Blaze

by Richard Bachman

  And with that the matter was “tabled for further discussion.” Which, in northern New England, is the polite term for purgatory.

  John Cheltzman and the other boys from Hetton House were enthusiastic about the trip from the first, but Blaze had his doubts. When it came to “working out,” he remembered the Bowies too well.

  Toe-Jam couldn’t stop talking about finding a girl “to jazz around with.” Blaze didn’t believe he himself had to spend much time worrying about that. He still thought about Marjorie Thurlow, but what was the sense in thinking about the rest of them? Girls liked tough guys, fellows who could kid them along like the guys in the movies did.

  Besides, girls scared him. Going into a toilet stall at HH with Toe-Jam’s treasured copy of Girl Digest and beating off did him fine. Did him right when he was wrong. So far as he’d been able to tell from listening to the other boys, the feeling you got from beating off and the feeling you got from sticking it in stacked up about the same, and there was this to be said for beating off: you could do it four or five times a day.

  At fifteen, Blaze was finally reaching full growth. He was six and a half feet tall, and the string John stretched from shoulder to shoulder one day measured out twenty-eight inches. His hair was brown, coarse, thick, and oily. His hands were blocks measuring a foot from thumb to pinky when spread. His eyes were bottle green, brilliant and arresting — not a dummy’s eyes at all. He made the other boys look like pygmies, yet they teased him with easy, impudent openness. They had accepted John Cheltzman — now commonly known as JC or Jeepers Cripe — as Blaze’s personal totem, and because of their Boston adventure, the two boys had become folk heroes in the closed society of Hetton House. Blaze had achieved an even more special place. Anyone who has ever seen toddlers flocking around a St. Bernard will know what it was.

  When they arrived at the Bluenote place, Dougie Bluenote was waiting to take them to their cabins. He told them they would be sharing Riffle Cabins that summer with half a dozen boys from South Portland Correctional. Mouths tightened at this news. South Portland boys were known as ball-busters of the first water.

  Blaze was in Cabin 3 with John and Toe-Jam. John had grown thinner since the trip to Beantown. His rheumatic fever had been diagnosed by the Hetton House doctor (a Camel-smoking old quack named Donald Hough) as nothing but a bad case of the flu. This diagnosis would kill John, but not for another year.

  “Here’s your cabin,” Doug Bluenote said. He had his father’s farmer’s face, but not his father’s strange pale eyes. “There’s a lot of boys used it before you. If you like it, take care of it so a lot of boys can use it after you. There’s a woodstove if it gets chilly at night, but it probably won’t. There’s four beds, so you get to choose. If we pick up another fella, he gets the one left over. There’s a hot plate for snacks and coffee. Unplug it last thing you do before you leave in the mornings. Unplug it last thing before turning in at night. There’s ashtrays. Your butts go there. Not on the floor. Not in the dooryard. There isn’t to be any drinking or playing poker. If me or my dad catches you drinking or playing poker, you’re done. No second chances. Breakfast at six, in the big house. You’ll get lunch at noon, and you’ll eat it in the yonder.” He waved his arm in the general direction of the blueberry fields. “Supper at six, in the big house. You start in raking tomorrow at seven. Good day to you, gentlemen.”

  When he was gone, they poked around. It wasn’t a bad place. The stove was an old Invincible with a Dutch oven. The beds were all on the floor — for the first time in years they would not be stacked up like coins in a slot. There was a fairly large common room in addition to the kitchen and the two bedrooms. Here was a bookcase made out of a Pomona orange crate. It contained the Bible, a sex manual for young people, Ten Nights in a Barroom, and Gone with the Wind. There was a faded hooked rug on the floor. The floor itself was of loose boards, very different from the tile and varnished wood of HH. These boards rumbled underfoot when you walked on them.

  While the others were making their beds, Blaze went out on the porch to look for the river. The river was there. It ran through a gentle depression at this point in its course, but not too far upstream he could hear the lulling thunder of a rapids. Gnarled trees, oak and willow, leaned over the water as if to see their reflections. Dragonflies and sewing needles and skeeters flew just above the surface, sometimes stitching it. Far away, in the distance, came the rough buzz of a cicada.

