Blaze

She thrust Blaze out of her way and ran outside. Mr. Bowie appeared in one of the many shed doors, his scrawny face long with surprise. He strode to Blaze and grabbed him by one shoulder. “What happened?”

“Randy’s dead,” Blaze said stolidly. “He jumped me and I did him down.”

“You wait,” Hubert Bowie said, and went after his wife.

Blaze took off his red and black jacket and sat down on the stool in the corner. Snow melted off his boots and made a puddle. He didn’t care. The heat from the woodstove made his face throb. He chopped the wood. He didn’t care.

Bowie had to lead his wife back inside, because she had her apron over her face. She was sobbing loudly. The high pitch of her voice made her sound like a sewing machine.

“Go out into the shed,” Bowie told him.

Blaze opened the door. Bowie helped him through it with the toe of his boot. Blaze fell down the two steps into the dooryard, got up, and went into the shed. There were tools in there — axes, hammers, a lathe, an emery wheel, a planer, a sander, other things he didn’t know the names of. There were auto parts and boxes of old magazines. And a snow shovel with a wide aluminum scoop. His shovel. Blaze looked at it, and something about the shovel brought his hate of the Bowies to completion, finished it off. They received a hundred and sixty dollars a month for keeping him and he did their chores. He ate badly. He had eaten better at HH. It wasn’t fair.

Hubert Bowie opened the door to the shed and stepped in. “I’m going to whip you now,” he said.

“That dog jumped me. He was going for my throat.”

“Don’t say no more. You’re only making it worse for yourself.”

Every spring, Bowie bred one of his cows with Franklin Marstellar’s bull, Freddy. On the wall of the shed was a walking-halter he called a “love-halter” and a nosepiece. Bowie took it from its peg and held it by the nosepiece, fingers curled through the lattices. The heavy leather straps held down.

“Bend over that work bench.”

“Randy went for my throat. I’m telling you it was him or me.”

“Bend over that work bench.”

Blaze hesitated, but he did not think. Thinking was a long process for him. Instead he consulted the tickings of instinct.

It wasn’t time yet.

He bent over the work bench. It was a long hard whipping, but he didn’t cry. He did that later, in his room.

The girl he’d fallen in love with was a seventh-grader at Cumberland A School named Marjorie Thurlow. She had yellow hair and blue eyes and no breasts. She had a sweet smile that made the corners of her eyes turn up. On the playground, Blaze followed her with his own eyes. She made him feel empty in the pit of his stomach, but in a way that was good. He imagined himself carrying her books and protecting her from outlaws. These thoughts always made his face burn.

One day not long after the incident of Randy and the whipping, the District Nurse came to school to give immunization boosters. The children had been given release forms the week before; those parents who wanted their children to have the shots had signed them. Now, the children with signed forms queued up in a nervous line leading into the cloakroom. Blaze was one of these. Bowie had called up George Henderson, who was on the schoolboard, and asked if the shots cost money. They didn’t, so Bowie signed.

Margie Thurlow was also in line. She looked very pale. Blaze felt bad for her. He wished he could go back and hold her hand. The thought made his face burn. He bent his head and shuffled his feet.

Blaze was first in line. When the nurse beckoned him into the cloakroom, he took off his red- and black-checked jacket and unbuttoned the sleeve of his shirt. The nurse took the needle out of a kind of cooker, looked at his slip, then said: “Better unbutton the other sleeve too, big boy. You’re down for both.”

“Will it hurt?” Blaze said, unbuttoning the other sleeve.

“Only for a second.”

“Okay,” Blaze said, and let her shoot the needle from the cooker into his left arm.

“Right. Now the other arm and you’re done.”

Blaze turned the other way. She shot some more stuff from another needle into his right arm. Then he left the cloakroom, went back to his desk, and began to puzzle out a story in his Scholastic.

When Margie came out, there were tears in her eyes and more on her face, but she wasn’t sobbing. Blaze felt proud of her. When she passed his desk on her way to the door (seventh-graders were in another room), he gave her a smile. And she smiled back. Blaze folded that smile, put it away, and kept it for years.

At recess, just as Blaze was coming out the door to the playground, Margie ran inside past him, sobbing. He turned to look after her, then walked slowly into the playground, brow creased, face unhappy. He came to Peter Lavoie, batting the tetherball on its post with one mittened hand, and asked if Peter knew what had happened to Margie.

“Glen hit her in the shot,” Peter Lavoie said. He demonstrated on a passing boy, balling his fist and hitting the kid three times fast, whap-whap-whap. Blaze watched this, frowning. The nurse had lied. Both of his arms now hurt badly from the shots. The large muscles felt stiff and bruised. It was hard to even bend them without wincing. And Margie was a girl. He looked around for Glen.

Glen Hardy was a huge eighth-grader, the kind that will play football, then run to fat. He had red hair that he combed back from his forehead in big waves. His father was a farmer on the west end of town, and Glen’s arms were slabs of muscle.

Somebody threw Blaze the keepaway ball. He dropped it on the ground without looking at it and started for Glen Hardy.

“Oh boy,” Peter Lavoie said. “Blaze is goin after Glen!”