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

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