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

butter knife, wrap it carefully, and send it off to the FBI. He simply could not believe such a thing. Dolly? This, too, seemed fantastic. But Rusty could have done it. He was a boy with an imagination and a mind of his own. It could have been no one else.

Rusty looked up from the comics and caught Joe watching him.

“What?” he said.

“What what?”

“Do I have a booger in my nose or something?”

“No, you don’t have a booger in your nose or something. Can’t I look at you?”

“Suit yourself.” Rusty went back to his comics. He was sitting, cross-legged, on Joe’s bunk, Pal with her velvet jowl on his thigh, while Joe sat in the kitchen booth with a cup of coffee and a letter from Holly. He watched the boy and wondered when his young voice would begin to crack. He was growing leggy and lean, like his mother.

Without looking up this time, Rusty said, “What?”

“You always get this shook up when people look at you?”

“Who’s shook up? I’m trying to read, is all.”

Joe folded Holly’s letter and put it in his shirt pocket. “Your mother tells me you went out looking for Mendelson the other day.”

Rusty sighed, put the comics away from him.

“Yeah, I did.”

“You worried about all this?”

“All what?”

Joe put his coffee down on the tabletop and looked at Rusty for a moment. “All this,” he said. “All this business about the fire coming in.”

Rusty flopped onto his back, crossed his arms behind his head. “What’s there to worry about? So far, it’s all just talk. If the fire comes all the way in, we’ll do something about it, I guess. Until then, why worry?”

“Just talk?” Joe slid out of the booth and walked over to his bunk. He grabbed Rusty by the wrist and hauled him to his feet. Pal leaped up.

“If you’re going to come over here and read my paper and eat my cookies and listen to my goddamned radio and ask me about girls and practice swearing in my Schooner, you’re going to have to play by Schooner rules.” He let Rusty go. “Rule one,” he said, pushing Pal’s nose out of his hand. “None of this goddamned ‘just talk’ bullshit. The fire is nearly here, and that is all there is to it.” He took a deep breath. “I don’t go up to Rachel’s house anymore. I haven’t spoken to her for a week. You know why?” Rusty shook his head. “Because we can’t talk about the fire without fighting, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to keep my mouth shut. I don’t dare talk to your mother about the fire, you know why? Because she’s already scared to death and I love her too much to make things worse.” Rusty seemed to grow smaller before Joe’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry if this kind of talk scares you. But inside these four walls I speak my mind. This is my home. You will always be welcome here. And I will always do whatever you want me to do, to help keep you safe, to help keep you happy. But I won’t lie to you.”

Rusty had not once taken his eyes from Joe’s face.

“Do you know why I came to Belle Haven?” Joe asked. Rusty shook his head.

“I had to leave home for a while because I found out that my father had been lying to me about some things. And then, after I got here, he told me another lie that kept me from going home. And when I finally figured out the truth, I made up my mind to face things, squarely, whenever I could. It is so much, so much worse, Rusty, to look the other way and hope for the best. And I only wish that I had had someone to teach me that when I was a boy.” Pal put her nose into Joe’s hand again, and this time he rubbed his fingers gently along her jaw. “Didn’t your mother ever wonder why the FBI was writing to you?”

Rusty’s eyebrows shot up, his jaw fell. “How’d you find out?”

Joe laughed. “Mendelson told me someone had sent in my fingerprints on a butter knife.”

Rusty ran a fingernail down the grain of his jeans. “How’d you know it was me?”

“Wild guess,” Joe said.

“You mad?”

“Mad? Me? At you?” He put one hand on the back of Rusty’s neck. “Never.”

It was Rusty, then, who began to talk about hot wells and poison gas, the house that was still sinking by inches deeper into the bottomless soil in Caspar’s Hollow.

They talked for a long time, until Angela finally ran over in her apron to call Rusty home for supper, homework, and bed.

Asked to join them for chicken pot pie and cider, Joe had quietly declined. Here, in his Schooner, it had felt right to talk with Rusty about the things that Angela refused to confront. As he had taught Rusty about Mars and the Parthenon, so had he tried to teach him about the danger of blinders, and of embracing the shadows they cast. But to sit in Angela’s Kitchen and eat her food—payment for the instruction he gave her son—when he knew full well that she had resolved to shield Rusty from certain knowledge … this seemed like a betrayal. And so, alone in his Schooner, he ate stew from a can. And wondered why it was that he had spoken so long and with such certainty to Rusty when such talk with Rachel always, always led him to retreat.

Chapter 39

        While Mendelson began work on the giant trench, other, milder men came into town to hold town meetings and offer the people a loathsome trade. The government, they said, would pay people to leave Belle Haven. By the head. Twenty-five thousand per adult (forty for anyone living alone). Ten thousand for each of no more than two children.

Those with the most land and the nicest houses went inside them, shut their doors, and roared with disgust. Those with