The Best People in the World (4 page)

The army had trained him to set up and maintain telegraph wires. But when he'd arrived in France, he'd been put in charge of three dozen messenger pigeons. He wasn't supposed to feed the pigeons too much, but it was hard not to, because the pigeons would always eat. In general, recalled Pawpaw, it was a slow war.

He had been stationed near a small stone bridge. He liked to stand on the bridge, staring into the water, and smoke. He could see the mossy stones on the streambed.

I asked him once if he ever wanted to go back to that bridge.

He cocked his head. “Why would I want to do that?”

“You could see everything again?”

“And what do you think that would accomplish?”

“It might help you remember things.”

“I remember things fine. I remember the cigarettes. I remember the egg pies.” There was a farm just down the road and every morning the farmer's wife brought him and his buddy an egg pie.

“I just thought it might be cool if you got a chance to see those things again.”

This was on one of those misty days when the water fills the screens so that every tiny opening offers a portrait of the outside world, perfect and upside down.

“The whole point of that war was to get your pawpaw off that bridge.”

“How do you mean that was the
point
of the war?”

“Forget those supposed histories you find in books. I mean exactly what I said. The whole purpose of the Great War was to get me off that bridge.”

“That's the craziest thing you've ever said.”

“The crazy thing was that twenty million people died. Yet as soon as they sent home all of us guys who'd been standing on bridges, the war was over. Why couldn't they have done that first?”

“Do you think it's weird that when you came back here, your first job was building a bridge?”

“This is the great mystery of anyone's life, Thomas.”

“What's the mystery?”

“Everything that you ever did or will do. How, looking back on it, you can almost detect an intelligent force leading you from one place to the next.”

While they were building the floodwall, the Army Corps of Engineers erected a new bridge upriver, a terrifying modern arc. Then they jackhammered and dynamited the old bridge apart.

 

Except for an usher going over the carpet with an automatic broom, the movie theater was empty. It had a high tin ceiling. Off to the side, the snack bar was crammed into a little alcove. On three of the walls there were these weird mirrors that were crazed with veins of gold paint.

Miss Lowe came in wearing a boatneck sweater and a skirt like a Persian rug. The fabrics rubbing together generated so much static that, as she made her way to my booth, her hair levitated about her face. This, I imagined, was the kind of effect that would prevent a woman from wearing something a second time. I concluded she'd dressed just for me.

“You're here!” she said.

Outside of the classroom, her voice had a great capacity for warmth.

“In the flesh,” I said.

The woman behind the grill circled words in a pulpy pamphlet and paid us no attention.

The second thing Miss Lowe said was, “I'm glad we did this.” I'd planned to say something similar when we went our separate ways. I had no idea what I would say now.

“This place is great,” she said, pulling her hair back from her face.

From beneath the table Miss Lowe's bare feet appeared. They found a spot beside me on the booth. Just as suddenly they darted away.

“Sorry,” she said. “My manners are the pits.”

I said, “I don't even have manners.”

She reached across the table and poked my arm.

It's hard to remember if she acted the way I like people to act or if what I like in people is to be reminded of Alice.

“You've got green eyes,” she said.

Nothing she might have said could have made me any happier.

“Well,” said Miss Lowe, “aren't we a couple of cheap dates.”

The last word just hung in the air.

“Can I see your necklace?” I asked her.

She pinched the chain and lifted it out of her shirt, a delicate cross with silver filigree.

“That's cool,” I said.

Did I wear a cross?

I felt disappointed in myself; I didn't.

She dropped the cross back inside her shirt.

“Don't you love the idea of miracles?” said Miss Lowe.

“Any welcome event is a miracle, according to Pawpaw.”

“So you believe in miracles, but not accidents?”

That was it.

Miss Lowe's feet reappeared on the cushion beside me. By Pawpaw's definition, a miracle.

“This was your idea,” she reminded me. “Ask me more questions.”

