The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel

“Hand me the lantern,” Jonas said.

  “Why?”

  “Just hand it to me. I want to show you something.”

  She gave Jonas the lantern, and he showed her what he wanted her to see. The shelf he was standing on was thin, and fragile, and the vine he was holding was pulling away from the clay strand by strand.

  “I don’t know where they are,” he said, “but I hope they’re close.”

  “They are,” she said. “They’re coming.”

  “Good,” he said, and he seemed to believe her. He shook his head and considered things for a moment. “I really wanted to find her,” he said. “For you. Or maybe . . . for me. So I could show you I wasn’t who you thought I was. Or that I was more than who you thought I was.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “Give me your hand,” he said.

  “I can’t pull you up.”

  “That’s not why I want to hold it.”

  He let go of the vine and took her hand. He’d never held it tighter. “I like this view,” he said, “with the light coming up like this from me to you. Where are they now?”

  She looked. They didn’t appear to be much closer. The lantern light was just as small as before, just as distant.

  “Coming,” she said. “They’ll be here soon.”

  Then the shale cracked, and she could see one half of it drop away; he only had room for one foot now. She looked into his eyes, and it was as if he had already fallen. His eyes had a nervous excitement to them, like he was taking a trip to a place he’d never been before. It was just like he was thinking about what came next, and wondering how things were going to be different in this new place.

  “Oh,” he said, “oh, shit,” knowing before it happened that the rest of the shale had broken and below him was nothing but a long way to fall. Oh, shit: his last words. He let go of her hand, but he held on to the lantern, and for a long, long time—a lifetime—she watched him recede into the depths of the night, unable to scream or even move, as if he were falling into the mouth of a monster. He watched her, too, but she would have disappeared long before he did. All he could have seen were the stars, their ancient light, cold, distant, remote, dead.

  They would never find Rachel. Not that night and not the next day. Though they were sure she would be at the bottom of the ravine, probably not far from Jonas, she wasn’t: only his body lay broken, horribly broken, on top of a boulder beside the stream. Smith climbed down and put him in a bag and hauled him back to town, and they buried him behind the church, the church doors that hadn’t even been opened for the last fifteen years.

  A couple of days later, Jonas came by the tavern, as Digby hoped he would. He was the same as he had been in life—reedy, skin stretched taut against his bones—except that he had the same smoky grayness all of the spirits did, the same passive acceptance of this permanent change. Jonas was there in the morning when Digby opened up and there in the evening when Digby locked the doors. He sat at the bar and listened to Digby tell his stories. One day Digby asked Jonas about Helen, and whether he’d seen her. But Jonas just shook his head. “That’s something I can’t do just yet,” he said. “For me to see her and her not to see me, I don’t know if I could stand that. Because I was never happier in my life than when I was falling, because I knew she loved me then. I could see it, the way she couldn’t stop looking at me. She never stopped looking, not until I disappeared.”

  Smith went back to his encampment at the edge of town. All of his dogs had left that night but for one. He liked to think that this was the first dog, the dog that had started it all, but he had no way of knowing. Smith and the dog slept in the same bed, and in the morning Smith would find himself holding her against his chest. Waking early, he watched the rising sun burn past the tops of the trees on the mountain. He tried to count how many trees were there, but he couldn’t count that high. He could hear the trees calling out to him: Cut me down! they seemed to be saying. Cut me down! He heeded their call. That very day he left Roam and went back to the mountain, where he resumed his life as a lumberjack with his lumberjack brothers. He was almost happy after that, or as happy as a lumberjack could be, which was never as happy as other people sometimes were.

  For the next month, Helen looked for Rachel every day. She looked for the other shoe, some article of clothing Rachel had been wearing, her skirt, her blouse, but Helen never found anything, no clue to what happened to her sister at all. Not finding her allowed Helen to imagine sometimes that Rachel could still be alive somewhere, but there was no way that could be true. To believe in that was a lie, and Helen was giving up on telling lies, to herself or to anybody else.

