The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel

by Wallace, Daniel

  One night by the fire, at dinner, he told his lumberjack brothers, “I’m going away.”

  His brothers glanced his way briefly, then went back to gnawing venison off the bone. No one wanted to say I’ll miss you, because being a lumberjack was a calling, and missing things was part of it—so much a part of it that if you started enumerating the things you missed as a lumberjack you could almost never stop. It was easier to name the things a lumberjack had that no one else did: the companionship of other lumberjacks. If Smith didn’t want to be a part of this, he wasn’t really a lumberjack anymore. Smith knew it, and that’s why he was leaving.

  “Where to?” a brother asked him, without trying to seem very interested. “Back to Arcadia, I imagine.”

  “No,” Smith said. “Not Arcadia. That’s where all my heartache started. I never want to see Arcadia again.”

  The other lumberjacks shifted a bit on the huge felled oak that was their fire-bench. That word, heartache, made them uncomfortable.

  “No,” Smith said. “I think I’ll go on down to Roam instead.”

  “Roam,” the brother said. “Roam?”

  “There’s a place to drink in Roam,” he said. “And there’s women.”

  “But no trees,” the brother said. “Not like these. And no lumberjacks.”

  “No,” he said. “And I’ll miss you, you can be sure of that.”

  “Don’t,” the brother said and spit in the fire, where it sizzled. “Knowing you’re out there, missing us, isn’t likely to help us much up here.”

  “No,” Smith said, the fire illuminating a tear. “I suppose it won’t.”

  The next day he began the long walk down. He had a truck, but he didn’t really need it, so he left it on the mountain for his brothers (or the men who used to be his brothers). The dogs followed him. He didn’t ask them, nor did he particularly want them to, but they didn’t have anyone but him and he didn’t have anyone, either. He was lonely with them, but he would have been desolate without them. They ran up ahead and scared away the bears and made his journey down the mountain dull and joyless. He wanted to fight a bear. It had been a long time since he’d done that.

  He’d been through Roam once before; he’d needed an axle for the truck and he’d heard of someone there who had a lot of them, and sure enough, there was an axle in Roam and he and that boy had stuck it on the truck and she was good to go. After they were done they went to the bar. It was run by a midget. He couldn’t remember the bartender’s name. Smitty, Igbert—something like that. The midget said he wasn’t a midget but he was, not that Smith cared one way or the other. People thought Smith was a giant sometimes and he wasn’t a giant at all, he was just a very big man.

  As they got closer to town the dogs started barking something terrible. He’d never heard them bark like that and he hated it. He wanted peace and he wanted quiet. That was yet another reason he left the mountain. He didn’t know what he’d do with these dogs if they didn’t stop barking.

  When he got to Roam he left them outside the bar, barking, and went in and had a drink. But the dogs were out there, barking still. He couldn’t enjoy his drink. So he left and he took the dogs and walked away from Roam until he reached that point at which they stopped barking. This is where he made his home. He built what turned out to be a grandiose doghouse, with many rooms and vaulted ceilings, in which he lived with his pack. Every day he came into town and had a drink or two or three at the bar—Digby, the barkeep’s name turned out to be—and then he’d return to his doghouse and read from books he found at the abandoned high school. He learned a lot reading those books. He learned about the past. Most important, he learned there was a past, that even beneath the dirt and rocks upon which he slept every night a thousand men had been born and lived and died, and women, too. Babies. People different from him who had been here, who were gone now, some just a hundred years ago, but some gone for a thousand, along with all of their hopes and dreams, their happiness and heartaches, their dogs. Whole worlds, all come and gone.

  He marked off the days of his new life, etching lines into the wood that was his walls. Numbers allowed him to remember that along with the past there was a future, too, something he could be a part of.

  He had marked his wall for the three-hundredth time on the night Rachel McCallister disappeared. That was the night he went from needing to being needed, and it changed his life.

