Blaze (19 page)

Wonderingly, he took off a glove and let his fingers trail over the ancient cuts. A boy he barely remembered had been here before him. It was incredible. And, in a strange way that made him think of birds sitting alone on telephone wires, sad. The cuts were old, the damage to the wood rubbed smooth by time. The wood had accepted them, made them part of itself.

He seemed to hear a chuckle behind him and whirled.

“George?”

No answer. The word echoed away, then bounced back. It seemed to mock him. It seemed to say there was no million, there was just this room. This room where he had been embarrassed and frightened. This room where he had failed to learn.

Joe stirred on his shoulder and sneezed. His nose was red. He began to cry. The noise was frail in the cold and empty building. The damp brick seemed to suck it up.

“There,” Blaze crooned. “It's all right, don't cry. I'm here. It's all right. You're fine. I'm fine.”

The baby was shivering again and Blaze decided to take him back down to The Law's office. He would put him in his cradle by the fireplace. With an extra blanket.

“It's all right, honey. It's good. It's fine.”

But Joe cried until he was exhausted, and not too long after that, it began to spit snow.

T
HE SUMMER AFTER
their Boston adventure, Blaze and Johnny Cheltzman went out blueberry raking with some other boys from Hetton House. The man who hired them, Harry Bluenote, was a straight. Not in the contemptuous sense in which Blaze would later hear George use the word, but in the best Lord Baden-Powell tradition. He owned fifty acres of prime blueberry land in West Harlow, and burned it over every other spring. Each July he hired a crew of two dozen or so young misfits to rake it. There was nothing in it for him other than the thin money any small farmer gets from a cash crop. He might have hired boys from HH and girls from the Wiscassett Home for Troubled Girls and given them three cents a quart; they would have taken it and counted themselves lucky to be out in the fresh air. Instead he gave them the straight seven that local kids asked for and got. The money for bus transportation to and from the fields came out of his own pocket.

He was a tall, scrawny old Yankee with a deeply seamed face and pale eyes. If you looked into those eyes too long, you came away with the conviction that he was crazy. He was not a member of the Grange or any other farmers' association. They would not have had him, anyway. Not a man who hired criminals to pick his berries. And they
were
criminals, dammit, whether they were sixteen or sixty-one. They came into a decent little town and decent folks felt like they had to lock their doors. They had to watch out for strange teenagers walking the roads. Boys
and
girls. Put them together—criminal boys
and
criminal girls—and what you got was no better than Sodom and Gomorrah. Everyone said so. It was wrong. Especially when you were trying to raise your own young ones up right.

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.

When they arrived at the Bluenote place, Dougie Bluenote was waiting to take them to their cabins. He told them they would be sharing Riffle Cabins that summer with half a dozen boys from South Portland Correctional. Mouths tightened at this news. South Portland boys were known as ball-busters of the first water.

Blaze was in Cabin 3 with John and Toe-Jam. John had grown thinner since the trip to Beantown. His rheumatic fever had been diagnosed by the Hetton House doctor (a Camel-smoking old quack named Donald Hough) as nothing but a bad case of the flu. This diagnosis would kill John, but not for another year.

“Here's your cabin,” Doug Bluenote said. He had his father's farmer's face, but not his father's strange pale eyes. “There's a lot of boys used it before you. If you like it, take care of it so a lot of boys can use it after you. There's a woodstove if it gets chilly at night, but it probably won't. There's four beds, so you get to choose. If we pick up another fella, he gets the one left over. There's a hot plate for snacks and coffee. Unplug it last thing you do before you leave in the mornings. Unplug it last thing before turning in at night. There's ashtrays. Your butts go there. Not on the floor. Not in the dooryard. There isn't to be any drinking or playing poker. If me or my dad catches you drinking or playing poker, you're done. No second chances. Breakfast at six, in the big house. You'll get lunch at noon, and you'll eat it in the yonder.” He waved his arm in the general direction of the blueberry fields. “Supper at six, in the big house. You start in raking tomorrow at seven. Good day to you, gentlemen.”

