The Best People in the World (31 page)

I wrote,
I think it's better that she doesn't see the tail or the carcass. Or the skin
.

“It doesn't seem right to let it go to waste.”

Please.

“I've got trout.” One by one, he pulled fifteen fish out of his duffel bag. Pieces of dead grass stuck to their flesh. But their colors, their vibrancy, gun-metal backs fading into cream-colored bellies, vertical stripes of red and purple, they looked as if they'd been skewered by rods of light. The scales came off in his hands, like dust off a butterfly's wing.

We got them in the sink. Guilt went hand in hand with wonder.

Shiloh stuck the knife's blade in their vent and slipped it up until it split their lower jaws. Their organs, a cornucopia of miniature fruits, sacs of color. Shiloh separated four egg yolks, coated the fish in the eggs, rolled them in cornmeal, and dropped them in the skillet with half a stick of butter. From the back of the fridge, he produced a plastic lemon. He turned the fish over, sprayed the juice over them. He put five on a plate and asked me to deliver them, with his apologies, to Alice.

She couldn't forgive him. But she accepted the fish. The pink flesh was sweet, and with the smallest ones we ate the bones.

6

The Knight of the Wood

Alice and I were running errands when she spotted a flier put up by someone who dealt in firewood. I called from a pay phone. A man answered. I said we needed to buy some firewood. Did we want rounds, split, quartered? Loose or stacked? For a woodstove or fireplace? Aged or green wood? And how many cords were we looking for?

I gave Alice a look; we'd found the guy for our firewood problem.

There was a pause during which he expected me to tell him what I wanted.

“I'm willing to trust your judgment as far as what's best,” I said.

This loosened him up some. So he put me through a questionnaire. We planned to heat with wood alone. We needed to burn the stuff this season. We didn't own a sledgehammer or a maul, so we'd need it quartered. I told him I'd seen a hatchet somewhere; he congratulated me. We could stack it on our own. He taught me the basics: a cord was equal to one hundred and twenty-eight cubic feet of wood, or, as it was commonly described, a pile four feet by four feet by eight feet. He recommended we buy six cords. If we were older, he said he might suggest eight cords. Older people just enjoyed watching wood burn, he explained. Where did we want this stuff delivered? To our home. Right; and where could he find this domicile?

I told him where we lived.

Here was the deal: certain larger economic forces had caused a run on firewood in the north country. His boss was trying to take care of his regulars before he started supplying new customers, but our guy just happened to have six cords of aged hardwood, quartered and cut in lengths between seventeen and twenty inches, loaded in the back of his truck—he'd taken this out of their woodlot this very morning. If we wanted it stacked, that was a two-person job, which meant including his boss (not a very sympathetic character the way he painted him), but since we could take it loose, then he could just dump it in the driveway and we'd be done. How did that sound?

My enthusiasm must have been apparent. I was goosing Alice, who spun around within reach of me so it became a game we were playing. “Fantastic,” I said. “You've made this very easy.”

He said, “In Burlington they're getting a hundred per cord.”

“What about around here?”

“Seventy-five.”

“Four hundred and fifty dollars?” I asked.

Alice got a panicked look on her face. She shook her head and mouthed, No.

“You there?” he asked.

“That seems like an awful lot,” I said.

“Wood may grow on trees, but it doesn't fall down, cut itself into
equal lengths, peel apart like an orange, and then jump into my truck.” Then he hung up the phone.

Alice chewed on her thumbnail. She wanted to know what her four hundred and fifty dollars would get her. I described to her six piles of aged hardwood, measuring four feet by four feet by eight feet. And was I certain that this was enough wood? I felt very confident.

I called the guy back.

“Listen,” he said, “I'll make a deal with you. The hydraulic lift isn't working right. If you and your friends unload the truck, I'll knock fifty off the total. I'm no bank—I don't take checks.”

 

When the truck came rumbling over the hill, all I could think about was the promise of heat. Downshifting about ten times, our guy stopped the truck just past the driveway. He backed it in.

