Those Who Favor Fire (34 page)

“Now
there’s
a better name.”

“Pal?”

“Better than Fortune.”

“I suppose.” And he did call her Pal, for all her born days.

        When spring arrived, Rachel took down the blue curtains, shook them clean, and stashed them up in her loft. She made long and narrow ceramic bowls, filled them with water, white pebbles, and flower bulbs, and put them to wait on the windowsills. She rolled the oriental rug and lugged it up into the loft, swept the fireplace clean. At a garage sale in Fainsville she found a lemon yellow throw for the bed, hung rounds of stained glass in the windows to enrich the thin April sun. She topped her bookshelves with more of Joe’s creations: a mermaid, a perfect acorn, a horse’s hoof, a polished bowl that she put odd pebbles in. Of these, the mermaid was and always would be her favorite.

When she planted seeds that spring, she put some into urns and jugs she’d made on her wheel and set them out in the sun. She didn’t give much thought to her reasons for doing this. She liked her pots and thought they looked lovely in her garden.

“Nobody just suddenly decides to plant a moveable garden,” Joe said as he lay in her hammock with Pal and watched her transplant a clump of pincushions into a big purple pot. “Not without a reason.”

“Why do I need a reason?”

“Forget it,” he said, closing his eyes. He was tired of talking. There were too many things that Rachel would not discuss, too many things he could not disregard. Like Otto Browning’s detached skull. Like the mine rats that were suddenly much more numerous—much more alarming with their slick pink tails and their white-thorn
teeth—than they had been since their first exodus from the mines over a decade earlier. And, most recently, like what had happened at the Hutter place, and then soon after to Rebecca Sader.

On the day of the first good thaw that spring, when the last stubborn inches of snow had melted off the grass, a man named Bill Hutter, who lived four long blocks from the mine tunnels, had gone outside to find a sheet of ice across his lawn. It was a good inch thick and too hard to break with his boot. Nobody else had ice. Everybody else had good, wet grass, already greening under the snow. His, through the ice, looked gray.

Nobody could think of an explanation for the ice except that something had melted the snow that lay closest to the ground and that the slush had frozen solid soon after. Rachel was not interested in explanations. When Joe brought it up, she changed the subject. And before long it became old news, for the ice melted in the strengthening sun and the lawn beneath it survived.

The greater mystery, the one that Joe had brought to Rachel this very morning, having heard about it from Angela over breakfast, was stranger, more frightening.

Rebecca Sader was not an overly dramatic woman. She was not flighty. She was, in fact, sensible, practical, and calm. But according to her husband, Doug, she had gotten mixed up somehow, the night before.

“She nearly cooked herself in the shower.” He pronounced it
shar
, waited while Angela warmed his cup. “You know how you do something a million times without even thinking about it, but as soon as you give it any thought a’tall, you’re not quite sure you’re doing it right?”

Angela nodded, her ponytail bobbing. “Happens to me all the time.”

“Well, Becca was in the shower last night, and after a while it started to get too hot. So she turned back the hot a bit, but that didn’t help. So she turned up the cold. It just got hotter, she says. So instead of just turning it off she got all in a tizzy, and I guess she got the handles mixed up and shut off the cold, left the hot on by mistake. I don’t know. She ended up doing the standing long jump outta the tub. Anyway, I was already in bed, sound asleep. First thing she says this morning when we wake up is, ‘Doug, there’s no cold water.’ ‘Whatdya mean, no water. The well can’t be dry.’ ‘No
cold
water,’ she
says. ‘Whatdya mean, no cold water?’ I says. ‘How could you run outta
cold
water?’ She gets outta bed, drags me into the bathroom, turns on the cold tap, and whatdya think comes out?”

“Cold water?”

“Cold water,” Doug said. “Cold as you please. But don’t tell her I told you. She made me promise to keep my mouth shut.”

But it was Rebecca herself who spread the news. She knew how it sounded. She knew people might think she’d made a silly, stupid mistake by nearly scalding herself, by talking about it afterward. But she knew—she
knew
—that she had made no mistake. The water that had come boiling down on her back had come straight up from the well, and it should have been cold. Somehow, the water in the well had become hot and then, by morning, cold again.

