Blaze

by Richard Bachman

  “I want to call Joseph Gerard,” he said. “Ocoma.”

  There was a blank pause, and then the operator gave him the number. Blaze wrote it on the fogged glass that shielded the phone from the worst of the snow, unaware that he had asked for an unlisted number and the operator had given it to him per FBI instructions. This of course opened the flood-gates to well-wishers and cranks, but if the kidnappers didn’t call, the traceback equipment couldn’t be used.

  Blaze dialed 0 and gave the lady the Gerard phone number. He asked if that was a toll-call. It was. He asked if he could talk three minutes for seventy-five cents. The operator said no; a three-minute call to Ocoma would cost him a dollar-ninety. Did he have a telephone credit card?

  Blaze didn’t. Blaze had no credit cards of any kind.

  The operator told him he could charge the call to his home phone, and there was a phone at the shack (although it hadn’t rung a single time since George died), but Blaze was too clever for that.

  Collect, then? the operator suggested.

  “Collect, yeah!” Blaze said.

  “Your name, sir?”

  “Clayton Blaisdell, Junior,” he said at once. In his relief at finding he hadn’t made this long slog just to come up empty for lack of phone-change, Blaze would not realize this tactical error for almost two hours.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Thank you,” Blaze said, feeling clever. Feeling cool as a fool.

  The phone rang only once on the other end before being picked up. “Yes?” The voice sounded wary and weary.

  “I’ve got your son,” Blaze said.

  “Mister, I’ve had ten calls today saying the same thing. Prove it.”

  Blaze was flummoxed. He hadn’t expected this. “Well, he’s not with me, you know. My partner’s got him.”

  “Yeah?” Nothing else. Just Yeah?

  “I seen your wife when I come in,” Blaze said. It was the only thing he could think of. “She’s real pretty. She ‘us in a white nightie. You guys had a pitcher on the dresser — well, three pitchers all put together.”

  The voice on the other end said, “Tell me something else.” But he didn’t sound tired anymore.

  Blaze racked his brain. There was nothing else, nothing that would convince the stubborn man on the other end. Then there was. “The ole lady had a cat. That’s why she came downstairs. She thought I was the cat — that I was—” He racked his brain some more. “Mikey!” he shouted. “I’m sorry I hit her so hard. I sure didn’t mean to, but I was scared.”

  The man on the other end of the line began to cry. It was sudden and shocking. “Is he all right? For God’s sake, is Joey okay?”

  There was a confused babble in the background. A woman seemed to be speaking. Another was yelling and crying. The one yelling and crying was probably the mother. Narmenians were probably specially emotional. Frenchies were the same way.

  “Don’t hang up!” Joseph Gerard (it just about had to be Gerard) said. He sounded panicky. “Is he okay?”

  “Yeah, he’s good,” Blaze said. “Got another tooth through. That makes three. Di’per rash is clearing up good. I — I mean we — keep ‘is bottom greased up real good. What’s the matter with your wife? Is she too good to grease his bottom?”

  Gerard was panting like a dog. “We’ll do anything, mister. It’s all your play.”

  Blaze started a little at that. He had almost forgotten why he called.

  “Okay,” he said. “Here’s what I want you to do.”

  In Portland, an AT&T operator was speaking to SAC Albert Sterling. “Cumberland Center,” she said. “Gas station pay phone.”

  “Got it,” he said, and pumped his fist in the air.

  “Get in a light plane tomorrow night at eight,” Blaze said. He was beginning to feel uneasy, beginning to feel he’d been on the phone too long. “Start flying south along Route 1 toward the New Hampshire border. Fly low. Got it?”

  “Wait — I’m not sure—”

  “You better be sure,” Blaze said. He tried to sound like George would. “Don’t try to stall me, unless you want your kid back in a bag.”

  “Okay,” Gerard said. “Okay, I hear you. I’m just writing it down.”

  Sterling handed a scrap of paper to Bruce Granger and made dialing motions. Granger called the State Police.

  “The pilot’ll see a signal light,” Blaze said. “Have the money in a suitcase attached to a parachute. Drop it like you wanted it to land right on top of the fla — of the light. The signal. You can have the kid back the next day. I’ll even send some of the stuff I — we, I mean — use on his bottom.” A witticism occurred to him. “No extra charge.”

