The Best People in the World (38 page)

 

Food healed Alice. Her plump cheeks wounded me. Wrapping my arms around her, I could just barely contain her. This was different. She stopped buttoning her pants and the copper zipper yawned. She
was magnificent. Dimples formed at the small of her back. Beneath our blanket tent, sweat gathered on the points of her breasts and painted my chest. I found myself a spectator to our pleasure. When she came to me, I didn't have the strength to stop her.

 

On a clear day, when the sun was just a nickel in the sky, Bill Legg came over the hill. He pulled in the driveway, honked, and rolled his window down. He left the engine running, the tailpipe puffing a trail of vapor. I waved from the porch and made my way to the driver's-side door.

“Business been slow?” I said. There hadn't been any snow in more than a week. I was concerned that he'd come out of his way.

“This isn't a full-time gig. I just subcontract for the county, Thomas. I'm not the kind of person who can sit at home watching the snow fall.” He pointed across the seat at some unidentifiable gear. “Diving is my number one passion. I teach snorkel and scuba classes at the Burlington Y.” A recent shave only made the pockmarks more pronounced.

“Oh,” I said, remembering how to have a conversation, how to let someone talk.

“Yeah,” he said. “I'll do anything underwater. Property recovery. Geological surveys. People think the Caribbean is the only place worth diving, but there's plenty to see around here. I saved a girl's life once.”

“Really?” I said.

“She was ice skating when she broke through. The skates just dragged her to the bottom. I didn't get there until almost twenty minutes later. When I brought her to the surface, she was blue but they got her to the hospital and forced the life back into her.”

“Wow,” I said.

“She won't take baths anymore—isn't that something? She's been to the other side and back. Her mother claims she saw a golden merry-go-round inside the gates of heaven. The mystery of the human mind.”

“So she wasn't really dead.”

“She was dead when I had her in my arms.” Bill gave a wave toward the house. “One of your friends?”

I turned around. Shiloh was staring out one of the kitchen windows. He turned and walked off.

“He's paranoid.”

“What about?”

I didn't know what to say.

Bill raised his hand, to show he didn't need an explanation. “It's none of my business.”

It was no problem, I told him.

He wanted to ask one more question.

Shoot.

“I have to ask a favor of you.” He twisted around in his seat and started to overturn the supplies he had in back. He found a sheet of paper and passed it to me.

There was a grainy reproduction of a sketch of a girl's face. The words “Missing” and “Reward” were in the largest type. According to the poster her name was Joanna-Marie; she was five foot four and she weighed a hundred and fifty pounds. “Help us find our daughter,” it said. “We love you very much. Ran away 4/72.” There was a number to call.

“That's my baby girl,” said Bill Legg.

I tried to pass the poster back to him. “I haven't seen her.”

“Her mother and I didn't do anything but love her.”

The poster was less than useless. The sketch looked like every girl. Why didn't they have a picture to reproduce? I said, “I'm sure she wasn't running away from you.”

“Why do you say that?”

I didn't really know.

“Your parents know where you are?”

“They know I'm fine.”

“I love my daughter, Thomas.”

I said, “I'm sure she loves you, too.”

“I apologize,” said Bill. “I didn't come by with the intention of giving you the third degree. It can make you crazy, driving around. I
probably don't have the disposition for it.” He leaned over, reaching down where a passenger's feet would go. He lifted a grocery bag onto his lap. “I picked some things up at the store.” He peeked into the bag. “It's real basic stuff. I'm no gourmet. Instant potatoes. Gravy. There're some cans of stew, pancake mix and a little bottle of maple syrup—that just seemed appropriate. Consider it a housewarming present.” He hefted the bag onto the windowsill.

I saw the plump profiles of the cans through the paper. “I don't know what to say.”

“I'm not one to make empty gestures. Take the food, Thomas. I don't expect anything in return. If appearances can be trusted, it's been a while since you've had a decent meal.”

“It's really not that bad.”

He held the bag out the window. “Take it.”

