The Best People in the World (6 page)

The corners of her mouth were red and creased. I watched her cut the words from the cloth of her breath.

“Here's the deal, buster. You need to tell me where you were and who you were with so I can speak with her parents. And let me tell you, this is not something I look forward to. Believe me. But I won't have her parents calling me and me looking like some nincompoop with no idea where her son is.”

But I couldn't give her Alice's name.

“The whole time, your poor grandfather kept looking for you. That he spent one second worrying about you makes me crazy. You didn't know there wasn't a flood. What did you plan on doing? Swimming?”

I wanted to suffer, too, and I wanted to be back in Alice's bed. And might Alice infer what my mother would demand? Had they seen each other? Had something slipped between them, and would Mary recognize it? I sat there, mute.

Mary sank her nails into my forearm. Frustration had led her to
that point. I didn't even mind so much. Later it would be an embarrassment for her that I wore the marks. She went inside the house and shut me out. I climbed in through my bedroom window, bringing the day full circle.

A little while later Mary came to the door. There was a person on the telephone who wished to speak with me. Mary had undone the twist tie that held the cord together, enabling me to take the call in my room.

“I understand, you and your mother are having a misunderstanding.” In the background I could hear the front loaders shuttling between the coal barge and the plant. “I'm pretty sure that's all it is. Your mother is definitely in your corner nine times out of ten. This, however, is one of those times when she is not one hundred percent in your corner and she called me because she is very upset to be in this position. Do you understand? She asked me if there's something she's not picking up on. It's important to her that she's being fair with you. What do I think? I think that, yes, she's being fair with you, but she also has never been a boy, right, so there are certain codes of, right, chivalry, basically, that we have to broach.

“Now apparently you don't want to give the name of this young girl who you were with. I understand it can be embarrassing, for one thing, to have your mother inquire into your personal habits. I can see your side of it and I can see your mother's side of it. It puts me in a sticky position. And, I don't try to misrepresent myself here. How can I, or your mother, guarantee that we're doing the right thing here? We have to go by feel. Well, in the same vein, I can't expect that you can undo some of your decisions. What I do expect is that you'll take responsibility, and not telling the girl's name is not taking responsibility. Not telling the girl's name is shirking responsibility. Are you listing to me, ace?”

I was listening to him.

“Right now your mother's upset and, obviously, you're upset. The thing you have to do is get past that and move toward making it less upsetting. And I'm saying this as your friend, right, not just your father.”

“I really can't talk about it.”

“Well, your mother isn't going to have much interest in talking with you until you do.”

 

Who took the trouble to pilot the police cruiser past the fragile inconvenience of ornamental trees, flower boxes, and vacant benches? And after he had gone through that trouble, to point it at something as resilient as concrete? What sort of sense did that make? It made no sense. So who had the opportunity? When the chief of police drove the car at the head of the River Parade, no one asked him about opportunity. Presumably he had as much opportunity every other day of the year.

And what about the dump-truck driver? Some people found it a bit too convenient how the driver was cast as a heroic figure. They saw evidence in the dump-truck driver's behavior to justify their suspicions. On the night in question, and under highly trying circumstances, he, a municipal worker, did a job exactly as had been expected of him. Come to think of it, hadn't he been a bit of a striver, a Johnny-come-lately?

No one, not the police (who were waiting for the river to recede before they could remove the sandbags and give the car a thorough once-over), or the John Birch Society (who'd offered a cash reward for the opportunity to interrogate the vandal), or the court of public opinion, for that matter, was able to get to the bottom of these questions. And though Mary and I weren't talking, I heard her say something that put the situation in sharper focus. Pawpaw had voiced his respect for such a clear message against the police department, or, as he put it, “those uniformed thugs.”

“Wait,” said Mary. “You think someone was trying to get back at the police?”

“They totaled the damn car,” Pawpaw reminded her.

“Sure,” said Mary, “the car was ruined, but what makes you think that was the intention? The car getting ruined was just incidental. Don't you see? They weren't trying to destroy the car. They were trying to let the river in.”

 

For the next couple of days, Alice flat out ignored me. If I lingered after the bell, she walked out. When I raised my hand to ask a question, she called on someone else. She allowed Ray to eat up half an hour of class explaining his feelings about the origin of Atlantis. I called her, but she never answered her phone.

So I showed up at her place unannounced on a Sunday afternoon. She threw the door open. “It's you,” she said, as though she was used to having all sorts of visitors. She was wearing a blue dress that tied around her waist. She looked as if she'd just gotten back from church.

If she just wanted me to feel bad, there wasn't much point in giving her the satisfaction. I turned around.

“Wait,” she said. “You have to explain to me where you went after you left here.”

I told her I went home.

“That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard.”

I couldn't offer a defense.

“I was worried about you,” said Alice.

“I wasn't actually in any danger.”

“But you didn't know that at the time.”

It wasn't clear if she was ever going to let me into her apartment again.

“My parents keep asking where I was.”

“You can tell them if you want. After this term is over, I'm going to take a break from teaching. I already turned in my resignation. A teacher needs to show better judgment than her students.”

We might have stayed like that, standing across from each other in a doorway, but I stepped toward her and kissed her lower lip. “Well,” she said as she closed the door behind us.

Tucked neatly beside her sofa, I saw a red toolbox and a stack of men's clothing.

Alice said, “I had a revelation.”

The clothes—though they looked dirty—had been ordered in fastidious piles.

“What kind of revelation?” I asked.

“Well,” said Alice, “I haven't been sleeping well. The reason for this, I think, is that I'm nervous about living alone. I don't like noises in the middle of the night. Ideally I'd like to get a dog.”

Of course, those weren't a dog's clothes.

