Blaze (15 page)

H
E WAS AT A CARNIVAL
—maybe the Topsham Fair, where the boys from Hetton House were allowed to go once each year on the rickety old blue bus—and Joe was on his shoulder. He felt foglike terror as he walked down the midway, because pretty soon
they
would spot him and it would be all over. Joe was awake. When they passed one of the funny mirrors that stretched you thin, Blaze saw the kid goggling at everything. Blaze kept walking, shifting Joe from one shoulder to the other when he got heavy, keeping an eye out for the cops at the same time.

All around him, the carnival rolled in unhealthy neon majesty. From the right came the amplified beat of a pitchman's voice:
“C'mon over here, got it all over here, six beautiful girls, half a dozen honeys, they all come straight from Club Diablo in Boston, these girls will tease you please you make you think you're in Gay Paree!”

This ain't no place for a kid, Blaze thought. This is the last place in the world for a little kid.

On the left was the House of Fun with its mechanical clown out front, rocking back and forth in clockspring gales of hilarity. Its mouth was turned upward in an expression of humor so large it was like a grimace of pain. Its lunatic laugh played over and over again from a tape-loop buried deep in its guts. A huge man with a blue anchor tattooed on one bicep threw hard rubber balls at wooden milk bottles stacked in a pyramid; his slicked-back hair gleamed under the colored lights like an otter's hide. The Wild Mouse rose and then went into a clattering dive, trailing the shrieks of country girls packed into tube tops and short skirts. The Moon Rocket rolled up, down, and all around, the faces of the riders stretched into goblin masks by the speed of the thing. A Babel of odors rose: French fries, vinegar, tacos, popcorn, chocolate, fried clams, pizza, peppers, beer. The midway was a flat brown tongue, littered with a thousand shucked wrappers and a million stamped cigarette butts. Under the glare of the lights, all faces were flat and grotesque. An old man with a runner of green snot hanging from his nose walked past, eating a candy apple. Then a boy with a plum-colored birthmark swarming up one cheek. An old black woman beneath a blonde beehive wig. A fat man in Bermuda shorts with varicose veins, wearing a tee-shirt saying PROPERTY OF THE BRUNSWICK DRAGONS.

“Joe,” someone was calling. “Joe…
Joe!
”

Blaze turned and tried to pinpoint the voice from the crowd. And then he saw her, wearing that same nightgown with her cakes practically falling out of the lace top. Joe's pretty young mother.

Terror seized him. She was going to see him. She couldn't help but see him. And when she did, she would take his baby away. He held Joe tighter, as if embrace could insure possession. The little body was warm and reassuring. He could feel the flutter of the child's life against his chest.

“There!” Mrs. Gerard screamed. “There he is, the man who stole my baby! Get him! Catch him! Give me back my baby!”

People turned to look. Blaze was near the merry-go-round now, and the calliope music was huge. It bounded and echoed.

“Stop him! Stop that man! Stop the baby-thief!”

The man with the tattoo and the slicked-back hair began to walk toward him and now, at last, Blaze could run. But the midway had grown longer. It stretched away for miles, an endless Highway of Fun. And they were all behind him: the boy with the swarming birthmark, the black woman in her blonde wig, the fat man in the Bermuda shorts. The mechanical clown laughed and laughed.

Blaze ran past another pitchman, who was standing beside a huge guy wearing what looked like an animal skin. The sign over his head billed him as Leopard Man. The pitchman raised his microphone and began to speak. His amplified voice rolled down the midway like thunder.

“Hurry, hurry, hurry! You're just in time to see Clayton Blaisdell, Jr., the noted babynapper! Lay that kid down, fella! He's right over here, folks, direct from Apex where he lives on the Parker Road, and the hot car is stashed in the shed out back! Hurry, hurry, hurry, see the live babynapper, right here—”

He ran faster, breath sobbing in and out, but they were gaining. He looked back and saw that Joe's mother was leading the posse. Her face was changing. It was growing paler, except for her lips. They were getting redder. Her teeth were growing down over them. Her fingers were hooking into red-tipped claws. She was becoming the Bride of Yorga.

“Get him! Catch him! Kill him!
The babynapper!
”

Then George was hissing at him from the shadows. “In here, Blaze! Quick!
Move,
goddammit!”

He veered in the direction of the voice and found himself in the Mirror Maze. The midway was suddenly broken up into a thousand distorted pieces. He bumped and thrust his way down the narrow corridor, panting like a dog. Then George was in front of him (and behind him, and to either side of him) and George was saying: “You have to make them drop it from a plane, Blaze. From a plane. Make them drop it from a plane.”

“I can't get out,” Blaze moaned. “George, help me to get out.”

“That's what I'm trying to do, asshole!
Make them drop it from a plane!
”

They were all outside now, and peering in, but the mirrors made it seem as if they were all around him.
“Get the babynapper!
” Gerard's wife shrieked. Her teeth were now huge.

“Help me, George.”

Then George smiled, and Blaze saw that his teeth were long, too. Too long. “I'll help you,” he said. “Give me the baby.”

But Blaze didn't. Blaze backed away. A million Georges advanced on him, holding out their hands to take the baby. Blaze turned and plunged down another glittering aisle, bouncing from side to side like a pinball, trying to hold Joe protectively. This was no place for a kid.

B
LAZE 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:

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.