Free The Best People in the World by Justin Tussing Page B

weren’t in the car ten minutes when Shiloh said, “A generation ago, your average person died less than fifteen miles from where he was born.”
    I asked Alice the name of the mountains around us.
    They didn’t have names. They were hills.
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    Gaps in the interstate system meant that for every ten miles of highway, we spent a mile creeping through some perfectly forgettable town. It rendered the whole idea of escape anticlimactic.
    Three hours into the future, we were exhausted and just a hundred miles from where we’d started. We stopped for gas. I bought cheese sandwiches. Alice asked me to drive. The sandwiches were damp inside their plastic wrap. We tossed them out the window. Alice fell asleep. The car converted fuel into miles. Shiloh sat up high in the backseat; whenever I checked the rearview mirror, his face was right where my eyes wanted to be. I trained myself to use the side mirror, but the moment I forgot, his face perked up.
    His mouth made word shapes.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œHow do you feel?”
    â€œGreat.”
    â€œWe’re on our way.”
    On either side of the road, chicken farms stretched as far as you could see, low aluminum barns. Downy feathers carpeted the road. The turbulence from the car snatched the feathers into the air.
    That afternoon, the road amazed us by passing over the Ohio again. The river had turned steely, and narrow. We wouldn’t have recognized it except for a sign. This bridge was an unremarkable cantilevered cement span, and crossing it seemed less an event, just as the river seemed less of a thing.
    Alice woke up and moaned. She’d slept in such a way that the right side of her face was sunburned. She commandeered the mirror in order to study her face.
    â€œTell me the truth,” she asked, “how noticeable is it?”
    I turned from the road to face her. Her lips took on a vulnerable shape.
    â€œIt’s fine.”
    â€œThere,” Shiloh said, pointing to a billboard that was being pulled down by vines. A place to spend the night.
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    Tiny white cabins were scattered among gnarled trees. A hand-lettered sign, “Pool,” pointed around the back. I gave a man twenty dollars for a key.
    Inside, there was just one big room. The bathroom and shower stall were hidden behind a kitchenette. The ceiling was open beamed and the rafters painted white. Organdy curtains in the windows. “God,” Alice pronounced from the bathroom. When she came out her face was buttered with Noxzema. She slumped into a chair.
    Shiloh and I decided to visit the pool.
    It wasn’t a swimming pool, but a diving pool, straight sided and as deep as a well. There was a springboard with handrails and a wheel underneath so you could adjust the board’s fulcrum. The water was green. Shiloh and I entertained ourselves with jackknives, cannon balls, suicides, and sailor dives. When we got tired of pulling ourselves out of the water, we stretched out on the cement apron and let the heat rise through our skin.
    Excitement pulsed through me, like money I needed to spend.
    Later the three of us sat on the cabin’s lumpy mattress and referred to a map. Assuming we got on the road at a decent hour, we were guaranteed to reach New York before noon. And what, Alicewanted to know, did New York have to do with Vermont? Shiloh had a friend he needed to see. This friend knew people in Vermont. He would help us find our way.
    Alice asked what the chances were we’d be in Vermont tomorrow night. That, Shiloh said, was not a matter of chance, but a statement of fact.
    I took my shoes off and slid my legs beneath the sheets. Alice did the same. Shiloh told us he’d sleep in the car. Could he borrow the bedspread? He rubbed it against his face. He wanted us to know it was too scratchy, too dirty, too thin. He was on a talking jag. He started a story about a guy who might have been him, who got so cold he broke into a pigeon coop and stuffed the