The Royal Family

by William T. Vollmann

  The whore just stood there holding the twenty.

  Now, am I a cop or not? he said.

  You? You stink of cop.

  All right. Fine. If I’m a cop, can I catch you anytime or not?

  Not if I run fast enough, sucker.

  If I put the word out, you’ll end up at Eight-Fifty Bryant faster than you can put a rubber on with your tongue.

  I believe you, officer. You bastards always have all the power. But I’m no rat. I’d rather be put away than rat on my Queen.

  No one’s asking you to be a rat, honey.

  So what do you want? You want me to blow you and give you back the twenty? God knows, I’ve had to do it before.

  I want you to take this jewel to the Queen, he said. Then you can do whatever she tells you to do. If you don’t take this to the Queen, if you keep it for yourself, then I’m going to have a problem with you, and once I tell the Queen, she’s going to have a problem with you, too. And tell her I’ll be waiting here.

  That bitch downstairs isn’t gonna let me in again. You gonna give me five so I can—

  That’s possible. Okay. So I’ll be waiting on Capp and Sixteenth in two hours, say, ten o’clock. If the Queen wants to give me any message or see me herself, she can find me there. So here goes the jewel back in this envelope, and there’s a letter in there, too, in case you forget my name and Dan Smooth’s name, and, darling, here you are.

  | 85 |

  Queen or no Queen, it’s getting old doing this, he thought—older if no Queen. I’m getting old. Open the night case. Unlock the hard case and open that. That’s not breaking the law, exactly, because a hotel room is a residence if you’ve paid for it, and even in California a citizen is allowed to play with his own possessions at home. The slide is open. Firmly thumb-nudge fifteen rounds into the magazine, which now waits ready to be fed into that oily hole, so do just that, then thumb the catch to close the slide: snick—a much less noisy sound than the bolt-slam of a street-sweeper shotgun, but authoritative nonetheless, and comforting to the proposective user. Now squeeze the release stud; catch the magazine as it returns to you, reborn from the grip. Fourteen rounds in it now, one left behind; add another copper candy (I recommend exploding hollowpoints). With the heel of your hand, shove the magazine back inside. Sixteen rounds, one of them chambered. Here it is now, your cold heavy little underarm pal. What would Smooth say about the smell of that? Zip up your jacket and look in the mirror to see how obvious the bulge is. If you feel so inclined, wash the lead off your fingers by means of this sink whose porcelain is stained yellow by the piss of whores and johns. Increasing the volume on the television, which now offered for his moral furthering a science fiction program about men kept as sex slaves in a world of beautiful hungry women, he went out, locked the door as far as it was capable of being locked, descended past the Indian woman, who cried out: Is she gone yet? If she isn’t, you’re gonna have to pay double. Is she still in your room? and after passing through both gratings, which is to say semipermeable steel membranes, found himself gazing upon the red letters of the Walgreens pharmacy shining like stars, the tail of the “g” flickering. A rush of hatred for everything he saw spewed out of his soul, spreading like the concentric circular patterns of the subway station’s tiles until it had reached the farthest building that he could see. Everything stank. A homeless man’s fat dog ran past as quickly as a whore can stuff fifty bucks down between her tits. His owner, vainly seeking to overtake him, stumped along on crutches, a bedroll upon his shoulders, cursing. Right at the curb a quartet of mariachi musicians in white cowboy hats formed and began singing loudly, their blank faces and sadly drooping moustaches as red as new bricks in the rain. The red Walgreens sign made them redder. Now the night-leaners began to come out from their burrows, thickening the bases of lampposts while they got the lay of the land, then striding shadow-legged across the light-stained street . . .

  Five minutes before ten. He walked down Sixteenth past the old theater and waited. No whores at all, he saw; perhaps there’d been a sweep; let’s see, it was getting on the end of the month, so their general assistance checks ought to have been long spent by now; where were they? A sweep, then; this was an election year.

  Across the street an addict was mumbling, his words, like Dan Smooth’s, reminiscent of the structure of graphite, which is to say comprised of slender hexagonal plates of atoms which slough off at a touch like the multitudinous crusts of a Turkish pastry.

  Then, at long last, the tall man came, tall as some dancer on stilts, that tall dark man who moved with easy intelligence, flaunting under his arm, his long grey arm which drooped down like a freeway off-ramp, the envelope called “EVIDENCE.”

  Tyler raised his hand, like a parachutist about to pull his rip cord. —I’m the one, he said.

  I’m not here to hurt you, the tall man said. She’ll see you now.

  You work for her?

  You asking my business? said the tall man.

