The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel

by Wallace, Daniel

  Kelly smiled at Digby and got up to leave. She walked through the door as if she were a regular customer, and her old friends sat down and closed their eyes and let the moment wash over them like a breeze.

  What an odd bunch, these dead people. But maybe it was a mistake to think of them that way. Maybe being dead wasn’t an ending at all, but more of an evolution, a new chapter. They had qualities that surprised him, that’s for certain. Their ability to laugh, for example, and to want things, to desire. Digby had always thought of death, if anything, as the end of desire, and he’d thought about it that way with some relief. He was also disappointed to learn that housing continued to be an issue into the afterlife. In fact, there appeared to be but three things the old-timers didn’t do anymore: eat, drink, and make love—which, Digby said, were the only three things he wanted to do. The old-timers made him, more than ever, want to live.

  While Digby had been surrounded by ghosts all of his life, the first ghosts Helen saw were those of her mother and father, the night after the car accident that killed them both.

  Helen had decided to go; it was her last chance. Along with whatever grief the loss of her parents inspired—and there was grief—came the knowledge that her life would not go well from here, an awareness of the sisterly caretaker she would become. She saw her story looming before her as if in a magic crystal ball. She was eighteen; Rachel was eleven; there was no one else to take care of them, so they would have to take care of themselves. Helen would lose everything when she left—the world she’d made for herself and Rachel, and the only person who believed her beautiful—but she had sustained that story long enough, too long, and she knew that if she didn’t leave she wouldn’t stop. While the neighbors sat with Rachel downstairs, Helen found the small wooden suitcase in her mother’s walk-in closet and packed a few essential items: a pale blue blouse, a skirt, her red dress, two pairs of underwear, three pairs of socks, and some of her mother’s jewelry. She slipped quietly down the stairs and out a backroom window. She threw the suitcase out ahead of her and then followed it into the herb garden, brushing herself off as she stood. And there she came face-to-face with the ghosts of her parents. They were not much different as ghosts than they had been as real people, because there had always been something dead about them to her. If anything they looked more alive, brighter, well polished. They had loved her, she knew this, and they may have been the only two people who ever really did, but she felt as if they’d raised her the way they would a plant: they made sure she had everything she needed to thrive—food, water, sunlight—but kept her rooted to this pathetic patch of soil called Roam.

  Helen had never seen a ghost before. She waited to be scared, but Mr. and Mrs. McCallister weren’t frightening, despite the fact that they had only just died. There was something natural about them, something real: she had never before believed in ghosts, but now that she saw them she believed. It was as simple as that.

  “Helen,” Mrs. McCallister said. A mother’s voice: no one else was able to pack that much meaning into just that word, her name. “How could you?”

  Her father didn’t have anything to say. He just stood there and glowered.

  Helen looked beyond them for a moment. The fog was rolling in like a cloud of cotton. Her mother and father were ghosts; she could have walked right through them to another life. But she didn’t. All it took was for her mother to remind her: her sister was all she had.

  Then her parents were gone, and Helen crawled back inside the house. How could you? For a long time Helen thought her mother meant how could she do this, leave at a time when her sister would need her the most? But it wasn’t that; her mother knew Helen would never—could never—leave. Her mother meant, How could you do what you’ve been doing to your sister for the last five years? Telling her these stories? Making up this dark and terrible world, and taking your sister’s face for your own?

  The dead know all our secrets.

  Later that same night, long after Helen thought Rachel had gone to bed, she heard Rachel’s little feet padding down the hallway to her room. The door edged open, and Rachel slipped in. Moonbeams glowed through the window in narrow beams, spotlighting her sister’s face as she entered. Helen had never seen her sister’s eyes so sunken, her cheeks raw from wiping away the tears. Still, even through all of this, so beautiful. But she had stopped crying now. Rachel stood by her bed and held out her hands and waited until Helen took them. Then Rachel held them tight.

  “It’s just us now,” Rachel whispered.

  “Yes,” Helen said. “Just us.”

