Blaze

Holloway told the others to get out.

Blaze asked if he could go to the bathroom.

Holloway pointed across the room to a door Blaze hadn’t even noticed and said, “What are you waiting for?” He was wearing that same friendly grin when he said it.

When Blaze came out, there was a pitcher of icewater and an empty glass on the table. Blaze looked at Holloway, and Holloway nodded. Blaze drank three glasses in a row, then sat back with what felt like an icepick planted in the center of his forehead.

“Good?” Holloway asked.

Blaze nodded.

“Yeah. Answering questions is thirsty work. Cigarette?”

“Don’t use em.”

“Good kid, that’ll never get you in trouble,” Holloway said, and lit one for himself. “Who are you to your pals, son? What do they call you?”

“Blaze.”

“Okay, Blaze, I’m Frank Holloway.” He stuck out his hand, then winced and clamped the end of his cigarette with his teeth as Blaze wrung it. “Now tell me exactly what you did to wind up here.”

Blaze began to pour out his story, beginning with The Law’s arrival at Hetton and Blaze’s problems with Arithmetic.

Holloway held up his hand. “Mind if I get a stenographer in on this, Blaze? That’s a kind of secretary. Save you repeating all this.”

No. He didn’t mind.

Later, at the end, the others came back in. When they did, Blaze noticed that Holloway’s eyes had lost their friendly glint. He slipped off the table, dusted his ass with two brisk whacks, and said, “Type it up and have the dummy sign it.” He left without looking back.

He left prison not quite two years after entering it — he got four months off for good behavior. They gave him two pairs of prison jeans, a prison denim jacket, and a holdall to carry them in. He also had his prison savings: a check for $43.84.

It was October. The air was flushed sweet with wind. The gate-guard waved one hand back and forth like a windshield wiper and told him to stay clean. Blaze walked past without looking or speaking, and when he heard the heavy green gate thud shut behind him, he shivered.

He walked until the sidewalks ended and the town disappeared. He looked at everything. Cars whipped past, looking strangely updated. One slowed, and he thought maybe he would be offered a ride. Then someone shouted, “Heyyy, JAILBIRD,” and the car scooted away.

At last he sat down on the rock wall surrounding a little country graveyard and just looked down the road. It came to him that he was free. He had no one to boss him, but he was bad at bossing himself and had no friends. He was out of solitary, but had no job. He didn’t even know how to turn the piece of stiff paper they’d given him into money.

Still, a wonderful soothing gratitude stole over him. He closed his eyes and turned his face up to the sun, filling his head with red light. He smelled the grass and fresh asphalt where some road-crew had recently fixed a pothole. He smelled exhaust from cars that went wherever their drivers wanted to go. He clutched himself with relief.

He slept in a barn that night and the next day got a job picking taters for a dime a basket. That winter he worked in a New Hampshire woolen mill, strictly non-union. In the spring he took a bus to Boston and got a job in the laundry of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He had been working there six months when a familiar face from South Portland turned up — Billy St. Pierre. They went out and bought each other many beers. Billy confided to Blaze that he and a friend were going to hold up a liquor store in Southie. The place was a tit. He said there was room for one more.

Blaze was up for it. His cut was seventeen dollars. He went on working at the laundry. Four months later, he and Billy and Billy’s brother-in-law Dom knocked over a combination gas station and grocery store in Danvers. A month after that, Blaze and Billy, plus another South Portland alum named Calvin Surks, knocked over a loan agency with a betting room in the back. They took over a thousand dollars.

“We’re hitting the big time now,” Billy said as the three of them split the swag in a Duxbury motel room. “This is just the start.”

Blaze nodded, but went on working in the hospital laundry.

For awhile life rolled like that. Blaze had no real friends in Boston. His only acquaintances were Billy St. Pierre and the loosely orbiting crew of small-timers of which Billy was a member. Blaze took to hanging out with them during his off-hours in a Lynn candy-store called Moochie’s. They played pinball and horsed around. Blaze had no girl, steady or otherwise. He was painfully shy and self-conscious about what Billy called his busted head. After they did a successful job, he sometimes bought a whore.

About a year after Blaze fell in with Billy, a fast-talking part-time musician introduced him to heroin — a skin-pop. It made Blaze violently sick, either from some additive or a natural allergy. He never tried it again. He would sometimes take a few tokes on a reef or fry-daddy just to be sociable, but he had no use for harder drugs.