Blaze

“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.

He began to descend again, then slipped and fell on his rump, still clutching the baby to his chest. There was a sharp flare of pain in his right ankle, as if someone had struck sparks inside his flesh. And he found himself staring at a triangular patch of shadow between two rounded rocks that bulged toward each other like breasts. He crawled toward it, still holding Joe against him. Yes, that was it. Yes and yes and yes. He ducked his head and crawled inside.

The cave was dark and moist and surprisingly warm. The floor was covered with soft, ancient pine-boughs. Blaze was swept with deja vu. He and John Cheltzman had dragged the boughs in after stumbling on this place by accident on a forbidden afternoon away from HH.

Blaze set the baby down on a bed of boughs, fumbled in his jacket pocket for the kitchen matches he always kept in there, and lit one. By its wavering light he could see Johnny’s neatly made printing on the wall.

Johnny C and Clay Blaisdell. August 15th. Third year of Hell.

It was written in candlesmoke.

Blaze shivered — not from the cold, not in here — and shook out the match.

Joe was staring up at him in the gloom. He was gasping. His eyes were full of dismay. Then he stopped gasping.

“Christ, what’s wrong with you?” Blaze cried. The rock walls knocked his voice back into his own ears. “What’s wrong? What’s —”

Then he knew. The blankets were too tight. He had pulled them around Joe when he put him down, and he’d pulled too hard. Kid couldn’t breathe. He loosened them with trembling fingers. Joe whooped in a huge lungful of damp cave air and began to cry. It was a weak, trembling sound.

Blaze shook the Pampers out of his shirt, then got one of the bottles. He tried to give Joe the nipple, but Joe turned his head away.

“Wait then,” Blaze said. “Just wait.”

He took his cap, put it on, gave it a tug to the left, and went out.

He got some good deadwood from a tangle at the end of the gulch, and several handfuls of duff from beneath it. These he stuffed in his pockets. When he got back to the cave, he made a little fire and lit it. There was a small fissure like a cleft palate above the main opening, enough to create a draft and pull most of the smoke outside. He didn’t have to worry about anyone seeing this little bit of smoke, at least not until the wind died and the snow stopped.

He fed the fire stick by stick, until it was crackling briskly. Then he put Joe on his lap before it and warmed him. The little guy was breathing more naturally now, but that bronchial rattle was still there.

“Gonna take you to a doctor,” Blaze told him. “Soon as we get outta this. He’ll fix you up. You’ll be as cool as a fool.”

Joe grinned at him abruptly, showing off his new tooth. Blaze grinned back, relieved. The kid couldn’t be too bad off if he was still grinning, right? He offered Joe a finger. Joe wrapped his hand around it.

“Shake, pard,” Blaze said, and laughed. Then he took the cold bottle out of his jacket pocket, brushed off the clinging bits of duff, and set it next to the fire to get warm. Outside, the wind howled and shrieked, but in here it was warming up nicely. He wished he had remembered the cave first. It would have been better than HH. It had been wrong to bring Joe to an orphanage. It was what George would have called bad mojo.

“Well,” Blaze said, “you won’t remember. Willya?”

When the bottle felt warm to the touch, he gave it to Joe. This time the baby latched on eagerly, and took the whole thing. While putting away the last two ounces, his eyes took on the glassy, faraway look Blaze had come to know well. He put Joe on his shoulder and rocked him back and forth. The baby burped twice and talked his little nonsense words for maybe five minutes. Then he ceased. His eyes were closed again. Blaze was getting used to his schedule. Joe would sleep now for forty-five minutes — maybe an hour — and then want to be active the rest of the morning.