Blaze

alive to lick her wrist when she did.

I understood what I had to do. There was no one to see me do it. Monica and her mother were inside. Mrs. Fevereau’s back was still turned. If others on this little stub of a street had come to their windows (or out on their lawns), the Hummer blocked their view of me sitting beside the dog with my bad right leg awkwardly outstretched. I had a few moments, but only a few, and if I stopped to consider, my chance would be lost.

So I took Gandalf’s upper body in my good arm and without a pause I’m back at the Sutton Avenue site, where The Freemantle Company is getting ready to build a forty-story bank building. I’m in my pickup truck. Pat Green’s on the radio, singing “Wave on Wave.” I suddenly realize the crane’s too loud even though I haven’t heard any backup beeper and when I look to my right the world in that window is gone. The world on that side has been replaced by yellow. Black letters float there: LINK-BELT. They’re swelling. I spin the Ram’s wheel to the left, all the way to the stop, knowing I’m already too late as the scream of crumpling metal starts, drowning out the song on the radio and shrinking the inside of the cab right to left because the crane’s invading my space, stealing my space, and the pickup is tipping. I’m trying for the driver’s side door but it’s no good. I should have done that right away but it got too late real early. The world in front of me disappears as the windshield turns to milk shot through with a million cracks. Then the building site is back, still turning on a hinge as the windshield pops out, flies out bent in the middle like a playing-card, and I’m laying on the horn with the points of both elbows, my right arm doing its last job. I can barely hear the horn over the crane’s engine. LINK-BELT is still moving in, pushing the passenger-side door, closing the passenger- side footwell, eating up the dashboard, splintering it in jagged hunks of plastic. The shit from the glove- compartment floats around like confetti, the radio goes dead, my lunchbucket is tanging against my clipboard, and here comes LINK-BELT. LINK-BELT is right on top of me, I could stick out my tongue and lick that fucking hyphen. I start screaming because that’s when the pressure starts. The pressure is my right arm first pushing against my side, then spreading, then splitting open. Blood douses my lap like a bucket of hot water and I hear something breaking. Probably my ribs. It sounds like chickenbones under a bootheel.

I held Gandalf against me and thought Bring the friend, sit in the friend, sit in the fucking PAL, you dump bitch!

Now I’m in sitting in the chum, sitting in the fucking pal, it’s at home but all the clocks of the world are still ringing inside my cracked head and I can’t remember the name of the doll Kamen gave me, all I can remember are boy names: Randall, Russell, Rudolph, even River-fucking-Phoenix. I tell her to leave me alone when she comes in with the lunch I don’t want, to give me five minutes to get myself under control. I can do this, I say, because it’s the phrase Kamen has given me, it’s the out, it’s the meep-meep-meep that says watch out, Pamela, I’m backing up. But instead of leaving she takes the napkin from the lunch tray to wipe the sweat off my forehead and while she’s doing that I grab her by the throat because in that moment it seems to me it’s her fault I can’t remember my doll’s name, everything is her fault, including LINK-BELT. I grab her with my good left hand, caught a break there, muchacho. For a few seconds I want to kill her, and who knows, maybe I almost do. What I do know is I’d rather remember all the accidents in the world than the look in her eyes as she struggles in my grip like a fish stuck on a gaff. Then I think It was RED! and let her go.

I held Gandalf against my chest as I once held my infant daughters and thought, I can do this. I can do this. I can do this. I felt Gandalf’s blood soak through my pants like hot water and thought, Go on, you sad fuck, get out of Dodge.

I held Gandalf and thought of how it felt to be crushed alive as the cab of your truck ate the air around you and the breath left your body and the blood blew out of your nose and mouth and those snapping sounds as consciousness fled, those were the bones breaking inside your own body: your ribs, your arm, your hip, your leg, your cheek, your fucking skull.

I held Monica’s dog and thought, in a kind of miserable triumph: It was RED!

For a moment I was in a darkness shot with that red, and I held Gandalf’s neck in the crook of my left arm, which was now doing the work of two and very strong. I flexed that arm as hard as I could, flexed the way I did when I was doing my curls with the ten-pound weight. Then I opened my eyes. Gandalf was silent, staring past my face and past the sky beyond.

“Edgar?” It was Hastings, the old guy who lived two houses up from the Goldsteins. There was an expression of dismay on his face. “You can let go now. That dog is dead.”

“Yes,” I said, relaxing my grip on Gandalf. “Would you help me get up?”

“I’m not sure I can,” Hastings said. “I’d be more apt to pull us both down.”

“Then go in and see the Goldsteins,” I said.

“It is her dog,” he said. “I wasn’t sure. I was hoping…” He shook his head.

“It’s hers. And I don’t want her to see him like this.”

“Of course not, but —”

“I’ll help him,” Mrs. Fevereau said. She looked a little better, and she had ditched the cigarette. She reached for my right armpit, then hesitated. “Will that hurt you?”

It would, but less than staying the way I was. As Hastings went up the Goldsteins’ walk, I took hold of the Hummer’s bumper. Together we managed to get me on my feet.

“I don’t supposed you’ve got anything to cover the dog with?” I asked.

“As a matter of fact, there’s a rug remnant in the back.” She started around to the rear — it would be a long trek, given the Hummer’s size — then turned back. “Thank God it died before the little girl got back.”

“Yes,” I said. “Thank God.”

“Still — she’ll never forget it, will she?”

“Well,” I said, “you’re asking the wrong person about that, Mrs. Fevereau. I’m just a retired general contractor.” But when I asked Kamen, he was surprisingly optimistic. He says it’s the bad memories that wear thin first. Then, he says, they tear open and let the light through. I told him he was full of shit and he just laughed.

Maybe si, he says. Maybe no.

A Note on the Type