The Best People in the World (19 page)

Then I was in the kitchen with Shiloh. He asked me if I had a moment. The two of us went outside. He had cut a piece of plywood to cover the broken window. Working together we used tape and wooden shims to hold the board in place.

It seemed one of those rare opportunities where something genuine might be expressed and—here was the miracle—understood. I might have said this thing.

Finally Shiloh asked me how I thought the tires looked. We checked the four corners of the van. Then Shiloh hopped on the rear bumper and jumped off to see the way the van reacted. It needed new springs, he concluded.

Across the road, a red-winged blackbird made a racket.

Parker came through the front door with his little mattress on top of his head, his hands pulling the sides down to make it fit. When he was outside he let go of the sides and it sort of flopped about, balanced on his head. We opened the back of the van. The mattress rested on a platform above the wheel wells.

“Well, I'm out of here,” said Parker. “Good luck and take care.”

Shiloh looked a little underwhelmed by these remarks. “I'll take care of everything,” he said.

“You'll be fine.”

“I'm sorry you had to leave.” I reached out my hand.

“Unavoidable. You've got a good thing. I wouldn't want to spoil it. Tell Alice I wish her the best.”

“You didn't say good-bye to her?” This distressed me suddenly.

“It's okay. She'd come out if she wanted to.”

“Let me get her.”

“It's fine.”

I went back inside the house. Alice was in the kitchen washing dishes.

“You have to come say good-bye to Parker.”

“He's really leaving?”

“The van is loaded.”

She rubbed her wet finger over a dish until it squeaked.

“Right now,” I said.

She and I were coming out of the mudroom when the van went over the hill. Shiloh stood in the yard, waving. Alice and I joined him.

“You sad?” I asked him.

“Things are good.”

“The fun is just beginning,” said Alice.

“I know,” said Shiloh. He dragged his heel across the driveway, making shapes in the dirt.

 

When at some point it stopped raining, we hardly noticed. The sky stayed blue and empty. From our bedroom window the meadow looked as bright as the skin of an airplane.

Alice and I practiced the rhythm method—we liked the fact that it was natural. In the middle of her period, we had sex on beds of moss in the humid heart of the forest. Afterward, contented and raw, we'd wander to the swimming hole to wash; a certain type of minnow, about an inch long, with a dark horizontal stripe, would groom us, picking off the flecks of dark blood that dotted our legs and groins. Abstinence was a chore. While she ovulated her body got so hot and insistent that we slept with our clothes on to keep from betraying ourselves.

We hardly ate. Our clothes hung off us. Shiloh punched new
holes in my belt. When Alice's breasts no longer filled the bras she had along, she stopped wearing them. She took to wearing a boy's T-shirt she'd found abandoned at the lake. The shirt fit her so tightly that it made her new, angular body look positively obscene. Between the hem of the shirt and the waist of her cutoffs, four inches of brown skin and the elastic of her underwear. Sometimes on the weekends she and I drove to town and watched Little League games from the aluminum stands. Gas was cheap.

Alice's Plymouth suffered these excursions. Three of the four hubcaps, having been jarred loose on washboard, rode in the trunk; one we never recovered. It was impossible to go anywhere without raising a cloud of dust that followed you until you stopped. Operating the windshield washer created a film of mud that the sun-baked wipers troweled like mortar.

It was all really the same day until, after a road trip that had taken us within a few miles of the Canadian border, we returned to Shiloh's inexplicable wrath.

“Where've you been?” he asked.

Alice and I tried to remember the names of the places we'd passed through.

“When was the last time you two lovebirds tended to our garden?”

Alice and I exchanged looks. We'd been there recently. A few days ago. We'd walked past it, I was sure.

Shiloh wanted us to go and take a look at it.

The soil in that part of the state was rich and glacial—stone walls that a century ago had marked the boundaries of fields had been overrun with forests. Things couldn't help but grow.

