Blvd. of Blood

Book 1, chapters 6–7

Continued from here. Table of contents here.

(The story so far: Colin Lang recruits hapless Bernie Feldstein to help him in something violent and evil, if as yet undefined, on Blande Boulevard. Meanwhile, Alan Jancewicz just lives with his parents and looks at cars; we won’t have to worry about him for a while.)

6.

John Oberman was some five years older than Bernie or Alan; he’d gone to the same high school, but had never heard about their fight. He’d never met either of them until that night in October.

Not that there were so many fights in Cottinwood High. It probably was not a rough place, really, although to Oberman it seemed rough. It was a rough time in his life. His mother was a high-functioning alcoholic, and his father was just generally low-functioning. John Oberman wasn’t very interested in most of his school subjects. His attempts to grow a mustache were unsuccessful and, he was told, pathetic. His best friend moved to Colorado. This one guy Bowen Mazzoli kept shoving him down. It was like an afterschool special except everyone was uglier.

Oberman was not a tattletale, and when Bowen pushed him down he just stood up again. Bowen sat two rows behind Oberman in Spanish class, and he used to shoot rubber bands at him. Probably he shot rubber bands at everyone.

But one day Bowen lobbed a hunk of gum over Trina Henderson’s head and it landed in Oberman’s hair. Even then, Oberman didn’t narc. He just went to Señora Pierdowski and asked if he could go to the nurse so she could cut the gum out.

Señora Pierdowski somehow decided immediately that Oberman had put the gum into his own hair in a bid to get out of class. She sent him not to the nurse but to the vice principal, who acted as though Pierdowski had been an eyewitness to Oberman gumming himself. In addition to the usual punishments for “defrauding a teacher” and “goldbricking”—in addition to the detention and the call home to a tipsy mother—Mr. Carrithers told Oberman that he would have to see the school psychologist, because putting gum in your own hair was not only “weird” but also “a little fruity.” Oberman lost one free period a week so he could listen to the psychologist, who was actually just the one school nurse with an extra summer of training, singsong platitudes to him. And all that day, through two periods and lunch and two more periods, Oberman had had to sit, at Carrithers’s orders, red-faced with gum in his hair.

A sane man may have given up all belief in a benevolent authority. But Oberman decided that he would, as the poster on the nurse-psychiatrist’s office wall said, Be the change that you want to see in the world. He was not temperamentally suited for being an educator; and he would probably never be a politician; but there are many ways to serve for a single-minded young man. Oberman buckled down at school and came out the other end as a police recruit. He joined the force in the Village of Cottinend, one of forty officers, and by far the youngest.

Bowen Mazzoli still lived in Cottinend. He was a dentist. Sarah Pierdowski lived in Cottinend, too, and Carrithers right over the border in Hobsons Falls. Oberman always fantasized about pulling one of them over for a routine traffic violation. He’d see if they remembered him as he remembered them. He wouldn’t tell them how they’d driven him to the force; he’d just let them off with a warning.

But he never pulled one of them over. Perhaps they were cautious drivers. He’d pulled his own mother over once, which was embarrassing for everyone. This time, this night, though, sometime around three in the morning, he pulled over a weaving car driven by (the license said) Bernard Feldstein.

Cottinened police rode with partners only on alternating weeks, and this week Overman was alone. It was a very dark night on Rano Boulevard. The lawns all sported skeletons and inflatable black cats. This Bernard Feldstein’s face was sunken and haunted.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” said Officer Oberman.

“I’ve seen a spook,” the young man mumbled back automatically.

But when he got out of the car to walk a straight line and take a breathalizer: The young man was completely sober.

“I’m fine,” said Mr. Feldstein. “I was just thinking.”

“About the ghost?”

“Yeah. About the spook.”

He did not appear to be on drugs. Oberman let him off with a warning.

They never met again.

7.

The next day, on the way home from work, Colin Lang bought a white board. He made his notes in marker, and erased them immediately afterwards.