Her favorite color: yellow. Her favorite sport: waterskiing. On one arm she wore about a hundred silver hoops, while wrapped around the other wrist was a braided leather band. At that time jewelry still meant things to people. Pawpaw wore a gold wristwatch that his mother had given him. In addition to his wedding band, Fran wore a silver Timex with the watch face over the inside of his wrist because he was convinced that was the logical place to have it. Mary wore her wedding ring and clip-on earrings that left hollow spots on the lobes of her ears. The only jewelry I owned was an enamel pin from the Mexico City Olympics.

She turned things back toward me. “Can I ask you a question?”

I had allowed myself to slouch in my seat. When I tried to push myself up, my hand came down on Miss Lowe's ankle. I was amazed that my hand had achieved something I couldn't will.

I told her she could ask me anything.

“Thomas,” she said, “what do you think about when you look at me?”

An honest answer was unthinkable. I said, “I'm probably just daydreaming.”

“And what are you daydreaming about?”

“I don't think I should say right now.”

“I'm the worst teacher,” she said.

I smiled at her.

“I really am,” she said.

I think she might have meant it.

The woman behind the counter left her station to prop open the theater's red doors. Miss Lowe turned her face toward the mirrored wall, as an orchestra played a martial tune and couples emerged,
blinking, into the bright lobby. I met her reflected gaze. We stayed like that for several uncomfortable moments.

I said, “You're the smartest person I know.”

She turned to look at me head-on. “Thomas, do you have a girlfriend?”

I felt like I was leaking information. The longer we sat there, the greater the odds that I would be left without secrets or hope.

“Currently I have exactly zero girlfriends.” It sounded stupid to say it that way, but I wanted there to be no ambiguity.

Back behind the counter, the woman poured popping corn into a hopper.

“I don't think I'm going to college,” I said, though I hadn't given the matter any thought before.

The woman I'd been sitting with disappeared and a more familiar person took her place. “What do you think you're going to do?”

I said, “I'd prefer to learn things in a more realistic environment.”

“Sure,” she said, and something about her tone suggested that she didn't quite agree with me.

“Or maybe I'll travel.”

Miss Lowe drew shapes on the Formica tabletop with her fingertip. “Do you ever get lonely, Thomas?”

It was obvious she didn't know the first thing about me. My bedroom and my parents' shared a wall—only the dehumidifier in Mary's closet disguised our night sounds. Pawpaw's military background meant he didn't think twice about visiting me in the bathroom. How, in that house, could a person feel lonely? “Why?” I asked. “Do you?”

She drove a Plymouth Valiant, a schoolteacher's car, modest and neat and seven years old, with full-length chrome molding and Blue Dot whitewall tires. The paint, a sort of blooming algae.

I walked over to the passenger door.

She slotted the key in the lock. “You knew this was my car.”

“You were walking toward it,” I said.

“No,” she said, opening the door. “You were in front of me.”

Inside her car, the headliner cloth was coming unglued from the ceiling—it jiggled like the walls of a tent.

It was the emptiness of her car that bothered me. Then I noticed, dangling from the turn-signal indicator, a red ribbon, like you might win at a fair.

“What's that?” I asked.

She turned the ribbon in her hand. “I don't know.”

She drove me to the lowest tier of River Park. We listened as the water slapped against the mud banks. I took casual, sidelong glances at her face. She had a high, blank forehead. I was singularly aware of her body, the radiating waves of heat that registered on my arms and neck. It was terrifying.

“Wouldn't you like to just float down that river?” said Miss Lowe.

It was as though she'd pulled the idea from some place deep inside me. I couldn't find the strength to speak with her.

A car crept toward us with just its parking lights on. They raked our car with a spotlight before driving off.

“Creeps,” said Miss Lowe. She cranked her window down.

“That was the police,” I said.

Miss Lowe turned in her seat. “You're right.”

“I should probably get home,” I said.

“Right,” said Miss Lowe. “I'd better get you home.”

 

In the month after Miss Lowe and I met in town, nothing passed between us but a sly look now and again. Her comments on my papers never revealed a hidden thought. We'd walked up to the edge of something and flinched.