  Then he looked at his free hand and saw he had crossed his fingers when he said they could have Joe back. Just like a little kid telling his first lie.

  “Don’t hang up!” Gerard said. “I don’t think I quite understand—”

  “You’re a smart guy,” Blaze said. “I think you do.”

  He hung up and left the Exxon station at a dead run, not sure why he was running, only knowing that it seemed like the right thing to do. The only thing. He ran under the blinker-light, angled across the road, and scaled the embankment in giant leaps. Then he disappeared into the spruce-lined rows of the County Reserve.

  Behind him, a giant monster with glaring white eyes came snarling over the hill. It plunged through the teeming air, nine-foot sidewings sending up sprays of snow. The plow obliterated Blaze’s tracks where they angled across the road. When two State Police cars converged on the Exxon station nine minutes later, Blaze’s footprints up the embankment to the Reserve were no more than blurry indentations. Even as the Troopers stood around the pay phone with their flashlights pointed, the wind did its work behind them.

  Sterling’s phone rang five minutes later. “He was here,” the State cop on the other end said. Sterling could hear wind blowing in the background. No, shrieking. “He was here but he’s gone.”

  “Gone how?” Sterling asked. “Car or on foot?”

  “Who knows? Plow went through just before we got here. But if I had to guess, I’d say he drove.”

  “Nobody’s asking you to guess. Gas station? Anybody see him?”

  “They’re closed because of the storm. Even if they’d been open — the phone’s on a wall around to the side.”

  “Lucky sonofabitch,” Sterling said. “Blind-lucky sonofabitch. We surround that crappy little cabin in Apex and arrest four girly magazines and a jar of strained peas. Tracks? Or did the wind take em?”

  “There were still tracks around the phone,” the Trooper said. “Wind blurred the treads, but it was him.”

  “Guessing again?”

  “No. They were big.”

  “Okay. Roadblocks, right?”

  “Every road big and small,” the Trooper said. “It’s happening as we speak.”

  “Logging roads, too.”

  “Logging roads, too,” the Trooper said. He sounded insulted.

  Sterling didn’t care. “So he’s bottled up? Can we say that, Trooper?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. We’re going in there with three hundred guys soon as the weather lifts tomorrow. This has gone on too long.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Snow plow,” Sterling said. “My sister’s rosy chinchina.” He hung up.

  By the time Blaze got back to HH, he was exhausted. He climbed the Cyclone fence and fell face-first into the snow on the other side. His nose was bloody. He had made his way back in just thirty-five minutes. He picked himself up, staggered around the building, and went inside.

  Joe’s furious, agonized howls met him.

  “Christ!”

  He ran up the stairs two at a time and burst into Coslaw’s office. The fire was out. The cradle was tipped over. Joe was lying on the floor. His head was covered with blood. His face was purple, his eyes were squeezed shut, his small hands powdered white with dust.

  “Joe!” Blaze cried. “Joe! Joe!”
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  He swept the baby into his arms and ran into the corner where the diapers were stacked. He grabbed one and swabbed the gash on Joe’s forehead. The blood seemed to be pouring out in freshets. There was a splinter sticking out of the wound. Blaze plucked it out and threw it on the floor.

  The baby struggled in his arms and screamed more loudly still. Blaze wiped away more blood, holding Joe firmly, and bent in for a closer look. The cut was jagged, but with the big splinter removed, it didn’t look so bad. Thank Christ it hadn’t been his eye. It could have been his eye.

  He found a bottle and gave it to Joe cold. Joe grabbed it with both hands and began to suck greedily. Panting, Blaze got a blanket and wrapped the baby in it. Then he lay down on his own blankets with the wrapped baby on his chest. Blaze closed his eyes and was immediately seized by horrible vertigo. Everything in the world seemed to be slipping away: Joe, George, Johnny, Harry Bluenote, Anne Bradstay, birds on wires and nights on the road.

  Then he was all right again.

  “From now on, it’s us, Joey,” he said. “You got me and I got you. It’ll be all right. Okay?”

