The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel (16 page)

T
here are stories in the woods, stories everyone hears and knows in their own heart to be true. Stories of darkness, beauty, life, death. Mystery. There
is
something out there, beyond the bend, before the
shadow: everyone knows this. But it’s not everyone who wants to find it. Rachel wanted to find it, and so did Ming Kai’s Markus. He left his home just days before Rachel left hers, heading her way before he even knew where he was going, as she was heading his. Because each had been told the same story by the person they loved the most: there was a world out there better than the one they lived in now, and all they had to do was seek it.

I
t was getting on to a purple dusk now, so when the fog settled in so suddenly it looked like the sky and all the clouds in it had fallen into the woods and across the road, and Helen felt like she was walking through a dream. She was also lost. She didn’t think it was possible to get lost in Roam, but Jonas had taken her outside of it, and the truth was she didn’t have a very good sense of direction. The road split at some point a mile or so back and there was no marker, no sign, nothing; she went left and she should have gone right. The left branch of the road became a path through a multitude of tall, scrawny pine trees, and then it just stopped altogether. She turned around and retraced her steps but hadn’t noticed how the path itself had bifurcated at some point and she had to make another choice and she made the wrong one again, and now there was no one in the world more alone than Helen McCallister—unless it was her sister, Rachel.

She stopped and leaned against one of the pine trees. The hem of her dress was damp and she was bleeding: some of the underbrush had cut thin red lines into her ankles. She itched all over. If she had to live the rest of her life confined to one little room somewhere it would all be the same to her; she hated the outdoors. She hated trees and grass and night and being in a place where if she died no one would ever find her.

Jonas probably would. He’d look for her. Maybe he was looking now, but it didn’t matter. She was too late and she knew it.

She leaned against the tree and watched the sky darken and go black. She could feel the tree she was leaning against, and if she put her eye close to it she could see its bark, but it wasn’t much to look at. She thought of Rachel. She turned away from the tree to the nothing of the night and hoped she was wrong about her sister, hoped she didn’t know Rachel as well as she knew she did.

When it finally turned inky dark and thick as water, she saw a dim, white light. She walked toward it and after a few minutes saw that it wasn’t a real light at all—it was her mother. Helen was in the graveyard. Her mother was pacing back and forth in front of her gravestone, looking sad and dark and grave herself. She was lost in thought and didn’t see Helen until Helen was right there. Then she stopped and looked at her, not surprised at all. “
Helen,
” she said, using that same tone of disapproval she’d used before.

Helen said, “You died. I did the best I could.”

“You did the
worst
you could,” her mother said.

She went back to pacing, and it wasn’t clear to Helen if she was even talking to her anymore, or just talking, the presence of a living ear inspiration enough.

“I imagined a different sort of life than the one I led,” she said, “but I suppose everybody could say the same. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, to be surprised by what you get. If the life you imagined
was the life you actually turned out to live it could be boring, or uneventful at the very least, even if the life you imagined
was
very eventful, if you see what I mean.
Here I am in a romantic foreign land,
you could think,
just as I imagined I would be!

“But who would have thought my first child, bless her heart, would have turned out to be so horrid, and my last child so very beautiful—but blind. This would be absolutely beyond the imagining of anyone.

“Your father and I weren’t really the ideal people to shoulder the burden of our various tragedies; they seemed to swallow us up. Or you could say they defined us. They became who we were: not just a family, but a family that had suffered and endured until our deaths, which only brought more suffering to the family, to you and Rachel.

“You were so good to her once, but then you changed. I don’t know what happened. If I could have screamed from the bottom of the lake I would have said, with my final words,
Do not let Helen have her
. But I couldn’t say it, because I was already dead.”

“I don’t know what to do now, Mother,” Helen said. “Tell me what to do.”

“It’s sad,” Mrs. McCallister said. “But I can’t see the future: I can only see the past.” Mrs. McCallister slowly dimmed, dying again, like a candle’s flame. She blended into the darkening air. And she was gone.

Helen stood there for another moment, and then walked back toward town, each step faster than the one before it. Soon she was running, and she didn’t stop running until she made it home.

