The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel (11 page)

Clearly further experimentation was required.

Unfortunately, Beadles had no other blind mice—but a blind human being, he decided, would be even better. Eyes are eyes, after all. He made inquiries and discovered, to his amazement, that there was not a
single blind person
in all of Arcadia, a town with a population verging on the thousands. And why?
It must be the water!
Beadles thought. He was definitely on the right track.

But, while there were no truly blind people in Arcadia, there were a number of people who couldn’t see that well, people who needed glasses to read, to drive, to walk without stumbling. This meant their eyes were far from perfect, and some improvement could be made. If he could cure blindness, he could certainly cure those on the darkening road toward it.

So he placed an advertisement in the
Arcadian Daily News
:

SEEING IS BELIEVING!
IF YOU DON’T THROW AWAY YOUR GLASSES
AFTER ONLY 3 TREATMENTS
THE ENTIRE PROCEDURE IS FREE!

It was a huge success. Eyeglass-wearing Arcadians lined up for the treatments. Freshwater from the underground river was bottled into dark brown eyedroppers, and everyone from the president of the Arcadian Bank to little Joey Cooper the paperboy, whose glasses were as thick as pop-bottle bottoms, took their turn in the dentist’s chair Beadles had found in a salvage yard. “I now will remove from the room all
the light,” he said as he flicked the switch, leaving him and his patient in complete darkness. “This, to confiscate all stimulation from the nerves of the eye.” The people of Arcadia delighted in his way of talking. It was his accent, his tortured syntax—and, of course, his moderately hunched back—which made them never question the
Dr
. he had placed before his name. They believed him; they believed
in
him. “Now I will emit a shower of photons. Do not be alarmed: they will not harm you. They will merely determine the presence of phosphors in your eyes. Once that has been determined to my satisfaction, we may proceed.”

Phosphors, Beadles went on to explain, are responsible for many problems of the eye, in that they
emit their own light,
and can destroy the
visual receptors.
He would then push a small red button on the end of a long white tube and people would be astonished and amazed to see a ghostly, glowing image of Beadles grinning before them, his teeth brighter than anything else in the room.

“Let me see,” he would say, and the patient would nervously watch as the teeth approached—it was indeed very frightening for some—until Beadles had seen what he needed to see.

“
I detect the presence of phosphors,
” he would invariably announce and, producing a bottle of his water, would drop one large drop of it into each open eye. “Very good. Yes. And we are . . . done.”

He turned the light back on and glared at his patient. “Better, yes?”

“Better,” the patient said. How could one say otherwise to Dr. Beadles? He so wanted you to be better. “Yes, I do think I can see better now.”

“Then you won’t be needing these.”

And he would take his patient’s glasses and deposit them into a disposal bin. By the end of the day his trash can was full of them, and his reputation as a miracle worker spread far and wide, all the way to Roam.

He was the McCallisters’ only hope.

M
r. and Mrs. McCallister did not speak to each other during the long drive. The fear that many a young person has when contemplating spending their entire life with another person—
Will we run out of things to say?
—had in fact been realized by the McCallisters: they had run out of things to say. Each had shared with the other all the information they cared to. Mr. McCallister had told her about his mother, Constance, who drank, and his father, Charles, who spent most of his time alone in the basement reading and building balsa wood models of old British frigates; Mrs. McCallister told him about her best friend, Katie, who had been born with only one leg. He had told her about his first kiss, with a Chinese girl in the weeds behind the old silk factory, and she in turn told him about a secret correspondence she had with a boy she never met: they would leave notes for each other in the hollow trunk of a dying elm, until one day the notes stopped coming, and she never knew why. She assumed he died. And though Rachel and Helen were always doing something that might provide conversational material, the McCallisters each knew how the other would respond to any gambit, so there was no good reason to get into anything. For the last six years they had simply not spoken, a decision they reached without having to discuss it at all. Their lives as a couple had been simplified to a single united desire: all they wanted was for their daughter to see again.

