The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel (12 page)

“What?” Smith said, the one to whom Beadles wanted to speak.

“Your dog?” Beadles said. “I’m given to understand it is blind?”

Smith looked at the other lumberjack as if to confirm the presence of this strange, tiny man who was speaking to them.

“Blind as a dead man,” he said.

“Sad,” Beadles said. “Heartbreaking, even to a man of your great size. But what if I told you . . . what if I told you I had it within my powers to restore her eyesight?”

“If you told me that,” Smith said, clearing his throat, “the first thing is, I would be unconvinced, then I would wonder if you were insane, and then I would ignore you entirely and return to my breakfast. Then later, as the day went on, I’d wonder why a stranger would approach me and say something like that, because even though I would know that such a thing is impossible it would make me hopeful in the way people get. In the end, I would be angry. I would be
very
angry. I’d want to kill you, and then feed your bloodied limbs to the same blind dog you said you could cure.”

He returned to his breakfast.

“Beadles,” Beadles said, extending a limp, shaking hand. He was afraid Lumberjack Smith would take it into his own hand and crush it into a fine powder.

The lumberjack stared at the appendage hovering before him. “Smith,” he said.

“Then Mr. Smith,” Beadles said. “May I call you Mr. Smith? Mr. Smith. I must tell you that I am a scientist, sir, on the cusp of a breakthrough which will astound the world. Your dog may be the key to that breakthrough. Imagine: not only would your precious dog see again, but her name would live on through time as the dog whose eyes led to a cure for blindness—and not just for her, and not just for other canines, but for us all.”

Smith deposited a chunk of half-chewed food to a back corner of his mouth. You could see the muscles in his face twitching, jaw muscles nearly as big as Beadles’s arms.

“I am skipping all those other parts I mentioned before and am going straight to the very angry stage,” Smith said evenly, “to the wanting to kill you part. As my father used to say, I was born at night
but not last night, and I can tell by looking that you are a kook and a quack, having seen many in my day. Believe me, I am prepared to do awful things.”

“Awful things,” the first lumberjack said. “Because after he kills you, I’ll kill you, too.”

Beadles was about to say it would only take a
bit
of testing, that it would not harm Carla in the
least,
that it was really no more than the administering of
water
,
three times a day
. But he didn’t. His scientific mind knew it was impossible, but something in the way they said what they said made Beadles believe they
could
kill him twice. So he smiled, and nearly bowed, and did his best to drift away.

T
wo weeks later, Beadles watched the lumberjacks (including Lumberjack Smith) pack up their things and head back to the mountains. They took everything with them they could: hardware, guns, ammo, food, warm clothes. One long flatbed truck was stacked two-men-tall with boxes. If the truck died—as it sometimes did on the long, uphill journey—the lumberjacks could easily push and pull it to their destination. That’s how big and strong they were.

It was a rainy day. The exhausted wives and girlfriends of the lumberjacks stood beneath awnings and umbrellas, waving at the large men as they disappeared into the gray sheets of falling rain.

From his office window, Beadles waved, too.

As night fell, it was still raining. Water rushed down from the mountains, flowing like a thousand tributaries through the streets. Wearing a child’s yellow parka (the only one he could find at the department store, all of the adult raingear having been taken by the departing lumberjacks), Beadles crept through the dripping darkness, a metal leash in one hand and a piece of flatiron steak in the other.

He followed the blind dog’s plaintive howls—mournful,
heart-piercing howls—until he found her. Whether the howls were for Lumberjack Smith, or because she was tethered to a rope in his backyard in the drenching rain, it was impossible to say. Beadles crouched and watched her. There was no doghouse, no hope of respite from the rain. She paced as far as she could in one direction, then the same in the other. She had worn a small rut in the yard, and now the rut was a little stream. Beadles felt a great sadness for her—he saw something of himself in the dog—but this reassured him of the rightness of what he was doing. Great men were rarely good men, but what he was doing
was
good. He wasn’t happy about all the mice he had made to be born and then drowned when it became clear they would be of no use to him. He wasn’t comfortable playing God. But he wasn’t God tonight; in this instance, he was merely borrowing an absent lumberjack’s blind dog, and nothing bad could possibly come from it. Nothing! When Lumberjack Smith returned from the mountains, his dog would have her sight back. Rather than kill Beadles, he would thank him, and perhaps over time they would become friends. The doctor and the lumberjack.

