The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel (7 page)

The past that Digby’s father was thinking about had everything to do with Allie Wei, his first girl; he was thinking of her jet-black pigtails and her eyes—one brown, one blue—and of the day they made love in the mulberry trees behind the factory, and fell asleep, and woke up the next morning naked, overlaid in a layer of silk, the dusty fibers sent airborne during the manufacturing process. She died a year later, her lungs ravaged by the silk dust. He thought he had stopped thinking about her when he met and married Digby’s mother, but it had been but a temporary reprieve, and when he turned fifty he was overwhelmed by almost palpable images of her. They possessed him. So Dr. Carraway wrote out a prescription for Digby’s father:
Stories. Three times a day. Morning, noon, and just before bed.
They were to be stories not of what was, or what is, but of what could be. That was the only thing that could cure him.

Mrs. Chang had never been much of a storyteller, so little Digby took on the job. But he only had one story to tell, and he had his mother leave the room to tell it.
When you die
, he told his father,
you will find Allie in the field behind the factory. It will be exactly as it was. She will be naked and covered in silk dust. So will you. But she will never die again, and neither will you, and you’ll be together forever
.

Then let me die,
his father said.

You
will
die
, he said
. But you have to finish this life first. Keep this story in a little box beside your bed, and look at it every morning when you wake and every night before you sleep. It will make you happy
.

H
is father was happy for the rest of his life.

Digby had no one to tell him stories, and who knew if they would even work with him, because his melancholia came from the past
and
the present. It was this town; it was Roam itself. It was in the very air he breathed. To live with what had happened to his home . . . It was as if he had to watch a good friend die, and then had to view the corpse every single day for the rest of his life. It was almost impossible to remember the Roam that once was, now that it had been abandoned, burned, broken, and worn down by time itself, all because of the curse born with it (or such was the old story people told). He grew up just as it was beginning the long, slow descent into decay, but he could remember all too well the town it used to be, its Main Street lined with shops and bustling with people, all of them dressed in the silk produced in McCallister’s factory just half a mile away, hidden behind a line of poplars as if it were the secret engine that powered the town. And it was. The day the factory died was the day the town began to die. It was the rich who left first, taking with them all the money, secure in their ability to find a life elsewhere. Left behind were the workers, mostly Chinese and combos, who had nothing at all. Now almost every storefront was dark and empty. A few old-timers had moved into them: Digby could see them in the windows, as if on display. The quiet was eerie, too, another absence that had all the qualities of sound: he could hear the silence, even feel it.

Digby stood by the door of his tavern and had these thoughts. Then, in the silence, he heard the dogs. They belonged to the lumberjack who lived in the woods at the edge of town. Lumberjack Smith, the sole human being who had actually come to Roam in the last few years and stayed here to live. When he heard the dogs barking Digby knew this meant the lumberjack was coming into town for a drink, as
he did every day. The dogs followed Smith everywhere, about a dozen of them, each one as black as the next. The closer they came to town the more they barked, and when they reached Main Street they began to howl, howl as if they’d gone completely mad. Digby thought it was because they could see the old-timers, too.

T
he saddest part of the day—of everyone’s day, really, of every day everyone in the entire town had to live through—was when Rachel and Helen set up their little shop on the northwest corner of the intersection at Twelfth and McCallister. They were there every Monday by ten (unless it rained), and today was no different.
Here come the girls
, said old Mrs. Branscombe, half to herself, half to her old dog Comer, a basset hound she’d named after her dead husband because she could not imagine living out the rest of her life
not
saying his name. There they were: Helen and Rachel pushing an old metal cart down the sidewalk, the one they borrowed from the big grocery store that had closed its doors years ago. Rachel insisted on pushing it, as heavy and unwieldy as it was, while Helen walked ahead with long, aggressive strides, as if she were challenging you to try and stop her. Townsfolk at their windows gawking, shaking their heads, sighing,
the
girls
,
again
. Helen didn’t care what they thought. She knew how they felt, but it fed her determination to do it, every Monday, at ten, until what she and Rachel were selling was all gone.

