The Best People in the World (37 page)

 

At night Alice and I retired under a strata of blankets. Falling asleep required conquering the fear of being buried alive, an instinct that might be traced back to our earliest cave-dwelling ancestors. Just as we dropped off, gravity would hiccup and our feet would kick and claw beneath us. One time Alice scared me to the edge of death when, returning to our bed, she sat squarely on my chest. I tried to complain, but her weight pushed a whistle out—searching for my face she stuck her fingers in my mouth.

Many times the floorboards' creaking recorded trespassers who entered the room and curled beneath the bed. And in the loneliest hours I know I heard men stomping about on the roof. I could hear the scrape of hobnailed boots. If they came down off the ridgepole to stand by the dormers, only the blankets would have prevented them from watching us sleep. I expected to wake to breaking glass and their dark bodies rushing in.

 

The three of us sat in the living room. It was warmer after Shiloh and I discovered that the entrance-hall fireplace had a damper. That we only learned of it at this late date was the saddest story any of us knew. Closing the damper was a simple matter of shaking a lever until two metal doors swung down. The organ-pipe hum that, for months, we'd thought of as part of the house, stopped. Just how much wood we'd wasted was the only question worth considering.

“The damper,” Shiloh said. “That is something everyone knows about.”

Alice remembered hearing something about how there were supposed to be chains one could look at to determine whether the damper was in the open position.

“Some are like that,” said Shiloh, “but this system was different.”

We had started on the final row of wood.

2

Visitors

Alice and I were sitting in front of the living-room fireplace when something came down the chimney. It made a racket, scraping soot and creosote on its way. A black cloud pushed into the room. Alice vaulted the sofa and stopped halfway up the stairs. Did I get a good look? Did she? I sneaked back into the room, my fists held in a boxer's guard. In a pinch my will would cave. I edged to the woodpile and chose a club. I saw nothing unusual in the fireplace. I examined all sides of the sofa. I looked behind the window curtains. The room was empty.

I told Alice that whatever it was, it must have rolled under the sofa. Since I couldn't simultaneously lift the sofa and look under it, I asked her to be my eyes. She came down the stairs. I bent over to lift it up and Alice stopped me. Did I have to stick my fingers underneath? Couldn't I lift it up by the arm? This seemed like sound advice. I hoisted my end up off the floor. Well? There was nothing there. Was she sure?

“Behind you,” she said.

I dropped the sofa and danced away. A crow perched on the corner of the woodpile.

“Open the door and I'll shoo it out,” I told Alice.

“I think it's probably hurt. It landed in the fire.”

It looked perfectly normal, except that it had fallen out of the clean world and into ours.

“Do crows carry rabies?” Alice asked.

“No,” I said—though I had no idea then and still don't.

“I think we ought to examine it.”

It seemed perfectly reasonable coming out of her mouth. I unhooked the curtain and shook it out.

“Are you scared?” Alice asked.

I found it a bit unnerving when the animal cocked its head. I tried to toss the blanket on top of him, to sort of float it down. With one flap of his wings, he escaped my trap.

Alice recognized its plan. She yelled, “No!”

It probably thought it was in the clear until it struck the glass.

It was still shuddering when I reached it. One wing was tucked beside the body and the other stuck out, how an elegant man in a cape might take a bow. Some of the feathers had been singed. The eyes were only halfway closed.

“Is it dead?” Alice asked the only question.

“It's alive,” I said. Who could tell?

Alice carried it upstairs in the cradle of her arm.

 

In the middle of the night, Shiloh took a spill on the stairs; my ears perceived shock troops coming up. I expected the door to be shivered in. Alice forced me wide awake. We found him in the kitchen, dabbing the back of his head with our only sponge.

He said, “I was heading down to the basement and I thought I heard someone talking. When I turned around, my feet skated out from under me.”

Alice found a goose egg above his ear. Otherwise he didn't look so beat up.

I scratched a note,
Just your head?

“Talk to me,” he said, his voice sputtering.

“Can you hear, Shiloh?”

