The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel (6 page)

“I’ve been thinking what we’d name it,” Elijah said. “Once we made it here, once we found it, the place where our fortune would be made. What would we call it? I bet you’ve been thinking the same thing.”

Ming Kai shook his head. He had but one thought, and that was of his family.

“If I were an Indian,” Elijah said, “I’d call it Happy Man Valley. But I’m not a goddamn Indian. So I came up with a lot of names as we were riding. I came up with a new one every day. There’s a peculiar and intoxicating power in that. Naming things is probably the second best thing in the world, next to actually inventing, creating the thing you get to name. Anyway, as one day became the next and the next and the next day after that and we rode all over every godforsaken mountain and valley and plain, I came upon the only name that would do.
Roam
. Because we have been roaming, my friend. And there will
be others behind us, roaming as well. More and more will come. We will make our silk and our homes and our families and they will come here, to Roam.”

Ming Kai nodded. “Yes,” he said. “And when my family arrives, then we shall begin.”

“Yes.” Elijah sighed, not entirely sure they would ever arrive. They were a long way away from everywhere. Even Elijah wasn’t sure where the two of them were now. But why borrow trouble? It might happen.

Meanwhile they needed shelter, and so over the next month they built two cabins: a small one for Elijah and a bigger one for Ming Kai and his family. The cabins were made entirely of cedar trees, trees that were tough to cut and hew but would last forever. Then the rains came and the valley flooded and they were surrounded by an ocean of water for days. Summer became fall and fall became winter, and Ming Kai kept his word about waiting and said nothing about the silk, and so when the snow melted Elijah mounted his horse to ride back to the last town he remembered passing through. How long ago was that? Weeks, months, years? It was all a blur now. But he had no choice but to return for supplies and—they hoped—Ming Kai’s family.

“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” Elijah said. “And while I’m gone feel free to start the whole silk-making process—”

“When my family is here,” Ming Kai said. “Only then we shall begin. But come quickly. The worms are dying.”

Elijah cursed him and left.

A
nd Ming Kai waited. Days became weeks, weeks a month, one month, two. He wondered if he had been abandoned. He wondered if Elijah had been eaten by a bear, since Ming Kai was not there to save his life. If so, he would die here as well, alone in the heart of America,
in a place no Chinese had ever been before and perhaps should not have ever been. At night the sounds from the forest were nightmarish—piercing cries and malicious hoots. Ming Kai would grab his gun and shoot into the darkness, and in this way he killed many shadows, and scared some bears and maybe a wild dog or two. During what quiet there was he missed his home, the lean-to his family lived in, the small thatched hut he’d built down by the sea they sometimes visited if he’d sold a bit of silk that week. He would never see the sea again, that much he knew for certain. But none of that really mattered if he could have his family. All he wanted was to be loved by those he loved. This is the kind of man he was.

H
e could hear the wagon coming long before he could see it, and at these first sounds his heart began to beat like a hammer on a nail. He tried to bridle his hopes, for he could not have lived through the disappointment if he thoroughly imagined them, his wife and sons, only to see Elijah arrive with a wagon full of wheat and rice.

At the top of the ridge, far, far away, the wagon came into view. Elijah was at the reins, and he paused briefly to raise a hand and wave it Ming Kai’s way. This had to mean he had been successful, for what man would raise his hand and wave if he had not?

So Ming Kai looked closer, and there, right beside Elijah, was Sing Loo, his wife. Sing Loo! Oh, how beautiful she was! She was even more beautiful than he remembered—and he had remembered her many times as the dark nights passed. And there, the two little black dots bobbing in the wagon behind her, Chang and Tan! They had grown. He had missed a part of their lives because of Elijah McCallister, and he hated his friend for that. But now look what he had done for Ming Kai: he had atoned. Ming Kai waved at them until his arm turned to rubber. Oh, happiness! He felt as though he were being
born all over again. It was the ecstasy of his life, of being alive, to have one’s ultimate dream realized, and this had been his dream from the day Elijah knocked him out and kidnapped him. He couldn’t wait. He ran up the hill to meet them.

