The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel

  “My God,” he said. “My God—it worked.”

  It was miracle water. He felt it coursing through his very blood, felt it saturate his body. He bent over to look into Carla’s eyes to be sure, to be completely sure, and he was. If you can see love, he thought, Carla was seeing it now. And so was he.

  Oh, finally to have done something right! He would bring the girl here, the little blind girl Rachel McCallister, and he would take her to the water, to this very pool, and with his hand on the back of her neck he would push her under, and when the water fell away from her eyes she would see, and her parents, who had shown such faith in him, who believed in him, would finally get everything they wanted. Their little girl would see again.

  Then the current changed, and he felt the stones beneath his feet begin to slide. An undertow. He took a step backward, but Carla, whose little feet didn’t have the hold his did, was pulled forward. He held the leash with a solid grip, a strength he didn’t know he had, that he had never had: this water had made him stronger. But he was not strong enough; she was being drawn away from him. He held the leash tightly, he would never let go, never, and in the next instant they were both dragged into the river, hostage to the current. It’s you and me, girl, he said to her, though he knew she couldn’t hear him over the roar of the river. You and me. And the river took them. From there it became a journey deep into the heart of the earth, but it wasn’t dark. The heart only became brighter the closer to it they came, and Beadles gazed at it, he gazed into it, until he could see absolutely nothing at all.

  THE LUMBERJACK

  AND HIS DOG,

  PART II

  On Friday, the McCallisters quietly prepared for their weekly trip. Without exchanging a single word they dressed, prepared a lunch for Helen and Rachel, and got into the car. Mr. McCallister backed the car down the driveway, and in his slow, careful way looked left, then right. Then he looked left again. Then he pulled out into the street.

  The back windows of the car had been left open the night before, in order to facilitate the passage of air. Mr. McCallister believed that stagnant air was a cause of illness and, in fact, secretly wondered if this was why Rachel became blind in the first place: had she been subjected to stagnant air? The perfectly healthy life would, according to Mr. McCallister, be lived in a place where one enjoyed a constant breeze—not a wind, but a breeze, a gentle and continuous waft of air. Island people, he had read, live long lives free of any illness whatsoever. Therefore he always left the car windows open just a little, and it was through this small opening, on this particular morning, that a bird had accidentally flown, and, not knowing what else to do but fly, continued until it hit the opposing window. It slammed into the glass and fell to the floor, stunned, motionless, and completely unseen by the McCallisters as they began their trip to Arcadia.

  It was a goldfinch.

  After bringing Carla back to his office Beadles had stopped seeing patients, so his disappearance had yet to be noticed. It’s conceivable, in fact, that it never would have been noticed were it not for the return of the lumberjacks, Lumberjack Smith among them, that same Friday. They came down the mountain in their huge flatbed trucks loaded with lumber and went to their wives, who were waiting for them, naked and trembling on their beds, waiting for that familiar weight to press mercilessly upon them, like being crushed beneath a house. Lumberjack Smith sated himself quickly—the first time was always quick—but as he lay beside his wife he suddenly raised himself on his elbows and looked out the bedroom window.

  “Where’s Carla?”

  His wife sighed, knowing this was going to come up eventually. “I don’t know where Carla is,” she said.

  “What do you mean you don’t know where Carla is?”

  “One night a man came—”

  “A man?”

  “That little man,” she said. “The old one. The one who took everyone’s eyeglasses away. He took Carla.”

  Lumberjack Smith lay in silence. Finally, he asked, almost in a whisper, “And you didn’t stop him?”

  “It was raining,” she said. “I thought—”

  “Thought?”

  “Maybe he was saving her,” she said. “Maybe you had told him—I don’t know.”

  He looked at his wife, at a loss for what to say, with so many violent feelings battling inside him. “You don’t know anything,” he said.

  Luckily he had not undressed, had not even taken off his shoes. He was a fast man with long strides and a few moments later he stood before the door of Dr. Beadles’s office, his heart pounding with a yearning, a yearning to find his precious Carla, as well as a yearning to do awful things to Beadles. He imagined a number of ways to kill him and tried to settle on a single one before going in. But standing there he realized he was too late: the smell of death was thick as fog, even in the hallway outside the office. The door was unlocked, but he tore it off its hinges anyway. Carla wasn’t there, of course, and neither was Beadles. The smell came from the corpses of a thousand dead mice.

  But the McCallisters, who had no idea their savior had died, kept to their schedule; you could set your watch by their departure, block by block. The left on Elijah McCallister Boulevard (9:01), followed by the hard right on Silk Road (9:03), and then they drove past Dark Green Lake and out of town (9:05).

  Mr. McCallister looked forward to this long drive; it gave him an opportunity to think. What was it about driving that allowed him to have the strange and mysterious sorts of thoughts he had, thoughts that never would have entered his mind had he been back home sitting in a chair? It was as if the wind itself blew things into his head. He imagined impossible scenarios. What if a giant bear suddenly presented itself to them, leaping from the forest into the middle of the road? (And by giant he meant fifteen feet tall at least, with teeth as long as his arm.) What would Mrs. McCallister do if he pulled into the lot before one of the motels they passed on the way to Arcadia—the Peach Blossom, say—and he turned to her and suggested, Let’s stay the night here. He never would—he never did—but he thought about it, and the scene played through his mind as if it were really happening. She blushed, turned away, smiling, and said, Let’s do.