  JONAS,

  PART IV

  Jonas admired Digby Chang, and Jonas told him this all the time. He said, “Digby Chang, I admire you. I admire you because in spite of everything you keep your head up. The fact that you’re waist-high to every other man in Roam and your face looks like it’s been peppered by a shotgun don’t get you down. You’re a lesson to me,” Jonas said, but it was a lesson Jonas never learned, because Jonas was always unhappy about something, and Digby expected it every time the door opened and Jonas walked in: how no one bought scrap metal anymore, how he couldn’t get gas for the cars, how—hell, there weren’t even any more nails in the gutter.

  Tonight would be no different, Digby thought as Jonas came barreling into the tavern; but he would be wrong about that. First, the lumberjack was here, too: he was sitting at the end of the bar—distant, it appeared, even from himself. His head sank into his huge shoulders as if he were trying to disappear into his own body. He had been here for an hour and had not said one word. A few old spirits—KK Munford, Caleb “Jimmy” Chi, and Fang and He-Ping of course—sat off in the corner talking about old times. That’s all the spirits talked about, really, those who spoke at all. Old times this and that, how it used to be, et cetera, and so on. As much as the living were entertained by stories of what happened after death, the dead apparently didn’t find much about it worth discussing.

  At least Jonas was alive, Digby thought, setting up a spot for him lickety-split. Digby couldn’t remember the last time he had two paying customers at the same time. Things were looking up.

  Jonas started in before the door closed behind him.

  “I’m going to tear the goddamn heart out of something,” he said. He looked like he’d been knocked in the face with a shovel and dragged through an icy pond—worse even than usual. “I don’t care who or what it is. But it’s either going to be one of those dogs—who’ve been barking all day and night if you haven’t noticed, about fifteen of ’em right outside—or goddamn Archie Yates, who shut his door in my goddamn face.”

  Jonas said he could see himself standing there with the heart of one of those dogs still beating in his hand, the blood dribbling down his arm like watermelon juice. He saw himself holding it up above his head and screaming like some monstrous half-human bear—the cry of victory, and a warning to those who might challenge him next. Like goddamn Archie Yates.

  “Welcome, my friend!” Digby said. With his eyes he indicated the silent presence of Smith in the corner; Jonas, in his anger at the world and what the world had done to him, had yet to see anything beyond the end of his nose. Fang turned his back on them: he’d never liked Jonas.

  “Oh,” Jonas said to Smith. “Sorry. Didn’t mean what I said about the dogs, Smith. I’m just . . . upset. Sorry.”

  Smith didn’t indicate that he had heard Jonas either time, or that he even knew that Jonas was there. Nothing about his demeanor changed at all.

  Digby climbed a stepladder and pulled a sparkling clean glass down from the shelf and let it slide down the bar. It stopped an inch away from Jonas’s hand. Digby was old-school. “You look like a man who needs a drink. Actually you look like a man who needs a drink, a big steak, an apple pie, and a cup of coffee. But all I got is the drink. First one’s on the house. What can I do you for?”

  “Whiskey, a beer chaser, a pack of matches, and an ashtray, a cigarette if you have it, and if it’s all the same to you can I pay you next week?”

  “How about a hand-job to go with that?”

  “Damn, Digby.”

  Digby pulled himself up with his elbows so he could lo
ok Jonas in the eye. “I can make that joke because I’ve had more women than a hundred men.”

  “No shit.”

  Digby didn’t blink. “No one believes me,” he lied, “but it’s true.”

  “Include me with the no ones.”

  “It’s true whether you believe me or not. That’s the way it is with truth. You don’t have to believe it. It is what it is.”

  “Okay.” Jonas sighed. “What about that drink and stuff?”

  Digby wavered a moment but served him anyway. Money didn’t make as much sense as it used to, now that there was no one about to spend it. Gave him a cigarette, too.

  Jonas sucked on it for a quiet minute. Digby watched what thoughts Jonas had pinging around in his brain.

  “Rachel’s gone,” he said, as if he were talking about something of no import whatsoever. He blew a great plume of smoke toward the ceiling and watched it fill the air.

