The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel

by Wallace, Daniel

  She sounded like a girl about to go onstage for the school play. Stage fright, that’s what it was. But it still took him a moment to get it. Waiting? He liked to think of himself as the kind of man who got things, but he was slow on the uptake today. Tired. He was tired, plain and simple. The road to now had been a long one. But they’d survived the worst, and here they were.

  “For you, you mean?” he said.

  “For me,” she said. “To hear me say something, and I don’t know what. What do I do? What do I tell them?”

  He thought about it. He felt real for the first time in his life: the woman he loved had asked him what to do. She needed him the same way he needed her. In that moment—not yet even in the church—they were married.

  He took her hand. “A woman is sometimes required to do things she’d rather not,” he said, “in part because she is a woman and has no real choice in the matter either way.” He stood on his toes and whispered in her ear. “Tell them the truth,” he said. “Tell them that everything is going to be all right.”

  “But is it?”

  “Sure it is,” he said, and hoped she believed him. “One day.”

  And that’s what she did, that day and the next, and the next, and the next, days becoming weeks, the weeks a month and more. For anybody and everybody who came, whether it was one or a hundred, she told them—she told herself—that everything was going to be all right. And hoped they believed her, too.

  THE DOGS

  The dogs came first: two, three, then half a dozen at least. There hadn’t been a single dog in Roam for a long, long time, not since Lumberjack Smith left, and their absence, while never consciously noted, was something deeply felt by those people who remained behind. There was an emptiness—when even the dogs give up, you know things are pretty bad.

  But then they crept on back. All black, one no different from the next, they wandered up and down the streets of Roam as if they owned it. No one touched them; no one even got close to them. On the one hand, they didn’t cause any trouble, but on the other, if you tried to shoo them or didn’t step aside they confronted you with a fiery malice in their eyes until you backed away and went about your business. Not that there was much business to be had in Roam anymore.

  After just a couple of days of this, the few citizens who had been on the fence about leaving now had no doubt at all. The remaining population was halved. No putting up FOR SALE signs, of course; the truth is that anyone could have come and taken possession of a nice home and made it their own through no more effort than it took to move in. On a Main Street that once boasted a dozen stores selling everything from the most elegant feathered hats to rare Chinese noodles, eventually there was only one: a general store selling whatever was left over and behind. You were as likely to find a brass commode there as you were a bag of flour. Old Man Cummings manned the register, his half-inch-thick eyeglasses reflecting the light from the huge, ancient candelabra hanging from his ceiling, smoking incessantly. If he was awake he had at least one cigarette going, sometimes two or three. And he drove a hard bargain—he wouldn’t take a penny off the price of anything. Sometimes he’d raise the price while you were looking, just because he wanted to. But when the dogs came, he locked the doors and never opened them again.

  The dogs ended up gathering around the McCallister house, there beneath the dying magnolias, the withering pin oaks, the relentless kudzu winding around the porch columns. Oh, this house! Just two years ago it was a rotting hovel held upright by nothing more than hope, one strong wind away from collapsing entirely. But it had been transformed, saved by the labor of the smallest man in Roam, Digby Chang. He’d sealed up all the holes in the floor and installed a banister the length of the winding stairs. He’d painted almost all the rooms, most of them in soft colors—Helen loved peach. He cleaned the windows, removing years of cobwebs, leaves, and dirt. Helen cleaned the kitchen (“Scour for an hour every day and all the grime will go away,” her mother always said) until, one day, it began to gleam. There was something magical about order, Helen had come to believe. Something happened when everything was just so, when every piece of the puzzle fit and perfection—fleeting perfection—was achieved. Was that happiness? Satisfaction at the triumph over disorder?

  This is the house that was surrounded. Helen was inside. So was Digby. Eight or nine times a day one or both of them would be standing at the living room window, pulling back a curtain and staring. It was like this going on three days. Digby had tried to go outside once and had almost lost a finger.

  “Still there,” Helen said, not even needing to say it. The idea that the dogs would ever leave now seemed impossible, unimaginable.

  “I keep waiting for the lumberjack,” Digby said. He sat on the couch with his hands on his knees, his knees pressed together, and his feet flat against the floor, as if he were a spring-loaded mechanism that might at any moment pop up. “They’re his dogs. I keep thinking he’s coming off the mountain and they know it and they’re waiting here for him.”

  “Well,” Helen said.

  “What?”

  “Remember the last time we saw them?”

  Digby was silent. He remembered and was hoping Helen wouldn’t. “I remember,” he said.

  “Smith said they’d save her. Jonas told me he said that. His dogs would save her.”

  “True,” Digby said. “That was said by Lumberjack Smith. I didn’t understand it then and I don’t now. But those words were spoken.”

  “And we haven’t seen them since. That’s all I’m saying.”

  Digby gazed into a middle distance, somewhere between himself and the living room wall.

  “Do you remember the birds and the deer and the bears, Helen? The way they used to come and take over the entire town. And then they left, and it was ours again. I think this is the price one pays for living in the wilderness.”

  “So you think the dogs will just go away?”

