Those Who Favor Fire

by Lauren Wolk

  “Cold water?”

  “Cold water,” Doug said. “Cold as you please. But don’t tell her I told you. She made me promise to keep my mouth shut.”

  But it was Rebecca herself who spread the news. She knew how it sounded. She knew people might think she’d made a silly, stupid mistake by nearly scalding herself, by talking about it afterward. But she knew—she knew—that she had made no mistake. The water that had come boiling down on her back had come straight up from the well, and it should have been cold. Somehow, the water in the well had become hot and then, by morning, cold again.

  But as soon as she began to talk about the fire coming up under the well, people stopped listening. Sophia Browning’s house had stood three country blocks from the tunnels. Bill Hutter’s ice-locked lawn was just a block farther away than that. But Rebecca and Doug Sader lived a half mile from the nearest tunnel. Lots of people lived closer, and none of them had ever had hot wells. Unless you counted the people right over the tunnels, who had to be careful whenever they ran a bath. But that was different.

  “Why is that different?” Joe had asked Rachel when he’d brought her the news about the Saders’ well.

  “All kinds of things go on out over the tunnels. Their gardens aren’t much good anymore. Their basements are hot sometimes. That’s to be expected. They’re used to that sort of thing. But you can’t go around assuming that every odd thing that happens in Belle Haven has something to do with the fire. Especially not as far from the tunnels as the Saders live.”

  Which is when Joe suddenly rose up from the hammock and asked Rachel why she was digging up her garden and putting it, piecemeal, into pots.

  Chapter 28

  By July Rachel had decked her room out in its summer things again and Belle Haven was ready to celebrate Independence Day in its own, inimitable way. The country was turning 206 years old, the fire 12, and the people of Belle Haven made the most of both events.

  There was, of course, the parade down Maple Street. There were picnics and baseball games, fireworks and painted faces. But there were other things, too: things that did not take place in other American towns. There was, every Fourth of July in Belle Haven, a gathering over an obliging hot spot. When night came on, enough wood was pitched into the glowing hole to make a magnificent bonfire. Everyone sang “The Star Spangled Banner,” “America the Beautiful,” “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” marched around to “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” while the volunteer fire department tossed small fireworks into the hot spot and let the fire set them off. No rockets, though. Nothing meant to fly. Just color, and light, and enough bang and sizzle to make the babies cry.

  It was at these outlandish fireworks that Joe finally met Mendelson, the firefighter.

  They had, of course, heard of each other. Belle Haven was too small for anonymity. They had seen each other, too, from time to time. But they had never before met.

  Joe had gone out to the hot spot—which had come up in the middle of a big tomato field—to please Rusty, but after a while he said good night.

  “You’re not leaving yet?” Ian was sitting in an old lawn chair with his pipe and a supply of sparklers. Rusty stood behind him, chewing on a stem of grass, his face bathed with firelight. Angela and Rachel were over with the firemen, begging them to throw something more dramatic into the flames: what, they did not know. All around the hot spot, the tomatoes had baked black. At a safe distance, the spectators, all of whom understood the value of farm goods, had carefully taken up posts in between the rows of plants, like an eccentric battalion.

  “I guess I am,” Joe replied. “If I could just look at the fire from the ground up, like you all do … but I can’t. It’s too spooky, to me.”

  “You think that’s how we look at it? From the ground up?”

  Joe stuck his hands in his pockets, looked back toward the fire. Rachel and Angela made precise, black figures against its glow. “Look at them, Ian,” he said. “You think they’re afraid?”

  “Things aren’t always how they appear,” Ian said. Rusty watched the fire, waited patiently for the firemen to throw something into the flames.

  “Well,” Joe said, “Pal’s a little nervous, too, so I think I’ll take her home.”

  “Where is she?” Rusty asked.

  Joe whistled, and Pal came trotting into the light. But when an emerald plume came whistling up out of the hot spot, she stopped short, wheeled on her hind legs, and plunged away. “Come here, you big chicken,” Joe called, but Pal stayed where she was. “So long,” he said, stepping carefully between the crowded tomato plants. “You going after trout tomorrow, Rusty?”

  “You bet.”

  “Can I come along?”

  “You bet.”

  “Good night,” Ian called after him, lighting his pipe. “See you back at the ranch? For a nightcap?”

  “In the words of Belle Haven’s finest trout fisherman,” Joe called, without turning around, “you bet.”

  He found Pal cowering among the infant pines at the edge of the woods. A single touch of his hand behind her ear calmed her. The scent of him made her smile. “Come on, girl,” he said, walking along the border of the tomato field, toward the road. It wasn’t far from here to Ian’s, and it was plenty warm, beautiful, a good night for walking. When he reached the road, he had nothing on his mind except the way the trees looked in the reddish glow. He did not notice Pal stop suddenly. The first he knew of Mendelson was the sound of his laughter, close by.

  “Hello, Joe. Had enough?”

  Joe stopped, Pal caught up with him, and the two of them stood looking at the man in the road. “Who’s that?” Joe asked.

  “We haven’t met,” the man said, stepping forward. “The name’s Mendelson.”

