Joe had a different theory. They’re paralyzed, he said to himself, wiping the apple juice from his chin. Paralyzed. He said it with gentle contempt, exasperation, and great fondness.
Whenever people asked Joe whether he was going to stay or leave, he’d say, “Why the hell do you care what I do? What in hell is the point of even asking?” But everyone knew that he would leave only when Rachel did, perhaps with her, perhaps alone.
Hell was a word heard often in Belle Haven. The reporters who had been coming into town lately never failed to ask, in the rare interviews they were granted, “Do you think of this fire as a sort of hell?” Then, glancing casually at their notes, they’d drop names from Dante and paraphrase the Bible, all the while wielding their microphones like weapons.
None of them expected much from Joe. Most passed him by altogether. His clothes were threadbare, his hands were thick with calluses, and the expression on his face was meant to discourage their intrusions. But a few, hoping to add color to their copy, laid their analogies carefully before him, smiled with impatience, pronounced him illiterate with their judge-and-jury eyes. Joe invariably backed away down the street, saying, as he walked, in a slow and thoughtful way,
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
“I’m sorry,” he would say over his shoulder. “ ‘Fire and Ice.’ Robert Frost. Not mine, although I, too, favor fire.”
Now, from his lookout on the tree stump, Joe watched the trick-or-treaters inch toward him, giggling with fear. Nearly at his feet, wary of his big troll hands, they stopped, reached into their candy sacks, and pulled out the apples they’d been given by the few old ladies who still refused to leave Belle Haven to its fire. The children placed the apples carefully into the bushel basket that Joe used to collect his toll each year.
“Pass,” he growled, waggling his horns at them. At this, even the older children trotted across the bridge, laughing like goats, all real fears forgotten.
The children gone, Joe polished up their grubby apples, made adjustments to his costume, and studied the stars. “How’s business been this year?” Rachel asked him, and her voice, in this lull, sounded too loud, too old.
“Terrible,” he said and, shrugging, managed to look endearing despite the tufts of green hair that sprouted wildly from his ears.
“I ran into Anne Schifflebien at the Superette last week,” Rachel said, easing down off the rail to take up a new spot beside him where she could see his face and he could see hers if he chose to. “She seems to think there’s something not quite right about a grown man extorting apples from children.”
“I’m the troll,” Joe replied, tilting his head back for a better look at the Seven Sisters. “It’s my job.”
“She said you’ve forced her into giving Cracker Jacks this year.”
“I’m evil, I am,” Joe said. He picked out an apple and offered it to Rachel.
Rachel returned to the rail for a while, eating her apple, and watched the occasional children pass, but she soon began to feel that she was spoiling the whole thing, despite her witch’s rig. The bridge was Joe’s domain this night, not hers. She’d already taken her basket of candies down to the huge willow tree in the park by the school where the children knew they’d find her, a tigress one year, an octopus the next, crouching or coiled among the branches, waiting to drop treats into their gaping bags. They had liked her as a witch, they said, because of the glow-in-the-dark spiral that climbed up her wonderfully pointed hat.
“I’ll eat you up, my little pretties,” she had cackled in reply and showered them with chocolate kisses wrapped in foil.
But that was all done with, and Rachel could not think of a way to make the night begin again. So she gained her feet, thanked Joe for the apple, and walked off down the street, her long black gown trailing behind her, a distant portion of red, smouldering horizon catching her in silhouette. My, my, thought Joe. What a beautiful witch she makes.
Rachel Hearn was twenty-three years old. The fire that burned under Belle Haven had started shortly after her tenth birthday. Garbage dumped for years in an old mine pit two miles from her house had somehow caught fire, and the flames had crept hungrily underground. They had followed shafts rich in timber straight down to the tunnels, to a feast of unmined coal, and had fed on coal veins ever since—slowly, quietly, but without pause. The government had sent experts in to track the fire, measure its girth, forecast its activity, predict its demise. Some said it would burn for a thousand years.
If not for the violence of its repercussions, this deliberate, nearly placid progression might have seemed more bovine than anything else. But, like the anaconda, it tended to creep up on its victims. Most easily, perhaps, on the swiftest among them, those most certain of their chances of escape.
There were now several places in Belle Haven where the ground had caved in without warning, where the heat coming up from below was 500 degrees Fahrenheit. And although boreholes had been drilled throughout the town to vent the fire’s hideous, sulfurous fumes, every basement was equipped with a monitor that sniffed the air filtering up through the ground and sounded an alarm at the scent of poison coming quietly in.
Rachel often wondered about the canaries imprisoned throughout the town. Would someone deeply asleep, full