When he was gone, they poked around. It wasn't a bad place. The stove was an old Invincible with a Dutch oven. The beds were all on the floor—for the first time in years they would not be stacked up like coins in a slot. There was a fairly large common room in addition to the kitchen and the two bedrooms. Here was a bookcase made out of a Pomona orange crate. It contained the Bible, a sex manual for young people,
Ten Nights in a Barroom,
and
Gone with the Wind
. There was a faded hooked rug on the floor. The floor itself was of loose boards, very different from the tile and varnished wood of HH. These boards rumbled underfoot when you walked on them.

While the others were making their beds, Blaze went out on the porch to look for the river. The river was there. It ran through a gentle depression at this point in its course, but not too far upstream he could hear the lulling thunder of a rapids. Gnarled trees, oak and willow, leaned over the water as if to see their reflections. Dragonflies and sewing needles and skeeters flew just above the surface, sometimes stitching it. Far away, in the distance, came the rough buzz of a cicada.

Blaze felt something in him loosen.

He sat down on the top step of the porch. After awhile John came out and sat beside him.

“Where's Toe?” Blaze asked.

“Readin that sexbook. He's lookin for pictures.”

“He find any?”

“Not yet.”

They sat quiet for awhile. “Blaze?”

“Yeah?”

“It's not so bad, is it?”

“No.”

But he still remembered the Bowies.

They walked down to the big house at five-thirty. The path followed the river's course and soon brought them to the Bend Cabins, where half a dozen girls were clustered.

The boys from HH and the ball-busters from South Portland kept walking, as if they were around girls—girls with
breasts
—every damn day. The girls joined them, some putting on lipstick as they chatted with each other, like being around boys—boys with
beard-shadows
—was as common as swatting flies. One or two were wearing nylons; the rest were in bobby-sox. The bobby-sox were all folded at exactly the same position on the shin. Make-up had been laid over blemishes—in some cases to the thickness of cupcake frosting. One girl, much envied by the others, was sporting green eye-shadow. All of them had perfected the sort of hip-rolling walk John Cheltzman later called the Streetwalker Strut.

One of the South Portland ball-busters hawked and spat. Then he picked a piece of alfalfa grass to stick between his teeth. The other boys regarded this closely and tried to think of something—
anything
—they themselves could do in order to demonstrate their nonchalance around the fairer sex. Most settled for hawking and spitting. Some originalists stuck their hands in their back pockets. Some did both.

The South Portland boys probably had the advantage of the Hetton boys; when it came to girls, the supply was greater in the city. The mothers of the South Portland boys might have been juicers, hypes, and ten-dollar lovers, their sisters two-buck handjob honeys, but the ball-busters in most cases at least grasped the essential
idea
of girls.

The HH boys lived in an almost exclusively male society. Their sex education consisted of guest lectures from local clergy. Most of these country preachers informed the boys that masturbation made you foolish and the risks of intercourse included a penis that turned black from disease and began to stink. They also had Toe-Jam's occasional dirty mags (
Girl Digest
the latest and best). Their ideas on how to converse with girls came from the movies. About actual intercourse they had no idea, because—as Toe once sadly observed—they only showed fucking in French movies. The only French movie they had ever seen was
The French Connection
.

And so the walk from Bend Cabins to the big house was accomplished mostly in tense (but not antagonistic) silence. Had they not been quite so involved in trying to cope with their new situation, they might have spared a glance for Dougie Bluenote, who was doing his mighty best to keep a straight face.

Harry Bluenote was leaning against the dining room door when they came in. Boys and girls alike gawked at the pictures on the walls (Currier & Ives, N.C. Wyeth), the old and mellow furniture, the long dining table with SET A SPELL carved on one bench and COME HUNGRY, LEAVE FULL carved on the other. Most of all they looked at the large oil portrait on the east wall. This was Marian Bluenote, Harry's late wife.

They might have considered themselves tough—in some ways they were—but they were still only children sporting their first sex characteristics. They instinctively formed themselves into the lines that had been their entire lives. Bluenote let them. Then he shook hands with each one as he or she filed into the room. He nodded in courtly fashion to the girls, in no way betraying that they were got up like kewpie dolls.

Blaze was last. He towered over Bluenote by half a foot, but he was shuffling his feet and looking at the floor and wishing he were back at HH. This was too hard. This was awful. His tongue was plastered to the roof of his mouth. He thrust his hand out blindly.

Bluenote shook it. “Christ, ain't you a big one. Not built for raking berries, though.”