Blaze

by Richard Bachman

  He went back to Maine, got a job cutting pulp, and waited for George to get out. He liked pulping, and he liked driving Christmas trees south. He liked the fresh air and horizons that were unbroken by tall buildings. The city was okay sometimes, but the woods were quiet. There were birds, and sometimes you saw deer wading in ponds and your heart went out to them. He sure didn’t miss the subways, or the pushing crowds. But when George dropped him a short note — Getting out on Friday, hope to see you — Blaze put in his time and went south to Boston again.

  George had picked up an assortment of new cons in Walpole. They tried them out like old ladies test-driving new cars. The most successful was the queer-con. That bastard ran like a railroad for three years, until Blaze was busted on what George called “the Jesus-gag.”

  George picked something else up in prison: the idea of one big score and out. Because, he told Blaze, he couldn’t see spending the best years of his life hustling homos in bars where everybody was dressed up like The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Or peddling fake encyclopedias. Or running a Murphy. No, one big score and out. It became his mantra.

  A high school teacher named John Burgess, in for manslaughter, had suggested kidnapping.

  “You’re trippin!” George said, horrified. They were in the yard on ten o’clock exercise, eating bananas and watching some mokes with big muscles throw a football around.

  “It’s got a bad name because it’s the crime of choice for idiots,” Burgess said. He was a slight balding man. “Kidnap a baby, that’s the ticket.”

  “Yeah, like Hauptmann,” George said, and jittered back and forth like he was getting electrocuted.

  “Hauptmann was an idiot. Hell, Rasp, a well-handled baby snatch could hardly miss. What’s the kid going to say when they ask him who did it? Goo-goo ga-ga?” He laughed.

  “Yeah, but the heat,” George said.

  “Sure, sure, the heat.” Burgess smiled and tugged his ear. He was a great old ear-tugger. “There would be heat. Baby snatches and cop-killings, always a lot of heat. You know what Harry Truman said about that?”

  “No.”

  “He said if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”

  “You can’t collect the ransom,” George said. “Even if you did, the money would be marked. Goes without saying.”

  Burgess raised one finger like a professor. Then he did that dopey ear-tugging thing, which kind of spoiled it. “You’re assuming the cops would be called in. If you scared the family bad enough, they’d deal privately.” He paused. “And even if the money was hot — you saying you don’t know some guys?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “There are guys who buy hot money. It’s just another investment to them, like gold or government bonds.”

  “But collecting the swag — what about that?”

  Burgess shrugged. He pulled on his ear. “Easy. Have the marks drop it from a plane.” Then he got up and walked away.

  Blaze was sentenced to four years on the Jesus-gag. George told him it would be a tit if he kept his nose clean. Two at most, he said, and two was what it turned out to be. Those years inside weren’t much different than the jail-time he’d put in after beating up The Law; only the inmates had grown older. He didn’t spend any time in solitary. When he got the heebie-jeebies on long evenings, or during one interminable lockdown when there were no exercise privileges, he wrote George. His spelling was awful, the letters long. George didn’t answer very often, but in time the very act of composition, laborious as it was, became soothing. He imagined that when he wrote, George was standing behind him, reading over his shoulder.

  “Prisin laundre,” George would say. “My fuckin word.”

  “That wrong, George?”

  “P-r-i-s-o-n, prison. L-a-u-n-d-r-y, laundry. Prison laundry.”

  “Oh yeah. Right.”

  His spelling and even his punctuation improved, even though he never used a dictionary. Another time:

  “Blaze, you’re not using your cigarette ration.” This was during the golden time when some of the tobacco companies gave out little trial packs.

  “I don’t hardly smoke, George. You know that. They’d just pile up.”

  “Listen to me, Blazer. You pick em up on Friday, then sell em the next Thursday, when everybody’s hurtin for a smoke. That’s how you roll.”

  Blaze began to do this. He was surprised how much people would pay for smoke that didn’t even get you stoned.

  Another time:

  “You don’t sound good, George,” Blaze said.

  “Course not. I just had four fuckin teeth out. Hurts like hell.”

