The Best People in the World (34 page)

Clovis told me to wait for him inside the cab. A guy got out of the other truck and the two of them had a conversation. The guy in the other truck wore a great big ski jacket about two sizes too large for him. It almost covered his knees. Then they transferred the trees from our truck to the other one. The panel truck rumbled off and Clovis got back in.

He handed me a fifty.

I said thirty was okay, since that's what I'd agreed on and since his truck had taken a beating, not me. It wasn't coming out of his pocket, Clovis explained. I should take the fifty and that was that. I'd convinced myself I'd never see home again, but when he went around a corner I knew where we were.

It wasn't until I'd gone inside—when Alice screamed—that I noticed the thin red stripe along my jawbone where the blade had passed. She cleaned me up and bridged the cut with a series of bandages that pulled my face off center. It didn't hurt until the edges stiffened up overnight, and then it ached so that I tried not to talk or chew. The black hairs of my beard got confused coming back in and formed red eruptions that I couldn't keep my fingers off. When he saw me touching the scab, Shiloh reminded me, unless I wanted it to scar, I should leave it alone. I picked at it; a scar didn't seem entirely undesirable.

5

Weather

What seemed at first like an unremarkable storm hunkered down and refused to leave. For a while we listened to an AM station on Shiloh's
portable, but once the battery died, that was that. We stoked fires in the living room and the entrance hall, but the heat wasn't adequate to fill the place. We didn't have storm windows, but the shutters actually worked, so Shiloh and I played rock-paper-scissors to see who had to go outside. I lost. I latched the shutters that latched and nailed shut the ones that didn't. Alice took a wooden ruler she'd found in the kitchen and used it to stuff rags in the chinks between the window frames and beneath the door.

We compartmentalized the house, shutting and plugging the doors to the basement, the pantry, the mudroom. We closed closets and improvised blinds with sheets and blankets. Like that, with everything as snug as a drum and the fires blazing, things weren't so bad. The floors stayed cold, along with the walls, but the air itself cheered us. The hot-water tank didn't have the capacity to warm the pipes, but if someone wanted a bath—it was the only way to flush the chill out of your bones—we'd set the stockpot on the stove.

Outside, chickadees and nuthatches huddled on the barbed wire. Drifting snow rose in peaks beside the fence posts, but the wind carved perfect, symmetrical gullies beneath the wire. Two days passed before a plow showed up.

As Alice pointed out it was only December, yet three feet of snow had piled up outside. We had to be self-sufficient if we planned to live out in the middle of nowhere. We decided to take our remaining cash and sock away a larder.

I dug the car out. Somehow in my exertion—and because the cold sapped the elasticity from my skin—the cut split open again. When the car refused to start, Shiloh brought the battery inside to warm it by the fire. Per his instructions I carried a tin bucket of hot ashes outside and spread them beneath the oil pan.

After we returned the battery to the car, Shiloh put a few drops of rubbing alcohol on the air filter. The car roared to life. We waited inside while the engine warmed up. When everything looked hunky-dory, the three of us got in. The upholstery was like sheet metal. Alice fishtailed up the hill, the front wheels clawing and the rear tires just sort of getting dragged along. The snow had transformed everything
into soft humps, really a desert landscape with trees poking through. This wasn't civilization; civilization was something buried. The wind caused steady streams of snow to drift across the road, every icy particle playing leapfrog. Even the road echoed as if it was hollow, as ponds can freeze and then the water beneath trickle out, so a thin skin of ice arcs over emptiness.

 

We loaded up on things like potatoes, rice, and onions. They almost couldn't go bad. We grabbed a few pounds of butter to stash in the freezer. We grabbed chili mixes and tomato paste. Alice and Shiloh went nuts in the canned aisle, from kidney beans to mandarin oranges (a treat we planned to save for the darkest days). Shiloh grabbed another box of matches. Alice picked up a bar of beauty soap.

