Blaze

by Richard Bachman

  Blaze went to his knees twice, each time holding his arms against his sides to cushion the baby. At last he reached the top. And bingo. There were at least five empty State Police cruisers parked up and down the road.

  Below him, Albert Sterling broke from the woods and looked up the incline Blaze had already climbed. And damn, there he was. There the big bastard finally was.

  “Stop, Blaisdell, FBI! Stop and put your hands up!”

  Blaze looked over his shoulder. The cop looked tiny from up here. Blaze turned back and ran out into the road. He stopped at the first cruiser and looked in. Once again, bingo. Keys dangling from the ignition. He was about to put Joe on the seat beside the officer’s citation book when he heard an engine revving. He turned and saw a white cruiser slewing up the road toward him. He turned the other way and saw another one.

  “George!” he screamed. “Oh, George!”

  He clutched Joe against him. The baby’s respiration was very fast and shallow now, the way George’s had been after Ryder stabbed him. Blaze slammed the State Police car’s door and ran around the hood.

  A Cumberland County Sheriff’s deputy leaned from the car that was coming from the north. He had a battery-powered bullhorn in one gloved hand. “Stop, Blaisdell! It’s over! Stay where you are!”

  Blaze ran across the road and someone fired at him. Snow puffed up on his left. Joe began to let out a series of gasping whimpers.

  Blaze plunged down the other side of the road, taking gigantic leaps. Another bullet droned past his head, snapping splinters and bark from the side of a birch tree. At the bottom he stumbled over a log hidden beneath the fresh snow. He went down into a drift, the baby beneath him. He struggled to his feet and brushed Joe’s face off. It was powdered with snow. “Joe! You all right?”

  Joe was breathing in hoarse, convulsive gasps. Each one seemed to come an age apart.

  Blaze ran.

  Sterling got to the road and ran across it. One of the County Sheriff’s cars had come to a skidding, veering stop on the far side. The deputies were out and standing there, looking down, guns pointing.

  Sterling’s cheeks were stretched and his gums were cold, so he supposed he was grinning. “We got the bastard.”

  They ran down the embankment.

  Blaze dodged through a skeletal stand of poplar and ash. On the other side, everything opened up. The trees and underbrush were gone. There was a flat white stillness in front of him, and that was the river. On the far side, gray-green masses of spruce and pine marched toward a snow-choked horizon.

  Blaze began to walk out onto the ice. He got nine steps before the ice broke, plunging him in frigid water up to his thighs. Struggling for breath, he lurched back to the bank and climbed it.

  Sterling and the two deputies burst through the last clump of trees. “FBI,” Sterling said. “Lay the baby down on the snow and step back.”

  Blaze turned to the right and began to run. His breath was hot and hard going down his throat now. He looked for a bird, any bird over the river, and saw none. What he saw was George. George was standing eighty yards or so ahead. He was mostly obscured by blowing snow, but Blaze could see his cap, slewed around to the left — the good-luck side.

  “Come on, Blaze! Come on, you fucking slowpoke! Show em your heels! Show em how we roll, goddammit!”

  Blaze ran faster. The first bullet took him in the right calf. They were firing low to protect the baby. It didn’t slow him down; he didn’t even feel it. The second hit the back of his knee and blew his kneecap out in a spray of blood and bone fragments. Blaze didn’t feel it. He kept running. Sterling would say later he never would have thought it possible, but the bastard just kept running. Like a gutshot moose.

  “Help me, George! I’m in trouble!”

  George was gone, but Blaze could hear his hoarse, raspy voice — it came to him on the wind. “Yeah, but you’re almost out of it. Shag, baby.”

  Blaze let out the last notch. He was gaining on them. He was getting his second wind. He and Joe were going to get away after all. It had been a close shave, but it was all going to turn out okay. He looked at the river, straining his eyes, trying to see George. Or a bird. Just one bird.

  The third bullet struck him in the right buttock, angled up, shattered his hip. The slug also shattered. The largest piece hung a left and tore open his large intestine. Blaze staggered, almost fell, then took off running again.

