The Best People in the World (40 page)

Alice went upstairs to retrieve the leash.

Shiloh put his lips to my ear. “Tell me how a bird pulls feathers from under its own chin.” His answer didn't come until my love was heading down the stairs. I heard her footsteps, but still I leaned closer. “She's gathering tragedies.”

Alice fastened the loop around the bird's foot. “I can't wait all night for the moon to rise.”

She didn't have to. A pale wash of light burnished the countryside. The moon was a gleaming sickle.

Alice buttoned the bird inside her coat. We went outside. The three of us cursing the sharp night air, the bird making its silent yawns, swiveling its head. The thinnest shadows undulated across the lumpy snow. Alice set the bird on her shoulder.

In that part of the country, you could see forever. We should have gone outside more often. But it was always colder than we could bear.

I clapped my hands to force the blood through them. The wind pushed through the bones of the trees.

“Take the leash off,” said Shiloh.

Alice tried to do this one-handed, but experienced some difficulty. The crow, growing anxious, picked at its foot. She cawed to soothe the bird.

Alice was using both hands to free the crow when it leaned over and nipped her on the nose. She gave a startled shout as the bird unfolded its wings and took flight. I pulled Alice's hands away from her face. It got her right on the septum, a little snip. Droplets of blood fell from her upper lip and drilled into the snow.

“Why'd it do that?” Shiloh asked.

Alice bent down and made a snowball; she daubed at her nose. In no time the bleeding stopped.

The crow had landed on top of a bush across the road, the leash draping over the woody branches. I made to go after it, but Alice said the bird trusted her. She tried cawing and snapping her fingers, but it didn't return. “Shit,” she said, throwing the bloody snowball down. She crossed the road, straddled the barbed-wire fence, and closed in on the bird. “Momma forgives you.” She had almost reached the bird when it took off again, heading down the field. It flapped its wings a lot, but didn't gain much altitude, just sort of followed the slope of the ground. The end of the leash hung over the valley like a noose.

At first I was sure it would turn back before it reached the wall of trees at the top of the ravine. It couldn't make it over them. But it flew right into their midst, pumping its wings. I expected a branch to thread the dangling loop, for the flight to come to a vicious halt.

We watched the bird until it was beyond the trees, a black spot passing over snow.

 

Shiloh took the hatchet outside and knocked every other slat off the porch swing, leaving it a skeleton of its skeletal self. The gray wood
burned hot and white, so we unhooked the chains, brought the rest in, an hour's warmth.

After moving the mattress and box spring to the floor, Shiloh and I broke apart the sleigh bed. It didn't come apart easily; the joints were mortise and tenon. Finally it succumbed to violence. What I did to the bed was one of the crimes for which Alice would never forgive me. She waited until it had gone up the chimney before calling me names. Thief. Impostor. Murderer. “Where has my Thomas gone, my boy?” she asked, cocking her head as if addressing her fretful bird, but the bird was gone.

Shiloh and I wandered from room to room, collecting everything extraneous and combustible. Our search kept leading back to the main staircase, the banisters, the newel post. Where would it stop? And when? He thought if we took our time, we could make it look all right. Saw everything flush. It would look modern. We demasted the stairs. It looked precarious. Alice asked that we dispatch her in her sleep before we continued disemboweling the house. Also, she wanted to know, was anything sacred? Yes, I replied, Shiloh was sacred. I was sacred. She was sacred.

6

Empty

I stumbled upon something odd in the entrance hall: Shiloh's legs in the abandoned fireplace. I thought it was a trick. I touched my toe to his trouser leg. He danced to the other side. Then he crouched down and peeked out. Arrows of soot streaked his face. “Go to bed, Thomas.” He stood back up in the chimney. When I touched him on the back of his knee, his hand appeared, giving me an annoyed wave. I walked over to the narrow window adjacent to the front door and stepped behind the curtain. The stars were pinpricks. In the middle of the field, three thin deer, like animated sawhorses, gnawed at trembling shrubs. I heard Shiloh extract himself from the fireplace. He ducked inside the curtain. Our faces and hands floated around invisible bodies. That's just the kind of light it was—alpenglow, Alice
called it. In the condensation I wrote
What's Parker got in the basement?
He reached up and jammed a finger in my eye. I bent over and covered my face. He towed me by my elbow into the kitchen.

