by Lauren Wolk
The odd light made the children walk quickly and laugh nervously, without reason. It made them quite literally jump when Frank rushed out of the Gas ’n’ Go in his werewolf costume. “Grrr,” he said, chasing them around the gas pumps. Their screams could be heard all the way down to the creek.
The mothers in town, accustomed to sorting out the cries of their children, stood on their porches and listened to the screaming and were not sure what to think. They had never before minded Frank’s high jinks or those of the other grown men who jumped out of their shrubbery when children walked past, or dressed like scarecrows and draped themselves in lawn chairs, springing to life when the children came their way. But this year such antics seemed stupid.
So did thirteen-year-old Jake McKinnen. He’d read all about the boy who cried wolf and should have known better than to start a fire in a trash can behind the library. “Help! Help! Fire!” he cried, throwing sheaves of newspaper into the flames until they soared.
Nearby children, hearing his screams, ran in all directions, shrieking, while grown-ups froze in their doorways, candy spilling from their hands, and then raced toward the light and smoke, white-faced.
“What the hell’s the matter with you!” Jake’s father snarled, dragging him home past a dozen shaken neighbors who had taken up posts along the sidewalk.
“It’s Halloween, Dad,” the boy whimpered, his arm hurting, at which his father snorted, “Not anymore. Halloween’s over for you.”
It ended early for everyone that year. When their children hurried home, tripping over their costumes, long before they were due, most parents shut their doors, turned off their porch lights, and called it a night. They felt a little silly, letting themselves be spooked by Halloween. At their age. But they looked forward to morning, nonetheless.
Joe, too, was glad when the last of the trick-or-treaters had made their way home. For weeks now he had spent too much time alone, working on farms here and there, passing his evenings in the Schooner with Pal and a book for company, and going to bed early. He sometimes visited Angela at the Kitchen or shared his newspaper with Rusty at the Schooner. And once a week he left Pal with Rusty and drove the Schooner out of town for the day. (“I’ve got an appointment,” he would say, leaving visions of doctors and dentists in his wake.) But more often than not he was alone.
He had not spoken to Rachel, had not heard her voice, since the night in the auditorium when he’d watched Mendelson tell her that her town was going to burn. When he saw her walking on the street, she was always on the other side. Whenever he went to Angela’s, it seemed she’d just left. Inside him, there was a longing as keen as winter wind, but in his head all was peaceful. He knew he’d been right to speak his mind.
Still, here he was, sitting alone on a tree stump, Pal shivering at his knee, and he had to admit he’d had better Halloweens. “Time to pack it in, girl,” he said. She had long since pawed away the paper horns he’d tied to her head. The apples he’d collected held no attraction for her. When he climbed to his feet, she started off toward Rachel’s hill, wagging her tail.
“No, Pal. This way,” he said, hoisting the basket of apples to his shoulder and heading across the bridge. But he, too, had been tempted to go the other way.
Joe stashed his apples in the Schooner, cleaned himself up, and put on some proper clothes. “Now what?” he said, looking at Pal, who didn’t answer. The Kitchen was closed. It was too early for bed. But there was always the Last Resort. “Don’t wait up for me,” he said to Pal as he headed out the door.
He did not pass a single soul as he walked through the town, and when he came within sight of the bar’s lighted windows, he lengthened his stride. The place was even more battered and grimy than it had been the first time he’d seen it, two and a half years since, but he smiled as he put his hand out and pulled open the blistered door.
It wasn’t until he had hung up his coat and turned to the bar that he saw Rachel in her tiger suit, whiskers painted on her cheeks and triangle ears pinned in her mahogany hair. Her face and lips were rosy, as if she’d just come in from the cold, and her eyes glittered with laughter over something Angela had said. She was sitting on a bar stool with Angela beside her, a bowl of popcorn between them, smoke swirling slowly above their heads like strange weather.
“Would you like to dance?” he said, his lips close to her ear, before she’d had a chance to see that he’d come in.
She turned so abruptly that she had to put a hand on his chest to keep from falling off the stool. “Joe,” she said.
“Rachel,” he replied.
She looked at him solemnly. “You want to dance?”
“I asked you first,” he said, smiling.
When they reached the dance floor in the back room and he took her in his arms, she found that her fist was full of popcorn. She ate it slowly over his shoulder.
“Does this mean we’re friends again?” she finally asked him. They were dancing to a slow Elvis Presley song. She was trying hard not to listen.
“This means we’re not fighting anymore,” he replied. They danced for a while, quietly.
Then, “I don’t think we were fighting,” she said. “I think things have changed so much between us that maybe we can’t go on the way we were before.” His shirt, against her neck, smelled like soap.
“You mean we can’t be in love anymore?” He lifted his head away, looked down into her whiskered face.
“Is that what we were?” She had not been this close to him for weeks, and she allowed herself a moment to linger over his strong, sweet face, the wonderful blue of his eyes.
“That’s what I was. That’s what I am. You know that.”
