Richard Bachman - Blaze

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.

BUT HE REMEMBERED the next morning.

That was the curse of being a dummy. You were always being surprised by grief, because you could never remember the important things. The only stuff that stuck was dumb stuff. Like that poem Mrs. Selig made them learn way back in the fifth grade: Under the spreading chestnut tree, the village smithy stands. What good was that? What good when you caught yourself peeling potatoes for two and got smacked all over again with knowing you didn’t need to peel no two potatoes, because the other guy was never going to eat another spud?

Well, maybe it wasn’t grief. Maybe that word wasn’t the right word. Not if that meant crying and knocking your head against the wall. You didn’t do that for the likes of George. But there was loneliness. And there was fear.

George would say: “Jesus, would you change your fuckin skivvies? Those things are ready to stand up on their own. They’re disgusting.”

George would say: “You only tied one, dimbulb.”

George would say: “Aw, fuck, turn around and I’ll tuck it in. Like havin a kid.”

When he got up the morning after he stole the Ford, George was sitting in the other room. Blaze couldn’t see him but knew he was sitting in the broke-down easy-chair like always, with his head down so his chin was almost on his chest. The first thing he said was, “You screwed up again, Kong. Congratcha-fuckin-lations.”

Blaze hissed when his feet hit the cold floor. Then he fumbled his shoes on. Naked except for them, he ran and looked out the window. No car. He sighed with relief. It came out in a little puff he could see.

“No, I didn’t. I put it in the shed, just like you told me.”

“You didn’t wipe the goddam tracks, though, did you? Why don’t you put out a sign, Blaze? THIS WAY TO THE HOT CAR. You could charge admission. Why don’t you just do that?”

“Aw, George—”

“‘Aw, George, aw, George.’ Go out and sweep em up.”

“Okay.” He started for the door.

“Blaze?”

“What?”

“Put on your fucking pants first, why don’t you?”

Blaze felt his face burn.

“Like a kid,” George said, sounding resigned. “One who can shave.”

George knew how to stick it in, all right. Only finally he’d gone and stuck it in the wrong guy, too often and too far. That was how you ended up dead, with nothing smart to say. Now George was just dead, and Blaze was making his voice up in his mind, giving him the good lines. George had been dead since that crap game in the warehouse.

I’m crazy for even trying to go through with this, Blaze thought. A dum-dum like me.

But he pulled on his underwear shorts (checking them carefully for stains first), then a thermal undershirt, then a flannel top shirt and a pair of heavy corduroy pants. His Sears workboots were under the bed. His Army surplus parka was hanging on the doorknob. He hunted for his mittens and finally found them on the shelf over the dilapidated woodstove in the combination kitchen-living room. He got his checkered cap with the earflaps and put it on, careful to give the visor a little good-luck twist to the left. Then he went out and got the broom leaning against the door.

The morning was bright and bitter. The moisture in his nose crackled immediately. A gust of wind drove snow as fine as powdered sugar into his face, making him wince. It was all right for George to give orders. George was inside drinking coffee by the stove. Like last night, taking off for a beer, leaving Blaze to figure out the car. And there he would still be if he hadn’t had the dumb luck to find the keys somewhere, either under the floormat or in the glove compartment, he forgot which. Sometimes he didn’t think George was a very good friend.

He swept the tracks away with the broom, pausing several minutes to admire them before he started. How the treads stood up and cast shadows, mostly, little perfect things. It was funny how little things could be so perfect and no one ever saw them. He looked at this until he was tired of looking (no George to tell him to hurry up) and then worked his way down the short driveway to the road, brushing the tracks away. The plow had gone by in the night, pushing back the snow-dunes the wind made across these country roads where there were open fields to one side and t’other, and any other tracks were gone.