He'd meant to grab my hair, he explained. He soaked our sponge and dabbed it at my face. The eye wasn't so bad, he told me. A little red. It looked as though I was crying, only just on one side of my face. He apologized until I accepted. He found his notebook and a pen. What did I know about the basement? I told him how it had occurred to me that his secret room must have a twin. That, I assumed, was why Parker had refused to leave before; either he hadn't finished setting it up, or else there was work he needed to do in there.

Shiloh said, “Don't tell Parker you know about that space.”

What was he doing down there?
I wrote.

Shiloh shook his head.

Do you know?

“It's why he left New York.” All the while Shiloh made these imprecise adjustments, shifts and bobs, as if he were being buffeted by a swirling wind. “It's too easy to get caught up in these questions.”

Which questions?

“That's what I am talking about, questions chasing questions.”

We'd been stripped of everything. Maybe that's why he was reluctant to forfeit the last thing he'd held on to.
Bad things?
I wrote.

It was, he promised, beyond my imagination.

He sucked on his lip.

Explosives? Guns?

“It's beyond your imagination.”

Drugs?

“It might be the most spectacular thing.”

Is it money?

“Are you sure Alice is asleep?”

Are we going to go downstairs?

“Nothing's downstairs anymore.” He gave me a long, appraising look. “Close your eyes,” he said.

Shiloh left me alone in the room. I watched my hands on the kitchen table.

“Do you smell anything?” he asked when he came back. “What'd I say? Close your eyes.”

I could see all the tiny mouths where the wood breathed.

“For God's sake, close your eyes. Use your hands if you have to. Now what do you smell?”

Smoke. Damp wool. That close human stain each of us trailed. Burned oil. Roses, maybe. Looking through my palms the world seemed pink. Roses.

He pulled my hands away from my eyes.

There on the table was a package furled in green canvas. The fabric was marked with soot—he must have been storing it inside the chimney. My first thought was guns, four or five of them wrapped up inside. And I decided they were long guns, Civil War–era rifles, bundled up like sticks. I almost didn't need to see them.

Shiloh walked over to the back stairs and checked to see if Alice was watching. He didn't just glance up, but stood there for a moment and waited. He turned to me. “Careful.”

One corner was safety-pinned. Once I undid that I began to unroll the bundle. The more cloth I unwound, the more details came through. It was like shucking corn. At first the ears feel perfectly cylindrical, but as you go down through the layers, you discover the taper, the elasticity, at last the ordered rows of kernels, like perfect teeth. As I unrolled the cloth, I began to see the dimensions of things. It wasn't a collection of firearms. At the widest place, no wider than a clothes hanger, I found a pair of hips. And folded arms across a chest. Slightly bent legs, pointing toes. Yes, at the opposite end, a hard, smooth skull.

I turned around. Shiloh had his hands clasped together, a thumb vised between his teeth. He was bound with anticipation, like a person who has given an extravagant gift and is uncertain whether it will be appreciated. What? I asked him. The air was full of roses. He urged me to go on.

But I couldn't go on. So Shiloh pulled away the last wrap of canvas. Here was the boy from Shiloh's photographs. His jaw was a bit offset and his hair, which at one time might have been in a bowl cut, stuck up in some places and was plastered down in others. A fine
nose came in a straight line off his brow. His eyebrows were full and dark and he had long eyelashes. Because of the way his jaw was fixed, his lips made a thin, crooked line; if the arrangement could be said to convey an expression, it would have been a cross between a smirk and a pout. He was not sleeping. There was a dead boy on our kitchen table. I put my hand on a cold wrist just to make sure. His skin showed a sort of olive cast. He probably had green eyes, I thought. It was hard to tell how tall he might have been, maybe five-six or five-seven. He had a slender, pale neck. A few dark hairs showed above the collar of a bleached, green shirt. The jeans he wore were a faded blue and as soft as flannel, with leather fringe sewn at the seams. One foot was in a white gym sock and the other was bare, as pale as the flesh of a radish. I couldn't take my eyes off him. I was thinking that someone must have been missing him.

“I told you he was beautiful,” said Shiloh.

