Dave Eggers - The Wild Things

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.”

Max was swept up and lifted high in the air and finally set down on the shoulders of the Bull. The Bull — that seemed to be his name — followed Carol into a cave under an enormous tree. Inside the cave, there were two torches illuminating a golden oval of a room.

The Bull put Max down and rooted around in a small pile of rubble on the ground. He soon retrieved a scepter, copper-colored and bejeweled, and gave it to Max. Max inspected it reverently. It was heavy, but not too heavy. It was perfect, with a hand-carved handle and a crystal orb at the top.

The Bull continued to dig through the rubble. Curious, Max peered around the Bull and saw that it wasn’t a pile of sticks and rocks but a pile of what looked to be bones. They were yellowed and broken, the remains of what seemed like a dozen different creatures. Twisted and spotted skulls and ribs in sizes and shapes Max had never seen in any book or museum.

“Aha!” Carol bellowed. “There it is.”

Max looked up to see that the Bull had pulled a crown from the heap. It was golden, rough-hewn, and the Bull turned to place the crown on Max’s head. Max pulled away.

“Wait,” he said, pointing to the pile of bones. “Are those … other kings?”

The Bull glanced quickly to Carol with a look of mild concern.

“No, no!” Carol said, chuckling. “Those were there before we got here. We’ve never even seen them before.”

Max was unconvinced.

“What are those, anyway?” Carol asked the Bull.

The Bull shrugged elaborately.

Then Carol and the Bull did a quick jig atop the bones, reducing them to dust.

“See?” Carol said, grinning, his eyes nervous and alight. “Nothing to worry about. Just all this dust.” He turned to the Bull. “Make sure you dust in here next time!”

Sensing Max’s apprehension, Carol stepped forward and spoke with great solemnity. “I promise you have nothing to worry about, Max. You’re the king. And nothing bad can happen to the king. Especially a good king. I can already tell you’ll be a truly great king.”

Max looked into Carol’s eyes, each of them as big as a volleyball. They were the warmest brown and green, and seemed sincere.

“But what do I have to do?” Max asked.

“Do? Anything you want to do,” Carol said.

“And what do you have to do?” Max asked.

“Anything you want us to do,” Carol said. He answered so quickly that Max was convinced.

“Then okay,” Max said.

Max lowered his head to receive his crown. Carol gently placed it on Max’s head. It was heavy, made of something like iron, and the metal was cool on his forehead. But the crown fit, and Max smiled. Carol stood back and looked at him, nodding as if everything had finally fallen into place.

The Bull lifted Max and placed him on his shoulder, and as they made their way out of the tunnel, there were deafening cheers from the rest of the beasts. The Bull paraded Max around the forest, as everyone whooped and danced in a very ugly — drool and mucus spraying left and right — but celebratory kind of way. After a few minutes, the Bull placed Max atop a grassy knoll, and the beasts gathered around, looking up to him expectantly. Max realized he was supposed to say something, so he said the only thing he could think of:

“Let the wild rumpus begin!”

The beasts cheered. Then they waited for Max to tell them what to do. They knew how to rumpus, but they wanted to make sure they did it to the pleasing of their king.

Max shimmied down the Bull’s torso and began to spin around like a dervish. “Do what I do!” he demanded.

And they did. The beasts were terrible dervishes, clumsy and slow at spinning, but this made it all more entertaining for Max. He watched and laughed as they spun themselves into a mass of dizzy fur and feet, each of them crumpling to the ground.

For the next five or six hours, Max thought of every fun thing he could possibly think of, and he made sure all the beasts did these things with him.

He sat on Ira’s back and made him act like a horse (though Ira had never heard of a horse). He lined them all up like dominoes and ordered them to knock each other over. He made them assemble themselves into a giant pyramid, and he climbed on the top and deliberately caused the pyramid to fall. The beasts were extraordinary diggers, so Max made them dig dozens of holes, huge holes, for no reason at all. Then it was back to knocking down trees — the ten or twelve that remained. It was Max’s task to think of as many ways as possible to knock them down, and to do it as loudly as possible.