“Yes,” she said, sighing. “I know that. But lately I don’t know how I feel about anything. My head hurts from thinking so hard all the time. I get up in the morning and I don’t know where to begin. I feel as if I’ve been told I have a rare disease that’s been known to kill people, but it might not kill me. And even if it does, I won’t know when until I’m already dead.”
He thought of a thousand things to say. “So that means you can’t love me anymore?”
“I don’t know.”
They danced to another song—afterward neither of them could remember what it had been—and then they returned to Angela. She was talking to a sort of cowboy named Sam who wore a Stetson on his head and a bronze lasso for a belt buckle. She seemed interested in what he was saying, and after a moment Joe and Rachel said good night.
It had grown colder, so Joe put his arm around Rachel, much as any friend might do, and hurried her to the Schooner, which was nearer than her house. Inside, he gave her a big sweater and made her some hot chocolate while she washed the whiskers off her face and took the tiger ears out of her hair. They talked for a while, about books they’d been reading and how much they missed Ian. Joe made them thick sandwiches and dished out some of the fat, crisp pickles she herself had made for him. At midnight they listened to The War of the Worlds on Joe’s small radio.
“I’ll walk you home,” Joe said when it was over.
“No need,” she replied.
“I insist,” he said, one arm in his coat. “I want to.”
“You misunderstand,” Rachel said, walking close to put her hand on his cheek. “I’m staying.”
Once again the world tilted on its axis and things shifted to where they’d been before. But like a forest altered by the seasons, the place they returned to was different now. Less certain. As if it would not take much the next time to cast them adrift.
Chapter 40
“It won’t do you any good, Rachel.”
Mr. Murdock was angry. At Rachel, mostly at himself. Once he had found out for himself how shortsighted and stingy the government had been in the matter of the fire, he had caught some of Rachel’s feverish determination to keep Belle Haven intact and had been plotting, planning, and keeping secrets with her for almost a year now. Armed with her money and a lot of hard-won knowledge, he had been p
repared to throw a monkey wrench into whatever plan the government was concocting to obtain Belle Haven. He had come to feel like a cross between Robin Hood and Karl Marx, and for a while he had liked the feeling. But when Ross Caspar’s house went down, when Mendelson laid out the evidence of the fire’s new and dangerous behavior, Murdock had balked. He had come, suddenly, to his lawyerly senses. He had returned to the pragmatism that had served him so well in the past. And now he was trying to bring Rachel along toward a more realistic attitude.
“It won’t do you one little bit of good,” he said to her, the day after the government had begun making bids on Belle Haven land. “You can buy half a dozen houses and maybe, after a few years as some sort of landlady, after the fire’s out or gone, sell the land back to someone who wants to live there, restore Belle Haven to its former glory. Something like that.” He slapped the air impatiently. “But it’s a whole lot more likely that you’ll go broke buying people out and then, when the fire comes to town, have all your property condemned and demolished. You’ll still own the land, but no one will ever come back to claim it. It will be yours—not exactly worthless, maybe worth a whole lot if the government decides to try and salvage the coal down below—but for your purposes, it will be worthless.” He gave her a hard look. “Buying land won’t save Belle Haven as you know it. It will simply eat up your money and maybe even cause some ill will between your neighbors. You start paying top dollar for some houses and let the government buy the others for less, how do you think people are going to feel?”
It was unlike Rachel to sit still and listen to such things. But she sat in Mr. Murdock’s office and said nothing. It was clear to him that she was angry, perhaps a bit afraid. He had expected her to fire him out of hand and was surprised that he had been permitted to speak his mind, encouraged by her silence.
He didn’t know that from the moment in the auditorium when Mendelson had pronounced his sentence, Rachel had begun to change and that she often now, despite continuing resistance, imagined hot air swirling around her ankles, certain as a tide, bringing with it nameless things: black-eyed serpents, long-tailed devils, and flame. She hadn’t admitted this to Joe. She saw no reason now to admit it to her lawyer.
“I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t try to protect your interests,” Mr. Murdock was saying. “My advice is that you wait and see what happens. There will be a lot of people who, like you, won’t sell an inch of their land until they’re convinced of immediate danger. The government’s offer will probably even keep them on their land longer: knowing that they can sell out in a hurry and get something for their land, even if it’s on fire, will encourage them to stay until the last minute. Personally, I think that’s a very dangerous, foolhardy attitude, but …”
Even at this, Rachel did not speak. Mr. Murdock began to wonder if she was listening to him at all. “If you wait and see what happens,” he said, “you’ll still have plenty of time to buy up some land, break up the government’s holdings, after the exodus has begun.”
“If it begins,” Rachel said, quietly. Mr. Murdock was both disappointed and relieved to hear her say it. She was not yet ready to give in and let go, but some of the spirit had gone out of her. She seemed close to surrender, and this pleased him. He was concerned about her money, about her contest with the government, but most of all he was concerned for her safety and her health. He wanted her out of Belle Haven, and he suspected that, given time, she would go of her own free will. She was still very young. She needed time to test her perceptions and discover for herself their faults.
“Give yourself some time,” he said gently. “There’s no hurry. And there’s every reason in the world not to do something now that you’re going to regret.”
