The Best People in the World (42 page)

He set the food on the table and stood up. “What do they put in the water up here? I bet you've grown four inches since I saw you last.” He clapped his hands on my shoulders. It seemed he was only measuring how much of me there was to bully.

A real raccoon coat draped over his shoulders, like the carcass of a dog.

How, I wondered, would I protect Alice and Shiloh and the dead boy? “You're not welcome here.”

He peeked into the pantry. “This is some desperate living. Don't tell me you ate those other folks.” He seemed to be in high spirits.

“They just left.”

He studied my face. When he saw that I was serious, something like pity flowed between us.

“When?”

“I think it was October. They just took their things and left. Supposedly they had tax problems.”

He went to look out the window. “She just gave you the car?”

I thought he'd been talking about the Sound of Music Commune. What I'd seen in his face was a type of awed respect for that person who, he thought, had accomplished all those exhausting tasks that together constitute survival. That he could think I was so capable and then having to correct him.

“I misunderstood.”

Parker looked relieved. “Who had the tax problems?”

“DWG.”

He resumed picking at his food. He did everything as though it were perfectly reasonable. His lips made a soft humming noise, like a machine at idle, just before or after it does the one task it was designed for.

“So what's the story with the cabinet doors?”

“We burned them.”

“I got to hand it to you, you out hell's-kitchened Hell's Kitchen.” Parker balled the tinfoil up. Walking over to the sink, he opened the faucet. He turned to me to show me that the water wasn't coming. He shook his head, as if he was ashamed.

All I wanted was to return to Alice in our bed.

“You shouldn't be here, you know.”

Parker walked over to the back stairs. He opened the door an inch. “How's your little Alice?”

“Thomas,” Alice cried, “who are you talking to?”

“Don't come down here,” I answered, but I heard her getting up.

“Reunions,” said Parker, returning to his chair.

He couldn't be allowed to stay. I knew what I had to do.

Alice flew down the main stairs. She had transformed from incubator into Fury. She was magnificent. She pushed past me and into the kitchen. “Get out of my house, you son of a bitch!”

“At least someone's been eating,” said Parker. And then, “You're a cow!”

She turned around and marched out.

Parker dared me to deny it.

She came back clutching the fire poker.

Parker covered his head with his hands. With a furious swing Alice knocked a leg off his chair, dropping him to the floor.

“I had that coming,” said Parker. “Never insult a woman's waistline. Lesson learned.”

I told Alice to get Shiloh.

“It sure don't take much to rile you folks up.” Parker stood up and brushed himself off. “I just have to pick something up, then I'll be on my way. Pardon me,” he said, stepping past me.

The quilts over the windows, the empty spaces left by furniture we'd burned, the half-charred sofa and the sooty mouths of the fireplaces, this was a different place than he'd left. If he noticed that, he might have deduced that we were different people. At the top of the basement stairs, he yanked the red bathrobe tie from the doorway.

He found the light switch and flipped it up and down.

He stared into the dark.

“You burned the stairs.” He shook his head. “You burned them. What about firewood? What about, I don't know, logs? I can't believe you people.” With both his hands gripping the door frame, he lowered a foot in search of something that might support his weight.

“There's nothing down there.”

Parker reached a hand out and shoved me away from him. “Just back up.” He dipped the foot lower.

“He's not down there. The dead boy's not down there anymore.”

He forgot about the basement for a second. Using his fingernail Parker scraped the plaque off a canine tooth. “Don't worry about that anymore. I'm here to take him off your hands.”

Alice called down to me, “Shiloh's not in his room.”

I told her to wait in our bedroom. I don't think I'd ever told her what to do before, but, just the same, she did as I asked.

“You must really pluck her strings,” said Parker.

It didn't matter if the dead boy was just a dead boy. It didn't matter if he wasn't an argument for God. Shiloh loved him. I could not permit Parker to strip Shiloh of his most cherished thing. I would not witness my friend's humiliation. I told Parker, “I can't let you take the boy.”

