Those Who Favor Fire (40 page)

“Sorry. You lost me.”

“To work on the statues.”

“Oh.” He nodded. “I don’t want to sneak out there,” he said. “And I’m not going anywhere near those hot spots again if I don’t have to.”

Rachel frowned. “Think about it, Joe. It’s probably safer out there in those dead trees than anywhere else around here. The fire’s already eaten up any coal in that spot.”

“I suppose.”

She gave a little grunt of exasperation. “Are you saying you don’t want to go back out there? I thought you loved carving those trees. They’re beautiful!”

“Yes, I think so too. But I can carve things right here.”

“You can’t mean you’re going to leave that last statue unfinished.”

“It’s a statue, Rachel. It’s dead wood. The worms are out there right now, and so are the woodpeckers. In a year or two those trees will be down and rotted.”

“How can you think about it like that?” she cried. “You were so excited, that day you took me out there to show me that first carving
of Holly. Don’t you remember talking about how good it felt to make something so beautiful?” She was close to tears, suddenly, and for that he was sorry. “What’s happened to you?” she said.

“I’m the same as I always was,” he said gently, “only better.”

Rachel looked into his face, unsmiling, and slowly turned away. “I don’t understand you anymore.”

“And I feel the same way about you,” he said. “I hope it’s like a temporary sickness and that we’ll both get better. But right now, you seem to be paralyzed by the prospect of leaving here.” He reached for her hand. “Don’t you think I ought to shake you out of it? Isn’t that what you would do for me? Isn’t that what you
did
do for me?”

She took her hand away. “I’m not paralyzed, Joe. But I’m not leaving either. I’m going to do what needs to be done.”

“About what?”

“About the fire, for Christ’s sakes. Isn’t that what we’re talking about?”

“But what can you do?” He was bewildered.

“I don’t know,” she said, although the look in her eye made him think she had something in mind. “But if I do eventually leave, it won’t be like some goddamned lemming.”

“What the hell have lemmings got to do with this?” He made no attempt to hide his exasperation. “Can’t you admit that there are plenty of good, rational reasons for leaving Belle Haven? Even if there were no fire, there would be plenty of reasons to go somewhere else. Good grief, Rachel, this isn’t the only decent spot on earth. If anything, I’d say you’re acting like a lemming by
staying
here.”

“You don’t understand.” She stood up, looked down at him. “This town isn’t just the place where I live. It’s part of me.” She shook her head impatiently. “The willow in the park where I go on Halloween … that was where my father taught me how to climb trees. I had my first haircut at Paula’s. I remember thinking my hair was going to bleed. I grew up on cider from those apples”—she pointed toward the trees—“and huckleberries from every backyard in town.” Her voice thickened. “I grew up knowing that there was a fire out under the fields, and waiting for it to get here has been terrible. But if it finally does, I think I’ll be relieved. I feel like a sailor who can’t swim, who’s terrified of the goddamned ocean and gets sick of shore after two days home.”

To Joe, the simple porch suddenly felt like a stage. He knew that she had allowed herself to be swept up in her dilemma, as if in a net made of her own hair. Listening to her now, he could only imagine
what she sounded like to herself. And yet, at the same time, he believed a part of everything she was saying.

“So don’t you treat me like I’ve lost my senses,” she said angrily. “You think I should leave Belle Haven? This place has made me what I am. Where am I going to find another Angela? Or another Rusty? What other place has roads my father walked on, trees my mother planted? Where on this entire earth will I ever find a place to compare with this one?” She looked at him sadly. “I would have bet anything you’d understand what I’m talking about. I thought you loved this place, too, for the same kinds of reasons.”

He could see in her eyes that she had begun to agonize, but he did not see any way around that. “Jesus, Rachel. I
do
. But you were one of the people who taught me that if you can live with yourself, you can live anywhere.” He reached up and pulled her down beside him on the step, pushed her hair away from her face. “This is only a
place
, Rachel. A few acres of ground.” He took her by the shoulders so that she had to look at him. “You can’t let your roots tie you down.”

She shook her shoulders free. “What do you know about roots?”