Poor Carla. She was hardly the animal Beadles had imagined she’d be. He’d thought a lumberjack’s dog would be as big as a bear, or feral as a wolf, its yellow eyes glowing in the night. But as he crept toward her she began to whimper. She cowered low, her tail between her legs, her belly covered in mud. “Carla,” he whispered. “Not to worry, old dog. It’s okay.” But she was worried. Her lumberjack was gone and she had been left outside in the rain—by the lumberjack’s wife, no doubt. She was shivering, shaking in fear; so was Beadles. He held out the steak he’d brought for her, but he didn’t need it: she would have gone anywhere, with anyone, to escape the life she was forced to live. He untied the rope and hooked her to the leash. He pulled, and she followed him.

Beadles looked back at the house as they were leaving. A woman stood at the window. She was sad and dark, the way most of the lumberjack wives were, but she didn’t see him or—or, if she did, she
didn’t care that he was doing what he was doing. They walked back to his office unmolested, the old man and the three-legged dog matching each other’s pace as they fought their way through the rain.

C
arla was a sweet dog. After a day or two she seemed happy in Beadles’s care, slept most of the day curled up on an old blanket, wagging her tail every time Beadles entered the room for her treatment. He thought she was a brown dog, but when he gave her a bath discovered that she was yellow and white, with soft warm fur Beadles liked to bury his fingers in. She was very much blind: her eyes were gray smoky orbs. And yet she seemed always to be
trying
to see, her head moving one way and another to capture the source of a sound. He desperately wanted to cure her. Though he had always wanted to meet Rachel McCallister, he was glad now he hadn’t: the sense of responsibility he felt toward Carla was so overwhelming he knew he couldn’t bear the actuality of a person, a real human being, counting on him for everything.

The treatments, however, were unsuccessful. Three times a day for five weeks he brought his dropper into the room, squeezed the rubber end, and let the magic water fall gently into her smoky gray eyes. If nothing else, the drops were soothing, because she always raised her head when she heard the door open, waiting (he imagined) to feel their efficacious cool. But her eyesight did not return, not even a little.

Beadles chose not to tell the McCallisters about Carla. Each week came and went much as the one before: they would be waiting on the street outside his office every Friday at one (their visits coincided with his lunch), and he would ask if there had been any improvement, and they would say no, and he would give them a fresh batch of water he had that morning drawn from the stream just as it left its underground
home, and they would return to Roam, hopeful in the way only the hopeless can be.

As was he. He believed in himself, believed in his quixotic ambition, letting the failures of the previous day disappear as each new day dawned. Yesterday was not today. The past did not predict the future if he could learn from his mistakes.

And this, he began to believe, was the problem: he
wasn’t
learning. He simply maintained his obstinate belief that the water he drew from the rivulet in the meadow was enough to achieve his ends, when clearly it wasn’t. It took Carla to make him understand. She slept with him now. In the morning he would wake and find himself holding her close, her warm body spooning his the way he imagined a man and a woman would spoon, and he felt something for her so strong that he could only call it love. He loved her, and she him, and more than anything he wanted her to see that love beaming from his eyes.

He could see smoke rising on the distant mountain now. One day, too soon, Smith would return, and Beadles knew what would happen then.

A change in treatment was called for.

O
ne spring morning he took Carla with him to the meadow. She walked easily on the leash, hobbling on her three legs without complaint. The day was bright and beautiful. The meadow was like a dream of a meadow, the way the breeze gently bent the stems of the daffodils and the tall trees cast purple shadows across the valley. Many years had passed since he’d first come, searching for rare herbs he thought might grow here. That was when he’d discovered the entrance to a cavern where the river flowed, a small opening beneath an overhang, just big enough for a man to walk through without stooping; he had been too frightened of the dark to enter then. There was
no trail. Beadles and Carla had to slide down a precipitous and rocky embankment; he didn’t know how they would make it back up, but he was sure they would find a way.