The three of us headed around the house. Shiloh led the way. Our first mistake had been in selecting this spot—the only places that overlooked it were the window in the pantry and Shiloh's room. If we'd had it to do over again, we would have picked a place that we had cause to walk past more often. But how could we have known our habits before we'd initiated them?

What confronted us was more an act of God than evidence of any misdeed on the part of Alice or me. Like I said, the rain just stopped
falling. The same sad story was probably playing itself out in every other garden across the state. This fantastic soil had been baked ashen gray. Fissures showed where the soil had contracted and torn apart from itself. Staring at it, I couldn't say when I'd visited it last. The garden looked so different from the garden in my memory. Alice and I inspected the plot, shook our heads, and tried to piece together what we were seeing. Tomato plants hung on their wire gallows; all the small fruit had been carried away. Where I remembered slender corn, we found shattered stalks. Shiloh gathered the desiccated vegetation and made a neat pile. Everywhere clumps of weeds sprouted; their health, relative to what we'd planted, was instructive. We might have fared worse, but the baked earth had kept scavengers from digging anything up. Whatever had eaten the tops off the carrots hadn't bothered with excavating the roots; when I dug them out they were withered and ancient looking. A tangle of yellow vines was all that remained of the pea plants. Alice recovered three overripe eggplants while I scraped up the radishes. The onions had matured into papery bags of pungent mush.

“What do you think?” Shiloh asked. He'd assembled enough dead material for a bonfire.

Alice said, “I'm really surprised.”

“Look,” I said, holding up a perfect zucchini, only about two inches long.

“You're smiling like it's some sort of joke. That was our food.”

“Settle down,” said Alice. “There's no way Thomas and I could have known the drought would last this long. This kind of weather has to be an anomaly.”

Shiloh reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. He handed it to me.

“Water Us,” it read.

“I didn't write that,” I said.

“I hung that on the tomatoes two weeks ago. When I came out here this morning, it was still there.”

Alice sat on the cracked earth.

“How do we know you're not making that story up?”

“That's exactly my point: you don't know.”

I walked up to him and shoved him backward. I felt like a stranger in my skin.

“Thomas,” he said, raising his arms to ward me off. “I'm right. You and Alice aren't taking things seriously.”

I shoved him again. To prove he couldn't stop me, I suppose.

“Stop!” shouted Alice. She seized my ankle.

“Why didn't
you
water it?” I asked.

“In order for societies to work, people have to behave ethically. By ignoring your responsibilities you've chosen to act unethically.”

“This isn't a social experiment,” argued Alice.

“Right,” said Shiloh. “This was our garden. This was our food.”

I went inside the house and filled the watering can. The wrinkled ground refused to drink. The water sluiced across it. I shuttled back and forth, until the pipes coughed and clanged, but no more water came.

I roared at the ceiling.

Shiloh came in. He tested the handle, but the water still didn't flow. He tried the hot water. It worked fine.

“Can you fix it?” I asked.

“Nothing's broken. We're just out of water.”

I turned the hot water on again.

He told me to turn it off. What remained in the water heater was all the water we had.

I grabbed an empty bucket and carried it, along with the watering can, to our swimming hole. Hardly a trickle came off the hillside. I filled the two containers and carried them back across the yard.

Alice came out of the kitchen and intercepted me. “Shiloh says we're out of water.”

“I think the well's dry.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means we're out of water, at least for the time being.”

“I didn't know wells could run dry.”

“You know the phrase ‘the well ran dry'? This is where it comes from.”

“Ask Shiloh if Parker's constant showering didn't have something to do with this.”

“You ask him,” I said, pushing past her. I delivered the water to the dry ground.

