Those Who Favor Fire (21 page)

“That damned step,” she muttered when it sagged under her weight. “Today’s the day I fix that damned step.” Ed would be disappointed, she knew. It gave him something to complain about when
he brought her mail. “One of these days it’s gonna go,” he often warned her. “Someone’s gonna get hurt.” And he was right, of course. The step was rotten with worms and wet. So she gathered up her tools and set to work.

With a crowbar, she pried and tugged and cursed until the top plank of the step gave way, splintering and shrieking, flakes of old paint flying. As she worked, she began to remember herself as a small girl. Struggling with her father’s hammer. Handing him nails and clapping her hands over her ears as he pounded them in. Trailing her small paintbrush along the wood, leaving grasslike streaks that skipped against the grain. Strangling with pride when he admired her work. These had been their steps, the ones they had built together. This rotten plank had been measured by his hands, fashioned with his saw, borne his weight, her mother’s, hers. This rotten plank. She set it to one side and looked straight into the sun. It was nothing to the brightness of her memory.

And suddenly it seemed to Rachel that she simply could not leave this place. The thought of going back to school again while this house stood here, locked up, mute with dust, made her sob aloud. She would stay, she decided. She would stay right here where she belonged.

As if afraid that her resolve might waver, she sprinted inside the house, up the stairs, and into the small study that overlooked the woods behind the house. Two blue jays were wrestling in the branches of a big maple. Rachel kept an eye on them as she rolled clean paper into her mother’s old typewriter and began to compose her letter to Dean Franklin. It thanked him for three good years, informed him that she had decided to postpone the fourth. She wouldn’t be wandering through Europe or getting the jump on her career, she wrote. She’d be catching her breath. Getting her bearings. She would be back, she assured him, when the time was right. If they would still have her.

She signed the letter, sealed it up in an envelope, stamped it, put it out on the porch for Ed. She felt better than she had since arriving back in Belle Haven, as deliciously guilty as a child who is kept home from school for a fever but does not yet feel any pain.

Before heading out to get a piece of lumber for the new step, Rachel wandered about the house looking for other things in need of repair. She had never done this sort of thing before, still had trouble
thinking of this house as hers, not theirs. She had never before questioned the furnishings, the wallpaper, the way things were arranged. Now, suddenly, she began to become excited by the prospect of making this house her own. She would keep some of the furniture, things that reminded her of her mother and father. And the artwork, such as it was: faded prints of bucolic scenes, simple watercolors here and there, several black-and-white photographs of dead relatives posing arm in arm. The braided rugs would stay. Certainly the curtains, stitched by her mother. Most everything, in fact, now that she came right down to it, reminded her of them. But once she had given away some of the weary old furniture, there would be room to add some things of her own. More art. More books. More color.

First, the step. She had all the time in the world to feather her nest. “Just keep your distance,” she said softly, looking out toward the horizon where a thread of smoke wavered like a cobra. Then she turned her back and went about her business.

        After leaving Frank’s Gas ’n’ Go, Joe pedaled over to the A&P. He hadn’t ridden a bicycle for ages and felt such a sense of liberation as he flew down the streets of Belle Haven that he waved to an old woman sitting on a bench in the sun.

Since the Schooner’s stern was equipped with a bike rack, it took Joe no more than a minute to stow his new transport and get under way. He had no good reason to linger in town: no money to spare, no errands to run, no appointments to keep. And, considering how small Belle Haven was, he was loath to do any more exploring than he’d already done. He would save the rest for the days that waited ahead, empty as drums.

Once back at the campsite, Joe parked the Schooner as before. With the bicycle Rachel had lent him, he probably wouldn’t have to drive it for days—if his father came to fetch him, perhaps not ever again. He paused to consider this idea, to plumb its depths, then briskly disembarked and began to make a less impermanent camp.

First, he unfurled the Schooner’s red-and-white striped awning and was relieved to find it clean and intact. Under the awning and next to a flat-topped tree stump, he set up the cheap lawn chair he’d bought in town. Then he mixed himself a glass of instant iced tea and carried it outside. The chocolate bar he’d bought at Frank’s and carried home in his shirt pocket was soft and warm. He ate it slowly, sipping his cold tea, and stared at the sunlight on the stream. With the exception of a damaged cuticle, his entire body felt marvelous. He was aware of each breath lifting his chest, the smooth, uncomplicated function of
his elbow, the way his brilliantly designed toes lay alongside one another and how the lenses of his eyes—the miracle of his eyes—brought to him so unerringly the majesty of the trees.