Unfortunately, there had been no improvement whatsoever. They had done everything Beadles told them to: after the sun went down they applied the drops—three of them, at three-second intervals—into their daughter’s eyes. Each week they would report the lack of progress, and each week Dr. Beadles asked them if they were administering the drops correctly.
Are you turning off the lights? For how long? Is she leaning back at the correct angle? If not, the drops won’t seep into
the nerve endings, where they need to go
. At one point he even suggested bringing Rachel to Arcadia and throwing her into the underground river, something that had never been done but in her case (which was clearly extreme) might be necessary.

“We are not throwing our blind daughter into an underground river, Dr. Beadles,” Mr. McCallister said.

His wife concurred. “Though we appreciate your zeal to see Rachel cured,” she said, “that course of action seems unwise.”

“So she cannot swim?” he said. Then he tapped his huge forehead with his index finger. “Of course she can’t! What was I thinking? Little blind girls don’t swim.”

“That’s actually not true, doctor,” Mrs. McCallister said, and—not for the first time—exchanged a worried glance with her husband.
Why do we risk our lives every week to see this man?
“She
can
swim. Even so . . .”

Coming here for Rachel only made them feel that much more love and pity for Helen. But what could they really do for her? Yes, Mr. and Mrs. McCallister were hard to get to know—and when you did get to know them, you knew them to be quite tedious—and aggravatingly slow drivers. But they loved their children. Both inhabited the same amount of space in their hearts.

Helen, though, didn’t see it that way. Clearly, to her, there was no contest: they loved Rachel more, and it was during her parents’ trips to Arcadia that Helen nursed her rancor. Not simply because Rachel was a burden, but also because her parents did nothing of equal value for Helen, nothing to make
her
life better. Helen yearned; there were things she wanted. Mostly what she wanted was another life. She wanted another world. She wanted a planet of her own. High school had been a nightmare. The vast, brick building with its long, dim hallways and cold, metal lockers. Once a thriving place, it had begun to resemble the abandoned Indian temples they read about in Mrs.
Crittendon’s tenth-grade World History class. The gray, linoleum floor squares—and there must have been ten thousand of them—were broken, peeling, betraying the dark and tarry surface beneath. Helen’s class would be the very last to graduate; after hers, there weren’t enough students left to justify the school’s existence, though the building was still there and always would be, a hulking relic of hope. That’s why Rachel was homeschooled, and why for so much of the time her teacher was Helen.

Helen wanted a man, or better yet
men,
men who were capable of penetrating her permanent mask to find the young and hungry woman within, a woman who would let them do things to her they could only imagine. The truth was she felt she had nothing else to offer. All week long, from Monday to Thursday, she trolled the streets of Roam, pretending to be on some errand for her parents. At the grocery she would lean her sturdy body against a boy and lock her smoldering eyes with his and take a slow and sultry bite from a crisp red apple—a maneuver she picked up from some romance novel she’d read. At the hardware store she would run her fingers up and down a wrench handle and breathe in short, hot inhalations, leaving her scent everywhere she went. She transformed herself into something pungent, rudimentary, and available.

They would come as soon as Mr. and Mrs. McCallister left for Arcadia. When the doorbell rang she locked Rachel in her room and opened the front door for whomever it happened to be. Grease monkeys, house painters, street sweepers, the police, a lonely clerk, and those twins Larry and Jerry, who, when it came time for their turn, would fight for her affections until one of them dropped unconscious to the ground and the other dragged himself into the house—cut, bruised, and bleeding.

Everyone did their best to ignore the little blind girl upstairs who was slamming her shoulder against the door and wailing to be set free.

And even though she wished she’d never had a sister, especially the blind one she ended up with, after her parents would return with the Arcadian water (
We’re back!
her father would announce each and every time) and placed the vials in the refrigerator for after the sun went down, Helen would take each vial and pour each of them out into the sink, filling them up with water from the tap.

