Blaze

Moochie came back with Hankie’s egg cream and George’s coffee. George took a sip, grimaced. He looked at Moochie. “Do you always shit in your coffee cups, or do you sometimes use the pot, Sunshine?”

Hank said to Moochie: “George don’t mean nothin by it.”

George was nodding. “That’s right. I’m just a card, that’s all. Get lost a little while, Hankie. Go in the back and play pinball.”

Hankie was still grinning. “Yeah, okay. Rightie-O.”

When he was gone and Moochie was back down at the far end of the counter, George turned to Blaze again. “That retard says you might be lookin for work.”

“That’s about right,” Blaze said.

Hankie dropped coins into the pinball machine, then raised his hands and began to vocalize what might have been the theme from Rocky.

George jerked his head at him. “Now that he’s out again, Hankie’s got big plans. A gas station in Malden.”

“That so?” Blaze asked.

“Yeah. Crime of the fuckin century. You want to make a hundred bucks this afternoon?”

“Sure.” Blaze answered without hesitation.

“Will you do exactly what I tell you?”

“Sure. What’s the gag, Mr. Rackley?”

“George. Call me George.”

“What’s the gag, George?” Then he reconsidered the hot, urgent eyes and said, “I don’t hurt nobody.”

“Me either. Bang-bang’s for mokes. Now listen.”

That afternoon George and Blaze walked into Hardy’s, a thriving department store in Lynn. All the clerks in Hardy’s wore pink shirts with white arms. They also wore badges that said HI! I’M DAVE! Or JOHN! Or whoever. George was wearing one of those shirts under his outside shirt. His badge said HI! I’M FRANK! When Blaze saw that, he nodded and said, “That’s like an alias, right?”

George smiled — not the one he’d used around Hankie Melcher — and said: “Yes, Blaze. Like an alias.”

Something in that smile made Blaze relax. There was no hurt or mean in it. And since it was just the two of them on this gag, there was no one to nudge George in the ribs when Blaze said something dumb, and make him the outsider. Blaze wasn’t sure George would’ve grinned even if there had been someone else. He might have said something like Keep your fuckin elbows to yourself, shitmonkey. Blaze found himself liking someone for the first time since John Cheltzman died.

George had hoed his own tough row through life. He had been born in the charity ward of a Providence Catholic hospital called St. Joseph’s: mother unwed, father unknown. She resisted the nuns’ suggestions that she give the boy up for adoption and used him as a club to beat her family with instead. George grew up on the patched-pants side of town and pulled his first con at the age of four. His mother was about to give him a whacking for spilling a bowl of Maypo. George told her a man had brought her a letter and left it in the hall. While she was looking for it, he locked her out of the apartment and booked it down the fire escape. His whacking later was double, but he never forgot the exhilaration of knowing he had won, at least for a little while; he would chase that I gotcha feeling the rest of his life. It was ephemeral but always sweet.

He was a bright and bitter boy. Experience taught him things that losers like Hankie Melcher would never learn. George and three older acquaintances (he did not have pals) stole a car when George was eleven, took a joyride from Providence to Central Falls, got pinched. The fifteen-year-old who had been behind the wheel went to the reformatory. George and the other boys got probation. George also got a monster whacking from the gray-faced pimp his mother was by then living with. This was Aidan O’Kellaher, who had notoriously bad kidneys — hence his street-name, Pisser Kelly. Pisser beat on him until George’s half-sister screamed for him to stop.

“You want some?” Pisser asked, and when Tansy shook her head he said, “Then shut your fucking airscoop.”

George never stole another car without a reason. Once was enough to teach him there was no percentage in joyriding. It was a joyless world.

At thirteen, he and a friend got caught boosting in Wool-worth’s. Probation again. And another whacking. George didn’t stop boosting, but improved his technique, and wasn’t caught again.

When George was seventeen, Pisser got him a job running numbers. At this time, Providence was enjoying the sort of half-assed revival that passed for prosperity in the economically exhausted New England states. Numbers were going good. So was George. He bought nice clothes. He also began to jiggle his book. Pisser thought George a fine, enterprising boy; he was bringing in six hundred and fifty dollars every Wednesday. Unknown to his stepfather, George was socking away another two hundred.

Then the Mob came north from Atlantic City. They took over the numbers. Some of the mid-level locals got pink-slipped. Pisser Kelly was pink-slipped to an automobile graveyard, where he was discovered with his throat cut and his balls in the glove compartment of a Chevrolet Biscayne.

With his living taken away, George set off for Boston. He took his twelve-year-old sister with him. Tansy’s father was also unknown, but George had his suspicions; Pisser had had the same weak chin.

During the next seven years, George refined any number of short cons. He also invented a few. His mother listlessly signed a paper making him Tansy Rackley’s legal guardian, and George kept the little whore in school. Came a day when he discovered she was skin-popping heroin. She was also, happy days, knocked up. Hankie Melcher was eager to marry her. George was surprised at first, then wasn’t. The world was full of fools falling all over themselves to show you how smart they were.

George took to Blaze because Blaze was a fool with no pretensions. He wasn’t a sharpie, a dude, or a backroom Clyde. He didn’t shoot pool, let alone H. Blaze was a rube. He was a tool, and in their years together, George used him that way. But never badly. Like a good carpenter, George loved good tools — ones that worked like they were supposed to every time. He could turn his back on Blaze. He could go to sleep in a room where Blaze was awake, and know that when he woke up himself, the swag would still be under the bed.