The Blob Read online

  He turned to check them out, then laughed to himself. Shit. Just the “Can Man” and his mangy mutt.

  The scruffy old dude, the Can Man, was a codger who looked as if he’d fallen off the rails in the thirties and decided to stick around. He lived in an old shack up aways, and made his living collecting bottles and cans and whatnot, which he turned in for nickels and dimes. The Can Man was a figure of popular local mythology, wearing all sorts of identities to the minds of youngsters growing up in Morgan City. Brian’s own mother had warned him to stay away from the guy, but when he was only nine, Flagg had actually ventured to the shack one day, where he’d quickly ascertained that the Can Man was just a harmless fellow who didn’t have much to say. Certainly he wasn’t any kind of bogeyman. In fact, Flagg rather identified with him. He was an outcast too. Their bond ended there, however. The Can Man had little to do with anyone or anything except the business of being a hermit and collecting stuff to sell. Brian understood. In fact, he respected that. But his dog—now, there was another matter. That scruffy mutt had already tried to bite him a couple times, so Brian gave the creature a wide berth.

  Now they were his audience. So, fine, he’d show the Can Man and his dog how to jump a gully.

  Flagg took another swallow of beer, then crumpled the half-empty can and threw it toward the Can Man.

  “There ya go, guy!” he snarled. “For your collection.”

  The dog barked and Brian Flagg chuckled. He could still hear the cheering from Morgan City High, and he pretended that they were yelling for him.

  Yeah. Here’s Brian Flagg, Colorado’s answer to Evel Knievel, about to show his stuff to the world. What? A twenty-five-foot jump? With a machine like this one under his butt, why, it would be child’s play!

  “Yo!” he called. “Here goes!”

  He gunned the throttle of the Indian, jammed the bike into gear, and spun out, spraying dirt behind him. The engine roared loud and hard, and the thrill of acceleration added excitement to Flagg’s determination. The wind whipped through his hair, whistling louder and louder as he went faster and faster. He bent his head forward to decrease the drag and yanked the throttle down all the way.

  The field flashed by; the bridge approached. Man, oh, man, this was going to be a rush… He was really going to do it…

  But then the Indian coughed! It sputtered and it coughed again, just yards from the bridge ramp! Flag gunned it again. What the hell was this… ?

  Damn, he wasn’t going to have the speed to make the jump.

  Instantly he jammed on the brakes, but it was too late. The bike skidded, kicking up dust as it veered to one side. Desperately he dug his heel into the ground, fighting his momentum as he reached the lip of the gully.

  For an endless moment he hung, teetering at the very edge of the busted bridge. Brian desperately shifted his weight, lurching back away from the precipice. His muscles strained as the machine tottered beneath him. And then the bike dropped, dragging him along with it.

  It really wasn’t too deep a fall till he hit the side of the gully, maybe five or six feet, and Flagg managed to land without the bike falling on his head. But the jolt was too strong and the pull of gravity too great. Both he and the Indian tumbled and slid ass over elbows, handlebars over axles, to the bottom of the gulch, collecting a goodly amount of dirt and dents along the way.

  For Flagg the world twirled around, away, and then, with an abrupt lurch and a splash, he found himself at the bottom, lying in a thin trickle of water, the motorbike on top, pinning him to the muddy clay. Wetness spread through his trousers, sopping them, and he struggled to get up.

  “You not only let me down,” he said to the Indian, “you rub my nose in it. What kind of faithful companion are you?”

  The cheers from the high school football game seemed to mock him.

  Then closer applause came from above. Flagg looked up. The Can Man was peering over the edge above, a big grin on his stubbly face. He started to wheeze with laughter.

  Flagg shot him a glare, then began to wiggle out from beneath the bike.

  The Can Man chuckled a little more as he polished Flagg’s discarded Coors can and chucked it with a clank into his plastic sack. The mutt whimpered away.

  Flagg sighed and finally pulled himself free.

  The Can Man turned and followed his dog.

