Richard Bachman - Blaze

If it matters to you (it shouldn’t — hopefully you came for a good story, and hopefully you will get one), any royalties or subsidiary income generated by Blaze will go to The Haven Foundation, which was created to help freelance artists who are down on their luck. [13] To learn more about The Haven Foundation, you can go to my website. That be www.stephenking.com .

One other thing, I guess, while I’ve got you by the lapel. I tried to keep the Blaze time-frame as vague as possible, so it wouldn’t seem too dated. [14] I didn’t like the idea of Clay Blaisdell growing up in post-World War II America; all that has come to seem impossibly antique, although it seemed (and probably was) okay in 1973, when I was pecking it out in the trailer where my wife and I lived with our two children. It was impossible to take out all the dated material, however; keeping some of it was important to the plot. [15] If I had written it today, certainly cell phones and Caller ID would have needed to be taken into consideration. If you think of this story’s time-frame as “America, Not All That Long Ago,” I think you’ll be okay.

May I close by circling back to where I started? This is an old novel, but I believe I was wrong in my initial assessment that it was a bad novel. You may disagree — but “The Little Match Girl” it ain’t. As always, Constant Reader, I wish you well, I thank you for reading this story, and I hope you enjoy it. I won’t say I hope you mist up a little, but—

Yeah. Yeah, I will say that. Just as long as they’re not tears of laughter.

Stephen King (for Richard Bachman)

Sarasota, Florida

January 30th, 2007

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.