The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel (10 page)

“You surprised us,” Helen said.

“Good surprise, I hope,” he said.

“I asked you to call first.”

“Same difference,” he said. “You know you’d just say to come on over. Or not. Then I would anyway. I thought we could work on your car.” Winking again.

“Uh-huh.”

“And?”

“Well. It does need work,” she said.

“Okay then.”

But that was enough of that. Helen didn’t want to talk to him any
more than he wanted to look at her, because he was as stupid as she was homely. She sometimes imagined what a baby of theirs might be like, and when she did she almost cried.

“I guess I’m going to my room,” Rachel said. She reached out with her right hand and found the butterfly-backed chair. Her north star. Rachel was able to negotiate around the holes in the floorboards, knew which doors were frozen at angles, skipped over the slats in the stairs that couldn’t bear the weight of even her slight frame. The winding staircase did not make her feel like royalty; she felt like a mountain climber descending a precipitous slope.

“Sounds like fun,” Jonas said, running his fingers along the sofa’s knotted weave, looking at Rachel up and down.

Helen saw him. “Stop it, Jonas,” she said.

“Stop what?” said Rachel.

“Nothing,” Helen said. “Nothing.”

Helen shook her head, trying to clear it. That Rachel could even think of leaving her stirred up the darkest place inside of her, that place she’d discovered the rainy day she’d been brushing her sister’s hair, the day they switched faces.

“I have an idea,” Helen said to her. Her voice was unbelievably bright and buoyant and cold. “Actually, Rachel had one.”

“I did?” Rachel said.

“You said you want to see what it’s like to be on your own,” Helen said. “Remember?”

“No, Helen. I—”

“That’s what you said, Rachel. You said, ‘I’m a grown woman.’ So be a grown woman. See what it’s like. It’ll make me happy if you are, that’s for certain: my life would be a great deal easier if I didn’t think I was going to be babysitting you for the rest of it. Jonas and I are going to go out for a while. We’re going for a ride. You stay here. See how you like it without me.”

“Don’t be mad at me, Helen,” she said.

“Who said I was mad?”

“I only want you to be happy.”

“If I were you I wouldn’t worry about me,” Helen said. She kicked Jonas, who immediately stood. “I’d worry about you.”

As Helen walked past, Rachel reached out for her, but Helen was just out of reach.

“I love you,” Rachel said.

Helen stopped. When was the last time she’d heard Rachel say this? It didn’t matter: today she was as hard as stone. “Of course you do,” Helen said.

Jonas followed Helen out the back door like an old dog, trailing a few steps behind. She gave him the keys. Helen could drive, but she liked it better when Jonas did, so she could roll down the window and let the wind blow against her face: on some days, when the air had that cool layer beneath it, there was nothing better than that feeling. Rachel always sat in the backseat, as quiet as a mouse.

He started the car up and backed it out of the drive and into the road.

“What was that about, with you and Rachel?” Jonas said. “Is she going to be okay?” He paused, carefully putting together the words of his next thought so as not to enrage her. “It’s just—it wasn’t nice, the way you said what you said.”

“I’m messing with her,” she said, “the way I do. It’s a joke, okay? She’ll be fine. We won’t be gone that long. Just long enough for her to see what it might be like for her without me.”

And off they drove in her parents’ car, turning into the street so fast they almost hit a dog. Helen looked back and saw Rachel at the living room window, following them with her eyes by the sound the car made as it got farther and farther away. It was the first time the sisters had been this far apart in nearly a dozen years. Nothing in the world would be the same for them after this, from now until forever.

T
he lumberjack left his dogs outside the tavern and took a seat at the bar, the caked dirt falling off his arms like bark. Digby was a small man, but in the lumberjack’s presence he appeared miniature, like a doll. Each existed at opposite ends of the spectrum of what a man could be, freaks of dimension. Smith was the lumberjack’s name, and what a frightening man to apprehend he was. His face was stained by time and etched by weather, like the side of a stone mountain. His cheeks were so deeply furrowed Digby thought that if he could pry apart the folds of skin he might find some burrowing creature, or a growing plant. His eyes were so sunken he appeared to be looking at you from twin caves in his head. His beard was like a forest. Digby could get lost in it—that’s how big it was, and how big he was. To be in the same room with a man who could eat you—that was something. Even the old-timers seemed frightened of the lumberjack, as if there
were something he could do to them that hadn’t been done already.

