Blaze Read online

  George would say: “You only tied one, dimbulb.”

  George would say: “Aw, fuck, turn around and I’ll tuck it in. Like havin a kid.”

  When he got up the morning after he stole the Ford, George was sitting in the other room. Blaze couldn’t see him but knew he was sitting in the broke-down easy-chair like always, with his head down so his chin was almost on his chest. The first thing he said was, “You screwed up again, Kong. Congratcha-fuckin-lations.”

  Blaze hissed when his feet hit the cold floor. Then he fumbled his shoes on. Naked except for them, he ran and looked out the window. No car. He sighed with relief. It came out in a little puff he could see.

  “No, I didn’t. I put it in the shed, just like you told me.”

  “You didn’t wipe the goddam tracks, though, did you? Why don’t you put out a sign, Blaze? THIS WAY TO THE HOT CAR. You could charge admission. Why don’t you just do that?”

  “Aw, George—”

  “‘Aw, George, aw, George.’ Go out and sweep em up.”

  “Okay.” He started for the door.

  “Blaze?”

  “What?”

  “Put on your fucking pants first, why don’t you?”

  Blaze felt his face burn.

  “Like a kid,” George said, sounding resigned. “One who can shave.”

  George knew how to stick it in, all right. Only finally he’d gone and stuck it in the wrong guy, too often and too far. That was how you ended up dead, with nothing smart to say. Now George was just dead, and Blaze was making his voice up in his mind, giving him the good lines. George had been dead since that crap game in the warehouse.

  I’m crazy for even trying to go through with this, Blaze thought. A dum-dum like me.

  But he pulled on his underwear shorts (checking them carefully for stains first), then a thermal undershirt, then a flannel top shirt and a pair of heavy corduroy pants. His Sears workboots were under the bed. His Army surplus parka was hanging on the doorknob. He hunted for his mittens and finally found them on the shelf over the dilapidated woodstove in the combination kitchen-living room. He got his checkered cap with the earflaps and put it on, careful to give the visor a little good-luck twist to the left. Then he went out and got the broom leaning against the door.

  The morning was bright and bitter. The moisture in his nose crackled immediately. A gust of wind drove snow as fine as powdered sugar into his face, making him wince. It was all right for George to give orders. George was inside drinking coffee by the stove. Like last night, taking off for a beer, leaving Blaze to figure out the car. And there he would still be if he hadn’t had the dumb luck to find the keys somewhere, either under the floormat or in the glove compartment, he forgot which. Sometimes he didn’t think George was a very good friend.

  He swept the tracks away with the broom, pausing several minutes to admire them before he started. How the treads stood up and cast shadows, mostly, little perfect things. It was funny how little things could be so perfect and no one ever saw them. He looked at this until he was tired of looking (no George to tell him to hurry up) and then worked his way down the short driveway to the road, brushing the tracks away. The plow had gone by in the night, pushing back the snow-dunes the wind made across these country roads where there were open fields to one side and t’other, and any other tracks were gone.

  Blaze tromped back to the shack. He went inside. Now it felt warm inside. Getting out of bed it had felt cold, but now it felt warm. That was funny, too — how your sense of things could change. He took off his coat and boots and flannel shirt and sat down to the table in his undershirt and cords. He turned on the radio and was surprised when it didn’t play the rock George listened to but warmed right up to country. Loretta Lynn was singing that your good girl is gonna go bad. George would laugh and say something like, “That’s right, honey — you can go bad all over my face.” And Blaze would laugh too, but down deep that song always made him sad. Lots of country songs did.

  When the coffee was hot he jumped up and poured two cups. He loaded one with cream and hollered, “George? Here’s your coffee, hoss! Don’t let it go cold!”

  No answer.

  He looked down at the white coffee. He didn’t drink coffee-with, so what about it? Just what about it? Something came up in his throat then and he almost hucked George’s goddam white coffee across the room, but then he didn’t. He took it oversink and poured it down instead. That was controlling your temper. When you were a big guy, you had to do that or get in trouble.

