Blaze

at once, swaying, swaying, usually grinning, his dented face turned up to the sky, finally toppling like a building, to the inevitable cheers of all. Mrs. Waslewski, who was a Catholic, saw him toting first-graders around on his shoulders one day when she had playground duty and started calling him St. Francis of the Little People.

Mrs. Cheney brought him along in reading, writing, and history. She understood early on that for Blaze, math (which he always called Arithmetic) was a lost cause. The one time she tried him on flash cards, he turned pale and she was convinced the boy actually came close to fainting.

He was slow but not retarded. By December he had moved from the first-grade adventures of Dick and Jane to the stories in Roads to Everywhere, the third-grade reader. She gave him a pile of Classics comic-books she kept bound in hard-covers to take back to the Bowies’ with a note saying they were homework. His favorite, of course, was Oliver Twist, which he read over and over until he knew every word.

All this continued until January and might have continued until spring, except for two unfortunate events. He killed a dog and he fell in love.

He hated the Collies, but one of his chores was to feed them. They were purebreds, but poor diets and lives lived exclusively in the kennel and the pen made them ugly and neurotic. Most were cowardly and shied from the touch. They would lunge at you, yapping and snarling, only to sheer away and approach from a different angle. Sometimes they snuck in from behind. Then they might nip at your calves or buttocks before dashing off. The clamor at feeding time was hellish. They were out of Hubert Bowie’s province. Mrs. Bowie was also the only one they would come to. She fawned over them in her buzzing voice. She always wore a red jacket when she was with the dogs, and it was covered with tawny hair.

The Bowies sold very few grown animals, but the pups fetched two hundred dollars each in the spring. Mrs. Bowie exhorted Blaze on the importance of feeding the dogs well — of feeding them what she called “a good mix.” Yet she never fed them, and what Blaze put in their troughs was discount chow from a feed-store in Falmouth. This feed was called Dog’s Worth. Hubert Bowie sometimes called it Cheap-Chow and sometimes Dog Farts. But never when his wife was around.

The dogs knew Blaze didn’t like them, that he was afraid of them, and every day they grew more aggressive toward him. By the time the weather really began to turn cold, their dashes sometimes brought them close enough to nip him from the front. At night he sometimes woke from dreams in which they packed together, brought him down, and began to eat him alive. He would lie in his bed after these dreams, puffing cold vapor into the dark air and feeling himself over to make sure he was still whole. He knew he was, he knew the difference between what was dreams and what was real, but in the dark that difference seemed thinner.

Several times their bumping and dashing caused him to spill the food. Then he had to scrape it up as best he could from the packed, urine-spotted snow while they snarled and fought over it around him.

Gradually, one became the leader in their undeclared war against him. His name was Randy. He was eleven. He had one milky eye. He scared the shit out of Blaze. His teeth were like old yellow tusks. There was a white stripe down the center of his skull. He would approach Blaze from dead-on, from twelve o’clock high, haunches pumping under his ragged pelt. Randy’s good eye seemed to burn while the bad one remained indifferent to it all, a dead lamp. His claws dug small clods of yellow-white impacted snow from the floor of the dogpen. He would accelerate until it seemed impossible he could do anything but launch himself into flight at Blaze’s throat. The other dogs would be whipped into a frenzy by this, leaping and turning and snarling in the air. At the last instant, Randy’s paws would come down stiff, spraying snow all over Blaze’s green pants, and he would race away in a big loop, only to repeat the maneuver. But he was sheering off later and later, until he was close enough for Blaze to smell his heat and even his breath.

Then one evening toward the end of January, he knew the dog wasn’t going to sheer off. He didn’t know how this charge was different, or why, but it was. This time Randy meant it. He was going to leap. And when he did, the other dogs would come in quickly. Then it would be like in his dreams.

The dog came, speeding faster and faster, silent. This time there were no paws out. No skidding or turning. Its haunches tensed, then pushed down. A moment later Randy was in the air.

Blaze was carrying two steel buckets filled with Dog’s Worth. When he saw Randy meant it this time, all his fear left him. He dropped his buckets at the same time Randy leaped. He was wearing rawhide gloves with holes in the fingers. He met the dog in midair with his right fist, under the long shovel-shelf of the jaw. The jolt ran all the way up to his shoulder. His hand went instantly and completely numb. There was a brief, bitter crack. Randy did a perfect one-eighty in the cold air and landed on his back with a thud.

Blaze realized all the other dogs had fallen silent only when they began to bark again. He picked up the buckets, went to the trough, and poured in the chow. Always before, the dogs had crowded in at once to begin snarking it up, growling and snapping for the best places, before he could even add water. He could do nothing about it; he was ineffectual. Now, when one of the smaller Collies rushed for the trough with its stupid eyes gleaming and its stupid tongue hanging from the side of its stupid mouth, Blaze jerked at it with his gloved hands and it cut sidewards so fast its feet went out from under it and it landed on its side. The others shrank back.

Blaze added two buckets of water from the bib-faucet. “There,” he said. “It’s wet down. Go on and eat it.”

He walked back to look at Randy while the other dogs ran to the feeding trough.

The fleas were already leaving Randy’s cooling body to die in the piss-stained snow. The good eye was now almost as glazed-looking as the bad one. This awoke a feeling of pity and sadness in Blaze. Perhaps the dog had only been playing, after all. Just trying to scare him.

And he was scared. That, too. He would catch dickens for this.

He walked to the house with the empty buckets, head lowered. Mrs. Bowie was in the kitchen. She had a rubbing-board propped in the sink and was washing curtains on it. She was singing a hymn in her reedy voice as she worked.

“Aw, don’t you track in on my floor, now!” she cried, seeing him. It was her floor, but he washed it. On his knees. Sullenness awoke in his breast.

“Randy’s dead. He jumped me. I hit him. Killed him.”

Her hands flew out of the soapy water and she screamed. “Randy? Randy! Randy! ”

She ran around in a circle, grabbed her sweater from the peg near the woodstove, then ran for the door.

“Hubert!” she called to her husband. “Hubert, oh Hubert! Such a bad boy!” And then, as if still singing: “OooooooOOOOOO —”