Blaze

Chapter 19

DARK CAME EARLY, wrapped in snow. By five o’clock, the only light in the headmaster’s office was the flickering fire on the hearth. Joe was sleeping soundly, but Blaze was worried about him. His breathing seemed fast, his nose was running, and his chest sounded rattly. Bright red blotches of color glowed in each cheek.

The baby book said fever often accompanied teething, and sometimes a cold, or cold symptoms. Cold was good enough for Blaze (he didn’t know what symptoms were). The book said just keep em warm. Easy for the book-writing guy to say; what was Blaze supposed to do when Joe woke up and wanted to crawl around?

He had to call the Gerards now, tonight. They couldn’t drop the money from a plane in this snowstorm, but the snow would probably stop by tomorrow night. He would get the money, and keep Joe, too. Fuck those rich Republicans. He and Joe were for each other now. They would get away. Somehow.

He stared into the fire and fell into a daydream. He saw himself lighting the road-flares in a clearing. Running lights of a small plane appearing overhead. Wasp-buzz of the engine. Plane banks toward the signal, which is burning like a birthday cake. Something white in the air — a parachute with a little suitcase attached to it!

Then he’s back here. He opens the suitcase. It’s stacked with dough. Each bundle is neatly banded. Blaze counts it. It’s all there.

Next he’s on the small island of Acapulco (which he believed was in the Bahamas, although he supposed he could be wrong about that). He’s bought himself a cabin on a high spur of land that overlooks the breakers. There are two bedrooms, one large, one small. There are two hammocks out back, one large, one small.

Time passes. Maybe five years. And here comes a kid pounding up the beach — a beach that shines like a wet muscle in the sunlight. He’s tanned. He’s got long black hair, like an Indian brave’s. He’s waving. Blaze waves back.

Again Blaze seemed to hear the sound of fugitive laughter. He turned around sharply. No one was there.

But the daydream was broken. He got up and poked his arms into his coat. He sat down and pulled on his boots. He was going to make this happen. His feet and his head were set, and when he got that way, he always did what he said he was going to do. It was his pride. The only one he had.

He checked the baby again, then went out. He closed the office door behind him and clattered down the stairs. George’s gun was tucked in the waistband of his pants, and this time it was loaded.

The wind coming across the old play-yard was howling hard enough to push him into a stagger before he got used to it. Snow belted his face, needling his cheeks and forehead. The tops of the trees leaned this way and that. New drifts were forming on the crusted layers of old snow, already three feet deep in places. He didn’t need to worry about the tracks he’d made coming in anymore.

He waded to the Cyclone fence, wishing he had snowshoes, and climbed awkwardly over it. He landed in snow up to his thighs and began to flounder north, setting off cross-country toward Cumberland Center.

It was three miles, and he was out of breath before he was halfway there. His face was numb. So were his hands and feet, despite heavy socks and gloves. Yet he kept on, making no attempt to go around drifts but plowing straight through. Twice he stumbled over fences buried in the snow, one of them barbed wire that ripped his jeans and tore into his leg. He merely picked himself up and went on, not wasting breath on a curse.

An hour after setting out, he entered a tree farm. Here perfectly pruned little blue spruces marched away in rows, each one growing six feet from its fellows. Blaze was able to walk down a long, sheltered corridor where the snow was only three inches deep — and in some places, there was no snow at all. This was the Cumberland County Reserve, and it bordered the main road.

When he reached the western border of the toy forest, he sat on top of the embankment and then slid down to Route 289. Up the road, almost lost in the blowing snow, was a blinker-light he remembered well — red on two sides, yellow on the other two. Beyond it, a few streetlights glimmered like ghosts.

Blaze crossed the road, which was snow-coated and empty of traffic, and walked up to the Exxon on the corner. A small pool of light on the side of the cinderblock building highlighted a pay phone. Looking like an ambulatory snowman, Blaze stepped to it — hulked over it. He had a panicky moment when it seemed he had no change, but he found two quarters in his pants and another in his coat pocket. Then — bool! — his money came back in the coin return. Directory Assistance was free.

“I want to call Joseph Gerard,” he said. “Ocoma.”

