The Best People in the World (2 page)

On an overcast August day, I watched dark polka dots appear on the bricks. The rain wasn't enough to send me home. When someone finally appeared, it was a guy. I watched his hunched figure cutting across the plaza. Tucked beneath one arm he carried an object wrapped in a bedsheet and secured with a length of twine. His head was bent over, maybe to keep the rain off his face. I expected him to pass me by, like everyone else, the pigeon feeders and the kids on bicycles and these women with their babies in strollers who would give me a wide berth. Instead of walking past, this guy stopped in front of me and stared, as if we had some history and he was only waiting for me to realize it. I didn't feel like meeting his eyes. Instead I looked at his
shoes. They were the weirdest shoes I'd ever seen; they looked as though he'd stolen them from a museum. They appeared to be made of straw. Maybe he'd made them himself.

He asked a question. “Are you thinking about turning yourself in?”

“Into what?”

He jabbed his thumb over his shoulder, toward the police station.

“What would I turn myself in for?”

The stranger took his place beside me. He spread his arms, resting them on the back of the bench.

I leaned forward, then left and right, as though I expected someone.

“I like to keep an eye on them,” offered the stranger.

“You like to keep your eyes on who?”

“The Man.”

“What's wrong with your shoes?” I asked.

He looked down at his feet. “There's nothing wrong with them; they're huaraches.”

“Huaraches?”

“Mexican Indians make them. Theirs is the oldest civilization in North America.”

The stranger had a chubby face.

“They look crazy,” I said.

“Are you a philosopher?”

“Am
I
a philosopher?”

“That's what I'm asking you.” Pink wrinkles lined his forehead. I saw that what I'd thought of as a tan was, instead, a layer of dirt.

“I'm a student.”

“What do you study?”

“I don't study anything. I'm in high school.”

“Classic.”

“I have to go,” I said. I stood up and turned toward the police station; it seemed less likely that he would bother me if I headed that way.

“Hey,” he said. He reached out his hand so we could shake.

Behind his squinted, fleshy lids, his eyes were a fragile blue.

He refused to let go of my hand. “Do you know who I am?”

I looked at him hard, but, instead of figuring out who he was, I
was trying to tell him who I was—namely, not the kind of person he wanted to mess with. I shook my head.

He turned his palm up. “Think for a second?” His thumb prevented me from retrieving my hand.

“Are you a musician?” He looked like he could own a guitar.

He shook his head. His hair was curly and burned butter brown.

“I don't know.”

He pointed a forefinger at my head and cocked the thumb. “Bang.”

“What's that mean?”

“Kill the cop in your head.”

“Okay,” I said.

He let go of my hand. “You into transcendental meditation?”

I had no idea how to answer. I started to walk away.

“Do you believe in the existence of superintelligent agents of progress?”

“Do you?” I asked.

His hands flew apart, as though I'd asked him to weigh two equal things.

I'd gone about ten yards when something dawned on me. I turned around. My inquisitor had poked a finger inside his shoe and was scratching his instep.

“You're Shiloh Tanager.”

The stranger perked up. “In the flesh.”

I felt like the detective who triumphantly announces that he's alone with the killer.

“You going to tell me your name?”

I shook my head.

“What were you doing down here anyway? Someone stand you up?”

“I just came here to think.”

“Any luck?”

There was nothing hostile in the way he asked his questions. He sounded like someone who'd engaged hundreds of strangers in pointless, circling conversations. I felt like I was doing a poor job of holding up my end of things.

“Fran and I noticed your house was standing again, but we didn't know if you were living there.”

“Who's Fran?”

“Fran's my father.” I walked about halfway back to where he sat.

Shiloh reached up to scratch the crown of his head. Next he scratched the back of his arms. It occurred to me that he might have fleas.

“Is Fran a cop?”

“He works at Western Kentucky State Power.”

“You think he'd let me poke around that place? I could cause some honest trouble in a joint like that.”

