The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel (5 page)

Digby took Sam Morgan’s hands in his own and held them tight. He looked right into Sam’s eyes: the stool Digby kept behind the bar allowed him to do that. “My friend,” he said, “a man is sometimes required to do things he’d rather not, in part because he is a man and has no real choice in the matter.”

These words seemed to strike Sam Morgan in the way Digby wanted them to. His eyes cleared, his jaw tightened, and he straightened those shoulders of his. “You’re right, little man,” he said. “Damn if you’re not right.”

“I have never been more right in my life,” Digby said. “My last gift to you—free of charge.”

Sam Morgan wiped the foam from his lips. “The kids want some goddamn ice cream,” he said.

“Wonderful!” said Digby. “Chocolate or vanilla?”

T
he old-timers watched Sam Morgan drive away until no one could see or hear his car anymore.

“Well,” Kelly said, breaking the silence. “I guess that’s me. My turn, right?”

“That’s right,” Fang said. But his face was still, his eyes empty. “Your turn. And good for you. Sam Morgan had a real nice place.” Fang looked over at He-Ping, leaning against the far wall, and He-Ping looked back at Fang until he couldn’t anymore.

“Don’t worry, Fang,” Kelly said. “People are clearing out of town faster than ever. Your turn’s coming.”

Digby wiped down Sam Morgan’s spot at the bar. He kept his tavern clean, same as his father had. “I still don’t get it,” he said. “Why do you need a place to live? Being dead and all.”

“You won’t get it,” Kelly said, “until you
are
dead.”

“It’s a second chance,” Fang said. “A do-over. Things not having gone so well the first time around.”

“Then I better make the days I have left really count,” Digby said, and gave him his best bartender’s wink. “Then maybe I can skip the trip back.”

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.

W
hile 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.

S
o 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.

M
ing 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 kill 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.