He looked at her steadily. He knew a lot about roots. “I know that the best ones grow inward,” he said, “and stay with you wherever you happen to be. It’s not the place that’s important. It’s what it means to you.” He put his hands on his chest. “And even when you leave, you won’t leave that behind.” He had not come to plead a case, but he feared that this might be the last time she would hear him out.

She stood up, stepped toward the door, looked down at him. “All you’ve talked about since you came back is how we ought to leave this place, which you claim to love. I don’t know what to think, Joe.” Again she said, “I don’t understand you.”

But he only shrugged. “I can’t help that.”

When she went inside the dark house, he stayed for only a moment more and then stood abruptly, set down his beer bottle, and, whistling for Pal, walked away, leaving her father’s bicycle behind.

Two hours later, when Rachel returned to the porch, exhausted, sick of her bed, she looked out toward the land that had belonged to Ian and saw a new landmark. Hot and orange, this one reached upward, violent, as if it came not from under the ground but from the world above it, fed with boundless air, strengthened by wind, and fortified by the rigid flesh of trees.

        When Mendelson walked into Angela’s Kitchen the next morning, stinking with sulfur and cologne, Joe put down his fork, wiped his mouth carefully on a clean napkin, and took a long swallow of water.

“Give me a bag of hot cinnamon buns and fill ’er up, Angela.” Mendelson left his thermos by the register, moved down the counter to a stool next to Joe’s. “I thought I might find you in here,” he said.

“Morning, Mendelson.”

Mendelson spun slowly on his stool until he sat with his back to the counter, elbows cocked and braced on the Formica, legs crossed at the knees. “You know, the oddest thing happened last night, out in the woods at the edge of my spread.”

“Ian’s place.”

“Used to be, yes,” he said, nodding. “Someone started a pretty big fire in the middle of the night. Enough fire around here as it is, but some dumb bunny can’t get his fill, I guess. Know anything about it?” He peered at Joe, one eye shut, his curiosity real.

“Why ask me?”

“You used to live out there, is all. Thought you might’ve seen something of this sort out that way before.”

Joe finished his breakfast, drained his mug. “Probably just a hot spot, Mendelson.”

“Not this one.” He shook his head, sent his stool into another lazy spin. “Somebody made a fire out of old wood, tended it, banked it.
Left a bunch of stumps and a nice, tidy pit of ashes, sort o’ like a druid hangout or something. Not the way kids would have done it, but I guess it might have been kids.”

Angela put a fat brown paper bag and a full thermos in front of Mendelson. “Post this in your window, Angela,” he said. He handed her a printed notice, paid for the food. “Guess I’ll be sleeping with one eye open from now on,” he said and left.

“There’s going to be a meeting in the school auditorium. Tomorrow night,” Angela said, reading. “I guess they’ve finally got something to tell us.”

Joe picked up a salt shaker, put it down, watched Angela looking at the notice in her hands. “You going to go?” he asked her.

“Not until I have to,” she sighed, and missed the sight of Joe bowing his head.

“This’ll go a whole lot faster if you’ll all shut the hell up.” Which did shut everyone up. They looked up at the stage and gaped at Mendelson, who stood and glared down at them all, breathing heavily through his mouth. “That’s better,” he said.

He looked at the papers in his hand. “Just shut up and listen, then I’ll go on home to bed and you folks can bitch at each other as long as you like. Jesus Christ,” he muttered to the man from the Department of Community Affairs, who stood nervously at his side. “Have you ever in your life heard such a load of crap?”

Had Mendelson paid closer attention, he might have noticed in the eyes of the townspeople a sudden shift, a change in temper, a clear, unmistakable signal that their silence meant anything but surrender.

“As usual, you all seem bent on confusing the issue, so let’s start over. At the beginning. And get things straight.” Teacherlike but not kindly, he said, “Ever since I walked into this school I’ve been hearing the same tired complaint. That the government has ignored Belle Haven. Which is simply
not
true. Hell, we’ve been fighting this fire for a dozen years! We tried sealing the shafts with clay. Not our fault the soil around the mine’s so porous it let air in anyway. Nothing we could do about the breathing room left when the coal’s burned away. No way to stop the fire from nipping up to the surface and leaving a vent behind. Plus, where it’s hot enough, the ground cracks like a bad brick, which lets air in too. Throw in a few thousand drilling holes
left behind when the mining outfits quit, and you’ve got dandy conditions for a mine fire to spread.” He slapped a hand against his chest. “None of which is
my
fault.”

