The Best People in the World (33 page)

Shiloh blew the matches out as Alice and I cycled through signs we'd made:

 

Happy
Birthday
To You

Happy
Birthday
To You

Happy
Birthday
Dear
Shiloh

Happy
Birthday
To You

 

Alice's idea: Happy and Birthday were on opposite sides of the same piece of paper; To You was alone; and Dear and Shiloh shared a card. He got all choked up. Nothing could get him to wipe the tears off his face—they got hung up in his sideburns, they lined up on his quivering jaw.

Make a wish
, I wrote on the back of To You.

“I wish that I had friends like you a long time ago. I wish that this ringing goes away.”

You can't say what you wish for
, added Alice.

“I didn't mean to say that out loud,” Shiloh said, looking truly heartbroken.

I cut the cake. Crying had left Shiloh's mouth so dry that he had to drink water with each bite to get it down.

He thanked us both continuously.

Would he like his present now?

There was no way for him to get the words out. His meaty lips struggled to hold his face together. “But you already got me a cake.”

Alice produced the package from the pantry, just a paper bag rolled over at the top.

He squeezed it, weighed it in his hands, bent it carefully. “I have no idea.”

We pointed to the message written on the bag. It said,
Thanks for keeping an eye out for us
.

“Okay,” Shiloh said, opening the bag. It was a white terry-cloth hat with “LIFEGUARD” embroidered around the crown. Alice had picked it up on clearance at the five-and-dime. He balanced it on his head like a book.

3

Apology

The first snowstorm of the year began in the middle of the night. We woke up to pine boughs unburdening themselves in chain reactions. Snow melting in the crotches of beech trees turned the bark a more steely shade of gray. Sodden red birches appeared as frayed as lengths of rope. Sticky snowflakes pinwheeled down.

Alice and I ran outside to throw snowballs at each other. Shiloh stood on the front step and watched. He was afraid to participate. What about his mask? I asked. He went down to the basement and got it. He adjusted the cotton batting so that it didn't bother his nose.

“Beware of Owlface!” Alice shrieked.

Shiloh sent a snowball over my head. He lifted the mask off so he could speak. “No ice balls.”

I hit him in the stomach with a loosely packed projectile.

“Got me!” he shouted. He lobbed a snowball at Alice.

The mask made him look very sad, just the two eye holes and the suggestion of a beak. He didn't dodge or duck, but stood stock still. He had to face us for fear of taking a shot to the back of his head.

Ignoring me, Alice focused her battery on Shiloh.

He may have assumed he was giving as good as he was getting, but his throws, hindered by his tender ribs, were usually weak and off the mark.

Alice kept pounding him.

When he threw one my way, I intentionally moved into it. His eyes lit up when it caught me. “Argh,” I said.

Alice made a lucky throw that burrowed into one of the eye holes.

“Time out,” I distinctly heard him say, almost cheerily.

She got him again, after he'd lifted the mask off. She caught him
on the chin. Certainly he was startled. I have heard that stress and injuries, even fatigue, can magnify involuntary reactions. I preface this because of what happened the moment she hit him—he relieved himself. He looked down, disappointed with his body's failure. “Oh Christ,” he said. Alice was covering her mouth when a fastball caught the side of her head. I threw it. Yes.

Shiloh scoured the damp spot with a handful of snow.

“Don't blame me,” Alice cried. She ran over to Shiloh. “Shiloh. Shy. Look at me. You're being such a baby. Here.” She grabbed his jaw and tried to aim his face at her.

“Stop!” he said.

We stood in the middle of acres of diamonds.

Alice let go of him. “Fine,” she said. She pleaded her case to me. “How was I to know?”

“You heard him call ‘Time out.'”

“He was laughing. How long has it been since he's laughed about anything?”

I told her I didn't know, not as an answer, but to say I was washing my hands of this. What need did I have for excuses?

“You SOB, Thomas. So he pissed himself. He thought his head was going to fall off. What are you doing? Look at me.”

I had decided to go inside. I wanted to do something for my feet. “I don't understand why you won't apologize.”

