Chapter 15

BLAZE CAME AWAKE in the first thin light of dawn, at first not sure where he was. Then everything came back and he collapsed on his side, breathing hard. His bed was drenched in sweat. Christ, what an awful dream.

He got up and padded into the kitchen to check on the baby. Joe was deeply asleep, lips pursed as if he was having big serious thoughts. Blaze looked at him until his eyes picked up the slow, steady rise of the kid’s chest. His lips moved, and Blaze wondered if Joe was dreaming about the bottle, or his mother’s titty.

Then he put on the coffee and sat down at the table in his long underwear. The paper he had bought yesterday was still there, amid the scraps of his kidnap note. He began to read the story about the kidnapping again, and his eye once more fell on the box at the bottom of page 2: Appeal to Kidnappers from Father, Page 6. Blaze turned over to page six, where he found a half-page broadside, outlined in black. He read:

TO THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE OUR CHILD!

WE WILL MEET ANY DEMANDS, ON CONDITION THAT YOU CAN PROVIDE US WITH EVIDENCE THAT JOE IS STILL ALIVE. WE HAVE THE GUARANTEE OF THE FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION (FBI) THAT THERE WILL BE NO INTERFERENCE WITH YOUR COLLECTION OF THE RANSOM, BUT WE MUST HAVE PROOF THAT JOE IS ALIVE!

HE IS EATING THREE TIMES A DAY, CANNED BABY DINNERS AND VEG FOLLOWED BY 1/2 A BOTTLE. THE FORMULA HE’S USED TO IS CANNED MILK AND BOILED, STERILIZED WATER IN A RATIO OF 1:1.

PLEASE DO NOT HURT HIM, BECAUSE WE LOVE HIM SO VERY MUCH.

JOSEPH GERARD III

Blaze closed the paper. Reading that made him feel unhappy, like hearing Loretta Lynn sing “Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad.”

“Oh Jeez, boo-hoo,” George said so suddenly from the bedroom that Blaze jumped.

“Shh, you’ll wake ’im up.”

“Fuck that,” George said. “He can’t hear me.”

“Oh,” Blaze said. He guessed that was true. “What’s a ratty-o, George? It says make him his bottles in a ratty-o of one-something-one.”

“Never mind,” George said. “Really worried about him, aren’t they? ‘He is eating three times a day, followed by a half a bottle…don’t hurt him, cuz we wuv him-wuv him-wuv him.’ Man, this piles the pink horseshit to a new high.”

“Listen —” Blaze began.

“No, I won’t listen! Don’t tell me to listen! He’s all they have, right? That and about forty million smackareenies! Ought to get the money and then send the kid back in pieces. First a finger, then a toe, then his little —”

“George, you shut up!”

He clapped a hand over his mouth, shocked. He had just told George to shut up. What was he thinking about? What was wrong with him?

“George?”

No answer.

“George, I’m sorry. It’s just that you shouldn’t say things, you know, like that.” He tried to smile. “We have to give the kid back alive, right? That’s the plan. Right?”

No answer, and now Blaze started to feel really miserable.

“George? George, what’s wrong?”

No answer for a long time. Then, so softly he might not have heard it, so softly it might have only been a thought in his own head:

“You’ll have to leave him with me, Blaze. Sooner or later.” Blaze wiped his mouth with the palm of his hand. “You better not do anything to ’im, George. You just better not. I’m warning you.”

No answer.

 

By nine o’clock, Joe was up, changed, fed, and playing on the kitchen floor. Blaze was sitting at the table and listening to the radio. He had cleared off the scraps of paper and thrown out the hardened flour paste, and the only thing on the table was his letter to the Gerards. He was trying to figure out how to mail it.

He had heard the news three times. The police had picked up a man named Charles Victor Pritchett, a big drifter from Aroostook County who had been laid off some sawmill job a month earlier. Then he had been released. Probably that scrawny little door-opener Walsh couldn’t make him for it, Blaze reasoned. Too bad. A good suspect would have taken the heat off for awhile.

He shifted restlessly in his chair. He had to get this kidnapping off the ground. He had to make a plan about mailing the letter. They had a drawing of him, and they knew about the car. They even knew about the color — that bastard Walsh again.

His mind moved slowly and heavily. He got up, made more coffee, then got out the newspaper again. He frowned at the police sketch of himself. Big, square-jawed face. Broad, flat nose. Thick shock of hair, hadn’t been cut in quite awhile (George had done it last time, snipping away indifferently with a pair of kitchen shears). Deepset eyes. Only a suggestion of his big ole neck, and they probably wouldn’t have any idea of how big he really was. People never did when he was sitting down, because his legs were the longest part of him.

Joe began to cry, and Blaze heated a bottle. The baby pushed it away, so Blaze dandled him absently on his lap. Joe quieted at once and began to stare around at things from his new elevation: the three pin-ups on the far side of the room, the greasy asbestos shield screwed into the wall behind the stove, the windows, dirty on the inside and frosty on the outside.

