Blaze by Richard Bachman Read Free Book Online Page A

slogans and initials, most worn to ghosts by repeated sandings and re-varnishings but never erased completely. They were bolted to the floor on iron discs. Each desk had an inkwell. The inkwells were filled with Carter’s Ink. Spilled ink got you a stropping in the washroom. Black heel-marks on the yellow floor got you a stropping. Fooling in class got you a stropping, only class fooling was called Bad Deportment. There were other stropping offenses; Martin Coslaw believed in stropping and The Paddle. The Law’s paddle was more feared in Hetton House than anything, even the bogeyman that hid under the beds of the little kids. The Paddle was a birch spatula, quite thin. The Law had drilled four holes in it to lessen air resistance. He was a bowler with a team called The Falmouth Rockers, and on Fridays he sometimes wore his bowling shirt to school. It was dark blue and had his name—Martin—in cursive gold over the breast pocket. To Blaze those letters looked almost (but not quite) like Palmer Method. The Law said that in bowling and in life, if a person made the spares, the strikes would take care of themselves. He had a strong right arm from making all those strikes and spares, and when he gave someone a stropping with The Paddle, it hurt a lot. He had been known to bite his tongue between his teeth while applying The Paddle to a boy with especially Bad Deportment. Sometimes he bit it hard enough to make it bleed, and for awhile there was a boy at Hetton House who called him Dracula as well as The Law, but then that boy made out, and they didn’t see him anymore. Making out was what they called it when someone got placed with a family and stuck, maybe even adopted.
    Martin Coslaw was hated and feared by all the boys at Hetton House, but no one hated him and feared him more than Blaze. Blaze was very bad at Arithmetic. He had been able to get back the hang of adding two apples plus three apples, but only with great effort, and a quarter of an apple plus a half an apple was always going to be beyond him. So far as he knew, apples only came in bites.
    It was during Basic Arithmetic that Blaze pulled his first con, aided by his friend John Cheltzman. John was skinny, ugly, gangling, and filled with hate. The hate rarely showed. Mostly it was hidden behind his thick, adhesive-taped glasses and the idiotic, farmerish yuk-yuk-yuk that was his frequent laughter. He was a natural target of the older, stronger boys. They beat him around pretty good. His face was rubbed in the dirt (spring and fall) or washed in snow (winter). His shirts were often torn. He rarely emerged from the communal shower without getting ass-smacked by a few wet towels. He always wiped the dirt or snow off, tucked his ripped shirt-tail in, or went yuk-yuk-yuk as he rubbed his reddening ass-cheeks, and the hate hardly ever showed. Or his brains. He was good in his classes—quite good, he couldn’t help that—but anything above a B was rare. And not welcomed. At Hetton House, A stood for asshole. Not to mention ass-kicking.
    Blaze was starting to get his size by then. He didn’t have it, not at eleven or twelve, but he was starting to get it. He was as big as some of the big boys. And he didn’t join in the playground beatings or the towel-snappings. One day John Cheltzman walked up to him while Blaze was standing beside the fence at the far end of the playground, not doing anything but watching crows light in the trees and take off again. He offered Blaze a deal.
    â€œYou’ll have The Law again for math this half,” John said. “Fractions continue.”
    â€œI hate fractions,” Blaze said.
    â€œI’ll do your homework if you don’t let those lugs tune up on me anymore. It won’t be good enough to make him suspicious—not good enough to get you caught—but it’ll be good enough to get you by. You won’t get stood after.” Being stood after wasn’t as bad as being