We filled two shopping carts. Twenty pounds of white rice. Evaporated milk. Two pounds of salt (this I think was for tanning the rabbit hides). A case of potted meat—for the protein. Three canned hams. Enough orange juice concentrate to fill a kiddie pool. Four dozen eggs—to be eaten before the potted meat. A flour sack as big as a pillow. Shiloh had the butcher put extra wrapping around ten pounds of hamburger, ten pounds of chicken thighs, and ten pounds of flank steak, figuring we could bury the whole cache in a snowbank. Peanut butter in a plastic pail. A bucket of shortening. Shiloh insisted on a five-pound bag of frozen smelt. Spaghetti. Ricotta cheese. Cottage cheese. American cheese. Cheddar from up the lake in Shelbourne. Did Alice know how to make pies? We got pumpkin filling, mincemeat, cans of blueberries, all kinds of apples, but especially red delicious, especially winesap. Cool Whip, Shiloh happened to know, could be stored indefinitely. Sweet peas. Green beans. Pinto beans. Creamed corn. Peanuts. Raisins. Toilet paper in gigantic “institution-size” twenty-four packs. Dried apricots. Cinnamon. Breakfast sausage. Sunflower seeds. Animal crackers. I craved Twinkies. More Clark bars. Ritz crackers. Nilla wafers. Cheese spread. Jiffy Pop. Little paper muffin cups. A canister of cloves. Orange marmalade. French's mustard. Or Gulden's? Four loaves of Wonder bread.

The cashier, a glass-haired woman, flirted with the bag boy who
slumped at the end of that river of commerce. He made no attempt to impose any order on the bags. When a bag of cans came apart in his hands, he gave us a contemptuous look.

Shiloh tried to ease the kid's burden, told him not to worry about the bread, the eggs, the apples. As things came down the conveyor, Shiloh talked about how unimportant they were.

The initial total exceeded our resources by about thirty-six dollars. To help us out the cashier got a flier and started plugging in coupons for everything she remembered us buying, but we were still twenty over. Alice and I gave up our sweets, the ricotta, the cloves, the Ritz. Eleven dollars. We gave up the marmalade and the premade pie crusts. The smelt had to go, which depressed Shiloh. Alice and I reviewed the receipt, dumped the canned beets.

Finally we gave all our money and the kid released our food to us.

 

Shiloh pronounced himself rehabilitated and, using tin snips, removed his cast. He made no mention of the fact that his hearing still hadn't come back in any measurable fashion. The injured wrist looked slightly jaundiced, about what you would expect from something that had been hidden from the light for six weeks. He put it to his nose and sniffed it. He forced Alice and me to sniff it. What kind of smell was that? he wanted to know. We agreed, it was familiar, but there was something nauseating about it. Cloying, said Alice. The particulars of this stink had a hold on Shiloh. Why couldn't he remember where he'd smelled this smell before? He wouldn't wash the arm—it was evidence. He searched the fridge and pantry for the source, the all important original smell that his arm was derived from.

“He's off his fucking rocker this time,” Alice said. “Who gets infatuated with their own stink? He has to let this thing go. If he shoves that arm beneath my nose one more time, I'll chop it off.”

Narrowed things down, yet?
I wrote on his notebook (he carried the notebook around again).

“Animal, vegetable, or mineral,” he said.

You think you might be taking this a bit far?

“Odors are often considered a bastard nation of science, viewed as
characteristics of matter rather than matter itself. It is possible that as a result of my accident, my olfactory sense has compensated for the damage to my auditory center. This is just a theory, but I have smelled something just like this arm.” He presented the arm between us, although not so close that I might smell it casually. “This sort of identification, I recognize, is extraordinary. The arm is only the first step—I have to train myself to harness these new powers.”

 

Due to the exponential growth of this neglected sense, Shiloh requested that Alice and I cut back on seasonings. He thanked us for our cooperation. Since smell comprised such a large component of taste, even a dash of pepper became an almost unbearably complex experience. Had someone left an onion uncovered? Yes. See, the onion molecules had stuck to the butter molecules and this made his French toast (no cinnamon, just eggs and bread) unappetizing. It's going to snow a little later, he'd say. And either it did or else a high front would come in (smelling of dear old Kentucky) to nudge the snow off to our north.

“It's not mineral,” he told me, after inhaling the intoxicating pale skin of his forearm. “If you can imagine, mineral smells are
heavy
.”

“Is there something, maybe you can detect it, Alice, cedary about this?” He presented the arm to us one more time.

She said, “If there was I'd put it in my closet.”

