The Best People in the World (26 page)

The animal's legs and two strips of loin bathed in pink water. Shiloh cradled the other parts of the animal in his hands. He'd left the skin on the head. It looked like a cross between a mammal and a fish. With its eyes closed, mouth slightly open, it might just have been asleep. Shiloh instructed me to bring the meat into the kitchen while he disposed of the body.

I got a fire going in the stove. I drained the water from the bowl and rinsed the meat. I coated the pieces with fried onions from a canister. When the stove got good and hot, I put a large skillet on with some oil in it. I dropped the loins in. The meat spit and sizzled.

When the onions started to blacken, I turned the meat.

Alice came downstairs. “Is someone actually cooking?” She pushed past me to stand beside the stove.

I removed the loins to a plate and fit the shoulders and haunches into the frying pan. The skillet was really hot now and the rendered fat gave off a rich, oily smell.

“A miracle,” Alice exclaimed. “Where did our friend get this? This?”

I told her Shiloh had snared a rabbit.

Once I'd seared both sides, I opened the oven and slid the whole thing in to cook through.

Alice picked at the loins and licked her fingers. “Do we have to wait for him before we can eat?”

“Probably a good idea.”

She lowered herself to the table and stared at the food.

Shiloh had stopped by the swimming hole to clean himself up. He came in looking scrubbed and pleased with himself. He had a shirt on and it was wet where it touched him, at his shoulders and belly.

“You devious mountain man,” said Alice.

I took the food out of the oven and placed it on the table.

We moaned and sighed and groaned. There was very little, actually, hardly enough for one, so the more we ate, the more demonstrative we became. We narrated every bite. It was theater and Shiloh enjoyed it so much that he gave his portion to us just so that the praise could continue. When everything that could be consumed had been consumed, after the knuckles had been gnawed and the bones broken and the marrow sucked, Shiloh placed the skillet in the sink. Alice and I fell asleep with our heads in the nests our arms made on the table.

 

A few days later Alice introduced me to charades. We did
All Quiet on the Western Front, The Wizard of Oz
, Gordon Lightfoot, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. We managed to enlist Shiloh, only to frustrate him when neither Alice nor I knew who Emma Goldman was. A hero of his, evidently. It was probably a little after eight when Alice and I decided to get ready for bed. She and I stood shoulder to shoulder as we brushed our teeth in the bathroom sink.

“Close your eyes,” she said.

I heard her spit and then sip a handful of water.

“Okay,” she said.

She went to our room while I finished up.

She was standing in the gabled alcove when I came in. Outside, in the moonlight, the field looked like it was made of ash. Deep inside the haystack the straw moldered and the heat from this caused wispy curls of vapor to rise. She pointed her finger. The fox paused as it crossed through the high grass. Maybe Shiloh was out on the porch swing. A moment later it darted off and was gone.

“They're good luck,” said Alice.

The temperature had started to drop at night. I decided to pull another blanket out of the closet—it was one of the ones we'd used to make Sonya's bed. Absently I put it to my nose. I didn't know what the right thing to do was, but I carried it to Alice. “Smell.”

“Our little girl. Our little ragamuffin.” Without getting up she shook it out and let it settle over us.

And the odor also settled over us; we breathed it, held it inside. After the smell dissipated we found that by kicking our feet we could conjure up the little girl, but each time it was more fleeting.

We were too worked up to sleep.

“What do you think of my face?” asked Alice.

I traced the whole landscape with my fingertips.

“It's like my face,” I said.

“Shut up,” she said.

I said, “I mean your face—it's as familiar as my face.”

“Familiar,” she said. “Ugh.”

“Your nose is smaller than mine.”

“Obviously.”

I kissed her. “Your lips are softer.”

“My lips are thin,” she said.

“I like thin.”

“You'd better.”

“What kind of face do I have?” I asked.

“Unblemished.”

If anyone wonders what I looked like that fall when I was seventeen, I say I had an unblemished face. And something else: I have not maintained it.

