The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel (18 page)

“Like what happened in my little tavern here,” Digby said. He looked over at Fang and He-Ping and the others, who made their home here, living and dead. Once there was a baby born to a woman named Patricia Sing, right there on the barroom floor. A baby, at Digby’s! Jonas was right. Life is about making worlds.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Jonas said.

“My friend,” said Digby. “A man is sometimes required to do things he’d rather not, in part because he is a man and has no real choice in the matter either way.”

Jonas let that set, and then, after it did, he nodded. “That’s true,” he said. “That’s really true.” And then Jonas started thinking. Digby could see it happen right in front of him; he could see that something had clicked, a candle was lit, a universe of possibility born. “But if I find her,” Jonas said, “if I find Rachel, everything would change. Helen would love me then, wouldn’t she, Digby?”

Digby was about to say,
Gratitude and love are two different things.
He was going to say exactly that until he looked at Jonas and saw the hope Jonas had in this new plan; everything was now riding on it.

“She would love you then, yes,” Digby said. “I’m sure of it, my friend.”

Jonas said he thought so, too. Then he looked around at all the pictures on the wall.

“If I’m your friend,” he said, “how come you never took me fishing?”

Digby clapped a hand on his shoulder. “I didn’t know you fished!” He tried to seem sincere, because that was his job, wasn’t it? That’s how he got people to come in and talk to him and drink. That’s how he made a living, by seeming to be sincere. It was the life he’d been given, and there were times—many times—he wished for more.

Jonas stood and pulled up his jeans. The stub of a pencil rested near an order pad, and he picked it up and scribbled “I.O.U.” and signed his name.

“Rachel left hours ago,” Jonas said. “She could be anywhere. The chances of finding her seem pretty slim, but I have to try. I have to.”

“Use my dogs.”

It was Smith, the lumberjack. It was as many words as Digby had ever heard him use in succession. Though the voice couldn’t have been more powerful, or the words spoken with more conviction, the utterance seemed to linger in the air for a moment before being absorbed by either of the men.

“Dogs?” Jonas finally asked.

“My dogs will save her,” Smith said. “I don’t know if they’ll bring her back, but if she’s alive they will save her. They saved me.”

Smith stood up, filling the bar with his gargantuan mass, as though he expanded to the size of the space he was given. His sunken eyes, nearly lost in the shadows of his face, moved back and forth from Digby to Jonas. He was wearing a long coat made from deerskin stitched together with cat guts (his dogs killed a lot of cats), and his boots were of hardened leather and bigger than Digby’s torso. It was as if a new wall had suddenly arisen, turning one room into two.

“Okay,” Jonas said. “We can follow them on out. But no matter what happens: it’s me who brings her back. It’s me who gets the credit. How’s that sit with you, Smith?”

Smith didn’t bother to answer. He turned and left the bar and went outside, and in a moment the dogs’ howling grew more and more
distant, as if Smith had told them what he wanted them to do and they were off doing it. Jonas followed quickly behind him. Then Digby hopped down from the bar, grabbed his coat and hat (the night had brought a nip with it), and turned to Fang and He-Ping.

“Don’t burn the place down,” Digby said.

And off they went—a near-midget, a possible giant, and one tough, reedy man—in search of a blind girl, at night, with a pack of dogs running on ahead, tearing into the darkness fearlessly, as though there was nothing they couldn’t see.

T
he birds would have devoured her by now, removed the meat from her bones, and left the rest for the Terrible Forest Beetle, a black, hard-shelled, eight-legged animal bigger than her head, traveling silent and unseen through the piney underbrush, waiting for leftovers just like her. Each bird would have taken its favorite part: some like the arms, others the neck.
It would happen in an instant
, Helen had told her once,
but an instant that seemed to last a lifetime.
Each incarnation of the story revealed new ways to scare the living hell out of Rachel.
Their claws, sharp as broken glass. Your hair, they use to make their nests
.
Your eyes—they may not want your eyes at all, seeing as how they’re dead already.

And Rachel said nothing, because the story filled her heart with such fear that there were no words for it anymore.
All you could hear would be their silent wings, slashing through the air, and then a darkness even darker than the dark you live in. That’s what death is.

