The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel (4 page)

“Yes,” Ming Kai said, hugging his old captor, his new friend. “Yes.”

And then, looking into his eyes, he said the word that would change Elijah’s life.

Mulberry
.

“Mulberry?” Elijah said.

“This is what we need. Mulberry trees. To make the silk. Let us find this tree, and I will tell you more when my family arrives.”

“Yes!” Elijah said. “You drive a hard bargain, but yes!”

“But I will also tell you this,” Ming Kai said, narrowing his eyes so they might burn into Elijah’s soul. “No good will come from what we do. No flower grows in a poisoned field. We may not see it now, but our children will, and our children’s children. They will be the ones who finally suffer. They always are.”

Elijah laughed. “What, is that some kind of Chinese curse?”

“No,” Ming Kai said, flicking the reins. “It is the truth of the world.”

And off they went into the heart of America, in search of the wild mulberry. The curse preceded them, blown on the wind through space and time. One hundred years would come and go before it found Helen and Rachel McCallister, Elijah’s great-grandchildren, and Markus, the last of Ming Kai’s line. Generations would pass before they could be born into the world, but the curse would find them, nonetheless.

G
hosts were everywhere in Roam, but only two people could see them: Helen McCallister and Digby Chang. Digby Chang was the smallest man in Roam. He had a ruddy, pockmarked complexion and was completely hairless, head to toe. He looked like a sausage with legs. Some people thought he was a midget, but, as he would be the first to tell you, he wasn’t. Not that there was anything wrong with being a midget, but if you weren’t a midget, as he wasn’t, he felt it incumbent upon himself to clarify and elucidate the fact of the matter, which is that he was not a midget, but rather as close as a man could come to being a midget without actually being one. He was simply a very small man, and he never thought a thing about it.

Digby ran the town bar, a bar he inherited from his father (a somewhat taller man of the same name), who had inherited it from his father and his father before him. In the beginning it wasn’t even a bar
at all, but just his great-grandfather Wei selling drinks from a bottle of potato vodka he had found on the side of the road as he was coming into town, a bottle of barely potable alcohol that had been accidentally dropped there or, more likely, thrown in anger: it tasted like piss. Wei dragged a half-dead log into what would become the main square, set the bottle on top of it, and in five minutes he had made the first real dollar in this town. In a sense, Digby’s family was one of the founding families of Roam—a kind of royalty, if such a thing were possible, or even desirable, out here in the middle of nowhere.

People called it Digby’s, or Digby’s Bar, even though it had never had a proper name. Digby didn’t even call it a bar: he called it a
tavern
, because a tavern sounded like something magnificent and historical, whereas a bar was just a place where people went to drink. Beer, whiskey, even potato vodka—he had it all, though business had gotten so bad over the last few years that if someone came in for a glass of water that was okay, too. He even served ice cream to the kids, when there were any. He had a big tub of vanilla in the icebox, but it had been there so long it was starting to look like chocolate.

Digby liked to say he had more ghosts in his tavern than he had customers, which used to be funny—until it started being true. Ghosts
were
his customers. He didn’t call them ghosts, though, because that word summoned up images of ghoulish night-visitors who stole the faces of children while they slept (that’s what his father used to tell him ghosts did), and Digby didn’t believe in that sort of thing. But there was no disputing it: most of his customers had passed away. Age, accident, disease, all those things life tended to throw at a person you either survived or you didn’t and when you didn’t you died and were buried and then—then? Apparently, this: revenants with no clear lines, gray, fading in and out of focus as you looked at them. They didn’t appear to be representatives of the afterlife so much as they were vestiges of this one, so Digby took to calling them either
leftovers
or
old-timers
—
leftovers
when they irritated him and
old-timers
when he was feeling warmly, the same way his dad called the Chinese
Orientals
when he liked them and
chinks
when he didn’t, and those of mixed race
combos
.

