The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel (19 page)

“Jonas?” she said, the word barely passing her lips. She couldn’t call for him, because she knew he couldn’t call back, that he had fallen and was a puddle of meat and blood at the bottom, alongside Rachel.

“Helen?” Jonas said.

His voice was just as soft as her own and came from the ravine itself, and she carefully held the lantern outward, above the abyss. All she could see was his face, shining, looking up at her. It was as if there were nothing left of him but his face, three or four feet away.

“You fell,” she said.

“I didn’t fall,” he said. “I tripped and slid over the edge and lucky for me there was this—I don’t know what it is. But I’m standing on it.”

She lowered the lantern a bit and saw that he was standing on what appeared to be an outcropping of slate, or shale. He could fit on it only by turning his feet sideways. He was holding on to a thick vine rooted to the red clay walls of the ravine, and that’s all she was able to see: everything else around and below him was black solid dark. His whole body was shaking, vibrating, as if from cold. But it wasn’t cold.

“I’m lucky,” he said. “One step left or right and that would have been it for me.”

Only Jonas would think that. “Very lucky,” she said. But she heard the tremor in her voice, the fragile breath the words were borne on. They didn’t have much time here.

“Dead,” he said. “I would have been dead.” He laughed. “I thought I was falling all the way down, but even when I didn’t, I started missing things I would have started missing if I’d fallen and died.”

“Jonas. Not now.”

“Like seeing your face,” he said, looking at her the same way she was looking at him. She couldn’t argue with him now, or dismiss him, or laugh at him the way she always did—laugh at him not because he was funny, but because he was an idiot. Things changed when you were looking at a man standing in midair, suspended in darkness above a ravine.

“Please don’t talk,” she said. “Give me your hand.”

The space between them was the length of their arms. She put down the shoe and the lantern and with her right hand took Jonas’s hand and with all the strength she had in her body pulled him upward. But he didn’t move, not even a little. She pulled again until she felt like her arm was going to leave its socket. She let go of his hand and picked up the lantern and held it over the edge of the ravine to see his face, and he was smiling now, though it was a different smile from any she had ever seen on his face before.

“This is like my life,” he said, “being here. I can either go up or down. That’s how it works for everybody, I guess. And I’ve been going down for such a long time. But I want to go up now, Helen. Up.”

She stood and looked down toward the field edge and saw the light and called out as loud as she could, “
Digby
!” As loud as anybody could.
“Digby, Smith!”

The light stopped moving: they had heard her. She didn’t have to say more; already she could see the light hurrying toward her, toward them.

“It’s going to be okay,” she said. “They’re coming. Smith—he’ll be able to fish you out of there, no problem.”

“Hand me the lantern,” Jonas said.

“Why?”

“Just hand it to me. I want to show you something.”

She gave Jonas the lantern, and he showed her what he wanted her to see. The shelf he was standing on was thin, and fragile, and the vine he was holding was pulling away from the clay strand by strand.

“I don’t know where they are,” he said, “but I hope they’re close.”

“They are,” she said. “They’re coming.”

“Good,” he said, and he seemed to believe her. He shook his head and considered things for a moment. “I really wanted to find her,” he said. “For you. Or maybe . . . for me. So I could show you I wasn’t who you thought I was. Or that I was more than who you thought I was.”

“I know,” she said.

“Give me your hand,” he said.

“I can’t pull you up.”

“That’s not why I want to hold it.”

He let go of the vine and took her hand. He’d never held it tighter. “I like this view,” he said, “with the light coming up like this from me to you. Where are they now?”

She looked. They didn’t appear to be much closer. The lantern light was just as small as before, just as distant.

“Coming,” she said. “They’ll be here soon.”

Then the shale cracked, and she could see one half of it drop away; he only had room for one foot now. She looked into his eyes, and it was as if he had already fallen. His eyes had a nervous excitement to
them, like he was taking a trip to a place he’d never been before. It was just like he was thinking about what came next, and wondering how things were going to be different in this new place.

“Oh,” he said, “oh, shit,” knowing before it happened that the rest of the shale had broken and below him was nothing but a long way to fall.
Oh, shit
: his last words. He let go of her hand, but he held on to the lantern, and for a long, long time—a lifetime—she watched him recede into the depths of the night, unable to scream or even move, as if he were falling into the mouth of a monster. He watched her, too, but she would have disappeared long before he did. All he could have seen were the stars, their ancient light, cold, distant, remote, dead.

T
hey would never find Rachel. Not that night and not the next day. Though they were sure she would be at the bottom of the ravine, probably not far from Jonas, she wasn’t: only his body lay broken, horribly broken, on top of a boulder beside the stream. Smith climbed down and put him in a bag and hauled him back to town, and they buried him behind the church, the church doors that hadn’t even been opened for the last fifteen years.

A couple of days later, Jonas came by the tavern, as Digby hoped he would. He was the same as he had been in life—reedy, skin stretched taut against his bones—except that he had the same smoky grayness all of the spirits did, the same passive acceptance of this permanent change. Jonas was there in the morning when Digby opened up and there in the evening when Digby locked the doors. He sat at the bar and listened to Digby tell his stories. One day Digby asked Jonas about Helen, and whether he’d seen her. But Jonas just shook his head. “That’s something I can’t do just yet,” he said. “For me to see her and her not to see me, I don’t know if I could stand that. Because I was never happier in my life than when
I was falling, because I knew she loved me then. I could see it, the way she couldn’t stop looking at me. She never stopped looking, not until I disappeared.”