  Snow struck the windows in hard, rattling bursts. Joe turned his face from the rubber nipple and coughed thickly, his tongue popping out with the effort of his chest to clear itself. Then he took the nipple again. Beneath his hand, Blaze could feel the small heart hammering.

  “It’s how we roll,” Blaze said, and kissed the baby’s bloody forehead.

  They fell asleep together.

  Chapter 20

  HETTON HOUSE INCLUDED a large parcel of land in back of the main buildings, and here was planted what generations of boys had come to call the Victory Garden. The headmistress before Coslaw went slack on it, telling people she had a brown thumb rather than a green one, but Martin “The Law” Coslaw saw at least two shining potentialities in the Victory Garden. The first was to make a substantial saving in HH’s food-budget by having the boys grow their own vegetables. The second was to acquaint the boys with good hard work, which was the foundation of the world. “Work and mathematics built the pyramids,” Coslaw liked to say. And so the boys planted in the spring, weeded in the summer (unless they were “working out” on one of the neighboring farms), and harvested in the fall.

  About fourteen months after the end of what Toe-Jam called “the fabulous blueberry summer,” John Cheltzman was among the pumpkin-picking crew at the north end of the VG. He took a cold, sickened, and died. It happened just that fast. He was packed off to Portland City Hospital on Halloween, while the rest of the boys were at their classes or “away schools.” He died in City Hospital’s charity ward, and he did it alone.

  His bed at HH was stripped, then re-made. Blaze spent most of one afternoon sitting on his own bed and looking at John’s. The long sleeping room — which they called “the ram” — was empty. The others had gone to Johnny’s funeral. For most it was their first funeral, and they were quite excited about it.

  Johnny’s bed frightened and fascinated Blaze. The jar of Shedd’s Peanut Butter that had always been stuffed down between the head of the bed and the wall was gone; he’d looked. So were the Ritz Crackers. (After lights-out, Johnny often said, “Everything tastes better when it shits on a Ritz,” which never failed to crack Blaze up.) The bed itself was made up in stark Army fashion, the top blanket pulled taut. The sheets were perfectly white and clean, even though Johnny had been an enthusiastic lights-out masturbator. Many nights Blaze lay in his own bed, looking up into the dark and listening to the soft creak of the springs as JC flogged his doggy. There were always stiff yellow places on his sheets. Christ, those stiff yellow places were on the sheets of all the bigger boys. They were on his own, right now, beneath him as he sat on his bed, looking at Johnny’s bed. It came to him like a revelation that if he died, his bed would be stripped and his come-stained sheets would be replaced with sheets like the ones that were on Johnny’s now — sheets that were perfectly white and clean. Sheets without a single mark on them to say someone lay there, dreamed there, was lively enough to squirt off there. Blaze began to cry silently.

  It was a cloudless afternoon in early November, and the ram was flooded with impartial light. Squares of sun and the shadow-crosses of muntings lay on JC’s cot. After awhile Blaze got up and tore the blanket from the bed where his pal had slept. He threw the pillow the length of the ram. Then he stripped off the sheets and pushed the mattress on the floor. It still wasn’t enough. He turned the bed over on the mattress with its stupid little legs sticking up. It still wasn’t enough, so he kicked one of the jutting bed-legs and succeeded in nothing more than hurting his foot. After that he lay on his bed with his hands over his eyes and his chest heaving.

  When the funeral was over, the other boys mostly left Blaze alone. No one asked him about the overturned bed, but Toe did a funny thing: he took one of Blaze’s hands and kissed it. That was a funny thing, all right. Blaze thought about it for years. Not all the time, but every now and then.

  Five o’clock came. It was free time for the boys, and most of them were out in the yard, goofing around and working up an appetite for supper. Blaze went to Martin Coslaw’s office. The Law was sitting behind his desk. He had changed into his slippers and was rocked back in his chair, reading the Evening Express. He looked up and said, “What?”

  “Here, you sonofabitch,” Blaze said, and beat him unconscious.

  He set off walking for the New Hampshire border because he thought he would be picked up inside of four hours driving a hot car. Instead, he was collared in two hours. He was always forgetting how large he was, but Martin Coslaw didn’t forget, and it didn’t take the Maine State Police long to locate a six-foot-seven male Caucasian youth with a bashed-in forehead.