  Blaze called him the next time he had phone privileges, not reversing the charges but feeding the phone with dough he’d made selling ciggies on the black market. He asked George how his teeth were.

  “What teeth?” George said grumpily. “Fuckin dentist is probably wearin em around his neck like a Ubangi.” He paused. “How’d you know I had em out? Someone tell you?”

  Blaze suddenly felt he was on the verge of being caught in something shameful, like beating off in chapel. “Yeah,” he said. “Someone told me.”

  They drifted south to New York City when Blaze got out, but neither of them liked it. George had his pocket picked, which he took as a personal affront. They took a trip to Florida and spent a miserable month in Tampa, broke and unable to score. They went north again, not to Boston but to Portland. George said he wanted to summer in Maine and pretend he was a rich Republican fuckstick.

  Not long after they arrived, George read a newspaper story about the Gerards: how rich they were, how the youngest Gerard had just gotten married to some good-looking spic chick. Burgess’s kidnap idea resurfaced in his mind — that one big score. But there was no baby, not then, so they went back to Boston.

  The Boston-in-the-winter, Portland-in-the-summer thing became a routine over the next two years. They’d roll north in some old beater in early June, with whatever remained of the winter’s proceeds stashed in the spare tire: seven hundred one year, two thousand the next. In Portland, they pulled a gag if a gag presented itself. Otherwise, Blaze fished and sometimes laid a trap or two in the woods. They were happy summers for him. George lay out in the sun and tried to get a tan (hopeless; he only burned), read the papers, swatted blackflies, and rooted for Ronald Reagan (who he called Old White Elvis Daddy) to drop dead.

  Then, on July 4th of their second summer in Maine, he noticed that Joe Gerard III and his Narmenian wife had become parents.

  Blaze was playing solitaire on the porch of the shack and listening to the radio. George turned it off. “Listen, Blazer,” he said, “I got an idea.”

  He was dead three months later.

  They had been attending the crap-game regularly, and there had never been any trouble. It was a straight game. Blaze didn’t play, but he often faded George. George was very lucky.

  On this night in October, George made six straight passes. The man kneeling across from him on the other side of the blanket bet against him every time. He had lost forty dollars. The game was in a warehouse near the docks, and it was full of smells: old fish, fermented grain, salt, gasoline. When the place was quiet, you could hear the tack-tack-tack of seagulls walking around on the roof. The man who had lost forty dollars was named Ryder. He claimed to be half Penobscot Indian, and he looked it.

  When George picked up the dice a seventh time instead of passing them, Ryder threw twenty dollars down on the crapout line.

  “Come, dice,” George said — crooned. His thin face was bright. His cap was yanked around to the left. “Come big dice, come come come now!” The dice exploded across the blanket and came up eleven.

  “Seven in a row!” George crowed. “Pick up that swag, Blazerino, daddy’s goin for number eight. Big eighter from Decatur!”

  “You cheated,” Ryder said. His voice was mild, observational.

  George froze in the act of picking up the dice. “Say what?”

  “You switched the
m dice.”

  “Come on, Ride,” someone said. “He didn’t—”

  “I’ll have my money back,” Ryder said. He stretched his hand out across the blanket.

  “You’ll have a broken arm if you don’t cut the shit,” George said. “That’s what you’ll have, Sunshine.”

  “I’ll have my money back,” Ryder said. His hand still out.

  It was one of those quiet times now, and Blaze could hear the gulls on the roof: tack-tack-tack.

  “Go fuck yourself,” George said, and spat on the outstretched hand.

  So then it happened quickly, as those things do. The quickness is what makes the mind reel and refuse. Ryder reached his spit-shiny hand into the pocket of his jeans, and when it came out, it was holding a spring-knife. Ryder thumbed the chrome button in the imitation ivory handle, and the men around the blanket scattered back.

  George shouted: “Blaze!”

  Blaze lunged across the blanket at Ryder, who rocked forward on his knees and put the blade in George’s stomach. George screamed. Blaze grabbed Ryder and slammed his head against the floor. It made a cracking sound like a breaking branch.

