Blaze

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 again. 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.