  Flagg shook his head morosely. God, the humiliation! He couldn’t have suffered this failure alone, he had to have Jimmy Nick the Can Man witness it. Like that saying, If a tree falls in the forest with no one to hear it, does it really make a sound? If Brian Flagg gets chucked into the mud by his bike, does he feel embarrassed unless someone sees it?

  Well, he felt damned embarrassed. Maybe that meant he had just proved something, though hell if he knew what. It wasn’t as if the old Can Man was going to go and blab his story all over town. The Can Man didn’t say diddly to most people, and he didn’t exactly hang out with the boys on the general-store porch. So why did it bother him?

  Flagg knew why.

  The Can Man didn’t use his mouth much, but sure as hell he used his ears. He knew Brian Flagg, and sure as shit he knew the boy’s troubled history. Trouble, trouble, trouble, was the theme here, with no happy endings, just a couple of stretches in juvie hall, getting “reformed.”

  The old Can Man was probably thinking: Typical. Typical Flagg move. Trouble. He thinks he’s so cool, and he ends up wallowing in a ditch.

  Brian stood and brushed his pants off. He pulled the bike up and pushed it toward a dry area so it wouldn’t get messed up worse. He loved his bike. It was cheap transportation, cheap freedom, and Brian Flagg cherished freedom deeply. Now more than ever, since he’d been deprived of it a few times. He just had to work out the kinks, that was all. He’d get it running right again; he was a pretty good mechanic, used to his machine.

  Still, as he parked the bike, the memory of the Can Man’s derisive clapping and the cheering in the distance lingered in Flagg’s mind. A low heat of anger simmered deep as he knocked some of the mud off the bike.

  People could be real jerks, all right. They peg you for something, and then that’s what they stick you with. He remembered when he was just a kid, he’d hear the whispers behind his back. “Hey… that’s Josh Flagg’s boy, isn’t it? Like father like son. Blood will out. Following in his daddy’s footsteps.”

  God, that had hurt. All his memories of Joshua Flagg had been good ones. At least up until Joshua Flagg had embezzled that money and skipped town, abandoning son and wife. That was a pain that Flagg didn’t think about much, but, of course, it never really went away. And ever since his dad ran off, the whole town had been waiting for him to turn bad too. All Brian had ever wanted was to be somebody, to be different. He’d made a few mistakes, sure. And the way he acted, the way he dressed—yeah, maybe it wasn’t exactly in the regular social mode of Morgan City, USA. But it was him, it was Brian Flagg, and to hell with them all if they couldn’t take a joke. Right?

  Damned right.

  He’d show them all. Soon as he could get some money together, get some prospects someplace else. He’d be outta here, leave this stupid little nowhere town, dumb old Morgan City with its cheesy ski resort and its watery, gassy beer.

  He tried to start the bike, but it didn’t even sputter.

  Yeah, he’d be outta here, all right. But not right now on this bike. He’d have to get the bike fixed and working right before he could even think about such a thing. He’d have to get the tools.

  Reluctantly Brian left his bike and began the walk to town.

  3

  Morgan City, USA.

  It wasn’t a name that carried a lot of magic. Not like Hollywood, or Miami, or New York. An occasional tourist at the Indian Summit resort might ask, “Named after J. Pierpont Morgan, right? The multimillionaire. Maybe he started the place, yeah?”

  The residents, upon hearing such a question, would just smile knowingly and neither nod nor shake their heads. The truth—which they seldo
m shared—was that Morgan was the name of the trapper who had built a shack there over a hundred years ago and had ended up ignominiously scalped and butchered by the local Indians.

  Morgan Lodge, a headquarters for hunters, had become Morgan Resort in the early twenties. The town that grew up to house the people who worked at Morgan Resort became Morgan City.

  But in truth it remained a town, marooned in the middle of the country, clinging desperately to the past with a vague hope for the future, but mostly just happy to eke out a present.

  Morgan City had all the prerequisites of a classic American town. There was a weather-beaten post office; a pseudo-Colonial town hall; an American Legion building that desperately needed a paint job; a pseudo-Gothic high school and a ticky-tacky box of an elementary school. And of course there were clusters of suburban houses strewn around, each built in whatever cheap style predominated in the decade of their creation.

