Those Who Favor Fire (48 page)

Rachel tried to picture Joe—Christopher—to picture him with the horses, but she kept shying away from the thought.

“Well, I guess I’d better get on back to the van before they come looking for me.”

“All right,” he said, putting out his hand once more. “It was nice to meet you, Rachel. I hope we’ll be seeing you again.”

She liked the way he kept saying “we,” as if his wife were never truly absent.

“It was nice to meet you, too,” she replied. “Take care of your horses.”

“You can count on that,” he said, and she turned away.

On her way back toward the van, Rachel felt her fury resurfacing, but it was a pervasive, chaotic anger that seemed to have too many sources, too many targets, to contemplate. It exhausted her, made her feel truly desperate. And so she forced it down and thought, instead, of horses and of Denver’s wayward son.

She was tempted to give up, give in, and not to mind that the people she had lived her life with had chosen to go their ways, too. But in the face of this temptation came a new resolve to resist any plot that was not her own. “I am not resigned,” she said as she came over the rise and saw the van waiting below.

        “What do you. mean, you’re not leaving?”

“I’m not leaving
yet
, I said. My mother’s going up to get the house ready. Earl and Mag will give her some help if she needs it. But Rusty and I are going to stay another week or so. I want to spend some time with Rachel, Joe. See if I can get her to change her mind. And Rusty wants a few more days with his friends. He’s known them all his life, and he’s never going to see some of them again. How can I say no?”

“Where is he now?”

“He’s over at Mary Beth Sanderson’s house. You know, over on Rachel’s side of the creek. There’s been no trouble over there. The nearest borehole is real quiet. The kids are just playing in the yard. Relax, Joe. Everything’s okay.”

He took Angela’s hands. She noticed that his fingernails were torn. He was growing a beard. “Don’t stay too much longer, Angie,” he said. He never called her Angie. “I’ve got a bad feeling about all this.”

Judy and Daniel Sanderson and their three children were among the hundred or so people still living in Belle Haven when the first cold nights came to town and the leaves began to turn. Judy, immense with her fourth child, had spent a whole week wandering through her house, looking at each room, checking to make sure the canaries were still on their tiny trapezes, trying to find the energy to pack everything up into the boxes she’d been collecting for months. It wasn’t that she
wanted to hang around any longer than she had to. With the A&P closed and the Superette always low on everything, even putting supper on the table had become a challenge. But the check from the government would be arriving any day now, and then they would go. Daniel would still have his job in Krebs Corners. They had found a house real close to his office, a good fifteen miles from the fire, and had all but paid for it. They had to wait for the check to arrive. Then they’d go. But she couldn’t get organized. She couldn’t stop thinking about that motor home going down the other day. Three blocks away, other side of the creek. Maybe the creek would keep the fire away.

She walked back down to the kitchen and stood at the window watching Mary Beth and Rusty in the backyard, sitting at the picnic table, eating grapes and reading comic books. Everything looked okay. But no matter how hard she tried, she could not stop thinking that maybe in the next minute, in the minute when she was not watching, the fire would come right up out of the ground. She looked down at the linoleum on the kitchen floor. It was blue and white and very pretty. She sat down in a chair at the kitchen table and took off her shoes. Took off her socks. Put her bare feet flat on the kitchen floor so she could feel the cool linoleum. And finally began to pack.

Angela, too, had begun to pack. She was still serving odd, scanty meals to use up everything she had in stock. She wasn’t making any money, barely breaking even, but with her check on the way and the house Joe had given her outright, she was not worried. She and Dolly packed up everything in their apartment over the Kitchen in just a couple of days. They didn’t have much to pack, really. Then Angela borrowed a big pickup, Joe and Frank helped her with the fridge, the beds, the heavy things, and they both drove up north with her to unload everything at the farm.

When Angela got back to Belle Haven, exhausted and pleased, she loaded up the pickup with smaller, lighter cargo, and drove north once more, this time with Dolly.

“Now, don’t worry about a thing,” she told her mother after they’d carted the last boxes inside. “And don’t rush around trying to make everything perfect inside of a week. Rusty and I will be along soon. A few days more. We’ll be fine staying at Rachel’s house, and maybe, when we come up, we’ll be bringing her with us.”

Dolly took Angela in her arms. “Don’t stay too much longer, girl,” she said. “It’s not a good idea to tempt fate.”

“I know, Mother. I won’t.”

The next morning, Angela put a sign in the Kitchen’s front window. It said,
CLOSING DAY. EVERYTHING’S ON THE HOUSE
. She served lots of eggs and ham, canned peas, raisin bread, cranberry juice she’d brought in for Joe. Odd stuff. Some of the people eating it were crying.

When she’d had enough, Angela and Rusty gave everyone something to take home: a sack of flour, sugar, salt, pickles, whatever was left. Then she sent Rusty on ahead to Rachel’s house, watched him as he walked away.