  “We’ll wake one day and they’ll be gone and we’ll go about our lives as if they were never here, and then, soon, we’ll forget they ever came.”

  She walked over to the couch and sat beside him. He kissed her on the cheek.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he said.

  “That’s because I told you what I was thinking.”

  “But even if you hadn’t, I would know.”

  He kissed her on the cheek again, in the same spot, or thereabouts, where he had planted a thousand of them in the last year. “He sent his dogs away to save her,” she said. “He said they would save her, not that they would bring her back.”

  “And so now that they’re back—”

  “I haven’t seen her in church,” Helen said, “with the others.”

  Digby was silent.

  “You would think she would come,” she said.

  Helen’s services, which were held three times a week (twice on Sunday and once on Wednesday night), had become standing-room-only affairs, as more and more of the old-timers were drawn to her sermons of hope and redemption. Helen had the sense that, even though they were essentially without the ability to change themselves or anything that had happened through the course of their lives, the dead still had a stake in life itself, the same way the Chinese who came to Roam so long ago still had a stake in China. The fact that they didn’t live there anymore didn’t change anything for them.

  “So what you’re saying is—and this is something I can’t quite fathom—you believe there’s a possibility, however slim, your sister is still alive.”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t. But it’s not completely impossible.”

  “But that’s what possibility is, Helen, the absence of complete impossibility.” He sighed, as if readying himself to perform a task he’d performed many times already. “One year,” he said. “Twelve months, Helen, three hundred and sixty-five days she’s been gone and not a word.”

  “All we found was her shoe,” she said.

  “She’s at the bottom of that ravine—”

&
nbsp; Helen closed her eyes and placed a hand on Digby’s knee, squeezing it. “No. Don’t. I see her in my dreams every night. I know what must have happened. Still.”

  “Still,” he said. “It’s important to accept it. So we can move on.”

  Neither spoke now. For a long time they sat together on the couch like two old lovers. That’s all Digby wanted: fifty years from now if they were still together, sitting on the couch holding hands, he would be happy. Or anywhere on any couch. How long could they hold out in Roam, the way things were going? Even before the dogs came, Digby had been trying to convince Helen to go away with him, it didn’t matter where. Arcadia wasn’t far, he said, but there were other places beyond Arcadia—who knew how many? An infinite number. And out of all of them, all they needed was one. But she wouldn’t go. Helen thought about it—it was impossible to watch the exodus and not want to join it—but she wouldn’t. At first Helen stayed in the hope that Rachel might return; then she stayed for fear that she never would.

  So Helen remained and discovered in her sister’s absence what love and the loss of it is; she discovered both at the exact same time. It’s not just a feeling: it’s a real thing inside of you made of a paper-thin glass, and when it breaks the shards move through your blood and cut you to pieces.

  Helen missed church. She missed church more than she missed freedom and food. Had the dogs let her out that’s where she would have gone first. She missed her flock, the attentive dead who hung on her every word as if she had something important to say, as if there were something she could say that would help them, though all she could do was tell stories, the same thing she had done all of her life. Different stories now, though: good ones. And they were more powerful than any lie she ever told her sister. She felt like she was finally becoming human, because out of all the life on Earth this is the one thing only people do. What other animal tells stories? Or more important: what other animal listens?

  Helen felt like she’d died, too. There was a Helen, another Helen, whom she’d buried when Rachel left her, and like the spirits who were her congregation, the leftover Helen was a vaporous shadow, gray as a cloud—the only difference between her and the others being that she was growing into her new self, and they would be the way they were forever. That’s why all eyes were on her. No one even blinked.

  “Welcome,” she had begun that first day, and she said exactly what Digby had told her to say. But after that, she hit a wall. It was a kind of stage fright, but more than that: she was scared of herself. She stood there for an entire minute, silently staring back at them, until one of them—James Harding—stood and said, “Tell us about yourself, Helen.”

  “About myself?”

  “Tell us what you’ve done with your life.”

  Another minute passed before she spoke.

  “Well, I did some things,” Helen said. “Some terrible, terrible things.”

  “But what exactly?” he asked her. “I think we’ve all done terrible things”—and a murmur of agreement spread through the pews—“but just saying it isn’t enough. Cat of mine had a litter of kittens I didn’t need. So I drowned them in the river. Six of them, in a bag with a rock in it. Watched their bodies struggle against the silk until . . . well, until they stopped.” He sat back down and popped back up and said, “That’s what I’m talking about. Get it out and let it go.”

  Jeddy Wong said from his seat, “Slept with my wife’s sister once.”

  His wife looked at him and said, “Once?”

  Others followed them, and more followed the others. It wasn’t confession as much as it was admission. Not that there was anything wrong with what they had done, but that wasn’t the point. The idea was that there was no one who hadn’t done something.

  “So now,” James Harding said, about half an hour after he’d opened the floodgates. “What is it you have to share with us?”

  Helen stood, feeling protected behind the pulpit. But this was no time to feel protected. She moved away from it and presented herself fully to the congregation.

