Those Who Favor Fire

by Lauren Wolk

  Rachel, watching them, felt like she was invisible. “That’s for Rusty’s education, Angela,” she protested. “If Joe needs anything, I can help him out better than you can.”

  They both turned to look at her. Joe picked up the gold and held it out toward her. “Then maybe you could drive into Randall for me and cash this in,” he said.

  Reluctantly, Rachel took the gold. “All right.”

  Although Joe never really thought about it, the gold that Angela gave him kept him suspended in penury. It paid his keep through the spring, allowed him the luxury of spending the little money he earned on good wood and a few more carving tools. It kept him from altering his life. It kept him content with things the way they were. But then, in the middle of May, came the change.

  It must have started during the night. When people left their houses in the morning they noticed right away that one of the boreholes right smack in the middle of Belle Haven proper was suddenly spouting smoke. Not a lot: only a wisp now and then. But within two days there was a steady thread of smoke and, worse, a stink coming up out of the ground.

  Ed Zingham, who had delivered mail in Belle Haven for fifteen years, lived in the house closest to the borehole, but he’d been walking past these things out by the tunnels for years and the sight of this one did not alarm him overmuch. When the smoke thickened and the smell began to bother him, he simply shut the windows nearest the hole and tried not to think about it. The people in the two other houses nearly as close as Ed’s nervously followed his lead. They watched the borehole, listened to their monitors ticking, told themselves again and again that Ed would know something before they did.

  Ed was dozing in front of an old spaghetti western one cool, wet Monday when he heard a brief squawk from down in his cellar, something like the sound of a foghorn. A moment later, the meter maid who was checking his monitor came quickly up the cellar stairs, her clipboard clutched under one arm. Ed watched as she rushed to the front door and flung it open.

  “Hey!” he called, “what’s your hurry?”

  “When’s the last time you were down to your cellar, Mr. Zingham?” she said, standing on the threshold.

  “Um. Friday,” he said. “I spent most of the weekend over in Randall with my sister. Why? Something the matter down there?”

  “How long you been home?”

  “I got home early this morning, went straight back out again to do my rounds, just got in about”—he glanced at his watch—“about forty minutes ago.”

  “Then I’d say you owe your sister one.” She took Ed’s coat off a hook by the door and tossed it into his lap. “Your cellar is hotter than hell,” she said. “If you’d turned on your monitor, you’d know that your carbon-monoxide level is up to fifty parts per million.”

  “I turned it off for the weekend,” he said, shrugging. “It uses up a lot of electricity, you know.”

  “But you didn’t turn it back on when you got home, or the alarm would have gone off. Too much trouble. Instead, you sat down in front of the television, got nice and drowsy.”

  “Got a headache, is what I got.” Ed put on his coat. “So how long do I have to leave before it’s safe in here again? How ’bout I just go back to my sister’s for another day or so? Leave the windows open while I’m gone?”

  She handed him his hat. “You don’t understand.” She sighed. “You can’t ever come back here again.”

  When Ed tracked down Mendelson, the man was unmoved. “I’m sorry as hell, Ed, but my hands are tied. You gotta know that. You’re the one who delivered the policy statements all over town, Ed, and you’ve all had months to get used to the idea. Any house that registers more than forty-five parts per million and tops ninety degrees Fahrenheit and is adjacent to a borehole with a sustained output gets condemned.” He took a rigid index finger and ran it like a knife across his Adam’s apple. “Fffft,” he said.

  Ed stared.

  “I told you way back in September that this day would come, Ed. But don’t worry.” Mendelson slid his arm around Ed’s shoulders. “You won’t be the only one.”

  Indeed, before the week was out, six other houses on Ed’s block wore red crosses on their front doors, as if they might be harboring medics or a renegade religious sect. Signs were posted in their yards warning people to keep out. An army of movers came and emptied out the houses in record time, carted everything off and into storage. The government put Ed and the others up at the Randall Motor Inn while they decided what to do next, and everyone in Belle Haven talked about them in whispers, as if they had died.

