Those Who Favor Fire (43 page)

“I propose that we set out to beautify our town. In every empty lot—and, God willing, there won’t be many—we’ll plant new grass and flowers, trees, make parks. None of us wants to see our neighbors leave, but if they do, we’ll heal up the wounds with our own hands, keep Belle Haven from scarring. That,” he said, smiling, “is what I propose.”

The next Sunday, half of the pews in the church were empty. Missing were those who thought that no one, much less a preacher, had the right to shame or tempt anyone into staying in a place that they had begun, reluctantly, to fear. Husbands were there without their wives, wives without their husbands. So far, there was no proof that there was any more fire under Belle Haven than there had ever been, but it felt like maybe there was.

Some people, already weary of debate, declared themselves in more subtle ways. Fran Harkley was seen putting a hundred new tulip bulbs in her front garden and a ring of daffodil bulbs round the birch by her porch. The Danielses put a new roof on their house. And Sarah Clemm ran an ad in
The Randall Recorder. Fire Sale! Swing set, kiddie pool, TV
antennae, porch swing, you name it. Everything must go. The house, if you want it. Sat. 9–5
. But she didn’t sell much. Someone said it felt too much like a foreclosure.

Halloween—Joe’s third in Belle Haven—brought a respite. No one had yet left town. No one was even packing. The monitors were all quiet. Wherever the fire was, it had not yet surfaced the way Mendelson said it someday would. So the town turned its attention to the annual business of horror and delight.

Rachel, dressed as a tiger and with a huge sack of candies in her paw, climbed the giant willow in the park and settled herself in a roomy fork. Joe hung himself with tattered furs, sooted his face, gave himself sharp nails and teeth, green hair and a club, and toted his bushel basket to the tree stump by the bridge over Raccoon Creek. Ghosts and corpses dangled in the trees along Maple. Jack-o’-lanterns glowed on every front porch. Earl leaned out of his window above the hardware store and dropped rubber spiders onto the heads of passers-by, then reeled them back in again, laughing like a child. Angela had
painted the big front windows of the Kitchen so it looked vaguely like the gingerbread house in “Hansel and Gretel.” But the sky, in the distance, glowed with the light of hot spots, many now closer than anyone liked to see.

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.

        “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 prepared 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.”