11

Safe

Shiloh thought it would be a good idea for the two of us to initiate a plan for water conservation. A plan, he reasoned, would guarantee that everyone knew their responsibilities. Up until this point, he believed, we had left too much up to chance. Alice had taken the car out to buy groceries and get me a surprise (she said it as though it was part of our shtick—I wondered if this wasn't a remnant of her marriage that she'd wrongfully attributed to me). I thought we should wait until she got back. There was no need to include her, according to Shiloh. If I could wait one moment, he would go to his room and get a tablet of paper and a couple of pens. He jogged upstairs and got his things. “Is it hot in here?” he asked when he came back. Sure, but what choice did we have? He motioned for me to follow and he led me to the basement stairs.

He went down two stairs, motioned for me to stand on the one above him, and told me to shut the door. He didn't bother to turn on the lights.

“Are you trying to freak me out?”

“Just close the door.”

I did.

“Give me your hand.”

Slowly we descended. I kept my shoulder against the wall of the house until the staircase opened up and all I could lean on was a shaky handrail. His shoes made a muffled sound when they reached the unfinished dirt floor. I stuck my foot out and found that I'd reached the bottom. I couldn't see anything but the thinnest sliver of light at the top of the stairs. As promised, the air was cooler down here, but it was more complex than that. There was a particular smell
in that close place that eluded me, a vaguely sulfuric scent that I thought might be traced to the molten core of the earth. He tugged my hand and I followed.

We walked far enough that I didn't see how we could still be in the basement. Then Shiloh turned me around and we zigzagged back. His intention was clearly to confuse me. I might have complained if I hadn't thought that my complicity was essential.

“We're almost there,” he said.

I didn't respond for fear that my voice would betray what I knew, that we'd almost been there as soon as we'd come down the stairs, that we hadn't been following labyrinthine subterranean tunnels, but had crisscrossed the finite confines of a basement.

“Here we go.”

Apparently he'd reached a wall—his hand scraped across it. A yawning sound and a swirling of the air told me a door had opened. Shiloh gave a grunt and his shoes scraped across the floor. The hand on my wrist tugged downward. My foot found the base of the wall that he was trying to pull me through. My hand measured an opening, a hole in the wall maybe two feet off the ground.

“How should I do this?”

The hand gave an insistent tug.

I crawled through head first. The floor in this new space was a few inches higher than the basement and finished with something exceedingly hard. I got to my feet. Shiloh took me by both hands and guided me to a chair. Once I sat down he went back and closed the door.

“Voilà,” he said.

Such a pervasive light filled the room that my eyes clamped shut and it was only through an act of will that I opened them. Everything had been rendered glossy white: the walls, the ceiling, a narrow workbench, and the cabinets that overhung it. I think an operating room would have been more intimate than the space I found myself in. The cabinet had four doors and each door had its own hasp and padlock. Two spotlights with brushed metal shades opposed each other. An adjustable magnifying light was mounted to the workbench with a
C-clamp and a brace made from wood scraps. Shiloh took a spot on the immaculate counter; his feet swung above a concrete floor.

“Where the heck are we?”

My question pleased him immensely. He raised one eyebrow.

Peering around him, I saw that the door we'd come through was obscured by a large piece of cardboard. The room was just four or five feet deep and twice that long. I'd been cautiously stooping when I'd come in, but I saw that the ceiling was high enough to permit me to stand. Something about the construction of the ceiling and walls bothered me. I touched the near wall and knew what he'd done. He'd insulated the walls and ceiling with rolls of fiberglass insulation, taped the seams, and then painted the backing.

Four cabinets, three lights, one workbench, a chair, a toolbox, a concealed room.

It may have been cooler when we first entered, but with the two big lights going and the metabolic output of our bodies, I began to sweat. Shiloh flipped on the magnifying light and turned off the other two. A white halo shone on the work space.

“You hungry?”

He took a key from his pocket and unfastened one of the padlocks. He got two Clark bars out from the cabinet.

“Why are you locking up candy bars?”

He hesitated before replacing the padlock on the cabinet door. “They last longer if it takes deliberate action to get to them.”

His ritual with the candy bars reassured me somehow.