For the rest of the morning, Joe did nothing more than putter around his Schooner and make it more his own. He took an empty pop bottle and filled it with stream water and Queen Anne’s lace for the sill of his kitchen window. He read the side panel of his carton of laundry soap, measured out what he needed, and washed his clothes in his new laundry tub. Then he rinsed them well and pegged them to the line he’d hung between two obedient pines in the middle of the sunny clearing.

For his lunch he had two bacon sandwiches with a cold bottle of beer, washed up his frying pan and dishes, dried them and put them away. He wiped the crumbs off his kitchen counter, squeezed out his sponge, dried his hands on a crisp tea towel, and hung it on a rack to dry. He dusted every surface, shook out the door mat, swept the Schooner’s steps, and opened all the windows to let the breezes through. When he stumbled across the letter he had scribbled to his father the day before, Joe was taken aback. It still said what he wanted to say, but he was no longer so eager to make contact. In a week or so he would find a phone and courage enough to call home. Until then, he didn’t much want to think about what he’d done or what he would say when his father answered the phone. He stuffed the letter into the glove compartment, slammed the door, and forgot about it.

At one-thirty on the afternoon of Joe’s first full day in Belle Haven, he realized that he was both content and something akin to lonely. An early morning spent with Rachel had made the day seem unusually long and quiet. So, without thinking much about his intentions, he locked the Schooner and walked through the woods to Ian’s house.

“Good afternoon,” Ian said when Joe knocked on his back door. “How you making out?”

“Fine,” Joe replied, smiling. “Feel like taking a walk?”

So the two of them strolled out across the fields that ringed the campground, wended their way through stands of pine and birch, and finally sidled up to a small hot spot that had opened in the bottom of a shallow ditch like a drain hole filled with flame.

“Yikes,” said Joe, appalled. “I can understand why people stopped coming here to camp.”

“That’s nothing. You can’t even get near the big ones, they’re so hot. And they can come up so fast that even when you’re well clear of the tunnels it’s impossible to know where it’s safe to camp. Except where you are,” he amended quickly, seeing the look on Joe’s face. “At least I think that spot’s okay. It’s hundreds of yards from the closest tunnel. And even though the fire branches out a bit, I’ve never seen any sign of trouble anywhere near there, maybe because of the stream, although I don’t know how a shallow little creek could discourage a fire that runs so deep. But it seems to.”

“I’m surprised no one’s been killed by one of these things.”

“Well, like I said, most all of them are within spitting distance of a shaft or a tunnel, and we all know where those are, give or take. Easy enough to steer clear of them if you know where they’re bound to be. Remind me to give you a map later on.”

“Uh-huh.” Joe nodded, his skin clammy.

“Plus,” Ian said, clearly accustomed to describing the fire and its habits, “the fire usually gives some warning on its way to the surface. Sort of like a whale coming up for air. The ground gets hot, of course, and softer, and sometimes buckles a bit right before the fire arrives. We get a few big hot spots around the tunnels because of the way the coal was mined. Traditional room-and-pillar style.” He looked at Joe for any sign of comprehension. Found none. “That’s when they leave pillars of coal to support the surface. The theory is that long, thin coal veins that didn’t get mined are carrying the fire out from the tunnels and lighting these pillars. Or sometimes a skinny vein will travel underground for a while and then head for the surface, where it makes a smaller hot spot.” He rotated his hands, one around the other. “Which in turn burns for as long as the coal vein lasts, peters out pretty quickly, the burned-out vein collapses in on itself, and the hot spot disappears as fast as it came. Leaves a bit of a crater, is all. But a lot of coal veins never hit a pillar or run near the surface so the fire doesn’t often break through.” Ian looked at the hot spot with grudging respect.

“You must get scads of geologists poking around out here. What do they think about all this?”