  He thought about the past. He became a sort of amateur anthropologist when he drove to Arcadia. He imagined what the world must have looked like a hundred years ago. He considered the life of his grandfather Elijah McCallister, a man who had single-handedly cleared a forest and built a town, who made a factory, who built a beautiful home where his descendents lived to this day.

  At 9:07, the goldfinch regained its bird-sense, looked around, panicked, and took off. Its first and last stop: Mrs. McCallister’s hair. Its little feet became caught, and it flapped its wings in terror. In the silence of the car, its appearance could not have been more disturbing—a masked man wielding an ice pick could not have been more terrifying. Mrs. McCallister screamed; Mr. McCallister turned to her. His mind was a hundred years away then, and at first he didn’t know what he was seeing; at first he thought his wife’s hair had come alive somehow. But hair is dead, he thought, hair is dead. He then surmised that a bird had flown out of his wife’s head. This was his last real thought. A bird has flown out of my wife’s head. He was in shock, and stayed that way for the rest of his life.

  The car broke through the wooden railing and plunged into the lake, and both of them (and the little goldfinch, too) drowned.

  Within the hour everyone in Roam knew what had happened. A big crowd gathered to view the accident: the lake was only six feet deep there, and the car could be seen clearly. It appeared to be parked at the bottom of the lake. James Harding, mayor of Roam, who felt as mayor it was his job to do it, jumped in. He peered through the window.

  The McCallisters looked like they were still alive. They were sitting in the front seat, belts securely fastened. Harding said later that it looked like they’d simply let the water take them. (No one admitted what they were thinking, that maybe they had done this on purpose, that their home life had f
inally become too much to bear, what with Rachel blind and Helen, with her epic face.) He said that as he stared through the driver-side window, Mr. McCallister’s head suddenly turned and appeared to look at him. Harding said his heart almost burst in his chest. Mr. McCallister looked somewhat surprised, he said, his small eyes wide open to take it all in.

  And in Mrs. McCallister’s hair there was a bird.

  JONAS,

  PART II

  Jonas drove this same car the day they left Rachel behind. The sun had turned the front seat into a hot plate. They drove around the lake and past the metal barriers the town had installed after the McCallisters’ accident. Helen peered over them into the shallow water, feeling not grief, not anger, but emptiness, the absence of feeling. She had been sad once, and angry, but those feelings had been buried beneath the sediment of a life that had been willed to her seven years ago. If her parents had lived: was there any bigger “if” in her life? Most things still would have been wretched, of course—nothing could change that—but some things would have been different. She would have been a part of the real world and not this patchy substitute she had created for her own amusement, a world for her and Rachel. In the beginning, when they were children, it was nothing: kids did that sort of thing all the time, especially sisters, they made things up, and they’d see how far they could take it. But it had gone too far; even Helen couldn’t remember all the details she had concocted. The complexity of her creation was what made it come alive, she thought—it was so mysterious, and therefore lifelike, in so many ways. It was the ever-changing totality of her grim vision that brought her the greatest joy, and not because it was inherently cruel (and it was, she knew that) but because she had made it all herself. She had taken the world and turned it inside out for both of them, and now the only beautiful thing in it was Helen herself. There were even times she believed in it, believed in the birds and the Boneyard and the story about the husband and wife who killed each other and who continue killing each other to this very day. And how she had given herself a new face, one that, in Rachel’s eyes, was as glorious as any face had ever been.

  This is what she had instead of love.

  After her parents died there was talk about what to do with the car. Roam was not equipped with a crane large enough to raise it (one would have to come from Arcadia), and some felt it was better just to leave it and let time and the water do what it would. But the day after the funeral, Dark Green Lake turned crystal clear. This was attributed by some to the intercession of a higher power, rather than to the great plankton holocaust that had in fact taken place. The car appeared to be on display to anyone driving past, the bottom of the lake like a showroom floor. You couldn’t see it without thinking of the McCallisters, Mrs. McCallister with the dead bird in her hair, Mr. McCallister clutching the wheel. Couldn’t see it without thinking of those girls, all alone. A man was sent to Arcadia, a crane truck dispatched, and the long black car was raised like an ancient ship from the six-foot-deep water. Jonas, being the expert with cars, was there that day, and for a lark turned the key, which was still in the ignition. The car started immediately, and, the seats still soggy, he drove it to its home. To this day the car smelled of mildew—even with the windows down, as they were now, the wind blowing Helen’s hair straight back, as though she were flying.

  Jonas kept looking over at her, smiling.

  “This is good,” he said. “Getting out, you and me.”

