Those Who Favor Fire (39 page)

She watched, speechless, as he stalked off the porch and into the Schooner, held the door for Pal and then shut it sharply behind them. He did not reappear for as long as she sat there alone in the darkness, stunned, furious, and for the first time sorry that he had come back to her changed.

        Rachel slept little that night. Her belly gurgled with acid, and her eyelids seemed to repel each other like mismatched magnets. Around midnight she heard Joe start up the Schooner and drive away. He drove out of town the way he had come in. She imagined that San Francisco had recalibrated Joe’s vision, had cast Belle Haven and all of its citizens—including Rachel herself—in a new, unfavorable light. She imagined that he was, at this moment, bound away, across the farmland, toward the nearest city.

The Schooner was the first thing Angela saw the next morning when she came down from her apartment above the coffee shop. She unlocked the front door and walked straight across the sidewalk to Joe’s door. She knocked, waited, knocked again.

“How do you want your eggs?” she asked when he opened the door.

“Good morning, Angela,” Joe said, knuckling his eyes. “Some law against sleeping past the crack of dawn?”

“Yep,” she said. “Never park your disreputable caravan outside my front door after a month’s absence unless you mean business. I’ve been itchin’ to talk to you, boy, and I hate to be kept waiting.”

“Don’t you want to know why my lovely caravan is parked outside your disreputable hash house?”

“All in good time,” she said, smiling. “Eggs?”

“Scrambled,” he said. “With cheese on top.”

“Ten minutes.” She turned on her heel and disappeared inside the coffee shop.

By the time Angela had fixed his breakfast—eggs with cheese, fried tomatoes, toast, coffee, and cranberry juice—Joe had showered, dressed, fed Pal, bought a paper.

“I know all about Holly,” she said, bringing him pepper. “And I know all about Mendelson moving into Ian’s place,” she said, back at the grill, busy with bacon. “But I don’t know why you’re here eating my eggs instead of up with Rachel where you belong.”

“We had a fight,” he said, drinking the cold juice. It was like liquid rubies. “I take it I’m the first to tell her how stupid she’s being about this fire business.”

“I don’t know as how I’d call her stupid.” Angela began to brew a second pot of coffee as a couple of farmers came in, corn silk on their sleeves. She took the first pot to their table, said hi, filled their mugs, put menus in their hands.

“You got to understand something about Rachel,” she told Joe. “And it’s not something I’ve ever said to her, because I think in time she’ll work everything out for herself and rushing her won’t help. But it’s my opinion that the way Rachel is acting about this fire has a lot to do with the way her parents died. Actually, more to do with
when
they died. She was beginning to outgrow this long habit she had of always doing the right thing, being so reliable it about made you sick.” She glanced over at the farmers, who were waving their menus at her. “Keep your shirts on, I’ll just be a sec,” she called. “But she was on her way, starting to outgrow all that, when
bang
. Her parents got killed in a pretty horrible way. Right on the heels of a miserable time at school. And right before my eyes she did this incredible flipflop. Instantly. All of a sudden she’s stubborn as a mule. Pigheaded. Absolutely set on doing things her own way.” Angela waggled her head. “All in all, a pretty reasonable reaction, wouldn’t you say?”

Joe shrugged.

“Besides,” she said, poking a stray wisp of hair back into place. “She’s not the only one dragging her feet. We all are. Some people can’t see that there’s any problem at all. Some are bent on looking the other way. Some see it all right, but it’s like they’re looking through binoculars from the wrong end. Some see a problem like this and they get their backs up. Rachel’s one sort or another, I’m not sure which.”

“And what sort are you, Angela?”

“Hang on a minute.” She went back to the farmers, took their order. “I,” she said, cracking their eggs onto the grill, “am the sort who’s gotten very good at knowing when to throw in the towel. And I’m not there yet, that’s for damned sure.”

“Don’t you think you ought to get Rusty and your mother out of here?”

Angela put bread into the toaster.

“I like you, Joe. You know that, right?”

“I guess.”