I said, “It'd be pretty hard to mess things up. Everything is automated.”

“What do you imagine would happen if I sprinkled iron filings on the right spot?”

“Probably nothing.”

“WHAMM-O! Blackout. The whole state goes dark.”

“I don't think iron filings would do that. Besides, they'd just call one of the other power stations and someone would flip a switch and that would be it.”

“Has your dad ever let you inside the plant?”

“I work there.”

“Then I've got a question for you. Does nepotism ensure society or undermine it?”

I just looked at him.

“You know what nepotism is, right? People giving jobs to their relatives. That's nepotism.”

I was pretty certain I hated him. “People thought you were dead.”

“No, I wasn't dead. I was traveling.” Either a raindrop fell on his face or he winked at me.

But who would return to a falling-down shed on the bank of a boring river?

“Abracadabra,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

He looked up at the sky. “Time for me to disappear.”

 

I couldn't remember to look when I backed down the driveway. Fran expected I'd kill the paperboy or some insomniac. Sometimes, cruising along the levee, we'd see light leaking through the wall of Shiloh's house, like light leaks through your hand if you cup the end of a flashlight. Then we arrived at the plant, where Fran and I went our separate ways.

On my last day, all of the people I hadn't gotten to know crowded into the break room to help eat a cake that smelled like electricity. Someone took a photo of me standing next to Fran. I got the feeling everyone else was as bored as me.

Driving home, Fran started talking very enthusiastically about the significance of school. “Are you going to tear it up this year?” he asked. He kept saying “tear it up” like it was some code we'd agreed on. I felt myself falling for it a little bit. “Yeah, I do think I'm going to tear it up.” “That's the spirit. Take no prisoners,” he said. I said, “I'm going to show them who's boss.”

We were talking like that when we got home. Mary thought we were a couple of lunatics.

3

The Laser Age

These days high schools look like pastel-hued laboratories. Sunshine pours down through skylights while vents in the walls pump in ionized air. At the back of the room you find a newspaper archive or else a place where the kids watch through a Plexiglas window as bees secrete royal jelly. There's no sense of curriculum. Everyone is too busy building their résumés. Instead of study halls the students hold internships. The teachers don't teach—they just sit at the front of the class and laugh at the jokes the kids make. If the kids ask a question, then the teacher responds with another question.

In 1972 my peers and I climbed the cast-concrete stairs to Annex 5—“annex” was the word the school district used for the plain, white trailers stranded on the blacktop. On a humid September
morning, thirty-five of us, heat anesthetized and yawny, busied ourselves scratching our names into the desktops with house keys and pen knives and the resilient points of our ballpoint pens. Someone had drawn a pair of boobs on the ceiling with the soot from a lighter.

“Mahey, why are you so pale? You look like a troglodyte.” Ray Moschi's vocabulary was all science fiction. He filled graph-paper notebooks with sketches of rocket prototypes and babes with swords.

I was supposed to say, “Because I was under your mother all summer.” Instead I said, “I was making electricity.”

“So was I,” said Moschi, “with your mother.” He stood up and pumped his hips. Then, pretending his dick was a stick shift, he raced around the desks, changing gears.
“Vroom vroom vrooooooom vrooooomm.”

The door snapped open and a confused-looking girl came in. She wore a brown tweed skirt, a gauzy shawl folded across her shoulders. She carried too many books and the wrong sort of bag. We recognized her as a stranger.

“How'd you find this place?” she asked.

While Moschi continued abusing his gearbox, the girl made the really unexplainable mistake of choosing the wrong desk. Some of us considered correcting her, while the rest of us reached the obvious conclusion. Moschi was going up and down the aisles making burnout sounds. She asked him his name.

Moschi's face lit up; he put his dick into reverse and sidled up beside her. “Raymond,” he said, which was not how any of us thought of him.