  But neither Ed’s house nor any of the other six was the next of Belle Haven’s homes to sink, as Ross’s had, through the earth’s hot skin. That day was coming, though no one believed it yet. They knew the fire had arrived. And many of them prepared to leave before their own houses were condemned. But the exodus, when it began, was a slow and measured procession that stretched through the summer without mishap.

  The government had purchased fifty of Belle Haven’s houses by the end of August but had not kept them. Soon after each family left, a red cross was sprayed on the front door of the vacant house and a weary bulldozer smacked the house down to nothing, leaving an open cellar full of debris. Frank had long since emptied out the big tanks at the Gas ’n’ Go—he’d had no choice—so the vans and the bulldozers and every other piece of machinery in Belle Haven had to drive over to Randall for gas. In the tiny clinic right in town, there were more and more cases of nausea and dizziness, bronchitis, allergy. People who had never lived through a war began to speak as if they were now part of one. But as the number of those still in Belle Haven dwindled, their dander rose. “We’ll leave when we’re good and ready,” some said, narrow-eyed and nervous. “We’re going to stay right here,” said others, “and we’ll be here long, long after everyone’s done selling out. And we’ll be the tightest, best little community you could ever want to see.”

  “You study your geography,” said Archibald Kreider, who had been a miner for most of his life and told anyone who would listen that it would take more than a mine fire to chase him off his land. “All the best places on earth are a bit ticklish. People live on river-banks. They get floods. People live on beaches. They get hurricanes. People live on volcanoes. They get … eruptions.” It was hard to tell if Archie was laughing or coughing. “Some things are worth the risk,” he said, loading his jowl with tobacco.

  He watched as his neighbors stripped their houses down to skeletons, hauling away lengths of hand-carved molding and mantelpieces torn carefully from the walls. No one wanted to leave anything precious to the bulldozers. They took stained-glass windows, thresholds, kitchen cupboards, weathervanes, even floorboards sometimes: whatever would remind them of the place where they had once lived.

  And along with these forlorn treasures, each family leaving town took a tiny garden grown in Belle Haven soil and cradled in Rachel’s unlikely pots. They took young huckleberry plants and tea roses, Johnny-jump-ups and hollyhocks, pincushion flowers and dragon’s head, and herbs like coriander and mint.

  Rachel left her hill less and less often as Belle Haven fell to pieces. She could not bear the sound of the bulldozers or the sight of moving vans. When she went to see Joe or Angela, she raced down the street and no longer stopped to listen to the water flowing under the bridge.

  Every day she woke with the thought of calling Mr. Murdock, telling him to buy something, anything at all, to slow this outrageous destruction of her town. But then she would recall his prediction and reluctantly admit that to see Belle Haven’s houses being leveled was bad enough, but to make them her own and then watch them fall would be even worse. No one would be coming back to reclaim these ruined plots of ground. She knew this now. But even as she slowly, bit by bit, gave up the notion of keeping her town together, she grew more and more determined. She would salvage what she could.

  Since their reconciliation, Joe had not spoken to Rachel about leaving. He had become a quiet man now that the fire ha
d arrived, choosing his words carefully and listening with great intensity. He hated the bulldozers—heartless as big, hard, yellow hyenas—and the sound of nails torn shrieking from old wood. So, on many days that summer, Joe climbed Rachel’s hill and walked farther, past her house, into the woods, to the tree house he had built for Rusty.

  He had rarely visited the tree house since the day he’d given it to Rusty many months before. When he returned to it after this long absence, hauling Pal up under one arm, he found its shelves stocked with canned goods—beans and corn, stews and chowders, soups with noodles shaped like little sharks. He found a stack of musty blankets. A tin of kerosene and an old railway lantern. Several boxes of candles and a supply of wooden kitchen matches. Three gallons of water in plastic jugs. A bar of soap and a small towel. Hung on a peg in the corner, a set of foul-weather gear.

