Chapter1
Blaze
When the door to Blaze’s prison cell slammed shut at nine-thirty p.m. sharp, the hard clang rang in his ears as his eyes adjusted to the half-dark.
Of course, it was never truly dark in prison. The security lighting system stayed on all night, sending waves of half-light everywhere, even into the individual cells, as a kind of force field against anything undesirable that might happen during the night. Like an escape attempt, or a fight in a cell, or unnamable fears that stayed awake, unblinking, like nightmares from childhood, hunched in the dark, shadowy corners of each level of Wyoming Correctional, just waiting for their chance to strike.
That chance was coming, Blaze knew it was, whether it was day or night.
Blaze had been admitted to the state prison almost two years prior and had done his best to adjust to the schedule. But it was hard to settle into a routine teeming with so much structure, so hard he thought he’d go crazy inside of two weeks and throw himself off the level-two balcony just to get out of the routine, even if it meant, at the same time, that he’d be in the infirmary for who knew how many broken bones. Not to mention, he’d be under a lot more scrutiny in the infirmary than anywhere else in the prison.
His old life, though it was less than two years ago, seemed so far away. Back then, he’d slept in the upper bunk of whatever trailer the Butterworth family used at the time. Then he’d wake up sometime mid-morning to the sound of happy chatter through the half-opened window, the smell of charred hot dogs and the crisp, brisk smell of kettle corn fresh in the still, humid air. His favorite flavor of cotton candy was pink, and it was his favorite thing to have for breakfast.
His job, when he was very young, and they were working the carnival in summertime, had been to ride the kiddie rides. He was tasked with drawing in customers by looking like he was having a great time, even though the dragon coaster, for all its mini, kid-appropriate size, hurtled and jerked and usually made him puke, and the small Ferris wheel bored him to tears.
When he got older, he ran those rides, doing security checks in a slap-dash manner, and hurrying to the corn dog stand at the end of his shift. Then, after a break, his lips greasy with mustard, he’d help run the game booths along the main strip of the carnival, and smile as customers were cheated out of their tickets because he knew there was no way they could put the ring around the pole when the pole was tilted to one side, misaligned like all the other target games.
At other times, over the years, he’d been, as his parents had said, at liberty to pick pockets. In other words,go get free money and bring it back. Blaze had obliged and had become very adept at getting square wallets out of tight back pockets and rectangular wallets out of loosely secured purses and backpacks.
He went to bed when it got late, whenever that was, and woke up when he had to. And did his best, as he got older, to get along with his brother, Alex. Over time, Blaze learned it was best to stay out of Alex’s way, which could be difficult sometimes, as they all lived in the same trailer.
It wouldn’t have mattered so much to Blaze that Alex was their parents’ favorite, if they didn’t, at the same time, let him get away with everything, including the drugs. Alex was a mean shit to begin with and he had gotten worse with time, especially when he started snorting coke or whatever he could get his hands on.
Blaze’s trouble really started the summer his parents decided to start working a driveway scam on rich old people.
The focus of the scam was on folks who lived in fifty-five plus communities and didn’t seem to have the sense to know any better. During the first week they were doing the scam, he and Alex and Pop had driven door to door, with Blaze half hanging out the window so he could spot driveways that looked even the least bit ragged.
When he found one, they’d stop. Then Pop, in an old uniform shirt he’d bought at a thrift store, would go up and knock on the door while Alex and Blaze waited by the truck and, wearing similar shirts, rakes in hand, stand there like they were ready to go to work. The stage for the scam was set.
Pop would flash his ID and point at the badge on his shirt as proof that he had been hired by the HOA to come around and fix up driveways. Only there was a fee, you see, and did the woman of the house want to check with her husband about writing a check for the deposit? Which would be promptly refunded by the HOA once the work was done, of course. The old person would squint a bit, and hem and haw, and then write checks made out to Pop, following Pop’s insistence.
Normally, Blaze had never minded working the shill at the game booths. After all, customers kind of expected that when they came to a carnival or a fun fair, they’d lose and lose and lose at those ring tosses and cap bottle tosses and the duck hunt because that was part of the carnival atmosphere. That and the oft-repeatedyou could win bigline that every carny knew almost from birth. Only carnies could call themselves that, though, and hell help the man, woman, or child who referred to them as such.
Blaze had never minded most of his life as a carnie, either, but something happened to him during that scam, right from the start, as none of it felt right. This feeling of unease worsened from the moment the old lady at the fourth house they stopped at had peered up at Pop, squinting with her confusion. She’d wanted to know why, all of a sudden, after living in the community that provided so much for them, where she was being asked to resurface her own driveway, at her own expense, when her driveway looked perfectly fine and was practically new?
So many driveways have been re-surfaced in this neighborhood, ma’am,Pop had said.I’m just trying to fit you into my schedule before all my slots are filled and I have no room for you. Is your husband at home?
It turned out that she was newly widowed, and had just about started crying as she told Pop this. She wore a huge ring on one finger that glinted in the sunlight, and around her neck she wore pearls, so it was easy to see that she was loaded, and he knew Pop was salivating about it.
She might have been able to afford the scam, but as Alex dragged Blaze closer to the open doorway, perhaps to add bulk to the lie that they were hard-working men hired by the HOA to fix her perfectly functional driveway, it began to feel less and less okay to Blaze.
In her old faded eyes was confusion mixed with a desire to understand what was going on, and a hefty shine of soon-to-be-betrayed trust. Then she looked at Blaze with a kind of affection, as if he was her favorite grandson, and he just about lost it.
Had Blaze been born into another family, he might have had grandparents of his own, but he hadn’t been. She could have been his grandma. He’d never had one, and they always seemed so nice on TV.
Had this been any other situation, he could have told himself the story that shewashis grandma, then continued to help Pop and Alex pull off the scam. But not this time, so for reasons he could never fully explain to himself, either that day or ever, he dropped his shovel.
In the quiet cul-de-sac, the noise echoed off the walls of the other houses, and out of each one came old folks, sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs, seven in all. That was too many witnesses, especially for Pop, so he pulled out his phone, pretended to check a list, and told the old woman that he had the wrong house and could she excuse him for bothering her. Then they all got in the truck, and Pop zoomed off.
Later, for some reason, he didn’t get called out for screwing up the scam. He did, however, make the mistake of expressing his opinion that the scam had been stupid from the get-go. Too full of risks and exposure were the reasons he gave to Mom, and Pop, and Alex, who had all looked at him with puzzled shock.
In his own mind, it occurred to him that he was meant for more than bilking old people out of their savings. Then, telling himself the story that his pretend grandma would be proud of him for finally getting his GED, he announced his plans to start studying for it.
He’d dropped out of high school four years earlier, so either his family thought he was joking or that he’d never succeed. Alex certainly made it more difficult to study, because every time Blaze would pull out his GED study guide, Alex would accuse him of thinking he was better than everybody else, smack the study guide to the floor, and generally be a dick about it.
Blaze soldiered on, doing his best to study beneath the single overhead light over the table in the trailer that everybody seemed to suddenly need to use when he had his workbooks out. The pleasure of his imaginary grandma dimmed day after day, but he was not going to give up.
Then, one hot August night, with his GED exam scheduled the first week in September, he’d been doing a practice test on a print-out, as he didn’t have a laptop, and the trailer had no wi-fi, his stub of a pencil smearing all over the place. Alex had come banging into the trailer, high on coke, nose red-rimmed with blood, staggering, fists swinging.