“I can’t really say. They don’t talk to us, you see. They don’t seem to care what we think about the fire, what we’ve observed, what we want to do about it.” He pulled a blade of quack grass from its sheath. It slid out smoothly, with only a single squeal of protest, as if
designed for easy destruction. “There’s a man named Mendelson you’ll see around if you’re here long enough. Don’t know where he is right now. Probably off somewhere trying to sell his latest scheme for putting out the fire. He’s an engineer, I guess. The government sent him in years ago, right after the fire got started, to dig a trench and cut the thing off before it spread. That didn’t work. They filled the trench back in. So then they tried to drown it with water, stifle it with fly ash, which is little particles of ash that fly up when you burn something solid.”

“Hence the name.”

“Right. It won’t burn, fly ash, so you blow in enough of it and it smothers a flame. Only it didn’t work with this fire. Nothing has worked too well. Those boys go away for a while, and no one sees them around. Then, after a few months, back they come to try something new. Mendelson’s always with them. Seems to take a personal interest in our little fire.” He put the grass between his teeth. “Pretty soon they’re going to have to make up their minds what to do next.”

“About the fire.”

“About the fire.” Ian nodded. “About us. If the fire gets bad enough, heads into town, we’ll all have to go somewhere else, I suppose. People who live out here where the fire already is, and along the edge of town, too, anywhere near enough to the tunnels … well, we look sharp. Take nothing for granted. Watch our step.”

“Literally,” Joe said, nodding.

“Any way we can,” Ian replied as he backed away from the fire, Joe following, and turned toward home.

They said little on the way back. The sun was hot, the grass full of bugs that flung themselves out of the way as the men walked by.

“I met a girl named Rachel this morning,” Joe said, following Ian across a plank that bridged the stream behind his house. “Know her?”

“Everybody knows everybody in Belle Haven, at least their faces. Rachel I know straight to the bone. I was her teacher in high school. Smart as a whip, that girl. Charmed me right down to my socks. Not a mean bone in her body. Probably the best student I ever had.”

“How come she didn’t go to college?” Joe asked as they crossed Ian’s yard.

“ ’Course she went to college. She’ll be a senior in the fall. What made you think otherwise?”

But Joe had no idea why he’d got it wrong. “Maybe the way she
seems so rooted here. She’s got a house of her own, lives alone, didn’t say a word about ever having lived anywhere else. I don’t know, I guess … I don’t know what I thought. I met her at Angela’s Kitchen. I thought she was a waitress, but …” He looked at Ian from under the visor of his hand. “She’s not a waitress, is she?”

“No, she’s not a waitress,” said Ian, smiling. He stopped by his back door. “Got any plans for tonight?”

“Actually, I don’t. Why? Is there a ball game on or something?”

“I have no idea. I only ever do one thing on Thursday nights. You’re welcome to join me. It would be a good way to get to know some people from around here.”

“What would?”

“Thursday night at the Last Resort. It’s a bar down by the tracks. Not much to look at, but the beer’s cold.”

“What’s so special about Thursday nights?” Joe asked, grinning because Ian was.

“They have live music on Thursdays, is all,” Ian said. “You coming?”

“Sure. We can take the Schooner, park near the bar, won’t have to drive home if we have too much to drink.”

“Now, that is one hell of an idea,” Ian said. “Not that I ever have too much to drink, but just in case.”

“Exactly,” Joe said. “I’ll see you back here at, what … nine o’clock?”

“On the dot,” said Ian, and waved Joe on his way.

        Some people are born too late and miss the pocket of time that would have suited them best. Others, born far too early, never know what’s to come and so perhaps don’t feel the lack so keenly. Others miss the mark by just a decade or two and live to see what might have been. For them, there is sometimes much to regret.

Ian Spalding, born in 1919, first heard the word
astronaut
when it was far too late. From the time he was five years old he had looked at the heavens the way some people look at the sea. He thought of the stars the way others thought of the continents. And he considered the planets to be destinations only temporarily beyond his reach. Decades too early for
Apollo
, Ian decided that he would learn to fly airplanes, master the sky, and be ready for the first spaceships. He was only twelve when he made these decisions. He did not know about such things as odds or impossibilities. He only knew that if he did everything right—kept himself fit, studied hard, read every word ever written about flight, and somehow found his way into the sky—he would be a worthy pilot, perhaps a great one.