Chapter Ten #5
First Bentley had set out to sort it alphabetically, but that seemed too arbitrary, so he had moved on to sort things by theme: delusions of persecution, belief in mystical animals, health fallacies, etc.
But this didn’t seem to solve the problem, either.
For example, was unicorn-horn medicine a belief in mystical animals or a health fallacy?
Maybe, he’d decided, it was better to sort them by their attributes, such as level of conviction, or how bizarre they were; harmless errors versus those that caused unfathomable suffering; beliefs held by one person or lots of people; beliefs that were more like notions versus those more like judgments versus hunches versus statements versus suggestible semi-convictions versus things not really believed at all but expressed for the sake of argument; beliefs that feel emotionally true versus ones arrived at by reason; notions that might be true but have no evidence versus things that have clear evidence against them; beliefs that could be held without causing problems versus those that really stirred things up.
“Well?” asked Miles.
“That’s my genius. I have an index. See those binders?”
Miles turned to see them rattling on a little shelf.
“Have you thought of using a computer?” he asked.
“You kidding?” said Bentley. “And lose it all at once?”
Currently, the index itself stood at eighteen volumes. Just when he thought he’d catalogued everything, people came up with more nonsense.
“I hear you,” Miles said.
The men fell silent. Now the worst of the mountains was behind them, the road descended toward the Greensbury River, the trees dropped away, and as the lights of the college appeared in the distance, Bentley turned to Miles and asked, if Miles didn’t mind sharing, what was on his phone that had caused him to leave the emergency room.
Of course Miles didn’t mind sharing. He had been tempted to share since Kate called, but back then it had seemed a strange thing to tell a stranger: “Our dog dug through the carpet, into the floor.” But it occurred to him that Bentley might have some opinion about this, and so he shared a little more, about the breed, the absence of truffles, the early days of calm, the animal’s newfound obsession.
“Say, you don’t live in Norbert Rumphius’s house, do you?” asked Bentley.
Once, thought Miles, I came from a land where you could tell a stranger that your dog tore up your rental, without fear that the stranger and the landlord were chums.
“You know him?”
Not only did Bentley know him, Norb sometimes hired him for mathematics projects, modeling, one-offs. He’d been hearing about the place for ages. “Let me guess, he’s letting you house-sit for free?”
Miles affirmed that this was so.
“And you weren’t suspicious?”
“We heard there was an affair.”
“Oh, there’s always an affair. Norb’s slept with half the European Central Bank. But that doesn’t mean one doesn’t charge rent. He had three or four other renters before you, and none of them could take it. How in the world have you lasted six months?”
“We did try the exterminator,” said Miles helplessly.
“Which exterminator?”
“I don’t know his real name. The Rat Man.”
“Clem. You mean the band teacher.”
“The Rat Man of Vermont is also the band teacher,” said Miles, half to himself, as, click, another puzzle piece of small-town life fell into place.
“There have been Rat Men ever since Ethan Allen. You didn’t expect that he would leave the family business?” Snowflake sighed. “Clem gets called to Norb’s house by every single renter. He told you that, right?”
“No.”
Bentley shook his head. “I don’t get it. I’ve told him, Clem, honesty. Just tell them. You can’t just go walking through and pretending it’s your first time there, just for the drama. Doesn’t serve anyone.”
He paused. “Hey, can I take a look? I’ve been wanting to see a Super-Rat-Line forever.”
—
It took twenty minutes to make it the last two miles, time spent talking about the Rat-Lines, which, to Miles’s disappointment, qualified, in Bentley’s taxonomy, as neither a rumor, a supposition, a legend, a myth, a delusion, a fanciful notion, nor a mass psychogenic illness.
By the time they reached the house, Miles was a little sorry that it was so late, and the children were asleep, because, secretly, he wanted the encyclopedic Bentley to go head to head with Wesley in arcana.
But it was late, and when the men descended, although Miles could have just as easily used the passenger door, he chose to exit as he had arrived, perched aboard the scooter, now zooming backward through the bay and onto the driveway.
Kate had heard them and was standing at the door, and as the men approached, Miles felt a little regal, a little presidential, standing tall, foot propped slightly up to ease the pressure on his injured knee, chest out and head thrown back, like Washington crossing the Delaware.
He did not think that the snow, in its volume, might be hiding something in the walkway, which the scooter struck with some velocity.
There was a crunch, and Miles fell into the mass of Bentley, and Kate cried out.
For a moment there was silence. And as Miles lay across Bentley’s deep, soft lap, sustained in that wintry pietà, his first thought, that he had destroyed this poor madman’s precious vehicle, gave way to the second, that Bentley would need to stay the night, and though Miles genuinely liked Bentley, it wasn’t clear where in the house there was a place for him to sleep.
The polite thing would be to give him their bed, and for him and Kate to decamp to the couches in the living room, but then a reflex had arisen, of which Miles frankly was not very proud, regarding Bentley’s person: the man was a paragon of knowledge and generosity, but he was also—and this was not his fault, truly, it was the fault of poverty, of a broken healthcare system, the simple cruel fact that it is hard to bathe at such a girth, which itself was likely the side effect of pharmaceuticals taken to ameliorate a terrible mental condition—well, he was not the cleanest man in Vermont.
And how terrible Miles felt to have had this thought, to be capable of this thought, and to have thought it about a man who had risked life and limb to drive him through the winter night—he, Miles, he who had not thought twice about shoving his own toe cheese into the warm, kneading hollows of the man’s dead wife’s foot shiatsu.
“Up you go, champ,” said Bentley with a gentle pat on the leg.
And with a lurch, aided no doubt by muscles built from so many skiing tumbles, Miles slipped off to inspect the damage to the scooter.
All the worrying was unnecessary, for it turned out that the shattering sound was Rumphius’s leaf blower, which someone had left in the path. Which Miles had left in the path, when he was testing it on snow.