At the dawn of a new school year you were allowed to pretend that you were not yourself. Something might have happened over the summer. You hoped that you had become smarter or more attractive. It was a small hope, but it was significant. It wasn't a secret. Your mother took you out and bought you a new outfit so that the teachers wouldn't recognize that familiar disappointment you'd been the year before. But we were juniors now. We were running out of time for reinvention. No one really expected our caterpillar selves to emerge as butterflies. We were all second-tier students. That was why we'd been enrolled in the History of Technology instead of Ancient History.
HisTech owed its origin to an often-observed phenomenon: those same students who struggle with the standard curriculum have no trouble reboring V-8 engines.

The girl opened one of her notebooks and turned a page. “Raymond Moschi,” she said, making a mark in her book. “Do me a favor, Raymond. Race back to the office and see if you can find us some chalk and an eraser.”

The class burst apart like thunder, our delight reverberating inside the melamine walls.

The teacher made a show of placing her shawl over the chair back, organizing her desk, slotting folders into desk drawers, sharpening pencils, all the while not looking at us looking at her. When Ray came back with the chalk and eraser, she sent him out for a fan. Then she walked to the front and wrote her name on the chalkboard. I wrote “Alice Lowe” on the palm of my hand. Miss Lowe looked at me, looked at my hand, and told me to add “notebook” so I'd remember to get one.

 

Miss Lowe stood before the class, our book propped against her hip, or she sat on her desk and placed the book beside her—tucking her wheat gold hair behind her ear whenever it fell across her face. Right off the bat we knew nothing, but she taught us how things put into our brains could be retrieved with some degree of reliability.

Everything we took out of the class was a testament to her will. She wasn't a graceful teacher; her lessons didn't unfold before us. She taught like someone might dig a ditch. She spaded the soil of our ignorance and pitched it out. There was something single-minded about it. She would pause to dab at her forehead with a blue bandanna. I'd never known a woman to perspire so much. We had no idea she'd just earned her teaching certificate.

Miss Lowe asked us to interpret, infer, and extrapolate. She encouraged us to deduce. She reminded us to consider the big picture. She said we should remember that everything inside the book is just a depiction of everything outside the book. What did that mean?

Well, she said, what is the significance of the wall that rings this
town? Significance? What does it tell you? That the river would flood sometimes. Yes, that the river would flood sometimes. Not recently, added Chrissy Ledew. Chrissy liked to sit at the back of the class and read magazines like
Hair Today!
and
Bangs
.

I wanted to reinvent myself as a student, not for me, or for Fran and Mary, but because of this woman with her thick fingers and too-small nose. I was trying to harness my powers of perception. And so I looked at what was close at hand. The covers of each of my textbooks depicted a variation on the same theme—a laser being pulled apart by a prism or rebounding within the edges of the book. A bigger picture of the world took form in my head. I asked Miss Lowe, “Right now, is this the Laser Age?”

“Is what the Laser Age?”

“This,” I said. “Now.”

She handed the question over to the class. “Does anyone know the name for the present age?”

Someone said, “Stadium-Rock-and-Roll Age.”

“What about jet planes?” asked a classmate.

“Maybe the first thing we ought to do,” said Miss Lowe, “is consider what stone, bronze, and iron have in common?”

“They're metal,” came a voice from the back of the room.

All you need to know about that class is that not one of us had the confidence to question that statement.

“You make things out of them,” I said.

“And what kinds of things?” prompted Miss Lowe.

The class raced to list all the many things that could be formed from stone, bronze, and iron.

“And what could you call those things?” Miss Lowe asked.

“Tools,” said Ray Moschi.

“Right. So one thing to consider is what we make tools out of today.”

“Steel,” shouted one of the shop-class savants.

“It's the Nylon Age,” said Chrissy.

Someone voiced the group's concern: “Is this a trick question?” We felt very vulnerable to trick questions.

“I don't see how,” said Miss Lowe.