“What's come over you people? I can't live like this. Tell me, Thomas, why are you sad?”

“Because you're lying.”

I didn't think that she would try to leave and I didn't think her car would start and I didn't think it would make it up the slippery hill, but I was wrong three times.

 

I took a bath. With my ears underwater I thought I heard sounds from miles away, tractor trailers and railcars, vehicles approaching and pulling away. The whole world kept on moving while I passed time in a bathtub. My legs were bent double, my bony heels touched my bony ass. I'd gotten that tall.

Finally Shiloh knocked on the bathroom door. I climbed out of the tub. He wanted to pick up my spirits.

Making firecrackers, he explained, was not unlike making a cigarette. A piece of oak tag was trimmed to size and, with a bit of fuse protruding from one end, it was rolled up. To ensure a good seal, tape closed off one end and then wound in an overlapping manner to the business end and snugly around the fuse. He lit a safety candle in the fireplace and set it on the table before us. When he showed the fuse to the flame, it hissed and sparked. With a flip of his wrist, he tossed the firecracker into the wood pile. A sharp clap and bits of cardboard and bark rained down around us.

Shiloh made another and threw it into the fire. Ash and embers jumped out.

I got his notebook and asked him if he could hear these explosions.

He shrugged.

Shiloh made a teeny little firecracker, about as big as a housefly, by putting a pinch of powder in the center of a piece of tape and twisting it up. He lit it and then placed it on top of his hat. I brushed it off. It went
pop!
somewhere inside the sofa. I told him not to do that.

I looked outside, at the failing light.

“Don't think about her,” Shiloh said.

 

I don't know how long we waited. Sometime in the middle of the night, headlights came over the hill. Shiloh went to bed. Alice came in and climbed onto my lap. “This is my apology,” is what she said.

4

Work

Clovis stopped by the house. It was out of the blue, entirely. Alice and I heard him coming over the hill. “Shit,” she said. We both expected there was some problem with the money we'd given him. Maybe his boss had found out, or some other business. I didn't see why we had to answer the door, but Alice gave me a shove. The reason he stopped by was to see if I was interested in some short-term work. Was I in or
out? he wanted to know. I made a snap decision. “Good,” he said. “You'll need a hat and gloves.” The next thing, I was in his truck.

He had his heater cranked over to bake. Most of the roads were just single lanes. He drove for half an hour. Apparently we'd gained some altitude because there was more snow here. He checked the side mirror, then turned the headlights off. “Now we're under the radar,” he said. The truck rolled to a stop. Beyond a small rise I could see a farmhouse set far back from the road. Clovis handed me a folding saw. Christmas-tree season. What he wanted was trees from five to eight feet high. I should drag them down near the road and he'd be back in a few hours to help me pick them up. Where was he going to be? Well, he wasn't going to be sitting around with his thumb up his ass. That wasn't quite what I'd meant. Did I have any food? He passed me a pack of Twinkies. The trees he wanted me to go after were just above the road. If I did a good job, he'd pay me a dollar a tree. I jumped out and he drove off.

I went over the rise. Row after row of trees stretched before me. I realized what was going on. On the one hand, I might have just walked home. But where exactly was my home? Some of the trees had ribbons on them, and since they were about the right height, those were the ones I started on. The saw was a right triangle with a blade for a hypotenuse. The frame was old, but the blade was new and the teeth bit into the soft wood. Once the blade had passed completely through the trunks, the trees didn't fall so much as swoon, a sort of loss of balance where they pirouetted and then, overwhelmed, collapsed on the snow. (I thought of the deer we'd seen lashed to car hoods, their legs failing under them, that same crumbling, only to wind up mounted on plaques on the walls of rec rooms or smoky corners of bars, and now these trees cut down and lashed and mounted in the same rooms.) A car drove up to the farmhouse. A couple got out. Someone went inside; someone stayed on the porch and smoked a pipe. Lights went on and off throughout the house. I stood stock still. The figure knocked the pipe to clear the bowl before going in. I crouched on one of the felled trees and ate the Twinkies. The moon rose. The lights went out in the farmhouse.