Alice wrapped some ice in a dishtowel and showed his hand how to hold it in place.

He turned to Alice. His eyes were wild. “The voice said, ‘Alexander Stephen Mills,' which is my given name. Who do you think it could have been? Alexander Stephen Mills. I'd give anything to see the people who know him.”

I asked Alice for her diagnosis.

She believed he was in a dream when he came down the stairs. She thought he needed a night of rest. The isolation had him conjuring up long-lost friends. She said she wouldn't be the least bit surprised if he remembered none of this in the morning.

I wanted him to return to his bed so I could return to mine.

“Shiloh is a massacre and Tanager is the name of my favorite bird. This describes perfectly how I felt at eighteen.” He stood up and tossed the dishtowel in the sink. “I'd like to thank you both for coming out.” He took the stairs one at a time. “I'll probably start hearing as soon as one of you says something interesting.”

 

When the crow came back to life, Alice named it Phoenix, after the Egyptian bird that lived for five hundred years above the desert, then fell in fire, only to rise again. These were things she knew just from living.

It was the fire stoker's job to collect grubs and spiders. Sometimes when I peeled back the bark, I found the worms they call red wigglers. Shiloh said it was a shame how the weather was outside. When the ground thawed we could use his electric prod to collect night-crawlers. We speculated that a crow fed such a diet might grow bigger than an eagle. I can't explain what that meant to us, the idea of a giant black bird to do our bidding.

 

We endured a series of disparate storms. Gray, dark clouds that brought an early dusk and a slanted salting of snow. Another time the air
turned white and snow came down in fluffy clumps. Finally a swirling wind tried to pull the clapboards off the house—the air was so agitated that the snow still drifted down a day later under a clear blue sky.

I was shoveling the porch when the plow truck came down the hill. The driver raised his hand as he went past. I shuffled out across the yard to stand beside the road. At the bottom of the hill, he turned around. The plow pushed a dense wave of snow above my knees before he came to a stop.

Leaning across the cab the driver cranked his window down. He wore a scruffy leather cap that sort of matched his face—he had windburned cheeks and acne scars. Maybe he was forty. The front seat was littered with newspapers, pull-top cans of soda pop, an empty box of doughnuts. A fresh mound of red sand, a shovel, and Styrofoam coffee cups were all that was in the bed. On the radio Johnny Paycheck sang “She's All I Got.”

“Something wrong?” he asked. A CB radio sat wedged on the dash.

I introduced myself. I said, “I always see you driving by.”

His name was Bill Legg. He said, “It's called a job, Thomas.”

It seemed that there was a slight embedded in his words.

“I was just digging us out,” I said.

“How many of you living there?”

“All of us,” I said, trying to redeem myself with a joke. He wore these big wool mittens and he rubbed one beneath his nose. “There's three of us.”

He looked at the house. “I believe it's owned by a bank in Montpelier.”

That was that, I figured. We'd been found out. And where could we go next? Jail?

“I don't imagine they'll give you any trouble. There's hundreds of places just like this scattered across the county. It used to belong to a Dutch family who ran a dairy farm, but they were what you might call trendsetters; they got out of the business.”

This was exciting and worthless news.

“At one time they owned the whole hill, I believe.”

“What was their name?”

“I'm useless with names.” He pointed a mitten at Alice's car. “Does that thing run?” The Plymouth was buried up to the fenders.

“Sure,” I said. In what I hoped would be a reassuring gesture, I waved my arm toward town.

“You and your friends have a phone?”

I tried to explain how we were doing a back-to-the-basics thing.

“You got to have someone check up on you from time to time,” said Bill Legg.

“We get along fine.” I really believed it.

“Suit yourself, I guess.” He shifted his attention back to the road, forgetting us.

I said, “Thanks for plowing, Mr. Legg.”

“You're welcome, Thomas.”

He took a mitten off so we could shake hands. Then he rolled up the window. I was standing there, waving. He motioned for me to move. He raised the plow, drove into the driveway, and dropped the blade about an inch behind the bumper of Alice's car. Backing up he dragged the snow into the road. Then he reset the blade and pushed it up the hill.