W
hen the rest of the lumberjacks went back to the mountain, Lumberjack Smith stayed behind and waited for Carla to return. Sometimes a dog would do that, he knew: go away somewhere and be a dog and then come back to the home where she lives. He missed his dog, missed her with a deep and unsettling pain that traveled through his chest and down to his stomach and then spread into his blood and to the very tips of his fingers. The tips of his fingers were the only place he could actually get to the pain, so he chewed like a rat on his nails until they disappeared completely. His fingers took on the appearance of naked eyeless snakes. He didn’t understand it, an emotion of this power, didn’t know what to do with it. It possessed him.

Lumberjack Smith was in love with a dog.

How could he have known? Up in the mountains for so long, for months and months at a time, he had grown used to missing her. But
the idea of her waiting for him was a salve, a prize, a promise of a homecoming so fine it more than equaled the dark time away. What good is
always
being happy? Sadness hints at the possibility of a future reward. He may have loved his wife as well, but it was a different kind of love, because there were lots of women who could have been his wife, and she was as good as any other. But there was no dog other than Carla who could have been Carla. There was no blind, three-legged dog anywhere in the world, and even if there were it would have been some other dog that wasn’t Carla, and there would be no more homecomings like the ones he’d had before, and there would be no more thinking of them, and there would be no more happiness. There is no greater grief than that of a man with a broken heart who only just learned he had a heart at all.

Lumberjack Smith tried to work through it. After a few months he went back to the mountain. With his lumberjack brothers he felled the mighty oaks and pine, the hearty maple, the occasional ginkgo. But there was no passion in it for him; Smith was merely going through the motions. At night around the fire, around the blazing fire that could be seen like some distant star from as far away as Roam, he rarely made a sound, and when he did it was little more than a grunt. He didn’t drink whiskey and ate no more than a normal man would eat, which, as he shrank up and weakened, is almost what he became—normal. His lumberjack brothers did not save him or even try to, because there was a code among them that a man saved himself, and if he couldn’t, then he wasn’t worth saving anyway. It was like that old story the lumberjacks told, the one about a giant who was taken down by a flea. The story was that the giant tried to kill a flea that had taken up residence in his hair, and became so frustrated that he pulled his own head off.

One day Lumberjack Smith crawled into his hole, a cave covered with various scraps of metal and steel, a wall between him and the rest of the world, and made no plans to come out.

But then one day, one day after many weeks of darkness, one day when he was close to extinguishing the tiny flame that burned inside of him, he saw two little eyes peering between pieces of corrugated steel. He thought it was a bear at first, but it wasn’t.

It was a dog.

Smith and the dog looked at each other through the slit in the steel for the rest of the day and into the night. Neither of them moved. The dog whimpered, though, and Lumberjack Smith whimpered, too. Smith’s heart began to beat again. He felt the flame within him flicker. He climbed out of his hole and took the loose fur of the dog’s neck in his hand, and he pulled the dog to him, wrapped his arms around it, and sobbed.

He had been saved.

He gave her (for it was a her) a name that would be uniquely hers, but would, at the same time, honor the dog who came before.

He named her Marla.

M
arla turned out to be nothing like Carla at all. Black, feral, she growled when his lumberjack brothers came too close and caught rabbits for Smith to eat as he regained his strength. Smith had taken care of Carla; Marla was taking care of Smith. Still, Smith liked to believe that the spirit of his old dog had come down from the Great Barn or wherever it was that dog souls go and possessed this wandering canine and led her here. A formidable animal, fierce and unforgiving as a wolf, but at night as gentle and warm as any woman curled up beside him. The moments of pure happiness Smith experienced—fleeting, like the shadows of birds flying just beyond the range of his vision—made him miss his old Carla all the more.

That’s when he discovered: Marla was pregnant. Soon she was the mother of half a dozen healthy pups, each one as strong and eager as
the next for a shot at her milky nipples. Only one died, and when it did Smith took it out to a quiet place and dug a hole and placed it carefully within. He had never had a chance to bury Carla. This tiny body, to him, was her, and he cried like a baby.

