The Best People in the World (30 page)

Alice nibbled on some dry toast and stared out the window. I put the pages back in order.

I reached my hand across and patted Shiloh's purple fingers where they stuck out of his cast.

“Ask him what he was doing down there in the first place,” said Alice.

“Just like that? Now?”

“Write it down,” said Shiloh.

“You heard him,” said Alice.

I wrote,
You've never told us about your accident
.

“Just going to keep bird-dogging me,” he said.

Alice shook her head.

“We were worried about you,” I said.

His face showed no recognition. I wrote it down.

“I wanted to make sure we were safe. You won't believe me, but
that was what was on my mind.” He tore the last sheet of paper off and stuffed it in his pocket.

“Useless,” said Alice.

4

Fortitude

What woke me was Alice stripping the covers from the bed. The frosty air leaped onto me. It was either very early, or else about to rain. “Chop-chop,” she said. “If you want to soar with the eagles, you have to be ready to run with the hounds.” She took the buckle of my belt and branded me with the cold metal. “Get a move on,” she said.

I followed her down the stairs.

Shiloh's pink bicycle stood on the kitchen table.

“Voilà!” said Shiloh.

Alice asked me what I thought of it.

It was part of my nature that I couldn't think well if roused from sleep. What use did I have for a little girl's bike? I said, “It's very nice. Thank you.”

Alice swatted me across my chest.

Shiloh had a knack for interpreting gestures. “For Sonya.”

I endeared myself to them by pointing out a strand of cobweb beneath the seat.

Alice gave Shiloh the high sign and he picked it up and cradled it in his arms.

Was I coming? she asked.

The three of us crowded in the front seat while the bike rode in back.

“We should get a bow,” Shiloh suggested.

The five-and-dime was stocked for Halloween. Boxes and boxes of paper masks with thin elastic bands and painted faces. The anonymous latex faces of murderers and maniacs. Instead of ribbons Shiloh selected orange crepe-paper streamers.

Back in the parking lot, Alice wove the paper through the spokes
and then strung it back and forth from the sissy bar to the handlebars. We were lighthearted and smiling.

It started to rain, big, fat, greasy drops.

We put the bike back in the car. Alice told me to drive.

Shiloh said, “I'm sorry I might have hurt you. You are my best friends.”

Alice said, “I'm writing that we forgive him.”

“Good,” I said. “I think he's a bit fragile right now.”

Across the lake a narrow band of trees hugging the New York shore burned yellow and red, but everywhere else you looked you saw brown. Probably something to do with the long drought.

Most of the trees had already lost their leaves. Peering past the bare branches I glimpsed the secret symmetry of the land. It struck me that around us were hidden valleys and brown meadows that hadn't been visible to us before now. The grass lay down in the ditches. Leaves choked puddles. All at once we were at the Sound of Music Commune. There were no cars in the lot. No smoke trailed from the chimneys. Where were the picnic tables? The oil-drum grills?

I laid on the horn. Nothing happened. We got out.

“They must be working,” said Alice.

Shiloh walked over to the nearest house and peeked inside. But I knew he wouldn't see so much as a table, knew it because I noticed other changes. The wood that they'd stacked between the cedars had been removed. Under the eaves of the A-frame, a row of naked nails showed where someone had taken down all that painted gingerbread. Alice asked if I remembered flower boxes on the porch rails. The place looked destitute. Looking through the windows Shiloh saw that everything had been cleaned out. No sleeping bags. No bead curtains. There was no sign of their furniture or those futuristic stoves.

I pointed out to Shiloh where the gingerbread used to be.

“That's a crime,” he said.

Alice went from house to house. Not one had been spared.

She yelled, “Do we even know which house she lived in?”

In all the emptiness we only missed the little girl.

I carried the bike over to Gregor and Magdalena's place and
propped it under the eaves to keep it dry. The idea of wet crepe paper depressed me.

We loitered beside the car while the raindrops whistled down. Alice asked Shiloh where he thought they'd gone.

Shiloh nodded his head gravely. “Well, they wouldn't have any trouble slipping into Canada. There must be a hundred logging roads that cross the border without so much as a sign. It's not necessary to leave the country. Lots of folks head to California to see what that's about. From what I've seen, too many people are trying to impress each other out there, but once you've made the trip, it's just a short shot to Mexico. Farther south things just get weird. The Rockefellers own a whole forest in Central America; whenever one of their family gives birth to a bastard, they send them down there to oversee their coffee plantation. But there's plenty of space left in this country. If you want to find yourself, you head to Montana, or Alaska even. If you want to get lost, you don't have to move more than a block or two. If you go underground, not even your shadow can find you.”

