Blaze

by Richard Bachman

  Blaze’s arm hurt real bad where the nurse had shot him, and his fist hurt, and his head hurt, but he struck out again, desperately hard, with a hand that felt numb and dead. It was the same hand he had used on Randy, and he struck as hard as he had that day in the pen. The blow caught Glen flush on the point of the chin. It made an audible snap sound that silenced the other children. Glen stood slackly, his eyes rolled up to whites. Then his knees unhinged and he collapsed in a heap.

  I killed him, Blaze thought. Oh Jeez, I killed him like Randy.

  But then Glen began to stir around and mutter in the back of his throat, like people do in their sleep. And Mrs. Foster was screaming at Blaze to go inside. As he went, Blaze heard her telling Peter Lavoie to go to the office and get the First Aid kit, to run.

  He was sent from school. Suspended. They stopped the bleeding of his nose with an ice-pack, put a Band-Aid on his ear, and then sent him to walk the four miles back to the dog-farm. He got a little way down the road, then remembered his bag lunch. Mrs. Bowie always sent him with a slice of peanut-butter-bread folded over and an apple. It wasn’t much, but it would be a long walk, and as John Cheltzman said, something beat nothing every day of the week.

  They wouldn’t let him in when he came back, but Margie Thurlow brought it out to him. Her eyes were still red from crying. She looked like she wanted to say something but didn’t know how. Blaze knew how that felt and smiled at her to show it was all right. She smiled back. One of his eyes was swelled almost shut, so he looked at her with the other one.

  When he got to the edge of the schoolyard, he looked back to see her some more, but she was gone.

  “Go out t’shed,” Bowie said.

  “No.”

  Bowie’s eyes widened. He shook his head a little, as if to clear it. “What did you say?”

  “You shouldn’t want to whip me.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that. Get out in that shed.”

  “No.”

  Bowie advanced on him. Blaze backed up two feet and then balled up his swollen fist. He set his feet. Bowie stopped. He had seen Randy. Randy’s neck had been broken like a cedar branch after a hard freeze.

  “Go up to your room, you stupid sonofabitch,” he said.

  Blaze went. He sat on the side of his bed. From there he could hear Bowie hollering into the telephone. He figured he knew who Bowie was hollering at.

  He didn’t care. He didn’t care. But when he thought of Margie Thurlow, he cared. When he thought of Margie he wanted to cry, the way he sometimes wanted to cry when he saw one bird sitting all by itself on a telephone wire. He didn’t. He read Oliver Twist instead. He knew it by heart; he could even say the words he didn’t know. Outside, the dogs yapped. They were hungry. It was their feeding time. No one called him to feed them, though he would have, if asked.

  He read Oliver Twist until the station wagon from HH came for him. The Law was driving. His eyes were red with fury. His mouth was nothing but a stitch between his chin and his nose. The Bowies stood together in the long shadows of a January dusk and watched them drive off.

  When they got to Hetton House, Blaze felt an awful sense of familiarity fall over him. It felt like a wet shirt. He had to bite his tongue to keep from crying out. Three months and nothing had changed. HH was the same pile of red and everlasting shit-brick. The same windows threw the same yellow light onto the ground outside, only now the ground was covered with snow. In the spring the snow would be gone but the light would be the same.

  In his office, The Law produced The Paddle. Blaze could have taken it away from him, but he was tired of fighting. And he guessed there was always someone bigger, with a bigger paddle.

  After The Law had finished exercising his arm, Blaze was sent to the common bedroom in Fuller Hall. John Cheltzman was standing by the door. One of his eyes was a slit of swelling purple flesh.

  “Yo, Blaze,” he said.

  “Yo, Johnny. Where’s your specs?”

  “Busted,” he said. Then cried: “Blaze, they broke my glasses! Now I can’t read anything!”

  Blaze thought about this. He was sad to be here, but it meant a lot to find Johnny waiting. “We’ll fix em.” An idea struck him. “Or we’ll get shovel-chores in town after the next storm and save for new ones.”

