The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel

by Wallace, Daniel

  Helen wanted a man, or better yet men, men who were capable of penetrating her permanent mask to find the young and hungry woman within, a woman who would let them do things to her they could only imagine. The truth was she felt she had nothing else to offer. All week long, from Monday to Thursday, she trolled the streets of Roam, pretending to be on some errand for her parents. At the grocery she would lean her sturdy body against a boy and lock her smoldering eyes with his and take a slow and sultry bite from a crisp red apple—a maneuver she picked up from some romance novel she’d read. At the hardware store she would run her fingers up and down a wrench handle and breathe in short, hot inhalations, leaving her scent everywhere she went. She transformed herself into something pungent, rudimentary, and available.

  They would come as soon as Mr. and Mrs. McCallister left for Arcadia. When the doorbell rang she locked Rachel in her room and opened the front door for whomever it happened to be. Grease monkeys, house painters, street sweepers, the police, a lonely clerk, and those twins Larry and Jerry, who, when it came time for their turn, would fight for her affections until one of them dropped unconscious to the ground and the other dragged himself into the house—cut, bruised, and bleeding.

  Everyone did their best to ignore the little blind girl upstairs who was slamming her shoulder against the door and wailing to be set free.

  And even though she wished she’d never had a sister, especially the blind one she ended up with, after her parents would return with the Arcadian water (We’re back! her father would announce each and every time) and placed the vials in the refrigerator for after the sun went down, Helen would take each vial and pour each of them out into the sink, filling them up with water from the tap.

  Very soon it became clear to the McCallisters that these trips to Arcadia were a waste of their time, yet they kept going. Even though in their hearts they knew Dr. Beadles had no science to offer them, he did at least persist in believing in the impossible; this was better than nothing. “I wish I could find another blind mouse,” Dr. Beadles said when he saw them. “It would lead me in the right direction. Still, it may take some years to . . . it is science, but not an exact one.”

  He never did find another mouse. He bred them like mad, until he had an entire room full of them, ten in some of the cages, twenty in others, the cages stacked one on top of the other nearly to the ceiling. Some mice had only two legs, others no hair whatsoever, but all of them (as far as he could tell) had perfect vision.

  Then one day a miracle happened. Beadles was eating breakfast in the Arcadian Diner when he heard two men talking in the booth behind him. They were lumberjacks, these two men, big and thick as trees themselves. Lumberjacks in Arcadia—there were about a dozen of them—had a reputation for being wild, terrible, violent men for whom human life was no more precious than a garden weed. Most of the year they lived together on a mountaintop miles from town, cutting down trees from dawn to dusk and eating whatever wandered too close to the burrows in which they lived. They came back to Arcadia for a month every year to sell their trees and see their wives, who in turn would need eleven months to recover from the poundings they endured from their otherwise abstinent mates. Beadles heard a name. Carla. At first the doctor naturally assumed it was a wife these two were discussing. But it wasn’t.

  “So how’s Carla doing, Smith?” one of the men said as he chewed on a mouthful of egg and sausage and toast.

  “Well. Not so good,” Smith said. “She’s getting old. She still has three good legs, though. That’s something.”

  “One more than my dog.”

  “Not much hair on her hindquarters.”

  “My dog has none at all.”

  “And blind.”

  “Blind?”

  “Can’t see a goddamn thing.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “Well, it happens.”

  “Yes, I reckon that it does.”

  “Even so,” Smith said, and this he said with resolute passion, “I’ll love that dog until all that’s left of her is a mangy old tail and a couple of rotten teeth. We’ve been through it all together, her and me. I see myself in that dog. It’s almost—I don’t know—I wish my wife were more like Carla.”

  The lumberjacks laughed. Beadles kept quite still; he needed to let the words settle in his head like snow in a little globe. Blind. A blind dog! Clearly this was fate taking a moment to intervene in his life and in the life of the poor little blind girl Rachel McCallister. It was not a mouse he needed at all: a three-legged dog would lead him from the dark Arcadian wilderness into the glaring light of the bulb that is Science.

  Beadles slid across the warm red vinyl booth and stood before the two behemoths like a bent blade of grass. Neither man looked up. Neither stopped eating until every last vestige of food was gone from their plates, and from around their plates, and from their shirtfronts and mustaches and beards. But once done they glanced over at the thin, somewhat hunchbacked old man with the rivers of purple veins running through his shaking hands. Though the lumberjacks were sitting and Beadles was standing, they were looking directly into each other’s eyes.

  “Hello,” Beadles said.

  The lumberjacks said nothing. One raised a hand for the waitress to bring them more plates piled high with bacon and eggs and toast.

  Beadles continued. “I don’t want to suggest that I was listening to or even overhearing the conversation the two of you were having. I am not the sort of man to eavesdrop. I would say, however, your words did seem almost to float on the air from your table across to my own, which in any case is a short distance, and, having arrived, they were, I would say, impossible not to hear, just as one would have no choice whether to hear a car backfire, or a bird sing. Very difficult not to hear, if one can hear, if one has ears; it’s involuntary, you see. We hear things whether we want to or not, and in this way the words you were speaking to one another entered my ears and thus here I am to speak to you, for what I heard—involuntarily, as I said—piqued my interest in a profound way.”

  This is what the lumberjacks, who weren’t listening, heard:

  I doooooonebeneben hehehehehe having sayword flairiedalirad rrrrrrrrrrrrr bleblebleee my own treeeeees hasod oidufois my ears gada gada goooo mmmmmm mmmmmmm bird sing hfuey bladdie gggggggggggrrrrrrraaaaaaaaaaah.

  “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.

  Two 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.

  Carla 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.

  One 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 co
uld 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.