The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel

  A dog appeared. Then another. Suddenly there were three of them, rocketing right at the bear’s head. A terrible melee ensued, full of growling and dog yelps and angry bear sounds. The dogs were no match for the bear; its huge paws knocked them off, and they sailed away into the night. But the dogs weren’t the least bit discouraged. They came back and went right at it, this time taking little chunks of fur and maybe more from a leg. And the bear, wondering what it did to deserve this, fell on all fours and ran away.

  The second time the dogs saved him was just yesterday. He had come upon this sign:

  THE PEACH BLOSSOM

  COOL AIR.

  FREE LIGHT.

  This sign excited him. The Peach Blossom itself, however, did not inspire the same enthusiasm. Five rooms in a low brick building. One big truck, its long flatbed loaded with scrap metal and rubber, was parked in front—probably a lumberjack. The office was a green door at the back of the house with the word OFFICE painted on it. Hidden in the trees, Markus cased it out for a while, because as much as he wanted a room he wanted just as much not to pay for one. He wasn’t sure, but he thought that the last of his money might have fallen out of his pocket when he took his pants off the previous night. He watched a man come out of the office, one of the fattest men Markus had ever seen. Balder than bald, not a hair on his head, and no evidence there ever had been. The man went from room to room opening the doors, peering inside. He left the doors open—to air them out, maybe. Markus could see the rooms. Beds. Tables. Colorless nubby rugs. The fat man walked from one room to the other as slow as anyone had ever walked. Then the man made his way to the small house through the door marked OFFICE and was gone.

  Markus slipped into one of the rooms—#3—and hid in the shower, and after the man came by just before dark and shut all the doors, as Markus had thought he would, Markus came out of the shower and watched the man disappear back into his house.

  He was hungry. It was dark now. There was a light coming from the fat man’s house—a moving light. He left the room and went to the man’s window and saw him leaning back in a big chair watching the box Markus knew was called a television. There was a big brown television in the Valley—Markus’s cousin had brought one back with him, carried it ten miles or more in his arms, and he had told them all what it would have done if there had been electricity. Markus watched the man watch the television, and then watched a bit of it himself. The man was watching a show in which cars chased each other through streets and crashed into things, but no one ever really got hurt. Many of the men were able to get out of their broken cars and make a run for it, shooting guns. No one got hurt then, either. After a minute or two someone did get shot in the arm, but you could tell he’d be okay.

  Markus tried to come up with a plan that had some food in it, when the fat man leaped up from his chair and before Markus could take another breath the man was out the door and had the muzzle of a shotgun digging into Markus’s chest.

  His little black eyes were even less loving than that bear’s two nights ago.

  “Freeloader,” he said. “Don’t think I haven’t had a bead on you since you was cowering in the woods like the jackal you are.”

  What could Markus say? Nothing. That’s exactly what he was: a freeloader. A jackal, maybe not, but a freeloader certainly.

  “I am missing my show,” the man said, “which—if I didn’t have reason enough—makes me feel even less kindly toward you. Look at you: no more than a boy. If I don’t shoot you now what does the world have to look forward to but more of the same, a lifetime of freeloading from one such as you? Killing is wrong, but letting you live is wronger. It’s a favor I do mankind, snuffing out the bad before it moves on to cause more of the same. Saying all this not for you incidentally but for me and for God, who’s listening. So He knows why your life is no more worthy to continue than a—a—”

  He stopped talking as his eyes turned toward something behind Markus. No time even to lower his gun before the dogs were on him.

  Markus ran back to his room and shut the door. He didn’t want to witness what the dogs were doing to the man: he had seen too much already, the moment their jagged teeth clamped onto his bulging neck vein. It wasn’t Markus’s fault—there was nothing he could have done to stop them—but even so, the image haunted him. He felt unclean, calloused, well on his way to becoming the man he had never meant to become. The next he looked the man was gone, and all that remained was a purple stain in the gravel.

  It was the next day when he was washing his face in the mirror and heard the dogs and saw what was surely yet another dead body. It was a woman: he could tell it was a woman because of the long orange hair that fell back behind her head and brought a strange and lovely hue to the forest floor. He splashed his face with water and stared at himself in the mirror again. That is me, he thought. It was new to him, being able to see who he was, what he looked like. The day before he had stared at himself for close to an hour. But enough of that. He walked out behind the low brick building and gingerly stepped over the puddles, careful as he could to keep the mud off the edges of his shoes, until he made it to the girl. Nothing could have prepared him for what he saw: so beautiful, so perfect. He felt like he should shield his eyes.

  “What happened to you?” he said, as if she could tell him.

  He brushed the dirt off her face.

  She was still warm.

  Markus picked her up from the forest floor and carried her back to his motel room. The dogs watched from a distance, then vanished into the trees. She was light, almost impossibly so, and in carrying her he felt as though he were also holding her down, as though if he hadn’t come when he did she might just have floated away. He placed her on the bed and then brushed the dirt off her face and pulled the leaves and twigs from her hair.