I was afraid Shiloh might peel open the boy's dead eyes. I felt that old fear, that death breeds death, that this boy drew me a little nearer the edge. But if it was an edge, how had this boy stayed so preserved after he had stepped across? I looked at Shiloh, at his battered hands and yellow teeth, his crooked nose with its knuckle hump. Living was the force that broke us down. And nothing was deader than the dead boy.

I kept my hands at my sides. Maybe I only imagined it, but I thought the boy looked something like me.

“He used to love me,” said Shiloh, stroking his hand over the boy's leg.

“Parker did this?” I asked. But I might as well have been speaking to the boy.

Still the roses, faint, but pleasant, as fresh as rain. I couldn't be sure if the smell came from the shroud or the boy. My finger found a burned spot on the center of the boy's shirt. It looked as if he had walked into the lit end of a cigar.

“It isn't easy, the way I grew up, to trust a human soul. Remember what I told you, walking in the woods?” Shiloh adjusted the boy's shirt so that the hole in the cloth lined up with the hole in the boy, a
puckered, black mouth. Tears made dark spots on the shroud. “He wanted me to admit that I needed him, but I refused. I told him I needed space to be. I grabbed my shit and left. I knew it was a mistake just as soon as I was out the door, but pride kept me from turning back. If I stayed away long enough, I thought, he'd forget what I had said. I camped out a couple of blocks away.”

I watched Shiloh's trembling hands.

“The counterargument he came up with was irrefutable.” Shiloh reached down and cupped the boy's naked foot. “It was just some gun someone had around for potting rats. He pulled the trigger with his toe. It should have been me who found him, but Parker came along. It wouldn't have been any good to have cops poking around the place. So Parker stuffed him in a seaman's bag and dumped him in an alley—problem solved. When I found out I made him take me to the spot. A mountain of garbage had piled up. I dug through it with my hands. I wanted something to say good-bye to. This is what we found. You know what you call that?”

I shook my head.

“You call it wonder.” Shiloh walked over to the sink and filled two glasses with water. He handed one to me. I felt relief when I was certain that the second glass was for himself and not the boy.

We sipped the water and looked at the dead boy on the table. Even a person who was perfectly ordinary while alive becomes spectacular when dead. The dead are one of the few things society sees the magic in. There is no stronger taboo than a dead body. Our greatest crime: making a dead body. Here was a boy who had transformed himself into a body. And what an extraordinary body he was.

I didn't know where to begin.

Shiloh touched the dead boy on the lips. Then he turned toward me, saying, “That's my explanation.” He started to wrap the boy back up. There was great solemnity to the operation. The rough cloth knew how to hold the boy.

I touched the back of Shiloh's hand. When he gave me his attention, I asked him the obvious question: Why was he here?

“Parker and I hid the body in a dumbwaiter shaft. I returned to
my river home, because I thought he would be safe. But Parker couldn't leave things alone. It didn't dawn on him that where he saw a curiosity, some folks would see a proof of God. Those sorts of people can't be deterred.”

Did I believe Shiloh? Was there something other than coincidence that caused us to arrive in New York when we had?

Your accident in the basement?

“I was building a trap for Parker.”

Shiloh carried the boy into the entrance hall. I doubt he weighed fifty pounds. He propped the boy up in the empty fireplace. Then he stooped inside and hefted the boy up to a little ledge. How alone was Shiloh? How alone the boy? After extracting himself, Shiloh closed the damper.

Shiloh said, “The ringing in my head isn't just some empty noise. He's calling my name.”

Did he mean the boy spoke to him, or that his mind kept the boy's voice alive? How could you tell a person the nature of the sounds in his head? I would never forget the sound of Alice calling me from another room.

 

Alice's body was conspiring against her. There was an itching inside her. She only knew one cure. Hers wasn't really a request. She slid beneath the sheets to work me up. I thought about the role of biology in history, men like me, my predecessors, a line connecting me all the way to the beginning of civilization. Creation, humiliation, and failure. She emerged smiling, covered me with her body. Can you feel it? she asked. I had a dream in which I might have been in a black boat on a black ocean. Beneath the surface the water teemed with silver fishes. Crazy, she said. Her elbows bowed my clavicles. I tried to lift my hips. She patted my cheeks with her fingers.