  George stood up. He looked at the knife-handle sticking out of his shirt. He grabbed it, started to pull, then grimaced. “Fuck,” he said. “Oh fuck.” He sat down hard.

  Blaze heard a door slam. He heard running feet on hollow boards.

  “Get me outta here,” George said. His yellow shirt was turning red around the knife-handle. “Get the swag, too — oh Jesus this hurts!”

  Blaze gathered up the scattered bills. He stuffed them into his pockets with fingers that had no feeling in them. George was panting. He sounded like a dog on a hot day.

  “George, let me pull it out—”

  “No, you crazy? It’s holding my guts in. Carry me, Blaze. Oh my fuckin Jesus!”

  Blaze picked George up in his arms and George screamed again. Blood dripped onto the blanket and onto Ryder’s shiny black hair. Under the shirt, George’s belly felt as hard as a board. Blaze carried him across the warehouse and then outside.

  “No,” George said. “You forgot the bread. You never got any goddam bread.” Blaze thought maybe George was talking about the swag and he started to say he had it, when George said: “And the salami.” He was beginning to breathe very rapidly. “I got that book, you know.”

  “George!”

  “That book with the picture of—” But then George began to choke on his own blood. Blaze turned him over and whammed him on the back. It was all he could think of to do. But when he turned George over again, George was dead.

  Blaze laid him on the boards outside the warehouse. He backed away. Then he crept forward again and closed George’s eyes. He backed away a second time, then crept forward again and knelt. “George?”

  No answer.

  “You dead, George?”

  No answer.

  Blaze ran all the way to the car and got in and threw himself behind the wheel. He screamed away, peeling rubber for twenty feet.

  “Slow down,” George said from the back seat.

  “George?”

  “Slow down, goddammit!”

  Blaze slowed down. “George! Come on up front! Climb over! Wait, I’ll pull over.”

  “No,” George said. “I like it back here.”

  “George?”

  “What?”

  “What are we going to do now?”

  “Snatch the kid,” George said. “Just like we planned.”

  Chapter 23

  WHEN BLAZE BLUNDERED out of the little cave and got his feet under him, he had no idea how many men were out there. Dozens, he supposed. It didn’t matter. George’s pistol fell out of the waistband of his pants and that didn’t matter, either. He trod it deep into the snow as he charged the first guy he saw. The guy was lying in the snow a little distance away, resting on his elbows and holding a gun in both hands.

  “Hands up, Blaisdell! Stay still!” Granger shouted.

  Blaze leaped at him.

  Granger had time to fire twice. The first shot creased Blaze’s forearm. The second plugged nothing but snowstorm. Then Blaze crashed all two hundred and seventy pounds into the guy who had hurt Joe, and Granger’s weapon went flying. Granger screamed as the bones of his broken leg grated together.

  “You hit the kid!” Blaze yelled into Granger’s terrified face. His fingers found Granger’s throat. “You hit the kid, you stupid sonofabitch, you hit the kid, you hit the kid, you hit the kid!”

  Granger’s head was flopping and nodding now, as if to say he understood, he was getting the message. His face had gone purple. His eyes bulged from their sockets.

  They’re coming.

  Blaze stopped choking the guy and looked around. No one in sight. The woods were silent except for the wind and the faint hissing noise the snow made as it fell.

  No, there was another sound. There was Joe.

  Blaze ran back up the embankment to the cave. Joe was rolling around, wailing and clutching at the air. The flying chip of rock had done more damage than the fall from the cradle; his cheek was covered in blood.

  “God damn it!” Blaze cried.

  He picked Joe up, wiped his cheek, slipped him into the envelope of blankets again, and stuck his cap back over the baby’s head. Joe whooped and screamed.

  “We gotta run now, George,” Blaze said. “Full-out run. Right?”

  No answer.

  Blaze backed out of the cave holding the baby to his chest, turned into the wind, and fled toward the logging road.

  “Where did Corliss leave him?” Sterling panted at Franklin. The men had paused at the edge of the woods, breathing hard.

  Franklin pointed. “Down there. I can find it.”

