The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel (3 page)

“I might,” Rachel said. “Birds like me. Remember that time—”

“Not these birds, Rachel,” Helen said. “These birds don’t like you at all.”

“Oh.” This set her back, Helen could tell. “Is the whole world like this?”

“The whole world? No,” Helen said. “There are better places than Roam. There’s a place I’ve heard of not far from here. It’s a land of light and honey. The sun comes up in the morning and paints the town all daffodil yellow, warming the porches and the windowsills. The dew clings to the grass until the sun melts it, and the air smells of pine needles—fresh like that. The sky is a milky blue and at night every star comes out to shine on the perfect little houses and the happy people inside them.

“Everyone goes about their day with joy in their hearts; they do honest work. Laughter: sometimes that’s all you hear. People laughing. Everyone’s happy. It’s a clean place. In the morning the streets themselves look like they’ve been swept, but it’s just the natural wind, taking away with it what it needs to, but leaving all the beauty behind.”

“Oh,” Rachel said.

“I could go on, but I won’t. Just know that
everything
about it is wonderful, more wonderful than you could ever imagine.”

“How do you know about this place?” Rachel said.

“Why wouldn’t I know?”

“You never said anything about it before.”

“Because you weren’t
old
enough before,” Helen said. “I don’t know that you would have been able to understand.”

“Have you been there?”

“Of course I haven’t been there! There’s only one way to get there from here. And it’s dangerous. Very dangerous.”

“There’s more than one way to get anywhere,” Rachel said.

Helen flicked Rachel’s arm sharply with her index finger: it’s how she gave her blind sister a stern look. “How is it you know so much all of a sudden?”

“I don’t,” Rachel said and rubbed her arm. “Why is it so dangerous to get there?”

“Because to
get
there,” Helen said, “you have to go through the Forest of the Flesh-Eating Birds. And if somehow you were lucky enough to get past the birds, which you wouldn’t be, there’s a ravine, a ravine so deep you can’t see the bottom of it. You’d fall in and no one would ever find you.” This was actually true—there
was
a ravine—but if there weren’t she would have invented one. “They built a bridge across it a long time ago, our ancestors, but it was almost impossible to build and it didn’t last much longer than it took for them to get over it the first time.”

“Why?”

“Because it was made of twigs and pine straw and spit is why,” she said. “And hope. Which the world is sorely in need of these days.” Helen took a deep breath and sighed: telling stories was hard. “But if you got past
that,
and then walked for days and days, you would come to the river.” Helen had heard her parents talk about a river, after they
came back from seeing the doctor in Arcadia where they went to get medicinal water for Rachel’s eyes. “Oh, the river is a wondrous thing, unlike any other river in the world. It’s magic. Everyone who bathes in it changes. Whatever ails them is cured. It’s what people say, anyway: no one from Roam has ever been to it. Not for lack of trying, of course. The bones at the bottom of the ravine are proof enough of that.”

“Whatever ails them,” Rachel said.

It made Helen sad to look at her. Not just because she was so pretty and all that prettiness was wasted on her, but because Rachel wanted so much to be something that she wasn’t, and could never be. Her world was a small dark box, and the only thing outside of the box was the world Helen created for her. The sad part was watching her struggle against the sides of the box. Helen tried to love her, but there were just too many things that got in the way.

“That sounds like such a wonderful place,” Rachel said.

The sighs of the dying brushed past them, and Helen turned away from her sister.

“I just thought you’d want to know,” Helen said. She brought her sister close in a tight hug: the lies she told—and that’s what they were, she knew that—made her feel empty, lost, and alone. At least for a moment or two. And that’s when she needed her sister most of all. “I’m sorry if it hurts. I’m sorry that I told you. Sometimes I tell you things I shouldn’t. Just don’t think about it.”

“I just don’t understand,” Rachel said. “Why hasn’t anybody built another bridge?”

“I said don’t
think
about it, okay?”

“Okay,” Rachel said. “I won’t.”

But Rachel
would
think about it. She would never stop thinking about it. Helen had spoken to some deep need inside of her sister, and this picture Rachel had conjured—of this faraway town and the river,
the beautiful river—would live inside her mind and grow, and over time—especially after their parents died, not too many years from now—it would become as real as anything else in her world. It was a failure of Helen’s own dark imagination, however, that she never for a moment thought that Rachel—her blind little sister—would actually try to go there on her own.

