Blaze

by Richard Bachman

  July disappeared wherever used months go. Then half of August. Soon summer would be over. Thinking of that made Blaze sad. Soon, Hetton House again. Then winter. Blaze could barely stand to think of another winter at Hetton.

  He had no idea how powerful Harry Bluenote’s liking for him had become. The big boy was a natural peacemaker and the picking had never gone more sweetly. Only one fistfight had broken out. Usually there were half a dozen. A boy named Henry Gillette accused one of the other South Portland boys of cheating at blackjack (technically not poker). Blaze simply picked Gillette up by the scruff of the neck and hauled him off. Then he made the other boy give Gillette his money back.

  Then, in the third week of August, the icing on the cake. Blaze lost his virginity.

  The girl’s name was Anne Bradstay. She was in Pittsfield for arson. She and her boyfriend had burned down six potato warehouses between Presque Isle and Mars Hill before getting caught. They said they did it because they couldn’t think of anything else to do. It was fun to watch them burn. Anne said Curtis would call her up and say “Let’s go French-fryin,” and off they’d go. The judge — who had lost a son Curtis Prebble’s age in Korea — had no understanding of such boredom, nor sympathy for it. He sentenced the boy to six years in Shawshank State Prison.

  Anne got a year in what the girls called The Pittsfield Kotex Factory. She didn’t really mind. Her stepfather had busted her cherry for her when she was thirteen and her older brother beat her when he was drunk, which was often. After that shit, Pittsfield was a vacation.

  She was not a bruised girl with a heart of gold, only a bruised girl. She was not mean, but she was acquisitive, with a crow’s eye for shiny things. Toe, Brian Wick, and two other boys from South Portland pooled their resources and offered Anne four dollars to lay Blaze. They had no motive save curiosity. Nobody told John Cheltzman — they were afraid he might tell Blaze, or even Doug Bluenote — but everyone else in camp knew.

  Once a night, someone from the boys’ cabins went down to the well on the road to the big house with two pails — one for drinking, one for washing. That particular night was Toe-Jam’s turn, but he said he had the belly-gripe and offered Blaze a quarter to go in his stead.

  “Naw, that’s okay, I’ll go for free,” Blaze said, and got the buckets.

  Toe smirked at the quarter saved and went to tell his friend Brian.

  The night was dark and fragrant. The moon was orange, just risen. Blaze walked stolidly, thinking of nothing. The buckets clashed together. When a light hand fell on his shoulder, he didn’t jump.

  “Can I walk with you?” Anne asked. She held up her own buckets.

  “Sure,” Blaze said. Then his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth and he began to blush.

  They walked side by side to the well. Anne whistled softly through her rotting teeth.

  When they got there, Blaze shifted the boards aside. The well was only twenty feet deep, but a pebble dropped into its rock-lined barrel made a mysterious, hollow splash. Timothy grass and wild roses grew luxuriously all around the concrete pad. Half a dozen old oaks stood around, as if on guard. The moon peered through one of them now, casting pale gleams.

  “Can I get your water?” Blaze asked. His ears were burning.

  “Yeah? Tha’d be nice.”

  “Sure,” he said, grinning thoughtlessly. “Sure it would.” He thought of Margie Thurlow, although this girl looked nothing like her.

  There was a length of sunbleached rope tied to a ringbolt set in one corner of the cement. Blaze tied the free end of this rope to one of the buckets. He dropped it into the hole. There was a splash. Then they waited for it to fill up.

  Anne Bradstay was no expert in the art of seduction. She put her hand on the crotch of Blaze’s jeans and grasped his penis.

  “Hey!” he said, surprised.

  “I like you,” she said. “Why don’t you screw me? Want to?”

  Blaze looked at her, struck dumb with amazement — although, within her hand, part of him was now beginning to speak its piece in the old language. The girl was wearing a long dress, but she had pulled it up to show her thighs. She was scrawny, but the moonlight was kind to her face. The shadows were even kinder.

  He kissed her clumsily, wrapping his arms around her.

  “Jeez, you got a real woodie, don’tcha?” she asked, gasping for breath (and grasping his cock even harder). “Now take it easy, okay?”