But as soon as she began to talk about the fire coming up under the well, people stopped listening. Sophia Browning’s house had stood three country blocks from the tunnels. Bill Hutter’s ice-locked lawn was just a block farther away than that. But Rebecca and Doug Sader lived a
half mile
from the nearest tunnel. Lots of people lived closer, and none of them had ever had hot wells. Unless you counted the people right over the tunnels, who had to be careful whenever they ran a bath. But that was different.

“Why is that different?” Joe had asked Rachel when he’d brought her the news about the Saders’ well.

“All kinds of things go on out over the tunnels. Their gardens aren’t much good anymore. Their basements are hot sometimes. That’s to be expected. They’re used to that sort of thing. But you can’t go around assuming that every odd thing that happens in Belle Haven has something to do with the fire. Especially not as far from the tunnels as the Saders live.”

Which is when Joe suddenly rose up from the hammock and asked Rachel why she was digging up her garden and putting it, piecemeal, into pots.

        By July Rachel had decked her room out in its summer things again and Belle Haven was ready to celebrate Independence Day in its own, inimitable way. The country was turning 206 years old, the fire 12, and the people of Belle Haven made the most of both events.

There was, of course, the parade down Maple Street. There were picnics and baseball games, fireworks and painted faces. But there were other things, too: things that did not take place in other American towns. There was, every Fourth of July in Belle Haven, a gathering over an obliging hot spot. When night came on, enough wood was pitched into the glowing hole to make a magnificent bonfire. Everyone sang “The Star Spangled Banner,” “America the Beautiful,” “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” marched around to “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” while the volunteer fire department tossed small fireworks into the hot spot and let the fire set them off. No rockets, though. Nothing meant to fly. Just color, and light, and enough bang and sizzle to make the babies cry.

It was at these outlandish fireworks that Joe finally met Mendelson, the firefighter.

They had, of course, heard of each other. Belle Haven was too small for anonymity. They had seen each other, too, from time to time. But they had never before met.

Joe had gone out to the hot spot—which had come up in the middle of a big tomato field—to please Rusty, but after a while he said good night.

“You’re not leaving yet?” Ian was sitting in an old lawn chair with
his pipe and a supply of sparklers. Rusty stood behind him, chewing on a stem of grass, his face bathed with firelight. Angela and Rachel were over with the firemen, begging them to throw something more dramatic into the flames: what, they did not know. All around the hot spot, the tomatoes had baked black. At a safe distance, the spectators, all of whom understood the value of farm goods, had carefully taken up posts in between the rows of plants, like an eccentric battalion.

“I guess I am,” Joe replied. “If I could just look at the fire from the ground up, like you all do … but I can’t. It’s too spooky, to me.”

“You think that’s how we look at it? From the ground up?”

Joe stuck his hands in his pockets, looked back toward the fire. Rachel and Angela made precise, black figures against its glow. “Look at them, Ian,” he said. “You think they’re afraid?”

“Things aren’t always how they appear,” Ian said. Rusty watched the fire, waited patiently for the firemen to throw something into the flames.

“Well,” Joe said, “Pal’s a little nervous, too, so I think I’ll take her home.”

“Where is she?” Rusty asked.

Joe whistled, and Pal came trotting into the light. But when an emerald plume came whistling up out of the hot spot, she stopped short, wheeled on her hind legs, and plunged away. “Come here, you big chicken,” Joe called, but Pal stayed where she was. “So long,” he said, stepping carefully between the crowded tomato plants. “You going after trout tomorrow, Rusty?”

“You bet.”

“Can I come along?”

“You bet.”

“Good night,” Ian called after him, lighting his pipe. “See you back at the ranch? For a nightcap?”

“In the words of Belle Haven’s finest trout fisherman,” Joe called, without turning around, “you bet.”

He found Pal cowering among the infant pines at the edge of the woods. A single touch of his hand behind her ear calmed her. The scent of him made her smile. “Come on, girl,” he said, walking along the border of the tomato field, toward the road. It wasn’t far from here to Ian’s, and it was plenty warm, beautiful, a good night for walking. When he reached the road, he had nothing on his mind except the way the trees looked in the reddish glow. He did not notice Pal stop suddenly. The first he knew of Mendelson was the sound of his laughter, close by.

