man looked as if he might have a hard head. Very hard.
The wallet plopped into the bag.
The hold-up man skirted them and headed for the door. He moved well for a man his size.
“You pig,” the girl said.
The hold-up man stopped dead. For a moment the girl was sure (so she later told police) that he was going to turn around, open fire, and lay them all out. Later, with the police, they would differ on the hold-up man’s hair color (brown, reddish, or blond), his complexion (fair, ruddy, or pale), and his clothes (pea jacket, windbreaker, woolen lumberjack shirt), but they all agreed on his size — big — and his final words before leaving. These were apparently addressed to the blank, dark doorway, almost in a moan:
“Jeezus, George, I forgot the stocking!”
Then he was gone. There was a bare glimpse of him running in the cold white light of the big Schlitz sign that hung over the store’s entrance, and then an engine roared across the street. A moment later he wheeled out. The car was a sedan, but none of them could ID the make or model. It was beginning to snow.
“So much for beer,” POT ROCKS said.
“Go on back to the cooler and have one on the house,” said Harry Nason.
“Yeah? You sure?”
“Sure I’m sure. Your girl, too. What the fuck, we’re insured.” He began to laugh.
When the police asked him, he said he had never seen the stickup guy before. It was only later that he had cause to wonder if he had not in fact seen the stickup guy the previous fall, in the company of a skinny little rat- faced man who was buying wine and mouthing off.
Chapter 6
WHEN BLAZE GOT UP the next morning, snow had piled in drifts all the way to the eaves of the shack and the fire was out. His bladder contracted the second his feet hit the floor. He hurried to the bathroom on the balls of his feet, wincing and blowing out little puffs of white vapor. His urine arched in a high-pressure flow for perhaps thirty seconds, then slowly faded. He sighed, shook off, broke wind.
Much bigger wind was screaming and whooping around the house. The pines outside the kitchen window were dipping and swaying. To Blaze they looked like thin women at a funeral.
He dressed, opened the back door, and fought his way around to the woodpile under the south eaves. The driveway was completely gone. Visibility was down to five feet, maybe less. It exhilarated him. The grainy slap of the snow on his face exhilarated him.
The wood was solid chunks of oak. He gathered a huge armful, pausing only to stomp his feet before going back in. He made up the fire with his coat on. Then he filled the coffee pot. He carried two cups to the table.
He paused, frowning. He had forgotten something.
The money! He had never counted the money.
He started into the other room. George’s voice froze him. George was in the bathroom.
“Asshole.”
“George, I—”
“George, I’m an asshole. Can you say that?”
“I—”
“No. Say George, I’m the asshole who forgot to wear the stocking.”
“I got the m—”
“
“George, I’m the asshole. I forgot.”
“Forgot what?”
“Forgot to wear the stocking.”
“Now say all of it.”
“George, I’m the asshole who forgot to wear the stocking.”
“Now say this. Say George, I’m the asshole who wants to get caught.”
“No! That ain’t true! That’s a lie, George!”
“It’s the truth is what it is. You want to get caught and go to Shawshank and work in the laundry. That’s the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. That’s the truth on a stick. You’re bull-simple.
“No, George. It ain’t. I promise.”
“I’m going away.”
“No!” Panic seemed to stop his breath. It was like the sleeve of the flannel shirt his old man had crammed down his throat once to stop him bawling. “Don’t, I forgot, I’m a dummy, without you I’ll never remember what to buy—”
“You have a nice time, Blazer,” George said, and although his voice was still coming from the bathroom, now it seemed to be fading. “You have a good time getting caught. Have a good time doing time and ironing those sheets.”
“I’ll do everything you tell me. I won’t fuck up again.”
There was a long pause. Blaze thought George was gone. “Maybe I’ll be back. But I don’t think so.”
“George! George?”
The coffee was boiling. He poured one cup and went into the bedroom. The brown sack with the money in it was under George’s side of the mattress. He shook it out on the sheet, which he kept forgetting to change. It had been on for the whole three months George had been dead.
There was two hundred and sixty dollars from the little mom-n-pop. Another eighty from the college-boy’s wallet. More than enough to buy
What? What was he supposed to buy?
Diapers. That was the ticket. If you were going to snatch a baby, you had to have diapers. Other stuff, too. But he couldn’t remember the other stuff.
“What was it besides diapers, George?” He said it with an air of off-hand casualness, hoping to surprise George into speech. But George didn’t take the bait.
He put the money back in the brown bag and exchanged the college kid’s wallet for his own, which was battered and scuffed and full of nicks. His own wallet held two greasy dollar bills, a faded Kodak of his old man and old lady with their arms around each other, and a photo-booth shot of him and his only real buddy from Hetton House, John Cheltzman. There was also his lucky Kennedy half-dollar, an old bill for a muffler (that had been when he and George had been running that big bad Pontiac Bonneville), and a folded-over Polaroid.
George was looking out of the Polaroid and smiling. Squinting a little, because the sun had been in his eyes. He was wearing jeans and workman’s boots. His hat was twisted around to the left, like he always wore it. George said that was the good-luck side.
They worked a lot of gags, and most of them — the best of them — were easy to work. Some depended on misdirection, some on greed, and some on fear. They were what George called short cons. And he called the gags that depended on fear “short con heart-stoppers.”
“I like the simple shit,” George said. “Why do I like the simple shit, Blaze?”
“Not many moving parts,” Blaze said.
“Correct-a-roonie! Not many moving parts.”
In the best of the short con heart-stoppers, George dressed up in clothes he called “a little past sharp” and then toured some Boston bars he knew about. These weren’t gay bars and they weren’t straight bars. George called them “gray bars.” And the mark always picked George up. George never had to make a move. Blaze had pondered this once or twice (in his ponderous way), but had never come to any conclusion about it.
George had a nose for the closet queers and AC/DC swingers who went out once or twice a month with their wedding rings tucked away in their wallets. The wholesalers on their way up, the insurance men, the school