  “Ah,” Joe said, taking his hand. It felt as if it were skinned with hoof, hard and dry and cold. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  “I’ll bet you have. And I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  “Have you?”

  “Well, sure. Strange young man shows up out of nowhere, no last name, no visible means of support. Curiouser and curiouser.”

  “Not really,” Joe said mildly. He couldn’t see much of the man’s face, but now and then, as Mendelson turned his head, the firelight caught his eyes. “I just got tired of living where I was, so I left.”

  “And now you’re here,” Mendelson said.

  “And now I’m here.”

  Mendelson spread his feet and crossed his arms, something that smacked of the military. “I’ll bet you didn’t know that some of the locals called you in to the FBI.”

  Joe raised his eyebrows and smiled. “Did they?”

  “Yes, indeed. Thought you might be one of the ten most wanted or something, looking for a place to hole up.”

  “And what did the FBI tell them?”

  “Said they didn’t want you, but thanks anyway.”

  “How could they know that, without taking a look?”

  “Fingerprints.”

  “Fingerprints?” Joe began to wonder if Mendelson might not be crazy.

  “From a butter knife.”

  Outside of the Schooner, the only Belle Haven butter knives he’d ever touched belonged to friends.

  “Do you always do this when you meet new people? Invent some far-fetched tale, see how they’ll react?”

  Mendelson chuckled. “I’ve been accused of a lot of things, Joe, and many of them are true, but I’ve never been known to lie.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, it was a pleasure to finally meet you, Mendelson. See you around.”

  “That you will,” he said as Joe walked away. “That you will.”

  As he made his way home Joe wondered if someone might really have sent his fingerprints to the FBI. The thought made him laugh aloud, but this was an odd place, full of people with odd habits. Anything, he thought, was possible. Mendelson—now there was an eerie man. Standing in the shadows, watching. A flat, awkward laugh, unlikely to spread. A man who had dealt with the same fire for a d
ecade, never making any headway, had to be unhappy in some ways. The way the dark air still looked red, this far from the hot spot, made Joe feel sorry for Mendelson. People seemed not to take this fire too seriously, but surely Mendelson did. Joe himself did, more and more the longer he stayed in Belle Haven.

  By now he knew the names of every street in town and of a great many people who lived there. He knew where all the boreholes were, where Mendelson and his men were drilling, measuring, mapping. He knew all about the hot spots as they came and went. And he knew, as few others seemed to know or admit, that the fire was not abating. If anything, it was growing stronger. Or so it seemed to Joe.

  The road twisted around a small hollow and rose, gradually, up the slope of a gentle hill. When it flattened out again, Joe could see Ian’s fields up ahead and the shape of the woods beyond them. He stopped and looked back toward the town, which cast its own faint light upward, like a dome. In the distance, Rachel’s hill rose smoothly up. Narrow valleys here and there plunged down and away. Small fields lay flat and fertile under the sky or sloped up to meet it. And all of this was cast in a subtle shade of orange, as if a foreign moon were preparing to roll up over the horizon.

  Always before, as he had crossed Ian’s fields with his carving tools, on his way to the dead trees in the woods, the occasional pit of flame in the distance had been easy to avoid, if not ignore. Like a horse with blinders, he had walked the land, the smoke or the fire passing away at the edge of his vision, less commonplace than lightning. But lately, when he glanced back toward town, the tools in his hands felt oddly like weapons. And when he looked at the land that stretched between him and the distant houses, he now felt as if he were on the far side of a border that absent statesmen had only recently laid down.

  It was with a sense of relief that Joe reached the Schooner and settled down with Pal to wait for Ian to arrive. This was a place where he had always felt safe, where he knew what to expect and what was expected of him. But for the first time he wondered how much of his comfort depended on the wheels that could someday take the Schooner on its way.

  Chapter 29

  Out in the woods beyond Ian’s fields, in the stand of dead trees, Joe’s statue of his sister had weathered to a softer mien, tranquil, as gray as clouds gathering rain. Beside her, Joe had carved a charming, elfish Rusty, unmistakably bright. Next to him Rachel stood wrapped in the bark of a young, dead oak tree, crowned with fragile branches, her eyes all challenge and entreaty. A fourth tree, awaiting its own face, bore the first of Joe’s incisions.

  It had been more than a year since he had discovered Holly’s gold and the site of her resurrection, but in all that time he had brought only Rachel into the woods. He had satisfied Ian’s curiosity by telling him he’d found some good wood to carve and would take him out for a look someday.

  For Christmas he’d carved for Ian, the stargazer, a plain wooden star from a flawless block of mahogany. The star was as smooth as Rusty’s young skin, its undulating grain as alluring as Rachel’s hair. “It will always be my Christmas star,” Ian had said, turning the polished wood in his gnarled hands. He was silent for a moment or two, and then he said, “I want to see what you’re working on out in the woods. When it’s all right with you.”

  On the first Sunday after Independence Day, Joe washed his breakfast dishes, made his bunk, and set out for Ian’s house with Pal at his heels. It felt like a good day to take Ian to the woods.

  Ian’s pickup was in the driveway, and there was a shovel thrust into his garden, but when Joe knocked first on the front door and then the back, Ian did not come.