  There was a short trial in Cumberland County District Court. Martin Coslaw appeared with one arm in a sling and a huge white head-bandage that dipped to cover one eye. He walked to the stand on crutches.

  The prosecutor asked him how tall he was. Coslaw responded that he was five feet and six inches. The prosecutor asked how much he weighed. Coslaw said that he weighed one hundred and sixty pounds. The prosecutor asked Coslaw if he had done anything to provoke, tease, or unjustly punish the defendant, Clayton Blaisdell, Junior. Coslaw said he had not. The prosecutor then yielded the witness to Blaze’s attorney, a cool drink of lemonade fresh out of law school. The cool drink of lemonade asked a number of furious, obscure questions which Coslaw answered calmly while his cast, crutches, and head-bandage continued their own testimony. When the cool drink of lemonade said he had no further questions, the State rested its case.

  Blaze’s court-appointed called him to the stand and asked why he had beaten up the headmaster of Hetton House. Blaze stammered out his story. A good friend of his had died. He thought Coslaw was to blame. Johnny shouldn’t have been sent out to pick pumpkins, specially not when it was cold. Johnny had a weak heart. It wasn’t fair, and Mr. Coslaw knew it wasn’t fair. He had it coming.

  At that, the young lawyer sat down with a look of despair in his eyes.

  The prosecutor rose and approached. He asked how tall Blaze was. Six-foot-six or maybe — seven, Blaze said. The prosecutor asked how much he weighed. Blaze said he didn’t know, exactly, but not three hunnert. This caused some laughter among the press. Blaze stared out at them with puzzled eyes. Then he smiled a little, too, wanting them to know he could take a joke as well as the next one. The prosecutor had no more questions. He sat down.

  Blaze’s court-appointed made a furious, obscure summary, then rested his case. The judge looked out a window with his chin propped on one hand. The prosecutor then rose. He called Blaze a young thug. He said it was the State of Maine’s responsibility to “snub him up fast and hard.” Blaze had no idea what that meant, but he knew it wasn’t good.

  The judge asked Blaze if he had anything to say.

  “Yessir,” Blaze said, “but I don’t know how.”

  The judge nodded and sentenced him to two years in South Portland Cor
rectional.

  It wasn’t as bad for him as it was for some, but bad enough so he never wanted to go back again. He was big enough to avoid the beatings and the buggery, and he walked outside all the underground cliques with their tinpot leaders, but being locked up for long periods of time in a tiny barred cell was very hard. Very sad. Twice in the first six months he “went stir,” howling to be let out and banging on the bars of his cell until the guards came running. The first time, four guards responded, then had to call in first another four and then a full half-dozen to subdue him. The second time they gave him a hypo that knocked him out for sixteen hours.

  Solitary was worse still. Blaze paced the tiny cell endlessly (six steps each way) while time faltered and then stopped. When the door was finally opened and he was let back into the society of the other boys — free to walk the exercise yard or pitch bundles off the trucks that came into the loading dock — he was nearly mad with relief and gratitude. He hugged the jailer who let him out on the second occasion and gained this note in his jacket: Shows homosexual tendencies.

  But solitary wasn’t the worst thing. He was forgetful, but the memory of the worst thing never left him. That was how they got you. They took you to a little white room and gathered around you in a circle. Then they began asking questions. And before you had time to think what the first question meant — what it said — they were on to the next, and the next, and the next. They backtracked, sidetracked, went uptrack and down. It was like being caught in a spiderweb. In the end, you would admit anything they asked you to admit, just to shut them up. Then they brought you a paper and told you to sign your name to it and brother, you signed.

  The man in charge of Blaze’s interrogation had been an assistant district attorney named Holloway. Holloway didn’t come into the little room until the others had been going at him for at least an hour and a half. Blaze had his sleeves rolled up and the bottom of his shirt had come untucked. He was covered with sweat and needed to go Number Two Bathroom, bad. It was like being in the Bowies’ dogpen again, with the Collies snapping all around him. Holloway was cool and natty in a blue pinstriped suit. He had on black shoes with galaxies of tiny holes in the fronts. Blaze never forgot the holes in the fronts of Mr. Holloway’s shoes.