Then warm rains melted Pennsylvania's snowpack, causing the Ohio to swell beyond its banks. It didn't matter that overhead we had clear skies and sunshine. Public Works employees scrambled about River Park, collecting anything that might be washed away—oil-drum ashcans, the sign reminding people to set their parking brakes on the boat ramp, the bases on the baseball field. They dogged down the sewer pipe overflows to prevent the rising river from following those passageways into town. Finally, the breaks in the flood wall, at North Main, Clairmont, and River Way, were sealed off with heavy steel plates. For the first time, the town was shut off from the river.

When the weather was fine, Baptist congregations gathered in the park, every Sunday, in white nightshirts and cassocks and dresses and trousers, to wade into that turbid muck and bathe in God's graces. Young families backed their station wagons to the water's edge to eat picnics on the ledges of their tailgates. But with the park under water, people returned to the downtown. They reclaimed the plaza for their shrieking kids and their yappy dogs. They gathered by the glass wall of City Hall's rotunda to look out over the flooded land. From that vantage, way in the distance, Shiloh's home looked like the pilothouse of a swamped ship. A driftwood boardwalk—damp planks sagging between sawhorses and cement blocks—connected his island to shore.

I felt something building in my heart. In the middle of the night, I sneaked out my bedroom window and across town to a squat, Federal-style building. I stood there, without a clue how to proceed, studying the iron stars that wept rust down the side of the brickwork. A window shuddered open. Miss Lowe leaned her head out, one hand on the sill, the other holding her hair back. After a moment she disappeared inside.

I heard a door open and then she came from around the side of the building. She wore cut-off jeans, a T-shirt and rubber flip-flops.

“We have to be like a couple of mice,” she said, taking my hand.

The hallway was too narrow for us to walk side by side. I followed her up the linoleum-covered stairs. On the third floor she pushed through a door into a cramped room filled with milk-colored light.

“Well,” she said, “take a look around.”

The furniture, a sofa and an armchair, was cloaked with white sheets. On one wall, a free calendar from the hardware store hung by a thumbtack. A banker's gooseneck lamp rested on a card table piled high with books. A blocky school phonograph sat beneath it on the floor.

I said, “This is a nice place, Miss Lowe.”

She wagged her finger in front of me. I understood.

“Alice,” I said.

I wound up in the bathroom; it was like a bathroom on a train, the sink as small as a salad bowl.

“Are you looking for the bedroom?”

Twin bed. Rainbow sheets. On a bedside table a lamp with a red scarf draped over the shade.

We sat on the edge of the bed with our knees touching. Alice showed me a picture of her sister with some guy—the two of them were waving like they were going off to live on the sun.

“Okay,” said Alice. “We need to have a conversation.”

Yes, a conversation.

“First of all, are you here of your own accord?”

“Yes,” I said, “I guess.”

She said, “I'm not on the pill.”

I was unprepared.

We went back into her kitchen to kiss. When things got too intense, she boiled water and introduced me to herbal tea. I was ready to swallow any bitter thing. In the drying rack beside the sink, I counted a single sponge, a single spoon, a single plate, a juice glass.

 

“Who's that ugly cuss?” my pawpaw asked, catching me as I checked my reflection in the bathroom mirror.

“Do I need to shave?”

He pinched my jaw in his bony fingers. He squinted at my bare cheeks. “A kitty cat could lick those off.”

“They're beginning to come in.”

He stood behind me so our heads were side by side in the mirror. “You know who used to look at himself all the time?”

“Who?”

“Robbie O'Dell.”

Mary's first husband. All I knew about him, other than the accident, was that he'd worked as a commercial pilot. (“Your mother's friend flew planes,” was how Fran put it.) They'd married straight out of high school. In a single year Mary and O'Dell lived in Texas, Montreal, and West Berlin. Then the accident and, as soon as she was released from the hospital, Mary moved back home. She married Fran on a rainy spring day, in a raw-wood gazebo in her parents' backyard. At his office Fran kept a favorite picture: my mother, in her wedding dress, leaning against him. Because the rain-soaked ground keeps
wrenching her heels off, she is barefoot. Fran faces the camera, but his eyes aim up through his eyebrows, at the rain. Mary smiles, with her lips pulled back from her teeth, like she is about to bite into something.