Blaze

“The picture is compliments of Hager’s!”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Lotta goodies, man,” the stockboy said. He was perhaps twenty, and just getting over his adolescent acne. He wore a little red bowtie. “Where’s your car parked?”

“The lot in back,” Blaze said.

He followed the stockboy, who insisted on pushing one of the carts and then complained about how it steered on the packed snow. “They don’t salt it down back here, see, and the wheels get packed up. Then the damn carts skid around. You can give your ankles a nasty bite if you don’t watch out. Real nasty. I’m not complaining, but…”

Then what are you doing, Sporty? Blaze could hear George asking. Eating cat-food out of the dog’s bowl?

“This is it,” Blaze said. “This is mine.”

“Yeah, okay. What do you want to put in the trunk? The highchair, the crib, or both?”

Blaze suddenly remembered he didn’t have a trunk key.

“Let’s put it all in the back.”

The stockboy’s eyes widened. “Ah, Jeez, man, I don’t think it’ll fit. In fact, I’m positive —”

“We can put some in front, too. We can stand that carton with the crib in it in the passenger footwell. I’ll rack the seat back.”

“Why not the trunk? Wouldn’t that be, like, simpler?”

Blaze thought, vaguely, of starting some story about how the trunk was full of stuff, but the trouble with lies was one always led to another. Soon it was like you were traveling on roads you didn’t know. You got lost. I always tell the truth when I can, George liked to say. It’s like driving close to home.

So he held up the dupe. “I lost my car-keys,” he said. “Until I find em, all I got is this.”

“Oh,” the stockboy said. He looked at Blaze as though he were dumb, but that was okay; he had been looked at that way before. “Bummer.”

In the end, they got it all in. It took some artful packing, and it was a tight squeeze, but they made it. When Blaze looked into the rearview mirror, he could even see some of the world outside the back window. The carton holding the broken-down changing table cut off the rest of the view.

“Nice car,” said the stockboy. “An oldie but a goodie.”

“Right,” Blaze said. And because it was something George sometimes said, he added: “Gone from the charts, but not from our hearts.” He wondered if the stockboy was waiting for something. It seemed like he was.

“What’s she got, a 302?”

“342,” Blaze said automatically.

The stockboy nodded. He still stood there.

From inside the back seat of the Ford, where there was no room for him but where he was, anyway — somehow — George said: “If you don’t want him to stand there for the rest of the century, tip the dipshit and get rid of him.”

Tip. Yeah. Right.

Blaze dragged out his wallet, looked at the limited selection of bills, and reluctantly selected a five. He gave it to the stockboy. The stockboy made it disappear. “All right, man, increase the peace.”

“Whatever,” Blaze said. He got into the Ford and started it up. The stockboy was trundling the shopping carts back to the store. Halfway there, he stopped and looked back at Blaze. Blaze didn’t like that look. It was a remembering look.

“I should’ve remembered to tip him quicker. Right, George?”

George didn’t answer.

Back home, he parked the Ford in the shed again and carted all the baby crap into the house. He assembled the crib in the bedroom and set up the changing table next to it. There was no need to look at the directions; he only looked at the pictures on the boxes and his hands did the rest. The cradle went in the kitchen, near the woodstove…but not too near. The rest of the stuff he piled in the bedroom closet, out of sight.

When it was done, a change had come over the bedroom that went deeper than the added furniture. Something else had been added. The atmosphere had changed. It was as if a ghost had been set free to walk. Not the ghost of someone who had left, someone who had gone down dead, but the ghost of someone yet to come.

It made Blaze feel strange.

Chapter 8

THE NEXT NIGHT, Blaze decided he ought to get cool plates for his hot Ford, so he stole a pair off a Volkswagen in the parking lot of Jolly Jim’s Jiant Groceries in Portland. He replaced the plates from the VW with the Ford’s plates. It could be weeks or months before the VW’s owner realized he had the wrong set of plates, because the number on the little sticker was 7, meaning the guy didn’t have to re-register until July. Always check the registration sticker. George had taught him that.

He drove to a discount store, feeling safe with his new plates, knowing he would feel safer still when the Ford was a different color. He bought four cans of Skylark Blue auto paint and a spray-gun. He went home broke but happy.

He ate supper sitting next to the stove, thumping his feet on the worn linoleum as Merle Haggard sang “Okie from Muskogee.” Old Merle had really known how to dish it up to those fucking hippies.