  Sterling was down on one knee with his gun in both hands. He sighted quickly, almost off-handedly. The trick was not to let yourself think too much. You had to trust your hand-eye coordination and let it do its work. “Jesus, work Your will,” he said.

  The fourth bullet — Sterling’s first — struck Blaze in the lower back, severing his spinal cord. It felt like being punched by a big hand in a boxing glove, just above the kidneys. He went down, and Joe flew from his arms.

  “Joe!” he cried, and began to haul himself forward on his elbows. Joe’s eyes were open; he was looking at him.

  “He’s going for the kid!” one of the deputies yelled.

  Blaze reached for Joe with one large hand. Joe’s own hand, searching for anything, met it. The tiny fingers wrapped around Blaze’s thumb.

  Sterling stood behind Blaze, panting. He spoke low, so the deputies couldn’t hear him. “This is for Bruce, sweetheart.”

  “George?” Blaze said, and then Sterling pulled the trigger.

  Chapter 24

  Excerpt from a news conference held February 10th:

  Q: How’s Joe, Mr. Gerard?

  Gerard: The doctors say he’s going to be fine, thank God. It was touch and go there for awhile, but the pneumonia’s gone now. He’s a fighter, no doubt about that.

  Q: Any comments about the way the FBI handled the case?

  Gerard: You bet. They did a fine job.

  Q: What are you and your wife going to do now?

  Gerard: We’re going to Disneyland!

  [Laughter]

  Q: Seriously.

  Gerard: I almost was being serious! Once the doctors give Joey a clean bill, we’re going on vacation. Somewhere warm, with beaches. Then, when we’re home, we’re going to work at forgetting this nightmare.

  Blaze was buried in South Cumberland, less than ten miles from Hetton House and about the same distance from where his father threw him down a flight of apartment house stairs. Like most paupers in Maine, he was buried on the town. There was no sun that day, and no mourners. Except for the birds. Crows, mostly. Near cemeteries in the country, there are always crows. They came, they sat in the branches, and then flew away to wherever birds go.

  Joe Gerard IV lay behind plate glass, in a hospital crib. He was well again. His mother and father would be back this very day to take him home, but he didn’t know it.

  He had a new tooth, and knew that; it hurt. He lay on his back and looked at the birds over his crib. They were on wires, and flew whenever a breath of air stirred them into motion. They weren’t moving now, and Joe began to cry.

  A face bent over him and a voice began cooing. It was the wrong face, and he began to cry louder.

  The face pursed its mouth and blew on the birds. The birds began to fly. Joe stopped crying. He watched the birds. The birds made him laugh. He forgot about wrong faces, and he forgot the pain of his new tooth. He watched the birds fly.

  (1973)

  Memory

  Stephen King’s short story “Memory” appeared in Volume 7, Number 4 of Tin House, the Summer 2006 issue. It is the seed from which has grown a much longer tale, Duma Key, which Scribner will publish in early 2008.

  MEMORY

  by Stephen King

  Memories are contrary things; if you quit chasing them and turn your back, they often return on their own. That’s what Kamen says. I tell him I never chased the memory of my accident. Some things, I say, are better forgotten.

  Maybe, but that doesn’t matter, either. That’s what Kamen says.

  My name is Edgar Freemantle. I used to be a big
deal in building and construction. This was in Minnesota, in my other life. I was a genuine American-boy success in that life, worked my way up like a motherfucker, and for me, everything worked out. When Minneapolis-St. Paul boomed, The Freemantle Company boomed. When things tightened up, I never tried to force things. But I played my hunches, and most of them played out well. By the time I was fifty, Pam and I were worth about forty million dollars. And what we had together still worked. I looked at other women from time to time but never strayed. At the end of our particular Golden Age, one of our girls was at Brown and the other was teaching in a foreign exchange program. Just before things went wrong, my wife and I were planning to go and visit her.