  Helen brushed a strand of her sister’s hair back behind her ear, and when she did could feel how hot Rachel was: the back of her neck was dripping wet.

  “You’ll protect me?” Rachel asked her.

  The moonlight disappeared behind a cloud, and then the cloud passed and Rachel’s face was bright with the moon again. “We’ll protect each other,” Helen said.

  So Helen stayed. She liked to imagine sometimes, just before she fell asleep, the life she might have had if . . . if her parents hadn’t died, if she’d been beautiful, or been even plain. She closed her eyes and dreamed. After years of taking care of her blind little sister, Helen McCallister left Roam and traveled the world. The great minds and swarthy lotharios of her generation sought her out. After one night with her, many men simply killed themselves, realizing they had achieved a happiness impossible to replicate. Why go on? She gave herself freely, for such was her way. She had given herself to her sister for all those years, and now it was time to share herself with the rest.

  The dreams came, impossible dreams in any world, but she dreamed them just the same, and when she woke up, nothing, of course, had changed; nothing.

  The ghosts of Mr. and Mrs. McCallister appeared to Helen on just that one night, and thereafter spent most of their time with Rachel, who couldn’t see them anyway, or no better than she could when they were alive. (It was an irony that at least some of the ghostly shapes the world presented to Rachel were in fact the shapes of real ghosts, watching over the only person they believed could not watch back.) Years passed before Helen saw another ghost, and it wasn’t her mother or her father. It was a man, standing beneath the chestnut tree in the front yard. She thought he was staring at her—she’d come out on the front porch for some air—but he was staring at the house, at one window and the next, then the side door, the path leading to the entryway. He was a small man with a white beard and gray eyes. He glowed like a dim bulb. She knew who he was in an instant, because there was a portrait of him in her living room, a portrait she looked at every single day. Elijah McCallister. He didn’t want anything to do with her, though; he just wanted what everybody else did: a house, a place to live.

  ROAM:

  A SHORT HISTORY,

  PART II

  Ming Kai and Elijah traveled into the wilderness for days and days, but at the next town Elijah did as he said he would. He telegraphed his naval friend, a man whose life Elijah had saved from a sea monster—some great shark or whale, he couldn’t remember—and asked him to get Ming Kai’s family and bring them to America. Ming Kai told Elijah the name of the street where his family lived, and a positive response arrived from Elijah’s friend early the next day: it would be done, and gladly, he wrote; anything for the man who saved his life. Of course, it would take some time—six months, perhaps a year, because Ming Kai’s village was far from the coastal provinces and only reachable by horse—but it would be done. Elijah told Ming Kai, and Ming Kai shed tears of the greatest joy.

  Happy now, Ming Kai and Elijah searched for the elusive mulberry. They traveled deep into the wooded hills and mountains of the virgin country that spread out before them like a soft green dream. Civilization, such as it was, was left far behind. They trod on earth that had never known the step of a human foot. Occasionally they’d encounter Indians, who would give them meat and water and then disappear into the forest like ghosts. (Even then Elijah knew that one day he would have to ki
ll his share of Indians. It wasn’t something he wanted to do, but it was something he would have to do to become the man he planned on becoming.)

  The journey was hard. In the beginning Elijah and Ming Kai were full of hope and a wild bravado, they felt like two reckless gods making their own path in a new world. They became like brothers. But after many weeks of making paths they began to feel desperate. Tired, hungry, sick, dirty, and scared—for there were lots of bears in this part of the world—at the end of each day they felt they could go no farther . . . and yet they arose the next day and did. Elijah saved Ming Kai’s life twice: once from a snake and once from rock slide. Ming Kai saved Elijah’s life three times: once from a giant cat, once from a poisonous berry, and the third time from an Indian woman (though Elijah didn’t feel this time should count because he really wasn’t in danger, so they were even, as far as he was concerned).

  And then one day, Elijah gave up. He simply stopped and sat down on the forest floor.

  “I can’t go on,” he said. “I am done. This is where it has been written that I will die.”