“You guess. Shit, boy, you
know
I do. But keep your goddamned nose out of my business.” She flipped the eggs with one smooth turn of her wrist. “ ’Course I’m worried. But we like it here. And besides, what choice do we have? No one in their right mind’s going to buy a square foot of Belle Haven land until this fire’s dead and gone. Certainly not my disreputable hash house. So you want to tell me how we’re supposed to start over somewhere else?”

He put down his fork and wiped his mouth. “What about the Schooner?”

Angela turned from the grill to look at him. “What about it?”

“It’s not much, but if you have to go somewhere else, it will get you there.”

Angela frowned at him. The eggs sputtered for attention. “You offering me your Schooner?”

“If you need to get out in a hurry,” he said.

She looked at him some more, thinking it through. “You planning to buy a place with your trust money?”

“Don’t worry about me,” he said, impatient.

Angela watched the bacon fry. “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it. What do I owe you?”

“Not a thing,” she answered. “It’s on the house.”

They talked for a while until Angela got too busy and Dolly came downstairs with Rusty to help out.

Before he left he asked, “All right if I park the Schooner here for a bit while I look for someplace more permanent?”

“I have a better idea,” Angela said, carrying a plate of flapjacks to a man in a bright orange feed cap. “See if Earl will let you park at the back of his lot. It’s never been full, not once in all these years. Tell him you’ll stock shelves for him one night a week, something of that sort. He’s likely got an outlet you can plug into, long as you pay for
the juice. And when it’s too cold to put a hose on his outside tap, you can use my shower upstairs if we’re not in it, no charge.” She came closer and lowered her voice. “You can even, ah, wash up in the back whenever you need to.”

“Thanks. I’ve got that part under control, Angie.”

“Enough said.”

“All right, then,” he agreed, smiling, pulling on his earlobe. “I’ll go talk to Earl.”

“Fine with me,” Earl said, dusting a pyramid of paint cans. “Long as you don’t mind paying for the electric and the water. Never mind using the lot. That’s what it’s there for.”

“How about I shovel your walkways come winter and keep the lot clear?”

“Now, there’s a thought,” Earl said, his eyes gleaming. “There is a thought.”

“It’s a deal, then,” Joe said. “Let me know if you hear of anyone hiring, Earl. I need a bit of a job.”

“I’ll do that,” Earl said.

As it turned out, Joe simply began to do what he’d done before: some of this, some of that, plenty to keep himself in soup and bread, soap and razors, new laces for his boots, the occasional carving tool, gasoline and oil for the Schooner. He mowed lawns, drove old ladies to the A&P and home again, picked late peaches and early apples. School started after Joe had been back only a few days, and Angela again offered to feed Joe for time spent with Rusty and his books.

“That’s ridiculous,” Joe said. “I’m the one getting an education. Rusty’s smart as a whip. He doesn’t need my help.”

“Don’t argue with me.”

“Fine. Okay.” He held up his hands. “If you really want to make a trade, Rusty can watch Pal for me once a week. I’ve got some stuff to do out of town, and she hates driving.”

“Pal drives?”

“Very funny.” He was surprised when she didn’t ask what he’d be doing out of town, but he was also relieved. There would be a time and a place to tell her, but this wasn’t it. “And I will use your shower, if you don’t mind. But that’s more than enough. Way more.”

And so things went.

A few weeks earlier Joe would have mourned the loss of his lovely camp: the sound of the stream and the blowing trees, the sight of deer at the edge of the woods, the fireplace he’d built, the place he’d made for himself, bit by bit. But he had come back to Belle Haven treasuring more than anything else the people he encountered, even those who failed to win his affections, for they all impressed him with their inimitable bones, the oddity of their notions, with their very human fragility. And of all the people in his life, he marveled at himself most of all. At the smoothness of his fingernails, the random lunacy of his dreams, the way the smell of oranges made him think of his mother.

He still knew how to appreciate the beauty and the genius of trees, blackbirds, other live things. He still loved music and color and art of all kinds—his own included. But the impressions these things left on him were as important to Joe as the things themselves. The memory of them as precious. And the idea of things to come as rewarding as their arrival. He asked little of the world, cared little if he left it different in his wake.