Smith never said anything, but this didn’t stop Digby from speaking to him.

“The usual, Mr. Smith?” he said as Smith rumbled in. Digby got no response, positive or negative, so the usual it was: one part vodka, one part rum, two parts beer, all poured into the largest receptacle Digby had: a terra-cotta flowerpot. He’d covered the drain hole in the bottom with four pieces of chewed gum that, when dried, provided the perfect stopper.

Smith threw it back, and then pushed it again toward Digby. Digby mixed another.

“I hope you’ve got everything you need out there, in the woods,” Digby said. “But what’s a man need, really, other than a roof, a woman, and a meal?”

Digby smiled the way a man smiles for another man when something manly has been said.

Smith said nothing. He was struggling with some thought, or some memory: Digby could see that clearly. He’d seen the look before: Smith was sad.

“It must be a nice respite, though, regardless, to be off the mountain. Done with the felling of trees, et cetera. No more
Timber!
All that. You must have a tale or two to tell from those days, Mr. Smith, those days on the mountain, a tale of lumberjacking and . . .”

Even Digby found it hard to continue talking when met with a veritable wall of silence and disinterest. And yet he continued.

“I once had a romantic liaison with a woman who lived in a tree. She built a tree house in a sprawling oak not far from here. I climbed that tree like a little squirrel the days of our assignations. There was something especially romantic about that, looking out a window hewn from used plywood, to see the leaves changing, turning red and gold, a cloud floating by above.”

Nothing!

“I hear it’s brutal, being a lumberjack, an environment only the strongest of men can endure. It’s almost a calling, isn’t it? Like the priesthood. Which simply makes me wonder why you came here, to Roam. You must have a story. Everyone has a story. I should create a bit of silence and within it let you tell yours. I shall shut my piehole, as they say. The floor is yours!”

Sometimes Digby talked too much. A good bartender knew when to shut up; it was his father’s greatest skill. So now he would be quiet, and the lumberjack would feel the need to fill the quiet with the sound of his own voice. Digby fiddled with the bar keys in his pocket, and then stopped even that. What followed was the most profound emptiness, the living and the dead together in this small place and not a one of them saying a word.

As Smith finished off the last of his concoction he met Digby’s eyes with his own, briefly, but long enough for Digby to see into them and ferret out some understanding of the man’s predicament.

Smith’s heart was broken. More than broken: it was crushed and shattered. That’s why he was the way he was.

Outside, the dogs started howling like mad. One was scratching at the door; another was on its hind legs, trying to see in the window, others howling like mad. It was a crazy canine symphony.
Maybe that’s why he’s so quiet,
Digby thought. Maybe this was the only time he could get even this far away from them. Smith dropped a few dollars on the bar, almost seeming to nod at Digby. Then he left, and the dogs left with him, their howls receding, becoming no less constant but somewhat less urgent the more distant they became.

“Sad,” Digby said. “He tries to hide it, but he can’t. I can see it plain as day. The sadness follows him around like one of his dogs.”

Digby said it more to himself than to anybody else, but Fang heard him. From a dark corner the chalky light that was Fang appeared and
walked toward the bartender, and once to him placed his hand on Digby’s chest, and it went straight through to his heart: Digby felt the odd warmth of it in his blood.

“You’re a good man,” Fang said. “You’re the last good man in this whole town. All the good that could be squeezed out of this forsaken place was used to make you. That’s why you’re so small, my friend: there just wasn’t that much left.” Fang laughed. “And that’s why you can see us, you know, and nobody else can. You see everybody, even that lumberjack.”

Then He-Ping and Fang joined in what sounded to Digby like a coordinated not unhappy sigh. He-Ping said something and laughed, and then Fang made a comment about the weather, and soon everything was back to normal.

