The Best People in the World (13 page)

We went over a hill. A paved two-laner bisected the road we'd
been following. A green sign pointed to the right and said “Underhill.” In that direction a few houses crowded each other. Beyond them I saw the makings of the town. The buildings had those facade fronts. That sealed the deal. I drove across the blacktop to see where the dirt road could take us. We started on a gentle climb. After a ways we reached an overlook. All around us the mountains were soft green humps. The road entered a forest. We kept heading up. We passed a series of emerald pastures. Tiny cabins hid among the trees. They excited us. I had a growing sense that we were getting close to whatever it was we'd come looking for.

A line of cars approached with their headlights on. In one of his outpourings of trivia, Shiloh had told us how Canadians kept their headlights on all day.

The obvious was invisible to me. I thought I was seeing a convoy of Quebecois.

“The last ride,” said Shiloh.

I didn't get his point.

“Someone's off to see the old generals,” he said.

They practically put me in the ditch.

Shiloh slugged me in the shoulder. “Get off the road, Thomas.”

The hearse passed so close, I saw my reflection in the door. The procession continued, peppering our windshield with kicked-up stones. Bringing up the end of the cortege, a hay truck, kids in back tackling one another and throwing handfuls of the stuff into the air. The yellow straw drifted down around us.

“They're taking him to his low home,” Shiloh said.

After the heavy dust settled, I eased us back onto the road. I was wary of stragglers. In places the road narrowed enough that meeting another car would have necessitated one of us backing up. We wound up a short hill before we came to a clearing. On the far side of the clearing, the road began to slope away. And there, way in the distance, we saw a body of water that looked to be a great river and, whether due to a general disorientation or an underlying belief in the mystical, nothing could convince us this was the same lake we'd camped beside the night before.

We hadn't expected that road to take us to any single place, but that it would connect us to other places. The funeral procession gave us hope. We thought we'd stumbled upon a shortcut through the mountains. The assumption was that roads didn't just head into the mountains, but through them. Sometimes, like a river, a road has a source.

We passed an Airstream trailer parked near the crown of the hill. The yard was overrun with tire tracks. The silver trailer looked almost medicinal, like some fantastic capsule. I slowed as we drew past. Inside a split-rail corral, a shaggy pony turned to watch its tail slap its back. Behind the trailer a pair of green lawn chairs were arranged side by side.

I drove on. The hump of the road became more pronounced, the gravel looser. We continued past pastures choked with brush. It seemed as if we'd reached a summit or crested a ridge. The trees pinched in on the road. The road passed over a culvert; a little stream gurgled and splashed. The trees began to thin and we came through on the other side. A couple of hundred yards farther, two crossed boards marked the place where the road dead-ended at a wall of trees. On the left side of the road, an empty field. On the other side, set back a ways, a house.

T
he two men had been in the room for a little more than an hour. The younger man was drinking ice water to pass the time. There were two double beds, and the older man was lying on top of the one closest to the door. There was a single fly in the room, but, for the moment, it was resting.

From time to time they heard people shuffle by in the corridor.

The older man got up and went into the bathroom. He washed his face in the sink. There was a soft knock on the bathroom door. “He's here,” said the younger man.

The older man was meticulous about drying his hands. When he came out of the bathroom, there was another man in the room. The other man wore an overcoat, suit, and tie. He set a valise on the table.

“That is a very nice valise,” said the older man.

“You mean the briefcase? Thank you. A gift from my wife.”

The younger man nodded, as if to say they knew of wives.

“Excuse me,” said the older man. He retrieved his briefcase from between the beds and carried it over to the other man. “I like that
yours has the strap. See, mine has the locks, but I never got in the habit of using them. The strap seems more academic somehow.”

The other man looked a bit perplexed. “Yours seems serviceable,” he said.

“Indeed,” said the older man, who now returned his briefcase to its place between the beds. “Yes.”

“I believe you have something to show us,” said the younger man.

The other man lifted two manila envelopes from the valise. Lengths of red string secured the envelopes. He opened the first and retrieved a piece of X-ray film.

The younger man pulled the curtains apart a few inches, then turned off the room lights.

“Do you need me to explain?” asked the other man.

The older man studied the film in front of the opening in the curtain. “He has suffered a broken scapula at some time.”

“Let me see,” said the other man. He traced a line. “I would have to check the patient's history.”

“It's not important,” said the older man. Shifting his finger to another region of the film, “It is this mass, then, that is at issue.” He pointed to a fist-size opacity.

“Indeed. I took one look at it, and considering its location and his reporting symptoms, it appeared…”

“Calcification of the muscle.”

“Of the heart muscle, yes. That was the diagnosis.”

“How old?” asked the younger man.

“At the time of this first scan, the patient was twenty-eight.”

