The Best People in the World (39 page)

I pulled Shiloh to the window.

“Poor bird,” he said.

Alice stood on tiptoe. She couldn't imagine Phoenix wanted to be free of her and so she was stretching to see if she and it might reach an altitude that suited them both. The struggle loosed feathers that, after they'd escaped the flurry of the bird, floated slowly down.

“She's never going to let go of that thing,” said Shiloh. “That would kill her.”

All at once the bird stopped fighting. The leash went slack, arced, as the bird fell from the sky. It plunged into the snow.

“It had a heart attack,” Shiloh said. “That little muscle just gave up and quit.”

I shut the shade and the two of us went downstairs to mourn. I expected that Alice would require sublime attentions. She came in with the bird cupped in both hands. Its beak was opened in a manner recognizable as panting.

“Phoenix just went crazy,” Alice explained.

Shiloh got real close and smelled the animal. “I hear it shrieking,” he announced, but the bird was silent.

 

I felt the gathering weight of snow piling on the roof. Alice was a soft mountain in our bed. I wrapped myself in a blanket and wandered down to the living room determined to do something decisive. I built a fire, stacking the wood almost to the flue. I had had enough of conservation. I wanted to explore the viability of consumption. Getting by wasn't working for us. We needed another solution.

The greedy fire chewed up the logs. Fingers of flame reached outward, toward the mantel. I stripped down to my underwear. The fire was like a beautiful television.

I woke up with Shiloh throwing water on the sofa and me. The upholstery had begun to smolder. If his implausibly sensitive nose hadn't alerted him to the danger…he didn't want to guess what would have happened. The bracing water returned the edges to the room.

“You sabotaged my authority,” said Shiloh, pointing at the paltry stack of wood I'd left.

Now we'd discover what would happen after the firewood ran out.

“Tell me,” said Shiloh. “Who's the anarchist now?”

4

We Have Needs Innumerable

In bed I huddled against Alice's voluptuous back, against her summery skin. She stayed fast asleep, even when she spoke. I lost track of where we were. The boundaries between sleep and conversations were indistinguishable, and I lost interest in charting them. My mind was playing all sorts of tricks. I was sure people were entering and exiting the room. I didn't quite believe in them, but they were as real as me.

Bill Legg's truck came over the hill. It was dusk and the sparks that spit off the plow blade skipped along the frozen ground. I found my way to the road.

Bill had to bash around at the bottom of the hill to give the truck room to turn around. He drove past where I stood, slowed the truck to a stop, raised the plow, and let gravity tug him back. He unlocked the door and I moved to climb inside. My foot slipped from the running board and I almost fell on my face.

“You ever been in a truck before?”

“I've been in trucks.”

“How come I don't see smoke coming out of the chimney?” He pointed at the two cold stacks of bricks.

“It's not so bad.”

He handed a tissue over to me and had me blow my nose. My attempt at hygiene didn't satisfy him. “Hold still,” he said. He reached over with another tissue and pinched my nose. “Good.”

I felt embarrassed and dropped my chin. There were some weight belts and other scuba stuff on the seat, but that was it. “What's your daughter's name, again?”

“Joanna-Marie.”

I thought, In this world a pretty name is no charm at all. And, at this rate, my baby is going to be bigger than me.

“You guys are all right in there?”

“We're okay.”

He looked around the inside of the truck. There was all kinds of recent trash. “I didn't think to get you anything.”

“No matter.” I opened the door and lowered myself from the seat.

“Are they looking for you?”

I didn't know.

“You want to call them? Do you want me to call them?”

He wrote the number on a slip of paper he picked up off the floor. I loitered by the window. “What are you going to say?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I'm not a jerk. I don't want them worrying.”

“Is that your message?”

“You can say whatever you want, just don't tell them where I am.”

“Right-oh,” said Bill Legg.