V
ery soon it became clear to the McCallisters that these trips to Arcadia were a waste of their time, yet they kept going. Even though in their hearts they knew Dr. Beadles had no science to offer them, he did at least persist in believing in the impossible; this was better than nothing. “I wish I could find another blind mouse,” Dr. Beadles said when he saw them. “It would lead me in the right direction. Still, it may take some years to . . . it
is
science, but not an exact one.”

He never did find another mouse. He bred them like mad, until he had an entire room full of them, ten in some of the cages, twenty in others, the cages stacked one on top of the other nearly to the ceiling. Some mice had only two legs, others no hair whatsoever, but all of them (as far as he could tell) had perfect vision.

Then one day a miracle happened. Beadles was eating breakfast in the Arcadian Diner when he heard two men talking in the booth behind him. They were lumberjacks, these two men, big and thick as trees themselves. Lumberjacks in Arcadia—there were about a dozen of them—had a reputation for being wild, terrible, violent men for whom human life was no more precious than a garden weed. Most of the year they lived together on a mountaintop miles from town, cutting down trees from dawn to dusk and eating whatever wandered too close to the burrows in which they lived. They came back to Arcadia for a month every year to sell their trees and see their wives, who in turn would need eleven months to recover from the poundings they
endured from their otherwise abstinent mates. Beadles heard a name.
Carla.
At first the doctor naturally assumed it was a wife these two were discussing. But it wasn’t.

“So how’s Carla doing, Smith?” one of the men said as he chewed on a mouthful of egg and sausage and toast.

“Well. Not so good,” Smith said. “She’s getting old. She still has three good legs, though. That’s something.”

“One more than my dog.”

“Not much hair on her hindquarters.”

“My dog has none at all.”

“And blind.”

“Blind?”

“Can’t see a goddamn thing.”

“That’s terrible.”

“Well, it happens.”

“Yes, I reckon that it does.”

“Even so,” Smith said, and this he said with resolute passion, “I’ll love that dog until all that’s left of her is a mangy old tail and a couple of rotten teeth. We’ve been through it all together, her and me. I see myself in that dog. It’s almost—I don’t know—I wish my wife were more like Carla.”

The lumberjacks laughed. Beadles kept quite still; he needed to let the words settle in his head like snow in a little globe.
Blind
. A blind dog! Clearly this was fate taking a moment to intervene in his life and in the life of the poor little blind girl Rachel McCallister. It was not a mouse he needed at all:
a three-legged dog
would lead him from the dark Arcadian wilderness into the glaring light of the bulb that is Science.

Beadles slid across the warm red vinyl booth and stood before the two behemoths like a bent blade of grass. Neither man looked up. Neither stopped eating until every last vestige of food was gone from their
plates, and from around their plates, and from their shirtfronts and mustaches and beards. But once done they glanced over at the thin, somewhat hunchbacked old man with the rivers of purple veins running through his shaking hands. Though the lumberjacks were sitting and Beadles was standing, they were looking directly into each other’s eyes.

“Hello,” Beadles said.

The lumberjacks said nothing. One raised a hand for the waitress to bring them more plates piled high with bacon and eggs and toast.

Beadles continued. “I don’t want to suggest that I was listening to or even overhearing the conversation the two of you were having. I am not the sort of man to eavesdrop. I would say, however, your words did seem almost to float on the air from your table across to my own, which in any case is a short distance, and, having arrived, they were, I would say, impossible
not
to hear, just as one would have no choice whether to hear a car backfire, or a bird sing. Very difficult not to hear, if one can hear, if one has ears; it’s involuntary, you see. We hear things whether we want to or not, and in this way the words you were speaking to one another entered my ears and thus here I am to speak to you, for what I heard—involuntarily, as I said—piqued my interest in a profound way.”

This is what the lumberjacks, who weren’t listening, heard:

I doooooonebeneben hehehehehe having sayword flairiedalirad rrrrrrrrrrrrr bleblebleee my own treeeeees hasod oidufois my ears gada gada goooo mmmmmm mmmmmmm bird sing hfuey bladdie gggggggggggrrrrrrraaaaaaaaaaah.