  Blaze hung around the shack until after lunch. Then he drove the stolen car out of the shed, stopping by the kitchen steps long enough to get out and throw snowballs at the license plates. That was pretty smart. It would make them hard to read.

  “What in the name of God are you doing?” George asked from inside the shed.

  “Never mind,” Blaze said. “You’re only in my head, anyway.” He got in the Ford and drove out to the road.

  “This isn’t very bright,” George said. Now he was in the back seat. “You’re driving around in a stolen car. No fresh paintjob, no fresh plates, no nothing. Where you going?”

  Blaze didn’t say anything.

  “You ain’t going to Ocoma, are you?”

  Blaze didn’t say anything.

  “Oh, fuck, you are,” George said. “Fuck me. Isn’t the once you have to go enough?”

  Blaze didn’t say anything. He was dummied up.

  “Listen to me, Blaze. Turn around. You get picked up, it’s out the window. Everything. The whole deal.”

  Blaze knew that was right, but wouldn’t turn back. Why should George always get to order him around? Even dead, he wouldn’t stop giving orders. Sure, it was George’s plan, that one big score every small-timer dreams of. “Only we could really make it happen,” he’d say, but usually when he was drunk or high and never like he really believed it.

  They had spent most of their time running two-man short cons, and mostly George seemed satisfied with that no matter what he said when he was drunk or getting his smoke on. Maybe the Ocoma Heights score was just a game for George, or what he sometimes called mental masturbation when he saw guys in suits talking about politics on TV. Blaze knew George was smart. It was his guts he had never been sure of.

  But now that he was dead, what choice? Blaze was no good by himself. The one time he’d tried running the menswear con after George’s death, he’d had to book like a bastard to keep from being picked up. He got the lady’s name out of the obituary column just the way George did, had started in on George’s spiel, had shown the credit slips (there was a whole bag of them at the shack, and from the best stores). He told her about how sad he was to have to come by at such a sad time, but business was business and he was sure she would understand that. She said she did. She invited him to stand in the foyer while she got her pockabook. He never suspected that she had called the police. If she hadn’t come back and pointed a gun at him, he probably would have still been standing there waiting when the police ho’d up. His time sense had never been good.

  But she came back with a gun and pointed it at him. It was a silver lady’s gun with little swoops on the sides and pearl handles. “The police are on their way,” she said, “but before they get here, I want you to explain yourself. I want you to tell me what kind of a lowlife preys on a woman whose husband isn’t even cold in his grave yet.”

  Blaze didn’t care what she wanted him to tell her. He turned and ran out the door and across the porch and down the steps to the walk. He could run pretty good once he got going, but he was slow getting going, and panic made him slower that day. If she had pulled the trigger, she might have put a bullet in the back of his big head or shot off an ear or missed him entirely. With a little short-barrel shooter like that, you couldn’t tell. But she never fired.

  When he got back to the shack, he was half-moaning with fear and his stomach was tied in knots. He wasn’t afraid of jail or the penitentiary, not even of the police — although he knew
they would confuse him with their questions, they always did — but he was afraid of how easy she saw through him. Like it wasn’t nothing to her. They had hardly ever seen through George, and when they did, he always knew it was happening and got them out.

  And now this. He wasn’t going to get away with it, knew it, kept on anyway. Maybe he wanted to go back inside. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad, now that George was wasted. Let someone else do the thinking and provide the meals.

  Maybe he was trying to get caught right now, driving this hot car through the middle of Ocoma Heights. Right past the Gerard house.

  In the icebox of New England winter, it looked like a frozen palace. Ocoma Heights was old money (that’s what George said), and the houses were really estates. They were surrounded by big lawns in the summertime, but now the lawns were glazed snowfields. It had been a hard winter.