The older man passed the film to his companion. “What was done for treatment?”

“The patient refused treatment.”

“Was there a prognosis?”

“They were not very hopeful, a matter of months.”

“And you have something else to show us, I think?”

The other man opened the second envelope and handed it to the older man.

“This was taken how much later?”

“About five months later.”

The older man passed the film to the younger man.

“I've shown this to specialists,” said the other man. “They can find no medical explanation for the transformation.”

“And we are certain,” asked the younger man, “that the X-rays are of the same individual?”

“There can be no doubt.”

“Did the patient have any insight?” asked the older man.

“He said my client cured him.”

“And is that the position of your client?”

“This is what he claims.”

“And what would you like us to do?”

“Ideally,” said the other man, “I would like you to make an appeal on his behalf.”

“An appeal to whom?” asked the younger man.

“We could start with the governor. If his eminence would want to get involved…”

“What was your client convicted of?” asked the older man.

“They say he killed his wife.”

“And what would he like us to argue in this appeal?”

“He wants the opportunity to do good and to share the word of God.”

“That is very noble,” said the older man.

The other man returned his envelopes to his briefcase.

“Tell your client he has nothing to worry about.”

“You will take up his cause, then?”

“Rather I mean that God will not abandon him.”

“I don't appreciate it when I think people are wasting my time.”

“I'm sure you've been compensated,” said the younger man, who walked to the door and held it open.

The other man exited the room.

The fly awoke and started to bump against the window. The older man walked to the window and let it out.

“Given the time,” said the younger man, “I doubt there is much a clever man can't create.”

“You believe he manufactured those X-rays?” asked the older man.

“Of course. Don't you?”

“It is immaterial. Instead I was thinking about his wife.”

“You're wondering why he killed her.”

“I am thinking about a wife giving her husband a briefcase. It is a very nice gift. I called it a valise, but he said briefcase. I don't know what is the difference.”

“I think you were correct. Valise, I think, means the strap.”

“‘Valise' is a beautiful word.”

It was the time of day when the two men were accustomed to taking walks. But the older man found a baseball game on the television and they sat on the edge of the mattress, watching until the final out.

1

The Place I Will Later Refer to
as the Place I Can't Return to

Two dormer windows faced the road, like eyes with arched brows. The front door, faded and red, looked almost festive, almost welcoming, but the rock slab that made up the front step had sunk so far below the threshold that a person would need to jump to get inside. There were two windows to the left of the front door and one to the right. This deviation from symmetry saved the house from plainness. Wild grass scratched at the clapboard. Mossy shingles scaled the roof. In the empty windows the palest pink curtains hung limp. Two stories high, bookended by stone chimneys, the roof bowed like a clothesline. In the shadow of the main building, a low wing extended—the eave sheltered a shallow porch, where a wood-slatted swing hung from chains. There were three closely spaced windows, and, furthest from the main building, a battered door. The lot sloped with the road. At the lowest corner a few feet of the foundation showed, stone and mortar. On the high side of the house, parallel tracks of bald earth, as hard as stone. The driveway ended at a pile of rotting boards, what could have been rabbit hutches or the remains of a garage.

Shiloh couldn't get the front door to open, so I climbed onto the porch and tried the door there. It didn't have a lock, just a great big spring to pull it shut. The three of us crowded into a room no bigger than a closet and baking hot. We would learn to call this the mudroom. The entrance to the kitchen was on our left. With both doors shut, the mudroom was the darkest room in the house, no windows and strips of wool felt tacked along the edge of the door. We identified a row of wooden pegs for hanging coats, a single peg at a child's height, a three-legged stool on its side. Alice pushed into the kitchen. She gasped when she saw the stove. It hulked against the far wall. The way the stovepipe ran straight down from the ceiling made it resemble, Shiloh pointed out, a beetle on a pin.

On the left were the three windows we had seen from the car and underneath them was an open space where a kitchen table would have to go. A person sitting there could watch anything passing on the road.

A deep, enamel sink was set in a plywood countertop bristling with splinters. Standing at the sink, I looked out a milky window, past a narrow meadow, and then, above that, to the wall of the forest. Grasshoppers were taking short flights in the high grass. The pantry shared a wall with the mudroom—the floor-to-ceiling shelving was laced with fine cobwebs. A small, square, four-paned window, dirtier even than the one over the sink, let in an imprecise light. Between the stove and the sink stood a narrow door. When Shiloh opened it he found a stairway as steep as a ladder, leading up.

Between the stove and where the table would go, an open doorway connected the kitchen to the rest of the house. This was something of an entrance hall. Set into the right wall was a shallow fireplace composed of whitewashed stone. To the left side was a hall closet and, past that, the front door was framed on either side by narrow windows of beveled glass. The door wasn't locked, but rusted shut. Shiloh kicked it free and threw it open. Fresh air pushed inside. A main staircase led up to a landing before turning back upon itself. Underneath the landing was another door.

