Blaze Read online

Blaze hit her. He hit her as hard as he had hit Randy, as hard as he had hit Glen Hardy. He didn’t think about it; he was startled into it. The old lady folded to the floor with her nightlight beneath her. There was a muffled tinkle as the bulb shattered. Her body lay twisted half-in and half-out of the swing door.

  There was a low and plaintive miaow. Blaze grunted and looked up. Green eyes peered down at him from the top of the refrigerator.

  Blaze turned back to the window and batted out the rest of the glass shards. When they were gone, he stepped out through the hole he’d made in the lower half of the storm window and listened.

  Nothing.

  Yet.

  Shattered glass glittered on the snow like a felon’s dream.

  Blaze pulled the ladder away from the building, freed the latches, lowered it. It gave out a terrifying ratcheting sound that made him feel like screaming. Once the latches were hooked again, he picked the ladder up and began to run. He came out of the house’s shadow and was halfway across the lawn when he realized he had forgotten the baby. It was still on the serving cart. All sensation left the arm holding the ladder and it plopped into the snow. He turned and looked back.

  There was a light on upstairs.

  For a moment Blaze was two people. One of them was just sprinting for the road — balls to the wall, George would have said — and the other was going back to the house. For a moment he couldn’t make up his mind. Then he went back, moving fast, his boots kicking up little puffs of snow.

  He slit his mitten and cut the flesh of his palm on a shard of glass that was still sticking out of the window-frame. He barely felt it. Then he was inside again, grabbing the basket, swinging it dangerously, almost spilling the baby out.

  Upstairs, a toilet flushed like thunder.

  He lowered the basket to the snow and went after it without a backward glance at the inert form on the floor behind him. He picked the basket up and just booked.

  He stopped long enough to get the ladder under one arm. Then he ran to the hedge. There he stopped to look at the baby. The baby was still sleeping peacefully. Joe IV was unaware he had been uprooted. Blaze looked back at the house. The upstairs light had gone out again.

  He sat the basket down on the snow and tossed the ladder over the hedge. A moment later, lights bloomed on the highway.

  What if it was a cop? Jesus, what if?

  He lay down in the shadow of the hedge, very aware of how clearly his footprints back and forth across the lawn must show. They were the only ones there.

  The headlights swelled, held bright for a moment, then faded without slowing down.

  Blaze got up, picked up his basket — it was his basket now — and walked to the hedge. By parting the top with his arm he was able to lift the basket over and put it down on the far side. He just couldn’t lower it all the way. He had to drop it the last couple of feet. It thudded softly into the snow. The baby found his thumb and began to suck it. Blaze could see his mouth pursing and relaxing in the glow of the nearest streetlight. Pursing and relaxing. Almost like a fish-mouth. The night’s deep cold had not touched it yet. Nothing peeked out of its blankets but its head and that one tiny hand.

  Blaze jumped the hedge, got his ladder, and picked up the basket again. He crossed the road in a hurried crouch. Then he moved across the field on his earlier diagonal path. At the Cyclone fence surrounding the Oakwood parking lot, he put the ladder up again (it wasn’t necessary to extend it this time), and carried his basket to the top.

  He straddled the fence with the basket balanced across his straining legs, aware that if his scissors-lock slipped, his balls were going to get the surprise of their life. He jerked the ladder up in one smooth pull, gasping at the added strain on his legs. It teetered for a moment, overbalanced, then fell back down on the parking lot side. He wondered if anyone was watching him up here, but that was a stupid thing to wonder about. There was nothing he could do about it if someone was. He could feel the cut on his hand now. It throbbed.

  He straightened the ladder, then balanced the basket on the top rung, steadying it with one hand while he swung carefully onto a lower rung. The ladder shifted a little, and he paused. Then it held still.

  He went down the ladder with the basket. At the bottom, he crooked the ladder under one arm again and crossed to where the Ford was parked.

  He put the baby on the passenger seat, opened the back door, and worked the ladder inside. Then he got in behind the wheel.

