The Best People in the World (22 page)

Shiloh jogged over to see what had happened. I told him I'd lost the sickle. He grabbed me beneath my arms and tugged me to my feet.

We walked over to the haystack, really just a little hump.

I said, “I'm going to check on Alice.”

Shiloh pushed me onto the haystack. I got up and pushed him down. We were laughing some. Then I lost my balance, so I lay down in the grass.

“We have to cut your hair,” said Shiloh. “You almost look like a girl. Like a gangly girl.”

“Everything is spinning.”

“You really are drunk.”

“Would you get Alice for me?”

“There's nothing she could do.”

“I bet she can hear us talking.”

Shiloh's head was just a shadow above me.

“You going to be sick?”

I stuck my tongue out.

Shiloh put his hand on my forehead.

I had to close my eyes.

“I don't think I'll ever drink again.”

“Are you cold?”

“I guess a little bit.”

“I'm going to lie down beside you.”

“I love Alice.”

“Thanks for that information.”

Our shoulders touched. He kicked my foot in a friendly way.

“I haven't told Alice about your workroom.”

“You're a good person, Thomas.”

“Parker said you used to love a boy.”

“Did Parker say anything else?”

“He said Alice's husband wound up in an institution because of nobility.”

“A person doesn't need nobility to wind up in an institution. I'm proof of that.”

“What kind of institution were you in?”

“Orphanages, juvie hall, and jail. Three institutions, off the top of my head.”

Shiloh held his arms out in front of us and wiggled his fingers. An optical illusion made it seem as if we could see right through them.

“Parker said the boy killed himself because of nobility.”

“This isn't something we can talk about, Thomas.” His voice sounded wounded.

I wanted to tell Shiloh that I didn't have any nobility either. And
I wanted to tell him that I loved him. The more I thought about it, they both seemed like shitty things to say.

 

I woke up in the middle of the field. Alice and Shiloh were standing at my feet. Alice announced that she and Shiloh would be taking the car. I tried to catch her eye, but she was busy looking everywhere I wasn't. Sometimes her face defied me and was only a face.

It hurt to keep my eyes open.

“You hungover?” asked Alice.

I guessed I was.

“Who do I look like?” asked Shiloh. He had on huaraches, jeans, a blue workman's shirt, and his sunglasses.

“A semiproductive member of society,” answered Alice.

“I've got them all fooled,” said Shiloh.

Once the sound of Alice's car died away, I went inside the house. I experienced a brief exhilaration at finding myself alone. Immediately afterward I felt dread. In order to distract myself, I tidied Alice's and my bedroom—folded our clothes, shook out the sheets and made the bed, pushed the bed square with the wall. In the kitchen I put dishes away, wiped down counters, washed out the refrigerator, culling the unidentifiable and the rancid. When all that was done, I went outside to wait for my friends to return. A blanket of translucent clouds obscured the sun. Butterflies and grasshoppers made imprecise flights above the meadow. The haystack had turned from gold to a dull yellow. So as not to be seen as taking shortcuts, I went around back and weeded the garden. Returning to the house, the kitchen didn't seem so immaculate anymore. I washed it again, now sponging the dust off the cabinet edges, polishing the sink fixtures, wiping down the black surface of the woodstove. I climbed the ladder-steep back stairs and swept out the house from top to bottom. I swept the pantry, careful not to excite the dirt enough that it might reach the kitchen counters. I pushed all of the filth to the threshold of the front door and swept it out. Then I swept the rectangular granite block of the front step. I removed five burned-out lightbulbs from their sockets, but when I couldn't find new bulbs, I returned the dead ones to their places.

I went into the bathroom, put the stopper in the tub, and ran a bath, scrubbing the dirt off my skin with chips of soap wrapped in a washcloth. The water turned gray. By standing up and checking myself in the mirror above the sink, I could tell which spots I'd missed because the dirt stained like a bruise. I sat in the hot water, working on my feet and under my arms. I rinsed myself. Even our cleanest towels smelled earthy. I squeegeed the water off with my fingers. In front of the mirror, I shaved, using soap suds for shaving cream, the hairs came sparse and black on the sides of my mustache and under my neck. I'd used soap on my hair, too, and already it was drying, shiny and limp, in a ragged crown. The last thing I did was rinse out the tub.