  If you want to take me someplace, I’ve got a right to ask what you do. I’m not messing with anybody’s business. You can ask that chickie who brought you the envelope if I treated her wrong.

  She went and told me you didn’t pay for her time, the tall man said.

  Well, I gave her twenty, Tyler said. You can either believe me or not believe me.

  Matter of fact, I believe you. And I’m gonna tell the Queen, too. That white bitch can lie on her own time. Now, I don’t have all night. You coming or not?

  I’ll walk with you, Tyler said.

  The tall man slipped the envelope called “EVIDENCE” under the windshield of an abandoned car, and began to walk rapidly down Capp Street, never looking back. Tyler followed as quickly as he could. At Eighteeth they turned south and continued all the way to the old mayonnaise factory at Harrison without speaking, and then the tall man said over his shoulder: You a cop?

  Nope.

  You a vig?

  What’s that?

  Vigilante.

  Not me.

  That’s good. We don’t have much use for vigs.

  They kept walking, street to side-street, side-street to alley, and then suddenly they were in a tunnel that Tyler had never seen before, shiny-scaled like the Broadway tunnel upon whose walls crawled the ghosts of cars and the squiggly fire-lines of reflected tail-lights; but here there was no traffic, although from somewhere came the dull ocean-boom of many vehicles; no, it was stale air from many ducts, or maybe traffic from elsewhere coming through by conduction. The tunnel was narrow, and they went in single file, the tall man’s heels ahead of him clapping lightly down upon plates of textured metal, the ceiling rainbowed with all the colors of dirty gold. Far ahead of them, he saw a shaveheaded woman carrying a suitcase. She vanished into one of the square tomblike openings which had been so occasionally spaced into the yellow walls.

  | 86 |

  What about the octopus-minded of this world? They were wriggling their fingers, which were as thick and cold and white as the bars of a hospital bed. What about Tyler and Brady? Well, they were as confident (or unwary, perhaps) as the legs that marched, ran, trudged and danced across that spidery whirr of shade on the sidewalk where a maple’s leaf-souls shimmered and shook in the shadow of a breeze; the legs were darkened and eaten by it as it trembled; what if the sidewalk opened suddenly there like a rotten decomposing glacier? Three policemen walked through the shadow, and their navy blue unforms became darker. What if a world tore itself open right beneath their shiny shoes? Deep within, we might find people living according to the same cultural laws as that species of slavemaking ants called Formica (Polyerges) rufescens, about which Darwin wrote: This ant is absolutely dependent on its slaves; without their aid, the species would certainly become extinct in a single year. The males and fertile females do no work of any kind, and the workers or sterile females, though most energetic and courageous in capturing slaves, do no other work. They are incapable of making their own nests, or of feeding their own larvae. Down, down
! A spider-girl’s chin pressed itself against the floor, eyeballs rolling. Tyler experienced the same feeling that he always had when after a long browse in the secret, cozy, and almost airy Poetry Room upstairs at City Lights where the window looked out on brick walls, a flat roof, and above everything a row of beautifully dancing laundry—he was almost in the sky, the world muffled and distant—he then passed the row of black and white Beatnik postcards and began to descend the long steep black-treaded stairs which pulled him down past clumps of newspapers and manifestoes, down, down, back into the world. When the old nest is found inconvenient, and they have to migrate, it is the slaves which determine the migration, and actually carry their masters in their jaws. So utterly helpless are the masters, that when Huber shut up thirty of them without a slave, but with plenty of the food they like best, and with their own larvae and pupae to stimulate them to work, they did nothing; they could not even feed themselves, and many perished of hunger. Huber then introduced a single slave (F. fusca), and she instantly set to work, fed and saved the survivors, made some cells and tended the larvae, and put all to rights. What could be more extraordinary than these well-ascertained facts?

  What should I draw? said the Queen aloud. Something like a shark or a stingray. Nothing cute. My girls don’t like nothing too cute. What’s gonna make Domino happy? What’s gonna make Strawberry come? What’s gonna make Kitty some fresh money? —Magic marker in hand, she upstretched against the concrete wall behind the grating, straining upward in her high heels so that her fringed skirt danced, smiling a little as she drew. She did the charcoal-colored eyes as far above her head as she could reach. The fringes quivered against her buttocks. Her little feet silently slid upon the light-pocked concrete.

  A woman with two shadows raised and lowered her arm with a strangely mechanical air. Her ankle-length white dress was as porcelain. She froze, turned, seeming to stand on a rotating platform rather than move herself. Her hand-edges chopped air like knives. She bent, bowing to one of her shadows, while the shadow behind bowed to her. Now she joined with her shadow, becoming a vast writhing mound.

