“I know it.”
The big man brought the steaks, and Caesar salads, and new peas, and huge mounds of string-fries, and huge glasses of milk. For dessert he brought them wedges of cherry pie with scoops of vanilla ice cream melting on top. At first they ate slowly. Then Detective Monahan of Boston’s Finest left (without paying nothing, so far as Blaze could see) and they both pitched to. Blaze had two pieces of pie and three glasses of milk and the third time the big guy refilled Blaze’s glass, he laughed out loud.
When they left, the neon signs in the street were coming on.
“You go to the Y,” the big man said before they did. “Do it right away. City’s no place for a couple of kids to be wandering around at night.”
“Yes, sir,” John said. “I already called and fixed it.”
The big man smiled. “You’re all right, kid. You’re pretty good. Keep the bear close, and walk behind him if anyone comes up and tries to brace you. Especially kids wearing colors. You know, gang jackets.”
“Yes sir.”
“Take care of each other.”
That was his final word on it.
The next day they rode the subways until the novelty wore off and then they went to the movies and then they went to the ballgame again. It was late when they got out, almost eleven, and someone picked Blaze’s pocket, but Blaze had put his share of their money in his underwear the way Johnny told him to and the pickpocket got a big handful of nothing. Blaze never saw what he looked like, just a narrow back weaving its way into the crowd exiting through Gate A.
They stayed two more days and saw more movies and one play that Blaze didn’t understand, although Johnny liked it. They sat in something called the lodge that was five times as high as the balcony at the Nordica. They went into a department store photo booth and had their pictures made: some of Blaze, some of Johnny, some of them both together. In the ones together, they were laughing. They rode the subways some more until Johnny got train-sick and threw up on his sneakers. Then a Negro man came over and shouted at them about the end of the world. He seemed to be saying it was their fault, but Blaze couldn’t tell for sure. Johnny said the guy was crazy. Johnny said there were a lot of crazy people in the city. “They breed here like fleas,” Johnny said.
They still had some money left, and it was Johnny who suggested the final touch. They took a Greyhound back to Portland, then spent the rest of their dividend on a taxi. John fanned the remaining bills in front of the startled driver — almost fifty dollars’ worth of crumpled fives and ones, some smelling fragrantly of Clayton Blaisdell, Jr.’s underpants — and told him they wanted to go to Hetton House, in Cumberland.
The cabbie dropped his flag. And at five minutes past two on a sunny late summer afternoon, they pulled up at the gate. John Cheltzman took half a dozen steps up the drive toward the brooding brick pile and fainted dead away. He had rheumatic fever. He was dead two years later.
Chapter 13
BY THE TIME BLAZE got the baby into the shack, Joe was screaming his head off. Blaze stared at him in wonder. He was furious! The face was flushed across the forehead and the cheeks, even the bridge of the tiny nose. His eyes were squinched shut. His fists made tiny circles of rage in the air.
Blaze felt sudden panic. What if the kid was sick? What if he had the flu or something? Kids caught the flu every day. Sometimes they died of it. And he couldn’t very well take him to a doctor’s office. What did he know about kids, anyway? He was just a dummy. He could barely take care of himself.
He had a sudden wild urge to take the baby back out to the car. To drive him to Portland and leave him on somebody’s doorstep.
“George!” he cried. “George, what should I do?”
He was afraid George had gone away again, but George answered up from the bathroom. “Feed him. Give him something out of one of those jars.”
Blaze ran into the bedroom. He clawed one of the cartons out from under the bed, opened it, and selected a jar at random. He took it back to the kitchen and found a spoon. He put the jar on the table beside the wicker basket and opened the lid. What was inside looked awful, like puke. Maybe it was spoiled. He smelled it anxiously. It smelled all right. It smelled like peas. That was all right, then.
He hesitated, just the same. The idea of actually putting food in that open, screaming mouth seemed somehow… irreversible. What if the little motherfucker choked on it? What if he just didn’t want it? What if it was somehow the wrong stuff for him and… and…
His mind tried to put up the word POISON, and Blaze wouldn’t look at it. He stuffed half a spoonful of cold peas in the baby’s mouth.
The cries stopped at once. The baby’s eyes popped open, and Blaze saw they were blue. Joe spit some of the peas back and Blaze tucked the goop back in with the end of the spoon, not thinking about it, just doing it. The baby sucked contentedly.
Blaze fed him another spoonful. It was accepted. And another. In seven minutes, the entire jar of Gerber Peas was gone. Blaze had a crick in his back from bending over the wicker basket. Joe belched a runnel of green foam. Blaze mopped it off the small cheek with the tail of his own shirt.
“Bring it up again and we’ll vote on it,” he said. This was one of George’s witticisms.
Joe blinked at the sound of his voice. Blaze stared back, fascinated. The baby’s skin was clear and unblemished. His head was capped with a surprising thatch of blond hair. But his eyes were what got Blaze. He thought they were old eyes somehow, wise eyes. They were the washed-out blue of desert skies in a Western movie. The corners turned up a little, like the eyes of Chinese people. They gave him a fierce look. Almost a warrior look.
“You a fighter?” Blaze asked. “You a fighter, little man?”
One of Joe’s thumbs crept into his mouth and he began to suck it. At first Blaze thought he might want a bottle (and he hadn’t figured out the Playtex Nurser gadget yet), but for the time being the kid seemed content with his thumb. His cheeks were still flushed, not with crying now but from his trip through the night.
His lids began to droop, and the corners of his eyes lost that fierce upward tilt. But still he peered at this man, this six-foot-seven stubbled giant with the crazed and scarecrowed brown hair who stood over him. Then the eyes closed. His thumb dropped out of his mouth. He slept.
Blaze straightened up and his back popped. He turned away from the basket and started for the bedroom.
“Hey dinkleballs,” George said from the bathroom. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“To bed.”
“The hell you are. You’re going to figure out that bottle gadget and fix the kid four or five, for when he wakes up.”
“The milk might go sour.”
“Not if you put it in the fridge. You warm it up when you need it.”
“Oh.”
Blaze got the Playtex Nurser kit and read the instructions. He read them twice. It took him half an hour. He didn’t understand hardly anything the first time and even less the second.
“I can’t, George,” he said at last.
“Sure you can. Throw those instructions away and just
So Blaze threw the instructions into the stove and then just fooled with the gadget, the way you did with a carb that wasn’t set quite right. Eventually, he figured out that you fitted the plastic liner over the gadget’s nozzle and then plunged it into the bottle shell. Bingo. Pretty slick. He prepared four bottles, filled them with canned milk, and put them away in the fridge.
“Can I go to bed now, George?” he asked.
No answer.
Blaze went to bed.
