Chapter 7

HE WAS AS OUT OF PLACE in the Baby Shoppe of Hager’s Mammoth Department Store as a boulder in a living room. He was wearing his jeans and his workboots with the rawhide laces, a flannel shirt, and a black leather belt with the buckle cinched on the left side — the good-luck side. He had remembered his hat this time, the one with the earflaps, and he carried it in one hand. He was standing in the middle of a mostly pink room that was filled with light. He looked left and there were changing-tables. He looked right and there were carriages. He felt like he’d landed on Planet Baby.

There were many women here. Some had big bellies and some had small babies. Many of the babies were crying and all of the women looked at Blaze cautiously, as if he might go berserk at any moment and begin laying waste to Planet Baby, sending torn cushions and ripped teddy bears flying. A saleslady approached. Blaze was thankful. He had been afraid to speak to anyone. He knew when people were afraid, and he knew where he didn’t belong. He was dumb, but not that dumb.

The saleslady asked if he needed help. Blaze said he did. He had been unable to think of everything he needed no matter how hard he tried, and so resorted to the only form of subterfuge with which he was familiar: the con.

“I been out of state,” he said, and bared his teeth at the saleslady in a grin that would have frightened a cougar. The saleslady smiled back bravely. The top of her head almost reached the midpoint of his ribcage. “I just found out my sister-in-law had a kid…a baby…while I was gone, see, and I want to outfit him. The whole works.”

She lit up. “I see. How generous of you. How sweet. What would you like in particular?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know nothing…anything…about babies.”

“How old is your nephew?”

“Huh?”

“Your sister-in-law’s child?”

“Oh! Gotcha! Six months.”

“Isn’t that dear.” She twinkled professionally. “What’s his name?”

Blaze was stumped for a moment. Then he blurted, “George.”

“Lovely name! From the Greek. It means, ‘to work the earth.’”

“Yeah? That’s pretty far out.”

She kept smiling. “Isn’t it. Well, what does she have for him now?”

Blaze was ready for this one. “None of the stuff they got now is too good, that’s the thing. They’re really strapped for cash.”

“I see. So you want to…start from the ground up, as it were.”

“Yeah, you catch.”

“Very generous of you. Well, the place to begin would be at the end of Pooh Avenue, in the Crib Corner. We have some very nice hardwood cribs…”

 

Blaze was stunned at how much it took to keep one tiny scrap of human being up and running. He had considered his take from the beer-store to be quite respectable, but he left Planet Baby with a nearly flat wallet.

He purchased a Dreamland crib, a Seth Harney cradle, a Happy Hippo highchair, an E-Z Fold changing table, a plastic bath, eight nightshirts, eight pairs of Dri-Day rubber pants, eight Hager’s infant undershirts with snaps he couldn’t figure out, three fitted sheets that looked like table napkins, three blankets, a set of crib bumpers that were supposed to keep the kid from whamming his brains out if he got restless, a sweater, a hat, bootees, a pair of red shoes with bells on the tongues, two pairs of pants with matching shirts, four pairs of socks that were not big enough to fit over his fingers, a Playtex Nurser set (the plastic liners looked like the bags George used to buy his dope in), a case of stuff called Similac, a case of Junior Fruits, a case of Junior Dinners, a case of Junior Desserts, and one place-setting with the Smurfs on them.

The baby food tasted shitty. He tried it when he got home.

As the bundles piled up in the corner of the Baby Shoppe, the glances of the shy young matrons became longer and more speculative. It became an event, a landmark in memory — the huge, slouching man in woodsman’s clothes following the tiny saleslady from place to place, listening, then buying what she told him to buy. The saleslady was Nancy Moldow. She was on commission, and as the afternoon progressed, her eyes took on an almost supernatural glow. Finally the total was rung up and when Blaze counted out the money, Nancy Moldow threw in four boxes of Pampers. “You made my day,” she said. “In fact, you may have made my career in infant sales.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Blaze said. He was very glad about the Pampers. He had forgotten the diapers after all.