Now out there in the world, Rachel would be waiting for this to happen, and when it didn’t, when death didn’t come, what would she think? Sadder still, of course, sadder than any story Helen could tell, would be that her sister was at the bottom of that ravine, dead. But even if she were alive, Helen’s life wasn’t going to be the same: dead or alive, Rachel would be lost to her. A world without Rachel—and without the world she had taught Rachel to believe was real—was a world she didn’t know how to live in.

“T
wo people?” she said to Jonas when they arrived on her porch. “That’s it?” She’d seen the lanterns, strange lights tethered to nothing, bobbing up the hill in the darkness, and went out to meet them.

“I tried for more,” Jonas said, “but no one came. Goddamn Archie Yates slammed the door in my—”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, believing it: one person could find a dead body. She could have gotten more people herself but thought she should stay at the house, in case Rachel wandered back. She looked at Digby, then at the lumberjack, who stood just behind Jonas. Digby looked like a child in the dark, especially standing next to the lumberjack—Smith, his name was. Smith.

“At your service, Miss McCallister,” Digby said, almost bowing. “It’s a desperate night to meet again, after so long.”

So long. She hadn’t remembered the last time she saw the tiny barkeep. She had never learned to drink. Perhaps she would now.

Smith didn’t say anything. He looked rooted there, unmovable. Then he scraped his boots on the porch step.

“How long ago did she leave?” Digby asked her.

“Hours,” she said. “Maybe three.”

“She could be far,” he said.

“Or maybe not,” Jonas said. “She could be walking in circles. She’s blind; she’s never been in the forest. She could be close.”

“The dogs will find her,” Smith said.

“Dogs?” she said.

“Lumberjack Smith sent his dogs on ahead,” Digby said.

“How could they possibly help?”

“Dogs know,” Smith said. “These dogs, they know.”

“He has complete confidence in their abilities,” Digby said. “Our job will be to follow their lead. In a way, then, we’re not merely four, we’re much, much—”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “We should go.”

“We talked about it,” Jonas said. He was trying to be the leader now. “We’ll split up. You and me, we’ll go out past the graveyard. Digby and Smith will cross the field. We’ll meet up at the ravine.”

“Fine,” she said, stepping off the porch. She took a lantern from Jonas and began walking, and the rest of them followed her until they came to the end of the drive, and then two walked one way, and two another, into the dark forest.

S
he could hear the dogs now, howling. They’d been howling like this all night, and maybe she hadn’t heard them because she was thinking about Rachel so intently, or maybe because it seemed that, since Lumberjack Smith moved here a year ago, there had always been some sort of howling, some dog always seemed to have something it wanted to say. Now that she was listening, it sounded like the dogs were talking to one another. One howled and another answered, and then another. They were everywhere.

Jonas trailed a step or two behind her, then caught up and matched her gait. He’d push the branches out of the way, or hold one up for Helen to walk under, and she could feel him looking at her, waiting
for a glance, a nod, something. But she wouldn’t give it to him. She blamed him for what happened today. She knew it wasn’t his fault, but there was so much rage and anger and sadness and hopelessness and shame banging against one another in her heart, she had to have someone help her with the burden of all these emotions, and that was Jonas.

“I saw the car,” he said to her as they walked. “By the tree. I could have fixed it and driven here, but it needs a part. Must have fallen off. Would have had to go back to the shop to get it, and it was getting on dark, so I figured I’d go back and fix it later. Maybe tomorrow.”

Helen kept walking. She didn’t say anything, because there was nothing to say. She wasn’t in the mood for small talk, but then she never was, especially with Jonas.

“Why’d you leave me there?” he said. Twigs snapped beneath their feet in the absence of an answer. As Jonas was looking at her, he ran into a tree. Pitiful. She kept walking. He caught up with her again. “I don’t know what I did.”

“Nothing,” Helen said, finally.

“Nothing? Then why—”

“It doesn’t
matter,
” Helen said, and realized she’d said that a few times tonight already. “You didn’t
do
anything. I had to get back. I knew something like this was going to happen. It’s like leaving the house and thinking,
Did I blow out that candle? Is the house going to burn down? Should I go back and make sure?
I had to go back. You . . . you didn’t do a thing.”