Rusty, Rachel, Holly, Angela, Ian, and his father, in their various ways, had taught him to waste no time, for there was none to waste. They had taught him to do whatever made his sleep easy and his appetite strong. They had taught him to yearn but not to crave. To feed and feel as if he’d feasted. To lay open the fragile membrane of each and every cell in his body and draw in all light, all sound, all substance—but not to overlook the dark, quiet emptiness between the stars.

The days since he had fought with Rachel had been like a fast, but even as he hungered for her, Joe was content with what he had. He stood by his choices: to leave home, to live simply, to spend his inheritance on something worthwhile, even if it might mean losing Rachel for good … and now to dispute the choices
she
was making. If he wanted to be able to live with himself, he had to risk living without her.

Then, one night, he found himself remembering the Jaguar he’d left back in a lot somewhere east of Belle Haven. He remembered the feel of it, the sound of it, the joy it had brought him. A car. A way to get from one place to another. Rubber and steel and leather. Glass and paint. Plastic.
Plastic
. But he had loved it and missed it for a long time.

He knew then—and realized that a part of him had always known—what Rachel saw when she looked down from her hill and out over the fields. She saw something coming for her. For the house
where her parents had lived, where she had made a place for herself. For the trees and the cats and the houses. For the people she knew and loved so well.

She did not see their destruction, or she would surely be nearer flight. She saw, instead, a kind of foreclosure, a species of theft, and she clung on, she dug in her heels and wrapped her fingers tighter, and bared her teeth like even the gentlest of dogs are known to do when threatened.

She had much more to lose than a car.

As Joe walked across Rachel’s front yard that night, pushing her father’s old bike, Pal trotting alongside, he saw her watching him from the porch.

“I’m sorry,” he said, leaning the bike against the porch rail.

She thought about that for a bit. “That’s good. Because the only way I can take you is whole and entire. I can’t just rope off little sections of you and say, well, that part’s no good, so I won’t touch it. That part’s broken, so I’ll leave it alone.”

Rachel watched Joe mull this over. Had she been able to read his thoughts—to know that he was forgiving each word as it left her mouth and promising her time to grow out of her tyranny—she might well have struck him. Instead, she leaned over the railing and offered him her bottle of beer, which he took. “I don’t mind fighting with you, but if you are truly as disgusted with me as you seemed to be the other night, I want nothing to do with you anymore.” She smoothed her hair behind her ears. “Have you gotten over all that?”

Joe sighed and handed back her bottle, sat down on the porch steps. He watched Pal move silently off into the night. “Oh, I don’t know, Rachel. You made me mad with all that talk about letting the fire run around like a rabid dog. I happen to think it’s going to kill some more people. I hate to think about that, or about you being swallowed up like Ross was. Take me down to his house and look at it with me and tell me you’re not scared stiff. Tell me that, truthfully, and I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

They shared the beer. She sat down next to him on the steps.

“I’m sorry,” he said again after a bit. “I should have remembered that you were patient with me once.”

“I don’t need your patience, Joe,” she said wearily.

“Well, maybe not. You’re a grown woman. You do what you have to do.”

He went inside and came back out with a second beer.

After a while, she said, “How do you like living in a parking lot?”

“It’s better than a stick in the eye.”

She laughed and laid her head against his arm.

“The best part about it is the view,” he said, which made her laugh harder. But when he said, “I can see your butterflies from the window by my bed,” she first looked up, confused, and then became still, remembering.

“What about your statues, out in Ian’s woods?” she said after a bit. “Does Mendelson know about them yet?”

“I don’t think so,” Joe said, drinking his beer, running the bottom of the bottle down his thigh. “I barely spoke to the guy. I wonder why he’d want to buy Ian’s place, what with the fire and everything.”

“He didn’t,” Rachel said. “The government did, from a cousin Ian has, had, out in Wyoming. He didn’t want the place, and the government got to him before any of the rest of us even knew the land was for sale. Now Mendelson’s living out there with a few of his crew. He’s supposed to figure out what happened to Ross’s house and plan what to do about the fire, once and for all. He’s the one who’s going to recommend what happens to this town.” She held her bottle with both hands. “Which scares me more than just about anything else.” Neither of them spoke for a while. Then Rachel said, “It shouldn’t be too hard to sneak out to the woods.”