The Best People in the World (3 page)

And then the bell shot us into the hall.

Later, Ray told Chrissy that she could be the queen of the Lumber Age, because she gave him a woody.

4

Flood

The congested halls between bells, the stoned kids, the bullies and the scared-o's, the kids from the marching band with their heavy plastic cases. The cymbal crash of locker doors and the zip spin of combination locks. Everywhere I turned, girls—in jersey dresses and faded dungarees. But they were the wrong girls somehow. We honed our peripheral vision out of necessity. We existed in a state of hyperawareness and we had dull, thoughtless faces.

I stopped when I heard my name. People flowed around me. Miss Lowe stood at the threshold to the teachers' lounge. “Someone looks pensive,” she said. She looked at me with an intensity that made me sick. Her pea-colored sweater, her suede boots, the point of her chin, her pale pink gums.

I wanted to appear as though I had a lot on my mind, but I was afraid I'd overdone it. I wanted to convey the impression of being thoughtful. I didn't want to look like one of those kids who moved their lips when they read.

“I was spacing out.”

We were close enough that I could smell the banana in her shampoo.

She looked at me. I looked at my shoes. One of the laces had come undone. I knelt down. All of a sudden I was sprawled in the hall.

“Wipeout,” someone said.

The other kids stepped over me. Girls in short denim skirts stepped over me. I was invisible to them.

Miss Lowe gave me her hand. She leaned back and pulled me to my feet.

“Thought I lost you for a second.”

I couldn't make up my mind about the color of her eyes. I hung my head. “I was pushed.”

“I'll bet it was an accident.”

“I don't believe in accidents.”

Already the current was abating; kids slipped through doors.

“No?”

Miss Lowe inspired me to have opinions. I said, “Some people see everything as an accident. They're always asking how this or that happened, and they always come up with the idea of an accident. My mother claims my father is accident prone, but nothing bad ever happens to him. Meanwhile, her first husband was killed when a type of deer they have in Germany jumped off an overpass and through the windshield of their car.”

“How awful.”

“If he'd swerved the deer could have killed my mother, then I wouldn't be here.”

“Well,” she said, like adults will when confronted by a kid's stupidity. But after a moment she added, “I'd miss you.”

Miss Lowe, I thought, who have you mistaken me for? You are my teacher, but there is, also, some ambiguity. I hope that I have a tragic accident or that I do something foolishly brave to confirm what you are thinking. And I knew that there was no way that she was thinking what I was thinking. She had to have some higher purpose in mind. The three freckles on her neck formed a line that pointed to her collarbone.

“It would be a tragedy,” I said. “I suppose.”

In class she seemed so self-possessed, as if she had weighed and measured everything we might possibly say. But now a quick sound escaped her, a laugh. I don't know if I'd heard her laugh before. I wanted to hear that happy sound again. If she'd laughed when I'd fallen down, I could have fallen again, but she laughed at what I'd said and I was less certain of my ability to reproduce that.

“Then again, if I weren't alive my grandfather could stop sleeping on the porch and move into my room. Of course, he wouldn't be my grandfather, either.”

One of the science teachers walked behind Miss Lowe to see which brainless fool she was talking to. He stopped to tap on the foggy glass of a terrarium. Then he let his eyes drift down Miss Lowe's back.

“Your grandfather sleeps on the porch?”

“He's an iconoclast. Which means…well, I guess you know what it means. He spent his life's savings trying to contact my grandmother.”

“Where is she?”

“She's dead. He tried to contact her with a psychic.”

The hall was empty, but for the two of us. I had to be somewhere, certainly.

Miss Lowe stepped toward me, pulling the door closed behind her. She reached out and brushed a fingernail across the shoulder of my shirt. “Dust,” she said.

I said, “Miss Lowe, do you think that I could meet you some time at a neutral location?” I had to make it ridiculous to say it at all.

“By neutral, I presume you mean somewhere away from school.”

“And, obviously, not a bar or a library, though a library would be pretty neutral for me.”

“We couldn't talk in a library.” She might have been looking at my lips.

“You would really meet me at a diner?”