Tied to one side of the cart with rubber ropes was a card table with a fake alligator-skin top, which they unfolded and placed just before the stop sign. Rachel and Helen sat in two old wooden chairs behind the table, and Helen had a cigar box—
PUNCH CIGARS, HANDMADE IN SPANISH HONDURAS
, the box said—that served as her cash register.

What were the girls selling? Everything. They were selling everything they had, one thing at a time. Helen had it all worked out, what they were selling and when—the order, as it were, in which they would be dismantling their lives.

They’d started with their parents’ things. Their parents had the most, so they were still selling them, ten years after their deaths. All their clothes, every coat and every dress, every pair of trousers. They had almost sold every sweater (there were many sweaters, since Mother and Father both wore sweaters of various weights and warmth deployment all year long, cold-blooded creatures that they were). Every sock, hat, tie, and belt—everything but their underwear, which Helen had thrown away in the days just after they were buried, unable to stand the idea of her dead parents’ underwear in the house. All of their things: books, pens, cuff links, hairbrushes, and boxes and photos of old friends, all of it available for purchase on the corner of Twelfth and McCallister.

After this, they would begin to eat away at the rest of it, all those things belonging to the house itself, and then what was Rachel’s, and then—Helen would probably stop there. And with all the money she’d earned she’d buy some new things for herself.

They had a ways to go. There weren’t a lot of people in town left to buy things, and those who remained couldn’t bring themselves to approach the girls. But sometimes Jonas came by to flirt,
and that was nice. He never bought anything unless Helen made him, though, promising with her smile the recompense he never stopped wanting.

There was a sturdy magnolia growing there. It had a nice strong branch jutting out over the sidewalk, and it was here Rachel hung the clothes. A dress of her mother’s, a pair of slacks belonging to her dad. Then a coat—his jacket—the herringbone he wore almost every day, still saturated in pipe smoke, a bit threadbare. It was a wonder he wasn’t wearing it when he died. Rachel pressed her face against it and took a deep breath. She pressed the palms of her hands against the tattered and—she smiled—ticklish wool blend. She stuck her hand in the pocket.

“Look,” she said, holding up her fingers. They were speckled with tobacco flecks. “Everything is here except for him.”

Helen took Rachel by the wrist and brought Rachel’s hand close to her face and smelled it and, as though she were testing some food that may have been too hot, or poisonous, tentatively stuck out her tongue and captured a small brown remnant of Mr. McCallister. This dust, proof he’d once had a place among the living, transported her back into the old world, one of youth and love and possibility, the big world, before it had become so small and dead.

“Let’s keep this jacket,” Rachel said.

But Helen shook the jacket out, watching the brown flakes scatter and fall.

“Everything must go,” she said. She hung the jacket on the tree. “It’s for the best.”

“But, Helen,” Rachel said. “These things are all we have left of them. Once they’re gone—”

“Exactly,” Helen said. “That’s the idea.”

“I want to stop,” Rachel said. “I want to stop doing this.”

Tears welled in her sister’s eyes, and Helen wondered, as she
always did when her sister cried, if there was something different about them, if the tears of a blind girl had a quality the tears of the seeing did not.

She held her sister close. “You smell good,” Helen said. “Like a flower. And listen to the birds. They always come out for you.”

These small kindnesses were usually enough for Rachel. But not today.

“It’s not
right
,” she said. “And it must look . . . wrong. A blind girl and her sister setting up shop on a corner.”

“Oh, Rachel,” Helen said softly, still holding her sister tight against her, tighter now, too tight. “This is what people have always done. Ever since long ago. For generations it’s been the same. When people die, you take their things and send them out into the world, and in that way—”

“I don’t believe you,” Rachel said, pushing her sister away. “I’ve never seen anyone do that before. Who else does that?”

Helen almost laughed. “No,” she said. “You’re right. You wouldn’t
see
anyone doing that anymore. But people used to set up shop on the corner all the time.”

Helen knew that if she said the same thing over and over again, and said it with conviction, eventually Rachel would believe it. Even Helen found herself believing some of the stories she told. Sometimes she felt like she was living in more of a dream world than the one she’d created for Rachel.