  Joe looked everything over. He did not know what to think. He did not eat any of the food or disturb the careful arrangement of the blankets. Not yet. There might come a time when Rusty’s preparations would serve a good purpose, but they were not meant for casual consumption or for play.

  If Joe arrived at the tree house and found Rusty there, the two of them were content to pass the time together. They did not speak of the supplies Rusty had gathered. They behaved as if he had instead stocked the tree house with the more traditional trappings of boyhood: comic books and Cracker Jacks, muddy bottles, arrowheads.

  Sometimes Joe stayed there alone with Pal, carving, reading, writing to his sister, sleeping when night came on before he’d noticed.

  Eventually, when the gold was spent, when his clothes once again became somewhat threadbare and his hair untamed, neither Angela nor Rachel seemed to notice. Each of them was stricken with Belle Haven’s dismantling. Each waited in single-minded suspense for the time when they would all leave town. But as long as they were still there, often separate but always close at hand, none spoke to the others of leaving. Not yet.

  It was strange how nothing had burned. The gases came up steadily, and the smoke pouring out of the boreholes was thick and grainy. But not a single house had actually burned. Perhaps that was the one thing that kept many of those still in Belle Haven from going.

  Perhaps they had forgotten about the house in Caspar’s Hollow.

  Chapter 42

  It was early October. More than a year had passed since the incident in Caspar’s Hollow, since Mendelson had begun his new trench. Rachel had been to Angela’s for an early supper and was hurrying home through the twilight. She thought of stopping in at the hardware store to see Earl and buy some lightbulbs, maybe spend some time at the Schooner, but Joe had not come to Angela’s for supper and was, perhaps, enjoying his solitude. The street was nearly empty. Rachel, who so rarely came down from her hill these days, was the only one there when it happened.

  As she approached the lot where Joe lived, Rachel heard Pal barking and, turning, saw her through one of the Schooner’s windows, saw her head snapping as she barked. Rachel figured that Joe would be lacing up his boots, buttoning his coat, coming out in a moment with Pal at his heels for their evening walk, so she waited where she was. She’d walk with them as far as her hill.

  Then, as she watched Pal becoming frantic, Rachel heard a new noise. It was something like the sound of a huge wind coming, or perhaps a train, but strangely distant, as if heard through a thick wall. She stood still and listened to it, tried to place it, found herself leaning toward the Schooner, when the asphalt beneath it buckled, a geyser of smoke shot upward, and the Schooner disappeared straight down into the earth as if it had never been.

  For a moment Rachel stood unmoving, staring at the place where the Schooner had been and hoping that she was simply dreaming. In the next second a powerful wave of thick, hot air hit her in the face, choking her, minutely wounding her cheeks. As she ran across the street, bright flames snarled up through the crevice, something down below exploded, and the sides of the pit caved in. When Rachel sank to the sidewalk she could feel, through her knees, a distant rumble.

  And then nothing.

  When people began to run out onto the street, they smelled the terrible stench of the fire. And when Angela ran down the block in her apron to where Rachel knelt on the sidewalk, the smell was so bad that she gagged.

  “Come on!” she yelled, dragging Rachel to her feet. “Come away from there. Rachel! Come on!” But Rachel could not stand up. So Angela and Earl picked her up between them and helped her back to the Kitchen.

  Angela sobbed, “Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn,” as she fed Rachel brandy and rocked her fiercely in her arms.

  Rachel was shivering. “This can’t be happening,” she said, bent at the waist as if she’d been halved, hinged, swung shut. “He said we should all go before somebody else got killed.” She clenched her fists. “I want him back.” And she began to cry as if nothing on earth could stop her.

  There were other people all around them, huddling together as if expecting bombs from below. The two women, unaware of Rusty sitting across the table from them with his head buried in his arms, unaware of the sound of a siren in the distance, unaware of the earth tumbling toward its own eventual demise, suddenly felt themselves wrapped in a cold embrace and heard the sound of Joe’s voice: “I’m all right. Hush now,” murmuring into their hair. “I’m all right. I’m all right …”

  As Joe held them, they cried even harder and clung to him so tightly they left bruises on his arms.

