Those Who Favor Fire by Lauren Wolk (no david read aloud TXT) 📗

lift and fall of the land beneath him. But there they were, all around him, so heavily wooded that they appeared to be furred. They rose up abruptly, sudden as a shout, making him feel smaller than he’d ever felt.

He didn’t mind the feeling. To be dwarfed by something as magnificent as these mountains did not diminish him. He felt himself to be in the best sort of company as he climbed into his car and headed back out onto the road.

For every mile Kit put between himself and his father, his perspective evolved a shade. During the night he had been filled, in turns, by loathing, fear, sorrow, and a sort of desperate optimism, each overlaid with irrepressible images of Holly’s lopsided face and of his father lurking in the magnolia grove. But as he made his way through the mountains, their peaks softened by countless storms and seasons, their forests gilded by the rising sun, he eventually calmed.

Crossing the border into New York, Kit turned onto a deserted parkway and dawdled south. The trees alongside the road were heavy with new leaves. The grass was so plump and green and bright that Kit yearned to lie in it. He tipped his face into the wind and felt it pull tears from his eyes. And as he began to awaken to the world around him, the part of him that had been fretting about his father and what might be happening at home grew curiously numb and finally became disinterested, as if his life until now had been a job that no longer suited him.

The mountains helped. Compared with these mountains, a man’s life seemed as brief as the flick of a bird’s tail.

At Route 84 Kit turned west and headed for the Hudson. He’d felt the tug of the big city that waited a bit farther to the south, as if it were an enormous magnet and he a sliver of iron, but he felt a far greater attraction to the mountains and the stretches of pastureland that led him west.

At midday he reached the Pennsylvania border and decided to try a two-lane road that meandered southward along the bank of the Delaware River. He was hungry, hungrier than he could ever remember being, so he stopped after a while at a small restaurant whose crowded parking lot suggested that the food might be worth eating.

At a table no bigger than a stop sign, Kit ordered a bowl of chicken soup and a club sandwich. All the other tables were taken. The waitresses raced among them like quail among cats.

“Are you always this crowded?” he asked the one who returned with his soup.

“It’s the Gap,” she explained, hurrying away.

Which meant nothing to Kit until he began to see signs for the Delaware Water Gap a couple of miles down the road. He was not tempted when presented with the choice of following the river south to the Gap or turning west at Route 80. The Gap would always be there, but not everything worth seeing could make such a claim. Kit wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but he suspected that it would be something easy to miss, something most people overlooked. He had no intention of spending his time on anything that drew crowds.

With this in mind, Kit soon left the interstate in favor of country roads, relying on the sun and his nose to guide him. It was possible to go for miles now without encountering another car. When he came to a gas station, he filled his tank, anticipating the need and wary of wandering through strange country without knowing its resources. For the same reason, he stopped an hour later at a place called the Short Stop Inn. It was still early enough in the day for more travel, but Kit was tired of driving and wanted nothing more than a quiet room and a comfortable bed.

The Short Stop Inn was a big white house covered in asbestos shingles that looked like fish scales. The innkeeper was, predictably, watching a ball game in the tiny bar off the front entrance. Autographed baseball bats were mounted on the walls above the liquor shelves, decals hemmed the mirror behind the bar, from the ceiling a long string of pennants pointed at the floor like a clown’s collar, and ball caps hung everywhere from nails, as if this might be the flip side of a hunter’s trophy room.

“What can I do ya for?” the innkeeper asked when he spotted Kit in the mirror. He was old enough to be retired, with enough time and energy on his hands to take a lifelong passion and make it his life. Kit suspected that once Christmas had come and gone the man would pack his bags and head south to be ready and waiting when spring training began.

“I’d like a room,” Kit replied. “Just me. For one night.”

“Well,” said the innkeeper, turned on his stool for a better look. “I like a man who answers all my questions before I’ve gotten around to asking ’em.”

Kit waited patiently. He wasn’t here to make friends. He wanted a place to sleep, that was all.

“Okay, then,” the man finally said, sliding off his stool. “One room, one man, one night. Sounds easy enough.”

He led Kit to a tiny office opposite the bar. “I am James Fiester,” he said firmly, as if starting in on a campaign speech. “That’s with an ie, although I get a lot of ribbing at Thanksgiving on account of it sounds like Feaster.”

Kit stood quietly, waiting for his key.

“I see you’ve no luggage,” Mr. Fiester said, peering at the floor around Kit’s feet.

“I have a bag in the car.”

Mr Fiester poked a finger through the Venetian blinds at the window and took a peek. “Nice car,” he said, as if Kit might not have noticed. “I was going to ask you to pay for the room up front, but it don’t look like you’re short of cash. I’ll