  But he couldn’t find the key. It wasn’t in either of his pants pockets. Not in his coat pockets, either. He was afraid he had lost it falling down and would have to go back over the fence to look for it when he saw it poking out of the ignition. He had forgotten to take it along. He hoped George hadn’t seen that part. If George hadn’t, Blaze wouldn’t tell him. Never in a million years.

  He started the car and put the basket in the passenger footwell. Then he drove back to the little booth. The guard came out. “Leaving early, sir?”

  “Bad cards,” Blaze said.

  “It happens to the best of us. Good night, sir. Better luck next time.”

  “Thanks,” Blaze said.

  He stopped at the road, looked both ways, then turned toward Apex. He carefully observed all the speed limits, but he never saw a police car.

  Just as he was pulling into his own driveway, baby Joe woke up and started to cry.

  Chapter 12

  ONCE BACK AT HETTON HOUSE, Blaze caused no trouble. He kept his head down and his mouth shut. The boys who had been big ‘uns when he and John had been little ‘uns either made out, went out to work, went away to vocational schools, or joined the Army. Blaze grew another three inches. Hair sprouted on his chest and grew lushly on his crotch. This made him the envy of the other boys. He went to Freeport High School. It was all right, because they didn’t make him do Arithmetic.

  Martin Coslaw’s contract was renewed, and he watched Blaze come and go unsmilingly, watchfully. He did not call Blaze into his office again, although Blaze knew he could. And if The Law told him to bend over and take the paddle, Blaze knew he would do it. The alternative was North Windham Training Center, which was a formatory. He had heard that in the formatory boys were actually whipped — like on ships — and sometimes put in a little metal box called The Tin. Blaze didn’t know if these things were true, and had no wish to find out. What he knew was he was afraid of the formatory.

  But The Law never called him in to be paddled, and Blaze never gave him cause. He went to school five days a week, and his chief contact with the Head became The Law’s voice, bellowing over the intercoms first thing in the morning and before lights-out at night. At Hetton House the day always began with what Martin Coslaw called a homily (homily grits, John sometimes said when he was feeling funny) and ended with a Bible verse.

  Life moved along. He could have become the King of the Boys if he had wished, but he did not wish. He wasn’t a leader. He was the farthest thing from a leader. He tried to be nice to people, though. He tried to be nice to them even when he was warning them he would crack their skulls open if they didn’t lay off his friend Johnny. Pretty soon after Blaze came back, they did lay off him.

  Then, on a summer night when Blaze was fourteen (and looking six years older in the right light), something happened.

  The boys were hauled to town on an ancient yellow bus every Friday, assuming that as a group they didn’t have too many DDs — discipline demerits. Some would just wander aimlessly up and down Main Street, or sit in the town square, or go up an alley to smoke cigarettes. There was a pool hall, but it was off-limits to them. There was also a second-run movie theater, the Nordica, and those boys who had enough money to buy a ticket could go in and see how Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, or Clint Eastwood looked when those gentlemen were younger. Some of the boys earned their money delivering papers. Some mowed lawns in the summer and shoveled snow in the winter. Some had jobs at HH itself.

  Blaze had become one of those. He was the size of a man �
� a big one — and the chief custodian hired him to do chores and odd jobs. Martin Coslaw might have objected, but Frank Therriault didn’t answer to that priss. He liked Blaze’s broad shoulders. A quiet man himself, Therriault also liked Blaze’s way of saying yes and no and not much more. The boy didn’t mind heavy work, either. He’d lug packs of Bird shingles up a ladder or hundred-pound sacks of cement all afternoon. He’d move classroom furniture and filing cabinets up and down stairs, not saying boo to a goose. And there was no quit in him. Best thing? He seemed perfectly happy with a dollar-sixty an hour, which allowed Therriault to pocket an extra sixty bucks a week. Eventually he bought his wife a swanky cashmere sweater. It had a boat neck. She was delighted.

  Blaze was delighted, too. He was making a cool thirty bucks a week, which was more than enough to pay for the movies, plus all the popcorn, candy, and soda he could put away. He bought John’s ticket, too, cheerfully, as a matter of course. He would have been happy to throw in all the usual snacks, as well, but for John the movie was usually enough. He watched greedily, his mouth agape.