She closed her eyes for a second. She seemed to be working out something complicated. Maybe she was thinking about aqueducts or Pythagoras. I was afraid she was going to say something, like, I'm very disappointed in you. Sometimes in class this look would come over her as if, despite our chirping questions and mouth breathing, she found herself alone in the room. Now her lips started to make this shape, this spreading, opening shape. She said, “Okay.”

 

From my parents' house it was about a fifteen-minute walk to the river. If you knew where to look, you could find the old limestone footers that were all that was left of the bridge my grandfather had helped build.

I walked along the river's sun-cracked bank. Wavelets licked at
the shore, at the junk that managed to climb out of the water. Pieces of nylon rope harnessed rafts of rotting saw grass. Everywhere you saw those white peas, like the eyes of poached fish, the broken Styrofoam from beer coolers, and those brittle life-preserver rings they sold in drugstores. The senseless meanderings of raccoons and birds were preserved in the mud like an ancient language. The water stunk, sometimes of sewage, sometimes of kerosene. The same stuff ran through the pipes in my parents' house. The greatest surprise in my life was coming across odorless water.

When I thought I'd gone far enough along the relatively clear and open riverbank, I stumbled my way through the brambles and saw grass, knowing full well I'd likely scare up yellow jackets and mud daubers and possibly cottonmouths.

The night before, we were gathered in the kitchen. Mary rolled chicken breasts in coconut flakes. As we watched, she plopped them into a pan of hot oil.

“I saw Shiloh finally,” Fran said, walking over to tug on the refrigerator door. “He's put on some weight.”

“When did he get back in town?” asked Mary. When the coconut turned brown, she fished the chicken pieces out of the oil. She set the meat on a wire rack to drain.

“Fran spotted his place this summer,” I said.

“Where'd you see him?” asked Pawpaw.

“He was down by the plant.”

“He was probably collecting parts for his paranoia boxes.” Pawpaw raised his hands to indicate a shoebox-size device. “He claims they monitor a secret radio frequency our government plans to use in the event of a nuclear catastrophe.”

Mary shivered. “They don't work do they?” She found doubt irresistible.

“Of course not,” Fran said, reaching over to pat her forearm. “It's just a bunch of wire and a little blinking light. That's people for you. They don't know science from nonsense.”

“I don't suppose anyone is going to get it in their heads to run him off again.”

“People tried to run him off?” I asked.

“Some fools tried to burn his place down,” said Pawpaw, “but the place wouldn't burn. It was too damp.”

“While they were dicking around, he snuck up behind them with an axe handle.” Fran nodded his head. “What they should have done is left it to the cops. They could bust him for vagrancy. That place of his is an illegal encampment.”

“I'm not crazy about vagrancy laws,” Pawpaw said.

“Your grandfather is an extremely moral person,” Fran told me. “That's his privilege for surviving a war. He's got ideals. Most people only have principles.”

“I just don't see how you can hold a person liable for their luck,” explained Pawpaw.

I didn't understand how my parents could know so much about a ghost.

 

I was unsticking myself from the puckerbrush when I spotted the dark little home. It looked ancient and abandoned. The walls were swollen particle board, the roof, a sheet of tin held in place with round stones. Tufts of yellow insulation shivered to register a breeze. I saw a figure walk out, shirtless and wearing canvas pants. He looked like he'd just woken from a nap, sort of unsteady. The muscles of his shoulders were stacked like rocks, but he was soft around the middle. He walked about twenty feet from the house, stopped, tilted his head back, and pissed in the grass.

I turned around and started to pick my way back to the river.

“Hey,” he called out to me.

I froze. If I'd run I don't think he could have done a thing about it.

“You found me,” he said.

“I wasn't looking for you.”

“Bullshit.” It looked like someone had slapped his chest with a wide brush of black paint.

“You really live in there?” I asked, pointing at his house. The front door had scraped clear a half-moon of dark earth. The house was the losing turn in a game of pickup sticks.

“You want to see inside?”

I shook my head.

“Suit yourself.”

He made a visor with his hand and scanned the panorama.

