The Best People in the World (21 page)

The pro dropped us off at a maintenance shed on the other side of the course. Outside there were rain gauges, piles of fertilizer, and a wind sock. The shed was ringed by all types of broken machinery and the most beautiful lawn I'd ever seen, which was actually their sod farm. Dupree opened a big green garage door. Inside were all manner of lawn mowers, a few battered tractors, and a white-and-peach, single-engine Piper Cub.

Shiloh put his arm over my shoulder. “That, my friend, is an airplane.”

Dupree wandered around the plane, checking mechanical connections, the angles of wires, the blades of the propeller. He popped the engine cowling and tried to wiggle the spark plugs.

“You guys ready?” Dupree asked.

“Before we take off,” said Shiloh, “could you tell my friend if there's any particular safety concerns he ought to be aware of?”

Dupree stopped his inspection to smile at Shiloh.

“Have you ever had to crash-land or anything like that?” Shiloh nudged me as though I'd put him up to the question.

“Not yet,” said Dupree.

“Should we be wearing parachutes?” Shiloh seemed bent on portraying himself as a rational person.

“Get in already,” said Dupree.

“How come you didn't know how to drive a car?” I asked him.

“I'm fifteen,” said Dupree.

 

I climbed onboard through a door that folded down. There was a bench seat in back and one up front where Dupree and Shiloh sat. I had a small rectangular window all to myself.

Dupree asked me if I was comfortable.

I didn't bother replying because at the same time he fired up the engine and I couldn't hear myself speak. We rolled out of the garage, and this is why the pro had been less than thrilled to see us. The golf course and the runway were one and the same. As we taxied out the golfers scattered.

The engine noise grew until it was as essential as our heartbeats. Shiloh twisted in his seat and shot me a thumbs-up. We bumped our way down the grassy track. I felt heavy in my core. I wanted to holler “Stop.” Things got very still. The ground fell away from my window. We banked above the trees. Presently, I was in the sky.

The engine noise backed down a notch. The little plane rocked like a boat. We sailed on a river of air.

Shiloh turned around to see how I felt.

“Okay?” he shouted.

I nodded a vigorous assent.

“It's just wood and canvas. It's like we're inside a living animal.”

“How long do we fly around?” I yelled.

I saw water through my window, a lake or a pond. For some reason this bothered me more than anything I might have imagined. I noticed, for the first time, the tremendous amount of air pushing through the cabin. My mind wanted me to think awful things: Alice far below and me with no way to lower myself from this height.

Dupree turned around to look at me. “Happy birthday!” said Dupree.

I didn't know what he was talking about.

Shiloh turned in his seat. “I hope you don't mind that I told him.”

“Happy birthday,” Dupree said again.

“Thank you,” I said.

“I bet you never figured you'd go up in a plane,” said Shiloh.

I shook my head.

“Shiloh can be very persuasive,” said Dupree.

“I have my talents,” said Shiloh.

“Should I loop the loop?” asked Dupree.

I couldn't will myself to speak.

Shiloh turned around and pointed his finger at me. “He's pulling your leg,” said Shiloh.

“Oh,” I said.

“I'm not aerobatics certified,” said Dupree.

I looked through my little peephole window at the distant world.

At some point my inner ear detected that we were starting to lose altitude. I didn't want to tell Dupree his business. Still, the treetops appeared to be getting closer. I had the unmistakable sense that the plane was sinking. I wanted greedily to gain altitude. Down, down we went. I didn't consider we might be landing until the wheels hit the ground.

We were on a dirt-and-gravel road, in a dirt-and-gravel landscape. I didn't recognize a thing, or know how far we'd come. This might be Canada, I thought, looking out at dwarf trees and scrub. The plane rolled to a stop.

Shiloh turned around, his face green tinged, a wide, dry smile, a window to his teeth. “How was your first flight?”

“Great,” I said.

“You want to trade seats?”

“No,” I said.

“Do that,” said Dupree. “Trade seats.”

I climbed up front. There was a guy carrying two big duffel bags walking toward us. If it wasn't for him, we could have been anywhere.