  Sterling turned to Bradley. “Call your people. And the Cumberland County Sheriff. I wanted that logging road plugged at both ends. What’s past it if he slips through?”

  Bradley barked a laugh. “Nothing but the Royal River. Like to see him ford that.”

  “Is it iced over?”

  “Sure, but not enough to walk on.”

  “All right. Let us press on. Franklin, take point. Short point. This guy is very dangerous.”

  They moved down the first slope. Fifty yards into the woods, Sterling made out a blue-gray figure slumped against a tree.

  Franklin got there first. “Corliss,” he said.

  “Dead?” Sterling asked, joining him.

  “Oh yeah.” Franklin pointed to tracks that were now little more than vague dips.

  “Let’s go,” Sterling said. This time he took point.

  They found Granger five minutes later. The marks on his throat were at least an inch deep.

  “Guy must be a brute,” someone said.

  Sterling pointed into the snow. “That’s a cave up there. I’m almost positive. Maybe he left the kid.”

  Two State Troopers scrambled up toward the triangular patch of shadow. One of them paused, bent, picked something out of the snow. He held it up. “A gun!” he yelled.

  As if the rest of us are blind, Sterling thought. “Never mind the frigging gun, see about the kid! And be careful!”

  One of them knelt, used his flashlight, then crawled after the beam. The other bent forward, hands on knees, listened, then turned back to Sterling and Franklin. “Not here!”

  They spotted tracks leading from the cave toward the logging road even before the Trooper who had gone into the cave was out again. They were little more than vague humps in the fast-falling snow.

  “He can’t have more than ten minutes on us,” Sterling said to Franklin. Then he raised his voice. “Spread out! We’re going to sweep him out onto that road!”

  They headed out fast, Sterling tromping in Blaze’s tracks.

  Blaze ran.

  He went in stumbling leaps, crashing straight through tangles of brush rather than trying to find a way around, bending over Joe to try and shield him from stabbing branches. Breath tore in and out of his lungs. He heard faint yelli
ng behind him. The sound of those voices filled Blaze with panic.

  Joe was whooping and struggling and coughing, but Blaze held him fast. Just a little more, a little farther, and they would come out on the road. There would be cars there. Police cars, but he didn’t care about that. As long as there were keys left in them. He would drive as far and fast as he could, then dump the police cruiser and switch to something else. A truck would be good. These thoughts came and went in his head like big colored cartoons.

  He blundered through a marshy place where the thin ice surrounding the snow-covered hummocks gave way and plunged him into frigid water up to his ankles. He kept going and came to a head-high wall of brambles. He went straight through, only turned around backwards to protect Joe. One of them got under the cap Joe was wearing, though, and slingshotted it back toward the marsh. No time to get it.

  Joe stared around, his eyes wide with terror. Without the enveloping hat to warm the air in front of his face, he began to gasp harder. Now his cries sounded thin. Behind them, the faint blue voice of the law was yelling something else. It didn’t matter. Nothing did except getting to the road.

  The land began to slope upward. The going became a little easier. Blaze lengthened his stride, running for his life. And Joe’s.

  Sterling was also going full out, and he had drawn thirty yards ahead of the others. He was gaining. Why not? The big bastard was breaking trail for him. The walkie on his belt crackled. Sterling pulled it but didn’t waste his breath, only double-keyed it.

  “This is Bradley, come back?”

  “Yeah.” That was all. Sterling needed the rest of his breath to run with. The most coherent thought in his mind, overlaying the others like a bright red film, was the knowledge that the homicidal fuck had killed Granger. Had killed an Agent.

  “County Sheriff has placed units on that logging road, boss. State Police will reinforce ASAP. Over?”

  “Good. Over and out.”

  He ran on. Five minutes later he came upon a red cap lying in the snow. Sterling stuck it in his coat pocket and kept running.

  Blaze struggled the last fifty uphill yards to the logging road, almost winded. Joe wasn’t crying anymore; he no longer had breath to waste on crying. Snow had clotted on his eyelids and in his lashes, weighting them down.