The Best People in the World (25 page)

Shiloh and I passed the picture back and forth, not knowing what to do with it.

“Give it back,” the girl yelled inside the tent. “It's Sonya's!”

If Alice hadn't come along when she did, I think we would have destroyed the picture, as if a person might be freed from fate if they only had other people around them who cared enough to try and change it.

I'd like to see that picture once again. Sonya isn't the only one preserved in the frame. That vertical shadow on the wall was the proof that I had been standing behind the sheet. What became of the picture? I can't say. I don't know what happened to Sonya, either. True to our fears, she left later in the day. She and Alice were napping in the tent when a car came down the hill. Gregor's brother parked in the driveway and blew his horn.

 

We left the tent standing, to bleach and billow and snap. When it rained Shiloh brought in the rug and the pillows. A storm carried the sheet down toward the ravine where it trailed off the top of a black maple like a veil or the escape route of an eloping tree-house bride.

 

In our bed I tried every trick to separate Alice's body from her mind. Her skin drove me crazy. Everything was surface about her, everything was outside. She wouldn't uncross her legs or open her lips or unclench her fists. I wanted to tear her to pieces. I dragged my teeth beneath her jaw. She breathed in snorting huffs. I bit her nipples. The corners of her eyes brimmed with water. I sucked on her hard shoulders.

We were two irreconcilable wills. I was destruction and she was preservation. I kept flinging myself at her. I tried to wedge pillows beneath her. The smells rising from her body seemed to demand all this effort. A slick perspiration grew from the exertion of my attacks and her parries. I wrenched her fingers open. I hooked my thumbs inside her lips and pried her mouth open. She was like some horrible fish. When finally I unknotted her legs, I pushed my mouth against her. She tried to crack my skull with her thighs. We made incursions into the narrow territory where violence borders love. She bucked against me when she came.

I said, “There's no fun like you.”

“Say it again.”

I said, “There's no fun like Alice Lowe.”

“Tell me you feel the same after I say the thing I'm about to say. You have to call your parents.”

I'd been intending to write them a letter, from the moment I left.
What had prevented that letter was a question that I didn't know how to answer. How to explain that Alice and Shiloh and a car had been enough to lure me away from the home my parents had kept for me? The letter that excluded this issue would hardly be a letter at all. I tried to explain this to Alice, the problem of starting the letter and then the problem of finishing the letter, the problem of the letter's essential shortcomings.

“That's why you're going to call them,” said Alice. “You make them tell you what they need to know.”

And wasn't it true that Alice and Shiloh were only half as brave as me? They hadn't left anything behind, while I had left people who loved me, and all because of the way it felt to hold someone's hand and the magic of watching her sleep, and that, for me, turning away from those things would have been a betrayal of myself. What if I had died swimming across that lake? Wouldn't that have been far superior to dying some other way, like not swimming across that lake? Then again, what if my parents had used the same justification for similar actions? What if Mary had run off in order to see some stupid sculptures she remembered from Berlin, or if Fran had quit that job at the plant he couldn't have enjoyed too much? Or if Pawpaw had gotten into one of his blue spells and just laid down and died?

Alice walked across the room, her legs slicing the yellow light. She lifted her hair above her head and let it sail down.

“What?” she said.

We put on our filthy clothes. Eight miles down the mountainside.

At the corner of the grocery-store parking lot, beneath an oversize sign that had been colonized by swallows, we found a phone booth. Alice showed me a fistful of change. She put the tips of her fingers in my front pocket, tilting her hand so the coins cascaded in. The birds swarmed above us. I stepped inside the booth and pulled the door shut. There was a recess in the ceiling where a light fixture had either been scavenged or never installed. I fed the phone my money. There was a moment, after I'd dialed, while the machine ratcheted away, when my bravado evaporated. And the only question they could ask I still didn't have an answer for.

Mary answered with only mundane expectation. “Hello?”

“It's me,” I said. “This is Thomas.”

“Thomas?”

The sound of water muttered behind her voice.

“Are you standing by the sink?”

“Yes. The water's on. One second. No one's here. Your father's off at work and your pawpaw, he could be anywhere.”

The voice that came through the line was filtered and changed. It was her voice and something else. I didn't know if this new voice was the voice that Fran heard in their bedroom or if it was reserved for me.

“Do you have a cold?” I asked.

“I had a cold a couple of weeks ago, but I recovered. Do I sound ill?”

“I haven't heard your voice in a while, I guess.”

“Where are you, Thomas?”

“I'm in a parking lot.”

“Great. A parking lot.” It sounded like she was squeezing all her words out of a single breath that she'd taken before answering the phone. “I wish your father was here. It's too bad, I know he would like to speak with you. He thought the two of you had an understanding. All the time you spent together last summer.”

Maybe she meant that it was a shame for me that Fran wasn't home. Fran would be easy. Fran would be a cinch. Instead I had Mary and her hard questions and her intelligence and her implacable patience.

“I'm sorry for not calling sooner.”

“I can't understand it, Thomas. I mean, I can understand it and I can't. Listen to me prattling on. You must have something to say.”

Alice was checking her face in the rearview mirror. I watched her put her teeth on edge for a type of exaggerated smile.

“I didn't mean to hurt anyone.”

“Your father and I know we didn't raise a spiteful person. You're a young man and you want to make some decisions on your own.”

“That's it. I wasn't even thinking, really.”

“Your father talked with one of the detectives in town. He suggested we try Chicago. They didn't have any luck, obviously, though
your father was nearly mugged. Your grandfather managed to interrupt things with the car. At least that's the story they told me. Those people who seemed like they were interested in helping find you were interested in something else instead. That was their experience. ‘Throwing good money after bad' was how your father characterized it.”