Parker stuck his lower lip over his mustache and sucked on the hair. “Sacrifice is overrated, kid.”

We'd lived with stillness for so long that we never expected to move again, just as we never expected to find warmth or to escape hunger. Each of us had consigned ourselves to the house. We had forgotten that we might leave—a theory often employed to explain the origins of ghosts.

Parker seized me by my neck and pinned me to the wall. It happened in an instant and all my strength bled away. He lifted me off the ground. My heels drummed the plaster and my spine received this rhythm like a radio in an empty room. Neither of us knew how to improvise beyond that moment. If Shiloh hadn't appeared, Parker might have held me there even after I was able to imagine it.

“Stop!” Shiloh yelled, his awful, wounded voice.

Alice appeared on the landing above us. I watched her watching me. I hated her to see me subdued like that.

“Let go of him!” Alice screamed.

Parker released me. “Don't make me take the place apart,” he said.

Shiloh began to recite an eclectic list of things: “All our money, a little girl, my hearing, Alice's fox, the clock, my tooth, the crow, their baby.” It was an accounting of everything we'd lost.

“Take a look at yourselves,” said Parker. He thought his will was immutable, but that house twisted everything.

All of our frustration with the house and the cold, all of our disappointments with ourselves and each other, these things found in Parker a target for their annihilation.

What must it have been like for Shiloh, in his silent world, to see us stepping forward? No, we had never given him his due, we had never thanked him for looking out for us, we had never been able to let him into our hearts, to love him, to accept that our fate and his were tied. But he had chosen the right people after all. In this moment we became his vengeful family. I knew what I was capable of.

It broke my heart when Parker hit me. His fist caught me on my forehead and drove me to my knees. The sum of my anger and determination didn't amount to anything. I watched Parker draw his black boot back.

But Shiloh decided to capitulate. He stepped in front of me. Parker could take the dead boy and drive away. And who knew what would happen then, when it was just the three of us and the ruined house, after Alice had seen me defeated, and I had seen her will quit, and after Shiloh had surrendered the last thing he cared for? How bankrupt we would be in that next moment! Slowly Shiloh raised his palms, in a recognizable gesture.

“I didn't ask for this,” said Parker. He pointed a finger at me. “You brought it on yourselves, all of you. I've been a reasonable man my whole life.”

Shiloh looked at his hands as though they, on their own, had come up with a compelling argument that he needed to consider. Then, no harder than you might push a child on a swing, Shiloh gave Parker a shove, high on the other man's chest. Instinctively, Parker took a step back to catch his balance, but there was nothing there to catch him. A quivering sound escaped his lips. Through the doorway it was a ten-foot drop to the basement floor. We heard a sharp crash followed by a whispery sound, like wind through leaves.

The three of us crowded in the doorway.

I stared into the dim space. Parker had come to rest on his stomach, but his face twisted back toward us. A few inches of water covered the basement floor. His hair radiated out across the water like rays of black light. The sound we heard was wafers of ice jostling to reknit.

“What have you done?” asked Alice.

“The pipes have burst,” said Shiloh. “The house is no good for anyone.”

8

Packing Up

With a screwdriver and pliers, Shiloh started Parker's van. The two batteries were linked with jumper cables. The sleeping engine woke. With new snow muting the sounds, the vehicles purred like giant cats.

Alice went upstairs while I wrestled the trailer from the frozen ground. I turned it upside down and towed it like a sled, out into the road.

Shiloh shuttled his things—the theme-park plans, the cigar box of photographs, the red toolbox, the bag containing the pieces of the mantel clock—out to Parker's van. I went to help him carry his green parcel across the snow-bright yard.

The plywood patch still covered the window I'd broken out. The mattress waited, a feather pillow in a crisp white case, blue flannel sheets turned neatly back. Red shag covered the ceiling and walls. A velvet curtain stretched between two brass rods, separating the sleeping area from the front. Something about the richness of the carpeting made the van appear noble or grand. I picked up a corner of the sheet so Shiloh might tuck the boy in. But that was not where he meant the boy to go.