A sort of half wall or partition framed the living room, which, if
you came through the front door, would have been immediately on your left. Four windows and eggshell walls made the room seem large and airy. Lichen and water stains gave a greenish cast to the stones of the second fireplace. Compared to the compact opening of the fireplace in the hall, this gray mouth seemed grand.

Back in the front hall, we climbed the stairway. The stairs had a dark-stained newel post, handrail, and white banisters. The first room we came to upstairs was a bathroom. It had a sash window, a sink balanced on a chrome pedestal, and a tub, one of those high-walled beauties with claw and ball feet. Someone had left a tower of aeronautical trade magazines teetering by the toilet. Shiloh checked the dates. The most recent: April '72. Fifteen months between us and the anonymous reader. Alice opened a door beside the sink and found the linen closet; it was only about ten inches deep, more like a hollowed-out wall than a closet. Inside this we found a cloth bag full of mothballs and the largest cake of soap I'd ever seen. Shiloh didn't have any patience for the details. He went back into the hallway. A moment later we heard him say, “Mine.” He'd chosen his bedroom. “Come right in,” he said. It was just to the right of the bathroom. The chimney from the living-room fireplace ran up one wall of his room. The exposed rock varied from pale river stones to dark and jagged shards. He saw me covet the chimney. “First come, first served.” A dormer window looked out behind the house at the empty meadow. Shiloh walked to the center of the room and indicated an imaginary bed. He got under imaginary covers and closed his eyes.

“Should we go see our room?” asked Alice.

Our room. And still the two dormer windows we had seen from the road were unaccounted for. I felt my blood flooding to my cheeks. Alice took me by the arm. I couldn't believe she and I would share a room, but the house had its own order that we had to conform to. Whatever I'd imagined when I'd climbed into the car…it hadn't been this.

There was no exposed stonework—a closet backed up against where that first chimney must have been. I went to a window and looked out across the road and the overgrown field. I could see that
mysterious blue water. If that wasn't enough, in the corner of the room I saw a piece of furniture singular in size and appearance. I didn't know what to call it.

“It's a sleigh bed,” said Alice. “It's a sleigh bed.”

The sole purpose of the house might have been to shelter this one thing. Bas-relief faces adorned the headboard. Spiral spindles crowned the corners, like an animal's horns. In scale and stature its closest relative was the stove.

Shiloh came in to see what Alice was yelling about.

He couldn't hide his disappointment. He'd been too rash by half. Or maybe I mistook the expression that clouded his face. Maybe he didn't regret that we had the better room. Maybe he was seeing the shape of things to come.

“How does one go about squatting?” asked Alice.

This seemed to bring Shiloh around. “Well, the most important thing is that you believe in your hearts that you have as much right to the place as anyone else. Then you make yourself at home, no apologies.”

2

Hopeful Commerce

The Sears store, as it turned out, was a catalog center. They had copies of the newest catalog, a counter, and some red phones that, if you picked them up, connected you to someone waiting to take your order. In search of more immediate gratification, we crossed the street to the Ben Franklin Five-and-Dime.

There was something inside us that allowed us to make impossible decisions. We were flesh spread thinly over a framework of desire. We weren't just buying clotheslines, washcloths, and dish soap—we were buying our future, and at bargain prices.

We bought candles and cloth napkins. We bought napkin rings. Alice bought an entire spool of sisal rope and a bag of wooden beads because she wanted to get into macramé. We loaded a shopping cart so full that the wheels seized and we had to drag it to the front of the
store. Then Alice found the gardening section, a sort of satellite store. The walls and ceiling were translucent green plastic. Shiloh said he had the overwhelming sensation of being in the stomach of a green animal. We bought a shovel, fertilizer, Burpee's entire selection of garden vegetables, gardening gloves for Alice, a trowel, wire tomato trellises. We made sure that we had one of every device we didn't understand the use of and most of everything else. The cashier and a manager exchanged looks and then double-checked their accounting. We couldn't get rid of our money fast enough. The manager held the bills up to the light.

“Do we look like criminals?” Shiloh asked.

No one would say.

I felt loose in my bones.

We couldn't stop laughing as we crammed everything into the backseat. The three of us scrunched together up front. Shiloh convinced us that, if we so much as saw a pothole, the Plymouth's frame would crack. The light was fading fast in those forested corridors. Alice let out a sigh when we crested the final hill. I, too, had been secretly afraid we'd never find the place again. We carried our new things inside. That we'd forgotten food seemed a minor thing. But we hadn't forgotten food! Shiloh had a secret stash of Clark bars and One Hundred Grand bars and Bit-O-Honey. And we ate that crap until our teeth ached.