  He looked at her for he didn’t know how long. He watched her breathe. He studied her features. There was a cut above her left eye, the blood a thin red line. His eyes traveled the part in her hair as if it were a map itself. Every so often her right hand would shiver. She made sounds—small, sad sounds—as if she were dreaming. He sat down on the edge of the bed and touched her hair—nothing else, just that. Even so, he felt as if he’d done something wrong.

  Finally she opened her eyes. He let her take him in, get used to the idea that a man was sitting on her bed, looking at her. He showed her his friendliest face.

  “I’m Markus,” he said.

  She didn’t tell him her name. She didn’t say anything. Her eyes wandered past him.

  “I found you out there in the woods,” he said. He pointed. She didn’t seem to care. Her eyes were open, but she wasn’t looking at anything. She wasn’t looking at anything at all. “Are you okay?”

  “Am I alive?”

  He nodded. “I didn’t think you were at first. I found you,” he said again, as if he were claiming her, as if having found her meant she was his now. A part of him hoped it would be that easy.

  “Where am I?”

  “I don’t—I’m not sure,” he said. “Where did you come from?”

  “Roam,” she said.

  “Roam?”

  She said it as though it were nothing special, just another place to be from, when to Markus it was the end of his exploring, the beginning of everything else.

  “I will take you there.” He said it as though he were taking a pledge.

  “No,” she said.

  “But it can’t be far. It can’t be.”

  “No!”

  “Okay,” he said. “All right. It’s just . . . that’s where I was going, where I’ve always wanted to go. My great-grandfather’s told me about it, and he . . .”

  She still hadn’t really looked at him, and he wished she would. He wished this was going to be like one of those stories, of two people finding each other in the middle of nowhere because they had to find each other somewhere: something that was meant to be.

  “The birds,” she said. “The birds didn’t get me.”

&nbs
p; “The birds?”

  “I made it through the Forest,” she said. “The birds didn’t get me. I knew they wouldn’t.”

  “Birds?” he said. “What kind of birds can get a person?”

  “Flesh-eaters,” she said, with such conviction he didn’t dare contradict her.

  “You do have a little cut above your eye.” And he reached to touch it, and that’s when he noticed: she didn’t blink or flinch the way most people would. “Here,” he said, touching it. “That’s all, the only thing.” He passed the open palm of his hand back and forth before her eyes—still nothing. “But . . . are you blind?”

  “Last I checked,” she said.

  She needed some food, and he did, too, so he went into the house where the motel owner had lived and figured out how to use a stove (it was just a machine that made fire) and cooked up some eggs and bacon. She sat up in bed and ate it, but then she went to sleep again and didn’t wake up until the next day. He went back inside the man’s house and found a shoe for her, a brown one, and while she slept he slipped it on her bare foot, and it was too big, but it would do. He slept on the floor beside her. Every time she moved he woke, so he didn’t sleep that much at all, but that was okay with him. He was in a motel room with a blind girl. What a thing that was. It was like being in a dream you didn’t know was a dream. One dream bled into the next and then she moved again and when he opened his eyes he saw she was standing above him.

  “I don’t want to go to Roam,” she said.

  “Okay,” he said, as much as he had always wanted to go. As much as Roam had been his only hope. And even though his compass had been set for half his life pointing toward this singular destination, he would have said okay to anything she asked. There were, he discovered that day, other worthy goals. “There’s only one other place I know.”

  “Then take me there,” she said.

  “I will.”

  He thought she needed him: he was the one who could see. But it didn’t feel like that. It felt like he needed her, and that she knew it somehow and the fact that he had eyes was secondary to the rest. He thought this a kind of magic.

  Markus stood up and brushed himself off. He peered outside. The day was warm and the sun was shining—a good day for traveling back the way he came. Looking on the bright side—Markus was good at that. He picked up his hat and turned it until it felt right on his head, and then he stood there, looking at her for a long moment before something occurred to him. “You haven’t even told me your name.”

  And she said, “Rachel. My name is Rachel.”

  Rachel. He had never heard a more beautiful name in all his life.

  Part III

  A SERMON

  FOR THE DEAD

  So much light flooded through Helen’s bedroom window in the morning that it was impossible for Digby to sleep past eight. It was as if his eyelids were being pried open by the sun itself. A barkeep never woke before noon: this was a lesson—maybe the only lesson—he learned from his father, who taught by example. But there wasn’t much bar to keep these days, and Helen liked to greet the day early, to attack it, as if there weren’t going to be another one coming tomorrow: she was up and gone before he had finished his last dream. He admired her energy, but sometimes he wished she would keep it to herself for an hour or two more.

  Not even a year had passed and the entire world had changed.