M
r. and Mrs. McCallister made the trip to Arcadia once a week. Arcadia, though only thirty miles away from Roam, felt like an entirely different world. It was built on the ruins of an old Indian trading post, and when the Germans and the Dutch settled there (and killed the Indians) they were inspired by the Greeks to call it Arcadia—an unspoiled, harmonious wilderness. There was no way to get there from Roam until a small road was finally built by Elijah McCallister. It was known as the Silk Road, because it was the main artery via which silk left his town, but also because it was as thin and slippery as a silk thread. Deaths on the road occurred so often that it was almost more newsworthy when someone survived it.

The McCallisters survived it once a week. Braving the journey was a courageous act, and not something one took lightly: Mr. McCallister slept poorly on Thursday nights, and usually left the bed long before
sunrise to wander the house, in an attempt to steel himself by drawing upon the history of all that had happened in it over the years. Mr. McCallister—Edward—was the son of Charles McCallister, who was the son of Elijah McCallister, who was, they said, one of the bravest explorers (and certainly the most courageous entrepreneur) the world has ever known. Edward’s father, Charles, had been quite bookish and dark, and Edward had become much more like him than he had become like his grandfather. Whatever strange and heroic virus there was lurking in the blood of Elijah McCallister, it had diminished and finally disappeared in future generations.

And so off they went, Mr. McCallister in his brown suit, white shirt, and bow tie, his father’s pocket watch tucked snugly in a vest pocket, his thin forty-two-year-old face unmarred by time because he so seldom used the muscles in it; and Mrs. McCallister in her cream-colored dress with the roses, in her slip and stockings, her sensible black shoes with the copper clasps, her only jewelry a wedding band and a small golden locket on display between her collarbones, her face round and serene, like that of an angelic cow. She was a tall woman with dark eyes that could hold you where you stood with the power of a strong man’s hands. That’s how she met and married Edward McCallister: she saw him one day, this reedy eighteen-year-old boy, mowing the lawn of the big house on the hill. She was on her way to a knitting class. When she saw him, she stopped and stared and somehow knew. He saw her staring and stared back, and as the world kept moving all around them they were still, alone in each other’s eyes.

Mr. and Mrs. McCallister continued living their life together in slow motion. They were old even when they were young. They felt that doing anything too quickly—whether it be moving, speaking, even thinking—usually resulted in a mistake of some kind. Both of their children were the result of a methodical plan, based on cycles tracked by temperature, the moon, and sperm motility, which was said
to be greater during the summer months. This was how Mr. and Mrs. McCallister, in a black car as big as a boat, navigated the treacherous cutbacks and blind curves of the Silk Road once a week: slowly.

And why? For Rachel, of course. In Arcadia there lived a Dr. Oscar Beadles. Beadles was a small, withered, balding man whose hands, due to a circulation problem, were blue. He was from the old country and had come for the water: he’d heard tales of its medicinal powers. By the time the tales had reached him, they were a bit garbled and it wasn’t entirely clear what the water really did: make old people young, or young people old? Did it promote hair growth or restrict it? He wasn’t sure. All he knew is that for a story about water to come all the way from the new world to the old there must be something to it, and if there was an opportunity to sow the seeds of his genius somewhere, he had to take it. When he got to America he made his way to Arcadia and discovered that there was indeed a magic water, a river rich with a unique mixture of subterranean minerals science had yet to fully understand but that Dr. Beadles was certain could aid him in creating a perfect elixir, a medicine with powers so vast and subtle it would cure not just one thing, but
all things
.

Every morning he captured the water from a spring just as it left the underground cavern. He placed the vials as deep into the hole as he could, because it was his feeling that prolonged exposure to sunlight degraded its magical, medicinal properties. But after eighteen years of the most rigorous scientific experimentation, he had succeeded in curing only one thing: blindness. Like many breakthroughs, it had happened quite by accident: one of the hundreds of mice he was working with had been born blind (or it certainly
looked
blind, it
acted
blind), and one day, after many treatments in which its entire little body was submerged in the mineral-rich Arcadian water, it miraculously regained the ability to see. Each treatment saw a marked improvement in its vision. Soon it was able to find its way through
a simple maze, and then one day—Beadles would swear to this—it made eye contact. With him. They actually
looked
at each other. The mouse would have achieved perfect twenty-twenty eyesight if what was to have been its final treatment hadn’t gone on just a moment too long and it drowned.