At any rate, there was nothing to be done; Digby had adapted to their constant presence. They were there when he opened up in the morning and there when he closed his doors at night, sometimes exactly as he’d left them, murky images of the people they once were and yet completely recognizable. They talked, fought, spit, laughed, and cried like anybody else who’d ever come into the tavern, but they didn’t drink. If they drank, it would have been different; they’d have spent some money. Instead, they just took up space. Why here? He imagined it was no different now than it was when they were alive: they had nowhere else to go. Digby knew that feeling: as he had neither wife nor family himself, the tavern was his home, too.

He opened up today, as usual, at two. Regardless of what it was like outside, inside the tavern it was all shades of gray and weary light, dust and smoke hanging in the air, perpetual cloud cover.

“Digby?”

One of them always called out his name when he walked in the door.
Digby?
As if his presence here was a surprise. As if he didn’t own the place. Today it was Fang Martin. Fang was one of his father’s good friends, round and wrinkled and happy, with a thin white sheet of hair on his head.

“Fang,” Digby said.

“We were talking,” Fang said, nodding toward He-Ping, his best friend, “and Ping said, ‘I wonder if Digby will be coming in today, and, if so, what time.’ ”

Digby sighed and closed the door behind him. He turned on the neon beer sign,
YANJING
, indicating the tavern was now open for the living customers, too. “I come every day, at the same time every day,” he said. “I am a human timepiece.”

“And that’s what I told him!” Fang said, laughing. “That’s what I told him.”

Halfway to the box of rags on the other side of the room, Digby stopped, looked back over his shoulder. “Where’s Chen?”

“Chen got himself a place,” He-Ping said. He-Ping didn’t sound one way or the other about it, but Digby knew He-Ping had been waiting on a place for a while now. “On Orchard. Where Martin used to live, before he took off.”

“Ah,” Digby said. Even his spiritual clientele was diminishing. Soon even they’d be gone and then . . . he didn’t want to think about it.

“Chen!” Fang said. “Glad to see him go myself, if you ask me. He smelled like cabbage.”

Fang had not been such an obstreperous spirit when he was alive. Digby remembered him as a sweet, quiet, serious man, second shift in the silk mill. He would be the guy who held the door for one person and would end up holding it for the next ten. A cobbler in his spare time, he could turn an old piece of ham into a shoe if someone needed him to. And he would do it without complaint. Digby, in fact, couldn’t remember Fang saying more than six or seven words his entire life.

Dying (he broke his neck one morning when he fell out of bed) changed all that. Fang was
loud
now. He cackled at nothing all day and night. He made terrible jokes. He never shut up, and there was nothing Digby could say or do to make him; his pointless joy was everything to him. At first Digby wondered if Fang was not Fang at all, but some otherworldly vision usurping his father’s friend’s body and face. But Digby learned soon enough that this is the way it was with all of the old-timers: the roles they took on in the hereafter were different from the roles they played in life. It was as if through dying they were given a chance to become someone else. He-Ping Rogers, the grocer, had been a great practical joker; he’d give you back change for a five when you and he both knew you had just given him a ten, and just before
you got angry and irritated with his insistence that you
did
in fact give him a five he would laugh and say, “I kid you, Digby Chang. Here is your five dollar.” Impish. Frivolous. (He had been trampled by a wild horse; it was just terrible, the horse tracking He-Ping’s insides all over town, a hoof-marked trail of blood you could still see.) Now He-Ping sat in a chair along the far wall in silence, watching the goings-on without so much as a smile. Those who’d lived the big lives, the expansive lives, they were the quiet ones: Digby had seen Elijah McCallister himself now and again, and sometimes you barely even knew he was in the room. If you tried to talk to him he’d wander away. Elijah was one of the old-timers whom Digby wished
would
talk; oh, the stories that man could tell.

Digby thought Fang should take a hint and shut the hell up, especially first thing in the afternoon. But it wasn’t just Fang. The bar was full of leftovers, a dozen or so, many of them laughing, yelling at one another, spitting, swapping tall tales about this thing or that. He-Ping looked like he was thinking about something, and the women (there were a couple of them) seemed to be waiting to be noticed, beams shining out of their eyes as if there were tiny lighthouses behind them. One of them smiled at Digby as he pulled a bulb cord, and he tipped an imaginary hat her way. The truth is, as much as he might like to complain, he liked their company, and they didn’t hurt what little business there was—nobody else could see them. But Digby was a bartender: he saw everything.