  I had an accident at a job site. That’s what happened. I was in my pickup truck. The right side of my skull was crushed. My ribs were broken. My right hip was shattered. And although I retained sixty per cent of the sight in my right eye (more, on a good day), I lost almost all of my right arm.

  I was supposed to lose my life, but I didn’t. Then I was supposed to become one of the Vegetable Simpsons, a Coma Homer, but that didn’t happen, either. I was one confused American when I came around, but the worst of that passed. By the time it did, my wife had passed, too. She’s remarried to a fellow who owns bowling alleys. My older daughter likes him. My younger daughter thinks he’s a yank-off. My wife says she’ll come around.

  Maybe sí, maybe no. That’s what Kamen says.

  When I say I was confused, I mean that at first I didn’t know who people were, or what had happened, or why I was in such awful pain. I can’t remember the quality and pitch of that pain now. I know it was excruciating, but it’s all pretty academic. Like a picture of a mountain in National Geographic magazine. It wasn’t academic at the time. At the time it was more like climbing a mountain.

  Maybe the headache was the worst. It wouldn’t stop. Behind my forehead it was always midnight in the world’s biggest clock-shop. Because my right eye was fucked up, I was seeing the world through a film of blood, and I still hardly knew what the world was. Few things had names. I remember one day when Pam was in the room — I was still in the hospital, this was before the convalescent home — and she was standing by my bed. I knew who she was, but I was extremely pissed that she should be standing when there was the thing you sit in right over in the cornhole.

  “Bring the friend,” I said. “Sit in the friend.”

  “What do you mean, Edgar?” she asked.

  “The friend, the buddy!” I shouted. “Bring over the fucking pal, you dump bitch!” My head was killing me and she was starting to cry. I hated her for starting to cry. She had no business crying, because she wasn’t the one in the cage, looking at everything through a red blur. She wasn’t the monkey in the cage. And then it came to me. “Bring over the chum and for Christ’s sake sick down!” It was the closest my rattled-up, fucked-up brain could come to chair.

  I was angry all the time. There were two older nurses that I called Dry Fuck One and Dry Fuck Two, as if they were characters in a dirty Dr. Seuss story. There was a candystriper I called Pilch Lozenge — I have no idea why, but that nickname also had some sort of sexual connotation. To me, at least. As I grew stronger, I tried to hit people. Twice I tried to stab Pam, and on the first of those two occasions I succeeded, although only with a plastic knife. She still needed stitches in her forearm. I had to be tied down that day.

  Here is what I remember most clearly about that part of my other life: a hot afternoon toward the end of my stay in the expensive convalescent home, the air conditioning broken, tied down in my bed, a soap opera on the television, a thousand bells ringing in my head, pain burning my right side like a poker, my missing right arm itching, my missing right fingers twitching, the morphine pump beside the bed making the hollow BONG that meant you couldn’t get any more for awhile, and a nurse swims out of the red, a creature coming to look at the monkey in the cage, and the nurse says: “Are you ready to visit with your wife?” And I say: “Only if she brought a gun to shoot me with.”

  You don’t think that kind of pain will pass, but it does. They shipped me home, the red began to drain from my vision, and Kamen showed up. Kamen’s a psychologist who specializes in hypnotherapy. He showed me some neat tricks for managing phantom aches and itches in my missing arm. And he brought me Reba.

  “This is not approved psychological therapy for anger management,” Dr. Kamen said, although I suppose he might have been lying about that to make Reba more attractive. He told me I had to give her a hateful name, so I named her after an aunt who used to pinch my fingers when I was small if I didn’t eat all of my vegetables. Then, less than two days after getting her, I forgot her name. I could only think of boy names, each one making me angrier: Randall, Russell, Rudolph, even River-fucking-Phoenix.

  Pam came in with my lunch and I could see her steeling herself for an outburst. But even though I’d forgotten the name of the fluffy blond rage-doll, I remembered how I was supposed to use it in this situation.

  “Pam,” I said, “I need five minutes to get myself under control. I can do this.”

  “Are you sure—”

  “Yes, just get that hamhock out of here and stick it up your face-powder. I can do this.”

