Blaze

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