Blaze

“The fuckhead couldn’t defend the Pope on a rape charge. Listen: you stay away from Moochie’s.”

“But Hank said if I came around, he could —”

“And stay away from Hankie, too. Get a straight job until I come out, that’s how you roll. Don’t go trying to pull any cons on your own. You’re too goddam dumb. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Blaze said, and grinned. But he felt like crying.

George saw it and punched Blaze on the arm. “You’ll be fine,” he said.

Then, as Blaze left, George called to him. Blaze turned. George made an impatient gesture at his forehead. Blaze nodded and swerved the bill of his cap around to the good-luck side. He grinned. But inside he still felt like crying.

He tried his old job, but it was too square after life with George. He quit and looked for something better. For awhile he was a bouncer at a place in the Combat Zone, but he was no good at it. His heart was too soft.

He went back to Maine, got a job cutting pulp, and waited for George to get out. He liked pulping, and he liked driving Christmas trees south. He liked the fresh air and horizons that were unbroken by tall buildings. The city was okay sometimes, but the woods were quiet. There were birds, and sometimes you saw deer wading in ponds and your heart went out to them. He sure didn’t miss the subways, or the pushing crowds. But when George dropped him a short note — Getting out on Friday, hope to see you — Blaze put in his time and went south to Boston again.

George had picked up an assortment of new cons in Walpole. They tried them out like old ladies test-driving new cars. The most successful was the queer-con. That bastard ran like a railroad for three years, until Blaze was busted on what George called “the Jesus-gag.”

George picked something else up in prison: the idea of one big score and out. Because, he told Blaze, he couldn’t see spending the best years of his life hustling homos in bars where everybody was dressed up like The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Or peddling fake encyclopedias. Or running a Murphy. No, one big score and out. It became his mantra.

A high school teacher named John Burgess, in for manslaughter, had suggested kidnapping.

“You’re trippin!” George said, horrified. They were in the yard on ten o’clock exercise, eating bananas and watching some mokes with big muscles throw a football around.

“It’s got a bad name because it’s the crime of choice for idiots,” Burgess said. He was a slight balding man. “Kidnap a baby, that’s the ticket.”

“Yeah, like Hauptmann,” George said, and jittered back and forth like he was getting electrocuted.

“Hauptmann was an idiot. Hell, Rasp, a well-handled baby snatch could hardly miss. What’s the kid going to say when they ask him who did it? Goo-goo ga-ga?” He laughed.

“Yeah, but the heat,” George said.

“Sure, sure, the heat.” Burgess smiled and tugged his ear. He was a great old ear-tugger. “There would be heat. Baby snatches and cop-killings, always a lot of heat. You know what Harry Truman said about that?”

“No.”

“He said if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”

“You can’t collect the ransom,” George said. “Even if you did, the money would be marked. Goes without saying.”

Burgess raised one finger like a professor. Then he did that dopey ear-tugging thing, which kind of spoiled it. “You’re assuming the cops would be called in. If you scared the family bad enough, they’d deal privately.” He paused. “And even if the money was hot…you saying you don’t know some guys?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“There are guys who buy hot money. It’s just another investment to them, like gold or government bonds.”

“But collecting the swag — what about that?”

Burgess shrugged. He pulled on his ear. “Easy. Have the marks drop it from a plane.” Then he got up and walked away.

Blaze was sentenced to four years on the Jesus-gag. George told him it would be a tit if he kept his nose clean. Two at most, he said, and two was what it turned out to be. Those years inside weren’t much different than the jail-time he’d put in after beating up The Law; only the inmates had grown older. He didn’t spend any time in solitary. When he got the heebie-jeebies on long evenings, or during one interminable lockdown when there were no exercise privileges, he wrote George. His spelling was awful, the letters long. George didn’t answer very often, but in time the very act of composition, laborious as it was, became soothing. He imagined that when he wrote, George was standing behind him, reading over his shoulder.

“Prisin laundre,” George would say. “My fuckin word.”

“That wrong, George?”

“P-r-i-s-o-n, prison. L-a-u-n-d-r-y, laundry. Prison laundry.”

“Oh yeah. Right.”

His spelling and even his punctuation improved, even though he never used a dictionary. Another time:

“Blaze, you’re not using your cigarette ration.” This was during the golden time when some of the tobacco companies gave out little trial packs.

“I don’t hardly smoke, George. You know that. They’d just pile up.”

“Listen to me, Blazer. You pick em up on Friday, then sell em the next Thursday, when everybody’s hurtin for a