The wagon and Ming Kai met but a minute later. Ming Kai’s chest was heaving as he tried to catch his breath. Elijah had a smile on his face so large it looked as if his entire head could fit in his own mouth.
This is the beginning
, Ming Kai was thinking.
My life has been returned to me.

Ming Kai stood, frozen, a smiling statue of himself, but then, slowly, his smile waned, and finally disappeared altogether. He looked at Sing Loo, and then at the two young boys. A tear came to his eyes. Then, he spoke.

“That is not my wife,” he said. The two smiling children in the back peeked at him and laughed, then hid behind a bag of corn. There was a little black dog with them, a puppy, and it barked once. “Those are not my sons.”

Stunned—or so he appeared—Elijah looked at the woman beside him, the woman who had not said a word through the course of their travels because she knew none he would understand. He looked at the darling black-haired children behind him, who had not cried once on the long journey, who seemed forever bright-eyed and happy, and at the cute little puppy he had purchased for them at the last outpost, because Elijah wanted to be thought of as the kind of man who would buy a puppy for a couple of Chinese kids, even if he was not.

“Not your wife?” Elijah said. “Not your sons?”

Ming Kai shook his head.

All joy had drained from Ming Kai’s face: it had become hard, petrified. He said something in Chinese, and the woman said something back to him.

She had a sweet voice.

“Her name is Wu Li,” Ming Kai said. “She is from Shanghai. She is not my wife.”

“But . . .” Now it was Elijah’s turn to fall mute. At that moment it was hard to say whose heart was more broken, Elijah’s or Ming Kai’s. Both had dreams that were shattered: Ming Kai’s dream of love, and Elijah’s dream of riches. Ming Kai wanted to die; he knew he would never see his real family again. But Elijah was the sort of man who, in the absence of authentic hope, created his own. He was the sort of man who could build a town in the middle of nowhere in order to conform to a dream, the sort of man who saw a wall not as a thing to go around but as something to be driven through.

He snapped the reins, and the horses began their descent to the place that would one day be Roam. Ming Kai had to move out of the way lest he be trampled—it was as though Elijah were no longer able to see him. But as the wagon passed, Elijah spoke.

“You’ll get used to them,” he said.

Ming Kai did get used to them. It took some time, but he did. They were not his family, but they were still
a
family, and they were much better than no family at all. He gave up the secret of his silk to Elijah, and Roam was born. And like everything that had ever been built in the history of the world, it was built by those who had nothing and, almost certainly, never would have anything more than that, people who sacrificed themselves for a future they would never see, almost all of them Chinese.

In America, Ming Kai learned, it is easier to be happy than sad. It’s better to forget what was and to remember what is, or better yet, what might be. The old self is wiped away like chalk on a blackboard, overwritten with new words in a foreign vocabulary. There is no history here. In America you can fly, because there’s no past to weigh you down. Only here could this place, which had been nowhere forever, become a town. And it grew so very fast, fast beyond imagining,
and soon, sooner than anyone could have believed—especially Ming Kai—there was a road, and buildings, and homes, and stores. It was all so fresh, so new. It
smelled
new, and for a full year after construction began you couldn’t breathe outside without swallowing a handful of sawdust. Chinese poured into Roam. What had taken Elijah and Ming Kai months to discover took the rest of the world a matter of days. Words travel on the wind, across the sea, into the ears of anyone willing to listen. Steel and braided wire and coal were brought in by the wagonful from as far away as Arcadia, and a mechanic named Shapiro was kidnapped and forced to design and build the factory. He died before it was done—worked beyond exhaustion—but Elijah was able to finish it himself, because he had the kind of mind that could subsume another man’s thoughts. He just made it bigger—twice as big as the design called for. It grew into a great steel giant. Ming Kai had never seen such quantities of silk emerge from its warehouse doors. Moths were everywhere, too: in every window, in every lamp, their carcasses littering the muddy streets like dead baby angels. But even before all of this happened—on the day he saw his new family, in fact—Ming Kai knew he would have to become a new man. China was thousands of miles away, and he would never return; best to let go of the memory as well.
Good-bye, family and the old tarnished world. Hello, sweet and glossy future!

