Blaze

The season lasted from the second week of July into the third or fourth week of August. Bluenote had constructed ten cabins down by the Royal River, which ran smack through the middle of his property. There were six boys’ cabins and four girls’ cabins in another cluster at a little distance. Because of their relative positions on the river, the boys’ quarters were called Riffle Cabins and the girls’ Bend Cabins. One of Bluenote’s sons — Douglas — stayed with the boys. Bluenote advertised each June for a woman to stay at Bend Cabins, someone who could double as a “camp mom” and a cook. He paid her well, and this came out of his own pocket too.

The whole scandalous affair came up at town meeting one year, when a Southwest Bend coalition tried to force a reassessment of the taxes on Bluenote’s property. The idea seemed to be to cut his profit margin enough to make his pinko social welfare programs impossible.

Bluenote said nothing until the discussion’s close. His boy Dougie and two or three friends from his end of town had more than held up his side. Then, just before Mr. Moderator gaveled the discussion to a close, he rose and asked to be recognized. Which he was. Reluctantly.

He said, “There’s not a single one of you lost a single thing during raking-time. There’s never been a single car-theft or home break-in or act of barn-arson. Not so much as a stolen soup-spoon. All I want to do is show these kids what a good life gets you. What they do about it after they’ve seen it is up to them. Ain’t none of you ever been stuck in the mud and needed a push? I won’t ask you how you can be for this and still call yourselves Christians, because one of you would have some kind of answer out of what I call the Holy-Joe-Do-It-My-Way Bible. But, Jeezly-Crow! How can you read the parable of the Good Samaritan on Sunday and then say you’re for a thing like this on Monday night?”

At that, Beatrice McCafferty exploded. Heaving herself up from her folding chair (which might have given a creak of thanks) and without waiting for so much as a nod of recognition from Mr. Moderator, she trumpeted: “All right, let’s get to it! Hanky-panky! You want to stand there, Harry Bluenote, and say there’s never been none between the boys in that one bunch of cabins and the girls in t’other?” She looked around, grim as a shovel. “I wonder if Mr. Bluenote was born yesterday? I wonder what he thinks goes on in the dead of night, if it ain’t robbery or barn-burning?”

Harry Bluenote did not sit during this. He stood on the other side of the meeting hall with his thumbs hooked into his suspenders. His face was the dusty, ruddy color of any farmer’s face. His pale, peculiar eyes might have been tipped just the slightest bit at the corners with amusement. Or not. When he was sure she was finished, had said her say, he spoke calmly and flatly. “I ain’t never peeked, Beatrice, but it sure as hell ain’t rape.”

And with that the matter was “tabled for further discussion.” Which, in northern New England, is the polite term for purgatory.

John Cheltzman and the other boys from Hetton House were enthusiastic about the trip from the first, but Blaze had his doubts. When it came to “working out,” he remembered the Bowies too well.

Toe-Jam couldn’t stop talking about finding a girl “to jazz around with.” Blaze didn’t believe he himself had to spend much time worrying about that. He still thought about Marjorie Thurlow, but what was the sense in thinking about the rest of them? Girls liked tough guys, fellows who could kid them along like the guys in the movies did.

Besides, girls scared him. Going into a toilet stall at HH with Toe-Jam’s treasured copy of Girl Digest and beating off did him fine. Did him right when he was wrong. So far as he’d been able to tell from listening to the other boys, the feeling you got from beating off and the feeling you got from sticking it in stacked up about the same, and there was this to be said for beating off: you could do it four or five times a day.

At fifteen, Blaze was finally reaching full growth. He was six and a half feet tall, and the string John stretched from shoulder to shoulder one day measured out twenty-eight inches. His hair was brown, coarse, thick, and oily. His hands were blocks measuring a foot from thumb to pinky when spread. His eyes were bottle green, brilliant and arresting — not a dummy’s eyes at all. He made the other boys look like pygmies, yet they teased him with easy, impudent openness. They had accepted John Cheltzman — now commonly known as JC or Jeepers Cripe — as Blaze’s personal totem, and because of their Boston adventure, the two boys had become folk heroes in the closed society of Hetton House. Blaze had achieved an even more special place. Anyone who has ever seen toddlers flocking around a St. Bernard will know what it was.