“You come all the way out here by yourself?”

I said, “It's a free world.”

“Oh, man,” he said, “I wish you hadn't told me. I wanted to be surprised when I found out.”

There wasn't much out there to distract us from each other.

“Want to see something?”

I didn't give him an answer.

He ducked back inside his place. In the next moment he came out waving a long brass rod. An extension cord trailed from his other hand. He stabbed the rod into the ground, twisting it back and forth to force it deeper. A power cord extended from the top of the rod. He asked me to back up, then he plugged it in. Nothing happened.

“What's it supposed to do?” I asked.

“Give it a second.”

I expected sparks to start leaping off the rod, or maybe it would melt.

Then, just a few inches from where the rod stuck into the earth, a worm came writhing to the surface. And then another and another.

“Cool, huh?” He seemed a little old for the expression. I suppose, like everything around us, he'd scavenged it from somewhere else.

When he unplugged the device, the worms retreated into the earth. “It makes a great Father's Day gift.”

My eyes traced the extension cord back inside his place. “How'd you get electricity out here?” I knew he was stealing it. It wouldn't be difficult to tap into a streetlight or a telephone pole, but he'd still need half a mile of extension cords. It was hard to believe.

“I worked out a deal with someone who had access to spools of wire. You are aware that there's another economy, a gray market, that exists in response to the insidious capitalist markup?”

“So you basically stole it.”

“I haven't stolen anything. They were compensated.”

“What did you give them?”

“It just so happens I was able to pay in legal tender, which I had accumulated in exchange for other goods and services.”

“Your paranoia boxes.”

“Disaster scanners and worm prods, this and that.” He coiled up the extension cord and pried the metal rod from the ground.

“Where did you go when you left here?”

“If you can find it on a map, chances are I've been there.”

“And you came back here?” I asked.

The two of us looked at his bankrupt little house.

“I have to be somewhere, right?” said Shiloh. “The opposite of somewhere is nowhere and I'm not interested in being there.”

“You mean dead?”

“What a strange bird you are, son of Fran.”

I told him my first name.

“Thomas, I'm here to rebuild my heart.”

I looked around us, at the silent river, the empty sky. What was wrong with me that drove people to talk like that?

“I should get going.”

“You don't have to ask my permission. You can go whenever you want to. My foremost belief is that a person has the right to do as he or she feels.

“I wasn't asking your permission.”

“And if you'd listened, you'd know I can't grant it to you anyway.”

“I'm not the strange bird. You're the strange bird.”

Shiloh put his hands over his chest. He staggered backward. “You got me,” he said. “I'm wounded.”

I was angry all of a sudden, for walking all the way out there, for his stupid answers, for this feeling inside my chest like an unreachable itch.

“Well, what is it?” asked Shiloh.

“What is
what?
” I shouted back.

“The thing driving you crazy.”

 

I didn't see Miss Lowe for the two weeks between Christmas and New Year's. She'd told the class she'd be visiting her sister outside Chattanooga. I felt her absence acutely. I did stupid things like sniff soap at the pharmacy trying to determine the brand she used. Before the break everyone had given her presents—chocolate apples, winter gloves, a bootjack. I put a card on her desk that read, “Miss Lowe, You will be receiving a one-year subscription to
Popular Mechanics
magazine, Courtesy of the Mahey family. Merry Christmas!” Mary had bought subscriptions for all my teachers, at a discount, from someone at our church.

 

My pawpaw stayed on the screen porch, smoking cigarettes and growing thinner. He slept out there on a cot. He came inside for meals and, sometimes, to use the bathroom. The azalea bush beside the porch door showed signs of ammonia poisoning. He liked to lie in his cot, entertaining his thoughts. Most of his thoughts revolved around mornings he'd spent smoking in France when he was sixteen and seventeen. He could remember the faces of the people he knew then, their boy faces and girl faces, their sleeping and tortured and peaceful faces. Mostly he liked to think about the faces they made while they smoked, what he thought of as their true faces. Often when they weren't smoking, they were scared, but most of the time while they were smoking, it was beautiful. The cigarettes were free.