  “Sure,” Blaze said, and lifted her in his arms. He set her down in the timothy. He unbuckled his belt. “I don’t know nothin bout this.”

  Anne smiled, not without bitterness. “It’s easy,” she said. She pulled her dress over her hips. She wasn’t wearing underpants. He saw a thin triangle of dark hair in the moonlight and thought if he looked at it too long, it would kill him.

  She pointed matter-of-factly. “Stick your pecker in here.”

  Blaze dropped his pants and climbed on. At a distance of about twenty feet, hunkered in some high pucky, Brian Wick looked at Toe-Jam with wide eyes. He whispered, “Get a load of that tool!”

  Toe tapped the side of his head and whispered, “I guess what God took away here he put back down there. Now shut up.”

  They turned to watch.

  The next day, Toe mentioned that he’d heard Blaze got more than water at the well. Blaze turned almost purple and showed his teeth before walking away. Toe never dared mention it again.

  Blaze became Anne’s cavalier. He followed her everywhere, and gave her his second blanket in case she got cold during the night. Anne enjoyed this. In her own way, she fell in love with him. She and he carried water for the girls’ and boys’ cabins for the rest of the picking and no one ever said anything about it. They would not have dared.

  On the night before they were to go back to Hetton, Harry Bluenote asked Blaze if he would stay a bit after supper. Blaze said sure, but he began to feel uneasy. His first thought was that Mr. Bluenote had found out what he and Anne were doing down by the well and was mad. This made him feel bad, because he liked Mr. Bluenote.

  When everyone else was gone, Bluenote lit a cigar and walked twice around the cleared supper-table. He coughed. He rumpled his already rumpled hair. Then he nearly barked: “Look here, you want to stay on?”

  Blaze gaped, unable at first to get across the chasm between what he had believed Mr. Bluenote was going to say and what he had said.

  “Well? Would you?”

  “Yes,” Blaze managed. “Yes, sure. I — sure.”

  “Good,” Bluenote said, looking relieved. “Because Hetton House isn’t for a boy like you. You’re a good boy, but you need taking in hand. You try goddam hard, but—” He pointed at Blaze’s head. “How’d that happen?”

  Blaze’s hand went immediately to the bashed-in dent. He blushed. “It’s awful, ain’t it? To look at, I mean. Lordy.”

  “Well, it ain’t pretty, but I seen worse.” Bluenote dropped into a chair. “How’d it happen?”

  “My dad go an pitch me downstair. He ‘us hungover or somethin. I don’t remember very well. Anyway—” He shrugged. “That’s all.”

  “That’s all, huh? Well, I guess it was enough.” He got up again, went to the cooler in the corner, drew himself a Dixie cup of water. “I went to the doctor’s today — I been puttin it off because sometimes I get these little flutters — and he gave me a clean bill. I was some relieved.” He drank his water, crumpled the cup, and tossed it into the wastebasket. “A man gets older, that’s the thing. You don’t know nothin about that, but you will. He gets older and his whole life starts to seem like a dream he had durin an afternoon nap. You know?”

  “Sure,” Blaze said. He hadn’t heard a word of it. Live here with Mr. Bluenote! He was just beginning to grasp what that might mean.

  “I just wanted to make sure I could do right by you if I went and took you on,” Bluenote said. He cocked a thumb at the picture of the woman on the wall. “She liked boys. She give me three and died havin the last. Dougie’s the middl
e boy. Eldest is in Washington state, buildin planes for Boeing. Youngest died in a car accident four year ago. That was a sad thing, but I like to think he’s with his ma now. Could be that’s a stupid idea, but we take our comfort where we can. Don’t we, Blaze?”

  “Yessir,” Blaze said. He was thinking about Anne at the well. Anne in the moonlight. Then he saw there were tears in Mr. Bluenote’s eyes. They shocked him and frightened him a little.

  “Go on,” Mr. Bluenote said. “And don’t linger too long at the well, you hear me?”

  But he did stop at the well. He told Anne what had happened, and she nodded. Then she began to cry, too.

  “What’s wrong, Annie?” he asked her. “What’s wrong, dear?”