“This town,” Digby said to himself and shook his head. “It’s not what it once was, but then, nothing is, is it?” He waited for someone to say something, and then answered the question himself. “No,” he said. “Nothing is.”

“You don’t look so good, Digby,” Fang said. “You look like you just rolled out of bed.” Fang winked. Same joke over and over and over. “Get it?”

“I get it,” Digby said.

“Like you rolled out of bed and broke your neck. The way I did.”

“I get it,” Digby said again.

Fang laughed and laughed and then sighed and sat down at a table and sighed again. “So who’s up for a game of cards?”

No one was.

There was a commotion outside, and Fang and some of the others stood to look out the window and see what it was. A car door slammed.

“It’s the Morgans, all packed up and everything,” Kelly Neighbors said, looking out. Kelly only had one hand; she lost the other in the factory. Digby thought it would have been nice to get your hand back when you died, but that wasn’t the deal, apparently. “And here comes Sam Morgan,”

“I guess they’re leaving town,” Fang said. “They lived over on Abby Lane, right? The nice two-bedroom.”

“Mattress roped to the top of their car,” Kelly said. “Wonder how long that will last.”

The old-timers laughed. There was a mattress graveyard half a mile up Silk Road.

Then Sam Morgan pushed through the barroom door and didn’t stop walking until he made it to the bar and the old-timers quieted down. Sam was a regular. There weren’t many regulars left: the lumberjack came in time and again, and Jonas, the mechanic, who had a thing going on with the McCallister girl—the homely one, Helen—he came in twice a week at least. Sam Morgan was among the last.

“Sam Morgan!” Digby said. He always greeted his customers with a sense of the exclamatory, as if they were the one person out of all the people in the world he had been waiting for. “You look tired but hopeful; a thoughtful man of action. A god among men.
That’s
Sam Morgan.”

Sam Morgan took a seat. His head was too big for his tiny shoulders; it looked like it belonged on another man. He had the face of a mustachioed bulldog. “Looks like I’m the first one here today,” he said.

“And you may be the last,” Digby said. “All I know is that I’m happy to see you. What can I do you for, Sam Morgan?”

“Something that’s wet, cold, and packs a punch,” he said. “Maybe a mug full of that Arcadian brew.”

“The perfect elixir to imbibe before a long drive,” Digby said.

“With two kids and a sad wife,” he said, “I’ll need more than one.”

Digby served his customer and gave it to him straight. “Starting over isn’t easy,” he said. “But you can do it. Believe it and it will happen.”

Sam Morgan threw back the drink. “That’s bullshit,” he said. “It’s going to be a slog from here on out. Two kids, a wife, and empty pockets. I can’t even sell my house.”

“It’s not a seller’s market,” Digby said. “Sadly.”

Digby looked over Sam Morgan’s shoulder: the old-timers were grinning. Sam Morgan followed Digby’s eyes, saw nothing, turned back. Digby smiled reassuringly, and Sam Morgan nodded toward his glass. Digby refilled it.

“The damn thing is,” Sam Morgan said, less to Digby than to himself or to no one at all, “you don’t think—you never imagine—that a whole town can die.
An entire town.
It’s even started to smell like it’s dead. You notice that?”

Digby said, “There’s an unpleasant olfactory presence in town, I will give you that.” It was hard to recall the way things used to be. Were things
ever
the way they used to be? Digby seemed to remember from his childhood a brightness, a sense of possibility, the belief that Roam’s best days were ahead of them—but did he remember that, or was it just a story that his father kept telling him? The silk factory had
been closed for a generation, and from that day forward Roam had commenced its ending. The miracle was that Roam was here at all and not just a scar on the landscape. Or maybe that’s how long it took to put a town out of its misery.

Still working things out in his head, Sam Morgan said, “Nothing lives forever, I guess. I guess the whole world will die one day and it’ll be a cinder of nothing, and no one around to know or care.”

“Ash,” Digby said. “Nothing but ash. Not even a memory left to say what it was.”

“That’d be better, in a way. Instead of this having to go on with it all.”