Shiloh pointed with the toe of his boot at the platform the mattress rested upon. At the top I found a clasp. When I unfastened it the end of the platform swung down on a piano hinge. Maybe ten inches high, it served to raise the mattress above the humps of the wheel wells. The storage space contained the spare tire and a jack, a combination tire iron/lug-nut wrench, tent stakes, a raincoat stuffed in its own pouch, a baseball bat, an orange thermos, and, after we were through, the dead boy. Exhaust fumes hung in the air.

Alice opened our bedroom window and dumped our clothes into the yard. I gathered them all up. Everything went in the car. Dirty
and clean, hers and mine, entanglements were preserved. I had an unexamined hope that we would never have to differentiate. I don't think one of us had a clue as to what we'd do next. But we'd follow this path as far as it took us and we'd make another decision when the time came.

The air, the trees, the birds, everything remained still.

Alice came out carrying my mangled suit.

What about the dishes and the pots and pans? What about the shovel and the trowel? “Do we just leave everything?” I asked.

She stabbed me with her eyes.

For some reason it fell upon me to give the place its final inspection.

Heading toward the house I noticed something, maybe a chimney's slight deviation from plumb. It appeared to me that the door had been forced open rather than swung, the way in forest cemeteries tree roots will unlock sealed crypts.

I would have liked to have seen a mouse, something fast and quick, a darting shape. The next person to come inside would infer that we had less than no respect for history or architecture, for that sanctity due every home. I could hear the distant sounds of the engines trying to blow themselves apart. It was rotten to be inside. Why do I forge my strongest bonds with objects? When my pawpaw died I was free of grief until I learned the fate of those clever silver shears he used to cut portrait silhouettes from black paper. Mary had given them to the man who shared his hospital suite, a machinist wasted by emphysema. It galled me to think of the stranger idly trimming his chin hairs with those fine scissors.

I couldn't bear to climb the stairs alone. I didn't want to see the ransacked bedrooms. Even worse, I didn't want to look outside to see my friends waiting by the cars. I wanted to see the green pasture and the hunting fox and I wanted to turn from those things to Alice in our fantastic bed.

On a whim—if it is a whim when there is no lightness—I ducked into the fireplace. I found that faint ocean sound that survives in seashells. My nose detected the perfume in the close air. When my back scraped the wall, I thought the fragrance grew. Had it perme
ated the soot and stone? Above, the only thing that I could see was a perfect square of gray, one perspective on the infinite. A few snowflakes drifted down, heavy with light.

9

Escape

The Plymouth's transmission refused to slot in reverse. Every time Alice eased off the clutch, it produced a metallic gurgling.

Misdiagnosing the problem, Shiloh positioned himself in the road and beckoned with his arms, as though she were backing up a tractor trailer or bringing a plane out of a hangar.

I put my shoulder to the bumper and, though my feet kept skating out from beneath me, I got the car moving. At the end of the driveway, I watched Shiloh reach inside the open window and help Alice cut the wheel. I wasn't paying attention to the task at hand. When she tapped the brakes, it caught me by surprise. I flipped over the hood like a stunt man. Then Alice was out of the car and running toward me.

“You boob!” Shiloh yelled.

In her rush to attend to me, Alice forgot to set the parking brake. Watching the car pick up speed, we consigned it to the bottom of the ravine. This is when it hit the trailer. The tow bar became wedged beneath the car and things came to a gentle halt. The clouds issuing from our mouths dispersed.

Shiloh brushed the snow from his clothes, then he walked over and kicked the trailer hard enough to make it shiver.

“Why do you always root for me to fail?” Alice asked.

I wrapped my arms around her waist and picked her off the ground. She kicked and clawed me as I stumbled beneath her weight. My face pressed against her spine. I was privy to her warmth and smell. (How much better to love her than a dead boy.) She screamed for me to put her down. (Complicity is the grace of a dead boy.) My hat slipped below my eyes, or I didn't want to see. I held her aloft despite her threats. My arms circumscribed my happiness. Still she defied me.