The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel (20 page)

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.

A
s 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.

T
he 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 could 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.

But then he looked at his hands. They had changed. All of the scars and calluses and wrinkles were gone. He had the hands of a young man, soft and smooth. He was not imagining it, or hallucinating in the dim light. It was real and true. What was this water? He had cut his arm on a branch that morning, not deeply, but he could see the dried blood and the open wound, and so, in thoughtless wonder, he applied the water to it like a salve, and he watched as the wound disappeared. He took a quick step away from the pool, suddenly afraid of what might happen if he let the water touch him again. He didn’t trust it. Magic is dangerous: it’s neither good nor bad, right nor wrong; it can be both a blessing and a curse. It takes strength, the strength of a man, to make the magic his own, to make it serve him, and not the other way around.

He had much to think about as he turned and made his way back to his world.

A
s he walked out of the cave, waiting for him were his replacement wife, his replacement sons, and some of the others, about ten of his people altogether. They stared at him.

“What happened?” his replacement wife said. “I thought you were dead.”

She seemed neither happy nor sad to see this was not the case.

“What’s down there?” she asked him.

“Hear that?” said one of the others. “It sounds like a river.”

“And look,” one of the others said. “Ming Kai’s hair glows. What is it you found inside the cave, Ming Kai? Tell us.”

Ming Kai wiped the last of the glittery cave crystals off his arms and spit. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing but the bones of the dead.”

T
hey did not leave the Valley. They grew some food and they killed some squirrels and sometimes something even bigger like a bear. But there were no schools and there were no stores. Little was created; objects just moved around from shack to lean-to, depending on who needed what, when. When it rained, most everything got wet, and when someone died they buried them in the grove in a plot close to where Ming Kai buried his horses. Where Roam had forced the forest out, Ming Kai’s settlement appeared to wedge itself uncomfortably within it, day after day asking for permission to exist.

The people there had children, and their children had children, and before long it was difficult to remember who belonged to which family, or why that was so important, and there were times when a man and a woman came together who shared the same bloodline and whose children proved it. Whole crops of these offspring wandered through the Valley, some disappearing into the mossy dark, others hovering like ghosts behind stands of trees. They’d broken or buried all of the mirrors they’d brought with them, because no one wanted to see what they’d become; they carried within them the image of what they might have been had things gone differently, had Ming Kai taken a different road out of Roam, or taken a right turn instead of a left, or if doubt hadn’t made him pause briefly so that his horses could eat a bit of that locoweed.

But Ming Kai was a good man. His people would follow him anywhere. As little as they liked the place they had ended up, they followed him, because over time he proved to them that he knew things. Magic, spells, potions that cured them from sickness and kept them from pain. The old magic the rest of them had forgotten or never
knew, Ming Kai kept
up here,
he said, pointing to his head.
I keep the magic up here.
They loved him for that; they respected him. They came to Ming Kai for his miracles, brief moments of wonder punctuating the infinite dreariness of their lives. It was the water from the cave, of course, bowls of which he kept in his hut, to help soothe the souls of the people he had doomed to this dark, dank life.

He never told them about the water. He wanted to believe that one day they would leave the Valley, and if he told them about the water he knew they never would. But a secret like that was too big to live inside just one man; he had to tell someone. So he told the old woman Liling, who in turn told Markus. Markus had yet to tell anybody. But then he had yet to know anyone he wanted to tell.

M
arkus was the product of the marriage of Ming Kai’s grandson Norton and a white girl named Kelly. Kelly had long, stringy yellow hair and dark brown freckles, and had worked at the silk factory all of her life. Norton had fallen in love with Kelly years ago, when he worked in the factory, too. He was too shy to even talk to her in Roam, but when he saw her arrive in the Valley on the back of a cart his heart flew to her. Her face was blank, and she’d not bathed in weeks. But Norton knew the woman asleep inside her, and he was determined to awaken her. They were married two weeks later, in one of the first formal ceremonies of its kind in the Valley. On their wedding night he took her to his lean-to and she lay on a bed of straw and he made love to her. He made love to her often, but it took her ten years to become pregnant. This was Markus. She died in childbirth, and Norton died, too, not long after from a snakebite. Markus was raised by an old Chinese woman named Liling, whom he would know and forever think of as his mother.

In spite of this, Markus thrived. He was slight, but strong. After
Ming Kai’s replacement wife grew tired of taking care of her slowly dying husband, Markus took over, turning him in his bed of sticks and straw twice a day to guard against bedsores, and feeding him, and cleaning him with a wet rag dipped in the magic water. The tales Ming Kai told Markus! By the time he was twelve—nineteen years after Ming Kai had taken to his deathbed—Markus could recount the entirety of his great-grandfather’s life, year to year, month to month, almost day to day. Ming Kai’s early life in China, his adult life in Roam, the love and hatred (each in equal portions) that he had for Elijah McCallister—Markus knew this all so well he could have told the stories himself, verbatim. He could feel his great-grandfather’s grief and disappointment, that he had been given but one life and that this is the way it had gone for him, and his heart broke for him.