Blaze

Blaze was delighted, too. He was making a cool thirty bucks a week, which was more than enough to pay for the movies, plus all the popcorn, candy, and soda he could put away. He bought John’s ticket, too, cheerfully, as a matter of course. He would have been happy to throw in all the usual snacks, as well, but for John the movie was usually enough. He watched greedily, his mouth agape.

Back at Hetton, John was beginning to write stories. They were stumbling things, cribbed from the movies he watched with Blaze, but they began to earn him a certain popularity with his peers. The other boys didn’t like you to be smart, but they admired a certain kind of cleverness. And they liked stories. They were hungry for stories.

On one of their trips they saw a vampire movie called Second Coming. John Cheltzman’s version of this classic ended with Count Igor Yorga ripping the head from a half-clad young lovely with “quakeing breasts the size of watermelons” and jumping into the River Yorba with the head under his arm. The strangely patriotic name of this underground classic was The Eyes of Yorga Are Upon You.

But this night John didn’t want to go, even though another horror movie was playing. He had the runs. He’d been five times that morning and afternoon despite half a bottle of Pepto from the infirmary (a glorified closet on the second floor). He thought he wasn’t done, either.

“Come on,” Blaze urged. “The Nordica’s got a terrific crapper downstairs. I took a shit there once myself. We’ll stick real close to it.”

Thus persuaded, despite the dire rumblings in his vitals, John went with Blaze and got on the bus. They sat up front, behind the driver. They were almost the big ‘uns now, after all.

John was okay during the previews, but just as the Warner Bros logo was coming on, he stood up, slid past Blaze, and started up the aisle in a crabwise walk. Blaze was sympathetic, but that was life. He turned his attention back to the screen where a dust storm was blowing around in what looked like the Desert of Maine, only with pyramids. Soon he was deeply involved in the story, frowning with concentration.

When John sat back down beside him, he was hardly aware of him until John started yanking his sleeve and whispering, “Blaze! Blaze! F’God sakes, Blaze!”

Blaze came out of the movie like a sound sleeper waking from a nap. “Whats’sa matter? You sick? You shit yourself?”

“No…no. Look at this!”

Blaze peered at what John was holding just below seat-level. It was a wallet.

“Hey! Where’d you —”

“Shh!” Somebody in front of them hissed.

“— get that?” Blaze finished in a whisper.

“In the men’s!” John whispered back. He was trembling with excitement. “It musta fallen out of some guy’s pants when he sat down to take a dump! There’s money in it! Lots of money!”

Blaze took the wallet, holding it well out of sight. He opened the bill compartment. He felt his stomach drop. Then it seemed to bounce, and cram itself halfway up his throat. The bill compartment was full of dough. One, two, three fifty-dollar bills. Four twenties. Couple of fives. Some ones.

“I can’t count it all up,” he whispered. “How much?”

John’s voice rose in slightly awed triumph, but it went unnoticed. The monster was after a girl in brown shorts and the audience was happily screaming. “Two hundred and forty-eight bucks!”

“Jesus,” Blaze said. “You still got that rip in the linin of your coat?”

“Sure.”

“Put it in there. They may frisk us goin out.”

But no one did. And John’s runs were cured. Finding that much money seemed to have scared the shit out of him.

John bought a Portland Press Herald from Stevie Ross, who had a paper route, on Monday morning. He and Blaze went out behind the toolshed and opened it to the classified ads. John said that was the place to look. The lost and founds were on page 38. And there, between a LOST French Poodle and a FOUND pair of women’s gloves, was the following item:

LOST

A man’s black leather wallet

with the initials RKF stamped beside

the photo compartment. If found, call

555-0928 or write Box 595 care of this

newspaper. REWARD OFFERED.

“Reward!” Blaze exclaimed, and punched John on the shoulder.

“Yeah,” John said. He rubbed where Blaze had punched. “So we call the guy and he gives us ten bucks plus a pat on the head. BFD.” This stood for big fucking deal.

“Oh.” The word REWARD had been standing in letters of gold two feet high in Blaze’s mind. Now they collapsed to a pile of leaden rubble. “Then what should we do with it?”

It was the first time he had really looked to Johnny for leadership. The two hundred and forty-eight bucks was a mystifying problem. If you had two bits, you bought a Coke. Two bucks got you into the movies. Going further now, struggling, Blaze supposed you could ride the bus all the way to Portland and go to the show there. But for a sum of this size, his imagination was no good. All he could think of was clothes. Blaze cared nothing for clothes.