At the entrance to the cavern a cold wind stung his face, and Carla, for the first time, simply refused to follow him, at least not until Beadles rubbed her neck and whispered in her ear
It’s okay
, just as he had the night he’d found her. She took a step forward, and together they walked into the darkness.

As soon as they entered the cavern he could hear the river, flowing neither sweet nor gentle but raging. He paused. After a moment his old eyes adjusted to the gloom, and the cavern walls appeared to glow. It was as if he and Carla had entered a secret palace. The river had carved out a giant hallway through the rock, and a kind of path on a gentle slope leading deeper and deeper into the underground world. When Beadles looked down at Carla, he saw that her fur was sparkling, covered in snowy flakes of mineral wonder, so that she looked magical, effervescent. He did, too. Radiant, the two of them made their way down to the river.

And there it was. Beadles had never seen anything like it. It rushed through the cavern with the power of something suddenly unleashed. But it wasn’t sudden: it had been running like this forever. Who could say how long this river was, or indeed, if it ever even stopped? “Look,” he said to Carla. “There is the remedy for your eyes.” This was not science anymore, if it ever was; it was religion. This was his god, the answer to all things, the source of the mystery. Carla barked once, sharply. He had never heard her bark before, not like this; she must have felt it, too.

He looked for a safe place to baptize her. He took her to the shallow edge of the river. Everything was happening as he hoped it would, as he had dreamed it would. He kneaded Carla’s neck.
This is where it will happen,
he thought; all his effort would be justified, his life’s work fulfilled.

He walked into the water with Carla.

It was cold, so cold. After just a few moments he was no longer able to feel his toes; his calves stung as if the water were full of needles. Carla whined, but he said
It’s okay
, and again she trusted the sound of his voice. When the water was up to her neck, and past his knees, he placed a hand on top of her head and pushed it under. He held it there for three seconds, four . . . She was entirely submerged. Then he let her go, and she raised her head and looked at him. She
looked
at him—met his gaze with her own. Between them he saw the colorful flakes falling softly through the air. He took a deep breath and let them coat his lungs.

“My God,” he said. “My God—it worked.”

It
was
miracle water. He felt it coursing through his very blood, felt it saturate his body. He bent over to look into Carla’s eyes to be sure, to be completely sure, and he was. If you can see love, he thought, Carla was seeing it now. And so was he.

Oh, finally to have done something right! He would bring the girl here, the little blind girl Rachel McCallister, and he would take her to the water, to this very pool, and with his hand on the back of her neck he would push her under, and when the water fell away from her eyes she would see, and her parents, who had shown such faith in him, who
believed
in him, would finally get everything they wanted. Their little girl would see again.

Then the current changed, and he felt the stones beneath his feet begin to slide. An undertow. He took a step backward, but Carla, whose little feet didn’t have the hold his did, was pulled forward. He held the leash with a solid grip, a strength he didn’t know he had, that he had never had: this water had made him stronger. But he was not strong enough; she was being drawn away from him. He held the leash tightly, he would never let go, never, and in the next instant they were both dragged into the river, hostage to the current.
It’s you and
me, girl,
he said to her, though he knew she couldn’t hear him over the roar of the river.
You and me.
And the river took them. From there it became a journey deep into the heart of the earth, but it wasn’t dark. The heart only became brighter the closer to it they came, and Beadles gazed at it, he gazed
into
it, until he could see absolutely nothing at all.

O
n Friday, the McCallisters quietly prepared for their weekly trip. Without exchanging a single word they dressed, prepared a lunch for Helen and Rachel, and got into the car. Mr. McCallister backed the car down the driveway, and in his slow, careful way looked left, then right. Then he looked left again. Then he pulled out into the street.