“It will be a miracle if he gets his size without being badly hurt or killed,” Sarah Jolison remarked one day in the teachers’ room.
The miracle didn’t happen. One hungover Saturday morning when not much was doing, Clayton Senior staggered out of the bedroom in the second-floor apartment he and his son shared while Clay was sitting crosslegged on the living room floor, watching cartoons and eating Apple Jacks. “How many times have I told you not to eat that shit in here?” Senior inquired of Junior, then picked him up and threw him downstairs. Clay landed on his head.
His father went down, got him, toted him upstairs, and threw him down again. The first time, Clay remained conscious. The second time, the lights went out. His father went down, got him, toted him upstairs, and looked him over. “Fakin sonofabitch,” he said, and threw him down again.
“There,” he told the limp huddle at the foot of the stairs that was his now comatose son. “Maybe you’ll think twice before you tote that fucking shit into the living room again.”
Unfortunately, Clay never thought twice about much of anything again. He lay unconscious in Portland General Hospital for three weeks. The doctor in charge of his case voiced the opinion that he would remain so until he died, a human carrot. But the boy woke up. He was, unfortunately, soft in the head. His days of carrying books under his arm were over.
The authorities did not believe Clay’s father when he told them the boy had done all that damage falling downstairs once. Nor did they believe him when he said the four half-healed cigarette burns on the boy’s chest were the result of “some kind of peelin disease.”
The boy never saw the second floor apartment again. He was made a ward of the state, and went directly from the hospital to a county home, where his parentless life began by having his crutches kicked out from under him on the playground by two boys who ran away chortling like trolls. Clay picked himself up and re-set his crutches. He did not cry.
His father did some protesting in the Freeport police station, and more in several Freeport bars. He threatened to go to law in order to regain his son, but never did. He claimed to love Clay, and perhaps he did, a little, but if so, his love was the kind that bites and burns. The boy was better off out of his reach.
But not much better. Hetton House in South Freeport was little more than a poor farm for kids, and Clay’s childhood there was wretched, although a little better when his body was mended. Then, at least, he could make the worst of the bullies stand away from him in the play yard; him and the few younger children who came to look to him for protection. The bullies called him Lunk and Troll and Kong, but he minded none of those names, and he left them alone if they left him alone. Mostly they did, after he licked the worst of them. He wasn’t mean, but when provoked he could be dangerous.
The kids who weren’t afraid of him called him Blaze, and that was how he came to think of himself.
Once he had a letter from his father. Dear Son, it said. Well, how are You doing. I am fine. Working these days up in Lincoln rolling Lumber. It would be good if the b*****ds didn’t steal all the Overtime, HA! I am going to get a little place and will send for You once I do. Well, write me a little Letter and tell Your old Pa how it goes. Can you send a Foto. It was signed With Love, Clayton Blaisdell.
Blaze had no photo to send his father, but would have written — the music teacher who came on Tuesdays would have helped him, he was quite sure — but there was no return address on the envelope, which was dirty and simply addressed to Clayton Blaisdell JR “The Orfan-Home” in FREEPORT MAINE.
Blaze never heard from him again.
He was placed with several different families during his Hetton House tenure, every time in the fall. They kept him long enough to help pick the crops and help keep their roofs and dooryards shoveled. Then, when spring thaw came, they decided he wasn’t quite right and sent him back. Sometimes it wasn’t too bad. And sometimes — like with the Bowies and their horrible dog-farm — it was real bad.
When he and HH were quits, Blaze knocked around New England on his own. Sometimes he was happy, but not the way he wanted to be happy, not the way he saw people being happy. When he finally settled in Boston (more or less; he never put down roots), it was because in the country he was lonely. Sometimes when he was in the country he would sleep in a barn and wake in the night and go out and look at the stars and there were so many, and he knew they were there before him, and they would be there after him. That was sort of awful and sort of wonderful. Sometimes when he was hitchhiking and it was going on for November, the wind would blow around him and flap his pants and he would grieve for something that was lost, like that letter which had come with no address. Sometimes he would look at the sky in the spring and see a bird, and it might make him happy, but just as often it felt like something inside him was getting small and ready to break.
