Blaze

Chapter 20

HETTON HOUSE INCLUDED a large parcel of land in back of the main buildings, and here was planted what generations of boys had come to call the Victory Garden. The headmistress before Coslaw went slack on it, telling people she had a brown thumb rather than a green one, but Martin “The Law” Coslaw saw at least two shining potentialities in the Victory Garden. The first was to make a substantial saving in HH’s food-budget by having the boys grow their own vegetables. The second was to acquaint the boys with good hard work, which was the foundation of the world. “Work and mathematics built the pyramids,” Coslaw liked to say. And so the boys planted in the spring, weeded in the summer (unless they were “working out” on one of the neighboring farms), and harvested in the fall.

About fourteen months after the end of what Toe-Jam called “the fabulous blueberry summer,” John Cheltzman was among the pumpkin-picking crew at the north end of the VG. He took a cold, sickened, and died. It happened just that fast. He was packed off to Portland City Hospital on Halloween, while the rest of the boys were at their classes or “away schools.” He died in City Hospital’s charity ward, and he did it alone.

His bed at HH was stripped, then re-made. Blaze spent most of one afternoon sitting on his own bed and looking at John’s. The long sleeping room — which they called “the ram” — was empty. The others had gone to Johnny’s funeral. For most it was their first funeral, and they were quite excited about it.

Johnny’s bed frightened and fascinated Blaze. The jar of Shedd’s Peanut Butter that had always been stuffed down between the head of the bed and the wall was gone; he’d looked. So were the Ritz Crackers. (After lights-out, Johnny often said, “Everything tastes better when it shits on a Ritz,” which never failed to crack Blaze up.) The bed itself was made up in stark Army fashion, the top blanket pulled taut. The sheets were perfectly white and clean, even though Johnny had been an enthusiastic lights-out masturbator. Many nights Blaze lay in his own bed, looking up into the dark and listening to the soft creak of the springs as JC flogged his doggy. There were always stiff yellow places on his sheets. Christ, those stiff yellow places were on the sheets of all the bigger boys. They were on his own, right now, beneath him as he sat on his bed, looking at Johnny’s bed. It came to him like a revelation that if he died, his bed would be stripped and his come-stained sheets would be replaced with sheets like the ones that were on Johnny’s now — sheets that were perfectly white and clean. Sheets without a single mark on them to say someone lay there, dreamed there, was lively enough to squirt off there. Blaze began to cry silently.

It was a cloudless afternoon in early November, and the ram was flooded with impartial light. Squares of sun and the shadow-crosses of muntings lay on JC’s cot. After awhile Blaze got up and tore the blanket from the bed where his pal had slept. He threw the pillow the length of the ram. Then he stripped off the sheets and pushed the mattress on the floor. It still wasn’t enough. He turned the bed over on the mattress with its stupid little legs sticking up. It still wasn’t enough, so he kicked one of the jutting bed-legs and succeeded in nothing more than hurting his foot. After that he lay on his bed with his hands over his eyes and his chest heaving.

When the funeral was over, the other boys mostly left Blaze alone. No one asked him about the overturned bed, but Toe did a funny thing: he took one of Blaze’s hands and kissed it. That was a funny thing, all right. Blaze thought about it for years. Not all the time, but every now and then.

Five o’clock came. It was free time for the boys, and most of them were out in the yard, goofing around and working up an appetite for supper. Blaze went to Martin Coslaw’s office. The Law was sitting behind his desk. He had changed into his slippers and was rocked back in his chair, reading the Evening Express. He looked up and said, “What?”

“Here, you sonofabitch,” Blaze said, and beat him unconscious.

He set off walking for the New Hampshire border because he thought he would be picked up inside of four hours driving a hot car. Instead, he was collared in two hours. He was always forgetting how large he was, but Martin Coslaw didn’t forget, and it didn’t take the Maine State Police long to locate a six-foot-seven male Caucasian youth with a bashed-in forehead.

There was a short trial in Cumberland County District Court. Martin Coslaw appeared with one arm in a sling and a huge white head-bandage that dipped to cover one eye. He walked to the stand on crutches.

The prosecutor asked him how tall he was. Coslaw responded that he was five feet and six inches. The prosecutor asked how much he weighed. Coslaw said that he weighed one hundred and sixty pounds. The prosecutor asked Coslaw if he had done anything to provoke, tease, or unjustly punish the defendant, Clayton Blaisdell, Junior. Coslaw said he had not. The prosecutor then yielded the witness to Blaze’s attorney, a cool drink of lemonade fresh out of law school. The cool drink of lemonade asked a number of furious, obscure questions which Coslaw answered calmly while his cast, crutches, and head-bandage continued their own testimony. When the cool drink of lemonade said he had no further questions, the State rested its case.