I
t’s impossible to say exactly where Roam is. A small settlement lost somewhere in a blanket fold of American terrain, between a range of mountains, a light in the forest, a sudden something in the middle of an infinite nothing—it doesn’t matter anymore. But for a few golden years, long before Helen and Rachel were born, it was a sight to behold. It was once the home of a great silk factory, and its owner, Elijah McCallister, had built the town to go along with it, inspired by the grainy black-and-white pictures of castles he’d seen in a book once as a child. His ambition had been to create a new world, something he could embellish or destroy to his heart’s content. With Roam he did both.

Elijah himself was a small man, five feet tall in thick-soled shoes, with the face of a sullen angel, and made up of equal parts brilliance and cruelty. He’d had a tough life. His parents abandoned him on a park bench within a gated children’s playground when he was only
seven; he swung all day and into the evening before he realized they weren’t coming back. He spent the next nine years in the St. Alphonso Home for Wayward Boys, and if he was not wayward before going in, he surely was on coming out.

For a year after that he lived on the streets, creating a life out of the refuse of the fortunate: shirt, pants, belt, jacket, a watch, a hat, a knife, food and drink—he found what he needed in the gutter and the alleyways, and what he didn’t find he stole. Finally he got himself a place—the back room of a subbasement apartment near the harbor, next door to a cobbler’s shop, a room he shared with a twelve-year-old mute girl, her syphilitic grandfather, and a tall, thin man they knew only as “Jim-Jim.” A lot of people in that gray and crumbling city would have said he had it pretty good, but it wasn’t good enough for Elijah. He eventually left the city and took a train to San Francisco, where he signed on as a cook on a private frigate, and sailed around the world.

And there he was but two years later in a Chinese saloon in Hainan, when he spotted a young man named Ming Kai selling something pretty from a small wooden cart. A cloth of some kind. Ming Kai looked—well, to Elijah he looked exactly like every other Chinese man. He motioned Ming Kai over. Ming Kai bowed and showed Elijah his wares. Later Ming Kai would realize: this is how a life is changed. Not gradually, over time, but in a moment, a moment as simple as this one. As the tips of Elijah’s fingers rested on the shiny, colorful surface of this strange and delicate object, he felt fireworks go off in his heart: it was merely silk (though Elijah didn’t know what it was called yet), and Elijah had never felt silk before; there weren’t many who had. Never in his hardscrabble life had he even imagined a thing as soft and cool as this, as shimmering and beautiful. Red, blue, orange, green. Every color so bright and delicious. Ming Kai smiled at him beneath his Chinese hat as Elijah ran his fingers across the fabric’s surface.

“Is this made . . . by
people
?” Elijah said. “By actual human beings?
Or did it fall off an angel’s back and float down from heaven itself?”

Ming Kai spoke no English, but men don’t have to know the same words to speak the same language. He understood exactly what Elijah meant. Ming Kai shook his head: no, it wasn’t made by people—but then yes, he nodded that it was. He placed his index finger over his mouth—a secret!—and beckoned Elijah to look beneath his cart. There was a small box full of what appeared to be worms, or caterpillars, and small cocoons the size of a tooth: white, covered in thread. Ming Kai pointed to the worms, then he pointed to the cocoons, then he pointed at himself. And Elijah understood.

“Nature and man together,” Elijah said, nodding. His eyes glowed with possibility. “The man and the worm.” Ming Kai nodded, happy, not yet knowing how much he would regret this encounter. “It’s a secret, isn’t it?” Elijah went on. “No one knows how to do it in my country, not like this. But you do, don’t you? You know the secret.” Now Elijah had completely lost him. Ming Kai cocked his head to one side.

“Do you realize what this could mean for us?” Elijah said. “It’s like it says in the book.
A well-guarded secret coupled with avarice and ambition is the birth of all good things
.” (Elijah had read a book on how to be a successful person.) “We’ll be rich, you and me!”