  “Could we do that, do you think?”

  “Sure. You got to see to help me with my homework, don’t you?”

  “Sure, Blaze, sure.”

  They went inside together.

  Chapter 10

  APEX CENTER was a wide place in the road boasting a barber shop, a VFW hall, a hardware store, The Apex Pentecostal Church of the Holy Spirit, a beer-store, and a yellow blinker-light. It was walking distance from the shack, and Blaze went down there the morning after he held up Tim & Janet’s Quik-Pik for the second time. His goal was Apex Hardware, a scurgy little independent where he bought an aluminum extension ladder for thirty dollars, plus tax. It had a red tag on it saying PRICED 2 SELL.

  He carried it back up the road, tromping stolidly along the plowed shoulder. He looked neither right nor left. It did not occur to him that his purchase might be remembered. George would have thought of it, but George was still away.

  The ladder was too long for the trunk or the back seat of the stolen Ford, but it fit when he placed it with one end behind the driver’s seat and the other jutting into the front passenger’s seat. Once that was taken care of, he went into the house and turned the radio on to WJAB, which played until the sun went down.

  “George?”

  No answer. He made coffee, drank a cup, and lay down. He fell asleep with the radio on, playing “Phantom 409.” When he woke up it was dark and the radio was just playing static. It was quarter past seven.

  Blaze got up and fixed him some dinner — a bologna sandwich and a can of Dole pineapple chunks. He loved Dole pineapple chunks. He could eat them three times a day and never get his fill. He swallowed the syrup in three long gulps, then looked around. “George?”

  No answer.

  He prowled restlessly. He missed the TV. The radio wasn’t company at night. If George was here, they could play cribbage. George always beat him because Blaze missed some of the runs and most of the fifteen-twos (they were Arithmetic), but it was fun charging up and down the board. Like being in a hoss-race. And if George didn’t want to do that, they could always shuffle four decks of cards together and play War. George would play War half the night, drinking beer and talking about the Republicans and how they fucked the poor. (“Why? I’ll tell you why. For the same reason a dog licks his balls — because they can.”) But now there was nothing to do. George had showed him a solitaire game, but Blaze couldn’t remember how it went. It was way too early to do the kidnapping. He hadn’t thought to steal any comic-books or skin mags when he was in that store.

  He finally settled down with an old issue of X-Men. George called the X-Men the Homo Core, as if they’d come from an apple, Blaze didn’t know why.

  He dozed off again at quarter to eight. When he woke up at eleven, he felt muzzy-headed and only halfway in the world. He could go now if he wanted — by the time he got to Ocoma Heights it would be past midnight — but all at once he didn’t know if he wanted to. All at once it seemed very frightening. Very complicated. He had to think it over. Make plans. Maybe he could think of a way to get into the house on his own. Look it over. Make like he was from The Public Water-works, or The Lectric Company. Draw out a map.

  The empty cradle standing by the stove mocked him.

  He fell asleep again and had an uneasy dream of running. He was chasing someone through deserted waterfront streets while seagulls whirled over the piers and warehouses in crying flocks. He didn’t know if he was chasing George or John Cheltzman. And when he began to catch up a little and the figure looked back over one shoulder to grin mockingly at him, he saw it was neither one. It was Margie Thurlow.

  When he woke, he was still sitting in the chair, still dressed, but the night was over. WJAB was on agai
n. Henson Cargill was singing “Skip A Rope.”

  He got ready to go again the second night, but he didn’t go. The day after that he went out and shoveled a long and senseless track toward the woods. He shoveled until he was winded and his mouth tasted like blood.

  I’m going tonight, he thought, but the only place he went that night was to the local beer-store, to see if the new comic-books had come in. They had, and Blaze bought three. He fell asleep over the first one after supper, and when he woke it was midnight. He was getting up to go in the bathroom and take a leak — then he’d hit the rack — when George spoke.

  “George?”

  “Are you gutless, Blaze?”

