The Best People in the World (43 page)

“This!” I said—I have no idea what I meant. I tried to toss her higher, to get an arm beneath her legs. My feet hit the snowbank and I fell forward. We dove beneath the snow. I had to let go of her to breathe.

Shiloh walked around the van, sweeping the bumpers clean. “Tear each other apart,” he said.

Alice got in her car and drove a few feet up the hill, so we had room to connect the trailer and its hitch. I fixed the cotter pin and safety chain. Shiloh reached inside the trunk and spliced the brake lights from the trailer to the brake lights for the car.

I raised my arms to say, What else do we do?

There was something desperate in Shiloh's eyes. He leaned inside the van and lifted something out.

It was a grasshopper pie, seven-eighths intact. Parker must have been saving it for dessert. Shiloh passed three pieces out. I inhaled the sweet gas of crème de menthe. The mint like some perfect compromise of ice and spring. We ate the dead man's food with pinches of snow and crumb. Our mouths hung open. We bared our shiny teeth. Shiloh brushed his mustache absently before serving up the rest. I couldn't remember the last time I'd tasted something sweet.

Shiloh ran behind the house. Neither Alice nor I moved.

I wondered how much longer it would take before winter broke, how long before the deep snow coursed through the ravine as meltwater. How long could the house shelter its icy heart?

When Shiloh returned he carried two coiled lengths of garden hose. “You're going to have to siphon gas,” he said.

There were all sorts of things we would need to do to continue to survive.

“We'll get money,” said Alice. Her complexion was like flour. “I'll call my sister.”

I was worried about myself, about where I'd go next. When I looked up, Shiloh said, “We're on different paths, partner.”

My head disagreed.

Shiloh stood, resolute. “Alice, if someone asks you what happened, what are you going to say?”

She didn't answer him.

“It was an accident,” I said. “Parker just fell.”

Shiloh kept his eyes fixed on Alice.

“You pushed him,” said Alice. “He pushed him.”

10

Shiloh

Shiloh sat on the van's bumper, his head resting in his hands.

“He probably saved our lives,” I said.

Alice reached out a hand and stroked Shiloh's back.

“I'll look you up sometime, Mahey,” said Shiloh, but I've never seen him since.

He stood up and wrapped us in his arms.

I was searching for the perfect thing to say as he climbed into the van.

As soon as he'd shut the door, the wheels began to turn. Where could he go in this world?

“We have to follow him,” I said.

Alice and I got in her car.

Patches of gray ice glinted on the road. Twice the wheels began to spin, we lost our speed, and the house pulled us back, but on the third try, we made it out.

In the light snow we followed the only set of tracks. Shiloh kept to secondary roads. A few times he veered toward one side of the road or the other. It seemed he might be driving very fast, or eating. All of a sudden we were in that empty valley where Alice and I had come upon the overturned van and the girl who'd bitten her tongue. A steady wind scoured the snow from the road. On an otherwise frozen pond, a flock of geese crowded into a section of open water. Across the valley Alice and I thought we saw something moving. If it was Shiloh, then that was the last time we saw him. Then we were back in the foothills where the trees could tame the wind. A few inches of snow covered the road, but there were no tracks before us.

11

Alice

The Western Union office was located in a grocery store. It shared its desk with the customer services counter. Alice called her sister. It's the nature of such calls that you can ask for anything so long as you show contrition. Alice told her sister that she'd just come through “a disaster.” I stood beside her in my jerry-rigged shoes, shaking my head. For two hours we sat on these hard plastic seats, looking at all that food we didn't have the money to pay for. People walked around sharing their bored faces with each other. Alice fell asleep beside me. She snored softly, her head resting on her shoulder. If Shiloh had driven past, I would have gone with him. It would have been a sacrifice, but I could live with it. The manager came over. “What happened?” he asked, pointing at his own forehead. I said, “I got punched.” He nodded toward Alice. “I'm not supposed to let people sleep in here.” But he didn't ask me to wake her.

The money came. We tried our best to spend it, but everything we wanted totaled under seven dollars. We ate in the car in the parking lot. It was cold, but Alice left the engine off. The world was a noisier place than we remembered and we couldn't bear to hear anything, not even our own voices. And I wanted to make love to her, but I didn't know how to tell her. How sad is that? I leaned over and kissed her fat face. She started the car.

By the time I took my turn behind the wheel, it was the middle of the night. My perception was cloaked by pure exhaustion. At some point I decided Alice and I were back in our old bed. The glow of the headlights was, in my mind, moonlight. I was grateful to be able to return there. I was only dimly aware of our velocity and the concrete things we passed.

An air horn returned me to my situation. Just like that, the bed went up the chimney again.

There was a silence in the car, as though one of us had just screamed. Alice sat there, her eyes wide open, stretching the muscles in her jaw.

“Why are you squinting?” she asked.

“Can you read all the road signs?”

“Do you need glasses?”

“I might.”

“If you do, get contacts—you have such a fine face.”

I said, “Do you think you could be pregnant?”

“Let's not talk about this.”

I reached over to hold her hand.

“There'll never be a baby.”

“But you don't really know.”

She yawned.

The road stretched before us in taillights.

“Maybe Parker loved him,” she said. “Why else would he come back?”

I didn't tell her about the boy.

“You don't even know why you're mad at me.”

I kept my thoughts to myself.

“Did you expect that the three of us were just going to start all over again?”

“Do you know where he'll go?”

“He'll find someplace, I don't doubt it.”

What would that place look like?

All these quiet houses slipping by in the night. The world reduced to cones of light and the things they passed over. “Where am I driving to?”

She didn't answer me.

“It was an accident with Parker,” I said. “He didn't mean to hurt him.”

“I saw what I saw.”

“Can I ask you one more question?”

“You don't have to say it like that.”

I looked at her beautiful fucking face.

And then she did scream.

But we lived.

 

I picked oranges. I took a job in a bakery, but didn't last a week. For a while I lived with a girl in a giant house on an island—her father patented a way to grow lettuce hydroponically. She and I would make a pitcher of margaritas and take a pontoon boat out onto the lake. We had many inconsequential accidents. Halley pioneered ways to help disabled kids communicate with horses. I met her at a poolside concession I managed outside Phoenix, Arizona. When it came to cursing, I've never met her equal. We make choices and then we make other choices. That's what I'd like to tell you, Alice. And it's warm everywhere I go. Tina and I slept on a green air mattress, like a square lily pad, in the midst of a garden of yellow flowers. There were these seedpods that looked lighted from inside and burst all of a sudden, triggering other seedpods. In the morning we hosed off on a wooden pallet to keep the grass from getting muddy. Alice, I missed you always.

 

We reached the Ohio in a misting rain. A raft of dark barges hugged the near shore. The bridge rose before us like a photograph of a dream. Seagulls perched in the ironwork to spread their soggy wings. Sodium floodlights in the guy wires seemed to manufacture the bridge as much as illuminate it, a yellow, caustic light. The tires made a humming sound. Alice's car shimmied over expansion joints that looked like enmeshed steel teeth. On the dash the radio's station-indicator light sparked from time to time. The roadway still angled up. We drove through the ceiling of the clouds and entered a silent world of rhythmic light. Before and behind were indistinguishable. We flew above the river. My heart leapt in the moment after we began to fall, before the bridge caught us.