  Blaze felt something in him loosen.

  He sat down on the top step of the porch. After awhile John came out and sat beside him.

  “Where’s Toe?” Blaze asked.

  “Readin that sexbook. He’s lookin for pictures.”

  “He find any?”

  “Not yet.”

  They sat quiet for awhile. “Blaze?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s not so bad, is it?”

  “No.”

  But he still remembered the Bowies.

  They walked down to the big house at five-thirty. The path followed the river’s course and soon brought them to the Bend Cabins, where half a dozen girls were clustered.

  The boys from HH and the ball-busters from South Portland kept walking, as if they were around girls — girls with breasts — every damn day. The girls joined them, some putting on lipstick as they chatted with each other, like being around boys — boys with beard-shadows — was as common as swatting flies. One or two were wearing nylons; the rest were in bobby-sox. The bobby-sox were all folded at exactly the same position on the shin. Make-up had been laid over blemishes — in some cases to the thickness of cupcake frosting. One girl, much envied by the others, was sporting green eye-shadow. All of them had perfected the sort of hip-rolling walk John Cheltzman later called the Streetwalker Strut.

  One of the South Portland ball-busters hawked and spat. Then he picked a piece of alfalfa grass to stick between his teeth. The other boys regarded this closely and tried to think of something — anything — they themselves could do in order to demonstrate their nonchalance around the fairer sex. Most settled for hawking and spitting. Some originalists stuck their hands in their back pockets. Some did both.

  The South Portland boys probably had the advantage of the Hetton boys; when it came to girls, the supply was greater in the city. The mothers of the South Portland boys might have been juicers, hypes, and ten-dollar lovers, their sisters two-buck handjob honeys, but the ball-busters in most cases at least grasped the essential idea of girls.

  The HH boys lived in an almost exclusively male society. Their sex education consisted of guest lectures from local clergy. Most of these country preachers informed the boys that masturbation made you foolish and the risks of intercourse included a penis that turned black from disease and began to stink. They also had Toe-Jam’s occasional dirty mags (Girl Digest the latest and best). Their ideas on how to converse with girls came from the movies. About actual intercourse they had no idea, because — as Toe once sadly observed — they only showed fucking in French movies. The only French movie they had ever seen was The French Connection.

  And so the walk from Bend Cabins to the big house was accomplished mostly in tense (but not antagonistic) silence. Had they not been quite so involved in trying to cope with their new situation, they might have spared a glance for Dougie Bluenote, who was doing his mighty best to keep a straight face.

  Harry Bluenote was leaning against the dining room door when they came in. Boys and girls alike gawked at the pictures on the walls (Currier & Ives, N.C. Wyeth), the old and mellow furniture, the long dining table with SET A SPELL carved on one bench and COME HUNGRY, LEAVE FULL carved on the other. Most of all they looked at the large oil portrait on the east wall. This was Marian Bluenote, Harry’s late wife.

  They might have considered themselves tough — in some ways they were — but they were still only children sporting their first sex characteristics. They instinctively formed themselves into the lines that had been their entire lives. Bluenote let them. Then he sh
ook hands with each one as he or she filed into the room. He nodded in courtly fashion to the girls, in no way betraying that they were got up like kewpie dolls.

  Blaze was last. He towered over Bluenote by half a foot, but he was shuffling his feet and looking at the floor and wishing he were back at HH. This was too hard. This was awful. His tongue was plastered to the roof of his mouth. He thrust his hand out blindly.

  Bluenote shook it. “Christ, ain’t you a big one. Not built for raking berries, though.”

  Blaze looked at him dumbly.

  “You want to drive truck?”

  Blaze gulped. There seemed to be something caught in his throat that wouldn’t go down. “I don’t know how to drive, sir.”

  “I’ll teach you,” Bluenote said. “It ain’t hard. Go on in and get y’self y’dinner.”