 

Shiloh told me to bring the hatchet to his room. When I did he slid the drawers from his dresser, showed me how the joints were joined, told me which was maple and which yellow pine. I noticed one wall was now covered with an older wallpaper, antique-looking stuff with lilacs and bluebirds. I walked over to see just what was happening. Vertical scoring marked the plaster. A thin strip was already missing from the adjacent wall.

I tapped my finger on the wall.

He took out a Barlow knife and opened the short blade, held it up to where the wallpaper met the ceiling, and carefully pulled it down.
Next he eased the blade between the top layer of paper and the one beneath and, in one piece, removed the top layer from the wall. He examined the backing, showed it to me (what was I looking for?), then dipped it into a basin of water. It left a cloudy residue. He took the paper out and indicated I was to lick it. I wouldn't.

He draped the damp paper over his hand, inside out, and then scraped his teeth across it. A sticky goo built up, which his tongue cleared away. I rubbed a nail over the paper and sucked my finger. There was a sweetness—it tasted doughy, or like silt.

“Wheat paste,” said Shiloh. “There was half a bag of the stuff left in the basement.”

All of this, an entire wall so far, he'd been eating this stuff? Either to prove this wasn't a stunt, or because he was hungry, he scraped some more of this reconstituted glue. I made a disgusted face.

“It's the same stuff you ate in kindergarten. I'd rather it was corn or cucumbers. I'd be eating bugs if someone wasn't saving them for a bird. What we have here is a situation where our resources are limited. I'm just stretching our stores.”

He went back to the dresser and hefted out a drawer. He punched the bottom out and collapsed the empty rectangle. I carried the pieces to the living room while he took the hatchet to the frame.

We burned the pantry shelves and the coat hooks from the mudroom. I unscrewed the porcelain pulls from the kitchen cabinets, collected them, and took the doors off their hinges. Both the dressers, the coffee table, a beautiful birch hat rack, Alice's chunky wooden beads, the three-legged stool, we converted everything to smoke.

“It's a fire sale,” Shiloh said.

 

Alice hunched beneath the dormer-window curtain, like a photographer beneath a shroud. I joined her in the tight little space. It was the middle of the day. I felt the sunlight on my skin. Alice had her eyes shut. Looking out toward the field, I willed something to pass before me, something I might share with her. A few clouds sailed past, but none resembled anything. She breathed twin plumes of condensation on the pane. Now her eyes were open.

“Thank goodness,” she said. “For a second I thought you were the mumbler.”

She lifted the window an inch and let the cold air flood our feet.

“You can't be mean to him anymore.”

The cold air came in like water. It reached our knees.

“So, the student reprimands the teacher.” She pulled the window shut. “The other day he came in here to measure the bed for the chimney.”

“He's doing what he thinks is best.”

“Don't let him burn the bed.”

She didn't seem to appreciate the spot we were in. I explained that Shiloh had reduced himself to eating glue.

“Tell me why he's doing that,” said Alice. “You don't believe he's sticking around just to make sure we scrape by.”

“I still love you, Alice.”

With our faces so close to the glass, it was as if we were holding a conversation with our own ghostly reflections.

“Why did you say it that way?”

“How did I say it?”

“It's like you're accusing me of something.”

“You have no appreciation for the things Shiloh and I have done.”

“Shut your nasty mouth.”

I walked straight away. I was too mad to speak.

Her voice reached me in the darkened room. “I love you more than I love myself,” she said.

 

A Volkswagen Beetle came putt-putting over the hill and parked in the driveway. The driver honked the horn. Bill Legg had hung his truck up on a stone wall. This was his wife's car. I asked if he'd been hurt. Right there. On the ass? On his wallet. He'd busted the axle, snapped a ball joint, punctured the radiator, plus smashed up the grill and all the lights. This was why he had insurance. What happened? He'd swerved to avoid a herd of rabbits. A herd of rabbits? That's what he'd told Mrs. Legg; he'd actually fallen asleep. He was glad to see we had a fire going again. I counted two grocery bags on the backseats.

“I called your parents.” He slid his hands over the steering wheel, pretending to take a sharp turn.

