by Lauren Wolk
“You must get scads of geologists poking around out here. What do they think about all this?”
“I can’t really say. They don’t talk to us, you see. They don’t seem to care what we think about the fire, what we’ve observed, what we want to do about it.” He pulled a blade of quack grass from its sheath. It slid out smoothly, with only a single squeal of protest, as if designed for easy destruction. “There’s a man named Mendelson you’ll see around if you’re here long enough. Don’t know where he is right now. Probably off somewhere trying to sell his latest scheme for putting out the fire. He’s an engineer, I guess. The government sent him in years ago, right after the fire got started, to dig a trench and cut the thing off before it spread. That didn’t work. They filled the trench back in. So then they tried to drown it with water, stifle it with fly ash, which is little particles of ash that fly up when you burn something solid.”
“Hence the name.”
“Right. It won’t burn, fly ash, so you blow in enough of it and it smothers a flame. Only it didn’t work with this fire. Nothing has worked too well. Those boys go away for a while, and no one sees them around. Then, after a few months, back they come to try something new. Mendelson’s always with them. Seems to take a personal interest in our little fire.” He put the grass between his teeth. “Pretty soon they’re going to have to make up their minds what to do next.”
“About the fire.”
“About the fire.” Ian nodded. “About us. If the fire gets bad enough, heads into town, we’ll all have to go somewhere else, I suppose. People who live out here where the fire already is, and along the edge of town, too, anywhere near enough to the tunnels … well, we look sharp. Take nothing for granted. Watch our step.”
“Literally,” Joe said, nodding.
“Any way we can,” Ian replied as he backed away from the fire, Joe following, and turned toward home.
They said little on the way back. The sun was hot, the grass full of bugs that flung themselves out of the way as the men walked by.
“I met a girl named Rachel this morning,” Joe said, following Ian across a plank that bridged the stream behind his house. “Know her?”
“Everybody knows everybody in Belle Haven, at least their faces. Rachel I know straight to the bone. I was her teacher in high school. Smart as a whip, that girl. Charmed me right down to my socks. Not a mean bone in her body. Probably the best student I ever had.”
“How come she didn’t go to college?” Joe asked as they crossed Ian’s yard.
“ ’Course she went to college. She’ll be a senior in the fall. What made you think otherwise?”
But Joe had no idea why he’d got it wrong. “Maybe the way she seems so rooted here. She’s got a house of her own, lives alone, didn’t say a word about ever having lived anywhere else. I don’t know, I guess … I don’t know what I thought. I met her at Angela’s Kitchen. I thought she was a waitress, but …” He looked at Ian from under the visor of his hand. “She’s not a waitress, is she?”
“No, she’s not a waitress,” said Ian, smiling. He stopped by his back door. “Got any plans for tonight?”
“Actually, I don’t. Why? Is there a ball game on or something?”
“I have no idea. I only ever do one thing on Thursday nights. You’re welcome to join me. It would be a good way to get to know some people from around here.”
“What would?”
“Thursday night at the Last Resort. It’s a bar down by the tracks. Not much to look at, but the beer’s cold.”
“What’s so special about Thursday nights?” Joe asked, grinning because Ian was.
“They have live music on Thursdays, is all,” Ian said. “You coming?”
“Sure. We can take the Schooner, park near the bar, won’t have to drive home if we have too much to drink.”
“Now, that is one hell of an idea,” Ian said. “Not that I ever have too much to drink, but just in case.”
“Exactly,” Joe said. “I’ll see you back here at, what … nine o’clock?”
“On the dot,” said Ian, and waved Joe on his way.
Chapter 13
Some people are born too late and miss the pocket of time that would have suited them best. Others, born far too early, never know what’s to come and so perhaps don’t feel the lack so keenly. Others miss the mark by just a decade or two and live to see what might have been. For them, there is sometimes much to regret.
Ian Spalding, born in 1919, first heard the word astronaut when it was far too late. From the time he was five years old he had looked at the heavens the way some people look at the sea. He thought of the stars the way others thought of the continents. And he considered the planets to be destinations only temporarily beyond his reach. Decades too early for Apollo, Ian decided that he would learn to fly airplanes, master the sky, and be ready for the first spaceships. He was only twelve when he made these decisions. He did not know about such things as odds or impossibilities. He only knew that if he did everything right—kept himself fit, studied hard, read every word ever written about flight, and somehow found his way into the sky—he would be a worthy pilot, perhaps a great one.
Each day, after his early chores, after school, after his late chores, after supper, Ian would sit on the edge of his bed and read books without number. He knew about Kitty Hawk as if he had been born there. The Wright brothers were his own brothers by everything but blood. Lindbergh was his hero, and the Spirit of St. Louis history’s most heavenly vessel. There was nothing on earth, for Ian, to compare with the realm of the sky.