Alice and Shiloh waited for me in the kitchen. They wanted to know what had possessed me to flag down a complete stranger. It didn't seem any more reckless than hiding behind the shades. It was a relief to see a new face.

 

Shiloh apprenticed himself to the cross-country skis. He taught himself how to walk up slopes with his toes pushed apart. Pointing himself down the field, he would glide toward the ravine's edge. If he tried to change direction, the equipment came apart. He said if not for the ravine, he'd never stop. He said the person who could thread his way between the trees would live in harmony with winter. I watched him from the dormer windows. Sometimes he would scream and shout in pure exhilaration.

I had an enormous headache. Every now and again I launched into a violent coughing fit, as though some part of me had come loose inside my chest. Alice asked me not to talk, as it only seemed to
exacerbate my condition. Something about my cough drove her to distraction. Alice would stroke the back of her faithful pet and sigh if she sensed I might start up again. When I complained that the temperature in the room seemed to dip and soar from one moment to the next, she accused me of gross exaggeration. Phoenix refused to caw, but liked to stretch its mouth into a yawn, which is what it did from its roost on the headboard as I stole from the room.

 

Several hours later Alice found me huddled in her car. She led me back inside. What was wrong with me? she wanted to know. The bird whispered in her ear.

“You have a fever, silly goose. Didn't you notice how you weren't yourself? This is what you deserve for getting so run-down. I expect the bug was a gift from your snowplow friend and I assume it will make its rounds.”

She kept me in bed, brought me fruit cocktail with oatmeal, took over the fire-stoking chores. She put Phoenix in the closet and removed the curtain so the light came in. Nothing was expected of me. I drifted on the verge of sleep and ate when I was fed.

From our bed I watched Alice perform the daily miracles of arching her back, twisting her hair. My chest ached from laughing when she danced for me.

It took a few days, but slowly my energy returned. To mark my recovery we had sex. It had been a couple of weeks since the last time and we were both self-conscious. Our happiness embarrassed us. How can I recapture that humility? Nobody has that anymore. People get nude, but where is the nakedness? Everyone's just so proud of themselves. I slept straight through the night. In the morning I was cured, but Alice had my fever.

“I don't like this,” I said.

“I suppose we all have to pay the price for your civility.”

“I mean because of your condition.”

“I know,” said Alice. “I guess I'll drink lots of water.”

“Can a baby get a fever?”

“What do I know?”

“We should probably have a book or something.”

“That is exactly the kind of father I always expected you to be.”

I wanted to ask her if she meant that.

She told me to fetch Phoenix out of the closet. I said what if she had caught the fever from the bird? How dare I blame the bird.

My second duty was going downstairs to feed the fire.

There might have been a hundred logs left. The same quantity hadn't lasted a week in early December, but now it might bring us to the cusp of March. I tried to remember what March was like.

I went upstairs to look for Shiloh. He was in his room engrossed in the skis. We admired them for a while. He gave all his attention to the way the boot mated with the binding. He'd shake his head, pull them apart, and then refit them. “You tend the fire?” he asked.

I showed him the match I planned to use. I hadn't noticed before, but half of one wall was covered in a different wallpaper; bright floral vines contrasted with the burnished gold on the other walls. Something like that would have driven Alice mad. I pointed to the mismatched wallpaper.

I should say, even though we were indoors, we wore hats and scarves and winter coats. That's the way it was.

He winked at me, which I thought was strange, since it was just the two of us. But then he winked again and I thought that maybe there was something wrong with his eye.

I was still holding the match out. I returned it to my pocket. We were probably fifteen minutes closer to summer. I started to cough, dry explosions.

“Are you laughing at me?” Shiloh asked.

I stumbled down to the kitchen to get a glass of water. I saw how, in the kitchen sink, a thin icicle had formed at the faucet. In the living room, I struck the match, applied it to the wood. Once again, heat beat cold in the battle for the plumbing's heart.