  “No! I ain’t—”

  “You been hanging around this place like a dog with its balls caught in a henhouse door.”

  “No! I ain’t! I did lots of stuff. I got a good ladder—”

  “Yeah, and some comic-books. You been havin a good time sittin around here, listenin to that shitkickin music and reading about superpower faggots, Blazer?”

  Blaze muttered something.

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I guess not, if you don’t have the guts to say it out loud.”

  “All right — I said no one ast you to come back.”

  “Why you ungrateful lowlife sonofabitch.”

  “Listen, George, I—”

  “I took care of you, Blaze. I admit it wasn’t charity, you were good when you were used right, but it was me who knew how to do that. Did you forget? We didn’t always have three squares a day, but we always had at least one. I saw that you changed your clothes and kept clean. Who told you to brush your fuckin teeth?”

  “You did, George.”

  “Which you are now neglecting, by the way, and you’re getting that Dead Mouse Mouth again.”

  Blaze smiled. He couldn’t help it. George had a cute way of saying things.

  “When you needed a whore, I got you one of those, too.”

  “Yeah, and one of em gave me the clap.” For six weeks, peeing fit to kill him.

  “Took you to the doctor, didn’t I?”

  “You did,” Blaze admitted.

  “You owe me this, Blaze.”

  “You didn’t want me to do it!”

  “Yeah, well I changed my mind. It was my plan, and you owe me.”

  Blaze considered this. As always, it took him a long and painful time. Then he burst out: “How can you owe a dead man? If people walked by, they’d hear me talkin to myself and answerin myself back and think I was crazy! I prob’ly am crazy!” Another idea occurred to him. “You can’t do nothing with your cut! You’re dead!”

  “And you’re alive? Sittin here, listenin to the radio playin those numbfuck cowboy songs? Readin comic-books and beatin your meat?”

  Blaze blushed and looked at the floor.

  “Forget and rob that same store every third or fourth week till they stake the place out and catch your ass? Sit here lookin at that numbfuck crib and sweetmother cradle in the sweet fuckin meanwhile?”

  “I’m gonna chop the cradle up for kinnelin.”

  “Look at you,” George said, and what was in his voice sounded beyond sadness. It sounded like grief. “Same pants on every day for two weeks? Piss-stains in your underwear? You need a shave and you need a fuckin haircut in the worst way — sittin here in this shack in the middle of the mumble-fuck woods. This ain’t the way we roll. Don’t you see that?”

  “You went away,” Blaze said.

  “Because you were actin stupid. But this is stupider. You have to take your chance or you’re gonna fall. You’ll do five years here, six there, then they’ll get you on three-strikes and you’ll sit in The Shank for the rest of your life. Just a two-bit dummy who didn’t know enough to brush his teeth or change his own socks. Just another crumb on the floor.”

  “Then tell me what to do, George.”

  “Go ahead with the plot, that’s what you do.”

  “But if I get caught, it’s the long bomb. Life.” It had been preying on his mind more than he wanted to admit.

  “That’s gonna happen to you anyway, the way you’re goin — ain’t you been listenin to me? And hey! You’ll be doin him a favor. Even if he don’t remember it — which he won’t — he’ll have something he can blow off his bazoo about to his country club friends for the rest of his life. And the people you’ll be rippin off, they stole the money themselves, only like Woody Guthrie says, with a fountain pen instead of a gun.”

  “What if I get caught?”

  “You won’t. If you run into trouble with the money — if it’s marked — you go on down to Boston and find Billy O’Shea. But the main thing is you just got to wake up.”

  “When should I do it, George? When?”

  “When you wake up. When you wake up. Wake up. Wake up!”

  Blaze woke up. He was in the chair. All the comic-books were on the floor and his shoes were on. Oh George.

  He got up and looked at the cheap clock on top of the refrigerator. It was quarter past one. There was a soap-spotted mirror on one wall and he bent down so he could see himself. His face looked haunted.

  He put on his coat and hat and a pair of mittens and went out to the shed. The ladder was still in the car but the car hadn’t been running for three days and it cranked a long time before it started.

