Blaze

Solitary was worse still. Blaze paced the tiny cell endlessly (six steps each way) while time faltered and then stopped. When the door was finally opened and he was let back into the society of the other boys — free to walk the exercise yard or pitch bundles off the trucks that came into the loading dock — he was nearly mad with relief and gratitude. He hugged the jailer who let him out on the second occasion and gained this note in his jacket: Shows homosexual tendencies.

But solitary wasn’t the worst thing. He was forgetful, but the memory of the worst thing never left him. That was how they got you. They took you to a little white room and gathered around you in a circle. Then they began asking questions. And before you had time to think what the first question meant — what it said — they were on to the next, and the next, and the next. They backtracked, sidetracked, went uptrack and down. It was like being caught in a spiderweb. In the end, you would admit anything they asked you to admit, just to shut them up. Then they brought you a paper and told you to sign your name to it and brother, you signed.

The man in charge of Blaze’s interrogation had been an assistant district attorney named Holloway. Holloway didn’t come into the little room until the others had been going at him for at least an hour and a half. Blaze had his sleeves rolled up and the bottom of his shirt had come untucked. He was covered with sweat and needed to go Number Two Bathroom, bad. It was like being in the Bowies’ dogpen again, with the Collies snapping all around him. Holloway was cool and natty in a blue pinstriped suit. He had on black shoes with galaxies of tiny holes in the fronts. Blaze never forgot the holes in the fronts of Mr. Holloway’s shoes.

Mr. Holloway sat on the table in the middle of the room, his ass half on and half off, one of his legs swinging back and forth, one of those elegant black shoes moving like the pendulum in a clock. He gave Blaze a friendly grin and said, “Want to talk, son?”

Blaze began to stammer. Yes, he did want to talk. If someone really wanted to listen, and be a little bit friendly, he did.

Holloway told the others to get out.

Blaze asked if he could go to the bathroom.

Holloway pointed across the room to a door Blaze hadn’t even noticed and said, “What are you waiting for?” He was wearing that same friendly grin when he said it.

When Blaze came out, there was a pitcher of icewater and an empty glass on the table. Blaze looked at Holloway, and Holloway nodded. Blaze drank three glasses in a row, then sat back with what felt like an icepick planted in the center of his forehead.

“Good?” Holloway asked.

Blaze nodded.

“Yeah. Answering questions is thirsty work. Cigarette?”

“Don’t use em.”

“Good kid, that’ll never get you in trouble,” Holloway said, and lit one for himself. “Who are you to your pals, son? What do they call you?”

“Blaze.”

“Okay, Blaze, I’m Frank Holloway.” He stuck out his hand, then winced and clamped the end of his cigarette with his teeth as Blaze wrung it. “Now tell me exactly what you did to wind up here.”

Blaze began to pour out his story, beginning with The Law’s arrival at Hetton and Blaze’s problems with Arithmetic.

Holloway held up his hand. “Mind if I get a stenographer in on this, Blaze? That’s a kind of secretary. Save you repeating all this.”

No. He didn’t mind.

Later, at the end, the others came back in. When they did, Blaze noticed that Holloway’s eyes had lost their friendly glint. He slipped off the table, dusted his ass with two brisk whacks, and said, “Type it up and have the dummy sign it.” He left without looking back.

He left prison not quite two years after entering it — he got four months off for good behavior. They gave him two pairs of prison jeans, a prison denim jacket, and a holdall to carry them in. He also had his prison savings: a check for $43.84.

It was October. The air was flushed sweet with wind. The gate-guard waved one hand back and forth like a windshield wiper and told him to stay clean. Blaze walked past without looking or speaking, and when he heard the heavy green gate thud shut behind him, he shivered.

He walked until the sidewalks ended and the town disappeared. He looked at everything. Cars whipped past, looking strangely updated. One slowed, and he thought maybe he would be offered a ride. Then someone shouted, “Heyyy, JAILBIRD,” and the car scooted away.

At last he sat down on the rock wall surrounding a little country graveyard and just looked down the road. It came to him that he was free. He had no one to boss him, but he was bad at bossing himself and had no friends. He was out of solitary, but had no job. He didn’t even know how to turn the piece of stiff paper they’d given him into money.

Still, a wonderful soothing gratitude stole over him. He closed his eyes and turned his face up to the sun, filling his head with red light. He smelled the grass and fresh asphalt where some road-crew had recently fixed a pothole. He smelled exhaust from cars that went wherever their drivers wanted to go. He clutched himself with relief.

He slept in a barn that night and the next day got a job picking taters for a dime a basket. That winter he worked in a New Hampshire woolen mill, strictly non-union. In the spring he took a bus to Boston and got a job in the laundry of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He had been working there six months when a familiar face from South Portland turned up — Billy St. Pierre. They went out and bought each other many beers. Billy confided to Blaze that he and a friend were going to hold up a liquor store in Southie. The place was a tit. He said there was room for one more.

Blaze was up for it. His cut was seventeen dollars. He went on working at the laundry. Four months later, he and Billy and Billy’s brother-in-law Dom knocked over a combination gas station and grocery store in Danvers. A month after that, Blaze and Billy, plus another South Portland alum named Calvin Surks, knocked over a loan agency