night. And it wasn’t done yet.
He whirled around. “George?” he called softly. “That you, George?”
It wasn’t. That had come from his own head. And why in the name of God would he have a thought like that?
He looked out the window again. His mutilated brow drew down in thought. They knew who he was. He had been stupid and given that operator his real name, right down to the Junior on the end. He had thought he was being smart, but he was being stupid. Again. Stupid was a prison they never let you out of, no time off for good behavior, you were in for life.
George would have given him the old horselaugh for sure. George would have said,
And then, like a meteor streaking across his troubled consciousness:
Blaze looked around wildly, as if to verify this.
He began to feel hunted again, trapped in a narrowing circle. He thought of the white interrogation room, of having to go to the bathroom, of having questions thrown at you that they didn’t even give you time to answer. And this time it wouldn’t be a little trial in a half-empty courtroom. This time it would be a circus, with every seat full. Then prison forever. And solitary confinement if he went stir.
These thoughts filled him with terror, but they were far from the worst. The worst was thinking of them bursting in with their guns drawn and taking the baby back. Kidnapping him again. His Joe.
Sweat sprang up on his face and arms in spite of the room’s chill.
That wasn’t George, either. That was his thought, and it was true.
He began to rack his brains furiously, trying to make a plan. There ought to be a place to go. There
Joe began to stir awake, but Blaze didn’t even hear him. A place to go. A safe place. Someplace close by. A secret place where they couldn’t find him. A place that even George wouldn’t know about, a place —
Inspiration burst upon him.
He whirled to the bed. Joe’s eyes were open. When he saw Blaze, he gave him a grin and stuck his thumb in his mouth — a gesture that was almost jaunty.
“Gotta eat, Joe. Quick. We’re on the run, but I got an idea.”
He fed Joe strained beef and cheese. Joe had been woofing down a full jar of this stuff at a go, but this time he started turning his head aside after the fifth spoonful. And when Blaze tried to force the issue, he began to cry. Blaze switched to one of the bottles and Joe sucked at it greedily. Trouble was, there were only three left.
While Joe lay on the blanket with the bottle clasped in his starfish hands, Blaze raced around the room picking up and packing up. He broke open a package of Pampers and stuffed his shirt with them until he puffed out like the circus fatman.
Then he knelt and began to dress Joe as warmly as he could: two shirts, two pairs of pants, a sweater, his tiny knitted hat. Joe screamed indignantly all through this tribulation. Blaze took no notice. When the baby was dressed, he folded his two blankets into a small, thick pouch and slipped Joe inside.
The baby’s face was now purple with rage. His screams echoed up and down the decaying hallway when Blaze carried him from the headmaster’s office to the stairs. At the foot of the stairs, he put his own cap on Joe’s head, taking care to cock it to the left. It covered him down to the shoulders. Then he stepped out into the driving snow.
Blaze crossed the back yard and clambered awkwardly over the cement wall at its far end. The land on the other side had once been the Victory Garden. There was nothing here now but scrub bushes (only rounded humps beneath the snow) and scraggly young pines that were growing with no rhyme or reason. He jogged with the baby pulled tightly to his chest. Joe wasn’t crying now, but Blaze could feel his short, quick gasps for breath as he struggled with the ten-degree air.
At the far end of the Victory Garden was another wall, this one of piled rock. Many of the stones had fallen out of it, leaving big gaps. Blaze crossed at one of these and descended the steep grade on the other side in a series of skidding leaps. His heels drove up clouds of powdery snow. At the bottom, woods took over again, but a fire had burned through here thirty-five or forty years before, a bad one. The trees and underbrush had grown back helter- skelter, fighting each other for space and light. There were blowdowns everywhere. Many were concealed by the snow, and Blaze had to slow down in spite of his need to hurry. The wind howled in the treetops; he could hear the trunks groaning and protesting.
Joe began to whimper. It was a guttural, out-of-breath sound.
“It’s all right,” Blaze said. “We’re gettin there.”
He wasn’t sure the old bobwire fence would still be there, but it was. It was drifted in right to the top, though, and he almost stumbled over it, plunging both himself and the baby into the snow. He stepped over instead — carefully — and walked down a deepening cleft of ground. The soil parted here and the land’s skeleton showed. The snow was thinner. The wind was now howling over their heads.
“Here,” Blaze said. “Here someplace.”
He began to hunt back and forth about halfway to where the ground leveled off again, peering at jumbles of rocks, half-exposed roots, snow pockets, and caches of old pine needles. He couldn’t find it. Panic began to rise in his throat. The cold would be seeping through the blankets now, and through Joe’s layers of clothes.
Farther down, maybe.