Ming Kai still had no idea what Elijah was saying but hoped it was something along the lines of, “I have a lot of money and I want to buy this silk from you, and your life will become better, and your family healthy and happy.” In a sense, Elijah was saying that. But in reality it was the preface to a plan that unfolded like so: Elijah invited Ming Kai aboard the ship and took him down to its bowels, and there he lopped him on the head with a piece of wood pulled from the side of an orange crate. He tied Ming Kai’s hands and feet with twine and stuffed a bandanna in his mouth and stowed him behind a stack of salted pork. He took great pains to hide him, but it wasn’t really necessary; sailors brought Chinese men and women back home with them all the time.
But it wasn’t Ming Kai he was hiding so much as it was the box of worms—and the secret inside Ming Kai’s head.

It would be three long months before they made it back to America. That worked in Elijah’s favor, as he used the voyage to teach Ming Kai English. By the time they arrived in San Francisco Bay, Ming Kai could confidently approach a street vendor and say, “A dozen of your freshest oysters, please.” Turned out he loved oysters.

But this isn’t why Elijah taught Ming Kai English. He taught him English in order to learn the secret of silk. Elijah was young enough to remember the one-room schoolhouse where he learned to read and the teacher, Mrs. Hauptman, who taught him. She was first-generation German, and spoke with an accent, and liked to whack her students on the back of the head with a ruler when they made mistakes. But he learned how to read and write goddamn it and so did Ming Kai. Ming Kai’s first complete sentence was, “Please never untie me, for if you do I will kill you, and I don’t want to become a man who takes another man’s life.”

“That’s a long sentence,” Elijah said. “Too long to follow.” And he whacked him across the back of his head with a piece of wood.

From San Francisco they took a train to Chicago, and in Chicago Elijah bought two horses, a donkey, and a wooden cart, which he loaded with guns, food, hammers, and nails, and the strange pair made their way into American wilderness. For the first three hundred miles or so, going roughly south, Elijah kept them on the main roads, the muddy thoroughfares of grassless dirt and wheel ruts any idiot could follow. Then he remembered the book.
Blaze a trail into oblivion and create your own paradise.

“Tell me how it’s done,” Elijah said as they slowly navigated among trees, across rivers, up mountains so steep they almost fell off of them, backward, as though they were falling from the sky. “I’m serious: I need to know.”

But Ming Kai stayed quiet. At night, every night, he cried himself to sleep. Elijah had never heard a Chinese man cry; their tears seemed sadder, purer, and more beautiful than the tears of a white man, and after a thousand tears like this Elijah’s heart opened for him, and as they watered their horses in a stream one day Elijah put his arm around Ming Kai’s shoulder.

“You,” he said, “are my friend. I know it doesn’t look that way. We started off badly. I hit you too much. I feel bad about that. But I want to make amends. Tell me what it is you want—anything—and I will see what I can do to get it for you. And perhaps in return for that you will tell me the secret of silk.”

“Set me free,” Ming Kai said. “Let me return to my home and my family. Wash out my skull and every memory I have in it of you and this great tragedy that has become my life.”

Elijah brought Ming Kai closer, and hugged him harder.

“I can’t do that,” Elijah said. “I would like to. I mean, if I were different, if the world were different, if this story of ours weren’t already written down somewhere, I would like to do this. That’s the thing, Ming Kai. This story—our story—is fated. We’re in this together. I’m nothing without you, and without me you’d be pulling that rickety cart around a crowded square that smelled of piss and rotten vegetables. You and I are part of something big. Do you think it was chance that brought us together? That I just happened to be sitting there, at a table at one of the smaller towns in China, when you walked by?

“This is no accident, Ming Kai. You will tell me how to make silk. We will make silk together and become great men. You will thank me. You will love me. This will happen regardless. But now, what I’m doing now is offering you something more. What can I do for you, Ming Kai, that will make your life that much better?” And he held up his fingers just the smallest width apart.

Ming Kai was silent. Then he said, “I want my family. My wife
Sing Loo and my two little boys. I want you to bring them here, to America. Then I will tell you the secret of silk.”

“Done!” Elijah said. “At the next town I’ll telegraph a man I know. He’s in the British Navy. He will do this for me. We’ll have them all brought over and you will be happy and together we will make silk! You and me!”