And as he loaded up two shopping carts (a stockboy had the cartons containing the highchair and the crib), Nancy Moldow cried: “Be sure to bring the young man in to have his picture taken!”

“Yes, ma’am,” Blaze mumbled. For some reason a memory of his first mug shot flashed into his mind, and a cop saying, Now turn sideways and bend your knees again, High-pockets — Christ, who grew you so fuckin big?

“The picture is compliments of Hager’s!”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Lotta goodies, man,” the stockboy said. He was perhaps twenty, and just getting over his adolescent acne. He wore a little red bowtie. “Where’s your car parked?”

“The lot in back,” Blaze said.

He followed the stockboy, who insisted on pushing one of the carts and then complained about how it steered on the packed snow. “They don’t salt it down back here, see, and the wheels get packed up. Then the damn carts skid around. You can give your ankles a nasty bite if you don’t watch out. Real nasty. I’m not complaining, but…”

Then what are you doing, Sporty? Blaze could hear George asking. Eating cat-food out of the dog’s bowl?

“This is it,” Blaze said. “This is mine.”

“Yeah, okay. What do you want to put in the trunk? The highchair, the crib, or both?”

Blaze suddenly remembered he didn’t have a trunk key.

“Let’s put it all in the back.”

The stockboy’s eyes widened. “Ah, Jeez, man, I don’t think it’ll fit. In fact, I’m positive —”

“We can put some in front, too. We can stand that carton with the crib in it in the passenger footwell. I’ll rack the seat back.”

“Why not the trunk? Wouldn’t that be, like, simpler?”

Blaze thought, vaguely, of starting some story about how the trunk was full of stuff, but the trouble with lies was one always led to another. Soon it was like you were traveling on roads you didn’t know. You got lost. I always tell the truth when I can, George liked to say. It’s like driving close to home.

So he held up the dupe. “I lost my car-keys,” he said. “Until I find em, all I got is this.”

“Oh,” the stockboy said. He looked at Blaze as though he were dumb, but that was okay; he had been looked at that way before. “Bummer.”

In the end, they got it all in. It took some artful packing, and it was a tight squeeze, but they made it. When Blaze looked into the rearview mirror, he could even see some of the world outside the back window. The carton holding the broken-down changing table cut off the rest of the view.

“Nice car,” said the stockboy. “An oldie but a goodie.”

“Right,” Blaze said. And because it was something George sometimes said, he added: “Gone from the charts, but not from our hearts.” He wondered if the stockboy was waiting for something. It seemed like he was.

“What’s she got, a 302?”

“342,” Blaze said automatically.

The stockboy nodded. He still stood there.

From inside the back seat of the Ford, where there was no room for him but where he was, anyway — somehow — George said: “If you don’t want him to stand there for the rest of the century, tip the dipshit and get rid of him.”

Tip. Yeah. Right.

Blaze dragged out his wallet, looked at the limited selection of bills, and reluctantly selected a five. He gave it to the stockboy. The stockboy made it disappear. “All right, man, increase the peace.”

“Whatever,” Blaze said. He got into the Ford and started it up. The stockboy was trundling the shopping carts back to the store. Halfway there, he stopped and looked back at Blaze. Blaze didn’t like that look. It was a remembering look.

“I should’ve remembered to tip him quicker. Right, George?”

George didn’t answer.

Back home, he parked the Ford in the shed again and carted all the baby crap into the house. He assembled the crib in the bedroom and set up the changing table next to it. There was no need to look at the directions; he only looked at the pictures on the boxes and his hands did the rest. The cradle went in the kitchen, near the woodstove…but not too near. The rest of the stuff he piled in the bedroom closet, out of sight.

When it was done, a change had come over the bedroom that went deeper than the added furniture. Something else had been added. The atmosphere had changed. It was as if a ghost had been set free to walk. Not the ghost of someone who had left, someone who had gone down dead, but the ghost of someone yet to come.

It made Blaze feel strange.