Blaze

He went into the other room. Joe was fussing and kicking on the bed, still chewing his fingers. Blaze burped the bottle the way the lady showed him, pushing a finger up inside the plastic bag until a drop of milk formed on the nipple. He sat down by the baby and carefully removed Joe’s fingers from his mouth. Joe started to cry, but when Blaze put the rubber nipple where his fingers had been, the lips closed over it and he began to suck. The small cheeks went in and out.

“That’s right,” Blaze said. “That’s right, you little bagger.”

Joe drank all of it. When Blaze picked him up to burp him, he spit a little back, getting some on the shirt of Blaze’s thermal underwear. Blaze didn’t mind. He wanted to change the baby into one of his new outfits, anyway. He told himself he only wanted to see if it fit.

It did. When Blaze was done with that, he took off his own top and smelled the baby’s burp-up. It smelled vaguely cheesy. Maybe, he thought, the milk was still a little too thick. Or maybe he should have stopped and burped the kid halfway through the bottle. George was right. He needed a book.

He looked down at Joe. The baby had bunched a small piece of blanket in his hands and was examining it. He was a cute little shit. They were going to be worried about him, Joe Gerard III and his wife. Probably thinking the kid had been tucked away in a bureau drawer, screaming and hungry, with crappy diapers. Or worse still, lying in a shallow hole chipped out of frozen earth, a tiny scrap of manchild gasping away its last few breaths in frozen vapor. Then into a green plastic Hefty Bag…

Where had he gotten that idea?

George. George had said that. He had been talking about the Lindbergh snatch. The kidnapper’s name had been Hope-man, Hoppman, something like that.

“George? George, don’t you hurt ‘im while I’m gone.”

No answer.

He heard the first item on the news, while he was making his breakfast. Joe was on the floor, on a blanket Blaze had spread for him. He was playing with one of George’s newspapers. He had pulled a tent of it over his head and was kicking with excitement.

The announcer had just finished telling about a Republican Senator who had taken a bribe. Blaze was hoping George heard it. George liked stuff like that.

“Topping area news is an apparent kidnapping in Ocoma Heights,” the announcer said. Blaze stopped stirring his potatoes around in the frying pan and listened carefully. “Joseph Gerard IV, infant heir to the Gerard shipping fortune, was taken from the Gerards’ Ocoma Heights estate either late last night or early this morning. A sister of Joseph Gerard, the boy’s great-grandfather — once known as ‘the boy wonder of American shipping’ — was found unconscious on the kitchen floor by the family cook early this morning. Norma Gerard, said to be in her mid-seventies, was taken to the Maine Medical Center, where her condition is listed as critical. When asked if he had called for FBI assistance, Castle County Sheriff John D. Kellahar said he could not comment at this time. He would also not comment on the possibility of a ransom note —”

Oh yeah, Blaze thought. I got to send one of those.

“— but he did say police have a number of leads which are being actively investigated.”

Like what? Blaze wondered, and smiled a little. They always said stuff like that. What leads could they have, if the old lady was el zonko? He had even taken the ladder with him. They said stuff like that, that was all.

He ate his breakfast on the floor and played with the baby.

When he got ready to go out that afternoon, the kid had been fed and freshly changed and lay sleeping in the cradle. Blaze had tinkered with the formula a little more, and this time had burped him halfway through. It worked real good. It worked like a charm. He’d also changed the kid’s diapers. At first all that green shit had scared him, but then he remembered. Peas.

“George? I’m going now.”

“Okay,” George said from the bedroom.

“You better come out here and watch him. In case he wakes up.”

“I will, don’t worry.”

“Yeah,” Blaze said, without conviction. George was dead. He was talking to a dead man. He was asking a dead man to babysit. “Hey, George. Maybe I oughta —”

“Oughtta-shmotta, coulda-woulda. Go on, get out of here.”

“George —”

“Go on, I said! Roll!”

Blaze went.

The day was bright and sparkling and a little warmer. After a week of single-number temperatures, twenty degrees felt like a heatwave. But there was no pleasure in the sunshine, no pleasure to be had in driving the back roads to Portland. He didn’t trust George with the baby. He didn’t know why, but he sure didn’t. Because, see, now George was a part of himself, and he most likely took all the parts with him when he went somewhere, even the George part. Didn’t that make sense?

Blaze thought it did.

And then he started wondering about the woodstove. What if the house burned down?