Blaze

Chapter 1

GEORGE WAS SOMEWHERE in the dark. Blaze couldn’t see him, but the voice came in loud and clear, rough and a little hoarse. George always sounded as if he had a cold. He’d had an accident when he was a kid. He never said what, but there was a dilly of a scar on his adam’s apple.

“Not that one, you dummy, it’s got bumper stickers all over it. Get a Chevy or a Ford. Dark blue or green. Two years old. No more, no less. Nobody remembers them. And no stickers.”

Blaze passed the little car with the bumper stickers and kept walking. The faint thump of the bass reached him even here, at the far end of the beer joint’s parking lot. It was Saturday night and the place was crowded. The air was bitterly cold. He had hitched him a ride into town, but now he had been in the open air for forty minutes and his ears were numb. He had forgotten his hat. He always forgot something. He had started to take his hands out of his jacket pockets and put them over his ears, but George put the kibosh on that. George said his ears could freeze but not his hands. You didn’t need your ears to hotwire a car. It was three above zero.

“There,” George said. “On your right.”

Blaze looked and saw a Saab. With a sticker. It didn’t look like the right kind of car at all.

“That’s your left,” George said. “Your right, dummy. The hand you pick your nose with.”

“I’m sorry, George.”

Yes, he was being a dummy again. He could pick his nose with either hand, but he knew his right, the hand you write with. He thought of that hand and looked to that side. There was a dark green Ford there.

Blaze walked over to the Ford, elaborately casual. He looked over his shoulder. The beer joint was a college bar called The Bag. That was a stupid name, a bag was what you called your balls. It was a walk-down. There was a band on Friday and Saturday nights. It would be crowded and warm inside, lots of little girls in short skirts dancing up a storm. It would be nice to go inside, just look around –

“What are you supposed to be doing?” George asked. “Walking on Commonwealth Ave? You couldn’t fool my old blind granny. Just do it, huh?”

“Okay, I was just—”

“Yeah, I know what you was just. Keep your mind on your business.”

“Okay.”

“What are you, Blaze?”

He hung his head, snorkled back snot. “I’m a dummy.”

George always said there was no shame in this, but it was a fact and you had to recognize it. You couldn’t fool anybody into thinking you were smart. They looked at you and saw the truth: the lights were on but nobody was home. If you were a dummy, you had to just do your business and get out. And if you were caught, you owned up to everything except the guys who were with you, because they’d get everything else out of you in the end, anyway. George said dummies couldn’t lie worth shit.

Blaze took his hands out of his pockets and flexed them twice. The knuckles popped in the cold still air.

“You ready, big man?” George asked.

“Yes.”

“Then I’m going to get a beer. Take care of it.”

Blaze felt panic start. It came up his throat. “Hey, no, I ain’t never done this before. I just watched you.”

“Well this time you’re going to do more than watch.”

“But—”

He stopped. There was no sense going on, unless he wanted to shout. He could hear the hard crunch of packed snow as George headed toward the beer joint. Soon his footsteps were lost in the heartbeat of the bass.

“Jesus,” Blaze said. “Oh Jesus Christ.”

And his fingers were getting cold. At this temperature they’d only be good for five minutes. Maybe less. He went around to the driver’s side door, thinking the door would be locked. If the door was locked, this car was no good because he didn’t have the Slim Jim, George had the Slim Jim. Only the door was unlocked. He opened the door, reached in, found the hood release, and pulled it. Then he went around front, fiddled for the second catch, found that one, and lifted the hood.

There was a small Penlight in his pocket. He took it out. He turned it on and trained the beam on the engine.

Find the ignition wire.

But there was so much spaghetti. Battery cables, hoses, spark-plug wires, the gas-line –

He stood there with sweat running down the sides of his face and freezing on his cheeks. This was no good. This wouldn’t never be no good. And all at once he had an idea. It wasn’t a very good idea, but he didn’t have many and when he had one he had to chase it. He went back to the driver’s side and opened the door again. The light came on, but he couldn’t help that. If someone saw him fiddling around, they would just think he was having trouble getting started. Sure, cold night like this, that made sense, didn’t it? Even George couldn’t give him grief on that one. Not much, anyway.

