Those Who Favor Fire (44 page)

Rachel bit her lip and folded her hands. “All right,” she said. “I’ll wait for a while longer. But I’m not saying that I’ve changed my mind.”

“I understand,” he said. He walked her to the door. “But there’s no shame in doing what you have to do to make the best of a bad situation. No one’s going to blame you for looking after your own interests.”

She turned back at the door. “That’s what I’ve been doing all along,” she said. “And I’m beginning to think that maybe there is some shame in it after all.”

        The number of those who thought that relocation was wiser than resistance slowly grew as autumn aged into winter, but still no one left. Some focused all their attention on Christmas, vowing to get on with things once the holidays were past. But Christmas came and went without incident and without the departure of a single family. No one wanted to believe that the fire would get to be as bad as Mendelson claimed. No one wanted to give up and go. Above all, no one wanted to be the first to leave.

Before winter hardened the ground, seventy new boreholes were drilled in town and fifty more around the fields, among the hills and hollows to the north. Many backyards, most street corners had them. Government workers roamed the town like coyotes. They lowered instruments into the holes to see if the temperature down below was changing. Out closer to Ross’s sunken house, they found that the fire was indeed moving slowly toward the town. Sometimes they found their gauges ruined when they hauled them back out of the boreholes. In such cases, “That’s one hot fire” was as close as they came to a reading.

The people of Belle Haven became accustomed to sleeping with their windows cracked open. They grew sick of the ticking of the monitors, day and night, and of the frequent visits from the “meter maids” who assessed the safety of the indoor air. The sight of the borehole spouts was sickening, but most people found themselves unable to walk by one without taking a good look. Somehow, the absence of smoke did not placate them.

In February, faced with the news that a monitor in one of the houses not far from the tunnels had gone off, most people were stymied. A few months earlier they would have shaken their heads and, perhaps, sent a prayer skyward. A few months earlier they had thought of the fire way out in the tunnels as nothing more than a dreadful old companion that required a bit of watching and a slightly cautious tread. No one would have been terribly worried about an alarm out there going off. Odd things seemed commonplace when they happened near the mine. But now, seven months since the incident in Caspar’s Hollow, since the rest of the town had begun to walk more softly, news of this first alarm was shocking.

“But why’s everyone so upset?” Rusty asked his mother one morning before school. “The fire’s been out there forever. It’s nothing new. If the McCoys had had a monitor all these years, it probably would have gone off hundreds of times. Heck, they’re glad it went off. They were all set to move out anyway. Now they’ll get their check faster. It’s not like a monitor in this part of town went off or something burned down or anything.”

“Hush now, Rusty,” Angela said, sliding a bowl of cornflakes in front of him. “You’ll be late for school.”

Joe, feeling Rusty’s eyes upon him, ate his waffles and shrugged.

Joe had spent a lot of time at Angela’s Kitchen since the cold had come into Belle Haven. There wasn’t much work for him to do during the winter, for the crops were all in and graves that needed digging after the ground froze were given to backhoes. But he had cut Christmas trees if the farmers came to fetch him, helped Earl with his inventory, shoveled snow. And he continued to spend one day each week out of town. “Taking care of some business,” he said if anyone asked. And Rusty continued to look after Pal while Joe was away, for she went nearly everywhere on foot, hated riding in cars, trucks, the Schooner especially.

These times away from Belle Haven, tending things that he had kept carefully secret, helped Joe stay out of the trouble the fire had caused among his friends and neighbors. Between sojourns, while those around him either prepared to leave or stubbornly set their anchors, Joe was quiet, mostly idle, carving small things, which he offered in trade now and then.

By March he had used up most of what he’d earned in the fall and was prepared to draw on what was left of his inheritance. But some-how
Angela knew he was a bit short. Perhaps she had noticed the condition of his jeans or the splitting seams of his gloves.

“You going to call, or what?” she said to him one evening when Rachel had come down from her hill to join them at the Kitchen for poker and pie.

“Nah,” he said, throwing in his hand. “Too rich for me.”

Both women looked up in surprise, for Joe, normally thrifty, loved to gamble, win or lose.