  “I let my blind sister walk into a bees’ nest,” she said. They stared, waiting. “I mean I walked her into it. She was stung all over, head to toe.” Helen wiped the palms of her hands across the front of her dress. “I rearranged the furniture so she’d run into it and hurt herself. That made me happy, to do things like that. I told her she stood a good chance of being hanged one day because she was a blind girl. I told her . . .” She let her words trail off into silence. Why was what she wanted to say now any worse than anything else she’d done to Rachel? Was there even a scale on which these things could be weighed, and judged? Helen thought: yes, there was. “I stole her face,” she said, “and I gave her mine.”

  Digby watched her from the back.

  There was too much to say for just one service. The next Sunday, Mrs. Cravens, the sixth-grade teacher (when there was a sixth grade in Roam), stood and told Helen and the spirits gathered there, “Everything I did was an accident. Everything good and bad. I floated on the surface of the river of my life and held on to whoever could keep me from drowning.” She blushed. “I don’t know what happened. I don’t know what’s happening now.”

  Then Jonas stood up. He lowered his head toward Helen in a gesture suggesting love and respect and sorrow. They had spoken, once, on the first day the church was open, the first time she’d seen him since he’d died. He’d been shy with her, the way old boyfriends were with the girls they still loved. He’d said, “I appreciate everything you did for me, Helen. I wasn’t easy. Especially when you tried to help me—you know. That last night. I appreciate that.”

  That last night.

  So today when he stood she thought he was going to talk about that. But he didn’t.

  “I killed my father,” he said. He paused, looked around. “Still—I don’t know. I don’t have a feeling about it. I don’t feel much of anything about that.”

  He shrugged, looking all around, as if for help. Then he sat back down.

  The meetings had become a time of healing for her congregation, though she suspected they were there, in part, because they had nothing else to do. They were stuck here the same way the living had been stuck here, only the dead had no reason to go anywhere else. They were stuck in Roam forever, even as it succumbed to the rapacious and, now, relentless onslaught of greenery engulfing the homes and stores. They were always there, and would always be there, and if there was a reason she and Digby could see them when no one else could, she wasn’t sure what that reason was. But it would have been lonely had only one of them been able to, and this was reason enough for her. All she knew is that every Sunday she left the church a better person, changed for the good, while they all stayed the same. This was how she came to realize that she wasn’t there to help them, but they were there to help her. They did more than that, though: they saved her.

  The quiet, inside and out, was unsettling. When the dogs stopped howling there was nothing to hear but the wind edging in through the windows Digby had yet to repair—a high whistling sound.

  “We’re running out of food,” she said.

  He looked at her, but she kept her gaze fixed on the door. Dust motes like a million miniature fish swimming through the lighted air, reproducing too fast to clean, a woman with her hands on her thighs, torturing herself with her past; and the man who really loved her not a few feet away, ready to do anything he could to make her happy.

  “It feels a little like the end of the world, doesn’t it?” he said. “What preachers preach about it. Know thou that dogs will come and . . . and I don’t know, surround your home so you can’t even go out to get a drink? Can’t get much worse than that.”

  But she didn’t smile at his little joke. Instead she said, “I’ve been thinking about that, too. But the end of the world’s not dogs, Digby. It’s plagues. Plagues, floods, locusts, fires. And miracles. Lots and lots of miracles.”

  He took her hand and held it tighter now, and she held his tighter back.

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nbsp; ROAM

  Markus fell out of the woods as if he’d been thrown out of them, his coat and pants torn and ripped in half a dozen places, light red stripes across his cheeks and even deeper cuts on his arms, where there was some serious blood, dirt smeared like camouflage around his neck and chin, gasping for air, looking behind him, ahead, as if at any moment something could come at him, from anywhere, and he had to be ready for it. Somehow, his hat had stayed on his head. Finally he either felt safe or gave up on feeling safe, brushed his pant legs and shirtsleeves off (as if that did any good whatsoever), and ran, ran just as fast as he could without falling. His shoes were mostly poster board and string now. With his face clenched from the blistering pain, he didn’t stop until he came to a sign. It was hard to assemble the letters into words because they were worn away by weather and time. He had to study it for a while.

  WE COME TO RO M

  THE SILK N ARADISE

  AND ND

  OF ALL EXP ORIN .

  EL JAH MCCALL TER, OWNER

  So he had made it for sure. In his rush to get here—and to escape the dog that was chasing him—he wasn’t sure where he was. When he got to that bridge over the ravine (so old and worn and fragile he wasn’t sure it would support him), he ran across it as fast as he could, at the very least hoping that if it fell it would fall behind him, that he could stay a step ahead of the dog. But it didn’t fall. He wasn’t sure, but he thought the dog was just behind him and that it might be a good idea to cut the bridge down (it was hanging there by a single thick, fraying rope) but decided (the way such things are decided, in less than a moment) that he might need it if he were to go back.

  Now he was here, the place he’d been moving toward one year ago. Ming Kai had told him stories about it since he was a small boy. How there had been nothing here but nature, and how two men made their way through the nothing of it all and created a world, a world so closely tied to the men who made it that when they became dead to each other the town itself began to die. From Markus’s small home in the Valley, remote from everywhere, Roam was never real. It was just a story. And now here it was.