  He already knew about Pal. “I … I had some things I had to do this afternoon. And the Schooner didn’t want to start. So I borrowed Frank’s pickup. You know Pal,” he said, the tears pouring down his cheeks. “I begged her to come, but she wouldn’t go near the truck. And it was damp and cold. And Rusty was still at school. And I thought I’d only be away for a couple of hours. So I left her in the Schooner. I left her in the Schooner.” He tipped his head way back, squeezed his eyes shut, and the tears rolled into his hair.

  When Angela brought him a mug of hot, sweet tea, he opened his eyes, shook his head, could not help panting.

  “I wasn’t going to go away today,” he said. “I didn’t feel like it, and I should have been digging potatoes instead. But if I’d stayed home I might have been in the Schooner, having supper. I should have been in the Schooner.” He began to tremble.

  As she put her arms around him, Rachel vowed never again to risk doing him the least harm. But within days she had broken her vow and left on him his freshest scar.

  Chapter 43

  Joe slept at Rachel’s house that night, although in fact he slept little. For hours he lay in Rachel’s bed with her hair blanketing his shoulder and thought about the days that lay ahead. He had known for a long time that changes were coming, but it seemed that they were suddenly upon him and now he did not feel quite ready for them. It still did not seem possible that the Schooner was gone, Pal gone with it. He himself had predicted such things. Now he found them difficult to believe.

  As he lay in Rachel’s bed, he thought about how he had lived his life. He thought about the things he’d done since finding Belle Haven and about how some of them had angered Rachel beyond understanding. He looked frankly and fully at what she meant to him and he to her, weighed this in several lights, imagined what would happen when she found out what he had done on his way home from California and had been doing behind her back ever since.

  In the morning, after Joe had washed and dried his only clothes, he went with Rachel down into town and found a red cross painted on the door of Earl’s hardware store and another on the door to Paula’s Beauty Salon, which stood on the other side of the ruined parking lot. A chain had been fixed across the entrance to the lot, and on it was a sign saying, DANGER! KEEP OUT! Earl stood on the sidewalk a few paces back, his hands thrust into his coat pockets, watching Mendelson prod gingerly at the ground around the cave-in. Earl seemed not to hear Rachel when she spoke his name.

  “Leave him be for now,” Joe said. “He needs to get used to the
idea.”

  Joe himself had not looked right into the lot where the Schooner had gone down. He could not bear to think that the floor of it might have grown hot, that Pal might have felt the fire coming. And, too, although he had to a great extent forsworn the lure of possessions, for him the Schooner had been a treasure. And, as such, the memory of it would always fire his heart. And so he could not look at the place where it had been.

  “They say the Lord looks after fools and little children,” Mendelson said, stepping over the chain to join Joe and Rachel, walking away with them toward Angela’s. “And considering how close you came to an early grave, I guess they’re right, Joe.”

  “Did you want something, Mendelson?”

  “Just to remind you that you’re not eligible for any government assistance, Joe. I’m sorry as hell about that, truly I am, but technically you’re not a resident of Belle Haven. And without you telling me your last name and your social security number, I can’t do anything no way, nohow.”

  “Uh-huh.” Joe opened the door to the Kitchen, let Rachel enter. “Not a problem, Mendelson.”

  “Well, I didn’t really think it would be, seeing as how your girl’s all set, money-wise.”

  Joe walked into the Kitchen and shut the door against the sound of Mendelson clucking his tongue as if he had run out of things to say but was still too full of noise to keep silent.

  Fewer people in Belle Haven might have meant fewer people at Angela’s, if not for the smell of cinnamon and coffee, the taste of good, hot food, the soothing wash of conversation: these were things that stood up to the fire and the fear of it. So there were quite a few people in the Kitchen that morning, a block away from the lot where the Schooner had been, and Angela was hot and busy. But at the sight of Joe, she said, “Hang on” to a man ordering flapjacks and sausage and came around the counter to kiss Joe and take his hands. “You’re looking bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning, my darlin’.”