Blaze

This news traveled quickly. Groups of boys began to move with studied casualness toward where Glen and some of the older boys were playing a clumsy, troll-like version of kickball. Glen was pitching. He rolled the ball quick and hard, making it bounce and skitter on the frozen ground.

Mrs. Foster, who had playground duty that day, was on the other side of the building, monitoring the little ones on the swings. She would not be a factor, at least not at first.

Glen looked up and saw Blaze coming. He dropped the kickball. He put his hands on his hips. Both teams collapsed to form a semicircle around him and behind him. They were all seventh- and eighth-graders. None were as big as Blaze. Only Glen was bigger.

The fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-graders were grouped loosely behind Blaze. They shuffled, adjusted their belts, pulled self-consciously at their mittens, and mumbled to each other. The boys on both sides wore expressions of absurd casualness. The fight had not been called yet.

“What do you want, fucknuts?” Glen Hardy asked. His voice was phlegmy. It was the voice of a young god with a winter cold.

“Why did you hit Margie Thurlow in the shot?” Blaze asked.

“I felt like it.”

“Okay,” Blaze said, and waded in.

Glen hit him twice in the face — whap-whap — before he even got close, and blood began to pour out of Blaze’s nose. Then Glen backed away, wanting to keep the advantage of his reach. People were yelling.

Blaze shook his head. Drops of blood flew, splattering the snow on either side and in front of him.

Glen was grinning. “State kid,” he said. “State kid, shit-for-brains state kid.” He hit Blaze in the middle of Blaze’s dented forehead and his grin faltered as pain exploded up his arm. Blaze’s forehead was very hard, dented 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.