  I didn’t know if I could or not, but that was what I was supposed to say — I can do this. I couldn’t remember the fucking doll’s name, but I could remember I can do this. That is clear about the convalescent part of my other life, how I kept saying I can do this even when I knew I was fucked, double-fucked, I was dead-ass-fucked in the pouring rain.

  “I can do this,” I said, and she backed out without a word, the tray still in her hands and the cup chattering against the plate.

  When she was gone, I held the doll up in front of my face, staring into its stupid blue eyes as my thumbs disappeared into its stupid yielding body. “What’s your name, you bat-faced bitch?” I shouted at it. It never once occurred to me that Pam was listening on the kitchen intercom, her and the day-nurse both. But if the intercom had been broken they could have heard me through the door. I was in good voice that day.

  I shook the doll back and forth. Its head flopped and its dumb hair flew. Its blue cartoon eyes seemed to be saying Oouuu, you nasty man!

  “What’s your name, bitch? What’s your name, you cunt? What’s your name, you cheap plastic toe-rag? Tell me your name or I’ll kill you! Tell me your name or I’ll kill you! Tell me your name or I’ll cut out your eyes and chop off your nose and rip off your — ”

  My mind cross-connected then, a thing that still happens now, four years later, although far less often. For a moment I was in my pickup truck, clipboard rattling against my old steel lunchbucket in the passenger footwell (I doubt if I was the only working millionaire in America to carry a lunchbucket, but you probably could have counted us in the dozens), my PowerBook beside me on the seat. And from the radio a woman’s voice cried “It was RED!” with evangelical fervor. Only three words, but three was enough. It was the song about the poor woman who turns out her pretty daughter as a prostitute. It was “Fancy,” by Reba McIntire.

  I hugged the doll against me. “You’re Reba. Reba-Reba-Reba. I’ll never forget again.” I did, but I didn’t get angry next time. No. I held her against me like a little love, closed my eyes, and visualized the pickup that had been demolished in the accident. I visualized my steel lunchbucket rattling against the steel clip on my clipboard, and the woman’s voice came from the radio once more, exulting with that same evangelical fervor: “It was RED!”

  Dr. Kamen called it a breakthrough. My wife seemed a good deal less excited, and the kiss she put on my cheek was of the dutiful variety. It was about two months later that she told me she wanted a divorce.

  By then the pain had either lessened considerably or my mind had made certain crucial adjustments when it came to dealing with it. The headaches still came, but less often and rarely with the same violence. I was always more than ready for Vicodin at five and OxyContin at eight — could
hardly hobble on my bright red Canadian crutch until I’d had them — but my rebuilt hip was starting to mend.

  Kathi Green the Rehab Queen came to Casa Freemantle on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I was allowed an extra Vicodin before our sessions, and still my screams filled the house by the time we finished the leg-bends that were our grand finale. Our basement rec room had been converted into a therapy suite, complete with a hot tub I could get in and out of on my own. After two months of physical therapy — this would have been almost six months after the accident — I started to go down there on my own in the evenings. Kathi said working out a couple of hours before bed would release endorphins and I’d sleep better. I don’t know about the endorphins, but I did start getting a little more sleep.

  It was during one of these evening workouts that my wife of a quarter-century came downstairs and told me she wanted a divorce.

  I stopped what I was doing — crunches — and looked at her. I was sitting on a floor-pad. She was standing at the foot of the stairs, prudently across the room. I could have asked her if she was serious, but the light down there was very good — those racked fluorescents — and I didn’t have to. I don’t think it’s the sort of thing women joke about six months after their husbands have almost died in accidents, anyway. I could have asked her why, but I knew. I could see the small white scar on her arm where I had stabbed her with the plastic knife from my hospital tray, and that was really the least of it. I thought of telling her, not so long ago, to get the hamhock out of here and stick it up her face-powder. I thought of asking her to think about it, but the anger came back. In those days what Dr. Kamen called the inappropriate anger often did. And what I was feeling right then did not seem all that inappropriate.