It’s bad to feel like that, he would think, and if I do, I shouldn’t be watching no birds. But sometimes he would look up at the sky anyway.
Boston was all right, but sometimes he still got scared. There were a million people in the city, maybe more, and not one gave a shake for Clay Blaisdell. If they looked at him, it was only because he was big and had a dent in his forehead. Sometimes he would have a little fun, and sometimes he would just get frightened. He was trying to have a little fun in Boston when he met George Rackley. After he met George, it was better.
Chapter 5
THE LITTLE MOM-N-POP STORE was Tim & Janet’s Quik-Pik. Most of the rear shelves were overflowing with jug wine and beer stacked in cardboard cases. A giant cooler ran the length of the back wall. Two of the four aisles were dedicated to munchies. Beside the cash register stood a bottle of pickled eggs as large as a small child. Tim & Janet’s also stocked such necessaries as cigarettes, sanitary napkins, hot dogs, and stroke-books.
The night man was a pimple-pocked dude who attended the Portland branch of the University of Maine during his days. His name was Harry Nason, and he was majoring in animal husbandry. When the big man with the dented forehead walked in at ten minutes of one, Nason was reading a book from the paperback rack. The book was called Big and Hard. The late-night rush had dried up to a trickle. Nason decided that after the big man had bought his jug or his six, he’d close up and go home. Maybe take the book along and beat off. He was thinking that the part about the traveling preacher and the two horny widows might be good for that when the big man put a pistol under his nose and said, “Everything in the register.”
Nason dropped the book. Thoughts of beating off left his mind. He gaped at the gun. He opened his mouth to say something intelligent. The kind of thing a guy being stuck up on TV might say, if the guy being stuck up happened to be the hero of the show. What came out was “Aaaa.”
“Everything in the register,” the big man repeated. The dent in his forehead was frightening. It looked deep enough for a frog-pond.
Harry Nason recalled — in a frozen sort of way — what his boss had told him he should do in the event of a hold-up: give the robber everything with no argument. He was fully insured. Nason’s body suddenly felt very tender and vulnerable, full of bags and waters. His bladder loosened. And all at once he seemed to have an absolute assful of shit.
“Did you hear me, man?”
“Aaaa,” Harry Nason agreed, and punched NO SALE on the cash register.
“Put the money in a bag.”
“Okay. Yes. Sure.” He fumbled among the sacks under the counter and dumped most of them on the floor. At last he managed to hold onto one. He flipped up the bill-holders in the cash drawer and began to drop money into the bag.
The door opened and a guy and a girl, probably college kids, walked in. They saw the gun and stopped. “What’s this?” the guy asked. He was smoking a cigarillo and wearing a button that said POT ROCKS.
“It’s a hold-up,” Nason said. “Please don’t, uh, antagonize this gentleman.”
“Too much,” the guy with the POT ROCKS button said. He started to grin. He pointed
at Nason. His fingernail was dirty. “Dude’s ripping you off, man.”
The hold-up man turned to POT ROCKS. “Wallet,” he said.
“Dude,” POT ROCKS said, not losing the grin, “I’m on your side. The prices this place charges — and everybody knows Tim and Janet Quarles are, like, the biggest right-wingers since Adolf—”
“Give me your wallet or I’ll blow your head off.”
POT ROCKS suddenly realized he might be in some trouble here; for sure he wasn’t in a movie. The grin went bye-bye and he stopped talking. Several zits stood out brightly on his cheeks, which were suddenly pale. He dug a black Lord Buxton out of his jeans pocket.
“There’s never a cop when you need one,” his girlfriend said coldly. She was wearing a long brown coat and black leather boots. Her hair matched the boots, at least this week.
