Blaze

Blaze swung onto the running board and then climbed into the cab. Said thank you. The driver nodded and said, “Goin to Westbrook.” Blaze nodded back and gave the guy a thumbs-up. The driver clashed the gears and the truck began to roll again. Not as if it particularly wanted to.

“Seen you before, ain’t I?” the trucker shouted over the flailing motor. His window was broken and blasts of cold January air whirled in, fighting with the baking air from the heater. “Live on Palmer Road?”

“Yeah!” Blaze shouted back.

“Jimmy Cullum used to live out there,” the trucker said, and offered Blaze an incredibly battered package of Luckies. Blaze took one.

“Some guy,” Blaze said. His newly bald head did not show; he was wearing a red knitted cap.

“Went down south, Jimmy did. Say, your buddy still around?”

Blaze realized he must mean George. “Naw,” he said. “He found work in New Hampshire.”

“Yeah?” the trucker said. “Wish he’d find me some.”

They had reached the top of the hill and now the truck began down the other side, picking up speed along the rutted washboard, banging and clobbering. Blaze could almost feel the illegal load pushing them. He had driven overweight pulp trucks himself; had once taken a load of Christmas trees to Massachusetts that had to’ve been half a ton over the limit. It had never worried him before, but it did now. It dawned on him that only he stood between Joe and death.

After they’d gotten on the main road, the driver mentioned the kidnapping. Blaze tensed a little, but he wasn’t particularly surprised.

“They find the guy grabbed that kid, they ought to string him up by his balls,” the pulper offered. He shifted up to third with a hellish grinding of gears.

“I guess so,” Blaze said.

“It’s gettin as bad as those plane hijacks. Remember those?”

“Yep.” He didn’t.

The driver tossed the stub of his cigarette out the window and immediately lit another one. “It’s got to stop. They ought to have mandatory death penalties for guys like that. A firing squad, maybe.”

“You think they’ll get the guy?” Blaze asked. He was starting to feel like a spy in a movie.

“Does the Pope wear a tall hat?” the driver asked, turning onto Route 1.

“I guess so.”

“What I mean is, it goes without saying. Of course they’ll get ‘im. They always do. But the kid’ll be dead, and you can quote me on that.”

“Oh, I dunno,” Blaze said.

“Yeah? Well, I know. Whole idea is crazy. Kidnappin in this day and age? The FBI’ll mark the bills or copy the serial numbers or put invisible marks on em, the kind you can only see with an ultraviolet light.”

“I guess so,” Blaze said, feeling troubled. He hadn’t thought about those sorts of things. Still, if he was going to sell the money in Boston, to that guy George knew, what did it matter? He started to feel better again. “You think those Gerards will really fork over a million bucks?”

The driver whistled. “Is that how much they’re askin?”

Blaze felt in that moment as if he could gladly have bitten off his own tongue and swallowed it. “Yeah,” he said. And thought Oh, George.

“That’s somethin new,” the driver said. “Wasn’t in the morning paper. Did you hear about it on the radio?”

George said, quite clearly: “Kill him, Blaze.”

The driver cupped his hand to his ear. “What? Didn’t quite get that.”

“I said yeah, on the radio.” He looked down at his hands, folded in his lap. They were big hands, powerful. One of them had broken a Collie’s neck with a single blow, and back then he hadn’t even had his growth.

“They might get that ransom,” the driver said, flipping out his second cigarette butt and lighting a third, “but they’ll never get to spend it. Nossir. Not never.”

They were headed up Route 1 now, past frozen marshes and clam-shacks shuttered for the winter. The trucker was avoiding the turnpike and the weighing stations there. Blaze didn’t blame him.

If I hit ‘im right in the throat, where his adam’s apple is, he’d wake up in heaven before he even knew he was dead, Blaze thought. Then I could grab the wheel and pull ‘im over. Prop ‘im up on the passenger side. Anyone who sees him’ll think he’s just catching him a little catnap. Poor fella, they’ll think, he was probably drivin all n —

“…goin?”

“Huh?” Blaze asked.

“I said, where you goin? I forgot.”

“Oh. Westbrook.”

“Well, I gotta swing off on Marah Road a mile up. Meetin a buddy, you know.”

“Oh,” Blaze said. “Yeah.”

And George said: “You got to do it now, Blazer. Right time, right place. It’s how we roll.”

So Blaze turned toward the driver.

“How about another cigarette?” the driver asked. “You in’trested?” He cocked his head a little as he spoke. Offering a perfect target.

Blaze stiffened a little. His hands twitched in his lap. Then he said, “No. Tryin to quit.”

“Yeah? Good for you. Cold as a witch’s tit in here, ain’t it?” The driver downshifted in anticipation of his turn, and from below them came a series of barking explosions as the engine backfired down its rotting tailpipe. “Heater’s broke. Radio, too.”