  The Gerard house was the best one of all. George called it Early American Hot Shit, but Blaze thought it was beautiful. George said the Gerards had made their money in shipping, that World War I made them rich and World War II made them holy. Snow and sun struck cold fire from the many windows. George said there were over thirty rooms. He had done the preliminary work as a meter-reader from Central Valley Power. That had been in September. Blaze had driven the truck, which was borrowed rather than stolen, although he supposed the police would have called it stolen if they’d been caught. People were playing croquet on the side lawn. Some were girls, high school girls or maybe college girls, good-looking. Blaze watched them and started feeling horny. When George got back in and told him to wheel it, Blaze told him about the good-looking girls, who had gone around to the back by then.

  “I saw em,” George said. “Think they’re better than anybody. Think their shit don’t stink.”

  “Pretty, though.”

  “Who gives a rat’s ass?” George asked moodily, and crossed his arms over his chest.

  “Don’t you ever get horny, George?”

  “Over babies like that? You jest. Now shut up and drive.”

  Now, remembering that, Blaze smiled. George was like the fox who couldn’t reach the grapes and told everyone they were sour. Miss Jolison read them that story in the second grade.

  It was a big family. There was the old Mr. and Mrs. Gerard — he was eighty and still able to put away a pint of Jack a day, that’s what George said. There was the middle Mr. and Mrs. Gerard. And then there was the young Mr. and Mrs. Gerard. The young Mr. Gerard was Joseph Gerard III, and he really was young, just twenty-five. His wife was a Narmenian. George said that made her a spic. Blaze had thought only Italians could be spics.

  He turned around up the street and cruised past the house once more, wondering what it felt like to be married at twenty-two. He kept on going, heading home. Enough was enough.

  The middle Gerards had other kids besides Joseph Gerard III, but they didn’t matter. What mattered was the baby. Joseph Gerard IV. Big name for such a little baby. He was only two months old when Blaze and George did their meter-reading bit in September. That made him — um, there were one-two-three-four months between September and January — six months old. He was the original Joe’s only great-grandson.

  “If you’re gonna pull a snatch, you got to snatch a baby,” George said. “A baby can’t ID you, so you can return it alive. It can’t fuck you up by trying to escape or sending out notes or some shit. All a baby can do is lie there. It don’t even know it’s been snatched.”

  They had been in the shack, sitting in front of the TV and drinking beer.

  “How much do you think they’d be good for?” Blaze asked.

  “Enough so you’d never have to spend another winter day freezing your ass off selling fake magazine subscriptions or collecting for the Red Cross,” George said. “How’s that sound?”

  “But how much would you ask?”

  “Two million,” George said. “One for you and one for me. Why be greedy?”

  “Greedies get caught,” Blaze said.

  “Greedies get caught,” George agreed. “That’s what I taught you. But what’s the workman worthy of, Blaze-a-rino? What’d I teach you about that?”

  “His hire,” Blaze said.

  “That’s right,” George said, and hit his beer. “The workman’s worthy of his fucking hire.”

  So here he was, driving back to the miserable shack where he and George had been living since drifting north from Boston, actually planning to go through with it. He thought he would be caught, but — two million dollars! You could go someplace and never be cold again. And if they caught you? The worst they could do would be put you in jail for life.

  And if that happened, you’d still never be cold again.

  When the stolen Ford was back in the shed, he remembered to brush the tracks away. That would make George happy.

  He made himself a couple of hamburgers for his lunch.

  “You really going through with it?” George asked from the other room.

  “You lyin down, George?”

  “No, standin on my head and jerkin off. I asked you a question.”

  “I’m gonna try. Will you help me?”

  George sighed. “I guess I’ll have to. I’m stuck with you now. But Blaze?”

  “What, George?”

  “Only ask for a million. Greedies get caught.”

  “Okay, only a million. You want a hamburger?”

  No answer. George was dead again.

  Chapter 3

  HE WAS GETTING ready to do the kidnapping that night, the sooner the better. George stopped him.