The interloper threw his bags in back and squeezed past me.

“Are we in Canada?” I asked.

This was some sort of joke. The new guy laughed and Dupree laughed. Shiloh tousled my hair.

“This is nowhere,” said the new guy.

“This is an Indian reservation,” said Dupree.

“Indian Nation,” corrected the new guy.

“Indian Nation,” repeated Dupree.

“Let's split,” said the new guy, who was older than any of us by twenty years. I looked at him for a moment, but Dupree gunned the engine and I wanted to see what it looked like to fly.

As soon as we were in the air, Dupree turned toward me. “I've been to Canada,” he said.

“Yeah?” I shouted.

“I might go to Hudson Bay, sometime.”

“What's in Hudson Bay?”

“That's why I want to go there.”

Shiloh tapped me on the shoulder. He leaned forward so I could hear him. “Pretty great, huh?”

The stranger was saying something to me. I cupped my hand around my ear.

“You look like you could be an angel or something.” His voice reverberated in the cockpit. He rolled a sleeve up. On his forearm there was a tattoo of a red crucifix floating between two mountains. Blood dripped off the bottom of the cross into a lake.

I gave him the thumbs-up.

He stuck his hand out and we shook.

Dupree pushed the control stick forward and dropped the nose of the plane. A feeling like itchy electricity traveled from the back of my throat down to my balls. The engine sound was replaced by the high-pitched crying of the guy wires. There was something about falling inside a plane that made it much worse than falling outside a plane. Dupree leveled us off.

We made a beeline for what, at first, appeared to be a black scar on a mountainside. We came in just above the trees. It didn't resemble a runway any more than the golf course had. Dupree set the plane down just the same.

Before I knew what was what, the passenger and his luggage had gotten out. Then the engine noise and once again we were in the sky.

Shiloh leaned forward so his mouth was just an inch from my ear. “Do you believe they let someone like me see the world from up here?” He leaned back and nodded.

I shook my head, like no, I couldn't believe it.

He tapped a finger on his chest and mouthed “My first time, too.”

Dupree turned around in his seat. “You want to see your house?”

That's exactly what we wanted.

We scanned the countryside for our hidden home. All of a sudden, Dupree set the plane on edge. The horizon turned like a wheel. There at the still point we saw our little place. Something about being in a plane made the general seem very grand and the specific insignificant.

I remember the relief I felt, after surveying a county brown with drought, to see the golfers scatter from the improbably green fairway. I was still alive.

13

Deluge

Alice and I woke to a cool breeze rushing through our bedroom. We heard tree limbs rattling. Outside our bedroom window, in the half-light, small forms flitted across the empty field. This dark flock burst in through our open window. They circled, close to the ceiling. Then the spell was over and the leaves settled around us, on our bed, on the floor, one, not quite escaping, perched on the windowsill.

The rain crashed into the house.

It overwhelmed the gutters (later, after collecting a dozen tiny mice corpses in the yard, Shiloh deduced that a nesting family had been flushed from the downspout). It ran off the roof in sheets. The din of the drumming, the comfort of being warm and dry, these things conspired to put us back to sleep.

It could have been five minutes later or the next day, the rain still hammered down when I woke. I got Alice up and convinced her that if we didn't go outside, we'd end up regretting it. She suggested that we take this opportunity to wash our clothes; we hadn't done much of that since the drought began. We stripped the sheets and collected the pillowcases. Taking the squeeze bottle of dish soap, we headed out into the weather. The rain had turned the road into a muddy river; it plastered hair to heads, stung our bare skin. Crossing the field
we passed within twenty feet of a pair of turkey hens huddled beneath a low bush.