I wrapped my arms around his gift. I thanked him.

“You can't hide it,” he said. “Someone raised you.”

He lifted a hand off the steering wheel, a casual good-bye. Then he backed out the driveway and drove over the hill.

No one was in the kitchen. I washed my face in the frigid water from the sink before carrying the bag upstairs.

She was feeding Phoenix cashews! The bird looked plump and shiny.

I dumped the bag's contents onto the bed. “Compliments of the infectious Mr. Legg.”

She sorted the food, counted the cans, examined the box of pancake mix, read the label on the syrup. “This everything?” she asked.

No matter where she turned, Alice saw insufficient things. Her eyes came to rest on me.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing.” She reached out to touch my filthy hair.

 

We prepared two cans of stew, adding boiled dumplings to make it more substantial. Carrots and corn bubbled in the caramel-colored juice. The smell drew Shiloh from his room. He crept down the back stairs looking as though he couldn't remember how he'd come into
the house. He took his usual spot at the table, tucked a dingy napkin in the neck hole of his shirt, waited.

“Valentine's Day?” Shiloh asked.

Alice thrust her thumb over her shoulder, Ask Thomas. The sour sea of my stomach threatened to back up into my throat. We each got a bowl and we sipped the stew from teaspoons. There was enough left for me to give Alice a second serving. Then I filled the pot partway with water to loosen whatever clung to the sides. While I waited for this to boil down to a gruel, I put a kettle on the stove to make hot water for the dishes. When the stew was done, I poured half into my bowl. Shiloh refused the other half.

“I'm not that hungry,” he said.

Impossible. I tried to serve him regardless, but he took his bowl and delivered it to the sink. He folded his hands over his empty gut.

“Maybe he's got a secret stash,” said Alice, pausing from blowing on her stew. “I wouldn't put it past him.”

There could be no truth to what she said. Shiloh enjoyed sacrifice too much. All his heroes were martyrs or pariahs. He preferred suffering publicly to everything else. This might have been the core of his character. He had that kind of recklessness that marks boys who, for whatever reason, feel most themselves while being dismantled by bullies.

There was a scrap of paper in Shiloh's hand. Before he saw my intention, I snatched it away. Alice had written:
Thomas begged his friend for this
.

Shiloh wanted to explain the indignity of begging. But I wasn't interested in his argument. I tossed the note back to Alice.

She wouldn't look at me. After a moment she stood and went upstairs.

I wrote,
She lied to you. It was a gift
.

I finished my food and relieved Shiloh of his station at the sink, washed the dishes and returned everything to its proper place. I arranged the cans in pairs, to show Shiloh how we could eat like this for six more days.

He looked unmoved. “You two can share that stuff.”

I tapped the pencil on the note, underlined
a gift
.

“She's just protecting the baby, Thomas. It's biological.” Absently he pulled the hem of his shirt up. Where his skin went over his ribs, there were greenish bruises.

Remember
, I wrote,
we rely on you
.

“Good.” He turned to walk toward the living room. When his shoulder hit the doorjamb, it spun him around.

3

Appetite

On sunny days, when we remembered, we opened the curtains to let in the light. At night, or when the sky was overcast, the curtains remained closed. Days passed unobserved. With our wool blankets and shuffling feet, magnificent blue sparks leaped from us whenever we passed too close to wall outlets or plumbing fixtures. Alice learned to flinch every time I bent to kiss her.

I told her about the men on the roof. To her mind the sound of a window rattling in its frame denoted a master thief removing the pane with a suction cup. Where these specters came from I can't say, but there were shadows that retreated from me even as I walked through that dark house. My empty suit turned its back to me each time I entered the bathroom.

 

Alice taught Phoenix a trick where he flew to her shoulder from across the room. It was a strange ritual, Alice separating herself from this thing she loved in order to experience the wonder of its return. When the bird got bored, abandoned on some chair back or a volunteer's wrist, Alice's face cracked with tics. Then the bird might do something that endeared it to Shiloh and me, pluck a button from a shirt or bend over to study the ground between its feet.