  “I see no such writing,” Ming Kai said, looking about.

  “I will die here and be remembered by nobody. All my friends will forget me. At least you have a family, Ming Kai. They will miss you. Your sons will tell the story of how a white man came and took you away and you were never seen again. At least you have that.”

  “Yes,” Ming Kai said. “At least I have that.”

  “Let’s pick where our graves shall be,” Elijah said.

  Elijah stood. He found a flatness not far from where it was written that he would die. “This seems like a nice enough spot,” he said. “What do you think?”

  Ming Kai sniffed the air. “I don’t know.”

  Elijah looked more closely at the ground and sniffed himself. “I think you’re right,” he said. “This is where the bears come to shit.”

  But Ming Kai shook his head. “I think—I think it is too soon to die.”

  For Ming Kai’s nose—which, like so many Chinese organs, was advanced beyond the reckoning of his Caucasian brother—smelled what was surely the mulberry tree. Mulberry trees smelled like red wine and wet grass, and his grandmother. He walked to the edge of the rise, the flattened expanse on which just moments before they had planned to bury themselves, and his Chinese eyes saw it, growing wild in the valley below them. Not one, not two, but a hundred of them. Elijah followed his stare.

  “Is that . . . ?”

  Ming Kai nodded. “Yes,” he said in a whisper. “Yes.”

  But there was a problem: between the two men and the bushes they had been seeking for who knows how long was a ravine, a ravine as deep and dark as the mouth of hell itself. A bridge would have to be built. Ming Kai knew how: they cut down two dozen saplings, each half again as long as the ravine itself, and tied them together with rope until they formed a solid frame, and let the thin and fragile platform fall from one side to the other, where it rested. Elijah looped a tree stump with a lariat and swung across the ravine on it—agile as a monkey—where he secured the posts and waited.

  “Come,” he told Ming Kai.

  “But—”

  “It will hold,” Elijah said.

  “The horses—”

  “Even the horses.”

  It didn’t really even matter to Ming Kai anymore. It would have been just the same to him if he had fallen to his death into the ravine. But the bridge held, and the rest of their lives began.

  Ming Kai ran down the hill; Elijah followed. From the first tree he found he clipped a leaf and ate it, just to make sure, and by his smile Elijah knew: he was sure.

  They were home. They embraced like friends who could not have known each other longer, and fell to the ground and rolled around in the leaves and bear scat like a couple of little boys. They hugged and rolled; they rolled as one. They came to their senses soon enough, however, and stood and breathed deep and surveyed the world around them, a world that over the course of the next quarter of a century would be changed beyond recognition. Ming Kai saw the trees, and smiled; Elijah saw what the trees would do for him. His smile was briefer than Ming Kai’s, but bigger.

  “I’ve been thinking what we’d name it,” Elijah said. “Once we made it here, once we found it, the place where our fortune would be made. What would we call it? I bet you’ve been thinking the same thing.”

  Ming Kai shook his head. He had but one thought, and that was of his family.

  “If I were an Indian,” Elijah said, “I’d call it Happy Man Valley. But I’m not a goddamn Indian. So I came up with a lot of names as we were riding. I came up with a new one every day. There’s a peculiar and intoxicating power in that. Naming things is probably the second best thing in the world, next to actually inventing, creating the thing you get to name. Anyway, as one day became the next and the next and the next day after that and we rode all over every godforsaken mountain and valley and plain, I came upon the only name that would do. Roam. Because we have been roaming, my friend. And there will be others behind us, roaming as well. More and more will come. We will make our silk and our homes and our families and they will come here, to Roam.”

  Ming Kai nodded. “Yes,” he said. “And when my family arrives, then we shall begin.”

  “Yes.” Elijah sighed, not entirely sure they would ever arrive. They were a long way away from everywhere. Even Elijah wasn’t sure where the two of them were now. But why borrow trouble? It might happen.