Smith went back to his encampment at the edge of town. All of his dogs had left that night but for one. He liked to think that this was the first dog, the dog that had started it all, but he had no way of knowing. Smith and the dog slept in the same bed, and in the morning Smith would find himself holding her against his chest. Waking early, he watched the rising sun burn past the tops of the trees on the mountain. He tried to count how many trees were there, but he couldn’t count that high. He could hear the trees calling out to him:
Cut me down!
they seemed to be saying.
Cut me down!
He heeded their call. That very day he left Roam and went back to the mountain, where he resumed his life as a lumberjack with his lumberjack brothers. He was almost happy after that, or as happy as a lumberjack could be, which was never as happy as other people sometimes were.

For the next month, Helen looked for Rachel every day. She looked for the other shoe, some article of clothing Rachel had been wearing, her skirt, her blouse, but Helen never found anything, no clue to what happened to her sister at all. Not finding her allowed Helen to imagine sometimes that Rachel could still be alive somewhere, but there was no way that could be true. To believe in that was a lie, and Helen was giving up on telling lies, to herself or to anybody else.

She kept to herself—not that there was anyone to keep herself from anymore; only a few dozen scattered families remained, faces and names she knew but didn’t need to know any better. The grocery store was still open, stocked with food people grew, which others bought or bartered for. When she went down there, she’d say hello to people, but not much more than that. It was a dark and dreary town, and living in it was like living in the windowless basement of an abandoned house. She supposed this was the way it was with the world, the
coming and going, the rise and fall of people and places. Roam was no different in that way from anywhere else.

But she didn’t think about these sorts of things very much. Instead she thought of Rachel, and of Jonas; she thought of birds and dogs and the other shoe. She thought over and over again of that night, of holding Jonas’s hand before he fell. Digby and Smith didn’t get there for another minute or two; they might as well have taken forever. Later that night, after Digby walked her back, she had him leave her at the bottom of the drive, because what was there to rush home to? Nothing.

But as she got closer, she saw that every light in the house was on. Every light. She hadn’t left it that way, had she? She couldn’t remember. Her house was the brightest place in Roam. Maybe Rachel had come back, she thought, maybe while they were out looking for her . . .

But Rachel wasn’t there. Rachel was gone: Helen felt that, literally, in her bones. Their life together had turned them into one thing, that
girl,
and a part of Helen was missing now: this is how she knew. She made it to the porch, where a tear caught itself on an eyelash. She couldn’t breathe. The bright, empty house loomed before her, bigger than it had ever seemed before. She couldn’t go in. She stood there, staring at the house where she’d lived with her sister, with her family, a house built by the man who had built everything else in Roam, and suddenly there were ghosts, ghosts all around her, slowly converging. No: that was just the fog. The fog was as white as smoke. She watched it curl around her ankles like manacles, slip up her legs and under her dress and all around and over her. The fog crawled into her mouth and down into her body. And she fell. She fell to her knees on the rocky drive, and without knowing how or to whom, or what good could possibly come from it, she began to pray.

H
e found the body in the woods behind the Peach Blossom Motel, the first motel he’d seen in his whole life. He thought the hotel was going to be better than it was, but it was mostly wretched, so wretched that seeing a body in the woods behind it did not shock him as much as it should have. The room itself was like a crypt, small, dark, and dank. The mattress was no more than a piece of pressed wood with a sheet stapled to it. A hole in the ceiling oozed some sort of syrupy brown liquid that pooled in a corner and (no matter how many times he soaked it up with the bathroom towels) streamed malevolently toward him across the floor. He slept with the light on because he knew that the dark would prove to be no more than an invitation to the vermin he heard inhabiting the walls, and he declined to remove his suit, uncomfortable enough during the day (it was a hand-me-down), which that night in the motel seemed to gradually shrink
further, especially around the area of his crotch. But he wouldn’t remove a stitch: there was no lock on the door, and if someone were to come in and try to kill him in the night he wanted to be dressed for it. He didn’t want to be discovered dead and half-dressed, his hairless body splayed across the floor, his bony chest a figure of fun to the awful men who would remove his carcass with all the care they would take with a bag of flour.

Oh, how he hoped he didn’t die in the night!

Frankly, he had expected more from the outside world than the Peach Blossom Motel, and yet what more that was, what he hoped for exactly, even he couldn’t say. His name was Markus Kennerly. He was nineteen years old.

In the Valley, people talked about the outside world all the time, and when they did it was with a mixture of reverence, fear, and revulsion, as though their own impossibly remote dip in the earth was the only completely good place one could be. No, his people said, the Valley didn’t have much to offer. Electricity hadn’t come that far; there were no telephones. A hard day’s work was a hard day’s work, no matter which way you cut it, and there was no getting under, around, or over that. But what the Valley did have was a real community where the load was shared equally and the people were honest and if you needed a chicken there was always a chicken, no questions asked. All you had to do was kill it.

But you still had to wonder, looking at the mountains looming over this dark place, how your people ended up in the Valley at all. Many of the homes were built at weird angles to the rise of the hills, and when it rained, great sheets of water came rushing down the mountain, sweeping away your hut, your food, the occasional loosely tethered youngster. The summers were scalding, the winters cold and damp, spiders grew hideously large and insidiously aggressive, and a thick green moss covered everything left too long unattended. Women too
old to do anything else became moss-scrapers, and when someone became a moss-scraper you knew it wouldn’t be long before she was gone. His mother was a moss-scraper right now.