ford, where there was no room for him but where he was, anyway—somehow—George said: “If you don't want him to stand there for the rest of the century, tip the dipshit and get rid of him.”

Tip. Yeah. Right.

Blaze dragged out his wallet, looked at the limited selection of bills, and reluctantly selected a five. He gave it to the stockboy. The stockboy made it disappear. “All right, man, increase the peace.”

“Whatever,” Blaze said. He got into the Ford and started it up. The stockboy was trundling the shopping carts back to the store. Halfway there, he stopped and looked back at Blaze. Blaze didn't like that look. It was a
remembering
look.

“I should've remembered to tip him quicker. Right, George?”

George didn't answer.

Back home, he parked the Ford in the shed again and carted all the baby crap into the house. He assembled the crib in the bedroom and set up the changing table next to it. There was no need to look at the directions; he only looked at the pictures on the boxes and his hands did the rest. The cradle went in the kitchen, near the woodstove…but not
too
near. The rest of the stuff he piled in the bedroom closet, out of sight.

When it was done, a change had come over the bedroom that went deeper than the added furniture. Something else had been added. The atmosphere had changed. It was as if a ghost had been set free to walk. Not the ghost of someone who had left, someone who had gone down dead, but the ghost of someone yet to come.

It made Blaze feel strange.

BOOK: Blaze
8.09Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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