Blaze

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. He didn’t. He read Oliver Twist instead. He knew it by heart; he could even say the words he didn’t know. Outside, the dogs yapped. They were hungry. It was their feeding time. No one called him to feed them, though he would have, if asked.

He read Oliver Twist until the station wagon from HH came for him. The Law was driving. His eyes were red with fury. His mouth was nothing but a stitch between his chin and his nose. The Bowies stood together in the long shadows of a January dusk and watched them drive off.

When they got to Hetton House, Blaze felt an awful sense of familiarity fall over him. It felt like a wet shirt. He had to bite his tongue to keep from crying out. Three months and nothing had changed. HH was the same pile of red and everlasting shit-brick. The same windows threw the same yellow light onto the ground outside, only now the ground was covered with snow. In the spring the snow would be gone but the light would be the same.

In his office, The Law produced The Paddle. Blaze could have taken it away from him, but he was tired of fighting. And he guessed there was always someone bigger, with a bigger paddle.

After The Law had finished exercising his arm, Blaze was sent to the common bedroom in Fuller Hall. John Cheltzman was standing by the door. One of his eyes was a slit of swelling purple flesh.

“Yo, Blaze,” he said.

“Yo, Johnny. Where’s your specs?”

“Busted,” he said. Then cried: “Blaze, they broke my glasses! Now I can’t read anything!”

Blaze thought about this. He was sad to be here, but it meant a lot to find Johnny waiting. “We’ll fix em.” An idea struck him. “Or we’ll get shovel-chores in town after the next storm and save for new ones.”

“Could we do that, do you think?”

“Sure. You got to see to help me with my homework, don’t you?”

“Sure, Blaze, sure.”

They went inside together.

Chapter 10

APEX CENTER was a wide place in the road boasting a barber shop, a VFW hall, a hardware store, The Apex Pentecostal Church of the Holy Spirit, a beer-store, and a yellow blinker-light. It was walking distance from the shack, and Blaze went down there the morning after he held up Tim & Janet’s Quik-Pik for the second time. His goal was Apex Hardware, a scurgy little independent where he bought an aluminum extension ladder for thirty dollars, plus tax. It had a red tag on it saying PRICED 2 SELL.

He carried it back up the road, tromping stolidly along the plowed shoulder. He looked neither right nor left. It did not occur to him that his purchase might be remembered. George would have thought of it, but George was still away.

The ladder was too long for the trunk or the back seat of the stolen Ford, but it fit when he placed it with one end behind the driver’s seat and the other jutting into the front passenger’s seat. Once that was taken care of, he went into the house and turned the radio on to WJAB, which played until the sun went down.

“George?”

No answer. He made coffee, drank a cup, and lay down. He fell asleep with the radio on, playing “Phantom 409.” When he woke up it was dark and the radio was just playing static. It was quarter past seven.