His father, a farmer with only one son and an ailing wife, knew that to farm, a man had to be tied to the land with a real bond, a sure commitment. Farming broke hearts and spirits. That’s what it meant to be a farmer. And only those who loved the land could bear it, whether they called the bond love or something else. So he did not insist that Ian farm. He expected his son to help with the chores, but he did not look for anything more and he was not bitter. When his wife died and as he grew older, he allowed more and more of his land to go to grass and clover, or rented it out to neighbors, or planted it in trees. He loved his son and, though he never admitted it to himself, envied him, too. There was such great enthusiasm in the boy, such determination. To fly had never been the father’s wish, but because it was the son’s, it fired them both. While Ian worked and studied and dreamed, his father saved every spare nickel, and though there weren’t many of these, there were enough to grant him one small wish of his own.
Living alone as they did, Ian and his father had learned to cook a dozen meals extremely well, exactly to their liking. They rarely fiddled with other possibilities. They saw no need. They had far too much to do to worry about what they ate, as long as it was good. On the third Friday in June 1935, they sat at the kitchen table eating oven-fried pork chops, mashed potatoes, baby limas, and store-bought bread. Ian’s father was drinking his Friday-night beer.
“School’s out next Friday,” he said.
“Don’t I know it,” Ian said, buttering his beans.
“Sounds like you’ll be glad to be out.”
“Not just out this time. Done.”
His father smiled. “Our first high school graduate.” He pronounced it “graj-e-at.”
“Soon to be a college man.”
“Soon to be a college man.” His father put a crust of browned pork fat in his mouth. “I don’t know if I’ve told you how proud I’ll be to have an educated son,” he said after a moment. “But I will be. Already am.”
“I know, Daddy,” Ian said, unabashed, grinning with his mouth full of mashed potatoes.
A week later, when Ian graduated from high school, his father gave him a compass. “So you’ll know it when you’re facing Belle Haven,” he said.
Two weeks before Ian was to leave for college, his father gave him a new suit of clothes and a small suitcase for his travels. “I’ve never in my life owned a suitcase,” his father said. “Never went anywhere.” But he said
it without rancor.
Ian was touched by each of these gifts and was sincerely grateful, but it was what his father gave him on the eve of his departure that made Ian understand forever the mettle of his father’s love.
Ian was packing his new suitcase when he turned to find his father standing at his bedroom door, looking all at once sad and delighted. A rare look for his father.
“Hey,” the boy said.
“Almost packed?”
“Yessir. Not much to pack.”
“Well, lights out soon as you’re done, boy. Big day tomorrow.”
Ian glanced at the clock by his bed. “It’s only nine, Daddy. If I go to bed now, I’ll be up at four.”
His father nodded.
Ian had somehow thought that on the coming all-important morning he would for once be excused from his regular chores, but he corrected himself and returned the nod. “You’re right,” he said. “That’ll give me plenty of time to catch the eight o’clock bus.”
Ian’s father shook his head, never taking his eyes from his son’s face. “That’ll give you just enough time to catch the five-thirty plane.”
Ian straightened up. The shirt he’d been folding fell out of his hands.
“What plane?” he said. He did not appear to be breathing.
“Man named Stephens down in Bolton is making a cargo run to Pittsburgh. He takes a passenger whenever he can. Helps pay for the gas. Tomorrow he’s taking you.”
“Oh, God, Daddy,” was all Ian said, unable to move, for every part of him—heart and head and soul—had already, impatiently, taken flight.
“And oh, my, what a flight it was,” Ian said to Joe as the Schooner carried them toward the Last Resort that Thursday night, nearly five decades later. Ian tipped his head back and shivered briefly, all over. “Nothing I had ever read or ever heard or ever done prepared me for that flight. Nothing even came close. I thought I knew what it would feel like to ride up into the sky, skim the clouds, split the wind. But, oh, dear Lord … it nearly killed me.”
“Killed you?”
Ian chuckled. “Nearly messed my pants before he even had that thing in the air. An old bucket of bolts, it was. I still think it’s the ninth wonder of the world that I didn’t throw up all over western PA.”
“What, you were scared?”
Ian snorted. “You could say that.”
“I guess you changed your mind about being a pilot, then.”
Ian nodded. “Didn’t give it too much thought while I was in the air. I think every circuit in my brain had blown. But after we landed and I’d spent half an hour breathing into a paper bag, I made a vow that I’d never get on one of those damned things ever again. Not ever. Amen.”
“But you did, of course.”
“Nope. Never. I hitched back and forth from home to school for the first three years. Then my daddy died and I drove his truck until it died, too. And then I came back to Belle Haven to teach school, and I’ve never gone so far afield that my own two feet or four Goodyears wouldn’t get me there.”
As Joe eased the Schooner into town, he wondered how different the wheel under his hands would feel if he ever decided to forego the world’s mightier machines.
Joe had never seen a bar like the Last Resort, except maybe in the movies. He’d gone slumming before, but the Last Resort was in a class by itself. This place was, he realized, no different from thousands of other bars in thousands of other tiny towns across the U.S. of A. (as they called it around here), but it was something new to him. Without Ian by his side, he never would have entered such a place. Its walls were unpainted cinder block, its windows glass brick, its roof warped and rotting tiles, its parking lot mud, refuse, and slag. It seemed intentionally ugly, unforgivably squalid, unconditionally decrepit.