  She kept to herself—not that there was anyone to keep herself from anymore; only a few dozen scattered families remained, faces and names she knew but didn’t need to know any better. The grocery store was still open, stocked with food people grew, which others bought or bartered for. When she went down there, she’d say hello to people, but not much more than that. It was a dark and dreary town, and living in it was like living in the windowless basement of an abandoned house. She supposed this was the way it was with the world, the coming and going, the rise and fall of people and places. Roam was no different in that way from anywhere else.

  But she didn’t think about these sorts of things very much. Instead she thought of Rachel, and of Jonas; she thought of birds and dogs and the other shoe. She thought over and over again of that night, of holding Jonas’s hand before he fell. Digby and Smith didn’t get there for another minute or two; they might as well have taken forever. Later that night, after Digby walked her back, she had him leave her at the bottom of the drive, because what was there to rush home to? Nothing.

  But as she got closer, she saw that every light in the house was on. Every light. She hadn’t left it that way, had she? She couldn’t remember. Her house was the brightest place in Roam. Maybe Rachel had come back, she thought, maybe while they were out looking for her . . .

  But Rachel wasn’t there. Rachel was gone: Helen felt that, literally, in her bones. Their life together had turned them into one thing, that girl, and a part of Helen was missing now: this is how she knew. She made it to the porch, where a tear caught itself on an eyelash. She couldn’t breathe. The bright, empty house loomed before her, bigger than it had ever seemed before. She couldn’t go in. She stood there, staring at the house where she’d lived with her sister, with her family, a house built by the man who had built everything else in Roam, and suddenly there were ghosts, ghosts all around her, slowly converging. No: that was just the fog. The fog was as white as smoke. She watched it curl around her ankles like manacles, slip up her legs and under her dress and all around and over her. The fog crawled into her mouth and down into her body. And she fell. She fell to her knees on the rocky drive, and without knowing how or to whom, or what good could possibly come from it, she began to pray.

  Part II

  MARKUS

  He found the body in the woods behind the Peach Blossom Motel, the first motel he’d seen in his whole life. He thought the hotel was going to be better than it was, but it was mostly wretched, so wretched that seeing a body in the woods behind it did not shock him as much as it should have. The room itself was like a crypt, small, dark, and dank. The mattress was no more than a piece of pressed wood with a sheet stapled to it. A hole in the ceiling oozed some sort of syrupy brown liquid that pooled in a corner and (no matter how many times he soaked it up with the bathroom towels) streamed malevolently toward him across the floor. He slept with the light on because he knew that the dark would prove to be no more than an invitation to the vermin he heard inhabiting the walls, and he declined to remove his suit, uncomfortable enough during the day (it was a hand-me-down), which that night in the motel seemed to gradually shrink further, especially around the area of his crotch. But he wouldn’t remove a stitch: there was no lock on the door, and if someone were to come in and try to kill him in the night he wanted to be dressed for it. He didn’t want to be disc
overed dead and half-dressed, his hairless body splayed across the floor, his bony chest a figure of fun to the awful men who would remove his carcass with all the care they would take with a bag of flour.

  Oh, how he hoped he didn’t die in the night!

  Frankly, he had expected more from the outside world than the Peach Blossom Motel, and yet what more that was, what he hoped for exactly, even he couldn’t say. His name was Markus Kennerly. He was nineteen years old.

  In the Valley, people talked about the outside world all the time, and when they did it was with a mixture of reverence, fear, and revulsion, as though their own impossibly remote dip in the earth was the only completely good place one could be. No, his people said, the Valley didn’t have much to offer. Electricity hadn’t come that far; there were no telephones. A hard day’s work was a hard day’s work, no matter which way you cut it, and there was no getting under, around, or over that. But what the Valley did have was a real community where the load was shared equally and the people were honest and if you needed a chicken there was always a chicken, no questions asked. All you had to do was kill it.