  “Ian,” Joe hollered through the screen door. He cupped his hands against the screen and peered into the house. The bathroom door on the far side of the kitchen stood ajar, the shower dry. The cellar door was shut, the bolt shot. “Ian,” he called, backing away from the door.

  He looked out across the fields, thinking that Ian might have gone walking. “Ian,” Joe called, walking toward the plank that bridged the stream at the edge of the fields. Pal, ahead of him, stopped suddenly and looked back over her shoulder.

  Ian, who had offered Joe sanctuary, who had seen how alone he was and offered him allegiance, was lying on his back in the clear, restless water of the stream. At first Joe thought he had simply become hot while gardening, fancied a moment in the cool waters of the stream, and become caught up with such dreams and diversions as water often inspires. He thought that Ian simply had not heard him calling, did not hear him at the stream’s edge, for he was lying in the shallow water with his ears submerged, his short hair waving like an unpinned halo, his face dry and pale in the sunlight.

  But in the water next to Ian lolled an upended pail. On his hands were gardening gloves. On his feet, good boots. His red shirt and old jeans were swollen with cold water.

  “Ian,” Joe whispered and went down on his knees. A jay landed on a rock near Ian’s boot, jabbed its beak at a stem of berries arcing over the water’s edge, and then hopped onto the toe of the boot to ruffle its plumage in the breeze.

  Joe waited until the bird had flown, waited until his heart had stopped trembling, and then stepped down into the water of the stream. He gathered Ian up against his chest and staggered onto the grass. He knew he would never be able to carry him to the house alone. He was a heavy man, in wet clothes, his body weighted with the gravity of the dead, impatient for the earth.

  Joe knew that if he dragged him, even in a barrow, the sight of his friend bouncing lightly, his hands dragging in the grass, losing their gloves, his heels rutting the lawn would haunt him for the rest of his days. This was Ian, drinker of brandy, singer of songs, teacher, confessor, companion, the sort of man Joe had made up his mind to be.

  He sat down with Ian stretched out beside him on the grass, attended by wildflowers, and closed his eyes. He had not prayed much in his life, but he prayed now. He prayed that Ian was somewhere good. He sent a bray of anguish and longing skyward. And he began, quietly, to cry.

  He thought of Ian lying alone in the beautiful water, dying, perhaps by conscious degrees, his eyes full of sky, his ears memorizing the sound of pebbles as they shifted in the current, his heart flooding with blood. He thought of Ian realizing that these were his last moments. Giving up his claim to flesh and land and voice. Sorry for the lack of warning, for the fact that he was leaving things undone, yet at the same time grateful to be leaving quickly.

  “Good-bye, Ian,” Joe said inside his chest. “Good-bye and good-bye and good-bye.” And as he gained his feet and started toward the empty house, where he would find a coffee cup on the kitchen table and on the desk a letter just begun, he knew with exhilarating certainty that someday, in the far, immeasurable distance, he would see his friend again.

  Chapter 30

  “Ian was my teacher,” Rachel said, looking at the faces of those assembled around his grave. “He taught me about Henry the Eighth and the fall of Rome, showed me how to make pickles, taught me the proper way to splice a rope.

  “I never had any uncles, but Ian was a lot like one to me. He and my father were friends, so I got to know Ian pretty well over the years. After my parents died, he told me I could depend on him if I ever needed anything. And I knew I could. He was that kind of man. I never expected him to die so soon.” She plucked at the damp sleeve of her dress. It was too hot for long sleeves, but Rachel didn’t notice. She had cried for Ian as she had not cried for her own parents—shock and anger over losing them leaving her too clenched for tears—and her eyes were swollen and red.

  “I didn’t expect him to die at all,” she said. “When he did, I sat down and tried to write a poem to read at his funeral. To read here. I sat up all night thinking about Ian, remembering. That’s as far as I got. What’s in my head wants to stay there.

  “But a few days ago I read something that reminded me of Ian. I think he would have liked it, too. It has no title.” She opened a small book to a dog-eared page.

  Joe, who had been looking at the
clouds, lowered his gaze slowly toward Rachel, who stood a bit apart from him, closer to the edge of the grave. From where he was standing he could see part of the page she was reading from and the poet’s name at the top of the page.

  H. Caldwell. The name stirred something in his brain. But then Rachel began to read, and once again Joe was overcome with thoughts of Ian, and the fact that this was his funeral.

  In the thick of the screaming, impolitic gulls

  sat a boy

  sand on his feet, hair sticky with wind

  arms sleeved in salt

  clutching in his hands

  a bag of old bread.

  He tore off a crust, peered at the birds.

  Threw it and the wind swept it back.

  The birds converged. The boy hastily drew in his feet.

  Drew out another bit. Thought about the wind.

  His second throw took the bread well out to the birds,

  who fought over it as if the sea held nothing to compare.

  They paid no attention to the boy.

  Their eyed, like fish eyes, left sticky impressions on the bag.

  The boy wanted to feel the tops of their heads,

  run his hands along the feathers on the tops of their heads.

  He wanted them to come closer, orderly like,

  and stand still.

  He took another crust from the bag and tossed it on the sand.