“Not much like where you came from, huh?” Blaze asked.

Joe smiled, then tried his strange, unpracticed laugh that made Blaze grin. The little guy had two teeth, their tops just peeking through the gums. Blaze wondered if some of the others struggling to come through were giving him trouble; Joe chewed his hands a lot, and sometimes whined in his sleep. Now he began to drool, and Blaze wiped his mouth with an old Kleenex that was wadded up in his pocket.

He couldn’t leave the baby with George again. It was like George was jealous, or something. Almost like George wanted to —

He might have stiffened, because Joe looked around at him with a funny questioning expression, like What’s up with you, buddy? Blaze hardly noticed. Because the thing was…now he was George. And that meant that part of him wanted to —

Again he shied away from it, and when he did, his troubled mind found something else to seize on.

If he went somewhere, George went somewhere, too. If he was George now, that only made sense. A leads to B, simple as can be, Johnny Cheltzman would have said.

If he went, George went.

Which meant that George was powerless to hurt Joe no matter how much he might want to.

Something inside him loosened. He still didn’t like the idea of leaving the baby, but better to leave him alone than with somebody who might hurt him…and besides, he had to do it. There was no one else.

But he could sure use a disguise, with them having that drawing of him and all. Something like a nylon stocking, only natural. What?

An idea came to him. It didn’t come in a flash, but slowly. It rose in his mind like a bubble rising to the surface of water so thick it’s nearly mud.

He put Joe back on the floor, then went into the bathroom. He laid out scissors and a towel. Then he got George’s Norelco shaver out of the medicine cabinet, where it had been sleeping all these months with the cord wrapped around it.

He cut his hair in big unlovely bunches, cut until what was left stuck up in bristly patches. Then he plugged in the Norelco and shaved those off, too. He went back and forth until the electric razor was hot in his hand and his newly nude scalp was pink with irritation.

He regarded his image in the mirror curiously. The dent in his brow showed more clearly than ever, all of it uncovered for the first time in years, and it was sort of horrible to look at — it looked almost deep enough to hold a cup of coffee, if he was lying on his back — but otherwise Blaze didn’t think he looked much like the crazed babynapper in the police sketch. He looked like some foreign guy from Germany or Berlin or someplace. But his eyes, they were still the same. What if his eyes gave him away?

“George has shades,” he said. “That’s the ticket…isn’t it?”

He vaguely realized he was actually making himself more conspicuous rather than less, but maybe that was all right. What else could he do, anyway? He couldn’t help being six-foot-whatever. All he could do was try and make his looks work for him rather than against him.

He certainly didn’t realize that he had done a better job of disguise than George ever could have, no more than he realized that George was now the creation of a mind working at a feverish, half-crazed pitch below the burnt-out surface of stupidity. For years he had identified himself as a dummy, coming to accept it as just one more part of his life, like the dent in his forehead. Yet something continued to work away beneath the burnt-out surface. It worked with the deadly instinct of living things — moles, worms, microbes — beneath the surface of a burnt-over meadow. This was the part that remembered everything. Every hurt, every cruelty, every bad turn the world had done him.

 

He was hiking at a good pace along an Apex back road when an old pulp truck with an oversized load wheezed up beside him. The man inside was grizzled and wearing a thermal undershirt under a checkered wool coat.

“Climb up!” he bawled.

Blaze swung onto the running board and then climbed into the cab. Said thank you. The driver nodded and said, “Goin to Westbrook.” Blaze nodded back and gave the guy a thumbs-up. The driver clashed the gears and the truck began to roll again. Not as if it particularly wanted to.

“Seen you before, ain’t I?” the trucker shouted over the flailing motor. His window was broken and blasts of cold January air whirled in, fighting with the baking air from the heater. “Live on Palmer Road?”

“Yeah!” Blaze shouted back.

“Jimmy Cullum used to live out there,” the trucker said, and offered Blaze an incredibly battered package of Luckies. Blaze took one.

“Some guy,” Blaze said. His newly bald head did not show; he was wearing a red knitted cap.

“Went down south, Jimmy did. Say, your buddy still around?”

Blaze realized he must mean George. “Naw,” he said. “He found work in New Hampshire.”

“Yeah?” the trucker said. “Wish he’d find me some.”

They had reached the top of the hill and now the truck began down the other side, picking up speed along the rutted washboard, banging and clobbering. Blaze could almost feel the illegal load pushing them. He had driven overweight pulp trucks himself; had once taken a load of Christmas trees to Massachusetts that had to’ve been half a ton over the limit. It had never worried him before, but it did now. It dawned on him that only he stood between Joe and death.

 

After they’d gotten on the main road, the driver mentioned the kidnapping. Blaze tensed a little, but he wasn’t particularly surprised.

“They find the guy grabbed that kid, they ought to string him up by his balls,” the pulper offered. He shifted up to third with a hellish grinding of gears.

“I guess so,” Blaze said.

“It’s gettin as bad as those plane hijacks. Remember those?”

