The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel

by Wallace, Daniel

  And off they drove in her parents’ car, turning into the street so fast they almost hit a dog. Helen looked back and saw Rachel at the living room window, following them with her eyes by the sound the car made as it got farther and farther away. It was the first time the sisters had been this far apart in nearly a dozen years. Nothing in the world would be the same for them after this, from now until forever.

  THE QUIET

  The lumberjack left his dogs outside the tavern and took a seat at the bar, the caked dirt falling off his arms like bark. Digby was a small man, but in the lumberjack’s presence he appeared miniature, like a doll. Each existed at opposite ends of the spectrum of what a man could be, freaks of dimension. Smith was the lumberjack’s name, and what a frightening man to apprehend he was. His face was stained by time and etched by weather, like the side of a stone mountain. His cheeks were so deeply furrowed Digby thought that if he could pry apart the folds of skin he might find some burrowing creature, or a growing plant. His eyes were so sunken he appeared to be looking at you from twin caves in his head. His beard was like a forest. Digby could get lost in it—that’s how big it was, and how big he was. To be in the same room with a man who could eat you—that was something. Even the old-timers seemed frightened of the lumberjack, as if there were something he could do to them that hadn’t been done already.

  Smith never said anything, but this didn’t stop Digby from speaking to him.

  “The usual, Mr. Smith?” he said as Smith rumbled in. Digby got no response, positive or negative, so the usual it was: one part vodka, one part rum, two parts beer, all poured into the largest receptacle Digby had: a terra-cotta flowerpot. He’d covered the drain hole in the bottom with four pieces of chewed gum that, when dried, provided the perfect stopper.

  Smith threw it back, and then pushed it again toward Digby. Digby mixed another.

  “I hope you’ve got everything you need out there, in the woods,” Digby said. “But what’s a man need, really, other than a roof, a woman, and a meal?”

  Digby smiled the way a man smiles for another man when something manly has been said.

  Smith said nothing. He was struggling with some thought, or some memory: Digby could see that clearly. He’d seen the look before: Smith was sad.

  “It must be a nice respite, though, regardless, to be off the mountain. Done with the felling of trees, et cetera. No more Timber! All that. You must have a tale or two to tell from those days, Mr. Smith, those days on the mountain, a tale of lumberjacking and . . .”

  Even Digby found it hard to continue talking when met with a veritable wall of silence and disinterest. And yet he continued.

  “I once had a romantic liaison with a woman who lived in a tree. She built a tree house in a sprawling oak not far from here. I climbed that tree like a little squirrel the days of our assignations. There was something especially romantic about that, looking out a window hewn from used plywood, to see the leaves changing, turning red and gold, a cloud floating by above.”

  Nothing!

  “I hear it’s brutal, being a lumberjack, an environment only the strongest of men can endure. It’s almost a calling, isn’t it? Like the priesthood. Which simply makes me wonder why you came here, to Roam. You must have a story. Everyone has a story. I should create a bit of silence and within it let you tell yours. I shall shut my piehole, as they say. The floor is yours!”

  Sometimes Digby talked too much. A good bartender knew when to shut up; it was his father’s greatest skill. So now he would be quiet, and the lumberjack would feel the need to fill the quiet with the sound of his own voice. Digby fiddled with the bar keys in his pocket, and then stopped even that. What followed was the most profound emptiness, the living and the dead together in this small place and not a one of them saying a word.

  As Smith finished off the last of his concoction he met Digby’s eyes with his own, briefly, but long enough for Digby to see into them and ferret out some understanding of the man’s predicament.

  Smith’s heart was broken. More than broken: it was crushed and shattered. That’s why he was the way he was.

  Outside, the dogs started howling like mad. One was scratching at the door; another was on its hind legs, trying to see in the window, others howling like mad. It was a crazy canine symphony. Maybe that’s why he’s so quiet, Digby thought. Maybe this was the only time he could get even this far away from them. Smith dropped a few dollars on the bar, almost seeming to nod at Digby. Then he left, and the dogs left with him, their howls receding, becoming no less constant but somewhat less urgent the more distant they became.

  “Sad,” Digby said. “He tries to hide it, but he can’t. I can see it plain as day. The sadness follows him around like one of his dogs.”

  Digby said it more to himself than to anybody else, but Fang heard him. From a dark corner the chalky light that was Fang appeared and walked toward the bartender, and once to him placed his hand on Digby’s chest, and it went straight through to his heart: Digby felt the odd warmth of it in his blood.

  “You’re a good man,” Fang said. “You’re the last good man in this whole town. All the good that could be squeezed out of this forsaken place was used to make you. That’s why you’re so small, my friend: there just wasn’t that much left.” Fang laughed. “And that’s why you can see us, you know, and nobody else can. You see everybody, even that lumberjack.”