Shiloh gave Alice a leash for the bird. There was a knotted handle for Alice. At the other end, the leash concluded with a loop which could be cinched around the bird's foot by tugging on some beads. It was a very thoughtful gift. Phoenix picked it up and flew it to the top
of the closet door. The leash hung from the bird's beak like the plundered body of a snake.

 

“Last night,” Alice started, “I caught Shiloh coming up from the basement. He stood there like a statue, like he was invisible or something.”

I asked, “What were you doing downstairs?” It never dawned on me that she might be moving around at night, that she might be doing things.

“I was getting a snack when he came up the stairs.”

Shiloh and I had taken to stirring baking soda into tap water to settle our stomachs. He could make my eyes glassy by whispering a word like “oranges.” “What sort of snack?” I asked.

“Do you have any idea what he does down there?”

“I really don't think he's going down there anymore.”

“Are you listening to me? I said he was down there. You have to listen to what I'm saying.” Her bird was combing her hair with its beak.

“Maybe he was sleepwalking.”

“If I find out he's doing anything stupid, I'll kill him.”

The bird flew at me with its cloaking wings. I threw my arms up to protect myself. It lighted on my forearm.

“Don't do that,” Alice said to one of us.

 

Shiloh called me into his room. He directed me to sit on the corner of his bed. He handed me the photographs. This was why we'd come to Vermont, he told me. He wanted me to see what he was talking about. But most of the pictures weren't from here. They showed brick-colored mesas, salt flats, city streets, a bowl of noodles. The intimate ones were missing. And I tried to remember what I'd seen in the pictures the first time I'd looked at them. The boy. He was in just two of the pictures I was being shown. In one he sat with his back to the camera, his face caught in profile. In the other picture Shiloh and the boy were peering into a skillet.

I pointed at the boy.

“We met outside the train station in Burlington,” said Shiloh.
“He could juggle any three things. A quarter, an iron spike, and a handkerchief. That sort of grace leaves its mark on a person. He had an arrangement with gravity.”

“What's his name?”

Shiloh wasn't paying attention to me. I bent down so my face was before him. I repeated my question, slowly shaping the words What. Is. His. Name?

“Alexander Stephen Mills.”

I shook my head and touched my finger to his chest. “You are Alexander Stephen Mills.”

“When I think of his face I don't know what to do. It's murder missing someone like I miss him. Can you believe someone that beautiful was in love with me?” From his shirt pocket he pulled out another picture. He handed it to me. Shiloh and the boy stood on the edge of a train trestle. In the world of the photograph, they were reduced to dashes of pale skin, knobby knees. Their toes curled over the edge of a wide steel beam. Shiloh looked at the picture taker while his friend looked down at the abyss beneath them.

Shiloh pulled the picture back. His fingernail traced over the emulsion. I expected him to say something. He licked his finger and cleaned up the picture.

I wrote this in his little pad:
What's in the basement?

“I know you poked around while I was in the hospital.”

That's not what I mean
.

“Say it, Thomas.”

The other side of the chimney
.

He directed my attention to the picture. “The real tragedy isn't how people we love become invisible to us, or that we lose track of them, or that we ask them to wait for us but never return. The real tragedy is that before those things happen, you can't let them know how sorry you are.”

This was the sort of thing Shiloh was capable of.

Alice was yelling in a place so distant that at first I thought it was a particularly insistent memory. I went out in the hall. The sound reached me from so many directions at once that I knew she'd
gone outside. I went into our bedroom and pulled aside the window shade. Out in the driveway, between the wreck of the silo and her snowbound Plymouth, Alice was engaged in a tug of war with the crow. The bird strained at its leash, like a balloon on a string. The events leading up to this were easily reconstructed. Alice had gone out to promenade the bird and the bird had seen an opportunity. Their struggle now came down to wills: did the bird have the strength to snap the leash, and would Alice risk injuring the bird just to retain it?