  Digby took aim at Jonas with his left eye. “Gone? That could mean one of two things,” he said. “Missing or dead.”

  Jonas nodded. “In this case,” he said, “I reckon it probably means both.”

  Digby made a noise he didn’t mean to. It just slipped out. It was almost a moan, a tiny moan. He had always had the feeling, watching those two girls wander around town all like they were joined at the hip . . . he couldn’t say what it was, actually, but it wasn’t a good feeling. A shadow seemed to follow them everywhere they went. And now the blind girl was gone. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, no. Tell me the tale.”

  Jonas threw back the whiskey and shook his head, giving Digby the look of a thirsty man: Jonas knew he couldn’t resist a good story. Digby quickly refilled his glass and left the bottle where it was.

  Smith nursed his whiskey and didn’t look up. Didn’t even look like he tried not to look up. He was very treelike, Digby thought. Very treelike indeed.

  “Well, to begin with,” Jonas said. “Helen and Rachel had some sort of family dispute earlier in the day. Not sure over what because that’s private information Helen doesn’t see fit to share with one such as me.” He shook his head. “I’ve only been there for half their lives, you know, why share anything really important with me? I’m only Jonas.”

  “You’re being sarcastic,” Digby said. “I’ve never heard you be sarcastic before.”

  “Maybe I never needed to be before,” he said.

  “Well, you’re good at it,” Digby said. “Very good. Go on.”

  Jonas took a look at his cigarette, sad to see that it was already half gone. “So Helen and me go for a ride. Without Rachel this time. We drive out to my shop, which is a good ways out of town, and I’m thinking, well, I’m thinking we’re about to . . . you know.”

  “I know,” Digby said. “I know what happens between a man and a woman, believe me. I have both the experience and the imagination. No need to go into details.”

  “But she’s not in the best humor now, and she says—”

  “I don’t know that I’ve ever seen Helen in a good humor.”

  “Well, even worse now,” Jonas said. “Worse than ever.”

  “How so?”

  “She wanted me to kill her.”

  Digby narrowed his tiny eyes and stared hard at Jonas for a moment. “She wanted you to kill her? To actually extinguish her life?”

  Jonas nodded. Digby, from his vantage point on the edge of the bar, peered past Jonas’s shoulder: even the spirits had stopped their palaver. It was possible now that Lumberjack Smith had an ear turned in their direction.

  “So. Did you?”

  “Did I kill her?” Jonas said. “No I didn’t kill her! What do you—Digby, I swear.”

  “Had to ask,” Digby said, and he held the palms of his hands up in the air, as if he were turning himself in to the authorities.

  Jonas went on to tell Digby the rest of the story, how all of a sudden Helen took off in the car and left him there, miles from town, and he had to walk back, and when he did he went straight over to Helen’s house because you can bet by then he did want to kill her. But that’s when he found out Rachel had gone, and when Helen got back to the house she was like he’d never seen her before, so sad and broken up and frantic, he couldn’t be mad at her anymore.

  “Never get mad at a woman,” Digby said. “It doubles the chances of her getting even madder with you.”

  Jonas lost the focus in his eyes. “She looked like a ghost,” he said.

  The old-timers laughed. Digby couldn’t help but laugh along with them.

  Jonas looked at Digby without comprehension. “I just don’t know what’s funny about that,” he said.

  “Nothing,” Digby said. “Nothing is funny about that.” Digby poured him another drink to calm him. It worked. “And so? Then? Next?”

  “She said for me to go out and get a search party together, and I said I would.”

  “A search party,” Digby said.

  “With emphasis on the search.”

  “And instead you came here for a libation?”

  Jonas shook his head. “This is my second stop. I was over to Archie Yates’s first and he slammed the door in my face. I was thinking, maybe you . . .”

  “Yes!” Digby said, manufacturing a specious enthusiasm. “Yes. I will be part of your search party. I’m honored. Together we will find the blind girl.”

