Those Who Favor Fire (45 page)

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.

        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.

        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’.”

Joe smiled at her.

“What can I get you two?”

“An apron,” said Rachel, and Angela did not protest. “You, Joe?” she asked.

“Tea, when you have a second.” Before she turned away, he said, “And what would you say, Angela, if I asked you to close up for a few hours tomorrow?”

“What for?”

“Something important.”

“Ask me again later,” she said, distracted by the man wanting flapjacks.

While Rachel helped Angela and Dolly, Joe sat at a small corner table, drinking his tea. Then, “I’ll do the dishes when I get back,” he told Angela, kissed Rachel’s cheek, and left. But it was nearly lunchtime before they saw him again. It took him a good deal longer than he had thought it would to talk with the other people who had come to be his best and only friends, asking them to spare him some time, some trust, and to take, in trade, some of the luck with which he had been blessed.

“What’s all this about, Joe?”

“I told you, Rachel. I want you to come somewhere with me tomorrow. It’s a surprise.” They were sitting in Rachel’s kitchen, sharing a chicken pie they had made together and trying not to listen for the sound of Pal at the door.

“Angela’s coming too?”

“And Rusty. And Dolly. And a couple of other people.”

“Who?”

“Mrs. Sapinsley,” whose garden Joe had worked so often that he thought of it as his, too. “Earl and Mag,” whose condemned hardware store had provided him with the tools to do what he loved. “And Frank,” who had been one of the first to welcome Joe to Belle Haven.

“You taking us to the circus?”

“The circus?”

“That’s what my dad did when things weren’t going particularly well, for whatever reason.” Rachel pushed her food around on her plate. “He’d hustle me and my mother into the car, wouldn’t tell us where we were going, and we’d end up at the circus or having a picnic up on top of a mountain or on a fishing boat out in the middle of some lake. He thought the adventure would snap us out of whatever sort of funk we were in.” She put down her fork and smoothed her hair behind her ears. There were purple smudges under her eyes.
“Didn’t work too well, though. Or I suppose it did, in a way. I’d feel so bad about how hard he was trying that I’d put on a good face and laugh a lot. Which is the sort of thing I used to do all the time. Worry about whether everyone else was happy. Just like he did, I suppose. Try to guess what would make things go along most smoothly.” She put both hands down flat on the table in front of her, as if to be ready for anything. “But I’ve changed, Joe. You take me to the circus, and I’m liable to smack you right in the face.”

Joe reached across the table and picked up one of her hands. “I already know that, Rachel,” he said. “I don’t think there’s much you could do to surprise me. Not anymore.” He held her hand tightly, looked into her face. “Will you come?”

She thought it over for a minute or two. “All right,” she finally said, nodding. “Let’s see if you have any surprises left for me.”

It was seven-thirty in the morning. In the window of Angela’s Kitchen was a sign that read,
GONE FISHIN’. BACK BY SUPPERTIME
. Since it was Saturday, the elementary school, where more and more desks sat stiff and empty, would not miss Rusty. Frank no longer had his gas station—just a pile of rubble—so he’d said, “Hell, why not?” when Joe asked him to spend the morning out of town.

Earl and Mag, who had emptied out the hardware store, put their furniture in storage, and were staying at the Randall Motor Inn, waiting for their check, drove into Belle Haven, unsmiling, to find out what Joe wanted with them. Betsy Sapinsley already had her check and was simply waiting out one final week until her son could find the time to drive over from Cleveland and take her home to his tiny apartment. She, who had not left Belle Haven for years, wondered what Joe could possibly have to show her, but he had been tending her garden for two years now, toting her groceries, shoveling her walks, and listening to her when she remembered being a girl. She would go with him for a few hours, gladly. All of them had gathered at dawn in the parking lot behind the school.

The grass on the baseball diamond was brilliant with dew, the cool, October sky nearly purple, the clouds immaculate, the breeze strong. It was nearly impossible to believe on such a morning that everything had gone so wrong, that the land beneath this particular piece of sky was dying.