Blaze

or not.

For a moment he forgot to back up and Blaze shot his fist out. He didn’t use his body; he just used his arm like a piston. His knuckles connected with Glen’s mouth. Glen screamed as his lips burst against his teeth and began to bleed. The yelling intensified.

Glen tasted his own blood and forgot about backing up. He forgot about taunting the ugly kid with the busted forehead. He just waded in, swinging roundhouse punches from port and starboard.

Blaze set his feet and met him. Faintly, from far away, he heard the shouts and exhortations of his classmates. They reminded him of the yapping Collies in the dogpen on the day he realized that Randy wasn’t going to sheer off.

Glen got in at least three good blows, and Blaze’s head rocked with them. He gasped, inhaling blood. He heard ringing in his ears. His own fist shot out again, and he felt the jolt all the way up to his shoulder. All at once the blood on Glen’s mouth was spread on his chin and cheeks, too. Glen spat out a tooth. Blaze struck again, in the same place. Glen howled. He sounded like a little kid with his fingers caught in a door. He stopped swinging. His mouth was a ruin. Mrs. Foster was running toward them. Her skirt was flying, her knees were pumping, and she was blowing her little silver whistle.

Blaze’s arm hurt real bad where the nurse had shot him, and his fist hurt, and his head hurt, but he struck out again, desperately hard, with a hand that felt numb and dead. It was the same hand he had used on Randy, and he struck as hard as he had that day in the pen. The blow caught Glen flush on the point of the chin. It made an audible snap sound that silenced the other children. Glen stood slackly, his eyes rolled up to whites. Then his knees unhinged and he collapsed in a heap.

I killed him, Blaze thought. Oh Jeez, I killed him like Randy.

But then Glen began to stir around and mutter in the back of his throat, like people do in their sleep. And Mrs. Foster was screaming at Blaze to go inside. As he went, Blaze heard her telling Peter Lavoie to go to the office and get the First Aid kit, to run.

He was sent from school. Suspended. They stopped the bleeding of his nose with an ice-pack, put a Band-Aid on his ear, and then sent him to walk the four miles back to the dog-farm. He got a little way down the road, then remembered his bag lunch. Mrs. Bowie always sent him with a slice of peanut-butter-bread folded over and an apple. It wasn’t much, but it would be a long walk, and as John Cheltzman said, something beat nothing every day of the week.

They wouldn’t let him in when he came back, but Margie Thurlow brought it out to him. Her eyes were still red from crying. She looked like she wanted to say something but didn’t know how. Blaze knew how that felt and smiled at her to show it was all right. She smiled back. One of his eyes was swelled almost shut, so he looked at her with the other one.

When he got to the edge of the schoolyard, he looked back to see her some more, but she was gone.

“Go out t’shed,” Bowie said.

“No.”

Bowie’s eyes widened. He shook his head a little, as if to clear it. “What did you say?”

“You shouldn’t want to whip me.”

“I’ll be the judge of that. Get out in that shed.”

“No.”

Bowie advanced on him. Blaze backed up two feet and then balled up his swollen fist. He set his feet. Bowie stopped. He had seen Randy. Randy’s neck had been broken like a cedar branch after a hard freeze.

“Go up to your room, you stupid sonofabitch,” he said.

Blaze went. He sat on the side of his bed. From there he could hear Bowie hollering into the telephone. He figured he knew who Bowie was hollering at.

He didn’t care. He didn’t care. But when he thought of Margie Thurlow, he cared. When he thought of Margie he wanted to cry, the way he sometimes wanted to cry when he saw one bird sitting all by itself on a telephone wire. He didn’t. He read Oliver Twist instead. He knew it by heart; he could even say the words he didn’t know. Outside, the dogs yapped. They were hungry. It was their feeding time. No one called him to feed them, though he would have, if asked.

He read Oliver Twist until the station wagon from HH came for him. The Law was driving. His eyes were red with fury. His mouth was nothing but a stitch between his chin and his nose. The Bowies stood together in the long shadows of a January dusk and watched them drive off.

When they got to Hetton House, Blaze felt an awful sense of familiarity fall over him. It felt like a wet shirt. He had to bite his tongue to keep from crying out. Three months and nothing had changed. HH was the same pile of red and everlasting shit-brick. The same windows threw the same yellow light onto the ground outside, only now the ground was covered with snow. In the spring the snow would be gone but the light would be the same.

In his office, The Law produced The Paddle. Blaze could have taken it away from him, but he was tired of fighting. And he guessed there was always someone bigger, with a bigger paddle.

After The Law had finished exercising his arm, Blaze was sent to the common bedroom in Fuller Hall. John Cheltzman was standing by the door. One of his eyes was a slit of swelling purple flesh.

“Yo, Blaze,” he said.

“Yo, Johnny. Where’s your specs?”

“Busted,” he said. Then cried: “Blaze, they broke my glasses! Now I can’t read anything!”

Blaze thought about this. He was sad to be here, but it meant a lot to find Johnny waiting. “We’ll fix em.” An idea struck him. “Or we’ll get shovel-chores in town after the next storm and save for new ones.”

“Could we do that, do you think?”

“Sure. You got to see to help me with my homework, don’t you?”

“Sure, Blaze, sure.”

They went inside together.

Chapter 10

APEX CENTER was a wide place in the road boasting a barber shop, a VFW hall, a hardware store, The Apex Pentecostal Church of the Holy Spirit, a beer-store, and a yellow blinker-light. It was walking distance from the shack, and Blaze went down there the morning after he held up Tim & Janet’s Quik-Pik for the second time. His goal was Apex Hardware, a scurgy little independent where he bought an aluminum extension ladder for thirty dollars, plus tax. It had a red tag on it saying PRICED 2 SELL.

He carried it back up the road, tromping stolidly along the plowed shoulder. He looked neither right nor left. It did not occur to him that his purchase might be remembered. George would have thought of it, but George was still away.

The ladder was too long for the trunk or the back seat of the stolen Ford, but it fit when he placed it with one end behind the driver’s seat and the other jutting into the front passenger’s seat. Once that was taken care of, he went into the house and turned the radio on to WJAB, which played until the sun went down.

“George?”

No answer. He made coffee, drank a cup, and lay down. He fell asleep with the radio on, playing “Phantom 409.” When he woke up it was dark and the radio was just playing static. It was quarter past seven.

Blaze got up and fixed him some dinner — a bologna sandwich and a can of Dole pineapple chunks. He loved Dole pineapple chunks. He could eat them three times a day and never get his fill. He swallowed the syrup in three long gulps, then looked around. “George?”

No answer.

He prowled restlessly. He missed the TV. The radio wasn’t company at night. If George was here, they could play cribbage. George always beat him because Blaze missed some of the runs and most of the fifteen-twos (they were Arithmetic), but it was fun charging up and down the board. Like being in a hoss-race. And if George didn’t want to do that, they could always shuffle four decks of cards together and play War. George would play War half