  “Honestly,” Jonas said, “I don’t know there’s much to be done. Rachel’s at the bottom of that ravine by now. Stake my life on it.” Digby had seen men with their spirits crushed more often than he’d seen a sunny day, but he couldn’t remember seeing a man in the condition Jonas was in right now. He was as lost as anybody, ever.

  “Things have changed,” Jonas said. “Used to be Helen and I were—well, we were like two dogs in the same pen. No more.”

  Jonas laughed, but there was no mirth in it. The two men ruminated in silence. In the quiet they could hear Smith breathe.

  “I used to find nails in her gutter,” Jonas said. “That’s the job my dad gave me, finding nails.”

  “This marked the beginning of your romantic liaison, no?”

  “What?”

  “When you began slipping it to Helen,” Digby said.

  “Oh. Yeah.” Jonas smiled. “We’d pick a room, a closet. It didn’t matter.” Jonas thought back to those times. “Rachel, we’d have to lock her out back then. She’d cry, bang at the door. But that didn’t stop us.”

  “Sounds like heaven,” Digby said and looked toward the door as if he had another customer; he didn’t.

  Jonas shrugged. “There wasn’t much to it. I mean, usually she’d have me wait in a room where there weren’t any windows and the light was off, so by the time she came in I’d have invented someone else in my head. Just do it and be done and I’d go my way, she’d go hers. Oh, people talked, I know that. About her and me and her and, you know, the others. Because there were some others for a while. I don’t mean to give it any more attention than it deserves, or to think about it too much because I don’t generally get along with people who think too much, but how is what we did any different from what every other animal in the world does? I mean every animal, down to the last fish in the sea? People—not you, Digby, but some of the others—have made it a lot harder than it needs to be. You got to eat, right? And you don’t always eat steak. When you get hungry—”

  “—you eat,” Digby said. “It’s the law of the jungle.”

  Digby poured Jonas another beer. The foam bloomed and spilled over the side, and both of them watched it stream across the dark mahogany bar as if there were a message in its sprawling amoebic shape. Jonas scratched at his chest. “I admit,” he said softly, even sweetly, “in the beginning she was just a place to fix my longing, because the fact is no one else would have me. But that changed. I got to loving her, Digby.”

  “Loving her?”

  “I know. I actually like to look at her. Maybe I just got used to looking, I don’t know. But when I don’t see her, I miss her. I guess that’s why
they call it love.”

  “I’ve never been in love,” Digby said. It was the first truly honest thing he’d said all night. “But that is what it sounds like.” He laughed and raised a glass. The two of them clinked. “To love,” Digby said.

  “To love,” Jonas said but stopped before bringing the glass to his lips.

  “What, my friend?”

  Jonas forced a smile. “The thing is, the thing that makes it rough? She doesn’t love me.”

  “Oh. Now that is sad.”

  Jonas drank, and for a moment his face became as blank as a baby’s, without a hint of pain or sadness to color it. “I do love her,” he said. “And I just . . . I just can’t stop being who I am. And why would she ever want to love me?”

  Digby didn’t have an answer to this. Jonas stared toward the far wall, where black-and-white photographs of Digby on a series of fishing trips were hung. In each photo he was with a different customer. Some of the fish Digby caught were half as big as he was.

  Jonas narrowed his eyes. “The truth is, I’m kind of glad Rachel’s run off. She’s always been a . . . a problem, you know? In lots of ways. Being so pretty, of course, she always made Helen feel less than what she was. And imagine having to take care of a blind girl your whole life. I was glad for a minute when Helen told me Rachel ran off. That’s the truth, and I’m ashamed of it. But I figured Helen would be happier because of it. Turns out the opposite.”

  Digby shook his head. He could hear the dogs outside, barking like crazy: it sounded like they were about to break down the door.

  Jonas’s mind turned rabid circles in his head. “I had this dream, I guess you’d call it, that one day Helen and me, we’d have a family. Where do you see those anymore? Just a plain little family. We’d live in the big house on the hill there and have babies and start over from scratch. Us. This town, everything. The way he did it. You know.”