  “Nothin,” she said. “Draw my water, will you? I brought the buckets.”

  He drew the water. She watched him raptly.

  The last day’s picking was over by one o’clock, and even Blaze could see the final haul didn’t amount to much. Berries was over.

  He always drove now. He was in the cab of the truck, idling along in low, when Harry Bluenote called: “Okay, youse! Up in the truck! Blaze’ll drive back! Change y’duds and come on down to the big house! Cake n ice cream.”

  They scrambled over the tailgate, yelling like a bunch of kiddies, and John had to yell back at them to watch out for the berries. Blaze was grinning. It felt like the kind of grin that might stay on all day.

  Bluenote walked around to the passenger side. His face looked pale under his tan, and there was sweat on his forehead.

  “Mr. Bluenote? Are you okay?”

  “Sure,” Harry Bluenote said. He smiled his last smile. “Just ate too much lunch, I guess. Take her in, Bla—”

  He grabbed his chest. Cords popped out on both sides of his neck. He stared full at Blaze, but not as if he was seeing him.

  “What’s wrong?” Blaze asked.

  “Ticker,” Bluenote remarked, then fell forward. His forehead smacked the metal dashboard. For a moment he clutched at the old torn seatcover with both hands, as if the world had turned upside-down. Then he tilted sideways and fell out the open door onto the ground.

  Dougie Bluenote had been ambling around the hood of the truck. Now he broke into a run. “Poppa!” he screamed.

  Bluenote died in his son’s arms on the wild, jouncing ride back to the big house. Blaze hardly noticed. He was hunched over the big, cracked wheel of the I-H truck, glaring at the unrolling dirt road like a madman.

  Bluenote shivered once, twice, like a dog caught out in the rain, and that was it.

  Mrs. Bricker — the camp mom — dropped a pitcher of lemonade on the floor when they carried him in. Icecubes sprayed every whichway on the plank pine. They took Bluenote into the parlor and put him on the couch. One arm dangled on the floor. Blaze picked it up and put it on Bluenote’s chest. It fell off again. After that, Blaze just held it.

  Dougie Bluenote was in the dining room, standing beside the long table, which was set for the end-of-picking ice cream party (a small going-away present had been set beside each kid’s plate), talking frantically on the phone. The other pickers clustered on the porch, looking in. All of them looked horrified except for Johnny Cheltzman, who looked relieved.

  Blaze had told him everything the night before.

  The doctor came and made a brief examination. When he was done, he pulled a blanket over Bluenote’s face.

  Mrs. Bricker, who had stopped crying, started again. “The ice cream,” she said. “What will we do with all that ice cream? Oh, lands!” She put her apron over her face, then all the way over her head, like a hood.

  “Have em come in and eat it,” Doug Bluenote said. “You too, Blaze. Pitch in.”

  Blaze shook his head. He felt like he might never be hungry again.

  “Never mind, then,” Doug said. He ran his hands through his hair. “I’ll have to call Hetton — and South Portland — Pittsfield — Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.” He put his face to the wall and began to cry himself. Blaze just sat and looked at the covered shape on the couch.

  The station wagon from HH came first. Blaze sat in the back, looking out the dusty rear window. The big house dwindled and dwindled until it was finally lost to view.

  The others began to talk a little, but Blaze kept his silence. It was beginning to sink in. He tried to work it out in his mind and couldn’t. It made no sense, but it was sinking in anyway.

  His face began to work. First his mouth twitched, then his eyes. His cheeks began to tremble. He couldn’t control these things. They were beyond him. Finally he began to cry. He put his forehead against the rear window of the station wagon and wept great monotonous sobs that sounded like a horse neighing.

  The man driving was Martin Coslaw’s brother-in-law. He said, “Somebody shut the moose up, how about it?”

  But nobody dared touch him.

  Anne Bradstay’s baby was born eight and a half months later. It was a whopping boy — ten pounds, nine ounces. He was put up for adoption and taken almost immediately by a childless couple from Saco named Wyatt. Boy Bradstay became Rufus Wyatt. He was named All-State Tackle from his high school team when he was seventeen; All-New England a year later. He went to Boston University with the intention of majoring in literature. He particularly enjoyed Shelley, Keats, and the American poet James Dickey.