There was a ratcheting creak, probably the emergency brake, and then the driver hopped out of the cab with a piece of wood. A sample, I thought. He dropped it and kicked it beneath the front wheel. He wore a shirt with coconut buttons and slashes of brown and red like a scene from the end of the world.

“I'm Clovis,” he said. “Tell me it's not just the two of you.”

I shrugged.

“My only rule is that you don't bang up the paint outside the bed. So when you're throwing stuff out, you got to be sure to throw it clear. You got it?” He pulled a pair of work gloves out from the driver-side door. He handed them to Alice. “You're going to get splinters otherwise.”

I watched her put on the filthy gloves.

“How do we know when we've unloaded six cords?” I asked.

“When you're down to sheet metal, you're done.”

Alice and I had planned to stack the wood in a single row alongside the kitchen wall, beneath the windows, but the mountain of wood in the back of the truck was a little overwhelming.

I climbed into the truck's bed and reached down to give Alice a hand up.

The sun burned right above the trees in New York.

Clovis swung himself back into the cab and turned the radio on.

The music confirmed that we were doing something beautiful. A man sang to his love that he had to get on a boat and sail away. The lyrics were what he wanted to say and the secret of the song was that he had already left.

There had to be more than a thousand pieces of wood in the back of that truck.

Once the sun finished turning the lowest clouds pink, a blue twilight filled the valley. I hoped the man might give us a hand, but neither he nor Alice seemed to notice or care how long this operation was going to take. I needed gloves. I could feel the insides of my fingers forming tender spots that would bloom into blisters.

Shiloh came down the road. I can't say what the accident did to his head, but there was a new quality to the attention he paid things. I think he saw the growing pile of wood before he noticed the truck, though they weren't ten feet apart.

“Look here,” he said, as if he'd discovered it.

I lobbed a stick close to where he stood.

“My head,” he said, cowering and dancing off. “Look at that truck. Thomas.”

Alice and I waved to him.

“I'm going to go inside and clean these fish.” He unzipped his duffel bag to give us a look.

I couldn't see anything.

Clovis said, “Buddy, why don't you help your friends first.”

Shiloh may have looked into the cab, but I don't think he saw Clovis sitting there.

The man got out of the truck and climbed the side rail, like a cowboy clinging to the side of a bull ring. “Strange cat.”

“He's deaf,” said Alice.

“I'm sorry,” said Clovis. “Why don't you take a break and I'll pitch in for a while.”

“I don't think we can afford your help.”

“Maybe I can donate my labor?”

There's no question they flirted.

“That's okay,” said Alice, “we wouldn't feel right about that.”

“It works in my favor, too. The sooner the truck is empty, the sooner I can get out of here.”

Alice kept finding the perfect log and tossing it out.

Clovis swung his leg over the rail.

“Stop,” said Alice. “You can't rush us.”

This perplexed the man; he'd never been told to stay out of his own truck.

“What's all this wood really worth?” Alice asked. “Two-fifty, three?”

“It's worth every cent of four hundred.”

“I thought it was worth four and a half, but you were giving us a deal.”

This caught him off guard.

“It is a deal.” He snatched up a piece and dropped it on the lawn.

“I suspect you're taking advantage of us, just a little bit. If you would have taken four and a half, and you'll drop it down to four, just so we feel like we've got a good deal, then I'd bet your regular customer wouldn't pay you more that two-fifty Am I right?”

“It's pretty clear you folks don't know what you're talking about.”

“But am I right about two-fifty?”

“You're forgetting the oil embargo. That changes the rules.”

We weren't forgetting the oil embargo; we'd never heard of it.

“We'll give you two seventy-five. That way you won't feel like you're cheating us and we won't feel like we've been cheated.”

Clovis sucked on his lower lip. “Your friend here agreed to four hundred.”

“Yes, but it's not his money, for one, and—being more trusting than I am—he took you at your word.”