  “What are you up to, dinkleballs?”

  Blaze had been getting ready to go start the Ford. Now he stopped. “Gettin ready to do it, George.”

  “Do what?”

  “Snatch the kid.”

  George laughed.

  “What you laughin at, George?” As if I don’t know, he thought.

  “You.”

  “Why?”

  “How are you gonna snatch him? Tell me that.”

  Blaze frowned. It turned his face, already ugly, into the face of a troll. “The way we planned it, I guess. Out’n his room.”

  “Which room?”

  “Well—”

  “How are you gonna get in?”

  He remembered that part. “One of the upstairs windows. They got those simple catches on em. You saw that, George. When we was bein the lectric company. Remember?”

  “Got a ladder?”

  “Well—”

  “When you get the kid, where you gonna put him?”

  “In the car, George.”

  “Oh my fuckin word.” George only said this when he had bottomed out and was at a loss for all other expression.

  “George—”

  “I know you’re gonna put him in the fuckin car, I never thought you were gonna carry him home pigga-back. I meant when you get him back here. What are you gonna do then? Where you gonna put him?”

  Blaze thought about the shack. He looked around. “Well—”

  “What about didies? What about bottles? And baby food! Or did you think he was gonna have a hamburger and a bottle of beer for his fuckin dinner?”

  “Well—”

  “Shut up! You say that one more time and I’m gonna puke!”

  Blaze sat down in a kitchen chair with his head down. His face was hot.

  “And turn off the shit-kicking music! That woman sounds like she’s about to fly up her own cunt!”

  “Okay, George.”

  Blaze turned off the radio. The TV, an old Jap thing George picked up at a yard sale, was busted.

  “George?”

  No answer.

  “George, come on, don’t go away. I’m sorry.” He could hear how scared he was. Almost blubbing.

  “Okay,” George said, just when Blaze was about to give up. “Here’s what you have to do. You have to pull a little score. Not a big one. Just a little one. That mom-n-pop where we used to stop for suds off Route 1 would probably be okay.”
/>   “Yeah?”

  “You still got the Colt?”

  “Under the bed, in a shoebox.”

  “Use that. And wear a stocking over your face. Otherwise the guy who works nights will recognize you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Go in Saturday night, at closing. Say, ten minutes of one. They don’t take checks, so you ought to get two, three hundred bucks.”

  “Sure! That’s great!”

  “Blaze, there’s one more thing.”

  “What, George?”

  “Take the bullets out of the gun, okay?”

  “Sure, George, I know that, it’s how we roll.”

  “It’s how we roll, right. Hit the guy if you have to, but make sure it doesn’t get to no more than page three in State and Local when it makes the paper.”

  “Right.”

  “You’re an asshole, Blaze. You know that, right? You’re never gonna bring this off. Maybe it’d be better if you got caught on the little one.”

  “I won’t, George.”

  No answer.

  “George?”

  No answer. Blaze got up and turned on the radio. At supper he forgot and set two places.

  Chapter 4

  CLAYTON BLAISDELL, JR., was born in Freeport, Maine. His mother was hit by a truck three years later while crossing Main Street with a bag of groceries. She was killed instantly. The driver was drunk and driving without a license. In court he said he was sorry. He cried. He said he would go back to AA. The judge fined him and gave him sixty days. Little Clay got Life with Father, who knew plenty about drinking and nothing about AA. Clayton Senior worked for Superior Mills in Topsham, where he ran the picker and sorter. Co-workers claimed to have seen him do this job sober upon occasion.

  Clay could already read when he started the first grade, and grasped the concept of two apples plus three apples with no trouble. He was big for his size even then, and although Freeport was a tough town, he had no trouble on the playground even though he was rarely seen there without a book in his hand or tucked under his arm. His father was bigger, however, and the other kids always found it interesting to see what would be bandaged and what would be bruised when Clay Blaisdell came to school on Mondays.