  But you still had to wonder, looking at the mountains looming over this dark place, how your people ended up in the Valley at all. Many of the homes were built at weird angles to the rise of the hills, and when it rained, great sheets of water came rushing down the mountain, sweeping away your hut, your food, the occasional loosely tethered youngster. The summers were scalding, the winters cold and damp, spiders grew hideously large and insidiously aggressive, and a thick green moss covered everything left too long unattended. Women too old to do anything else became moss-scrapers, and when someone became a moss-scraper you knew it wouldn’t be long before she was gone. His mother was a moss-scraper right now.

  So why the Valley? Why settle in this dark sad place?

  It was the place where his great-grandfather’s horses had died. His great-grandfather, Ming Kai.

  ROAM:

  A SHORT HISTORY,

  PART IV

  As Elijah McCallister lay dying, firing shot after shot into what he hoped was Ming Kai’s head or back or both, he did not miss by much. But it was enough for Ming Kai to know that there must be a reason fate would not allow him to be killed that day. The bullets came too close to miss, and yet they did miss: for a few brief moments, Ming Kai was immortal. With his hand on the jeweled doorknob he paused and waited either for his friend to stop shooting at him or to die. Neither happened. The gun kept clicking even after all the bullets were gone. Click click click. It was that pathetic sound that touched Ming Kai the most, Elijah’s desire not to see him go persisting long after he had already gone. He heard it even after he left the room, and took a deep breath, and left his best friend behind.

  He had already packed a wagon with all of his belongings and food, including flour, bacon, rice, coffee, sugar, dried beans, dried fruit, honey, salt, vinegar. His replacement family sat in the wagon, patiently waiting. They had been a good replacement family. He had learned to love them. He climbed up, took the reins and snapped them, and without looking back even once slowly rode away.

  They rode in silence for an hour until Ming Kai abruptly stopped. There didn’t appear to be a reason—they were in the middle of nowhere—but he stopped and stared ahead into nothing.

  “Ming Kai,” his replacement wife said. “What is it?”

  “Oh. Nothing,” he said. But it was something. He stopped because he realized he had no idea where he was or where he was going. He wasn’t sure how far this road went before it stopped being a road at all. Then what would they do? And what would they do if it didn’t stop? What if this were one of the roads Elijah had begun and then abandoned?

  No matter. He snapped the reins again and off they went, into the mystery.

  The horses died on the sixth day.

  They had paused at a small stream for water. The horses drank. One of his replacement sons had climbed down to fill a canteen, and when the first horse keeled over it fell on his son’s right leg, breaking it in two places. The boy let out a cry that echoed through the Valley and came back to them sharper and stronger than when it left his mouth.

  His replacement wife would never forgive Ming Kai for what happened next: he attended to the horse first. Not because he didn’t love his replacement son; he did. But even if his replacement son were to lose that leg and live his life out as a one-legged Chinese man in some faraway American city, selling potions from a wooden cart on the corner of a busy sidewalk, it was better that the horse live; if it didn’t, the chance that his son would ever get to that city, with or without his legs, was very slim. So he looked first at the horse.

  It was dead.

  “Locoweed,” Ming Kai said, pulling a green stem from the horse’s mouth. “Must have eaten it on the trail.”

  The last few miles, the road had become narrower and narrower and the going slower and slower, and the horses had been pulling up weeds growing at the edge of the forest and eating them. Ming Kai hadn’t worried about it because he was worrying about so many other things, mostly having to do with his own life and the life of this family and what would happen to them. He wanted to give them a better life than the one they were leaving behind, and now he had serious doubts as to whether this was going to happen. He was feeling less and less sanguine about his decision to leave Roam, and yet, at the same time, he couldn’t imagine going back. And now here they were with one dead horse and a boy with a broken leg, in a steep, densely wooded valley as distant from any one place as it was from another. How could things get any worse?