As Elijah had predicted, Ming Kai got used to his replacement family, and like fish growing legs and learning to crawl on dry land, everyone changed. Sing Loo became Sarah, and the boys were named Thomas and Norton, and together with Elijah, Ming Kai and his worms created a new world; the future would see them produce enough skeins in a month to drape the entire town of Roam in a billowing sheet of silk. There was so much beauty: is there anything more beautiful than silk? Every bed in Roam was covered in it. Women wore the loveliest silk dresses, and some men wore their silken
pajamas out early in the morning, taking their dogs for a walk. And there was no man, no matter how poor, who couldn’t boast a drawer full of handkerchiefs. It was a soft town with a sweet sheen, and Ming Kai had helped create it. That was something. That filled a spot inside his large heart.

O
nce they were settled, Ming Kai had Elijah over for a feast. The boys played in the dirt beneath the table, and Elijah smoked a fat cigar.

“Thomas and Norton seem like good boys,” Elijah said. “And Sarah, she’s a good cook.”

“Yes,” Ming Kai said. “What you say is true.”

Elijah stood, and it seemed as if in that moment all the blood drained out of his face. He turned a chalky white, and his cold eyes flared. The old Elijah died then, and a new one was born.

“Before we go any further in our enterprise, you should know: they are yours,” Elijah said. “But everything else is mine.”

T
here was a fire burning down the street, and from what Digby could see of it—which wasn’t much, since all he did was poke his head out the tavern door—it looked like it might have been the fire station itself. He wasn’t particularly worried about it, though, because fires in Roam had about the same ambition the rest of the population did: soon it would die out on its own. There were a lot of fires these days. Sometimes it was just a great big pile of old furniture, or books, or clothes, or whatever got collected during the course of an entire lifetime spent in one place (always too much to take with you to the new life), but some of the other fires were a good deal bigger. Entire homes, shops, businesses—turned to ash. Digby understood the rage, he understood the bitterness. But to burn down your own home? The place you raised your children? It seemed unnecessary. Were Digby himself to leave Roam—and at this point in time he had no plans to, but who
knew what tomorrow might bring—he would make sure the tavern was clean, the lights were off, and the keys were on the counter along with a note wishing the very best to whomever wanted to have it.

He took another step out into the day and craned his neck to see around the door. Yes, it
was
the fire station. He wondered if Sam Morgan had started it before he left; he used to volunteer down there. Sam Morgan, driving away in that beater with the mattress strapped to the top. Is there any sadder sight? A man, a wife, two kids. A family with nothing to call their own except all the time in the world. And that car, same as the rest of them around here, cobbled together from the parts of half a dozen other cars, not cars at all really but rumors of what cars were supposed to be. Digby knew there had to be a place where cars were actually
made,
that there was a time when they were new and shiny, but by the time the cars got to Roam they were seven different colors, cannibalized, chopped up, three doored, loud as all creation. He’d seen people using the trunks as bathtubs. He witnessed one poor soul warming up a sandwich on the engine block. The steering wheels were sometimes completely missing and in their place were two blocks of wood wired to a metal rod, and inside the car no place to sit at all: you just had to squat. This was the trade-off of living in what Digby thought of as a frontier community: it took a while for the future to get here, and by the time it did it was the past.

The old-timers liked a fire, though. Most of them left the tavern to get a closer look at it, gathering at its edge, as if to warm themselves. Digby watched them file out the door, hundreds of them, all dressed up in their pants and dresses and hats, strolling down Main Street as if they actually lived here, as if this were still their town.

Digby shook a cigarette out of its pack and struck a match on the wooden post supporting the portico. Again he was beset by that sadness, a family trait; his father had it so bad that there were days he wouldn’t get out of bed at all. He would just lie there, staring at the
ceiling. All Dr. Carraway had to do was look at him to know what it was:
nostalgic melancholy,
which he described as a deep sadness brought on by thoughts of the past, and since sometimes all a man
had
was the past, this nostalgic melancholy could be quite dangerous, in some cases even fatal. The only cure was to paint a picture of the future so bright and powerful and real that it overwhelmed the patient’s obsession with times-gone-by.