He drew breath as if to continue but suddenly turned instead to the man from Community Affairs who had begun to shift his ample weight from foot to foot. He said, as if there were not hundreds of others looking on: “Did you know there’s an Australian mole that actually
swims
through sand, breathing tiny pockets of air caught between the grains.” He made stroking motions through the air. “Amazing.”

The fat man beside him nodded uncertainly. The audience, torn between fascination and an accelerating impatience, leaned forward in their chairs as if they did not trust their hearing.

“Anyway,” Mendelson muttered, “where was I? Oh, yeah. We couldn’t choke off the fire. Right. So.” He smacked his hands together once. “Next thing we did was we sunk a barrier to keep it away from the town. Fire went under it. So we tried drowning it with water. Fire came right back, like that.” He snapped his fingers, and a moth that was beating its dizzy way across the stage veered into the shadows. “Tried suffocating it with fly ash. Waste of time. We even thought about building a power plant right on top of the fire, giving it a boost or two, using its power and letting it burn out. But we were afraid that doing that might make things a whole lot worse.” He did not mention the trench that he had dug before taking any of these other measures. The room was silent.

“So all this talk about the government wasting time and money is nonsense. We’ve been trying everything possible to put the goddamned fire out. And while we’ve been trying all these things, Belle Haven’s been pretty lucky. Up until now, the fire’s been taking its time, meandering around out there, generally keeping out of town. Coal veins carry it up where it doesn’t belong, stink things up, spread it around out in the fields a bit … big deal. No harm done, am I right? Hell, the boreholes at the far end of town didn’t even go in until three, four years ago, and they’re not so bad.

“You want to know how lucky you are? Take a look at India.” He held his arms out as wide as they would go. “They got whole villages sinking into coal fires that make ours look like a weenie roast. They’ve got such bad fires in Jharia that if they were flooded and every air vent was packed with sand, they’d still stay hot for eighty-five,
ninety years. Hot enough to reignite if they were exposed to air. And the coal beds are so hot they ignite other beds without even touching them.” Mendelson’s eyes were gleaming. He shook his head but it was not clear whether in admiration or more impartial wonder. “By comparison, you haven’t been bothered much at all.

“That’s because when
this
fire finally made its way down to the tunnels under the edge of town, the cupboard was almost bare. Most of the coal out there had already been mined. So what if the tunnels were on fire? Without a lot of coal, there wasn’t that much heat. The fire moved slowly. And if it was spreading out from the tunnels, it was headed toward the fields and around the hills where there’s still some coal left and close enough to get at.

“But things are different now,” said Mendelson. “And if you don’t believe me, ask Ross Caspar—if you can find him.” An old woman in the back of the auditorium got up, sat down again, began to rummage through her purse.

“He probably thought he was in the catbird seat. Plenty far from the nearest tunnel … farther than a lot of you, if you care to check the maps. Snug as a bug down in that hollow of his. So what happened? That’s the question. What happened.” He plucked a fat marker off the lecturn and tapped it against his chin.

“Here’s what happened,” he said, turning to a flip chart. At the top of the chart he made a squiggly line. “Here’s where the fire started, where it’s been burning all along, about two miles from here, give or take.” Toward the bottom of the chart he drew a long, sloppy rectangle. “And here’s the town proper.” Above the rectangle, more toward the left than the right, he drew something like a kidney. “Here’s Caspar’s Hollow.” In the open space on the chart, mostly at the top and down along the far left edge, he drew thick stripes. “And here are where most of the tunnels are, quite a ways from Ross’s place.” He turned back and looked at the audience. “But when we went into the hollow to look at the situation, we found the kinds of things we’re used to seeing way out in the fields: hot ground, soft ground, a bit of smoke coming up here and there. No flames, mind you. No fire visible from above. But an awful lot of heat. An awful lot of heat.” He paused, rolling the marker between his palms.