Those Who Favor Fire by Lauren Wolk (easy readers .TXT) 📕

“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