“Drop the wallet in the bag,” the hold-up guy said. He held the bag out. Harry Nason always thought he could have become a hero at that point by braining the hold-up man with the giant bottle of pickled eggs. Only the hold-up man looked as if he might have a hard head. Very hard.
The wallet plopped into the bag.
The hold-up man skirted them and headed for the door. He moved well for a man his size.
“You pig,” the girl said.
The hold-up man stopped dead. For a moment the girl was sure (so she later told police) that he was going to turn around, open fire, and lay them all out. Later, with the police, they would differ on the hold-up man’s hair color (brown, reddish, or blond), his complexion (fair, ruddy, or pale), and his clothes (pea jacket, windbreaker, woolen lumberjack shirt), but they all agreed on his size — big — and his final words before leaving. These were apparently addressed to the blank, dark doorway, almost in a moan:
“Jeezus, George, I forgot the stocking!”
Then he was gone. There was a bare glimpse of him running in the cold white light of the big Schlitz sign that hung over the store’s entrance, and then an engine roared across the street. A moment later he wheeled out. The car was a sedan, but none of them could ID the make or model. It was beginning to snow.
“So much for beer,” POT ROCKS said.
“Go on back to the cooler and have one on the house,” said Harry Nason.
“Yeah? You sure?”
“Sure I’m sure. Your girl, too. What the fuck, we’re insured.” He began to laugh.
When the police asked him, he said he had never seen the stickup guy before. It was only later that he had cause to wonder if he had not in fact seen the stickup guy the previous fall, in the company of a skinny little rat-faced man who was buying wine and mouthing off.
Chapter 6
WHEN BLAZE GOT UP the next morning, snow had piled in drifts all the way to the eaves of the shack and the fire was out. His bladder contracted the second his feet hit the floor. He hurried to the bathroom on the balls of his feet, wincing and blowing out little puffs of white vapor. His urine arched in a high-pressure flow for perhaps thirty seconds, then slowly faded. He sighed, shook off, broke wind.
Much bigger wind was screaming and whooping around the house. The pines outside the kitchen window were dipping and swaying. To Blaze they looked like thin women at a funeral.
He dressed, opened the back door, and fought his way around to the woodpile under the south eaves. The driveway was completely gone. Visibility was down to five feet, maybe less. It exhilarated him. The grainy slap of the snow on his face exhilarated him.
The wood was solid chunks of oak. He gathered a huge armful, pausing only to stomp his feet before going back in. He made up the fire with his coat on. Then he filled the coffee pot. He carried two cups to the table.
He paused, frowning. He had forgotten something.
The money! He had never counted the money.
He started into the other room. George’s voice froze him. George was in the bathroom.
“Asshole.”
“George, I—”
“George, I’m an asshole. Can you say that?”
“I—”
“No. Say George, I’m the asshole who forgot to wear the stocking.”
“I got the m—”
“Say it.”
“George, I’m the asshole. I forgot.”
“Forgot what?”
“Forgot to wear the stocking.”
“Now say all of it.”
“George, I’m the asshole who forgot to wear the stocking.”
“Now say this. Say George, I’m the asshole who wants to get caught.”
“No! That ain’t true! That’s a lie, George!”
“It’s the truth is what it is. You want to get caught and go to Shawshank and work in the laundry. That’s the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. That’s the truth on a stick. You’re bull-simple. That’s the truth.”
“No, George. It ain’t. I promise.”
“I’m going away.”
“No!” Panic seemed to stop his breath. It was like the sleeve of the flannel shirt his old man had crammed down his throat once to stop him bawling. “Don’t, I forgot, I’m a dummy, without you I’ll never remember what to buy—”
“You have a nice time, Blazer,” George said, and although his voice was still coming from the bathroom, now it seemed to be fading. “You have a good time getting caught. Have a good time doing time and ironing those sheets.”