  Blaze went in. The table was mahogany. It glittered like a pool. Places were set up and down both sides. Overhead glittered a chandelier, just like in a movie. Blaze sat down, feeling hot and cold. There was a girl on his left and that made his confusion worse. Every time he glanced that way, his eye fell on the jut of her breasts. He tried to do something about this and couldn’t. They were just — there. Taking up space in the world.

  Bluenote and the camp mom served out. There was beef stew and a whole turkey. There was a huge wooden bowl heaped with salad and three kinds of dressing. There was a plate of wax beans, one of peas, one of sliced carrots. There was a ceramic pot filled with mashed potatoes.

  When all the food was on the table and everyone was seated before their shining plates, silence dropped like a rock. The boys and girls stared at this feast as if at a hallucination. Somewhere a belly rumbled. It sounded like a truck crossing a plank bridge.

  “All right,” Bluenote said. He was sitting at the head of the table with the camp mom on his left. His son sat at the foot. “Let’s have some grace.”

  They bowed their heads and awaited the sermon.

  “Lord,” Bluenote said, “bless these boys and girls. And bless this food to their use. Amen.”

  They blinked at each other surreptitiously, trying to decide if it was a joke. Or a trick. Amen meant you could eat, but if that was the case now, they had just heard the shortest goddam grace in the history of the world.

  “Pass me that stew,” Bluenote said.

  That summer’s raking crew fell to with a will.

  Bluenote and his son showed up at the big house the next morning after breakfast driving two Ford two-tons. The boys and girls climbed into the backs and were driven to the first blueberry field. The girls were dressed in slacks this morning. Their faces were puffy with sleep and mostly free of make-up. They looked younger, softer.

  Conversations began. They were awkward at first, but became more natural. When the trucks hit field-bumps, everyone laughed. There were no formal introductions. Sally Ann Robichaux had Winstons and shared out the pack; even Blaze, sitting on the end, got one. One of the ball-busters from South Portland began discussing girly books with Toe-Jam. It turned out that this fellow, Brian Wick, just happened to have come to the Bluenote farm equipped with a pocket-sized digest called Fizzy. Toe allowed that he had heard good things about Fizzy, and the two of them worked out a trade. The girls managed to ignore this and look indulgent at the same time.

  They arrived. The low blueberry bushes were in full fruit. Harry and Douglas Bluenote dropped the truck tailgates and everyone jumped down. The field had been divided into strips with white cloth pennants fluttering from low stakes. Another truck — older, bigger — pulled up. This one had high canvas sides. It was driven by a small black man named Sonny. Blaze never heard Sonny say a single word.

  The Bluenotes gave their crew short, close-tined blueberry rakes. Only Blaze did not get one. “The rake is designed to take nothin but ripe berries,” Bluenote said. Behind him, Sonny got a fishing pole and creel out of the big truck. He clapped a straw hat on his head and started across the field toward a line of trees. He didn’t look back.

  “But,” Bluenote said, raising a finger, “bein an invention of human hand, it ain’t perfect. It’ll get some leaves and greenies as well. Don’t let that worry you, or slow you down. We pick em over back at the barn. And you’ll be there, so don’t worry we’re shorting your wages. Got that?”

  Brian and Toe-Jam, who would be inseparable pals by the end of the day, stood side by side, arms folded. They both nodded.

  “Now, just so’s you know,” Bluenote went on. His strange pale eyes glittered. “I get twenty-six cents the quart. You get seven cents. Makes it sound like I’m makin nineteen cents a quart on the sweat of your brow, but it ain’t so. After all expenses, I make ten cents the quart. Three more’n you. That three cents is called capitalism. My field, my profit, you take a share.” He repeated: “Just so’s you know. Any objections?”

  There were no objections. They seemed hypnotized in the hot morning sunshine.

  “Okay. I got me a driver; that be you, Hoss. I need a counter. You, kid. What’s your name?”

  “Uh, John. John Cheltzman.”

  “Come over here.”

  He helped Johnny up into the back of the truck with the canvas sides and explained what had to be done. There were stacks of galvanized steel pails. He was to run and hand one to anyone who called for a bucket. Each empty bucket had a blank strip of white adhesive tape on the side. Johnny had to print the picker’s name on each full bucket. Full buckets were tucked into a slotted frame that kept them from falling over and spilling while the truck was moving. There was also an ancient, dusty chalkboard to keep running totals on.