  His shirt and pants were hanging off the back of the red butterfly-backed chair in the corner of the room. She had placed them there, as she did every morning. At his place, where he never was anymore, his clothes were always where he had left them the night before: on the floor. But Helen picked them up, folded them, and sometimes even washed them, all while he was asleep. He insisted that it wasn’t necessary, and that he rather preferred his clothes strewn across the floor, but this wasn’t true anymore, and both of them knew it. Digby liked being tended to, having tended to so many others for so long. If he never said as much, it was only because he wanted to maintain the fiction he had brought into this house with him: that he had been a happy man alone. And maintaining fictions, after all, had been his job.

  He lay in the bed and listened to the house, but it was silent. She must already have gone to the church. His breakfast—a boiled egg, one green apple, and a roll—would be waiting for him in the kitchen, and he would eat it and then go join her, walking alone down the near-deserted streets of Roam. Life was good: he actually felt this. It was very strange to think he had lived so long without being able to articulate this simple idea.

  Helen McCallister and Digby Chang. Who could have seen this coming? Not Digby. Not Helen. Not even the best fortune-teller there ever was.

  After the night one year ago when they went looking for Rachel, the night Jonas died, Digby stumbled back to the tavern in a daze. He felt as if he had been ripped out of his own world and taken to another one, a world he didn’t know and couldn’t understand. None of it made sense: a blind girl running away from home, and Jonas—poor, poor Jonas. No one should have been out in those woods after dark; the odds were that something terrible was going to happen to somebody. They should have waited until first light, but Helen wouldn’t have it. He probably wouldn’t have been able to wait, either, if Rachel were his sister. Still, cooler heads should have prevailed. Cooler heads never prevailed, though; that was the thing about cooler heads: they only made good sense in retrospect, and by then it was too late, and that’s when the cooler heads said I told you so. Even the leftovers, the spirits who crowded his tavern, were preternaturally quiet that night. They knew what had happened—they sensed it.

  But even then, even after everything that had happened, Digby had been gripped with a sense of the inevitable: he and Helen McCallister were going to be together. It was like a vision, and it stunned him. How could this be? He had no surreptitious affection for her. In fact, he hardly knew her at all, and what he did know of her—her face, primarily—he did not care for. That same evening, not three hours before Jonas died, Digby went on and on with Jonas about it. How did you manage to maintain yourself, keep the fire of your desire alive, when you knew that on the other end there was . . . that . . . face? And Jonas gave him the only right answer there was: he loved her. Digby had pretended not to care much for love, and instructed his patrons in the whoremonger’s approach to women—not because he believed in it himself, no, far from it—but because it relieved the pressure on a man’s heart.

  He’d never felt such relief himself.

  Digby told his patrons otherwise, to make them feel less alone, that they were talking to someone who knew whereof he spoke, when in fact he had only been with one woman in his entire life. She lived in the house next door to the one he grew up in (as much as he was going to grow up). She came from somewhere else—China, perhaps, or someplace like it. He could spy the girl from his bedroom window. She saw him, too. They were both fourteen. Every night before blowing out their candles they would give each other a long look. He watched her brush her long black hair. Neither waved, and it’s possible that not even a smile or a nod of the head was exchanged. Everything happened in that look. It really felt to Digby then that if a person paid intense and discreet attention to another person they could say anything they wanted to with their eyes, have an entire conversation, share their deepest feelings, and he wondered if there were tribes somewhere in the world that did that, whole tribes where people didn’t speak at all but only expressed themselves in a look. He tried it with other people to see if it worked, and it didn’t: everyone thought he was odd, and one boy punched him, and that’s when he realized it wasn’t a language just anyone could speak.

  It was, literally, the language of love. He loved the girl and the girl loved him. They’d never met, never exchanged a word—he didn’t even know her name—but none of that mattered: he knew who she was the moment he saw her. They said things with their eyes they never could have said with their lips. Oh girl you are so beautiful and your life has not been easy and the future is un
known but now let us be together we are meant for each other at least in this moment in time. And she said I want to know what it’s like to be loved. And finally that singular night came when he left the window and walked out into the dark cornfield behind his house and waited for an hour and then she was there, and she kissed him, and they brought each other as close as they could, skin to skin, and still only spoke with their eyes. Then it was over, and everything was different. He couldn’t say if it was he or she who changed, whether it was he who wanted more or she who wanted things to stay the same. But he didn’t understand her in the same way. And then—almost overnight, it felt like—she grew, while he stayed the same. Not another inch did he add to his fourteen-year-old frame. Not a midget—never a midget—but just a very, very, very small man.

  As he grew older he listened to the men around him tell the tales of the women they’d had, or been had by; to memory he committed the vocabulary, the dialect, of the womanizer, and made it his own. He took great care not to mimic any single story but instead to take the woman of one and combine her with the situation of another. No one believed Digby could possibly have done what he said he had, because if his numbers were accurate the chances were good that he’d not only slept with your wife, but with everybody’s wife. Still, he told a good story, and if he’d only done half of what he said he did, that would have been something. The truth, of course, was that he had done precisely none of what he’d said he’d done. And later he wondered if the men from whom he had lifted those details—the soft contours of a woman’s hips, her pleasured cries, that warm vortex—had been lifted by them as well.