  Back at Hetton, John was beginning to write stories. They were stumbling things, cribbed from the movies he watched with Blaze, but they began to earn him a certain popularity with his peers. The other boys didn’t like you to be smart, but they admired a certain kind of cleverness. And they liked stories. They were hungry for stories.

  On one of their trips they saw a vampire movie called Second Coming. John Cheltzman’s version of this classic ended with Count Igor Yorga ripping the head from a half-clad young lovely with “quakeing breasts the size of watermelons” and jumping into the River Yorba with the head under his arm. The strangely patriotic name of this underground classic was The Eyes of Yorga Are Upon You.

  But this night John didn’t want to go, even though another horror movie was playing. He had the runs. He’d been five times that morning and afternoon despite half a bottle of Pepto from the infirmary (a glorified closet on the second floor). He thought he wasn’t done, either.

  “Come on,” Blaze urged. “The Nordica’s got a terrific crapper downstairs. I took a shit there once myself. We’ll stick real close to it.”

  Thus persuaded, despite the dire rumblings in his vitals, John went with Blaze and got on the bus. They sat up front, behind the driver. They were almost the big ‘uns now, after all.

  John was okay during the previews, but just as the Warner Bros logo was coming on, he stood up, slid past Blaze, and started up the aisle in a crabwise walk. Blaze was sympathetic, but that was life. He turned his attention back to the screen where a dust storm was blowing around in what looked like the Desert of Maine, only with pyramids. Soon he was deeply involved in the story, frowning with concentration.

  When John sat back down beside him, he was hardly aware of him until John started yanking his sleeve and whispering, “Blaze! Blaze! F’God sakes, Blaze!”

  Blaze came out of the movie like a sound sleeper waking from a nap. “Whats’sa matter? You sick? You shit yourself?”

  “No—no. Look at this!”

  Blaze peered at what John was holding just below seat-level. It was a wallet.

  “Hey! Where’d you—”

  “Shh!” Somebody in front of them hissed.

  “- get that?” Blaze finished in a whisper.

  “In the men’s!” John whispered back. He was trembling with excitement. “It musta fallen out of some guy’s pants when he sat down to take a dump! There’s money in it! Lots of money!”

  Blaze took the wallet, holding it well out of sight. He opened the bill compartment. He felt his stomach drop. Then it seemed to bounce, and cram itself halfway up his throat. The bill compartment was full of dough. One, two, three fifty-dollar bills. Four twenties. Couple of fives. Some ones.

  “I can’t count it all up,” he whispered. “How much?”

  John’s voice rose in slightly awed triumph, but it went unnoticed. The monster was after a girl in brown shorts and the audience was happily screaming. “Two hundred and forty-eight bucks!”

  “Jesus,” Blaze said. “You still got that rip in the linin of your coat?”

  “Sure.”

  “Put it in there. They may frisk us goin out.”

  But no one did. And John’s runs were cured. Finding that much money seemed to have scared the shit out of him.

  John bought a Portland Press Herald from Stevie Ross, who had a paper route, on Monday morning. He and Blaze went out behind the toolshed and opened it to the classified ads. John said that was the place to look. The lost and founds were on page 38. And there, between a LOST French Poodle and a FOUND pair of women’s gloves, was the following item:

  LOST

  A man’s black leather wallet with the initials RKF stamped beside the photo compartment. If found, call 555-0928 or write Box 595 care of this newspaper. REWARD OFFERED.

  “Reward!” Blaze exclaimed, and punched John on the shoulder.

  “Yeah,” John said. He rubbed where Blaze had punched. “So we call the guy and he gives us ten bucks plus a pat on the head. BFD.” This stood for big fucking deal.

  “Oh.” The word REWARD had been standing in letters of gold two feet high in Blaze’s mind. Now they collapsed to a pile of leaden rubble. “Then what should we do with it?”

  It was the first time he had really looked to Johnny for leadership. The two hundred and forty-eight bucks was a mystifying problem. If you had two bits, you bought a Coke. Two bucks got you into the movies. Going further now, struggling, Blaze supposed you could ride the bus all the way to Portland and go to the show there. But for a sum of this size, his imagination was no good. All he could think of was clothes. Blaze cared nothing for clothes.

