Blaze

into his suspenders. His face was the dusty, ruddy color of any farmer’s face. His pale, peculiar eyes might have been tipped just the slightest bit at the corners with amusement. Or not. When he was sure she was finished, had said her say, he spoke calmly and flatly. “I ain’t never peeked, Beatrice, but it sure as hell ain’t rape.”

And with that the matter was “tabled for further discussion.” Which, in northern New England, is the polite term for purgatory.

John Cheltzman and the other boys from Hetton House were enthusiastic about the trip from the first, but Blaze had his doubts. When it came to “working out,” he remembered the Bowies too well.

Toe-Jam couldn’t stop talking about finding a girl “to jazz around with.” Blaze didn’t believe he himself had to spend much time worrying about that. He still thought about Marjorie Thurlow, but what was the sense in thinking about the rest of them? Girls liked tough guys, fellows who could kid them along like the guys in the movies did.

Besides, girls scared him. Going into a toilet stall at HH with Toe-Jam’s treasured copy of Girl Digest and beating off did him fine. Did him right when he was wrong. So far as he’d been able to tell from listening to the other boys, the feeling you got from beating off and the feeling you got from sticking it in stacked up about the same, and there was this to be said for beating off: you could do it four or five times a day.

At fifteen, Blaze was finally reaching full growth. He was six and a half feet tall, and the string John stretched from shoulder to shoulder one day measured out twenty-eight inches. His hair was brown, coarse, thick, and oily. His hands were blocks measuring a foot from thumb to pinky when spread. His eyes were bottle green, brilliant and arresting — not a dummy’s eyes at all. He made the other boys look like pygmies, yet they teased him with easy, impudent openness. They had accepted John Cheltzman — now commonly known as JC or Jeepers Cripe — as Blaze’s personal totem, and because of their Boston adventure, the two boys had become folk heroes in the closed society of Hetton House. Blaze had achieved an even more special place. Anyone who has ever seen toddlers flocking around a St. Bernard will know what it was.

When they arrived at the Bluenote place, Dougie Bluenote was waiting to take them to their cabins. He told them they would be sharing Riffle Cabins that summer with half a dozen boys from South Portland Correctional. Mouths tightened at this news. South Portland boys were known as ball-busters of the first water.

Blaze was in Cabin 3 with John and Toe-Jam. John had grown thinner since the trip to Beantown. His rheumatic fever had been diagnosed by the Hetton House doctor (a Camel-smoking old quack named Donald Hough) as nothing but a bad case of the flu. This diagnosis would kill John, but not for another year.

“Here’s your cabin,” Doug Bluenote said. He had his father’s farmer’s face, but not his father’s strange pale eyes. “There’s a lot of boys used it before you. If you like it, take care of it so a lot of boys can use it after you. There’s a woodstove if it gets chilly at night, but it probably won’t. There’s four beds, so you get to choose. If we pick up another fella, he gets the one left over. There’s a hot plate for snacks and coffee. Unplug it last thing you do before you leave in the mornings. Unplug it last thing before turning in at night. There’s ashtrays. Your butts go there. Not on the floor. Not in the dooryard. There isn’t to be any drinking or playing poker. If me or my dad catches you drinking or playing poker, you’re done. No second chances. Breakfast at six, in the big house. You’ll get lunch at noon, and you’ll eat it in the yonder.” He waved his arm in the general direction of the blueberry fields. “Supper at six, in the big house. You start in raking tomorrow at seven. Good day to you, gentlemen.”

When he was gone, they poked around. It wasn’t a bad place. The stove was an old Invincible with a Dutch oven. The beds were all on the floor — for the first time in years they would not be stacked up like coins in a slot. There was a fairly large common room in addition to the kitchen and the two bedrooms. Here was a bookcase made out of a Pomona orange crate. It contained the Bible, a sex manual for young people, Ten Nights in a Barroom, and Gone with the Wind. There was a faded hooked rug on the floor. The floor itself was of loose boards, very different from the tile and varnished wood of HH. These boards rumbled underfoot when you walked on them.

While the others were making their beds, Blaze went out on the porch to look for the river. The river was there. It ran through a gentle depression at this point in its course, but not too far upstream he could hear the lulling thunder of a rapids. Gnarled trees, oak and willow, leaned over the water as if to see their reflections. Dragonflies and sewing needles and skeeters flew just above the surface, sometimes stitching it. Far away, in the distance, came the rough buzz of a cicada.

Blaze felt something in him loosen.

He sat down on the top step of the porch. After awhile John came out and sat beside him.

“Where’s Toe?” Blaze asked.

“Readin that sexbook. He’s lookin for pictures.”

“He find any?”

“Not yet.”

They sat quiet for awhile. “Blaze?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s not so bad, is it?”

“No.”

But he still remembered the Bowies.

They walked down to the big house at five-thirty. The path followed the river’s course and soon brought them to the Bend Cabins, where half a dozen girls were clustered.

The boys from HH and the ball-busters from South Portland kept walking, as if they were around girls — girls with breasts — every damn day. The girls joined them, some putting on lipstick as they chatted with each other, like being around boys — boys with beard-shadows — was as common as swatting flies. One or two were wearing nylons; the rest were in bobby-sox. The bobby-sox were all folded at exactly the same position on the shin. Make-up had been laid over blemishes — in some cases to the thickness of cupcake frosting. One girl, much envied by the others, was sporting green eye-shadow. All of them had perfected the sort of hip-rolling walk John Cheltzman later called the Streetwalker Strut.

One of the South Portland ball-busters hawked and spat. Then he picked a piece of alfalfa grass to stick between his teeth. The other boys regarded this closely and tried to think of something — anything — they themselves could do in order to demonstrate their nonchalance around the fairer sex. Most settled for hawking and spitting. Some originalists stuck their hands in their back pockets. Some