  But the single, enduring symbol of an earlier innocence, of a period of hope and prosperity, as well as the cornerstone of its social life, to say nothing of its gustatory tradition, was the town diner.

  The Tick Tock Diner was built in the late forties in the classic roadside Pullman design, as though poised and ready to be hitched up to some train and make a streamlined exit at any moment. It was the fifties, however, that had left its stamp on the place, when Tandy Rumpyard had bought it and called it Tick Tock after the garish neon clock sign he’d purchased in Denver at a bankrupty sale. Even today Elvis songs still played on the jukebox and echoed against the diner’s metal walls. The whole place smelled of years’ worth of malteds and cheeseburgers. A cemetery of cracked linoleum and dulled metal, the Tick Tock might have been a monument to nostalgic memories of better days if the owner had cared to polish it up a bit, take out the patched orange booth seats, and remortar some of the tile. But why should he? Morgan City was too busy just hanging on to care much about nostalgia. It was too busy using the Tick Tock Diner as a place to eat and meet to think in terms of its history and style.

  And they all did use it, from the oldest resident to the youngest, each agreeing you could say what you wanted about the grease and the pall, but the Tick Tock still managed to brew the best coffee in town.

  Sheriff Herb Geller certainly thought so. It was his kind of coffee, all right, not like the battery-acid stuff at the local McDonald’s. This coffee was thick and rich, dark and deep, with a smooth taste and no afterbite. And they served it with real cream too—well, half-and-half. Close enough.

  The sheriff half turned on the creaky old metal stool that sat as part of a row in front of the counter. He looked out into the afternoon light, and then he looked back at his coffee in its chipped cup, and then he looked over to where Fran Hewitt sat, dreamily watching the convection heat rise from the macadam parking lot. The sheriff was dying to make some conversation with the lady, and coffee, he supposed, was about as good a subject as any.

  “Coffee’s even better than usual,” said Sheriff Geller, easing his girth a little closer to the counter.

  Fran looked over at him, her eyebrows raised. She didn’t seem at all annoyed that he’d interrupted her daydreaming. “Pardon me, Herb?”

  “I said, I’d take this coffee any day over that battery acid they dredge up over at McDonald’s!”

  “Yeah, it ain’t bad, is it?” Fran was a handsome lady in her thirties, with a kind of resignation hanging on her that signified she’d been waiting on tables all her life so far, and expected to be waiting on tables the rest of her years. Still, she kept herself looking good, and had a touch of sass to her that Herb found appealing. “You want some more?” she asked.

  “Sure do!”

  She poured him some more coffee and the steam and rich, nutty flavor rose up in a hot breath from the stained ceramic cup. “You’re an obstinate fella, Herb. Everybody else who comes in here is sucking up the iced tea on a scorcher like today, and you’re sticking to your coffee.”

  He was about to respond to that, when a pair of telephone linemen barged through into the diner and plopped into a booth.

  “Pardon me, Herb. Ma Bell rings,” said Fran, pulling a couple of menus from a rack and going around to serve the men.

  Herb took a stainless steel metal creamer from its spot by the salt and pepper and poured himself some into his coffee. Steam rose, and clouds swirled in the liquid as he looked at that coffee. Hell, he thought. Why am I drinking hot coffee on a day like this?

  Fran came back and he immediately waved at her.

  “You know, I’m one stubborn son of a bitch. You’re right. Gimme an ice tea, Fran.”

  She smiled, filled a glass with ice and poured. “Good. I suppose you’ve guessed that the manager is giving me a healthy commission on iced tea today!”

  Geller laughed as he took the iced tea. He drank some, no sugar, and he said, “Yeah, Fran. Hits the old spot!”

  It was that kind of day.

  He was about to start up another conversation—broaching a subject he’d been working up to for half an hour now—when the linemen started waving for Fran’s attention.

