The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

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 beforeyou 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