Underground. I thought of the earthy smell in our basement.

Now mixed in with the rain, granules of white pinged down: snow.

“Let's get out of here,” Alice said, returning to the car and its heater.

I tapped Shiloh on the shoulder, nodded my head at the car.

He jogged back up onto the porch and picked up the bicycle. In the next instant he'd thrown it through the sliding glass door. It was madness. He stepped inside the empty house.

When he came out he couldn't conceal the look of triumph on his face. Cradled in his arms were four cardboard tubes—the blueprint plans.

5

Idyll

Shiloh announced he was feeling well enough to check his snares. And after what he'd been through, he deserved some recreation. If
the snares didn't work out, then he'd try the beaver ponds. He'd picked up a telescoping rod and reel somewhere. We waved him off. “Good luck,” we said. “Good luck.” We thought of fresh meat on the stove.

In preparation for his catch, Alice and I resolved to come up with something that might burn. A run of frosty mornings had depleted our stack of aviation magazines. We'd already looted the few loose beams from the wreckage in the yard, but thick steel hoops held the bulk intact. Armed with claw hammers and some wire cutters, we approached. However, this closer examination revealed that most of the wood was in no shape to burn. It crumbled in your fingers. When a nail punched through the sole of Alice's shoe and threaded the keyhole space between her big toe and its neighbor, we decided to give up our effort. The prospect of visiting the emergency room again took the wind out of our sails.

We decided to make one last visit to the swimming hole. We stared into that clear water, at the piled rocks and the leaf boats rushing over the top of the dam.

We undressed. The cold ground made our feet tingle. We jogged in place, gave little shouts, all in an attempt to work ourselves into a condition to get in the water. Alice grabbed my hand and we rushed in together. The cold water scalded us. It stole our breath and our grace. We flopped around. When we couldn't stand it another second, we thrashed our way to shore. And then, for a moment, the air felt positively tropical. We dashed back into the water to feel that way again.

The next time we came out, our hands were numb and cramped.

“So clean,” Alice said, meaning, I've never felt so clean in my whole life.

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you.” Meaning: I am in love completely; the argument for all of this is you; tomorrow I will try to pull you back into the water, and the day after.

It took a long time to get back into our clothes. We shuffled across the meadow.

At the top of the road, Shiloh was coming toward us. He had the duffel bag in front of his chest; the tip of the fishing pole whipped
back and forth in front of him. From his other hand dangled the long, puffy tail of Alice's fox.

Alice stormed inside—I thought so as to be spared seeing the animal reduced to a pennant. He probably wanted to tie it to the car's antenna. Seeing me, he waved his prize. “I caught the thief.”

Alice came back out holding the mantel clock over her head. It was, Shiloh liked to point out, the only beautiful thing he'd ever owned. The clock was about three feet high. Counterweights shaped like pine cones pendulumed at the end of tarnished chains.

In his silent world Shiloh didn't understand the transformation Alice had undergone. But he saw her intention. She searched the yard for something.

He was screaming, “Please, no! Not my clock!” The words piled on each other to form a single awful sound.

What Alice was searching for was something hard. She trotted over to the flagstone and flung the clock down. The effect was irreversible.

Shiloh sat down in the grass.

I gathered the clock pieces together in a paper bag. There was no way that I found everything. Some of the parts had been under tension; when the cabinet came apart, so did they.

“Will you talk to me?” Shiloh asked. “I don't know why she hates me.”

I pulled the notebook from around his neck. I wrote,
She's mad about the fox
.

He gave me a look of incredulity. His hand brought the tail before us—there was blood on the fur at the base of the tail—and pointed at it as if to say, This fox?

I nodded.

“Alice,” he yelled at our bedroom window. “You broke my clock because of a stupid animal. Who's crazy, Alice? You're the crazy one.”

I wrote,
And we're both concerned that we could have been blown up
.

“No,” he said. “Never.”

I wrote,
Did you think there was any chance of blowing yourself up?

He rubbed his fingertips around his eyes.

“I'm sorry,” he called to Alice, “for the fox, but especially for my accident.”