“Are we really going in?” Joe whispered as they approached the door.
“Well, of course we are,” Ian said, clearly surprised. “That’s what we came for.”
“But what kind of music could they possibly have that’s worth spending time in a place like this?”
“Probably the worst music you’ve ever heard in your life.” Ian was laughing as he pushed Joe into the one bar in the world that he would come to love, heart and soul.
It was smoky inside the Last Resort. The floor was bare plywood, the walls unadorned. The horseshoe bar left little room for the unseated patrons who clotted the corners, drinking beer out of long-necked bottles. In a far corner of the room was a large doorway leading to a second room. Several people stood by this doorway, looking in and laughing at something that Joe could not see. He could hear the music coming from the other room: a guitar, a piano, some brass, an unlikely fiddle. And then someone began to sing the opening bars to the most appalling rendition of “Rambling Man” he’d ever heard.
“Jesus God,” he gasped. “That’s horrendous. Even I can sing better than that.”
“Well, we’ll just see about that,” Ian said, and led the way into the crowd.
Most of the men were a good deal bigger than Joe, with heads that sat directly on their shoulders. They wore jeans, short-sleeved work shirts, belts with big buckles, dusty boots, and, a few of them, Stetsons. There was, as well, a leaner breed among them: smaller, with slim hips, arms that were brown and beautiful to look at, hairless faces, colorful eyes. The women had clean, shining hair, ironed jeans, crisp cotton blouses, too much makeup, and a few of them, too, Stetsons. No one seemed to mind the smoke, the mournful music, the bare-bones decor. As Ian had said, the beer was cold, the music terrible, the opportunity to become acquainted with a few Belle Haven natives too good to pass up.
“We’ll just see about what?” Joe shouted into the din.
“It’s amateur night, my boy,” Ian fairly chortled as they finally reached the doorway into the back room. “One giant shower stall. Ain’t it grand?”
Along two walls of the back room, twenty, maybe thirty people sat around narrow tables that were draped in long sheets of thin, white paper anchored with the biggest ashtrays Joe had ever seen. Everyone had either a beer in a bottle or something stronger in an uncomplicated tumbler. There was not a lime or a lemon or a swizzle stick in sight. There were baskets of pretzels on the tables, the air was awash with smoke, and a stupid breed of moths wandered through a propped-open fire door.
At the far end of the room a quartet of sweating musicians struggled valiantly to keep pace with a young man in a big hat who was singing so badly that many of those listening winced and writhed in their chairs. One older man covered his eyes with his hands. The musicians swayed in their folding chairs and thought about the beer and ashtrays tucked behind their heels. Spare instruments lay about, an empty guitar case doubled as a footrest, and in the shadow of an old upright piano, a little girl lay curled up on a blanket, impossibly asleep. There was a small patch of bare floor in front of the band, but no one was dancing.
After a final, prolonged yelp, the young man in the hat surrendered the microphone, bowed to a bit of belated applause, and took his seat. He was flushed, exultant, mortified. With one arm tucked across his belly, the other busy with his drink, he moved his head this way and that, careful not to look around at his neighbors but not at all sure what to do, where to look, how to settle himself. He took a long drink and calmed down a bit, leaning back in his chair, as a woman wearing jeans and rhinestones stepped up to announce the next performer.
“That’s Amelia,” Ian said. “Plays the organ at my church. She and her husband, Jim, own this place. Their son—the one with the fiddle—got together with three of his friends and started playing here Thursday nights. For beer money, you know. They’re not too good, and they’ve all got day jobs, but we like them well enough. For a buck, they’ll play backup. Pick a song from the list on the table there, and they’ll give you lyrics and a microphone. The whole thing works out great.”
“Ed?” Amelia called, peering through the smoke. “You out there?” When Ed sidled up to the microphone, staring at it in terror, Amelia tu
rned to the band. “ ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon,’ ” she said.
“Ah, shit,” said the guitar player. “Not again.”
“One of my all-time favorites,” Joe said, grinning, his thumbs in his belt loops, chin in the air.
As he looked around at the patrons of the Last Resort, watched the man named Ed falter and fumble through his song, Joe wondered how many of them had ever been more than a hundred miles from Belle Haven, ever seen a ballet, ever read To Kill a Mockingbird, ever learned the exact configuration of the fifty states.
“These are the diehards,” Ian said, waving an arm at those seated in the back room. “They’re on deck. You in good voice tonight?”
“Not bloody likely.” Joe snorted. “Come on. Let’s get something to drink.”
A few minutes later, not paying much attention to the onslaught of sound from the back room, Joe suddenly noticed that the bar had become quite still. People were turning toward the back room and around again. Then the stillness was gone and the din back, as before, but Joe, curious, got up to have a look at the man who was taking a turn with the band.
He was not a young man, not an old one. Neither plain nor fancy. He had a hard face, a hard body, clean clothes, lots of sun. He was bowed a bit with drink. Joe could see the weave of his shoulders and the lazy slide of his eyelids. But there was nothing sloppy or weak about this man. And the way he was singing “The Green, Green Grass of Home” made Joe think that maybe he had someplace he’d rather be.