 

It started raining again. I made a fire in the stove and boiled three hot dogs. They tasted salty and delicious. Where, I wondered, had my friends gone to? I couldn't keep myself from imagining twisting wrecks. What if Shiloh had taken Alice up in the plane? I couldn't bear it. Forcing myself to consider other things, I thought about the hideout in the basement and those shiny new locks. But I was afraid that if I went down there, I wouldn't hear their return.

I went upstairs and tried Shiloh's door. He'd hung a beach towel in front of his window. The towel moved back and forth with a subtle sway. I turned his light on and closed the door behind me. The room was practically unchanged. The upside-down flag thumbtacked to the wall; the pitcher of water—almost empty, the surface dimpled with dust—was now closer to his mattress; his hay-flecked clothes were in a pile, and beside them was another pile showing sweat-hardened socks, greasy jeans, and his few shirts; by his mattress was an English-Italian dictionary, a pocket comb, nail clippers, a pile of change. At the head of his mattress, there was a closet door. Inside the closet wire hangers waited for clothes.

A cigar box stuck out from beneath his bedsheet. It was secured with a brass hook and loop. Inside I found a collapsible Polaroid camera and a stack of photographs. The pictures were held together with rubber bands. The top picture showed a skinny boy riding on
top of a train car full of coal, his arms extending across the frame to usher the viewer in. On the back of the picture, Shiloh had written “Utah.” The next picture showed the boy standing in front of Mount Rushmore, but at an angle so that his head was the same size as the presidents'. Shiloh appeared in some of the pictures, in strange cities, on mountain trails, eating out of a can, pointing at the horizon. Denver, Akron, Butte, Lawrence. Men sleeping under a bridge, looking older than corpses. An indigo sky. Shiloh owning a younger face. There was a picture of someone jumping off a train trestle and another one of a man's wounded hands (“poor landing in Portland”). Every picture was focused on the same middle distance; because of this, all of the landscapes seemed related. Then I came across the pictures I'd expected to find: a hard-on laying on a palm like a trout; the top of a boy's head over what I was certain must have been Shiloh's crotch; a self-portrait where Shiloh holds the camera straight over their heads and he and the boy—naked, holding hands—look into it. It is the same boy each time. Shiloh's lover. And then, toward the bottom of the stack, the boy disappears. Instead the pictures show junkyard cars slipping into a slow river; contrails crossing at angles; half of a coyote resting on the side of a road, Shiloh's shoes just edging into the frame.

I heard the car coming down the road. I got the photos back into shape, refastened the lid, and replaced the box. I tucked the bedsheet around it. I was reaching to turn the light off when I saw the sign he'd affixed to the back of his door:

I turned off the light.

The house was dark. I didn't hear anyone come in. I went downstairs, flipped on the kitchen light, and walked onto the porch. Ribbons of night cut through the clouds. I could hear the hot
engine clank and hiss as it cooled. But the car parked in the driveway wasn't Alice's.

“You alone?” a voice asked, gruffly, from inside the car.

All I could say was, “Huh?”

“Come here, guy.”

I took a step off the porch.

“I need a hand.” The driver's door creaked open. The car rocked each time he moved.

I was completely unnerved. “I don't know who you are,” I said, my voice shaky and thin.

“That's my insurance.” He stood up. The whole state was populated by giants. “Mags told me how to get here.”

Mags?

“I think you've got the wrong place.”

This troubled the man for a second. He looked at the house and at me. “I'm Gregor's brother.”

He didn't have his brother's accent or his stilted speech. Standing beside the car he patted down his pockets. He reached and grabbed the door handle. He paused for a moment and looked at me.

“What do you want?”