Blaze’s court-appointed called him to the stand and asked why he had beaten up the headmaster of Hetton House. Blaze stammered out his story. A good friend of his had died. He thought Coslaw was to blame. Johnny shouldn’t have been sent out to pick pumpkins, specially not when it was cold. Johnny had a weak heart. It wasn’t fair, and Mr. Coslaw knew it wasn’t fair. He had it coming.

At that, the young lawyer sat down with a look of despair in his eyes.

The prosecutor rose and approached. He asked how tall Blaze was. Six-foot-six or maybe — seven, Blaze said. The prosecutor asked how much he weighed. Blaze said he didn’t know, exactly, but not three hunnert. This caused some laughter among the press. Blaze stared out at them with puzzled eyes. Then he smiled a little, too, wanting them to know he could take a joke as well as the next one. The prosecutor had no more questions. He sat down.

Blaze’s court-appointed made a furious, obscure summary, then rested his case. The judge looked out a window with his chin propped on one hand. The prosecutor then rose. He called Blaze a young thug. He said it was the State of Maine’s responsibility to “snub him up fast and hard.” Blaze had no idea what that meant, but he knew it wasn’t good.

The judge asked Blaze if he had anything to say.

“Yessir,” Blaze said, “but I don’t know how.”

The judge nodded and sentenced him to two years in South Portland Correctional.

It wasn’t as bad for him as it was for some, but bad enough so he never wanted to go back again. He was big enough to avoid the beatings and the buggery, and he walked outside all the underground cliques with their tinpot leaders, but being locked up for long periods of time in a tiny barred cell was very hard. Very sad. Twice in the first six months he “went stir,” howling to be let out and banging on the bars of his cell until the guards came running. The first time, four guards responded, then had to call in first another four and then a full half-dozen to subdue him. The second time they gave him a hypo that knocked him out for sixteen hours.

Solitary was worse still. Blaze paced the tiny cell endlessly (six steps each way) while time faltered and then stopped. When the door was finally opened and he was let back into the society of the other boys — free to walk the exercise yard or pitch bundles off the trucks that came into the loading dock — he was nearly mad with relief and gratitude. He hugged the jailer who let him out on the second occasion and gained this note in his jacket: Shows homosexual tendencies.

But solitary wasn’t the worst thing. He was forgetful, but the memory of the worst thing never left him. That was how they got you. They took you to a little white room and gathered around you in a circle. Then they began asking questions. And before you had time to think what the first question meant — what it said — they were on to the next, and the next, and the next. They backtracked, sidetracked, went uptrack and down. It was like being caught in a spiderweb. In the end, you would admit anything they asked you to admit, just to shut them up. Then they brought you a paper and told you to sign your name to it and brother, you signed.

The man in charge of Blaze’s interrogation had been an assistant district attorney named Holloway. Holloway didn’t come into the little room until the others had been going at him for at least an hour and a half. Blaze had his sleeves rolled up and the bottom of his shirt had come untucked. He was covered with sweat and needed to go Number Two Bathroom, bad. It was like being in the Bowies’ dogpen again, with the Collies snapping all around him. Holloway was cool and natty in a blue pinstriped suit. He had on black shoes with galaxies of tiny holes in the fronts. Blaze never forgot the holes in the fronts of Mr. Holloway’s shoes.

Mr. Holloway sat on the table in the middle of the room, his ass half on and half off, one of his legs swinging back and forth, one of those elegant black shoes moving like the pendulum in a clock. He gave Blaze a friendly grin and said, “Want to talk, son?”

Blaze began to stammer. Yes, he did want to talk. If someone really wanted to listen, and be a little bit friendly, he did.

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.

Not long after the heroin experiment, Billy and Calvin (whose proudest possession was a tattoo reading LIFE SURKS, THEN YA DIE) were busted trying to heist a supermarket. There were others willing to take Blaze on their current gags, however. Eager, even. Someone nicknamed him The Boogeyman, and it stuck. Even with a mask to hide his disfigured forehead, his immense size made any clerk or storekeeper think twice about grabbing the piece he might have under the counter.

In the two years after Billy fell, Blaze just missed going down himself half a dozen times, some of those by the narrowest of margins. On one occasion, two brothers with whom he had heisted a clothing store in Saugus were grabbed just around the corner from where Blaze said thanks and got out of their car. The brothers would have been glad to give Blaze up in order to earn a break, but they only knew him as The Big Boogie, thus giving the police the idea that the third member of the gang had been African-American.

In June, Blaze was laid off at the laundry. He didn’t even bother looking for another straight job. He simply drifted through the days until he met George Rackley, and when he met George, his future was set.