  Chapter 19

  DARK CAME EARLY, wrapped in snow. By five o’clock, the only light in the headmaster’s office was the flickering fire on the hearth. Joe was sleeping soundly, but Blaze was worried about him. His breathing seemed fast, his nose was running, and his chest sounded rattly. Bright red blotches of color glowed in each cheek.

  The baby book said fever often accompanied teething, and sometimes a cold, or cold symptoms. Cold was good enough for Blaze (he didn’t know what symptoms were). The book said just keep em warm. Easy for the book-writing guy to say; what was Blaze supposed to do when Joe woke up and wanted to crawl around?

  He had to call the Gerards now, tonight. They couldn’t drop the money from a plane in this snowstorm, but the snow would probably stop by tomorrow night. He would get the money, and keep Joe, too. Fuck those rich Republicans. He and Joe were for each other now. They would get away. Somehow.

  He stared into the fire and fell into a daydream. He saw himself lighting the road-flares in a clearing. Running lights of a small plane appearing overhead. Wasp-buzz of the engine. Plane banks toward the signal, which is burning like a birthday cake. Something white in the air — a parachute with a little suitcase attached to it!

  Then he’s back here. He opens the suitcase. It’s stacked with dough. Each bundle is neatly banded. Blaze counts it. It’s all there.

  Next he’s on the small island of Acapulco (which he believed was in the Bahamas, although he supposed he could be wrong about that). He’s bought himself a cabin on a high spur of land that overlooks the breakers. There are two bedrooms, one large, one small. There are two hammocks out back, one large, one small.

  Time passes. Maybe five years. And here comes a kid pounding up the beach — a beach that shines like a wet muscle in the sunlight. He’s tanned. He’s got long black hair, like an Indian brave’s. He’s waving. Blaze waves back.

  Again Blaze seemed to hear the sound of fugitive laughter. He turned around sharply. No one was there.

  But the daydream was broken. He got up and poked his arms into his coat. He sat down and pulled on his boots. He was going to make this happen. His feet and his head were set, and when he got that way, he always did what he said he was going to do. It was his pride. The only one he had.

  He checked the baby again, then went out. He closed the office door behind him and clattered down the stairs. George’s gun was tucked in the waistband of his pants, and this time it was loaded.

  The wind coming across the old play-yard was howling hard enough to push him into a stagger before he got used to it. Snow belted his face, needling his cheeks and forehead. The tops of the trees leaned this way and that. New drifts were f
orming on the crusted layers of old snow, already three feet deep in places. He didn’t need to worry about the tracks he’d made coming in anymore.

  He waded to the Cyclone fence, wishing he had snowshoes, and climbed awkwardly over it. He landed in snow up to his thighs and began to flounder north, setting off cross-country toward Cumberland Center.

  It was three miles, and he was out of breath before he was halfway there. His face was numb. So were his hands and feet, despite heavy socks and gloves. Yet he kept on, making no attempt to go around drifts but plowing straight through. Twice he stumbled over fences buried in the snow, one of them barbed wire that ripped his jeans and tore into his leg. He merely picked himself up and went on, not wasting breath on a curse.

  An hour after setting out, he entered a tree farm. Here perfectly pruned little blue spruces marched away in rows, each one growing six feet from its fellows. Blaze was able to walk down a long, sheltered corridor where the snow was only three inches deep — and in some places, there was no snow at all. This was the Cumberland County Reserve, and it bordered the main road.

  When he reached the western border of the toy forest, he sat on top of the embankment and then slid down to Route 289. Up the road, almost lost in the blowing snow, was a blinker-light he remembered well — red on two sides, yellow on the other two. Beyond it, a few streetlights glimmered like ghosts.

  Blaze crossed the road, which was snow-coated and empty of traffic, and walked up to the Exxon on the corner. A small pool of light on the side of the cinderblock building highlighted a pay phone. Looking like an ambulatory snowman, Blaze stepped to it — hulked over it. He had a panicky moment when it seemed he had no change, but he found two quarters in his pants and another in his coat pocket. Then — bool! — his money came back in the coin return. Directory Assistance was free.