  The other horse died then, and when it fell it turned the cart over, spilling all of their supplies along with Ming Kai’s replacement wife to the damp and mossy forest floor. She was fine, though, and scrambled to her feet to save what she could of their food, while the boy continued to cry out as though inch by inch his skin were being removed from his body and his naked flesh covered in pepper flakes.

  It was at this inopportune moment that Ming Kai had an epiphany: he had never really done anything, had he? Everything had been done to him. He was knocked out and put on a boat and brought to America. He was given this second family. And he was forced into doing McCallister’s bidding for the last twenty-five years. (Or was it fifty? It seemed like forever.) He’d done nothing on his own—nothing.

  He wandered off to investigate the parameters of their new world, one thought before all others in his mind: if McCallister could make something out of nothing, so could he.

  But he couldn’t. In fact, they would have died within the week if not for the other families who, also fleeing the end of their lives in Roam, followed Ming Kai’s trail, hoping that he might know where he was going. When they ended up in the same situation, dead horses and all, what could they do but agree that this was where they’d make a new home and start their new lives?

  A home never materialized—ever—not in the sense that Roam was a home. Not in the sense of a real community, with a main street and shops and like-minded women who met every Thursday night to knit and talk about their children while their husbands went to the bars and caroused and on Sunday rested, sleeping late into the morning. No. By the time these families arrived they were worn-out, nearly hopeless. America had proven to be a huge disappointment, and not just to the Chinese who had come here, but even to the white people. The Chinese would have returned to China if they could’ve, but they had no idea how: they could no longer even smell the ocean in the Valley, and the Chinese could smell the ocean from a long way away. In every way there was, they were lost.

  Ming Kai wanted to take all his people from this dark land, but without horses, how far could they go? Elijah would never have allowed the world to stop him from achieving his dream—yet this was the essence of Ming Kai’s dilemma: his only dream had been to leave Roam, and he had achieved that. Now what?

  Ming Kai paced the Valley, thoughtful, melancholy, like a king without a kingdom, and tried to find something good, something he coul
d point to and say, Here. This. This is why I have chosen this place instead of another. But there was nothing like that to point to in the Valley. Were they to forge ahead, surely they would discover a better place; he had seen such places himself, many years before. But the truth was simply this: Ming Kai was afraid.

  “No,” he muttered to himself. “No. We must leave, today.”

  And it was then, the moment he decided to dream a new dream, that he found the cave.

  The entrance was blanketed by vines and was just big enough for a single person to slip through. A sound had drawn his attention, an intimation of the familiar amid the mysteries beyond. He knew the sound well; he’d heard it as a child back in Nanking when the rains would come and everything would flood. It was the sound of a river, a powerful river.

  He pushed the vines away and stepped inside the cave.

  As his eyes adjusted to the gloom the cavern walls appeared to glow in starry patches on the surface of the rocky walls—white, green, blue, gold. It was like being inside the mind of a dreaming man. The river had carved a giant hallway through the rocky earth, a natural path on a gentle slope leading deeper and deeper into the underground world. He followed it down to the river. He could see the cave dust enter his own mouth and disappear; his skin glowed. He moved carefully down the rocky path, deeper and deeper into the underground world, the river becoming louder and louder in his ears, until finally he saw it. It was like a monster, tearing past him, moving from the darkness behind it to the darkness ahead. It looked like an enormous snake, with no end and no beginning—a never-ending river. Were he to step into the river he would have disappeared into it, without even a moment to take a breath. And he thought about doing just that.

  But there was a small pool adjacent to the river. He knelt, and touched it. It was cold, and full of those starry sparkles floating in it like effervescent tadpoles. He cupped his hands and brought a bit of it to his lips. He had never tasted water like this: he could feel the bright granules on his tongue, but after a moment they melted into a sweetness. Following the slope of the soil he could see the bottom of the pool. It was enough for a man to bathe in it. Ming Kai let the water drip from his hands until all of it returned to the pool. A source of water, he was thinking; perhaps a place to bathe. Good.