Now he had six dogs, each as black as the next. There was no room for all of them in his cave, so he made his cave deeper, longer, wider. They huddled and slept around Smith in a circle no other living thing could penetrate. They hunted together, and brought back deer with them—once an entire herd, which Smith and his dogs shared with the other lumberjacks. One year became two. The six dogs became ten, then twenty. And all they did, down to a dog, was love Lumberjack Smith.

How sad it was, then, when Smith realized that this was not enough, that all the love from all the dogs in the world could not begin to heal the gaping wound in his heart. Though he truly believed they had been sent to him by Carla to make him happy, he wasn’t; there was no substitute for the love he had for her. There was no substitute even for the
idea
of her, and it was wrong of him to think any other dog—or any other fifty or a hundred dogs—could be that one dog for him.

One night by the fire, at dinner, he told his lumberjack brothers, “I’m going away.”

His brothers glanced his way briefly, then went back to gnawing venison off the bone. No one wanted to say
I’ll miss you,
because being a lumberjack was a calling, and missing things was part of it—so much a part of it that if you started enumerating the things you missed as a lumberjack you could almost never stop. It was easier to name the things a lumberjack had that no one else did: the companionship of other lumberjacks. If Smith didn’t want to be a part of this, he wasn’t really a lumberjack anymore. Smith knew it, and that’s why he was leaving.

“Where to?” a brother asked him, without trying to seem very interested. “Back to Arcadia, I imagine.”

“No,” Smith said. “Not Arcadia. That’s where all my heartache started. I never want to see Arcadia again.”

The other lumberjacks shifted a bit on the huge felled oak that was their fire-bench. That word,
heartache,
made them uncomfortable.

“No,” Smith said. “I think I’ll go on down to Roam instead.”

“Roam,” the brother said.
“Roam?”

“There’s a place to drink in Roam,” he said. “And there’s women.”

“But no trees,” the brother said. “Not like these. And no lumberjacks.”

“No,” he said. “And I’ll miss you, you can be sure of that.”

“Don’t,” the brother said and spit in the fire, where it sizzled. “Knowing you’re out there, missing us, isn’t likely to help us much up here.”

“No,” Smith said, the fire illuminating a tear. “I suppose it won’t.”

T
he next day he began the long walk down. He had a truck, but he didn’t really need it, so he left it on the mountain for his brothers (or the men who used to be his brothers). The dogs followed him. He didn’t ask them, nor did he particularly want them to, but they didn’t have anyone but him and he didn’t have anyone, either. He was lonely with them, but he would have been desolate without them. They ran up ahead and scared away the bears and made his journey down the mountain dull and joyless. He wanted to fight a bear. It had been a long time since he’d done that.

He’d been through Roam once before; he’d needed an axle for the truck and he’d heard of someone there who had a lot of them, and sure enough, there was an axle in Roam and he and that boy had stuck it on the truck and she was good to go. After they were done they went to the bar. It was run by a midget. He couldn’t remember the bartender’s name. Smitty, Igbert—something like that. The midget said he wasn’t
a midget but he was, not that Smith cared one way or the other. People thought Smith was a giant sometimes and he wasn’t a giant at all, he was just a very big man.

As they got closer to town the dogs started barking something terrible. He’d never heard them bark like that and he hated it. He wanted peace and he wanted quiet. That was yet another reason he left the mountain. He didn’t know what he’d do with these dogs if they didn’t stop barking.

When he got to Roam he left them outside the bar, barking, and went in and had a drink. But the dogs were out there, barking still. He couldn’t enjoy his drink. So he left and he took the dogs and walked away from Roam until he reached that point at which they stopped barking. This is where he made his home. He built what turned out to be a grandiose doghouse, with many rooms and vaulted ceilings, in which he lived with his pack. Every day he came into town and had a drink or two or three at the bar—Digby, the barkeep’s name turned out to be—and then he’d return to his doghouse and read from books he found at the abandoned high school. He learned a lot reading those books. He learned about the past. Most important, he learned there
was
a past, that even beneath the dirt and rocks upon which he slept every night a thousand men had been born and lived and died, and women, too. Babies. People different from him who had been here, who were gone now, some just a hundred years ago, but some gone for a thousand, along with all of their hopes and dreams, their happiness and heartaches, their dogs. Whole worlds, all come and gone.