There was a blank pause, and then the operator gave him the number. Blaze wrote it on the fogged glass that shielded the phone from the worst of the snow, unaware that he had asked for an unlisted number and the operator had given it to him per FBI instructions. This of course opened the flood-gates to well-wishers and cranks, but if the kidnappers didn’t call, the traceback equipment couldn’t be used.

Blaze dialed 0 and gave the lady the Gerard phone number. He asked if that was a toll-call. It was. He asked if he could talk three minutes for seventy-five cents. The operator said no; a three-minute call to Ocoma would cost him a dollar-ninety. Did he have a telephone credit card?

Blaze didn’t. Blaze had no credit cards of any kind.

The operator told him he could charge the call to his home phone, and there was a phone at the shack (although it hadn’t rung a single time since George died), but Blaze was too clever for that.

Collect, then? the operator suggested.

“Collect, yeah!” Blaze said.

“Your name, sir?”

“Clayton Blaisdell, Junior,” he said at once. In his relief at finding he hadn’t made this long slog just to come up empty for lack of phone-change, Blaze would not realize this tactical error for almost two hours.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Thank you,” Blaze said, feeling clever. Feeling cool as a fool.

The phone rang only once on the other end before being picked up. “Yes?” The voice sounded wary and weary.

“I’ve got your son,” Blaze said.

“Mister, I’ve had ten calls today saying the same thing. Prove it.”

Blaze was flummoxed. He hadn’t expected this. “Well, he’s not with me, you know. My partner’s got him.”

“Yeah?” Nothing else. Just Yeah?

“I seen your wife when I come in,” Blaze said. It was the only thing he could think of. “She’s real pretty. She ‘us in a white nightie. You guys had a pitcher on the dresser — well, three pitchers all put together.”

The voice on the other end said, “Tell me something else.” But he didn’t sound tired anymore.

Blaze racked his brain. There was nothing else, nothing that would convince the stubborn man on the other end. Then there was. “The ole lady had a cat. That’s why she came downstairs. She thought I was the cat — that I was—” He racked his brain some more. “Mikey!” he shouted. “I’m sorry I hit her so hard. I sure didn’t mean to, but I was scared.”

The man on the other end of the line began to cry. It was sudden and shocking. “Is he all right? For God’s sake, is Joey okay?”

There was a confused babble in the background. A woman seemed to be speaking. Another was yelling and crying. The one yelling and crying was probably the mother. Narmenians were probably specially emotional. Frenchies were the same way.

“Don’t hang up!” Joseph Gerard (it just about had to be Gerard) said. He sounded panicky. “Is he okay?”

“Yeah, he’s good,” Blaze said. “Got another tooth through. That makes three. Di’per rash is clearing up good. I — I mean we — keep ‘is bottom greased up real good. What’s the matter with your wife? Is she too good to grease his bottom?”

Gerard was panting like a dog. “We’ll do anything, mister. It’s all your play.”

Blaze started a little at that. He had almost forgotten why he called.

“Okay,” he said. “Here’s what I want you to do.”

In Portland, an AT&T operator was speaking to SAC Albert Sterling. “Cumberland Center,” she said. “Gas station pay phone.”

“Got it,” he said, and pumped his fist in the air.

“Get in a light plane tomorrow night at eight,” Blaze said. He was beginning to feel uneasy, beginning to feel he’d been on the phone too long. “Start flying south along Route 1 toward the New Hampshire border. Fly low. Got it?”

“Wait — I’m not sure—”

“You better be sure,” Blaze said. He tried to sound like George would. “Don’t try to stall me, unless you want your kid back in a bag.”

“Okay,” Gerard said. “Okay, I hear you. I’m just writing it down.”

Sterling handed a scrap of paper to Bruce Granger and made dialing motions. Granger called the State Police.

“The pilot’ll see a signal light,” Blaze said. “Have the money in a suitcase attached to a parachute. Drop it like you wanted it to land right on top of the fla — of the light. The signal. You can have the kid back the next day. I’ll even send some of the stuff I — we, I mean — use on his bottom.” A witticism occurred to him. “No extra charge.”

Then he looked at his free hand and saw he had crossed his fingers when he said they could have Joe back. Just like a little kid telling his first lie.

