Blaze

Pampers.

“Shit,” he said. “Shit, shit, shit.”

“He can’t be far,” Franklin said. “He’s on foot. With the kid.”

“It’s ten degrees out there,” someone in the hall remarked.

Sterling thought: One of you guys tell me something I don’t fucking know.

Franklin was looking around. “Where’s Corliss? Brad, did you see Corliss?”

“I think he might still be downstairs,” Bradley said.

“We’re going back into the woods,” Sterling said. “The moke’s got to be in the woods.”

There was a gunshot. It was faint, muffled by the snow, but unmistakable.

They looked at each other. There were five seconds of perfect, shocked silence. Maybe seven. Then they broke for the door.

Joe was still asleep when the bullet came into the cave. It ricocheted twice, sounding like an angry bee, chipping away splinters of granite and sending them flying. Blaze had been laying out diapers; he wanted to give Joe a change, make sure he was dry before they set out.

Now Joe started awake and began to cry. His small hands were waving in the air. One of the granite chips had cut his face.

Blaze didn’t think. He saw the blood and thought ceased. What replaced it was black and murderous. He burst from the cave and charged toward the sound of the shot, screaming.

Chapter 22

BLAZE WAS SITTING at the counter in Moochie’s, eating a doughnut and reading a Spider-Man funnybook, when George walked into his life. It was September. Blaze hadn’t worked for two months, and money was tight. Several of the candy-store wiseguys had been pinched. Blaze himself had been taken in for questioning about a loan-office holdup in Saugus, but he hadn’t been in on that job and had come across so honestly bewildered that the cops let him go. Blaze was thinking about trying to get back his old job at the hospital laundry.

“That’s him,” someone said. “That’s The Boogeyman.”

Blaze turned and saw Hankie Melcher. Standing with him was a little guy in a sharp suit. The little guy had sallow skin and eyes that seemed to burn like coals.

“Hi, Hank,” Blaze said. “Ain’t seenya.”

“Ah, little state vacation,” Hank said. “They let me out cause they can’t count right up there. Ain’t that so, George?”

The little guy said nothing, only smiled thinly and went on looking at Blaze. Those hot eyes made Blaze uncomfortable.

Moochie walked down, wiping his hands on his apron. “Yo, Hankie.”

“Chocolate egg cream for me,” Hank said. “Want one, George?”

“Just coffee. Black.”

Moochie went away. Hank said, “Blaze, like you to meet my brother-in-law. George Rackley, Clay Blaisdell.”

“Hi,” Blaze said. This smelled like work.

“Yo.” George shook his head. “You’re one big mother, know it?”

Blaze laughed as if no one had ever observed he was one big mother before.

“George is a card,” Hank said, grinning. “He’s a regular Bill Crosby. Only white.”

“Sure,” Blaze said, still smiling.

Moochie came back with Hankie’s egg cream and George’s coffee. George took a sip, grimaced. He looked at Moochie. “Do you always shit in your coffee cups, or do you sometimes use the pot, Sunshine?”

Hank said to Moochie: “George don’t mean nothin by it.”

George was nodding. “That’s right. I’m just a card, that’s all. Get lost a little while, Hankie. Go in the back and play pinball.”

Hankie was still grinning. “Yeah, okay. Rightie-O.”

When he was gone and Moochie was back down at the far end of the counter, George turned to Blaze again. “That retard says you might be lookin for work.”

“That’s about right,” Blaze said.

Hankie dropped coins into the pinball machine, then raised his hands and began to vocalize what might have been the theme from Rocky.

George jerked his head at him. “Now that he’s out again, Hankie’s got big plans. A gas station in Malden.”

“That so?” Blaze asked.

“Yeah. Crime of the fuckin century. You want to make a hundred bucks this afternoon?”

“Sure.” Blaze answered without hesitation.

“Will you do exactly what I tell you?”

“Sure. What’s the gag, Mr. Rackley?”

“George. Call me George.”

“What’s the gag, George?” Then he reconsidered the hot, urgent eyes and said, “I don’t hurt nobody.”

“Me either. Bang-bang’s for mokes. Now listen.”

That afternoon George and Blaze walked into Hardy’s, a thriving department store in Lynn. All the clerks in Hardy’s wore pink shirts with white arms. They also wore badges that said HI! I’M DAVE! Or JOHN! Or whoever. George was wearing one of those shirts under his outside shirt. His badge said HI! I’M FRANK! When Blaze saw that, he nodded and said, “That’s like an alias, right?”

George smiled — not the one he’d used around Hankie Melcher — and said: “Yes, Blaze. Like an alias.”

Something in that smile made Blaze relax. There was no hurt or mean in it. And since it was just the two of them on this gag, there was no one to nudge George in the ribs when Blaze said something dumb, and make him the outsider. Blaze wasn’t sure George would’ve grinned even if there had been someone else. He might have said something like Keep your fuckin elbows to yourself, shitmonkey. Blaze found himself liking someone for the first time since John Cheltzman died.

George had hoed his own tough row through life. He had been born in the charity ward of a Providence Catholic hospital called St. Joseph’s: mother unwed, father unknown. She resisted the nuns’ suggestions that she give the boy up for adoption and used him as a club to beat her family with instead. George grew up on the patched-pants side of town and pulled his first con at the age of four. His mother was about to give him a whacking for spilling a bowl of Maypo. George told her a man had brought her a letter and left it in the hall. While she was looking for it, he locked her out of the apartment and booked it down the fire escape. His whacking later was double, but he never forgot the exhilaration of knowing he had won, at least for a little while; he would chase that I gotcha feeling the rest of his life. It was ephemeral but always sweet.

He was a bright and bitter boy. Experience taught him things that losers like Hankie Melcher would never learn. George and three older acquaintances (he did not have pals) stole a car when George was eleven, took a joyride from Providence to Central Falls, got pinched. The fifteen-year-old who had been behind the wheel went to the reformatory. George and the other boys got probation. George also got a monster whacking from the gray-faced pimp his mother was by then living with. This was Aidan O’Kellaher, who had notoriously bad kidneys — hence his street-name, Pisser Kelly. Pisser beat on him until George’s half-sister screamed for him to stop.

“You want some?” Pisser asked, and when Tansy shook her head he said, “Then shut your fucking airscoop.”

George never stole another car without a reason. Once was enough to teach him there was no percentage in joyriding. It was a joyless world.

At thirteen, he and a friend got caught boosting in Wool-worth’s. Probation again. And another whacking. George didn’t stop boosting, but improved his technique, and wasn’t caught again.