“I never was in Chicago.”

“They believed they were very close to finding you. Sometimes they were told that they'd missed you by just a matter of minutes.”

“It wasn't me.”

“Are you with that Shiloh character, or is it just a coincidence that he ran off at the same time?”

“He's not the reason I left.”

“Are you with him?”

“He's here.”

“Thomas!” Her voice drilled into my ear. “Tell me you're not in California. You're not way out there, are you?”

“I'm in Vermont.”

“You're kidding. There's nothing in Vermont. We assumed you'd head to a city.”

“I was in New York for about a day.”

“You're not making any sense…”

The line cut out and I had to feed more coins to restore the connection.

“Are you still there?” asked Mary.

I explained that I was at a pay phone.

“Your voice sounds very flat, Thomas. Are you on something?”

“No I'm not
on
anything. I'm the same person you know. I'm just tired, if anything.”

“Well, do you have a job?”

“We're sort of outside the economy.”

“Oh,” said Mary.

“I mean we're not really buying anything.”

“You keep saying ‘we.' That's you and Shiloh?”

“There's a girl here, too.”

“This was the other theory.”

“We're going together.”

“Did she run away, too?”

“She couldn't really do that.”

“I don't understand.”

“She's twenty-five.”

“Let me tell you, buster, you've painted quite a picture. I see the three of you sitting around together—my son, his unreliable friend, and this strange woman. Three months have gone by and in all that time you call once to tell me you're okay. You didn't call on Father's Day. You didn't call to wish your father and me a happy anniversary. Yesterday was your pawpaw's eighty-first birthday and you haven't mentioned that yet. I'm not quite sure what I'm supposed to say. You're standing beside a pay phone in Vermont; at some point you're going to run out of money and we're going to be disconnected.”

Everything Mary said was true, of course. I opened the door of the booth.

I said, “I'm happy here.”

“And that's what your father and I want, too, but it's not all we want. You know your pawpaw has heard some disturbing rumors about that friend of yours.”

“I don't think most people know much about him.”

“He wasn't abandoned like some Moses, floating down the river or whatever he says. His mother put him up for adoption. She used to waitress at the Koffee Klub. Now, your mother doesn't like to cast aspersions on someone's character, but apparently she had a reputation for being friendly with her regular customers. And that hokum about his father, well, I think it's just a sad story concocted by a nobody wanting to be a somebody. I know you can understand that.”

“He's still a friend of mine.”

“Well, the police want to speak with your friend. Remember the car that got smashed into the floodwall? It was hot-wired! Can you believe that?”

“And they think Shiloh did that?”

“The detective told your father that if he found out where Shiloh was, to let them know because they already had a judge's order to pick him up.”

I told her that Shiloh had been blamed for lots of things he had nothing to do with.

“I just pray you look out for yourself.”

She started saying something else, but got cut off. I put in the rest of my change.

I told her the situation with the phone. That the next time we got separated would be it.

“Your father is going to be really sorry he didn't get a chance to speak with you.”

“Tell Pawpaw happy birthday for me. I'm sorry I forgot.”

All around me there were acres of immaculate asphalt, but between my feet little green plants were springing among the dead leaves and litter. Pushing the leaves around with my toes, I uncovered a dime. I left it there.

“You can call us collect, whenever you want.”

“It's not too easy for me to get to a phone. We're sort of in the middle of nowhere up here.”

“Do you want to tell me anything more than the name of the state? You know your father is going to have a look at a map. That's just the way he is.”

“We're not really too near anything you'd find on a map. We're sort of on a mountain, but I'm not sure if there's a name for it.”

“Of course they have a name for it, if it's really a mountain.”

I told her I'd try to find out.

“Tell me what the weather's like.”

“It's warm. It's nice. It's not so humid.”

Alice had gotten out of the car. She was walking around with her hands on her hipbones.

“What are you doing about school?”

“I've learned more in the last four months than I ever learned in school.”

I could hear Mary turn the water back on.

“Oh my Lord, you're seeing that exhausted-looking teacher. What was her name?”

Alice looked at me through the windshield. She'd put on Shiloh's mirrored shades.

“I can't believe you. Your pawpaw circled her name on your report card. Two As. You only earned two As in your whole life. She ought to be arrested.”

I said it in a soft voice. I'd never betrayed Mary like this before. And I knew by saying it I would have to live with it for the rest of my life. I said, “We're in love.”

“Ha,” said Mary. She hung up.

 

Eight miles back.

I wasn't talking.

Alice kept winging me with sidelong glances. Finally she said, “There's no food in the house.”

I said, “You're always hungry.”

That shut her up.

When we pulled into the drive, Shiloh kneeled in the front yard, concentrating on some small mystery, no doubt. Beside him, a metal bowl caught the sunlight. Alice marched inside.

“Get over here, Mahey.”

I had one foot on the porch.

Shiloh turned toward me. Dark smears angled across his cheeks. There were more slashes on his arms. His hands were caked with gore.

He tossed a bloody rag toward me. When it landed it unrolled itself into a map of an animal. Mucus and strings of blood laced over the white skin.

“I'm teaching myself how to set snares.” He lifted a pink haunch out of the bowl.

“What was it?”

“Turn the skin over.”

Gray-and-white heather: a rabbit. I petted the fur. “What are you going to do with it?”

“I could make a drum head, earmuffs, a rabbit hat. I could
make slippers or, if I catch enough, I might make a blanket or a coat.”

“Do the rabbits feel anything?” The animal's experience was suddenly important to me.

“Depends—either the snare breaks their necks or they asphyxiate.”

“What happened to this one?”

“It died.”