“You talked to them?”

He pulled the sun visor down. “What if I told you your father is in the hospital. Heart problem.”

I said, “Oh, man. Jesus. Fran.” The car was shrinking. I couldn't get any air.

Bill reached across and rolled down the window.

“Is he okay? Did you talk to my mother?”

“Yeah,” Bill said. “She was upset.”

“I'm wondering if it's my dad or my pawpaw. You have to take me to a phone.”

“You worried?” Bill asked. He'd sort of turned his body toward me. “I mean, how does it feel?”

I was trying to get the words out, but tears were rocketing from my eyes. I fell apart, my hands shaking, my mouth just hanging open, so my teeth got dry.

Bill clapped me on the shoulder, craned my neck back with his thumb. “You got lucky,” which even at the time seemed an inappropriate introduction to bad news. “Everyone's fine. I made the hospital bit up.”

My fingers fumbled with the handle and I fell out of the car. I got my feet under me and slammed the door. As it bounced back I kicked it shut. I was in no shape to be jerked around. I sat up to my armpits in the snow.

Bill got out, too, but stayed on his side of the car.

“You needed to know what regret feels like.” With his mittens he swept the snow off the car's roof. “Your parents have had all this time to question how they raised you, feeling like they're the bad guys. Yours is a generation of runaways. You got to know what it feels like when you're the asshole.”

“Don't tell me who I am. Tell me what happened to your daughter. Tell me something you know!”

Leaning inside the car he took out the bags. He set them on the snowbank.

“We don't want that stuff,” I said.

He got in the car and put it in gear. “Spare me, Thomas.”

The mudroom door creaked. Alice shuffled out onto the porch.

Bill raised a hand to her.

I went over to the passenger-side window. “I put a dent in the door.”

“Remember, it's not my car. Watch yourself,” he said, putting his arm over the passenger seat, as if he meant to back out. “Your mother begged me to tell her where you were.”

“You didn't tell them anything?”

“I gave you my word.”

I thanked him.

He shushed me. “I wasn't doing you any favors.” He revved the engine and started up the hill.

Alice watched me gather the food. She held the door for me as I carried it inside. “Should we get the glue eater?” she asked. I felt too empty to eat. It was all for her. She fell on it, a wolf.

5

Idyll

I'd found a can of yams behind the stove. With fork and knife I cut them into pieces so small that I could have impaled one on each of the four tines of the fork and they wouldn't have touched.

“I want to let Phoenix go,” Alice said.

That couldn't have been what she meant. That bird's antics were her only entertainment. Instead, she had to have anticipated that we might experience something like joy, watching the bird take to the air. It couldn't have been an easy decision for her to reach, this sacrifice.

But when I saw the bird, I knew that it wasn't generosity that guided her. From just beneath its chin, the whole breast was just the palest skin. The bird had preened itself bare. She didn't want to free it as much as she wanted to be free of the guilt of watching this pitiful animal.

Alice bit her lower lip. It appeared the bird was shivering.

“You can't let go of him like that,” I said. “He won't make it.”

Alice was crying.

I went looking for Shiloh. A strip of red cloth, the tie from a bathrobe, spanned the doorway to the basement. The treads from the stairs were stacked beside the fireplace.

I found him in his room, writing in his notebook. I told him I needed his help with a delicate situation.

He had Alice spread the crow's wings while he studied the bird. He cut a crude bib for the bird out of shirt cloth. He traced the bib onto a piece of possum fur. He cut this out and tried it on the bird. There were further fittings, fine-tuning. When he had everything the way he liked it, he sewed the ties together so they couldn't come undone, a crow in an apron. Did he think it would work? He knew it would work.

The hour was late. Alice thought we should wait until the morning before we released Phoenix.

Shiloh shook his head. “Right now.”

I pointed at a dark window.

“The moon will be along. Besides, this is when they travel.”

I asked Alice what she thought.

She didn't like the idea.

“It has to be now,” said Shiloh, and, for some reason, I joined his camp.