  He got in behind the wheel. “Here I go, George. I’m gonna roll.”

  There was no answer. Blaze twisted his cap to the good-luck side and backed out of the shed. He made a three-point turn and then drove down to the road. He was on his way.

  Chapter 11

  THERE WAS NO PROBLEM parking in Ocoma Heights, even though it was well patrolled by the fuzz. George had worked out this part of the plan months before he died. This part had been the seed.

  There was a big condo tower opposite the Gerard estate and about a quarter of a mile up the road. Oakwood was nine stories high, its apartments inhabited by the working well-to-do — the very well-to-do — whose business interests lay in Portland, Portsmouth, and Boston. There was a gated visitors’ parking lot on one side. When Blaze pulled up to the gate, a man stepped out of the little booth, zipping up a parka.

  “Who are you calling on, sir?”

  “Mr. Joseph Carlton,” Blaze said.

  “Yes, sir,” the attendant said. He seemed unruffled by the fact that it was now nearly two in the morning. “Will you need a buzz-up?”

  Blaze shook his head and showed the parking attendant a red plastic card. It had been George’s. If the attendant said he would have to call upstairs — if he even looked suspicious — Blaze would know the card was no longer any good, that they had changed colors or something, and he would haul ass out of there.

  The attendant, however, only nodded and went back into his booth. A moment later, the gate-arm swung up and Blaze drove into the lot.

  There was no Joseph Carlton, at least Blaze didn’t think there was. George said the apartment on the eighth floor was a playpen leased by some guys from Boston, guys he called Irish Smarties. Sometimes the Irish Smarties had meetings there. Sometimes they met girls who “did variations,” according to George. Mostly they played cutthroat poker. George had been to half a dozen of those games. He got in because he had grown up with one of the Smarties, a prematurely gray mobster named Billy O’Shea with frog eyes and bluish lips. Billy O’Shea called George Raspy, because of his voice, or sometimes just Rasp. Sometimes George and Billy O’Shea talked about the nuns and the fadders.

  Blaze had been to two of these high-stakes games with George, and could barely believe the amount of money on the table. At one, George had won five thousand dollars. At another he had lost two. It was Oakwood being near to the Gerard estate that had gotten George thinking seriously about the Gerard money and the small Gerard heir.

  The visitors’ parking lot was black and deserted. Plowed snow glittered under the single arc sodium light. The snow was heaped high against the Cyclone fen
ce that divided the parking lot from the four acres of deserted parkland on the other side.

  Blaze got out of the Ford, went around to the back door, and pulled out his ladder. He was in action, and that was better. When he was moving, his doubts were forgotten.

  He threw the ladder over the Cyclone fence. It landed silently, in a snowy dreampuff. He scrambled after, caught his pants on a jutting wire strand, and went tumbling headfirst into snow that was three feet deep. It was stunning, exhilarating. He thrashed for a moment, and made an inadvertent snow-angel getting up.

  He hooked an arm into his ladder and began to trudge toward the main road. He wanted to come out opposite the Gerard place, and he was concentrating on that. He wasn’t thinking about the tracks he was leaving — the distinctive waffle tread of his Army boots. George might have thought of it, but George wasn’t there.

  He paused at the road and looked both ways. Nothing was coming. On the other side, a snow-hooded hedge stood between him and the darkened house.

  He ran across the road, hunched over as if that would hide him, and heaved the ladder over the hedge. He was about to wade through himself, just bulling a path, when some light — the nearest streetlamp or perhaps only starglow — traced a silvery gleam running through the denuded branches. He peered closer and felt his heart bump.

  It was a wire strung on slim metal stakes. Three-quarters of the way up each stake, the wire ran through a porcelain conductor. An electrified wire, then, just like in the Bowies’ cow pasture. It would probably buzz anyone who came in contact with it hard enough to make them pee in their pants and set off an alarm at the same time. The chauffeur or the butler or whoever would call the cops, and that would be that. Over-done-with-gone.