“I’ll do everything you tell me. I won’t fuck up again.”
There was a long pause. Blaze thought George was gone. “Maybe I’ll be back. But I don’t think so.”
“George! George?”
The coffee was boiling. He poured one cup and went into the bedroom. The brown sack with the money in it was under George’s side of the mattress. He shook it out on the sheet, which he kept forgetting to change. It had been on for the whole three months George had been dead.
There was two hundred and sixty dollars from the little mom-n-pop. Another eighty from the college-boy’s wallet. More than enough to buy
What? What was he supposed to buy?
Diapers. That was the ticket. If you were going to snatch a baby, you had to have diapers. Other stuff, too. But he couldn’t remember the other stuff.
“What was it besides diapers, George?” He said it with an air of off-hand casualness, hoping to surprise George into speech. But George didn’t take the bait.
Maybe I’ll be back. But I don’t think so.
He put the money back in the brown bag and exchanged the college kid’s wallet for his own, which was battered and scuffed and full of nicks. His own wallet held two greasy dollar bills, a faded Kodak of his old man and old lady with their arms around each other, and a photo-booth shot of him and his only real buddy from Hetton House, John Cheltzman. There was also his lucky Kennedy half-dollar, an old bill for a muffler (that had been when he and George had been running that big bad Pontiac Bonneville), and a folded-over Polaroid.
George was looking out of the Polaroid and smiling. Squinting a little, because the sun had been in his eyes. He was wearing jeans and workman’s boots. His hat was twisted around to the left, like he always wore it. George said that was the good-luck side.
They worked a lot of gags, and most of them — the best of them — were easy to work. Some depended on misdirection, some on greed, and some on fear. They were what George called short cons. And he called the gags that depended on fear “short con heart-stoppers.”
“I like the simple shit,” George said. “Why do I like the simple shit, Blaze?”
“Not many moving parts,” Blaze said.
“Correct-a-roonie! Not many moving parts.”
In the best of the short con heart-stoppers, George dressed up in clothes he called “a little past sharp” and then toured some Boston bars he knew about. These weren’t gay bars and they weren’t straight bars. George called them “gray bars.” And the mark always picked George up. George never had to make a move. Blaze had pondered this once or twice (in his ponderous way), but had never come
to any conclusion about it.
George had a nose for the closet queers and AC/DC swingers who went out once or twice a month with their wedding rings tucked away in their wallets. The wholesalers on their way up, the insurance men, the school administrators, the bright young bank executives. George said they had a smell. And he was kind to them. He helped them along when they were shy and couldn’t find the right words. Then he’d say he was staying at a good hotel. Not a great hotel, but a good one. A safe one.
It was the Imperial, not far from Chinatown. George and Blaze had a deal going with the second shift desk-man and the bell-captain. The room they used might change, but it was always at the end of the hall, and never too close to another occupied room.
Blaze sat in the lobby from three to eleven, wearing clothes he wouldn’t be caught dead in on the street. His hair always gleamed with oil. He read comic-books while waiting for George. He was never aware of passing time.
The true indicator of George’s genius was that when he and the mark came in, the mark hardly ever looked nervous. Eager, but not nervous. Blaze gave them fifteen minutes, then went up.
“Never think about it as coming in the room,” George said. “Think of it as going onstage. The only one who don’t know it’s showtime is the mark.”
Blaze always used his key and walked onstage saying his first line: “Hank, darling, I’m so glad to be back.” Then he got mad, which he did passably well, although probably not up to Hollywood standards: “Jesus, no! I’ll kill him! Kill him!”
At that he would heave his three hundred-pound bulk at the bed, where the mark quivered in horror, by that time usually wearing only his socks. George would throw himself between the mark and his raging “boyfriend” at the last moment. A flimsy barrier at best, the mark would think. If he was capable of thinking. And the soap opera was on.
George: “Dana, listen to me — this isn’t what it seems.”
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