  Helen said nothing. She stared straight ahead with her hands in her lap. They passed by the Bentons’ house. They were having a yard sale. Everything was in the yard, even the bed, the meat freezer, the kitchen table, a big box of shoes, and, hanging from a tree, dresses. No one was at the yard sale but the Bentons. She slipped down in the seat and closed her eyes. She wondered if anyone would see her, wondered what they would think if they did. There goes . . . a girl. They would have to know what she was doing because everyone knew everything in this town whether they knew they knew it or not. People could smell it, smell change, smell difference, new things. Where is Rachel? they would wonder. They would see Helen, and then they would wonder where Rachel was and what the little blind girl was doing. Helen herself wondered. Where is she? What is she doing now, without me? She felt as if some part of her had been severed, or scooped out of her like ice cream. She had no idea it would feel this way.

  “I said—”

  “I heard you, Jonas.”

  He looked back and forth, from her to the road. Some time went by, and then he cleared his throat.

  He said, “Sometimes I wonder what it’s going to be like.”

  “Wonder what what is going to be like?”

  “Everything,” he said. “Roam. Me. You. Me and you.”

  Helen let a little time go by, her eyes still closed. “No one knows what’s going to happen,” she said. “That’s why they call it the future.”

  “I know. It’s just—you wonder, too. I know you do.”

  Now she opened her eyes. “Why are you talking so much?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Just stop it,” she said, and he did.

  They turned off the main road and crunched down the gravel drive to the shop. Helen didn’t want to be here now. The sun filtered through the kudzu and pine trees and glowed on the dirt. The air singed her lungs. The shop was a sheet of corrugated metal resting on top of two sketchy wooden walls, open on both ends. Scattered over the scrubby half-acre around it were the rusty husks of a dozen dead cars, gutted of all value and waiting to be sold for next to nothing to a man in a flatbed who occasionally came through Roam, and to the lumberjacks, who flattened the metal and used it to fortify the holes they lived in for most of the year. And that one lumberjack who lived in the woods outside of town, Smith his name was, he’d bought some of it, too, even though he lived in Roam now and wasn’t a lumberjack. If a car could be fixed, though, Jonas could fix it. He was a genius with cars and an idiot with everything else. This is what everybody said, and everybody was right.

  He put the car in neutral, turned it off, and let it coast to a stop beneath the shadow of the metal overhang. Then he put it in park and just sat there, looking out on his kingdom. Now that they were here, it was all about him waiting to have her: Helen knew his mind didn’t have room for another thought.

  “So,” he said. “You want to get out of the car and look around?”

  It took her a little while to hear him. “Look around?” she said. “No. No, I don’t think so.”

  Jonas didn’t know what to do next—but when did he? He shook his head and took in a deep breath through his nose.

  “I think I’ve finally hit the bottom,” she said. She still wasn’t looking at Jonas. If he turned into a gnat and flew away she wouldn’t have noticed. “I thought I had already, but I hadn’t.”

  “What are you talking about, Helen?”

  “I think I’ve done everything I can do to her now. The way she looked out the window—that face. That was a new look from her, that kind of . . . despair. All that’s left from here on out is more of the same. She knows it and so do I. I’ve taken everything from her, and for the rest of our lives this is how it’s going to be: me taking more, even when there’s nothing more to take.”

  Jonas looked at the dirt beneath his nails and tried to pick some of it out. “You and Rachel, y’all are like peas in a pod, aren’t you?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I thought that’s what you were saying.”

  Helen rubbed her forehead with her fingers. Jonas reached toward her tentatively and touched the hem of her blue silk dress.

  “You want to get on over to the shop?” he said. “I mean, if you want to we could.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Okay,” he said, giving patience a try, and failing. “What do you want then, Helen? What is it you’d like to do?”

  She sighed. “Not this,” she said. Then she said, “I think I
’d rather die.”

  “What?” He held the steering wheel in both hands as if he were driving. “Don’t say that. That’s not funny, Helen.”

  “Seriously,” she said. “I want you to kill me.” Even she didn’t know where this voice was coming from. A feeling had somehow hijacked her tongue, and it sounded about right, so she stuck with it. “How about you kill me and stick me into one of these cars,” she said. “No one will ever know.”

  “Kill you,” he said. He laughed. He gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white. “I’m okay just sitting here, talking. Or I got a better idea. How about we get out of the car and get some fresh air. That’ll make you feel better.”

  The air inside the car was so hot the sweat on her arm burned. Her forehead was glistening. Jonas reached over and placed a gentle hand on her knee.

  “How do you even stand to look at me, Jonas?”

  “Are you kidding?” he said. “It’s the easiest thing I do all day.”

  He started unfastening his seat belt. The sweat flowed down her face now, burning her eyes, and for a moment she couldn’t see. She shouldn’t have left Rachel like that—not because it was any worse than anything Helen had ever done to her before, but because Rachel knew Helen for who she was now, and if she didn’t know for certain, she would, and soon. It had been easier when Helen thought she would never be caught—as long as Rachel didn’t know it was possible for Helen to imagine her own self as the picture of that person she had painted for Rachel. And it was this, more than the darker parts of her own heart, that made her malice so successful, and necessary. Rachel let Helen believe she was better than she was.

  Jonas slid quickly across the seat and took her hands in his and brought them to his lips, where he kissed them. He kissed them front and back. “What’s wrong with us today?” he said. “We’re usually thinking the same thing.”

  “We’re never thinking the same thing, Jonas. Never.”