The Best People in the World (29 page)

“I don't even want to know what he has in that one,” she said, indicating the locked cabinet.

“It's just candy bars in there.”

She studied my face.

“Seriously,” I said.

Under the desk she spotted his toolbox. “That thing was in my apartment.”

I lifted the toolbox onto the table. Inside were the normal sorts of odds and ends. Transistors. Vacuum tubes. All grouped by color or size. Wire strippers and crimping tools. The shelves lifted out and he had set screws and bolts and fasteners. In the bottom of it, in the sort of heart of the thing, he had a hacksaw and a soldering iron. A bunch of surgical steel hemostats and a chrome C-clamp. All these bright, blameless objects.

“Remember when you couldn't find Parker?” Alice asked. “He must have been sleeping in here.”

“That occurred to me.”

“You mean it occurred to you now, or when he had you down here?” Her voice sounded strangled.

“Parker wanted to build it. That's what Shiloh told me. It's like a getaway, I guess.”

“Getaway from what?”

I shrugged my shoulders. I didn't have an answer. “Shiloh was using it as a workroom.”

Alice had her arms folded across her chest. She was interrogating everything with her eyes.

I needed fresh air and sunshine. I bent down to use the hatchway.

“Wait,” she said, “look at this.”

I stood back up. Behind where he must have been working, frozen on the wall, was a picture of Shiloh at the moment of his accident. In the instant of ignition, as the hot gases expanded, and the shock wave pushed him against the wall, there, with only his body to shield it, those gases had burned the paint on the paper. What was left was a portrait of our friend in negative. His white arms flung wide, owl head and rectangular torso, all surrounded by thunderclouds of encroaching malevolence, a dark halo.

“He was building a bomb,” said Alice.

 

While low clouds raked the land with mist, I cleaned the living room and the car. Alice decided the time had come to unpack those things that remained in the fiberglass trailer. Maybe she wanted to see if Shiloh had any more secrets.

Alice didn't know what to think about Shiloh. Previously she'd considered his excitement about anarchism just some empty talk. His accident forced her to confront the possibility that she didn't know him at all. And that I'd known about his secret room made me his accomplice.

And maybe she was right. Maybe I shared some blame. Did my careless talk about nobility put some harmful ideas in his head? Maybe he was trying to send me a message about the sort of person he could be.

Alice and I were both afraid of seeing that person in the hospital.

We donned yellow slickers and propped the mudroom door open. Making our way around the house, we scared up a pair of partridges. The birds exploded into the air with buzzing wings, almost causing us to go into cardiac arrest.

The white trailer stuck out of the high grass like a suppurating wound. Alice fit the key and popped the lock. Usually the thing would yawn open, but all that sun had conspired to weld shut the rubber seal. I latched my fingers around the lip and pulled. The gasket came apart with a crack. Here, I thought, was air that we'd
brought with us all the way from our distant home. But while I wanted the Ohio, that familiar rankness, constant sunlight had refined a petroleum smell from the plastic.

It was hard to get too worked up about the things we found inside. Woolen blankets. An army-surplus sleeping bag. Clothes I'd forgotten I owned: a few pairs of jeans that made my legs look spindly, a ski sweater, a crocheted hat, gloves, and a pair of mittens. My suit—my only suit—a pinstriped number with a gray vest, balled up in the acetate bag it came in. (I'd brought it along only because I had no real understanding of where I was off to and because, had I left it behind, it might have made things worse for my father—he'd bought it for me on the occasion of his mother's funeral.) Now the thing was curled up like a cat in a bag. It depressed me completely. I held it in front of Alice, who recognized what was going on inside my eyes, without knowing what caused it.

“It's a suit,” I said.

“As soon as we get the stuff stored away, you're going to put that on for me.”

I ferried things inside, an armload at a time. I set Shiloh's things—some shirts and pants—on his bed. I told myself that I couldn't wait to see his face again. But having Alice in the house was enough for me.

Alice wanted to build a fire, so she sent me out to see what I could salvage from that wreckage in the yard. We believed it had been a silo, once upon a time. We liked to imagine the upright silo and the neat little home in a time before us, in a time of industry.

We tore up grocery bags to get the fire started. The wood I found produced more smoke than heat. Even after the kitchen warmed up, the upstairs rooms still felt like meat lockers. I climbed the stairs to change.

I unzipped the garment bag. Coat, vest, pants, a shirt with collar points that curled like an elf's shoes, the belt was as thin as the strap on a woman's purse. Everything gave off the same chemical smell. The creases that used to define the shins were replaced, or maybe overwhelmed, by new folds in the fabric; one that traversed the jacket
diagonally made it appear as though I leaned against an invisible wire. By opening the medicine cabinet and standing on the rim of the tub, I managed to get a look at myself. Barefoot, the pants ended a few inches above my anklebones (a fact that the suit tried to conceal by falling off my hips—there was enough room around the waist for me to stick both hands down the front); no amount of tugging or adjustments to my posture would allow the shirt cuffs to cover both wrists simultaneously. I looked at my image in the mirror. I wasn't a kid playing grown-up, but a grown-up aping a child.

I called to Alice. She came up carrying a stack of towels. “That can't be yours,” she said, setting her things down on the sink and moving around me. I was seeing myself through her eyes. The muscles of her mouth started to riot. It was one of those smiles that only show up in candid photos. “You look like…I don't know. Why is the vest a different color from the suit?” She hid her face behind her hands.

I opened the jacket to display the vest to its best advantage. She squeezed tears out of the corners of her eyes.