“Good,” he said. “Because if I did do something and you told me what it was, I wouldn’t do it again.”

“
Rachel!
” Helen yelled as loud as she could.
“Rachel!”

“
Rachel!
” Jonas bellowed.

In the distance they heard Digby crying out the same.

There was, of course, no answer, because she was likely dead and she couldn’t answer. But even if she were dead they needed to find her
body. Helen was not going to leave it out here for the buzzards. To think of her sister facedown at the bottom of that ravine tore a fissure through her own heart. They called again and listened to the dogs and were quiet for the next few minutes.

“How far is it?” she said.

“To where?”

“To the ravine, Jonas.”

“Oh. Not far.” He stopped. “You think that’s where she is, don’t you?” She looked up at Jonas. The lantern made his face appear solemn and shadowy, his green eyes reflecting the light like the moon. She leaned her shoulder into his chest and he draped an arm around her, pulling her closer, tighter. She shook, but she didn’t know what it was that was making her shake, whether it was the tears or something else. He had never held her like this, not in all the years they had been with each other. She felt like she had just met somebody new in the dark woods, someone she had mistaken for somebody else.

“Look,” he said.

He gently pushed her away and turned her to one side and pointed at the straw-covered ground, and she held the lantern outstretched for a better view.

A shoe. Small, white, taped together—Rachel’s shoe. Helen picked it up and brought it close to her face, as if it might yield a clue; maybe there would be blood on it. There was no blood. It was just her shoe, and Rachel had lost it as she walked and couldn’t find it when she went back for it. Or maybe she was running from something chasing her. Helen’s mind kept spinning the darkest tales—but then that was Helen, who she was, the kind of tales she told.

“I made up a place,” she said to Jonas. “A river. I told her it was across the ravine. And then those boys, talking about the bridge. That’s why she did this. It’s my fault. Everything is my fault.”

“No,” he said. “You just made up a story. You didn’t tell her to
come out here. She did that. We’ll find her, Helen. Don’t worry.”

She’d never heard Jonas use that tone of voice before: it was so warm, so comforting, a voice she wanted to believe in. She almost took his hand. Instead, Helen held on to the shoe with one hand and the lantern with the other, and they kept walking, calling out Rachel’s name, following the howls.

T
hey weren’t too much farther when a dog up ahead started barking like crazy. Helen had never heard a bark like that before. Wild—and beckoning, or so she wanted to think.

“Jonas, do you—”

“I hear it, too,” Jonas said. “I think it means something. I think it means—”

Helen looked at Jonas and saw the hope on his face. He was squinting into the patch of woods before them. “I see something,” he said. “Do you see that?” He pointed straight ahead.

Helen looked. She may have seen something; it was hard to tell. She may have just told herself she did because she wanted to so much, wanted to see Rachel standing there in the woods before them. She did see Digby and Smith, the light from their lantern anyway, floating in the dark some five hundred yards away. It looked ghostly.

“Rachel?” Jonas said, and when there was no answer he walked ahead, toward whatever it was he thought he saw, saying, “Rachel, Rachel?” over and over again.

“Hold up,” Helen said to his back. “Take the light.”

Instead of stopping he began to run. “It’s not far,” he said, then called, “If she’s here I want to find her for you,” and just like that he disappeared into the inky black woods, invisible, not even a shadow anymore. She heard him, though, the branches cracking beneath his boots. “It was just right here,” he yelled. “Can you see anything? It’s just—”

Then something happened. He didn’t scream, but there was the sound of surprise, like the sound you make when you accidentally drop a glass, say, or forget your hat and have to go back inside the house for it. Sort of like,
Whoops
.

“Jonas?”

Nothing. Helen took a few steps, and with each step the light broke through the darkness a little more, but beyond it there was only more darkness and the trees, the branches scraping across her cheeks and pulling her hair as she walked faster, calling out his name, and still nothing. She took one more small step and was fortunate to have had the lantern, because she had come to the ravine, and there was no light bright enough to show any more than the edge of that: beyond the edge was black like the night sky.