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

hot spot he’d passed on the way to Ian’s place. People in town had warned him that he would pass one, but it had not looked all that threatening, really. Not from the window of his substantial Schooner. Not from a football field away. But it apparently had an erratic sort of temper, flaring up one moment and then subsiding the next. It had frightened him, intrigued him, made him decide to have a closer look. Some other day.

As he lay in his bunk, the night half gone, he felt as if he had lost himself to outlandish circumstance. He knew why he had left home: that much still made sense to him. But how had he ended up in a motor home, in such an unlikely place? And how to explain his renaming, his unrehearsed selection of the simple Joe, there among the pumps at Frank’s Gas ’n’ Go, surrounded by the men who’d helped him extricate and become better acquainted with his Schooner. Joe. A mechanic’s name, stitched above a pocket hung with a greasy pen. Not even Joseph, which was not in any real way related to Joe. Just Joe.

He felt unsettled, jumpy. His brand of self-confidence had always been fueled not by trustworthy instincts, intuition, or even the fundamental senses that most people rely on for survival, but instead by trappings: good looks, good grammar, wealth in the form of cars, clothes, and the like. His confidence was therefore shaken by his new trappings, by the trades he had recently made: the Schooner for the Jag, beans for lobster, Sears for Saks. All easy enough to change back again, he thought, pulling his virgin blankets closer to his chin. But it was the image of his sister locking doors behind her that made him ache and mutter, chastised with dreams, until the crows announced the morning.

With a wonderful feeling of reprieve, he slipped quietly from his bed, wrapped himself in a blanket warmed by his body, and went outside. As he wandered around his campsite, looking out across the fields, then toward the woods that framed them, Joe was surprised by a silver stream moving through the trees at the edge of the clearing. He could hear it making its way over rocks and roots and wondered how he’d missed the sound before. Was he so dependent upon his eyes, he wondered, his other senses so stunted, that he could not recognize something until he’d seen it? But this alarming new tendency toward introspection made him uncomfortable, even irritable, so he shook himself all over, threw his head back, and yawned.

Forsaking the privy with a chuckle, he relieved himself in the bushes and then, on an impulse, dropped his blanket and his shorts at the edge of the stream, waded into its icy current, and began to splash himself clean.

“Holy shit,” he screamed, prancing out of the icy water and, in the process, tripping on a tree root, badly wrenching his toe. For the second time since his arrival at Ian’s campground he fell to the ground, this time bashing his knee, and then rolled about like a worm that’s been halved by a spade, shivering with cold and pain, coating himself with mud and rotting leaves. When his pain had subsided, he stood up and looked down at his wet, muddy body.

“Why am I so damned stupid?” he whimpered. He washed himself off, picked up the blanket, and draped it around himself, but it did little to warm him and furthermore had snagged enough tiny twigs to make him feel as if he were wearing horsehair. Limping slightly, he made his way to the Schooner while his forgotten shorts slowly drifted downstream.

Small children oftentimes do not pay enough attention to how things work: which shoe goes on which foot, how a glass of milk on a table’s edge is bound to be spilled, the hastened demise of bikes too often left in the rain. Older children, habitually rescued from their own inexperience by interfering adults, are equally prone to a debilitating brand of inattention. So it was that Joe had failed to notice how the side door to the Schooner—the one he’d used after leaving his bed—could be opened from the inside even while it was locked from the outside. And that once this door was firmly shut, it was automatically locked unless the small button set into its inner knob had first been released. And that to open this door, one needed the same key that was now languishing inside the pocket of the pants Joe had tossed on the foot of his bed the night before.

“Please, please, please,” he intoned as he hobbled around, blue-lipped, to try the Schooner’s front doors. They were locked. “Why, why, why,” he whimpered as he hugged the blanket closer and circled the Schooner, confirming what he already knew: that every single window was closed up tight. The thought of fetching Ian was more than Joe could bear. So he sat down on a stump in the thin morning sun and thought it through. He didn’t really want to smash a window, although this had been his immediate inclination. The Schooner was fairly old and might have parts quite difficult to replace. Maybe, he thought, the Schooner’s former owners had hidden a key in one of these incredibly clever little magnetic boxes.

“Worth a look,” he said aloud, once again breaking the vow of silence he’d sworn in the privy the night before.

He found the little black box on the Schooner’s undercarriage after only a brief search. That it was rusted shut caused Joe no alarm. He was so pleased with his discovery that he barely noticed his fingernails ripping, dragging bloody bits of cuticle right along with them, as he forced open the rust-locked box. The key inside was in fine shape, for someone had had the brains to seal it inside a tiny plastic sack. Along with the key, Joe found a small sheet of paper folded