Rachel bit her lip and folded her hands. “All right,” she said. “I’ll wait for a while longer. But I’m not saying that I’ve changed my mind.”
“I understand,” he said. He walked her to the door. “But there’s no shame in doing what you have to do to make the best of a bad situation. No one’s going to blame you for looking after your own interests.”
She turned back at the door. “That’s what I’ve been doing all along,” she said. “And I’m beginning to think that maybe there is some shame in it after all.”
Chapter 41
The number of those who thought that relocation was wiser than resistance slowly grew as autumn aged into winter, but still no one left. Some focused all their attention on Christmas, vowing to get on with things once the holidays were past. But Christmas came and went without incident and without the departure of a single family. No one wanted to believe that the fire would get to be as bad as Mendelson claimed. No one wanted to give up and go. Above all, no one wanted to be the first to leave.
Before winter hardened the ground, seventy new boreholes were drilled in town and fifty more around the fields, among the hills and hollows to the north. Many backyards, most street corners had them. Government workers roamed the town like coyotes. They lowered instruments into the holes to see if the temperature down below was changing. Out closer to Ross’s sunken house, they found that the fire was indeed moving slowly toward the town. Sometimes they found their gauges ruined when they hauled them back out of the boreholes. In such cases, “That’s one hot fire” was as close as they came to a reading.
The people of Belle Haven became accustomed to sleeping with their windows cracked open. They grew sick of the ticking of the monitors, day and night, and of the frequent visits from the “meter maids” who assessed the safety of the indoor air. The sight of the borehole spouts was sickening, but most people found themselves unable to walk by one without taking a good look. Somehow, the absence of smoke did not placate them.
In February, faced with the news that a monitor in one of the houses not far from the tunnels had gone off, most people were stymied. A few months earlier they would have shaken their heads and, perhaps, sent a prayer skyward. A few months earlier they had thought of the fire way out in the tunnels as nothing more than a dreadful old companion that required a bit of watching and a slightly cautious tread. No one would have been terribly worried about an alarm out there going off. Odd things seemed commonplace when they happened near the mine. But now, seven months since the incident in Caspar’s Hollow, since the rest of the town had begun to walk more softly, news of this first alarm was shocking.
“But why’s everyone so upset?” Rusty asked his mother one morning before school. “The fire’s been out there forever. It’s nothing new. If the McCoys had had a monitor all these years, it probably would have gone off hundreds of times. Heck, they’re glad it went off. They were all set to move out anyway. Now they’ll get their check faster. It’s not like a monitor in this part of town went off or something burned down or anything.”
“Hush now, Rusty,” Angela said, sliding a bowl of cornflakes in front of him. “You’ll be late for school.”
Joe, feeling Rusty’s eyes upon him, ate his waffles and shrugged.
Joe had spent a lot of time at Angela’s Kitchen since the cold had come into Belle Haven. There wasn’t much work for him to do during the winter, for the crops were all in and graves that needed digging after the ground froze were given to backhoes. But he had cut Christmas trees if the farmers came to fetch him, helped Earl with his inventory, shoveled snow. And he continued to spend one day each week out of town. “Taking care of some business,” he said if anyone asked. And Rusty continued to look after Pal while Joe was away, for she went nearly everywhere on foot, hated riding in cars, trucks, the Schooner especially.
These times away from Belle Haven, tending things that he had kept carefully secret, helped Joe stay out of the trouble the fire had caused among his friends and neighbors. Between sojourns, while those around him either prepared to leave or stubbornly set their anchors, Joe was quiet, mostly idle, carving small things, which he offered in trade now and then.
By March he had used up most of what he’d earned in the fall and was prepared to draw o
n what was left of his inheritance. But some-how Angela knew he was a bit short. Perhaps she had noticed the condition of his jeans or the splitting seams of his gloves.
“You going to call, or what?” she said to him one evening when Rachel had come down from her hill to join them at the Kitchen for poker and pie.
“Nah,” he said, throwing in his hand. “Too rich for me.”
Both women looked up in surprise, for Joe, normally thrifty, loved to gamble, win or lose.
“What’s a buck or two?”Angela asked him. After a moment she put down her cards and ducked under the counter. “Be right back,” she said.
When she returned from her apartment, she laid in front of Joe a roll of quarters and a single Krugerrand. “The quarters are for the game,” she said. “The coin will keep you going for a while, just until you can get some farmwork.”
“Where’d you get this?” he asked quietly.
“A friend gave it to me,” she replied, cutting him another wedge of pecan pie.
“Well, you hang on to it, then,” he said. “I still have some money left I can send for.”
“Just take it.” Angela picked up her cards and arranged them fanlike. “I don’t like those Kruger-whatever-you-call-’em anyway. If I were that antelope on there, I’d take a flying leap somewhere else, go play with some deer.”
“Springbok,” Joe said, smiling at her.
“Whatever. Besides,” Angela continued impatiently, “it doesn’t matter to me how much money you have left. This is mine to give, and I want to give it to you. It’s not often I can do such a thing, but I come from people who take care of their own.”