“Don’t hang up!” Gerard said. “I don’t think I quite understand—”

“You’re a smart guy,” Blaze said. “I think you do.”

He hung up and left the Exxon station at a dead run, not sure why he was running, only knowing that it seemed like the right thing to do. The only thing. He ran under the blinker-light, angled across the road, and scaled the embankment in giant leaps. Then he disappeared into the spruce-lined rows of the County Reserve.

Behind him, a giant monster with glaring white eyes came snarling over the hill. It plunged through the teeming air, nine-foot sidewings sending up sprays of snow. The plow obliterated Blaze’s tracks where they angled across the road. When two State Police cars converged on the Exxon station nine minutes later, Blaze’s footprints up the embankment to the Reserve were no more than blurry indentations. Even as the Troopers stood around the pay phone with their flashlights pointed, the wind did its work behind them.

Sterling’s phone rang five minutes later. “He was here,” the State cop on the other end said. Sterling could hear wind blowing in the background. No, shrieking. “He was here but he’s gone.”

“Gone how?” Sterling asked. “Car or on foot?”

“Who knows? Plow went through just before we got here. But if I had to guess, I’d say he drove.”

“Nobody’s asking you to guess. Gas station? Anybody see him?”

“They’re closed because of the storm. Even if they’d been open — the phone’s on a wall around to the side.”

“Lucky sonofabitch,” Sterling said. “Blind-lucky sonofabitch. We surround that crappy little cabin in Apex and arrest four girly magazines and a jar of strained peas. Tracks? Or did the wind take em?”

“There were still tracks around the phone,” the Trooper said. “Wind blurred the treads, but it was him.”

“Guessing again?”

“No. They were big.”

“Okay. Roadblocks, right?”

“Every road big and small,” the Trooper said. “It’s happening as we speak.”

“Logging roads, too.”

“Logging roads, too,” the Trooper said. He sounded insulted.

Sterling didn’t care. “So he’s bottled up? Can we say that, Trooper?”

“Yes.”

“Good. We’re going in there with three hundred guys soon as the weather lifts tomorrow. This has gone on too long.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Snow plow,” Sterling said. “My sister’s rosy chinchina.” He hung up.

By the time Blaze got back to HH, he was exhausted. He climbed the Cyclone fence and fell face-first into the snow on the other side. His nose was bloody. He had made his way back in just thirty-five minutes. He picked himself up, staggered around the building, and went inside.

Joe’s furious, agonized howls met him.

“Christ!”

He ran up the stairs two at a time and burst into Coslaw’s office. The fire was out. The cradle was tipped over. Joe was lying on the floor. His head was covered with blood. His face was purple, his eyes were squeezed shut, his small hands powdered white with dust.

“Joe!” Blaze cried. “Joe! Joe!”

He swept the baby into his arms and ran into the corner where the diapers were stacked. He grabbed one and swabbed the gash on Joe’s forehead. The blood seemed to be pouring out in freshets. There was a splinter sticking out of the wound. Blaze plucked it out and threw it on the floor.

The baby struggled in his arms and screamed more loudly still. Blaze wiped away more blood, holding Joe firmly, and bent in for a closer look. The cut was jagged, but with the big splinter removed, it didn’t look so bad. Thank Christ it hadn’t been his eye. It could have been his eye.

He found a bottle and gave it to Joe cold. Joe grabbed it with both hands and began to suck greedily. Panting, Blaze got a blanket and wrapped the baby in it. Then he lay down on his own blankets with the wrapped baby on his chest. Blaze closed his eyes and was immediately seized by horrible vertigo. Everything in the world seemed to be slipping away: Joe, George, Johnny, Harry Bluenote, Anne Bradstay, birds on wires and nights on the road.

Then he was all right again.

“From now on, it’s us, Joey,” he said. “You got me and I got you. It’ll be all right. Okay?”

Snow struck the windows in hard, rattling bursts. Joe turned his face from the rubber nipple and coughed thickly, his tongue popping out with the effort of his chest to clear itself. Then he took the nipple again. Beneath his hand, Blaze could feel the small heart hammering.

“It’s how we roll,” Blaze said, and kissed the baby’s bloody forehead.

They fell asleep together.