  “Okay, son,” Bluenote said. “Get em to line up and give em their buckets.”

  John went red, cleared his throat, and whispered for them to line up. Please. He looked as though he expected to be ganged-up on. Instead, they lined up. Some of the girls were putting on headscarves or tucking gum into their mouths. John handed them buckets, printing their names on the ID tapes in big black capital letters. The boys and girls chose their rows, and the day’s work began.

  Blaze stood beside the truck and waited. There was a great, formless excitement in his chest. To drive had been an ambition of his for years. It was as if Bluenote had read the secret language of his heart. If he meant it.

  Bluenote walked over. “What do they call you, son? Besides Hoss?”

  “Blaze, sometimes. Sometimes Clay.”

  “Okay, Blaze, c’mere.” Bluenote led him to the cab of the truck and got behind the wheel. “This is a three-speed International Harvester. That means it’s got three gears ahead and one for reverse. This here stickin up from the floor’s the gearshift. See it?”

  Blaze nodded.

  “This I got my left foot on is the clutch. See that?”

  Blaze nodded.

  “Push it in when you want to shift. When you got the gearshift where you want it, let the clutch out again. Let it out too slow and she’ll stall. Let it out too fast — pop it — and you’re apt to spill all the berries and knock your friend on his fanny into the bargain. Because she’ll jerk. You understand?”

  Blaze nodded. The boys and girls had already worked a little distance up their first rows. Douglas Bluenote walked from one to the next, showing them the best way to handle the rake and avoid blisters. He also showed them the little wrist-twist at the end of each pull; that spilled out most of the leaves and little twigs.

  The elder Bluenote hawked and spat. “Don’t worry about y’gears. To start with, all you need to worry about is reverse and low range. Now watch here and I’ll show you where those two are.”

  Blaze watched. It had taken him years to get the hang of addition and subtraction (and carrying numbers had been a mystery to him until John told him to think of it like carrying water). He picked up all the basic driving skills in the course of one morning. He stalled the truck only twice. Bluenote later told his son that he had never seen anyone learn the delicate balance between clutch and accelerator so quickly. What he said to Blaze wa
s, “You’re doin good. Keep the tires off the bushes.”

  Blaze did more than drive. He also picked up everyone’s pails, trotted them back to the truck, handed them to John, and brought back empties to the pickers. He spent the whole day with an unvarying grin on his face. His happiness was a germ that infected everyone.

  A thundersquall came up around three o’clock. The kids piled into the back of the big truck, obeying Bluenote’s admonition to be damn careful where they sat.

  “I’ll drive back,” Bluenote said, getting up on the running-board. He saw Blaze’s face fall and grinned. “Give it time, Hoss — Blaze, I mean.”

  “Okay. Where’s that man Sonny?”

  “Cookin,” Bluenote said briefly, punching the clutch and engaging first gear. “Fresh fish if we’re lucky; more stew if we ain’t. You want to run into town with me after dinner?”

  Blaze nodded, too overcome to speak.

  That evening he looked on silently with Douglas as Harry Bluenote haggled with the buyer from Federal Foods, Inc., and got his price. Douglas drove home behind the wheel of one of the farm’s Ford pick-ups. No one talked. Watching the road unroll before the headlights, Blaze thought: I’m going somewhere. Then he thought: I am somewhere. The first thought made him happy. The second was so big it made him feel like crying.

  Days passed, then weeks, and there was a rhythm to it all. Up early. Huge breakfast. Work until noon; huge lunch in the field (Blaze had been known to consume as many as four sandwiches, and nobody told him no). Work until the afternoon thundersqualls put an end to it or Sonny rang the big brass dinner-bell, strokes that came across the hot, fleeting day like sounds heard in a vivid dream.

  Bluenote began letting Blaze drive to and from the fields along the back roads. He drove with increasing skill, until it was something like genius. He never spilled a single container from the low wooden slat-holders. After dinner he often went to Portland with Harry and Douglas and watched Harry do his dickers with the various food companies.