We heard the stream before we saw it—a grinding, industrial sound. Arcs of spray hung above the white water. Smaller, auxiliary streams formed along the flooded banks. Where it clobbered the dam, the water stood up in a frozen wave. I left the dirty clothes on the bank and waded in. Alice gave our clothes a shot of dish soap before handing them to me. I scrubbed these things in the rushing water. Pants held in the current kicked with phantom legs. A quick twist to dry, and then I tossed them back to Alice. I lost half of my only pair of dress socks. A few minutes later, a pillowcase swam away. The bedsheets were saved for last. I'd gotten pretty good about keeping my footing, and though the top sheet was many times larger than anything I'd washed before, it didn't give me that much trouble; I got it done. Next came the fitted sheet. As soon as the current took it, I knew I was in trouble. The articulated corners filled up like a sail and pulled me off my feet. What came to my mind was a kite pulling a boy into the sky. I scrambled to regain my footing. I saw Alice jump in the stream. She stood between me and the angry water at the dam. My body hit her and she stayed fast. I gave a sharp tug on the sheet and it dumped the water. I stood up.

“You idiot. We can replace sheets.”

I thanked her.

She was shaking. “I had to get in the stupid water because you didn't let it go.”

I wrapped the sheet around her shoulders and led her back to the bank.

“I'm sorry.”

She reached up and pinched my lower lip. When she held her thumb in front of me, there was a dab of blood on it. I'd bitten my tongue.

 

Even after the storm, Shiloh insisted that we continue following water-conservation protocol. He spoke very expertly about aquifers and water tables. When Alice asked how long it would be before we
could forget about conservation, Shiloh said, “We're on geologic time now.”

Elsewhere the changes were sudden and dramatic. The rain had knocked the grass flat in the fields, but by the time Alice and I went to retrieve our clothes, not only had it rebounded, but new growth was thatched with the old. In a demonstration of hydraulics, our lightest garments rode the green shoots into the air. Despite the sun, the heat didn't return. Alice and I wore clothes again. I wound up cutting a V in the heel of my sneakers so I could cram my feet inside. (Alice observed this without comment.)

Alice and I tended our garden. The zucchini came back strong, but everything else had to be forgotten. We spaded the plot under. Before dark we drove down to the five-and-dime to see what was still worth planting. The clerk suggested Swiss chard. We bought six packets of seeds.

At the grocery store we bought bags of beans and rice, cases of canned tomatoes, peas, and tuna fish. Alice bought a demijohn of red wine. On the drive back we slowed to look at a field that was filled with pumpkins. That evening the three of us sat on the porch. Shiloh watched while Alice and I drank the wine. I got drunk for the first time in my life. They explained the four kinds of drunks: surly, morose, even-keeled, and like me. I talked too much.

Just before dusk Alice's fox trotted right down the middle of the road with a bird in its mouth. It turned to look at us as it passed.

“Maybe it was someone's pet,” said Alice.

Shiloh said, “He sees we're no threat, and it's easier to walk on the road than in the hay.”

“Is anyone coming to harvest that stuff?” I asked. The grass rolled in the slightest breeze.

“No,” said Shiloh, “besides, it's full of brush.”

“That's great stuff,” I argued.

“Do foxes mate for life?” asked Alice.

“Swans do,” said Shiloh.

“I'd like to make a haystack.” I poured the last of the bottle into my glass.

“Let me have that.” Alice stuck her hand out to me.

“You're thirsty?”

“I'm trying to save you from yourself.”

I finished off the glass.

Shiloh appeared holding a sickle. “Here, champ, go make your haystack.”

Alice protested in vain.

I examined the wooden dowel handle, the rusty metal crescent.

“Make a big one like in all the French paintings.”

I didn't know the paintings Shiloh was talking about.

Alice announced that she was going inside.

Wading into the waist-high grass, I tried swinging the blade into the thickest patches. This didn't work well—the grass bent away. What I ended up doing was gathering a bunch in my left hand and chopping it free with my right. Being drunk infused the methodical with a certain grace. I tried to spiral out from my starting place, but determining the center became difficult. Instead of a circle I cleared a more amoebic shape. Once, stopping to stretch, I caught Alice in our window, but she moved away. Shiloh raked the cut grass with his fingers.

I didn't want to wait to see if Alice would come back. I told Shiloh I was heading in.

“You can't quit now,” he said.

On impulse I threw the sickle. As soon as it was out of my hand, I imagined it curving in the air like a boomerang. I dropped to the ground.