Blaze

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.