The Wild Things

CHAPTER XIX

The beasts stopped. They stopped moving, stopped talking, stopping raising their arms to claw Max to death, stopped salivating profusely. Max couldn’t believe it. He didn’t know what to do next.

“Why?” said Judith. “Why should we stop?”

This was a tricky question, Max knew. If he were about to bite into, say, a strawberry, and it told him to stop, he too would want a good explanation.

“Because … Uh … Because …” he mumbled. The beasts stared, waiting, blowing roughly through their nostrils. Max knew he had to come up with something immediately, and to his surprise, he did. “Because,” he said, “I heard about this one time that they weren’t still and they …”

“Who?” said Judith. “Who wasn’t still?”

Now Carol arrived, standing behind the others. He had been impressed with Max before, but now he seemed in awe of this small creature’s presence and power.

“Um … The hammers,” Max explained, making it up as he went along, “they were huge ones and they didn’t know how to be still. They were crazy. They were always shaking and running around and they never stopped to see what was right in front of them. So this one time the hammers were storming down the mountainside and they couldn’t even see that someone was coming up to help them. And you know what happened?”

The beasts, enthralled, shook their heads.

“They ran right over him and killed him,” Max said.

There were a few gasps, but there were also a few sounds that said “Well, what else would they do?”

“And the thing is,” Max added, “he liked them. He was there to help.”

“Who was he?” asked Douglas.

“Who was who?” Max said.

“The guy coming up the hill,” Douglas said.

“He was …” And again Max fumbled in the velvet darkness of his mind and found, impossibly, a gem. “He was their king,” Max answered.

Max had never told a more bizarre story, but the creatures were just floored by it.

Carol stepped forward. “Do you like us?”

This was a tough question. Max wasn’t sure that he liked any of them, given they were, moments earlier, about to devour his flesh and brains. But in the interest of self-preservation, and because he had been liking them a lot when they were all breaking things and lighting trees on fire, he said, “Yeah. I like you.”

Ira cleared his throat and said, with a hope-filled catch in his voice, “Are you our king?”

Max had rarely had to do so much bluffing in his life. “Sure. Yeah,” he said. “I think so.”

A ripple of excitement spread through the beasts.

“Wow, he’s the king,” Ira said, now seeming very happy.

“Yeah,” Douglas said. “Looks like he is.”

“Why is he the king?” Alexander said, full of sarcasm. “He’s not a king. If he can be king I could be king.”

Thankfully, as usual, all the other creatures ignored the goat.

“He’s very small,” noted Judith.

“Maybe that’s why he’ll be good,” suggested Ira. “That way he can fit in small places.”

Douglas stepped forward, as if he’d just thought of a stumper of a question that might decide it all: “Were you king where you came from?”

Max was getting good at the fibbing, so this one was easy. “Yeah, I was. King Max. For twenty years,” he said.

A quick happy murmur spread through the creatures.

“Are you going to make this a better place?” Ira asked.

“Sure,” Max said.

“Because it’s screwed up, let me tell you,” Judith blurted.

“Quiet, Judith,” Carol said.

“No, really, I could tell you stories …” she continued.

“Judith, stop,” Carol snapped.

But she wasn’t finished: “All I’m saying is that if we’re gonna have a king, he might as well solve all our problems. It’s the least he can do, after knocking over all our houses.”

“Judith, of course he’s here to fix everything,” Douglas said. “Why else would a king be a king and a king be here?” He turned to Max. “Right, King?”

“Uh, sure,” Max said.

Carol smiled. “Well, that settles it then. He’s our king!”

They all moved in to hug Max.

“Sorry we were gonna eat you,” Douglas said.

“We didn’t know you were king,” Ira said.

“If we knew you were the king, we almost definitely wouldn’t have tried to eat you,” Judith added, then laughed in a sudden, mirthless trill. She lowered her voice to a confessional tone. “We just got caught up in the moment.”