The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel Read online

  “What things?” she asked again. “Tell me.”

  “Are you sure you want to know?”

  Rachel nodded. Helen was buying time, trying to think something up. Rachel was thinking, too. When Rachel was lost in thought her eyes shivered and pinged in their sockets. Normally they didn’t move much at all, and when her pupils were steady they could be piercing, and it made Helen wonder whether Rachel could see a great deal more than she let on. Just to be sure Helen would test her sometimes: she’d put the salt in the pepper shaker, or move a chair into her walking path. How many times must she see her sister trip over a chair leg before she could be assured Rachel was totally blind? There was no certain number.

  A dog wandered past them, rubbing against Rachel’s leg: dogs loved Rachel. Helen shooed it away.

  “Okay then,” she said. “I’ll tell you.”

  They came to the old Yott House first, and the stories began to flow. Ghost stories. Helen didn’t know where they came from. It was as if the stories were already out there somewhere and she was capturing them, like a butterfly in a net, so real that as she told them they felt true even to her. The Yott House, Helen told Rachel, they called . . . the Yott House of Death. Everyone knows what happened there, she said, though no one likes to speak of it. Helen could only say in a whisper: Caleb Yott built a lovely sandstone home on the corner. It used to be a grand house (which, in truth, it still is)—grand enough, he thought, to get him a wife. He needed something more than what he brought to the table himself, what with a drinking problem, a bad temper, and a clubfoot. He found a wife, a Chinese woman named Bao, and they were married and had children—a boy and a girl, Franklin and Anita.

  But it wasn’t a happy marriage. Caleb had that temper, and as the years passed, he drank more and more. The story goes that one night Caleb came home drunk and began to argue with Bao, and one thing led to another and he hit her in the head with a brass candlestick. He cracked her head wide open; worse, the children were watching the whole thing transpire from the top of the stairwell, and when Bao was hit Anita screamed and fell down the flight of stairs, and by the time she got to the bottom her neck had broken and she was dead, too.

  But it turned out Bao wasn’t dead—yet. She had enough life left in her to run her husband through with the fireplace poker. But then she died, and the little boy Franklin was alone, his family’s bodies scattered across the living room floor like firewood.

  “What happened to Franklin?” Rachel asked, spellbound.

  “Franklin ran out into the street for help—and was run over by a horse and buggy. Crushed beneath the hooves.”

  “That’s terrible,” Rachel said.

  “It is. But it gets worse. After their bodies were cleared away and the blood was cleaned up and the brains shoveled off the living room floor, another family moved in. Husband, wife, son, daughter. And they all died as well, in a fashion too grisly to even describe.” Helen held her sister’s arm tight and pulled her closer, so her lips were touching the side of Rachel’s ear. “And ever since then, every family who has moved into the Yott House has died—by their own hands or by somebody else’s, or by the hand of God Himself.”

  “But why would people do that? Move to a place where they know something like that’s going to happen?”

  “Because people always think it could never happen to them,” Helen said. “Then it always does.”

  They kept walking.

  Beyond the Yott House was the Hanging Tree. “Ah! Here we are,” Helen said. “The Hanging Tree. From this tree—from this beautiful chestnut—over a hundred people had been hanged, and they’d been left hanging there until the meat fell off their bones. A hundred people: one every year for a hundred years!”

  Rachel stiffened, but her curiosity always got the better of her. “Hanged?” she asked. “Why?”

  “Who really knows anymore?” Helen said. “At first, they were actual criminals. People who did terrible things. In the early years, before Elijah McCallister civilized them, someone would always do something bad enough to be hanged for. But over time people became better. They followed the rules. But hanging had become something of a tradition, and so every year the town voted, and someone was hanged. Usually it was someone people didn’t like, or . . .”

  “What? Or what?”

  Helen paused. “People with some sort of . . . problem. Some sort of physical problem.”

  “Physical problem?”

  “Something wrong with them. Something that made them . . . different.”

  “Oh.”

  They stood there for a long time.

  “But they’ve stopped doing that?” Rachel said, hopefully. “I mean, we’ve stopped doing that. Right?”

  “Of course,” Helen said, laughing. “Of course we have. I can’t remember the last time someone was hanged from this tree.”

  They kept walking.

  They walked past the Poison Fields, where nothing had ever grown, not even dirt, and then to the Boneyard where—and again, this was a long time ago, Helen told her—the dead weren’t even buried. Their bodies were simply discarded there and left to rot. The people of the town were so busy making silk they didn’t have time to bury the dead! The poor, the unknown, the evil, and then those unlikeable people they hanged from the tree—they all were left here. The bones are still there.

  And after the Boneyard, Helen took Rachel to the most dangerous and deadly place in Roam there was.

  The Forest of the Flesh-Eating Birds.

  “Where these birds came from, nobody knew. Maybe they weren’t even birds at all; maybe they were the last of the flying dinosaurs, with long sharp beaks and teeth like ice picks. They had a magic that allowed them to blend in with the trees. And they were so quiet, so quiet that even if you had eyes you wouldn’t be able to see them. But they can see you. They can see everything. They’re part of the darkness all around them, and if you come too close or linger too long—even here, where we’re standing right now!—they’ll fly out in a great flock and before you have a chance to turn away they’ll be upon you, and all that will be left of you is nothing, not even a bone to clatter against the sidewalk. Very few people have walked through the Forest and lived.”

  “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.

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nbsp; 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.

  ROAM:

  A SHORT HISTORY,

  PART I

  It’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. H
e 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.”