The most important thing was to avoid any record of anything. Colin considered burning the napkin Bernie had given him, but he was afraid he would forget the address. It was on a dead-end side street, so he could hardly drive past and memorize the house, and an address might prove a hard thing to remember over the long, upcoming months. He folded the napkin in half and hid it in the pantry under a can of mixed nuts. It would be less damning than writing it down himself.

Any research he had to do he did from the library computer. There was a lot of research, most of it innocent on the face; anything too compromising he skipped. At the beginning of the plan there was room to “wing it”; only the end must be worked out thoroughly. He cleared the library computer’s bowser history afterwards. To conceal why he had come to the library in the first place, he checked out a book from the fiction section he was not going to read, one old enough that he could look up a plot summary easily in case the librarian asked him, when he returned it, how he had enjoyed Nicholas Nickleby.

He started using the exercise bikes at the gym.

The White Pages phonebook—the original untraceable search—confirmed Bernard Feldstein’s address. Coronet Street, as he said. It wasn’t a total blow-off, then.

On November first, Colin stopped shaving. He told his boss he was raising awareness for men’s health, and he passed around the office fliers for The Movember Foundation, with suggestions on how to make a donation. His face itched terribly.

At a thrift store he picked up a plaid shirt, a cotton scarf, and two mesh baseball caps, one of which read CAT across the front. At a hardware store—one a half-day’s weekend journey north—he bought two pairs of black painter’s coveralls, special ones with two zippers. At a sporting goods store he got a gym bag, one made for a lacrosse stick.

“Kids,” he said, rolling his eyes when the clerk rang the bag up. You know kids and their lacrosse games, he tried to imply. “Am I right?” Always he paid cash.

The clothes and gym bag he put into a drawer in his bedroom, a drawer he first cleaned out very carefully, with Windex and paper towels, so there was nothing touching the clothes but antiseptic Ikea pasteboard. The gym bag, plaid shirt, and CAT cap were on top. He’d need them first.

Colin knew Blande Boulevard because it was one way of getting to I-81. His mother was in a retirement home in Salton, fifty minutes north on I-81, and if Blande was not the most convenient route to the onramp from Colin’s house, it made for a handy alternate route. He started driving up and down Blande after work. There was a four-mile stretch, between Maple Street and the access roads to the I-81 ramps, where Blande Boulevard had no cross streets, no exits, no escape. It had a scenic median, but this was protected by metal railings. Right beyond the breakdown lane, on either side, grew tangled tree cover.

Traffic was the most important consideration, and Colin would never get an accurate idea of traffic patterns from weekend, or nighttime, excursions; so he called out one day from work (“dentist’s appointment”) and drove up and down Blande in rush hour. It would not do to get caught in stopped traffic when the day came, but he noticed that northbound traffic lightened to a trickle after nine, while southbound traffic still came quick and regular.

In daylight, for this was the first time he had been down Blande Boulevard before sundown in quite some time, he spied a brief break in the tree cover on the northbound side. An overgrown dirt road, visible now merely as tall grass and fern between the spaced-out trees, snaked into the forest. Colin only spotted it as he was already zooming past, so he looped all the way around and on his next pass pulled over into the breakdown lane. He got out of the car and trudged through the brush. The road, or trail, curved behind some trees and ended in what must have once, years ago, been a maintenance shed, now a pile of corrugated rust. Hiking a little past, Colin found a steep embankment overlooking the rear parking lot of Choice Pizza on Route 434. Climbing up from the parking lot might be difficult, though hardly impossible, but sliding down the grassy slope would be child’s play.

Route 434—Ridgemont Road in local parlance—did not connect to the highway. Colin had been to Choice Pizza, once, many years ago. It was at least a fifteen-minute drive from Blande Boulevard.

Colin hurried back to his car. Already a good samaritan had pulled over, and was loitering over the car, offering help. Colin waved the do-gooder away.

“I thought I saw a bobcat,” he said, pointing his thumb towards the woods. “Turned out to be just a stray dog.”

Perhaps it wasn’t wise, to hop out of a car and chase a bobcat into the woods, but nature boys do stupid things, don’t they? The samaritan drove away to antagonize someone else. Colin drove home. The completed plan appeared, fully formed, in his mind now, although he would have to write it on the white board again and again to work out the details.

(Continued here)