“At the same time, I don't want a dog. So what I decided was that I needed a roommate.”

“Oh,” I said.

“And guess what, I went out and found one.”

I looked at the guy shirts and the guy pants. “What's her name?”

Alice came over and gave me a hug. “Nothing is going to change between us,” she said.

“What's your roommate's name?”

“His name,” said Alice, not spitefully, but clearly, “is Shiloh Tanager.”

6

House Guest

Three days before, Alice had carried a stack of papers down to the little brick plaza across from city hall. She wanted to take advantage of the weather to do some outdoor grading. People came and went. She could hear the river sweeping past.

Shiloh took a spot at the opposite end of her bench. He seemed preoccupied, watching passersby. He reached a hand up, threaded it inside the neck of his shirt, and massaged his left shoulder. Turning toward Alice, he assessed the pile of papers. Somewhere in the pile was an essay I'd written on vaulted ceilings.

“You're a teacher?”

Alice nodded.

“Reading. Riting. Rithmetic. Which are you?”

“I teach history.”

“I'm a student of history,” said Shiloh. “Social theory, Judeo-Christian democracy, capitalistic monotheism. I'm interested in nondiscriminatory political fabrics.”

“Where do you study?”

He stuck a finger out, as though ringing a doorbell.

She didn't comprehend his gesture.

He jabbed his finger twice more.

“You got me.”

“On the shores of the Ohio River.”

“Cincinnati?”

He shook his head, pleased.

“Pittsburgh?”

“I was homeschooled,” he said.

“Oh.”

“In my own home.” But, again, he'd failed to convey his message. “By myself.”

“That's ambitious,” said Alice.

A flattened smile found its way onto his face. He kneaded his shoulder again. “You know anything about shots?”

Somewhere Alice had picked up one of those apologetic shrugs.

“They gave me tetanus at the clinic.”

“A tetanus shot?”

He rolled the cuffs of his pants up, revealing shins crossed with black scabs and red welts.

“Ouch,” said Alice.

“I woke up in the middle of the night to see that water coming up. The stove shorted out. POP! Blue sparks. I didn't know if the TV had gone yet. So I waited while the water came up. I didn't want to step in at the same moment the TV went. ZAP! Killed by television. It was coming up five inches an hour. I waited till I couldn't wait any longer and I floated out of there.”

“You floated out of your house?”

“Like a water bug. I had a duffel bag under each arm.”

“I hope your house is okay.”

Shiloh made a chopping motion with his hand, a gesture that divorced himself from the house. Maybe there had never been a house, he seemed to indicate.

“I was fortunate to have had an awful childhood,” said Shiloh. “Short of everything else, it's probably the best way to teach a person optimism.” He rapped on the bench with a knuckle.

“What made it awful?” asked Alice.

“My hateful father, of course!”

“Ah,” said Alice. A perfect puckered sound.

“A scoundrel. A family man. A millionaire. A poet. That's my father. You won't hear me say his name. All I have to do is open my mouth and there'd be a Cadillac full of lawyers waiting to drag me off to court.”

The name Shiloh Tanager meant nothing to Alice. She had never seen his damp little home or one of his paranoia boxes. It also seemed to Alice that she'd never spoken to a person less interested in her. For some reason she found this reassuring.

 

Alice showed me the growing evidence that she'd picked the perfect roommate. Here was the door that no longer squeaked, the window that slid in its sash. Gone was the wiggly chair, the sink's drip. All of a sudden the light came on when she opened the refrigerator and the milk didn't freeze when it got pushed against the back wall. Dishes left in the sink miraculously put themselves away. But for the toolbox and stack of clothes beside the sofa, he was like the cobbler's elves.

She kept waiting to thank him, but their paths never seemed to cross. She couldn't just leave a note. A note suggested that she didn't want to see him. And while she didn't necessarily want to see him, she didn't need it to be so established. Her invitation had been an invitation to compromise, but where was the compromise? She was supposed to be doing him a favor, not the other way around. This wasn't what she'd expected.

One night she decided to wait up for him. That would allow them to put things in perspective. It would establish some boundaries. He couldn't just come and go as he pleased, like some wild animal. She would express her gratitude and then they would straighten this stuff out. Midnight came and went. At three in the morning, he still hadn't returned. How had this happened? Just when she'd gotten over worrying about herself, she had to worry for everyone else. Maybe teaching wasn't the best fit for her. She worried for all of her students. Parents' night had been a disaster as she found herself worrying about these
sad, hopeful parents. And grading. Grading was really the worst of it. If she gave the students the grade they had earned, it just confirmed their deepest fears, but if she didn't, if she gave them the grade that they hoped for, well, it wasn't realistic. And eventually all of these grades were compiled and then the report cards had to go out and those poor parents and their poor student children. She'd tried to express this to her sister when they got together over her Christmas break, but her sister wouldn't hear any of it. “Fuck your brains out,” had been her advice. Her younger sister. Which was absolutely no surprise at all. The dentist had a brother in Florida, and if Alice only said the word, then the brother would hop in his plane and fly up and show her a good time. The brother had built the plane in his garage.

She turned the lights off, but she couldn't go to bed. Had she invited this stranger into her home only so that she could worry about him? That took the cake. But in the next moment, she heard footsteps coming up the stairs and she waited in the darkened living room as the door opened. Shiloh slipped inside, made his way across the darkened room to the reading lamp, which he snapped on—hadn't she broken the bulb off inside the socket? How does a person learn to fix things like that?

Shiloh saw Alice sitting on the sofa.

“You want me to boil you some water or something?” He gave her just a fleeting look and he was in the kitchen putting the kettle on.

“That would be nice.” She looked at her watch. It was a quarter till four. “I was waiting up for you,” she said.