16

What's Wrong with My Face

Later I would spend a winter on the Gulf Coast of Florida, working as a landscaper. The couple who owned the company practically adopted me; they found me an apartment overlooking a canal where, night and day, kids yanked bullheads from the quiet water. One night I watched an alligator and a golden retriever locked in a struggle—the alligator had the dog by the neck, but for the longest time they stayed like this, as if the dog wasn't being eaten, but tamed. Then the dog's owner came down with a pistol and dispatched both animals, still in their strange embrace. I worked with three guys who were amateur bodybuilders and two women who were in love. The six of us
drove around in a panel truck. We'd pull into your driveway and the bodybuilders, on principle, refused to use ramps to unload the machinery. They wore spandex shorts before the rest of us knew what the stuff was. I knew the women were in love because they had owned a flower shop in Missouri and left that to work outside together. They kept a houseboat on another canal system. One time someone broke into my room and stole three thousand dollars that I'd secreted in a Tupperware container in my freezer. Still later the police broke in to charge me (charges that, contingent on my leaving the state, were dropped) with the distribution of child pornography, which, they told me, was where my employers buttered their bread.

I drifted north to Baltimore. My arrival corresponded with the Iranian hostage crisis. Which I mention because my next job was with a Pakistani family who owned two used-car lots. For no reason but ignorance, windshields were smashed, people urinated into gas tanks—the police arrested a forty-two-year-old housewife who urinated into the filler, one of those behind the license plate setups, on a Cadillac; she became a minor and not so reluctant celebrity. I was hired to pose as part owner and, by my presence, Americanize the place.

A cocktail waitress who worked at a bar across the street helped me soften up prospective buyers. I'd order rum and Cokes and she'd serve me Tabs. After work I'd drive her back to her place, a damp-smelling row house. It looked awful from the outside, but it was furnished with all this elegant salon furniture she'd inherited from grandparents, prairie royalty from Terre Haute. At work she wore her hair in bilious piles, and short skirts with purple tights, but the hair was a wig; she had a hereditary condition that caused her hair to grow in clumps—she kept it razored tight to her head so that her skull felt like a strange globe with smooth lakes and oceans and fuzzy, forested continents. When we got to her place, she invariably changed into print dresses with lace collars. Everything was on the up-and-up. I don't think she ever figured out why I liked her, nor did I tell her enough about myself that she might have formed an opinion about me. Her parents were Episcopalian; we'd drink coffee and
talk about that. If we had an understanding, it was that we were both lonely.

A young couple with three kids came in to buy a station wagon and I'd nearly sold them an Oldsmobile convertible when my waitress barged in, crying. She waved her hand in front of me as if it had been crippled in an accident.

“I'm engaged,” she said. “I'm engaged.”

She came around my desk and threw herself across me. She'd decided to return to Indiana and marry an old beau, a pharmacist. She'd planned to take the bus back home, but I used all my skills and part of my savings to sell her a Renault coupe at a loss.

I loaned her money for a moving truck so all that wonderful furniture could get back where it belonged (she'd considered selling it); I was crazy for that furniture, but it's probably much worse now from children and such.

On the day she was to leave, I went to see her off.

“You're so sweet,” she said, going crazy, running in and out of the place.

I asked a favor.

Anything, she promised.

Could her pharmacist prescribe a cure for a broken heart?

Overcome with emotions neither of us could have named, she slapped me across the face. Before the shock wore off, she hugged me, rubbed her hands up and down my spine, and, the only time, kissed me. (And yes, where was Alice? And how had I lost her?) There were tears on her cheeks when she drove away. I never saw the money I loaned her.

Reagan took office. The hostages came home and my figurehead proprietorship ended. The family sold both lots to a third party and moved to California.