  Meanwhile they needed shelter, and so over the next month they built two cabins: a small one for Elijah and a bigger one for Ming Kai and his family. The cabins were made entirely of cedar trees, trees that were tough to cut and hew but would last forever. Then the rains came and the valley flooded and they were surrounded by an ocean of water for days. Summer became fall and fall became winter, and Ming Kai kept his word about waiting and said nothing about the silk, and so when the snow melted Elijah mounted his horse to ride back to the last town he remembered passing through. How long ago was that? Weeks, months, years? It was all a blur now. But he had no choice but to return for supplies and—they hoped—Ming Kai’s family.

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” Elijah said. “And while I’m gone feel free to start the whole silk-making process—”

  “When my family is here,” Ming Kai said. “Only then we shall begin. But come quickly. The worms are dying.”

  Elijah cursed him and left.

  And Ming Kai waited. Days became weeks, weeks a month, one month, two. He wondered if he had been abandoned. He wondered if Elijah had been eaten by a bear, since Ming Kai was not there to save his life. If so, he would die here as well, alone in the heart of America, in a place no Chinese had ever been before and perhaps should not have ever been. At night the sounds from the forest were nightmarish—piercing cries and malicious hoots. Ming Kai would grab his gun and shoot into the darkness, and in this way he killed many shadows, and scared some bears and maybe a wild dog or two. During what quiet there was he missed his home, the lean-to his family lived in, the small thatched hut he’d built down by the sea they sometimes visited if he’d sold a bit of silk that week. He would never see the sea again, that much he knew for certain. But none of that really mattered if he could have his family. All he wanted was to be loved by those he loved. This is the kind of man he was.

  He could hear the wagon coming long before he could see it, and at these first sounds his heart began to beat like a hammer on a nail. He tried to bridle his hopes, for he could not have lived through the disappointment if he thoroughly imagined them, his wife and sons, only to see Elijah arrive with a wagon full of wheat and rice.

  At the top of the ridge, far, far away, the wagon came into view. Elijah was at the reins, and he paused briefly to raise a hand and wave it Ming Kai’s way. This had to mean he had been successful, for what man would raise his hand and wave if he had not?

  So Ming Kai looked closer, and there, right beside Elijah, was Sing Loo, his wife. S
ing Loo! Oh, how beautiful she was! She was even more beautiful than he remembered—and he had remembered her many times as the dark nights passed. And there, the two little black dots bobbing in the wagon behind her, Chang and Tan! They had grown. He had missed a part of their lives because of Elijah McCallister, and he hated his friend for that. But now look what he had done for Ming Kai: he had atoned. Ming Kai waved at them until his arm turned to rubber. Oh, happiness! He felt as though he were being born all over again. It was the ecstasy of his life, of being alive, to have one’s ultimate dream realized, and this had been his dream from the day Elijah knocked him out and kidnapped him. He couldn’t wait. He ran up the hill to meet them.

  The wagon and Ming Kai met but a minute later. Ming Kai’s chest was heaving as he tried to catch his breath. Elijah had a smile on his face so large it looked as if his entire head could fit in his own mouth. This is the beginning, Ming Kai was thinking. My life has been returned to me.

  Ming Kai stood, frozen, a smiling statue of himself, but then, slowly, his smile waned, and finally disappeared altogether. He looked at Sing Loo, and then at the two young boys. A tear came to his eyes. Then, he spoke.

  “That is not my wife,” he said. The two smiling children in the back peeked at him and laughed, then hid behind a bag of corn. There was a little black dog with them, a puppy, and it barked once. “Those are not my sons.”

  Stunned—or so he appeared—Elijah looked at the woman beside him, the woman who had not said a word through the course of their travels because she knew none he would understand. He looked at the darling black-haired children behind him, who had not cried once on the long journey, who seemed forever bright-eyed and happy, and at the cute little puppy he had purchased for them at the last outpost, because Elijah wanted to be thought of as the kind of man who would buy a puppy for a couple of Chinese kids, even if he was not.

  “Not your wife?” Elijah said. “Not your sons?”