“So that’s it,” she said, closing the door as night came on. She washed the dishes, dusted off the shelves in the pantry, scraped down the big grill, swept the floor, scrubbed the counter, set everything to rights before the bulldozers came in a day, a week, whenever they were through wrecking someone else’s home.

Then she went upstairs one last time and sat on a milk crate by a window, her cheek resting on the sill, and looked down into the street where she’d been walking the day her water broke, looked over toward Raccoon Creek where she’d taught Rusty how to skip rocks, looked up into the sky where the night’s stars had started shining, and said the first of her good-byes.

When Angela arrived at Rachel’s house, she was shivering with exhaustion.

“Where’s Rusty?” she asked as she came through the door.

“He’s out in the tree house with Joe,” Rachel muttered, shutting the door and switching on some lights.

“You been sitting here in the dark?”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Boy, oh boy. I can see I’ve got my work cut out for me.”

“You think you’re going to bring sweetness and light back into my life, talk me into moving up to that farm with you? Save your breath.”

Angela sat down heavily in a big, mushy chair and pulled her knees up to her chest. “You got any brandy?” she asked.

When he came in through the back door, Rusty heard his mother and Rachel talking. He took off his jacket, meaning to join them, but then heard what Rachel was saying and stood where he was, listening.

“You all have too much faith in the man, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why. You’ve known him for a couple of years only, and he’s never done one single thing to prove he’s capable of making this thing work.”

“Come on, Rachel. You saw those houses. They’re there. They exist. What kind of proof are you talking about?”

“Since when can a person like Joe—who’s never had to work for a living, not really, or deal with the real world—in a single year build all those houses with all the proper permits, utilities, wells, you name it. One year. It’s impossible. It’ll be the middle of winter and some guy with a badge will show up on your doorstep and start asking you a lot of questions you just won’t have the answers to. And who knows where Joe will be by then?”

Rusty listened for his mother to come to Joe’s defense, but she did not.

“When I want to know something,” he said, walking into the room, “I ask. Why can’t you ask Joe about all this?”

When Rachel didn’t answer, Rusty said, “I asked Joe what it was like, building those houses, having all that money and being able to say, ‘I want you to build me a house here, and one over there, a bigger one, and a little cottage right in those birches there, and make them all beautiful.’ I thought he must have felt like a king.”

Rachel sat forward in her chair, opened her mouth to say something, but Rusty cut her off. “But he said, no, he didn’t feel like a king. He felt good, but mostly lucky. He realized that he’d need all kinds of permits and probably wouldn’t ever be able to get them, at least not in time to do what he wanted to do, as quickly as he wanted to do it. But when he called up some of the commissioners and told them what he wanted to do, as soon as he said, ‘Belle Haven,’ they jumped all over him trying to help. They made sure everything got done right. Imagine how happy they must have been when this strange guy with a zillion bucks walks in and says, ‘Hi. I want to settle a bunch of people who are being burned out of their town.’ So they helped him. Makes them look good, he figured. Makes Belle Haven an easier problem. Gets a few people out of town faster. That’s what Joe figured, anyway. He didn’t really care why they were so helpful, though. As long as they didn’t try to stop him.” Rusty sat down, looking pleased with himself, expecting the women to smile and fan themselves with their hands, relieved to hear that everything was taken care of all right. Rachel surprised him.

“He’s not just an opportunist,” she said quietly. “That was bad enough. Now he’s a traitor, too. I feel sick.”

“Oh, come on now, Rachel. I know you’re angry with Joe,” Angela said tiredly. “I know you want to hang on to this town as long as you can. But it’s not Joe’s fault we’re in trouble. And you of all people ought to know he’d never do anything to hurt you.”

Rachel smacked the top of her thigh. “But he has, hasn’t he? You don’t understand, Angela. He thinks he knows what’s best for me. Goddamnit, I’m not a child. And he’s not my father.” Rusty remembered telling Joe the same thing. He felt awful.

Angela wanted to say, “If your father were here, he’d be on Joe’s side.” But she knew better than to say such a thing.

“I know what’s best for me,” Rachel said. “I always have.” She walked off toward the kitchen.

Angela remembered how much Rachel had changed when her parents died. But in some ways she seemed exactly the same as she’d always been. For the first time, Angela wondered if Rachel was clinging to Belle Haven because it was a part of something else that she did not know how to give up.

If that was the case, no one, not even Joe, could loosen her grip until she was ready to let go.

Angela held her hand out to Rusty, who walked over to sit on the arm of her chair. “I don’t think we’d better stay here too much longer,” she said, running her hand slowly over the hair at the nape of his neck. “Everything’s going wrong, and I don’t think there’s anything we can do to set it right.”

“Will Joe come with us?” Rusty asked.

“I don’t know,” his mother replied. “But I don’t think there’s anything he can do, either.”

        In the morning, Rachel drove her truck to Randall. Succinctly, she told Mr. Murdock to keep her money where it was.