“What’s a buck or two?”Angela asked him. After a moment she put down her cards and ducked under the counter. “Be right back,” she said.

When she returned from her apartment, she laid in front of Joe a roll of quarters and a single Krugerrand. “The quarters are for the game,” she said. “The coin will keep you going for a while, just until you can get some farmwork.”

“Where’d you get this?” he asked quietly.

“A friend gave it to me,” she replied, cutting him another wedge of pecan pie.

“Well, you hang on to it, then,” he said. “I still have some money left I can send for.”

“Just take it.” Angela picked up her cards and arranged them fanlike. “I don’t like those Kruger-whatever-you-call-’em anyway. If I were that antelope on there, I’d take a flying leap somewhere else, go play with some deer.”

“Springbok,” Joe said, smiling at her.

“Whatever. Besides,” Angela continued impatiently, “it doesn’t matter to me how much money you have left. This is mine to give, and I want to give it to you. It’s not often I can do such a thing, but I come from people who take care of their own.”

Rachel, watching them, felt like she was invisible. “That’s for Rusty’s education, Angela,” she protested. “If Joe needs anything, I can help him out better than you can.”

They both turned to look at her. Joe picked up the gold and held it out toward her. “Then maybe you could drive into Randall for me and cash this in,” he said.

Reluctantly, Rachel took the gold. “All right.”

Although Joe never really thought about it, the gold that Angela gave him kept him suspended in penury. It paid his keep through the spring, allowed him the luxury of spending the little money he
earned on good wood and a few more carving tools. It kept him from altering his life. It kept him content with things the way they were. But then, in the middle of May, came the change.

It must have started during the night. When people left their houses in the morning they noticed right away that one of the boreholes right smack in the middle of Belle Haven proper was suddenly spouting smoke. Not a lot: only a wisp now and then. But within two days there was a steady thread of smoke and, worse, a stink coming up out of the ground.

Ed Zingham, who had delivered mail in Belle Haven for fifteen years, lived in the house closest to the borehole, but he’d been walking past these things out by the tunnels for years and the sight of this one did not alarm him overmuch. When the smoke thickened and the smell began to bother him, he simply shut the windows nearest the hole and tried not to think about it. The people in the two other houses nearly as close as Ed’s nervously followed his lead. They watched the borehole, listened to their monitors ticking, told themselves again and again that Ed would know something before they did.

Ed was dozing in front of an old spaghetti western one cool, wet Monday when he heard a brief squawk from down in his cellar, something like the sound of a foghorn. A moment later, the meter maid who was checking his monitor came quickly up the cellar stairs, her clipboard clutched under one arm. Ed watched as she rushed to the front door and flung it open.

“Hey!” he called, “what’s your hurry?”

“When’s the last time you were down to your cellar, Mr. Zingham?” she said, standing on the threshold.

“Um. Friday,” he said. “I spent most of the weekend over in Randall with my sister. Why? Something the matter down there?”

“How long you been home?”

“I got home early this morning, went straight back out again to do my rounds, just got in about”—he glanced at his watch—“about forty minutes ago.”

“Then I’d say you owe your sister one.” She took Ed’s coat off a hook by the door and tossed it into his lap. “Your cellar is hotter than hell,” she said. “If you’d turned on your monitor, you’d know that your carbon-monoxide level is up to fifty parts per million.”

“I turned it off for the weekend,” he said, shrugging. “It uses up a lot of electricity, you know.”

“But you didn’t turn it back on when you got home, or the alarm
would have gone off. Too much trouble. Instead, you sat down in front of the television, got nice and drowsy.”

“Got a headache, is what I got.” Ed put on his coat. “So how long do I have to leave before it’s safe in here again? How ’bout I just go back to my sister’s for another day or so? Leave the windows open while I’m gone?”

She handed him his hat. “You don’t understand.” She sighed. “You can’t ever come back here again.”

When Ed tracked down Mendelson, the man was unmoved. “I’m sorry as hell, Ed, but my hands are tied. You gotta know that. You’re the one who delivered the policy statements all over town, Ed, and you’ve all had months to get used to the idea. Any house that registers more than forty-five parts per million and tops ninety degrees Fahrenheit and is adjacent to a borehole with a sustained output gets condemned.” He took a rigid index finger and ran it like a knife across his Adam’s apple.
“Fffft,”
he said.

