Blaze (7 page)

Several times their bumping and dashing caused him to spill the food. Then he had to scrape it up as best he could from the packed, urine-spotted snow while they snarled and fought over it around him.

Gradually, one became the leader in their undeclared war against him. His name was Randy. He was eleven. He had one milky eye. He scared the shit out of Blaze. His teeth were like old yellow tusks. There was a white stripe down the center of his skull. He would approach Blaze from dead-on, from twelve o'clock high, haunches pumping under his ragged pelt. Randy's good eye seemed to burn while the bad one remained indifferent to it all, a dead lamp. His claws dug small clods of yellow-white impacted snow from the floor of the dogpen. He would accelerate until it seemed impossible he could do anything but launch himself into flight at Blaze's throat. The other dogs would be whipped into a frenzy by this, leaping and turning and snarling in the air. At the last instant, Randy's paws would come down stiff, spraying snow all over Blaze's green pants, and he would race away in a big loop, only to repeat the maneuver. But he was sheering off later and later, until he was close enough for Blaze to smell his heat and even his breath.

Then one evening toward the end of January, he knew the dog wasn't going to sheer off. He didn't know how this charge was different, or why, but it was. This time Randy meant it. He was going to leap. And when he did, the other dogs would come in quickly. Then it would be like in his dreams.

The dog came, speeding faster and faster, silent. This time there were no paws out. No skidding or turning. Its haunches tensed, then pushed down. A moment later Randy was in the air.

Blaze was carrying two steel buckets filled with Dog's Worth. When he saw Randy meant it this time, all his fear left him. He dropped his buckets at the same time Randy leaped. He was wearing rawhide gloves with holes in the fingers. He met the dog in midair with his right fist, under the long shovel-shelf of the jaw. The jolt ran all the way up to his shoulder. His hand went instantly and completely numb. There was a brief, bitter crack. Randy did a perfect one-eighty in the cold air and landed on his back with a thud.

Blaze realized all the other dogs had fallen silent only when they began to bark again. He picked up the buckets, went to the trough, and poured in the chow. Always before, the dogs had crowded in at once to begin snarking it up, growling and snapping for the best places, before he could even add water. He could do nothing about it; he was ineffectual. Now, when one of the smaller Collies rushed for the trough with its stupid eyes gleaming and its stupid tongue hanging from the side of its stupid mouth, Blaze jerked at it with his gloved hands and it cut sidewards so fast its feet went out from under it and it landed on its side. The others shrank back.

Blaze added two buckets of water from the bib-faucet. “There,” he said. “It's wet down. Go on and eat it.”

He walked back to look at Randy while the other dogs ran to the feeding trough.

The fleas were already leaving Randy's cooling body to die in the piss-stained snow. The good eye was now almost as glazed-looking as the bad one. This awoke a feeling of pity and sadness in Blaze. Perhaps the dog had only been playing, after all. Just trying to scare him.

And he
was
scared. That, too. He would catch dickens for this.

He walked to the house with the empty buckets, head lowered. Mrs. Bowie was in the kitchen. She had a rubbing-board propped in the sink and was washing curtains on it. She was singing a hymn in her reedy voice as she worked.

“Aw, don't you track in on my floor, now!” she cried, seeing him. It was her floor, but he washed it. On his knees. Sullenness awoke in his breast.

“Randy's dead. He jumped me. I hit him. Killed him.”

Her hands flew out of the soapy water and she screamed. “Randy? Randy!
Randy!
”

She ran around in a circle, grabbed her sweater from the peg near the woodstove, then ran for the door.

“Hubert!” she called to her husband. “Hubert, oh Hubert! Such a bad boy!” And then, as if still singing: “Ooooooo
OOOOOO
—”

She thrust Blaze out of her way and ran outside. Mr. Bowie appeared in one of the many shed doors, his scrawny face long with surprise. He strode to Blaze and grabbed him by one shoulder. “What happened?”

“Randy's dead,” Blaze said stolidly. “He jumped me and I did him down.”

“You wait,” Hubert Bowie said, and went after his wife.

Blaze took off his red and black jacket and sat down on the stool in the corner. Snow melted off his boots and made a puddle. He didn't care. The heat from the woodstove made his face throb. He chopped the wood. He didn't care.

Bowie had to lead his wife back inside, because she had her apron over her face. She was sobbing loudly. The high pitch of her voice made her sound like a sewing machine.

“Go out into the shed,” Bowie told him.

Blaze opened the door. Bowie helped him through it with the toe of his boot. Blaze fell down the two steps into the dooryard, got up, and went into the shed. There were tools in there—axes, hammers, a lathe, an emery wheel, a planer, a sander, other things he didn't know the names of. There were auto parts and boxes of old magazines. And a snow shovel with a wide aluminum scoop. His shovel. Blaze looked at it, and something about the shovel brought his hate of the Bowies to completion, finished it off. They received a hundred and sixty dollars a month for keeping him and he did their chores. He ate badly. He had eaten better at HH. It wasn't fair.

Hubert Bowie opened the door to the shed and stepped in. “I'm going to whip you now,” he said.

“That dog jumped me. He was going for my throat.”

“Don't say no more. You're only making it worse for yourself.”

Every spring, Bowie bred one of his cows with Franklin Marstellar's bull, Freddy. On the wall of the shed was a walking-halter he called a “love-halter” and a nosepiece. Bowie took it from its peg and held it by the nosepiece, fingers curled through the lattices. The heavy leather straps held down.

“Bend over that work bench.”

