new comic-books had come in. They had, and Blaze bought three. He fell asleep over the first one after supper, and when he woke it was midnight. He was getting up to go in the bathroom and take a leak — then he’d hit the rack — when George spoke.
“George?”
“Are you gutless, Blaze?”
“No! I ain’t —”
“You been hanging around this place like a dog with its balls caught in a henhouse door.”
“No! I ain’t! I did lots of stuff. I got a good ladder —”
“Yeah, and some comic-books. You been havin a good time sittin around here, listenin to that shitkickin music and reading about superpower faggots, Blazer?”
Blaze muttered something.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
“I guess not, if you don’t have the guts to say it out loud.”
“All right — I said no one ast you to come back.”
“Why you ungrateful lowlife sonofabitch.”
“Listen, George, I —”
“I took care of you, Blaze. I admit it wasn’t charity, you were good when you were used right, but it was me who knew how to do that. Did you forget? We didn’t always have three squares a day, but we always had at least one. I saw that you changed your clothes and kept clean. Who told you to brush your fuckin teeth?”
“You did, George.”
“Which you are now neglecting, by the way, and you’re getting that Dead Mouse Mouth again.”
Blaze smiled. He couldn’t help it. George had a cute way of saying things.
“When you needed a whore, I got you one of those, too.”
“Yeah, and one of em gave me the clap.” For six weeks, peeing fit to kill him.
“Took you to the doctor, didn’t I?”
“You did,” Blaze admitted.
“You owe me this, Blaze.”
“You didn’t want me to do it!”
“Yeah, well I changed my mind. It was my plan, and you owe me.”
Blaze considered this. As always, it took him a long and painful time. Then he burst out: “How can you owe a dead man? If people walked by, they’d hear me talkin to myself and answerin myself back and think I was crazy! I prob’ly
“And you’re alive? Sittin here, listenin to the radio playin those numbfuck cowboy songs? Readin comic-books and beatin your meat?”
Blaze blushed and looked at the floor.
“Forget and rob that same store every third or fourth week till they stake the place out and catch your ass? Sit here lookin at that numbfuck crib and sweetmother cradle in the sweet fuckin meanwhile?”
“I’m gonna chop the cradle up for kinnelin.”
“Look at you,” George said, and what was in his voice sounded beyond sadness. It sounded like grief. “Same pants on every day for two weeks? Piss-stains in your underwear? You need a shave and you need a fuckin haircut in the worst way…sittin here in this shack in the middle of the mumble-fuck woods. This ain’t the way we roll. Don’t you see that?”
“You went away,” Blaze said.
“Because you were actin stupid. But this is stupider. You have to take your chance or you’re gonna fall. You’ll do five years here, six there, then they’ll get you on three-strikes and you’ll sit in The Shank for the rest of your life. Just a two-bit dummy who didn’t know enough to brush his teeth or change his own socks. Just another crumb on the floor.”
“Then tell me what to do, George.”
“Go ahead with the plot, that’s what you do.”
“But if I get caught, it’s the long bomb. Life.” It had been preying on his mind more than he wanted to admit.
“That’s gonna happen to you anyway, the way you’re goin — ain’t you been listenin to me? And hey! You’ll be doin him a favor. Even if he don’t remember it — which he won’t — he’ll have something he can blow off his bazoo about to his country club friends for the rest of his life. And the people you’ll be rippin off, they stole the money themselves, only like Woody Guthrie says, with a fountain pen instead of a gun.”
“What if I get caught?”
“You won’t. If you run into trouble with the money — if it’s marked — you go on down to Boston and find Billy O’Shea. But the main thing is you just got to wake up.”