“Yep.” He didn’t.

The driver tossed the stub of his cigarette out the window and immediately lit another one. “It’s got to stop. They ought to have mandatory death penalties for guys like that. A firing squad, maybe.”

“You think they’ll get the guy?” Blaze asked. He was starting to feel like a spy in a movie.

“Does the Pope wear a tall hat?” the driver asked, turning onto Route 1.

“I guess so.”

“What I mean is, it goes without saying. Of course they’ll get ’im. They always do. But the kid’ll be dead, and you can quote me on that.”

“Oh, I dunno,” Blaze said.

“Yeah? Well, I know. Whole idea is crazy. Kidnappin in this day and age? The FBI’ll mark the bills or copy the serial numbers or put invisible marks on em, the kind you can only see with an ultraviolet light.”

“I guess so,” Blaze said, feeling troubled. He hadn’t thought about those sorts of things. Still, if he was going to sell the money in Boston, to that guy George knew, what did it matter? He started to feel better again. “You think those Gerards will really fork over a million bucks?”

The driver whistled. “Is that how much they’re askin?”

Blaze felt in that moment as if he could gladly have bitten off his own tongue and swallowed it. “Yeah,” he said. And thought Oh, George.

“That’s somethin new,” the driver said. “Wasn’t in the morning paper. Did you hear about it on the radio?”

George said, quite clearly: “Kill him, Blaze.”

The driver cupped his hand to his ear. “What? Didn’t quite get that.”

“I said yeah, on the radio.” He looked down at his hands, folded in his lap. They were big hands, powerful. One of them had broken a Collie’s neck with a single blow, and back then he hadn’t even had his growth.

“They might get that ransom,” the driver said, flipping out his second cigarette butt and lighting a third, “but they’ll never get to spend it. Nossir. Not never.”

They were headed up Route 1 now, past frozen marshes and clam-shacks shuttered for the winter. The trucker was avoiding the turnpike and the weighing stations there. Blaze didn’t blame him.

If I hit ’im right in the throat, where his adam’s apple is, he’d wake up in heaven before he even knew he was dead, Blaze thought. Then I could grab the wheel and pull ’im over. Prop ’im up on the passenger side. Anyone who sees him’ll think he’s just catching him a little catnap. Poor fella, they’ll think, he was probably drivin all n —

“…goin?”

“Huh?” Blaze asked.

“I said, where you goin? I forgot.”

“Oh. Westbrook.”

“Well, I gotta swing off on Marah Road a mile up. Meetin a buddy, you know.”

“Oh,” Blaze said. “Yeah.”

And George said: “You got to do it now, Blazer. Right time, right place. It’s how we roll.”

So Blaze turned toward the driver.

“How about another cigarette?” the driver asked. “You in’trested?” He cocked his head a little as he spoke. Offering a perfect target.

Blaze stiffened a little. His hands twitched in his lap. Then he said, “No. Tryin to quit.”

“Yeah? Good for you. Cold as a witch’s tit in here, ain’t it?” The driver downshifted in anticipation of his turn, and from below them came a series of barking explosions as the engine backfired down its rotting tailpipe. “Heater’s broke. Radio, too.”

“Too bad,” Blaze said. His throat felt as if as if someone had just fed him a spoonful of dust.

“Yeah, yeah, life sucks and then y’die.” He applied the brakes. They screamed like souls in pain. “You have to hit the ground runnin; sorry, but she stalls out in first.”

“Sure,” Blaze said. Now that the moment had come and gone, he felt sick to his stomach. And afraid. He wished he had never seen the driver.

“Say hi to your buddy when you see ’im,” the driver said, and downshifted another gear as the overloaded truck swerved onto what Blaze assumed was Marah Road.

Blaze opened the door and jumped out onto the frozen shoulder, slamming the door behind him. The driver honked his horn once, and then the truck roared over the hill in a cloud of stinking exhaust. Soon it was just a sound, dwindling away.

Blaze started up Route 1 with his hands jammed in his pockets. He was in the exurban sprawl south of Portland, and in a mile or two he came to a big shopping center with stores and a cinema complex. There was a laundrymat there called The Giant Kleen Kloze U-Wash-It. There was a mailbox in front of the laundrymat, and there he mailed his ransom note.

There was a newspaper dispenser inside. He went in to get one.

“Look, Ma,” a little kid said to his mother, who was unloading kleen kloze from a coin-op dryer. “That guy’s got a hole in his head.”

“Hush,” the kid’s mother said.

Blaze smiled at the boy, who immediately hid behind his mother’s leg. From this place of safety he peered out and up.

Blaze got his paper and went out with it. A hotel fire had pushed the kidnap story to the bottom of page one, but the sketch of him was still there. SEARCH FOR KIDNAPPERS GOES ON, the headline said. He stuffed the newspaper in his back pocket. It was a bummer. While cutting across the parking lot to the road, he spotted an old Mustang with the keys in it. Without giving it much thought, Blaze got in and drove it away.