  “Let’s run away,” John said. His narrow face was bright with excitement.

  Blaze considered. “You mean, like — forever?”

  “Naw, just till the wad’s gone. We’ll go to Boston — eat in big restaurants instead of Mickey D’s — get a hotel room — see the Red Sox play — and — and—”

  But he could go no further. Joy overcame him. He leaped on Blaze, laughing and pounding his back. His body was lean under his clothes, light and hard. His face burned against Blaze’s cheek like the side of a furnace.

  “Okay,” Blaze said. “That’d be fun.” He thought about it. “Jesus, Johnny, Boston? Boston!”

  “Ain’t it a royal pisser!”

  They began to laugh. Blaze carried John all the way around the toolshed, both of them laughing and pounding each other on the back. John finally made him stop.

  “Someone’ll hear, Blaze. Or see. Put me down.”

  Blaze recaptured the newspaper, which had begun to flutter all over the yard. He folded it up and rammed it down in his hip pocket. “We goin now, Johnny?”

  “Not for awhile. Maybe not for three days. We gotta make a plan and we gotta be careful. If we aren’t, they’ll catch us before we get twenty miles. Bring us back. Do you know what I’m saying?”

  “Yeah, but I’m not very good at makin plans, Johnny.”

  “That’s okay, I got most of it figured out already. The important thing is that they’ll think we just buzzed off, because that’s what kids do when they make out from this shitfarm, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Only we got money, right?”

  “Right!”

  Blaze was overcome with the deliciousness of it again, and pounded Johnny on the back until he almost knocked him over.

  They waited until the following Wednesday night. In the meantime, John called the Greyhound terminal in Portland and found out there was a bus for Boston every morning at seven AM. They left Hetton House at a little past midnight, John figuring it would be safest to walk the fifteen miles into the city rather than attract attention by hitchhiking. Two kids on the road after midnight were runaways. Period.

  They went down the fire escape, hearts thumping at each rusty rattle, and jumped from the lowest platform. They ran across the playground where Blaze had taken his fi
rst beatings as a newcomer many years before. Blaze helped John climb over the chainlink fence on the far side. They crossed the road under a hot August moon and started to walk, diving into the ditch whenever an infrequent car showed headlights on the horizon ahead or behind them.

  They were on Congress Street by six o’clock, Blaze still fresh and excited, John with circles under his eyes. Blaze was carrying the wad in his jeans. The wallet they had thrown into the woods.

  When they reached the bus depot, John collapsed onto a bench and Blaze sat down beside him. John’s cheeks were flushed again, but not with excitement. He seemed to be having trouble with his breath.

  “Go over and get two round-trippers on the seven o’clock,” he told Blaze. “Give her a fifty. I don’t think it’ll be more, but have a twenty ready, just in case. Have it in your hand. Don’t let her see the roll.”

  A policeman walked over, tapping his nightstick. Blaze felt his bowels turn to water. This was where it ended, before it had even gotten started. Their money would be taken away. The cop might turn it in, or he might keep it for himself. As for them, they would be driven back to HH, maybe in handcuffs. Black visions of North Windham Training Center rose before his eyes. And The Tin.

  “Mornin, boys. Here kinda early, ain’tcha?” The clock on the depot wall read 6:22.

  “Sure are,” John said. He nodded toward the ticket-cage. “Is that where a fella goes to get his ticket?”

  “You bet,” the cop said, smiling a little. “Where you headed?”

  “Boston,” John said.

  “Oh? Where’s you boys’ folks?”

  “Oh, him and me aren’t related,” John said. “This fella’s retarded. His name’s Martin Griffin. Deaf n dumb, too.”

  “Is that so?” The cop sat down and studied Blaze. He didn’t look suspicious; he just looked like someone who had never seen a person before who’d scored the trifecta — deaf, dumb, and retarded.

  “His mumma died last week,” John said. “He stays with us. My folks work, but since it’s summer vacation, they said to me, would you take ’im, and I said I would.”