He flipped down the visor over the steering wheel, hoping against hope that a spare key might flop down, sometimes folks kept one up there, but there was nothing except an old ice scraper. That flopped down. He tried the glove compartment next. It was full of papers. He raked them out onto the floor, kneeling on the seat to do it, his breath puffing. There were papers, and a box of Junior Mints, but no keys.

There, you goddam dummy, he heard George saying, are you satisfied now? Ready to at least try hot-wiring it now?

He supposed he was. He supposed he could at least tear some of the wires loose and touch them together like George did and see what happened. He closed the door and started toward the front of the Ford again with his head down. Then he stopped. A new idea had struck him. He went back, opened the door, bent down, flipped up the floormat, and there it was. The key didn’t say FORD on it, it didn’t say anything on it because it was a dupe, but it had the right square head and everything.

Blaze picked it up and kissed the cold metal.

Unlocked car, he thought. Then he thought: Unlocked car and key under the floormat. Then he thought: I ain’t the dumbest guy out tonight after all, George.

He got in behind the wheel, slammed the door, slid the key in the ignition slot — it went in nice — then realized he couldn’t see the parking lot because the hood was still up. He looked around quick, first one way and then the other, making sure that George hadn’t decided to come back and help him out. George would never let him hear the end of it if he saw the hood still up like that. But George wasn’t there. No one was there. The parking lot was tundra with cars.

Blaze got out and slammed the hood. Then he got back in and paused in the act of reaching for the door handle. What about George? Should he go in yonder beer-farm and get him? Blaze sat frowning, head down. The dome light cast yellow light on his big hands.

Guess what? he thought, raising his head again at last. Screw him.

“Screw you, George,” he said. George had left him to hitchhike in, just meeting him here, then left him again. Left him to do the dirtywork, and it was only by the dumbest of dumb luck that Blaze had found a key, so screw George. Let him thumb a ride back in the three-degree cold.

Blaze closed the door, dropped the gear-shift into Drive, and pulled out of the parking space. Once in an actual lane of travel, he stomped down heavily and the Ford leaped, rear end fishtailing on the hard-packed snow. He slammed on the brakes, stiff with panic. What was he doing? What was he thinking of? Go without George? He’d get picked up before he went five miles. Probably get picked up at the first stop-n-go light. He couldn’t go without George.

But George is dead.

That was bullshit. George was just there. He went inside for a beer.

He’s dead.

“Oh, George,” Blaze moaned. He was hunched over the wheel. “Oh, George, don’t be dead.”

He sat there awhile. The Ford’s engine sounded okay. It wasn’t knocking or anything, even though it was cold. The gas gauge said three-quarters. The exhaust rose in the rearview, white and frozen.

George didn’t come out of the beer joint. He couldn’t come out cause he never went in. George was dead. Had been three months. Blaze started to shake.

After a little bit, he caught hold of himself. He began to drive. No one stopped him at the first traffic light, or the second. No one stopped him all the way out of town. By the time he got to the Apex town line, he was doing fifty. Sometimes the car slid a little on patches of ice, but this didn’t bother him. He just turned with the skid. He had been driving on icy roads since he was a teenager.

Outside of town he pushed the Ford to sixty and let it ride. The high beams poked the road with bright fingers and rebounded brilliantly from the snowbanks on either side. Boy, there was going to be one surprised college kid when he took his college girl back to that empty slot. She’d look at him and say, You are a dummy, I ain’t going with you again, not here or nowhere.

“Aren’t,” Blaze said. “If she’s a college girl, she’ll say aren’t.”

That made him smile. The smile changed his whole face. He turned on the radio. It was tuned to rock. Blaze turned the knob until he found country. By the time he reached the shack, he was singing along with the radio at the top of his voice and he had forgotten all about George.