  Herb Geller had been sheriff of Morgan City for over ten years now. Before that he’d been a police officer in Denver, accepting a job as a cop in the small town when he got sick of dealing with big city stuff and just wanted to get away. When Sheriff Patterson had thrown in the towel and retired, Herb Geller had been in the exact right spot to run for sheriff. He liked the job; he really did. It wasn’t just that he liked being a big fish in a little pond. He had honestly grown to care about this town and its people, to sympathize with their problems. They were people just like people everywhere, and the fact that they had to hang on just a little harder than most to keep their town alive appealed to Geller.

  Trouble was, here he sat, a good three years past the big four oh, and his wife, Abby, was long gone. She said she couldn’t stand it here, that she missed Denver. So she moved back and got hitched up to some other cop. And now Herb Geller was getting tired of just dating the pretty snow bunnies that showed up for winter vacations; now he was looking around for someone steady.

  And then, just last year, Fran Hewitt showed up. She was with some guy at the time but now the guy was gone. Herb had started noticing her right away, but at first Fran had seemed about as friendly as a rattlesnake. She wouldn’t go out with nobody. But lately she was getting friendlier, smiling at him and talking; then it was his turn to get nervous and tongue tied. It was one thing to chase ladies who were eager for a holiday romance, ladies you probably would never see again. It was a different thing entirely with a woman you saw every day, who knew all your warts and tics and probably your history as well.

  So now he was really thinking hard about putting it on the line, thinking about finally asking Fran Hewitt out.

  He drained half the cold glass, thinking about what to say.

  As Fran stepped behind the counter and slapped the order onto the ledge of the window between the serving area and the kitchen, Geller groped in his mind for another conversation starter.

  “That’s the biggest order the whole hour I’ve been here,” he said. “Looks like the game’s put you out of business.”

  She looked at him strangely, then realized he was just making conversation. “Don’t worry. When they’re done screaming their heads off, they’ll come in here like a flood. More ice tea?”

  Herb pushed his glass forward. “Please!”

  Fran had long hair that was drawn tightly behind her head now, making her look severe. But those bluish eyes and those soft lips betrayed a kind of vulnerability that appealed immensely to Herb Geller, that made him really want to know about this lady. As she poured him the tea, he noted admiringly the way she kept her uniformed starched and clean. He caught a whiff of fresh-scrubbed skin, a hint of Opium perfume, which just happened to be his very favorite.

  “Good to see this town get up on its hind legs about something,” she said. “Even if it is only a football game.”

  �
��Takes their minds off their troubles. Been a lean year for most folks.”

  Fran shrugged. “Ski season’s almost here. There’ll be tourists. I hear you like the tourists especially, Herb.”

  Before he could comment, she grabbed his plate, which held the remnants of his tuna on whole wheat. “You done with this?”

  “Yeah.”

  Cripes! he thought. So she’d heard about him and the ski ladies. It figured. This wasn’t a big town, and it was only to be expected that the sheriff’s sexual activities would get talked about. Still, her comment did put a bit of a crimp in his confidence. He had been planning on playing himself as a shy and lonely guy—both of which he really and truly was, down deep. But with his reputation, it sure didn’t look like it. The truth was he didn’t really mind much getting rejected by ladies he didn’t especially care about. Experience showed that about one in seven would say yes anyway. But when you did care…

  Ah, the hell with it, he thought. Get on with it, Geller!

  “You know, Fran,” he said, “they got a new band out at the Tin Palace tonight. The Spurs. Country and western, so they say.”

  “Is that right?” Fran turned, but her expression stayed blank.

  “Supposed to be pretty good.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “You like country music?” Herb continued, not knowing what else to say.

  Then she seemed to get it. She leveled her gaze at him, really looking at him for the first time all day. “Herb, are you askin’ me out?”

  Herb stammered for a moment. “Well, er… uhm… Well, yeah! I guess I am!”

  Suddenly it was Fran’s turn to be flustered, and Herb Geller couldn’t tell why. He had a bad feeling, though, as she scribbled out his check, her back turned to him.

  “I don’t know,” she said suddenly. “I’m stuck here pretty late. Gotta make a living, you know.”

  Uh-oh! Here come the excuses. Herb knew a gentle letdown when he heard it, and he didn’t have to hear any more. Feelings sinking a bit, he tried to bow out gracefully.