“Shush,” he said. He opened the back door and pulled a bundle out. It was a child wrapped in a blanket. “Let's get her in the house,” he said.

“In our house?”

“Don't start hassling me.”

So I led the way and the giant carried the girl in. He looked at our spindly chairs and took a seat on the floor. The nails in the boards cried. Sonya shifted in his arms and got back to sleep.

“What's going on?”

“There's sort of a situation.”

I really had no idea how I could enter into this negotiation. Alice would have been able to find a solution, I felt. But she had abandoned me to this mess. And it wasn't enough to know what she'd say. I had to understand her reasoning and I needed to pit that against this man's will.

“Well,” I said, “there's a situation here, too.”

Like a gambler laying down a winning hand, he said, “Gregor told me you were an orphan.”

“I'm not the orphan. Shiloh's the orphan.”

“Who're you then?”

They hadn't told him about me.

“I live here with Alice and Shiloh.”

He didn't seem to give this much thought.

“Let me explain: Gregor is having a routine problem with the government. It's a tax thing, but they like to make tax things into social-service things. Right? So, unless you want Sonya to grow up in some foster home, you need to look out for her for a couple of days.”

I understood why he was looking for Shiloh.

“Why can't you take her?” I asked.

“My lifestyle isn't appropriate for minors.” He set the girl on the floor.

“I don't even know what to feed a kid.”

“She eats food, man.” He eased himself up.

“I don't know.”

“Someone'll be by Wednesday to pick her up.”

“What day is today?” I asked.

“Are you serious?”

Where to begin?

“They'll be here in four days.”

“Why then?”

“Because that's the plan.”

I stared at the sleeping girl while he let himself out.

She stayed there, curled against the baseboard. Her dark, insect eyelashes twitched and her feet kicked inside her blanket. I was amazed that a whole person could take up such a tiny space. I didn't quite know what to do with myself. I crept about the room easing the windows down in their sashes. I rekindled the fire in the stove. With her pip nose and hair half as long as her torso, she was some type of beauty, if not entirely human.

At that precise moment I felt capable of protecting her, but just on the other side of her nap, the rest of her life waited. An arm
snaked out of her blanket and she plugged her thumb into her mouth. Sooner or later she would wake up…and what would it mean to her, of all the faces in the world, to be confronted with mine? She wouldn't be able to protect me from the depth of her disappointment. For the moment, she was safe in sleep. Until then I would be faithful and true. And when anticipation exceeded patience, I clattered the pots on the stovetop.

 

When Shiloh and Alice returned, Sonya was sitting at the table—I'd put two pillows on the chair and still her chin just barely peeked above the tabletop. She'd already eaten pork and beans. Since we didn't have any desserts, I put a couple of ice cubes in a cereal bowl; this was fine with her. She'd get the ice cube in her spoon, then ladle it to her mouth. When it got too cold, she'd spit it back in the bowl. Sometimes she'd fan her mouth afterward and say, “Hot.” It was a joke.

“Shiloh,” I said, “you remember Sonya.”

He walked over and shook her tiny hand.

“Hi, sweetie,” said Alice.

They looked at me for an explanation.

“Where's the rest of the gang?” asked Shiloh.

“She's staying with us for a few days.”

“You're kidding,” said Alice.

“Hot,” Sonya said. Waving her hand in front of her face, she accidentally catapulted the spoon out of the bowl. She burst out laughing.

I picked the spoon up and rinsed it before returning it to her.

The next time it wound up under the stove.

“You guys got her all riled up,” I said.

“Wait.” Alice raised her hands like she was trying to flag down a train.

Sonya slid beneath the table.

“What, exactly, is going on?” Alice looked as though she was preparing to multiply two large numbers in her head.

“She's hugging one of the table's legs,” said Shiloh.

“Apparently Gregor has some sort of P-R-O-B-L-E-M with the IRS.”

“
Irs
?” asked Shiloh.

“But it's not our P-R-O-B-L-E-M,” said Alice. “We have to take her H-O-M-E right now.”