“Hello, Joe. Had enough?”

Joe stopped, Pal caught up with him, and the two of them stood looking at the man in the road. “Who’s that?” Joe asked.

“We haven’t met,” the man said, stepping forward. “The name’s Mendelson.”

“Ah,” Joe said, taking his hand. It felt as if it were skinned with hoof, hard and dry and cold. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“I’ll bet you have. And I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“Have you?”

“Well, sure. Strange young man shows up out of nowhere, no last name, no visible means of support. Curiouser and curiouser.”

“Not really,” Joe said mildly. He couldn’t see much of the man’s face, but now and then, as Mendelson turned his head, the firelight caught his eyes. “I just got tired of living where I was, so I left.”

“And now you’re here,” Mendelson said.

“And now I’m here.”

Mendelson spread his feet and crossed his arms, something that smacked of the military. “I’ll bet you didn’t know that some of the locals called you in to the FBI.”

Joe raised his eyebrows and smiled. “Did they?”

“Yes, indeed. Thought you might be one of the ten most wanted or something, looking for a place to hole up.”

“And what did the FBI tell them?”

“Said they didn’t want you, but thanks anyway.”

“How could they know that, without taking a look?”

“Fingerprints.”

“Fingerprints?” Joe began to wonder if Mendelson might not be crazy.

“From a butter knife.”

Outside of the Schooner, the only Belle Haven butter knives he’d ever touched belonged to friends.

“Do you always do this when you meet new people? Invent some far-fetched tale, see how they’ll react?”

Mendelson chuckled. “I’ve been accused of a lot of things, Joe, and many of them are true, but I’ve never been known to lie.”

“Uh-huh. Well, it was a pleasure to finally meet you, Mendelson. See you around.”

“That you will,” he said as Joe walked away. “That you will.”

As he made his way home Joe wondered if someone might really have sent his fingerprints to the FBI. The thought made him laugh
aloud, but this was an odd place, full of people with odd habits. Anything, he thought, was possible. Mendelson—now there was an eerie man. Standing in the shadows, watching. A flat, awkward laugh, unlikely to spread. A man who had dealt with the same fire for a decade, never making any headway, had to be unhappy in some ways. The way the dark air still looked red, this far from the hot spot, made Joe feel sorry for Mendelson. People seemed not to take this fire too seriously, but surely Mendelson did. Joe himself did, more and more the longer he stayed in Belle Haven.

By now he knew the names of every street in town and of a great many people who lived there. He knew where all the boreholes were, where Mendelson and his men were drilling, measuring, mapping. He knew all about the hot spots as they came and went. And he knew, as few others seemed to know or admit, that the fire was not abating. If anything, it was growing stronger. Or so it seemed to Joe.

The road twisted around a small hollow and rose, gradually, up the slope of a gentle hill. When it flattened out again, Joe could see Ian’s fields up ahead and the shape of the woods beyond them. He stopped and looked back toward the town, which cast its own faint light upward, like a dome. In the distance, Rachel’s hill rose smoothly up. Narrow valleys here and there plunged down and away. Small fields lay flat and fertile under the sky or sloped up to meet it. And all of this was cast in a subtle shade of orange, as if a foreign moon were preparing to roll up over the horizon.

Always before, as he had crossed Ian’s fields with his carving tools, on his way to the dead trees in the woods, the occasional pit of flame in the distance had been easy to avoid, if not ignore. Like a horse with blinders, he had walked the land, the smoke or the fire passing away at the edge of his vision, less commonplace than lightning. But lately, when he glanced back toward town, the tools in his hands felt oddly like weapons. And when he looked at the land that stretched between him and the distant houses, he now felt as if he were on the far side of a border that absent statesmen had only recently laid down.

It was with a sense of relief that Joe reached the Schooner and settled down with Pal to wait for Ian to arrive. This was a place where he had always felt safe, where he knew what to expect and what was expected of him. But for the first time he wondered how much of his comfort depended on the wheels that could someday take the Schooner on its way.