  Then He-Ping and Fang joined in what sounded to Digby like a coordinated not unhappy sigh. He-Ping said something and laughed, and then Fang made a comment about the weather, and soon everything was back to normal.

  THE LUMBERJACK

  AND HIS DOG,

  PART I

  Mr. and Mrs. McCallister made the trip to Arcadia once a week. Arcadia, though only thirty miles away from Roam, felt like an entirely different world. It was built on the ruins of an old Indian trading post, and when the Germans and the Dutch settled there (and killed the Indians) they were inspired by the Greeks to call it Arcadia—an unspoiled, harmonious wilderness. There was no way to get there from Roam until a small road was finally built by Elijah McCallister. It was known as the Silk Road, because it was the main artery via which silk left his town, but also because it was as thin and slippery as a silk thread. Deaths on the road occurred so often that it was almost more newsworthy when someone survived it.

  The McCallisters survived it once a week. Braving the journey was a courageous act, and not something one took lightly: Mr. McCallister slept poorly on Thursday nights, and usually left the bed long before sunrise to wander the house, in an attempt to steel himself by drawing upon the history of all that had happened in it over the years. Mr. McCallister—Edward—was the son of Charles McCallister, who was the son of Elijah McCallister, who was, they said, one of the bravest explorers (and certainly the most courageous entrepreneur) the world has ever known. Edward’s father, Charles, had been quite bookish and dark, and Edward had become much more like him than he had become like his grandfather. Whatever strange and heroic virus there was lurking in the blood of Elijah McCallister, it had diminished and finally disappeared in future generations.

  And so off they went, Mr. McCallister in his brown suit, white shirt, and bow tie, his father’s pocket watch tucked snugly in a vest pocket, his thin forty-two-year-old face unmarred by time because he so seldom used the muscles in it; and Mrs. McCallister in her cream-colored dress with the roses, in her slip and stockings, her sensible black shoes with the copper clasps, her only jewelry a wedding band and a small golden locket on display between her collarbones, her face round and serene, like that of an angelic cow. She was a tall woman with dark eyes that could hold you where you stood with the power of a strong man’s hands. That’s how she met and married Edward McCallister: she saw him one day, this reedy eighteen-year-old boy, mowing the lawn of the big house on the hill. She was on her way to a knitting class. When she saw him, she stopped and stared and somehow knew. He saw her staring and stared back, and as the world kept moving all aro
und them they were still, alone in each other’s eyes.

  Mr. and Mrs. McCallister continued living their life together in slow motion. They were old even when they were young. They felt that doing anything too quickly—whether it be moving, speaking, even thinking—usually resulted in a mistake of some kind. Both of their children were the result of a methodical plan, based on cycles tracked by temperature, the moon, and sperm motility, which was said to be greater during the summer months. This was how Mr. and Mrs. McCallister, in a black car as big as a boat, navigated the treacherous cutbacks and blind curves of the Silk Road once a week: slowly.

  And why? For Rachel, of course. In Arcadia there lived a Dr. Oscar Beadles. Beadles was a small, withered, balding man whose hands, due to a circulation problem, were blue. He was from the old country and had come for the water: he’d heard tales of its medicinal powers. By the time the tales had reached him, they were a bit garbled and it wasn’t entirely clear what the water really did: make old people young, or young people old? Did it promote hair growth or restrict it? He wasn’t sure. All he knew is that for a story about water to come all the way from the new world to the old there must be something to it, and if there was an opportunity to sow the seeds of his genius somewhere, he had to take it. When he got to America he made his way to Arcadia and discovered that there was indeed a magic water, a river rich with a unique mixture of subterranean minerals science had yet to fully understand but that Dr. Beadles was certain could aid him in creating a perfect elixir, a medicine with powers so vast and subtle it would cure not just one thing, but all things.

  Every morning he captured the water from a spring just as it left the underground cavern. He placed the vials as deep into the hole as he could, because it was his feeling that prolonged exposure to sunlight degraded its magical, medicinal properties. But after eighteen years of the most rigorous scientific experimentation, he had succeeded in curing only one thing: blindness. Like many breakthroughs, it had happened quite by accident: one of the hundreds of mice he was working with had been born blind (or it certainly looked blind, it acted blind), and one day, after many treatments in which its entire little body was submerged in the mineral-rich Arcadian water, it miraculously regained the ability to see. Each treatment saw a marked improvement in its vision. Soon it was able to find its way through a simple maze, and then one day—Beadles would swear to this—it made eye contact. With him. They actually looked at each other. The mouse would have achieved perfect twenty-twenty eyesight if what was to have been its final treatment hadn’t gone on just a moment too long and it drowned.

  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.

  Mr. 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.