I think, had it been lighter out, if he'd seen me smile when Alice baited him, he could have stonewalled us and he would have ended up getting the price he'd set. But just so there'd be no hard feelings, Clovis agreed on two seventy-five and even helped us unload the truck. After we'd transferred the mountain of wood to our yard, the two of them settled up by the light of his headlights. He wound up driving away with two-eighty because he didn't carry any change.

Inside, Shiloh had the trout ready. We banked a fire in the living room. The heat pushing through the house made the timbers creak.

Shiloh called to us from his room, “I'm sweating,” he said, delight in his voice. “All the poisons are coming out of my system.”

It felt like the third summer of the year.

7

Snug

I had the bright idea to stack the wood in the living room. Alice put some newspaper down and I stacked the wood nice and neat. When Shiloh saw what I'd done, he said, “Try that in a modern house. The wood would have dropped straight into the basement.”

As a reward Shiloh decided to cook a genuine hobo stew, a recipe entrusted to him by a dying man, a gypsy who traced the recipe's history back as far as the Caucasus Mountains. Shiloh promised this would be a rare treat—the secret was saltpeter. It made the meat soft. This old gypsy used to carry a tin snuff box full of the stuff, but saltpeter had other uses and Shiloh happened to have a small supply down in the basement.

Alice and I went upstairs to clean up. We confessed to each other that every moment, we expected the floor to collapse in the living room. After Shiloh mentioned the possibility, it only seemed a matter of time before it happened. The big question was whether the whole house would collapse in on itself, folding itself into the basement as neatly as one of those camper trailers with the cloth walls.

So when Shiloh called us down for dinner, we stopped in the living room to unburden the floor of a few measly logs. Here was the other reason people didn't stack wood in their living rooms: millipedes, centipedes, earwigs, daddy longlegs, pill bugs. I got the broom and started sweeping them out the door. Some of the bugs startled Alice by flying.

Alice actually said, “I knew this was going to happen.” At which point I handed her the broom and went to see Shiloh.

Our friend stirred a blue enamel stockpot. I looked in the trash to
see what he'd put in there. Stewed tomatoes. A can of white potatoes. Kidney beans. Pinto beans.

He motioned for me to look in the pot.

I rubbed my stomach.

“After you eat this”—he pointed at his crotch and let his hand dangle from his wrist—“the navy used to feed the stuff to sailors, for morale.”

I wiped my hand over my forehead. Whew, like, what a burden erections were to me.

“It'll be like a snake on a cold rock. The real trick is what this stuff does to the meat. Mark my word, you can't even tell it's the same animal.”

“They're vanquished,” Alice announced, coming in.

Shiloh ladled stew into bowls, filled glasses with water. He pulled a pan of corn bread out of the oven. We rubbed his arms to thank him. Alice fetched his notebook so we could tell him how much we were going to like the stew.

“I have an announcement to make,” Shiloh said, nodding along with his words. “My birthday is next week, in five days, actually. I would very much like it if either of you made me a yellow cake with chocolate frosting. I think this is reasonable.”

 

But no matter how much I loved him right then, for asking for what he wanted, for his sad, bruised face and poached hands, the problem with Shiloh Tanager was that he didn't want to be one hundred percent reliable. He didn't want to be one hundred percent anything. He wanted to be coy, clever, dangerous. He liked to think that he knew what was best for people. He thought of himself as a person of vision. And the worst of it was that he thought he had either the intelligence or the charisma to make people see only what he wanted them to see. What else could have goaded him into serving Alice a stew made from her good-luck fox.

One taste of the meat and all his talk about the transformative powers of saltpeter evaporated for me. It wasn't beef, and the cubes were too large to come out of any of the rabbits he'd caught.

I pulled the stockpot off the edge of the stove. It hit the floor, bounced once, splashed over my pants. The lid rattled while the contents seeped across the floor. Alice shot up, probably intending to salvage some of the stew, so I swept my shoe through it.

The thud of the pot hitting the floor must have sent a tremor into Shiloh's legs, because he looked from the mess to me—I shot him a hateful look. He left the table and went upstairs.