Ed stared.

“I told you way back in September that this day would come, Ed. But don’t worry.” Mendelson slid his arm around Ed’s shoulders. “You won’t be the only one.”

Indeed, before the week was out, six other houses on Ed’s block wore red crosses on their front doors, as if they might be harboring medics or a renegade religious sect. Signs were posted in their yards warning people to keep out. An army of movers came and emptied out the houses in record time, carted everything off and into storage. The government put Ed and the others up at the Randall Motor Inn while they decided what to do next, and everyone in Belle Haven talked about them in whispers, as if they had died.

But neither Ed’s house nor any of the other six was the next of Belle Haven’s homes to sink, as Ross’s had, through the earth’s hot skin. That day was coming, though no one believed it yet. They knew the fire had arrived. And many of them prepared to leave before their own houses were condemned. But the exodus, when it began, was a slow and measured procession that stretched through the summer without mishap.

The government had purchased fifty of Belle Haven’s houses by the end of August but had not kept them. Soon after each family left, a red cross was sprayed on the front door of the vacant house and a weary bulldozer smacked the house down to nothing, leaving an open cellar full of debris. Frank had long since emptied out the big tanks
at the Gas ’n’ Go—he’d had no choice—so the vans and the bulldozers and every other piece of machinery in Belle Haven had to drive over to Randall for gas. In the tiny clinic right in town, there were more and more cases of nausea and dizziness, bronchitis, allergy. People who had never lived through a war began to speak as if they were now part of one. But as the number of those still in Belle Haven dwindled, their dander rose. “We’ll leave when we’re good and ready,” some said, narrow-eyed and nervous. “We’re going to stay right here,” said others, “and we’ll be here long, long after everyone’s done selling out. And we’ll be the tightest, best little community you could ever want to see.”

“You study your geography,” said Archibald Kreider, who had been a miner for most of his life and told anyone who would listen that it would take more than a mine fire to chase him off his land. “All the best places on earth are a bit ticklish. People live on river-banks. They get floods. People live on beaches. They get hurricanes. People live on volcanoes. They get … eruptions.” It was hard to tell if Archie was laughing or coughing. “Some things are worth the risk,” he said, loading his jowl with tobacco.

He watched as his neighbors stripped their houses down to skeletons, hauling away lengths of hand-carved molding and mantelpieces torn carefully from the walls. No one wanted to leave anything precious to the bulldozers. They took stained-glass windows, thresholds, kitchen cupboards, weathervanes, even floorboards sometimes: whatever would remind them of the place where they had once lived.

And along with these forlorn treasures, each family leaving town took a tiny garden grown in Belle Haven soil and cradled in Rachel’s unlikely pots. They took young huckleberry plants and tea roses, Johnny-jump-ups and hollyhocks, pincushion flowers and dragon’s head, and herbs like coriander and mint.

Rachel left her hill less and less often as Belle Haven fell to pieces. She could not bear the sound of the bulldozers or the sight of moving vans. When she went to see Joe or Angela, she raced down the street and no longer stopped to listen to the water flowing under the bridge.

Every day she woke with the thought of calling Mr. Murdock, telling him to buy something, anything at all, to slow this outrageous destruction of her town. But then she would recall his prediction and reluctantly admit that to see Belle Haven’s houses being
leveled was bad enough, but to make them her own and then watch them fall would be even worse. No one would be coming back to reclaim these ruined plots of ground. She knew this now. But even as she slowly, bit by bit, gave up the notion of keeping her town together, she grew more and more determined. She would salvage what she could.

Since their reconciliation, Joe had not spoken to Rachel about leaving. He had become a quiet man now that the fire had arrived, choosing his words carefully and listening with great intensity. He hated the bulldozers—heartless as big, hard, yellow hyenas—and the sound of nails torn shrieking from old wood. So, on many days that summer, Joe climbed Rachel’s hill and walked farther, past her house, into the woods, to the tree house he had built for Rusty.