“Randy went for my throat. I'm telling you it was him or me.”

“Bend over that work bench.”

Blaze hesitated, but he did not think. Thinking was a long process for him. Instead he consulted the tickings of instinct.

It wasn't time yet.

He bent over the work bench. It was a long hard whipping, but he didn't cry. He did that later, in his room.

The girl he'd fallen in love with was a seventh-grader at Cumberland A School named Marjorie Thurlow. She had yellow hair and blue eyes and no breasts. She had a sweet smile that made the corners of her eyes turn up. On the playground, Blaze followed her with his own eyes. She made him feel empty in the pit of his stomach, but in a way that was good. He imagined himself carrying her books and protecting her from outlaws. These thoughts always made his face burn.

One day not long after the incident of Randy and the whipping, the District Nurse came to school to give immunization boosters. The children had been given release forms the week before; those parents who wanted their children to have the shots had signed them. Now, the children with signed forms queued up in a nervous line leading into the cloakroom. Blaze was one of these. Bowie had called up George Henderson, who was on the schoolboard, and asked if the shots cost money. They didn't, so Bowie signed.

Margie Thurlow was also in line. She looked very pale. Blaze felt bad for her. He wished he could go back and hold her hand. The thought made his face burn. He bent his head and shuffled his feet.

Blaze was first in line. When the nurse beckoned him into the cloakroom, he took off his red- and black-checked jacket and unbuttoned the sleeve of his shirt. The nurse took the needle out of a kind of cooker, looked at his slip, then said: “Better unbutton the other sleeve too, big boy. You're down for both.”

“Will it hurt?” Blaze said, unbuttoning the other sleeve.

“Only for a second.”

“Okay,” Blaze said, and let her shoot the needle from the cooker into his left arm.

“Right. Now the other arm and you're done.”

Blaze turned the other way. She shot some more stuff from another needle into his right arm. Then he left the cloakroom, went back to his desk, and began to puzzle out a story in his
Scholastic
.

When Margie came out, there were tears in her eyes and more on her face, but she wasn't sobbing. Blaze felt proud of her. When she passed his desk on her way to the door (seventh-graders were in another room), he gave her a smile. And she smiled back. Blaze folded that smile, put it away, and kept it for years.

At recess, just as Blaze was coming out the door to the playground, Margie ran inside past him, sobbing. He turned to look after her, then walked slowly into the playground, brow creased, face unhappy. He came to Peter Lavoie, batting the tetherball on its post with one mittened hand, and asked if Peter knew what had happened to Margie.

“Glen hit her in the shot,” Peter Lavoie said. He demonstrated on a passing boy, balling his fist and hitting the kid three times fast,
whap-whap-whap.
Blaze watched this, frowning. The nurse had lied. Both of his arms now hurt badly from the shots. The large muscles felt stiff and bruised. It was hard to even bend them without wincing. And Margie was a girl. He looked around for Glen.

Glen Hardy was a huge eighth-grader, the kind that will play football, then run to fat. He had red hair that he combed back from his forehead in big waves. His father was a farmer on the west end of town, and Glen's arms were slabs of muscle.

Somebody threw Blaze the keepaway ball. He dropped it on the ground without looking at it and started for Glen Hardy.

“Oh boy,” Peter Lavoie said. “Blaze is goin after Glen!”

This news traveled quickly. Groups of boys began to move with studied casualness toward where Glen and some of the older boys were playing a clumsy, troll-like version of kickball. Glen was pitching. He rolled the ball quick and hard, making it bounce and skitter on the frozen ground.

Mrs. Foster, who had playground duty that day, was on the other side of the building, monitoring the little ones on the swings. She would not be a factor, at least not at first.

Glen looked up and saw Blaze coming. He dropped the kickball. He put his hands on his hips. Both teams collapsed to form a semicircle around him and behind him. They were all seventh- and eighth-graders. None were as big as Blaze. Only Glen was bigger.

The fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-graders were grouped loosely behind Blaze. They shuffled, adjusted their belts, pulled self-consciously at their mittens, and mumbled to each other. The boys on both sides wore expressions of absurd casualness. The fight had not been called yet.

“What do you want, fucknuts?” Glen Hardy asked. His voice was phlegmy. It was the voice of a young god with a winter cold.

“Why did you hit Margie Thurlow in the shot?” Blaze asked.

“I felt like it.”

“Okay,” Blaze said, and waded in.

Glen hit him twice in the face—
whap-whap
—before he even got close, and blood began to pour out of Blaze's nose. Then Glen backed away, wanting to keep the advantage of his reach. People were yelling.

Blaze shook his head. Drops of blood flew, splattering the snow on either side and in front of him.

Glen was grinning. “State kid,” he said. “State kid, shit-for-brains state kid.” He hit Blaze in the middle of Blaze's dented forehead and his grin faltered as pain exploded up his arm. Blaze's forehead was very hard, dented or not.

For a moment he forgot to back up and Blaze shot his fist out. He didn't use his body; he just used his arm like a piston. His knuckles connected with Glen's mouth. Glen screamed as his lips burst against his teeth and began to bleed. The yelling intensified.

Glen tasted his own blood and forgot about backing up. He forgot about taunting the ugly kid with the busted forehead. He just waded in, swinging roundhouse punches from port and starboard.

Blaze set his feet and met him. Faintly, from far away, he heard the shouts and exhortations of his classmates. They reminded him of the yapping Collies in the dogpen on the day he realized that Randy wasn't going to sheer off.