After relying on it for five years, I totaled a Chevy Cavalier in Tulsa. A trauma surgeon—a reputable specialist, but, I believe, no genius—closed the forehead I'd opened on the plastic steering wheel. I spent two months living with a physician's assistant, loving her on a twin bed half-filled with stuffed animals and beneath a framed illustration
of a kitten in a nurse's uniform (a gift from her father—a hard case himself—whose ugliness surely primed her for me). She was six years my junior; we'd go out with her friends—all optimists—and I couldn't take it. Finally I suspect she started seeing a good-looking security guard, a well-mannered kid who did two seasons in the CFL as a wide receiver. She asked me to move out. I rubbed a weal into my forehead with a piece of 600 grit sandpaper (at that time I worked as the manager of a hardware store, even though I knew less than most of my employees and all of my customers—Tulsa was full of oil jobs at the time, but I never roughnecked) in the hopes she might take me back. I was also aware that eventually I'd bore through the hard shell and get to the nut of my problem. Her name was Shaylanna.

When the oil boom died, the hardware store closed its doors. I called her to say I was leaving town and would she meet me for coffee, but she wasn't home or wasn't answering.

17

Trapline

Shiloh Tanager had no people. It was a common phrase. In most instances it was a qualitative remark masquerading as a quantitative one. In Shiloh's case it was a statement of fact.

“I am the prodigal son,” said Shiloh. “Left on the courthouse steps. My birth announcement ran on the front page. ‘Boy Abandoned' was the headline. Sixteen months old. Ripe for adoption.”

The two of us were walking through the woods above the house. Shiloh had offered to give me a tour of his trapline.

“The room with yellow walls. That's my first memory. I have no idea where that room was. I've known plenty of rooms. For the first three years, I lived with the Jacobs. I don't remember too much. I was admitted to the hospital for shingles and, upon my discharge, I wound up with a different family. Uncle Gil and Aunt Gert had a nice in-ground pool with a little plastic mountain at one end that caused a hose's worth of water to splash into the pool. No other siblings. A quiet place. They never seemed to know what I was doing in
their house. I think they were using me as a dry run on the idea of having children. Twice I was admitted to the emergency room for the ingestion of household cleaning products. Gil decided to change careers, and they packed up and moved to Alaska. I got two letters from them when I first moved in with the Murrays. The Murrays were very active in the Pentecostal church. They were petitioning for sainthood—trying to raise fourteen of us in a great big shell of a house. We all went to church as a group on Saturdays and Sundays. After services the congregation made meals for us and generally treated us like stray dogs, with kindness and nourishment and a healthy dose of suspicion. After the meal they all went back to their ordinary lives and we went back to our place, what the Murrays called Willow Grove and the older kids called Pussy Patch. They had actually adopted a couple of kids—a crippled Japanese girl and a blind kid who swore continually. The older kids would suspend you by your ankles from the top bunk and ask if you wanted to be adopted. The Murrays had it all down to a science with their picnic tables in the dining room and chore schedules and wood-paneled bunk rooms crowded with foot lockers. You were assigned to an older sibling whose duty it was to look out for you and show you the ropes. Claude Wopanski was my big brother; a real gentle kid with a dent in his skull that he combed his black hair over. Whenever anyone got on his case, he'd fidget with his hair to make sure the hole was concealed. If we were supposed to clean the bathroom, he'd pass the whole time checking his face in the mirror. He carried his head at an angle like one of those classroom globes.

“As much as the Murrays believed the spirit was in us, they didn't account for hormones, bad judgment, experimentation, and youth. The younger boys were coerced into circle jerks, violating vacuum cleaners. At night you could hear the squeaking of the mattress springs, like peeper frogs singing all around. And we were expected to interact normally with the regular community. The high school principal used to come over at the beginning of the year and give everyone a big pep talk about how, in his eyes, we were just like everyone else. But he wasn't fooling anyone. He got back in his car,
returned to his office, and told his secretary what a bunch of savages we were.

“Claude left for a junior college in Illinois, where he was killed crossing the street and just because he was so vain about his stupid melon head. The driver who hit him said Claude walked right into traffic. I was inconsolable, and then the Murrays took in a sullen, reed-thin kid with wavy black hair and too close eyes, and they promoted me to older boy. The new kid's name was Field. I tormented him out of basic psychology.