“A long time ago,” Helen said, “but not
that
long ago, you would see people on every corner of this town, selling their things. It was called . . . cornering. And some corners were the good ones, and some were the bad ones . . .” But Helen stopped midstory: somebody was coming.

“I think we have customers,” Rachel said, cocking her head to one side, like a dog.

“No,” Helen said, sighing. “It’s just those boys.”

Those boys: Gus Dyer and his quiet tagalong Johnny Clare. They always came around on sale days and never bought anything, just picked up things with their sticky hands and stared at Rachel, especially Gus, who was clearly smitten by her. He stammered and blushed as if Rachel could see him. It was—almost—adorable. Helen tried to keep Rachel behind her when they came by, but today she was too late. They were there before she had a chance to protect her.

“Hey,” Gus said. He was chewing on something—a twig. It made his lips green. Little bits of bark were in his teeth. Helen wished Rachel could see this. “Hey, Rachel. Hey, Helen.”

Neither of the girls said anything. Rachel had been instructed in how to be with boys. She had been told how they were.

“Can we help you?” Helen said.

“No,” Gus said. Johnny Clare just shook his head.

“Y’all can scoot then,” Helen said.

“We’re not hurting anything.” Gus had never been scared of Helen, for some reason. It might have been because he wasn’t smart enough to be. “Do you mind if I speak to Rachel?”

Helen laughed. “She has nothing to say to you.”

“That’s right, Gus Dyer,” Rachel said, but without much conviction. “I have nothing to say to you.” She was smiling. Helen realized she was actually trying to flirt with him.

“See?” Helen said. “Get on out of here.”

Gus didn’t move. He looked back at his friend Johnny Clare. Johnny didn’t say anything, either. Everyone was quiet until Gus spoke. “Well,” he said. “That’s what I wanted to say to Rachel. We’re going. My folks and me. Leaving Roam.”

Rachel actually gasped. “No,” she said.

“What do you care?” Helen knocked against her sister’s shoulder with her own.

Rachel appeared to gather herself. “I don’t,” she said. “It’s just . . . you can’t give up on Roam. Our great-grandfather founded this town.”

Gus nodded. “I know,” he said. “But we’re not giving up. There’s just not much left to hold on to.”

Suddenly Johnny spoke up. “Gus and I are about the only boys still here,” he said.

“Men,” Gus said, correcting him. “We’re men.”

A black dog wandered in the yard behind them, stopping to look at the gathering as if it might be something the dog wanted to be a part of. Then it disappeared behind the Treadways’ house.

“Anything else?” Helen asked. “You’re scaring away our customers.”

Gus looked behind him, to his left and his right. No one was there.

“Just one more thing,” Gus said. “Rachel.”

Rachel
. She’d never heard her name spoken like that before. Helen wasn’t sure she had heard anyone say her name like that, either.

“Yes?” Rachel said.

“We,” Gus started, then rethought it. “Johnny and me and a couple of others—not just us—Laura Anne’s going to be there, too. But we’re going down by the bridge and just, you know, have a farewell party. Say good-bye with smiles on our faces instead of frowns.”

“The bridge?” Rachel said. “What bridge?”

Helen would have liked to kill Gus Dyer now.

“The old bridge down by the ravine,” he said.

“That bridge is gone,” Helen said. “Long gone.”

“It’s old,” Gus said. “And I wouldn’t trust it. But—”

“There’s a bridge?” Rachel asked again.

“There’s no bridge,” Helen said.

Gus and Johnny looked at each other, and then at Rachel, and then at Helen. There was a story in Helen’s eyes, and somehow they could read it. It wasn’t a short story, either; it was a long one, and it was all
about Helen and Rachel and who they were to each other, and even about the things Helen had told her. It couldn’t have been clearer if it had been written in a book.

“There’s no bridge,” Rachel said.

Gus and John kept looking at Helen, and Helen kept looking at them. “Okay,” Gus said. “Jeez. There’s no bridge. Can you come anyway?”