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.

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. It was impossible to take out all the dated material, however; keeping some of it was important to the plot.^15. 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

1. In saying this, I assume you’re like me and rarely sit down to a meal — or even a lowly snack — without your current book near at hand.

2. With this exception: Bachman, writing under the pseudonym of John Swithen, sold a single hard-crime story, “The Fifth Quarter.”

3. Now out of print, and a good thing.

4. The Bachman novel following these was Thinner, and it was no wonder I got outed, since that one was actually written by Stephen King — the bogus author photo on the back flap fooled no one.

5. I believe I am the only writer in the history of English story-telling whose career was based on sanitary napkins; that part of my literary legacy seems secure.

6. I have had the same reaction to Everyman, by Philip Roth, Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, and The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, by Kim Edwards — at some point while reading these books, I just start to laugh, wave my hands, and shout: “Bring on the cancer! Bring on the blindness! We haven’t had those yet!”

7. Not in an actual trunk, though; in a cardboard carton.

8. A dame with trouble in her eyes. And ecstasy, presumably, in her pants.

9. Also a throwback to the bad old paperback days, now that I think of it.

10. In my career I have managed to lose not one but two pretty good novels-in-progress. Under the Dome was only 50 pages long at the time it disappeared, but The Cannibals was over 200 pages at the time it went MIA. No copies of either. That was before computers, and I never used carbons for first drafts — it felt haughty, somehow.

11. And, of course, it’s an homage to Of Mice and Men — kinda hard to miss that.

12. Purple, pulsing, and panting.

13. To learn more about The Haven Foundation, you can go to my website. That be www.stephenking.com.

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.

15. If I had written it today, certainly cell phones and Caller ID would have needed to be taken into consideration.

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.