Max Collins - The Baby Blue Rip-Off

Something was wrong. I eased out of the van, shut the door as soundlessly as I could, and jogged up toward the house, leaving behind what I’d come to deliver. Because something was definitely wrong.

From half a mile down the road, I’d spotted the lights; every damn light in the house was going, which was way out of character for its occupant, an elderly woman who had pinched pennies for so many years it was second nature now to sit in the dark and save on electricity. Yet here the house was, lit up like Christmas, beacons of light streaking out the windows of the clapboard crackerbox and cutting through the night the way a movie projector cuts through a dark theater.

The next thing I noticed was the cars. Even before I’d brought the van to a halt, I noticed them, parked right up there next to the house, on the lawn, crowding the screened-in porch like relatives at a millionaire’s deathbed. Actually, only one of the two vehicles was a car: a late-model white Pontiac GTO trimmed in sporty, tasteless red and blue-you could be arrested for desecrating the flag driving that car. The other vehicle was, like my Dodge, a van; only this one was a Ford and-unlike my relatively new, sky blue number-pale green and of indeterminate age.

The cars were just as wrong as the bright lights; the resident of the little bungalow didn’t own any sort of car, let alone a GTO or a van, both of which seemed a little unlikely for an elderly, mostly incapacitated person. Why not a Harley-Davidson, or a submarine?

I was halfway up the lawn, feeling like a one-man task force invading some beachhead, when I started having second thoughts. Thoughts like maybe I was just letting the uneasiness of the day work on my mind. Maybe I was ready to expect the worst, after trudging through the sort of unpleasant, overcast day that migraine headaches were invented for.

The whole day had seemed out of sync, as if somebody had been shuffling the leaves of the calendar and a day got stuck in July that belonged in October. A cold, sullen day, with the night coming in before it was supposed to. It was dark already at seven o’clock, an hour that would normally be daylight-savings-time light. The temperature was fifty-seven shivery degrees on a date that would normally tally eighty-five or more.

I was walking now, not jogging, and I was maybe a hundred feet away from the house when I figured out what was going on. I did this by studying the dark figures moving around in the bright frames of light that were the windows of the little house. The figures were carrying things, lifting them. Taking them.

Stealing.

People in the house were looting it, cleaning it out. And as if gutting a house-any house-isn’t bad enough, these lowlifes were preying on an elderly semi-invalid who happened to be a friend of mine.

Okay, I told myself, sucking in wind. Okay. Before you go looking for a tree and a vine to swing down into that house like Tarzan, maybe you better do your homework. I decided to get the license numbers of the car and van so I’d have that to hang onto in case I got the worst of the confrontation that was about to take place. Damn it.

Walking on eggs is the way you describe how carefully I was moving, and I moved that way around the back end of the patriotic GTO and zeroed in on the license plate. I’d been hoping it wouldn’t be some deadly multi-digit that might overload my memory banks, and my wish came true: 70-3. Seventy was the county number; three was the vehicle number.

In addition to being easy to remember, the number told me something about the character of the GTO owner-or the three part did, anyway. It told me he was a lunatic. Because to get license plate number three, or any other early number, you have to be a pretty early number yourself. That is, you have to be at the Port City Courthouse bright and early the morning of the first day of license-plate sales, and that usually means camping out overnight on the lawn of the courthouse with a throng of fellow lunatics, all dedicated to the proposition that meaning in life can be achieved via the attainment of a low license-plate number.

Keeping in mind that I was dealing with at least one potential fruitcake, I moved quietly and carefully around to the back of the van, the rear doors of which were swung wide open. I had two unpleasant surprises. Let me list them in order of increasing disappointment: the van had no license plate at all; the van had someone in it.

Let me be specific.

The van had a big, hulking figure inside it, a featureless blob of darkness just one size smaller than the van itself. And I had just perceived the hulk as something not unlike a human being when it reached out skillet-size hands to fry me in. I heard my tee-shirt tear as the paws clutched at it and I was yanked inside the van. He’d been stacking things in there-the things he and his cohorts had been stealing-and I was just another thing to be hauled in and stacked. Only I got special, preferential treatment the inanimate objects didn’t receive, though at the conclusion of that treatment I, too, might be an inanimate object.

What I’m trying to say is, he started hitting me.

They were backhands; he could’ve been fanning himself or swatting flies or something, but they sent me sailing just the same, tumbling onto one of his stacks, slamming into something-a TV I think-and when I stopped bouncing into things and felt the metallic surface of the floor, he kicked me in the side, gently, as if trying to put my ribs up my nose.

The next time the foot came down at me, I grabbed onto it and heaved up. Hulk went crashing awkwardly into the carefully stacked stuff in the van, a comical Frankenstein’s monster smashing things he didn’t mean to, and there was the appropriate noise to go with it: glass splintering, metal and wood scraping, even a bonging from an object that was apparently a grandfather clock on its side.

With Hulk helpless, I clearly had the upper hand, which I played to full advantage by scrambling the hell out of there, getting on my feet and heading back down the sloping grass.

Somebody caught me with a flying tackle, and I went down hard, the wind whooshing out of me and leaving me on the ground and rasping, gasping for air. Then I was surrounded by dark figures-four of them, maybe, or forty-and they began to beat on me. I covered my face and they hit me in the crotch. I covered up my crotch and they hit me in the face. It went on like that for a while.

When I came to, I was being dragged by the legs up the sloping lawn. My back was to the ground and I had a rather pleasant view of the sky, which had a lot of stars in it for the evening of an overcast day. My mind, however, was on other things-like feeling to see what was left of my sex life, and poking my tongue around my teeth to see if I’d be eating anything but baby food from now on. I couldn’t see any of my captors and, quite honestly, I didn’t try to. I was thinking about other things, like surviving.

As we approached the house, they dragged me like a squaw behind an Indian’s pony (but with considerably less affection). My head went skipping over a stone, and I thought, giddy with pain, ain’t that something; I’m the lake and the stone is skipping over me, and I skipped over another one and went away for a while.

I woke up inside the house. I knew that because there was a floor beneath me: a hard, varnished wood floor. It was dark in the house now. All those bright lights had been snuffed; it was so dark I could’ve been unconscious still, only my eyes were open. My first thought was: I’m alive. My second thought was: They’re gone.

Alive, on my stomach on the floor in the house, alive; the lights off, so they’ve gone away, those men. Those men were gone now.