She made me take it off so she could try it on. I made her wear just the suit without the shirt, only one button holding the vest together and the swell of her breasts. I ran a bath.

The hot water released a smell that you only get from well water, a smell like frying mud. The windows fogged up. Alice hung my suit from the shower curtain rod. The steam would take the wrinkles out, she promised. (This prediction didn't pan out, but, for whatever reason, the suit stayed there, over the tub until our final hour. Many times the surprise of that dark silhouette gave me access to my most veiled fears.) Alice and I lowered our bodies into the water and watched our skin turn pink. I'd never had sex in a tub before.

We returned to the kitchen and the whispering fire. The meager outside light faded right away. The only color in the kitchen was the orange light from the cracks in the stove. While she made hot cocoa, I shook out the sleeping bag. We both fit inside.

On the pine floor, there in an empty husk of a house, beside a road that at one end led into the sky and at the other drowned in a
lake, Alice Lowe and I. Her hair retained that earthy smell from the water. This on a forgotten day in October. Surely the partridge came back and nestled beside the foundation. The mist sizzled on the tin hat of the stove pipe.

3

Moonface

A week passed. Alice and I sat on the porch swing. My head was in her lap. We hadn't seen a cloud all day. The sun was like a photograph of a sun. We'd shared a box of animal crackers for lunch.

It might have been three or four. Alice clapped a hand over my mouth. I struggled to sit up. I watched Shiloh come over the top of the hill on a bicycle. Inexplicably, it was a girl's bike—a sissy bar was clamped behind the banana seat; a white wicker basket decorated with bright plastic flowers hung between the handlebars. He wore a green poncho that flapped as he descended. He dragged his feet in the gravel, as the pedals egg-beat. He coasted into the driveway and dumped the bike onto its side.

I ran out to greet him.

He raised his hands to ward me off. A plaster cast covered his left wrist. He tugged on the poncho, first one side, then the other. He didn't seem to be able to lift his arms above his head.

“He needs some help,” said Alice.

Instead of answering, he struggled some more.

“Maybe you should have stayed there a little longer,” I said.

Bruises hugged the bones of his face. He blinked slowly. He seemed to be reconciling the place with his memory and this seemed to take an inordinately long time. What he did was walk over to us. “Grab the hood,” he said.

He backed out from under the poncho, leaving me holding it.

A stenographer's pad dangled from a string necklace. He took a spot beside Alice on the swing. Perspiration bloomed at his hairline and rolled into his bloody eyes.

“I stole the bike.”

This, of course, didn't even scratch the surface.

“I'm not hearing things very well.”

“I'm sorry,” said Alice.

“Am I shouting?” Shiloh asked.

His voice hardly reached me. I shook my head.

“I'm out of breath. Of course that I'm here at all is a miracle. I'm going to try to live my life with a constant awareness of that.”

I went inside and got a glass of water and brought it out for him. He thanked me and drank it down. He said “fine” and “smell” and “horse.” Maybe he forgot that he was talking; the words dribbled out of his mouth.

“All further communications must be conducted on the paper I've provided. Unfortunately, in the process of cycling, I lost my pen. If you don't mind, I'm going to retire. Tomorrow, I will outline a few plans for our future. I only trust you haven't let the garden go to shit. Comrades. Statues. You silent fools. Delinquent mimes.”

I followed him inside. He poked around the kitchen and pantry. I watched him peer out toward our garden. Turning around he almost bumped into me. “Don't mind me, my head's scrambled.” He walked past the basement door and patted the frame with his cast. In the living room he studied the sofa where I'd found him. We'd gotten the blood off the floor, but the upholstery hadn't given it up so easily. I followed him up the stairs. “It's probably real quiet right now.” All I could hear was his breathing. I followed him into his room. He leaned against me as he kicked off his shoes. There was a scab in the crook of his arm where an IV must have been. I helped him into bed. I pulled the blankets up to his chin. His eyes were already closed and for a moment I was taken with the efficiency with which he'd made the passage from consciousness to sleep. “If I'm not up in the morning, come check on me.” He didn't look to see my response. I flipped the lights off and backed out of the room.

In the kitchen I told Alice that it was a miracle he got here, how he barely made it up the stairs.

“He's probably on all sorts of medication,” said Alice.

“What do we do now?”

“We watch him like a hawk.”

I banked the fire. I put my palms on the cold metal and waited for the heat.

 

The next morning Shiloh paused outside our door. “I'm going downstairs to make breakfast.”

I considered going to help him with the stairs, but underneath our blankets, Alice and I were naked. Her body began saying the nicest things to mine.

We listened as he scuffed his butt down the stairs, one at a time.

“Blessed mercy,” he said. “Whore's sons. Cocksucking gravity.”

It occurred to Alice that he might burn the house down around us. We dressed and went downstairs. He turned when we came into the kitchen. Somewhere he'd found enough wood to get the stove started up. Eggs and American cheese bubbled in the skillet. The thin envelope of heat made us huddle close. He had his mouth half open and he whistled while he breathed. He pivoted toward us and shared a wry smile.

“Did you sleep all right?” Alice asked.

Instead of answering, Shiloh ducked his head under the sink's faucet and wet down his hair.

Alice took a spot at the kitchen table. “Looks like you did some damage,” she said.

“Breakfast is ready,” said Shiloh, carrying the skillet to the table. I got the utensils and napkins and plates. He pulled the string necklace with the pad of paper out from beneath his shirt. He tore some sheets out and shoved them in front of Alice.

After Alice finished with the papers, she passed them to me.