Two at a time I dragged the felled trees over close to the road. There was no sign of Clovis so I went back and cut some more trees, a few shorter ones—they sort of hopped off their stumps and fell, as stiff as tin soldiers. I'd knocked down maybe fifteen of the smaller ones when I heard the truck pull up. I peeked over the embankment and Clovis motioned for me to toss the trees down to him. There wasn't much growing on the hillside. They just sledded down. He tossed them in the back of the truck. We took care of all the big ones and I went back to grab the shorts. I grabbed four and dragged them to the truck, let them roll down to him. Going back to grab the others, I stopped about twenty yards shy of where I'd dropped the last tree. A shadow moved up the hill a ways, hugging tight to the tallest row of pines. The folding saw was where I'd used it last. I trotted over to pick it up, and when I got to it, I saw a figure running toward me. He had something in his hands that could have been a baseball bat or a gun, but couldn't have been, say, a telescope. We had a moment where we hoped we hadn't seen each other and then we were in a footrace. The last thing that registered as I turned to flee was that either he had the biggest pair of boots I'd ever seen or he was wearing snowshoes.

When I got to the top of the embankment, I started hollering that we had to GO! I didn't dare yell earlier because I thought that since Clovis already had the trees, he might not be inclined to wait for me, and, another thing, since my pursuer didn't know I had a partner, he might have been holding his fire figuring to catch me before I could get a car started. The guy behind me made all sorts of awful curses and oaths. Also he seemed to take two steps to my one. I leaped down the embankment, the saw held high overhead. Clovis was hanging out by the tailgate, probably wondering what I was yelling about, but when he saw the way I was moving, he raced to the driver's door and got inside. I tossed the saw in the bed and went up front. He had the passenger door open and the truck was already rolling away. I threw myself inside. For a moment it looked like a clean escape; I checked the side mirror and there was no one back there. But Clovis couldn't find first gear, so the truck wasn't under power, just sort of rolling along with gravity. The guy came bounding
down the little hill. He fixated on me. Things got real slow. I saw that it was an ax he carried, a single-bitted one. It was obvious that Clovis had no intention of stopping. With a jab the stranger pushed the ax through my passenger-side window, just as simple as could be. The glass hung in the air for a second and then it was all these noises at once. The radio played the last song I would ever hear. The guy at my window had to be about forty; he was breathing so hard, it was the same as being yelled at. He'd stuck the ax through the window with the blade pointing away from me, but neat as could be, he switched it around so the blade sat under my chin.

“Stop the truck,” he said.

Clovis struggled to mate the gearshift with the transmission.

My pursuer took a hand off the ax handle to reach through the exploded window and lift the door-lock button. Clovis found a gear and my throat jumped toward the blade. The man turned the ax sideways so the metal only brushed against my cheek as it retreated through the window, and we rumbled off. I saw the man wind up to deliver the ax head into the rear tire, which, because it was spinning, wrenched the tool from his hands. Luckily Clovis's truck had a dualie rear end; the rear axle still had three good tires turning. The ax made a few loud orbits around the wheel well before it was ejected. My pursuer stood in the road, hands on his hips.

I reported what the man had done to the tire.

Clovis didn't turn the headlights on right away. A guy like that obviously didn't know when to quit.

“Sorry about your truck,” I said.

I could hear the tire disintegrating behind us. Great black chunks of rubber flew off and littered the road. The night air came in through the smashed window.

“People don't show any sense,” said Clovis. “He might have killed you, and over some trees. See if you can't plug up that hole with your jacket. I catch colds easy.”

We went over hill and dale, through towns that I could never find again. Finally we pulled over beneath a highway underpass. The two of us got out to survey the damage. The outside tire had torn itself
apart; only the two flapping sidewalls remained on the rim. And the window, which he checked, proved uncompromisingly broken, gone forever and always. Clovis said something about this eating into his profits. I counted the white circles of the tree stumps piled in back. There were fifty trees back there, thirty-one of which were mine. With thirty-one dollars I could buy two weeks' worth of food. But that maniac had ruined it for me. A panel truck drove up and parked tail to tail with us.