“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. “
“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
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.
Chapter 20
HETTON HOUSE INCLUDED a large parcel of land in back of the main buildings, and here was planted what generations of boys had come to call the Victory Garden. The headmistress before Coslaw went slack on it, telling people she had a brown thumb rather than a green one, but Martin “The Law” Coslaw saw at least two shining potentialities in the Victory Garden. The first was to make a substantial saving in HH’s food-budget by having the boys grow their own vegetables. The second was to acquaint the boys with good hard work, which was the foundation of the world. “Work and mathematics built the pyramids,” Coslaw liked to say. And so the boys planted in the spring, weeded in the summer (unless they were “working out” on one of the neighboring farms), and harvested in the fall.
About fourteen months after the end of what Toe-Jam called “the fabulous blueberry summer,” John Cheltzman was among the pumpkin-picking crew at the north end of the VG. He took a cold, sickened, and died. It happened just that fast. He was packed off to Portland City Hospital on Halloween, while the rest of the boys were at their classes or “away schools.” He died in City Hospital’s charity ward, and he did it alone.
His bed at HH was stripped, then re-made. Blaze spent most of one afternoon sitting on his own bed and looking at John’s. The long sleeping room — which they called “the ram” — was empty. The others had gone to Johnny’s funeral. For most it was their first funeral, and they were quite excited about it.
Johnny’s bed frightened and fascinated Blaze. The jar of Shedd’s Peanut Butter that had always been stuffed down between the head of the bed and the wall was gone; he’d looked. So were the Ritz Crackers. (After lights-out, Johnny often said, “Everything tastes better when it shits on a Ritz,” which never failed to crack Blaze up.) The bed itself was made up in stark Army fashion, the top blanket pulled taut. The sheets were perfectly white and clean, even though Johnny had been an enthusiastic lights-out masturbator. Many nights Blaze lay in his own bed, looking up into the dark and listening to the soft creak of the springs as JC flogged his doggy. There were always stiff yellow places on his sheets. Christ, those stiff yellow places were on the sheets of all the bigger boys. They were on