Shiloh sniffed it again. “No.”

Alice asked him if he'd smelled his bellybutton recently.

Shiloh lifted his shirt and picked at the moist hole. He put the finger to his nose.

Familiar?

“I can't believe it,” he protested. “Why would my arm and my bellybutton smell the same? It doesn't make any sense. Look here.” He showed her a section of his notebook. “I recognize over two hundred unique odors, but my arm ends up smelling like my bellybutton and I can't make the connection. It was right before me. I can't think with all these impossible smells. It's like my nose is farsighted. How can I eat when I'm smelling the kitchen, the miserable bathroom? A
cold front is on its way here from the Arctic—I smell all of goddamn Canada, for Christ's sake—and I'm trying to differentiate my bellybutton from my arm. And you know what? You want to hear my prediction? I'll tell you this: it's only going to get worse.”

6

The Room Inside Is Immaterial

Shiloh came into our bedroom and woke me. He led me to the kitchen. Outside, the snow looked indigo. He opened up the faucet. I couldn't believe we'd run out of water.

“No,” he said. “It's frozen.”

This, he explained, was an emergency. Either we thawed the pipes before a hard freeze set in or else we said good-bye to indoor plumbing. Shiloh showed me how the pipes ran along the baseboard before they poked through the floor. If the pipes burst down below, then the well would empty right into the basement. But the basement floor was dry.

He sent me to restring blankets over the windows while he tended to the stove. We stoked fires in both fireplaces.

We ladled warm water on the pipes. After half an hour he'd coaxed a trickle of the coldest water into the sink.

I asked him where he'd learned to do this.

“In a tiny town called Improvisation,” said Shiloh.

There were new angles on his face. His clothes sort of floated around him.

When I returned upstairs the place was sauna hot. Alice had kicked the sheets away. She was laid out on the platter of our bed like a Christmas goose.

7

Return to Improvisation

As resident expert it fell to me to find a tree for the house. I bundled up, tucked the hatchet in my pocket, and went out. The wind had
made steep-sided wells around the trunks of trees and, in some cases, I could see all the way down to the shivering grass.

Unlike the symmetrical wonders at the tree farm, the hillside above our house was crowded with lopsided and dog-legged pygmies. I settled on a specimen that had, from one angle, a reasonable profile. I knelt down and started with the hatchet. I pulped the base until it was as white and hairy as a green onion. Once it fell I kicked the resilient fibers apart. I felt every bit a murderer.

Back at the house some trick of the wind caught the smoke rising out of the chimney and pushed it down across the field. It left the faintest stain on the empty snow. The patchwork of blankets hanging inside the windows made me want to return to that warm and filthy air.

I tugged the tree inside. The two of them had passed the time making ornaments. There were paper stars and paper birds. A garland of stick figures linking arms. Alice pointed to the ornaments she had made and by contrast I knew which belonged to Shiloh. He'd made a rocketship out of a couple of Sunkist cans. Alice pretended not to notice while I admired it. It was amazing what he could do with his hands. It had fins and a bullet-shaped top and there was a little gangplank that folded out, so you didn't know if it had just landed or was about to take off.

 

Whenever I kissed Alice's cold-scarred face, I'd find frizzled hairs she'd singed feeding wood to the fire. The palms of her hands were tough and dry. Her breasts filled her bras the way nutmeat filled shells. In bed we were a collision of bones. The horns of our pelvises rasped during sex. I'd tell her how much I loved her. I'd say how wonderful I felt. Your nose, I'd say, this smell, your fucking eyes. You're fire. She could have such fickle moods. She made the peace sign in front of her face, the tips of her fingers before her eyes, and then she stretched the arm in my direction, gesturing wires that connected our eyes.

“What? I see you.”

But she didn't have anything else to say so we just looked at each other as the light left the room, a quarter past four. Was I sleeping? she wanted to know. No. Could she tell me something? About her
self or about me? Herself. Sure. Sometimes a voice in her head told her to hate me.

 

Another morning, Alice and I entangled, trying to subdue each other, inflict points toward some colossal argument. Shiloh began banging pots. Alice and I dressed in the humid clothes we found trapped at the foot of the bed. We took the back stairs into the kitchen.