  What is it, Sapphire? asked the Queen.

  The porcelain woman covered her face and giggled. Then she began to stammer: S-s-s-some-b-b-b-body . . .

  Oh, somebody’s here, huh? What a good girl. Always looking out for your Queen. C’mere, baby. Queen’s gonna kiss your pussy . . .

  L-l-l-uh . . .

  Love you, too, Sapphire. Lemme kiss you. Quickly now. Can’t keep guests waiting.

  The girl approached, shyly scuttling sideways, timidly entered the Queen’s arms. Sweat formed like milk on her porcelain face, and her pale legs began to writhe in the darkness.

  Uh-uh-uh. Oh. Oh. Oh, oh, oh.

  That’s a good girl. That’s my girl. You’ll always be Queen’s little girl. Now go let the man in.

  | 87 |

  An old, old face, he thought when he saw her; a face without any whites in the eyes anymore, a palish head upon a dark dress. Old, but maybe not so old—but a middle-aged black woman, just as Smooth had said. Older than in the photo—old, old!

  What’s your name, please, ma’am? he said.

  Africa, replied the woman with a faint smile. I’m the Queen.

  She had a codeine girl’s sleepy froggy voice, her perfume and soft crackly sweater further manifestations of the same, a narcotic blood that dizzied with a sweet scent that was half a stench—well, maybe she actually smelled like smoked leather.

  Take my cigarette, she said to Sapphire. And go make them be quiet.

  The porcelain girl fled, her shining mouth pulsating with strings of mucus. Distant whispers ceased, and the silence crawled in his ears like sweat.

  So there’s this guy who wants to do business, Tyler said. Mr. Brady’s his name. One of those losers with money. I don’t like him and I guess he doesn’t like me, because he fired me, but he’s been looking for you.

  Are you the one who wrote me those letters? said the Queen.

  Yes, ma’am.

  And you beat up one of my girls, she said.

  No, that was him. That wasn’t me.

  But you set her up to get beaten up.

  I have some responsibility for that, he admitted. I thought he was too dumb to know the difference. I didn’t know you were for real, and I thought she could fake it and he’d pay her and then she’d give me a kickback. I’m sorry. I looked for her after that, but I never saw her. If you can tell me where she is, I’d like to make amends. Financial amends.

  You’ll make amends to me, the Queen said.

  Here’s two hundred bucks, he said, pulling out ten twenties. I wish it could be more. But I didn’t beat her up and this is my money which I’ll never get paid back and work hasn’t been going very well lately.

  What kind of work?

  I’m a P.I.

  Take his money, Justin, said the Queen.

  He saw the tall man’s hand. He began to count money into it, and a flashlight shone upon the bills by magic.

  The flashlight wandered. Hunched and kneeling, with her hands over her face, the porcelain girl was a whitish thing, a strange staring thing, her dress like a sail catching in a breeze. It widened as she leaned back and spread her legs. Imperceptibly it stretched, like a sail catching air. Her eyes almost closed, her wrists gripped one another in turn. Then she began to masturbate. In the stillness, Tyler could hear the creaking of her shoes. She began to club her temples with her bent wrists, like a wrought-up windup doll.

  You’re carryin’ a piece, the Queen said.

  Yes, ma’am.

  Justin, take his piece.

  Tyler hesitated for a moment. Then, deciding to see matters through, he drew the gun out, careful to keep it downpointed.

  Mind if I make it safe? he asked.

  Go ahead.

  He dropped the magazine out, brought the slide back to unchamber the sixteenth round, put magazine and cartridge into his coat pocket, handed the tall man his gun.

  And you’re Tyler? said the Queen.

  Yes, ma’am.

  And the fellow lookin’ for me?

  Jonas Brady from Missouri. That’s his name, ma’am. You know him?

  Sure I know him, she said with a grin. Klexter, klokan, kladd, kludd, kligrapp . . .

  He heard a sharp click, and tensed, believing for a moment that somebody had loaded his gun, but then the omniscient flashlight showed him a drop of water trembling on the concrete ceiling; when it fell to the floor its echo harshly slammed. He nodded then. The Queen’s eyes glittered ironically.

  And why are you here? she said then.

  I—I want to know you, he replied, to his own surprise. (That was what he kept expecting Dan Smooth to say.)

  Ah, said the Queen.

  He waited.

  Down on your belly, said the Queen. Hands behind your head.

  He obeyed. He was in for anything now. The floor was damp.

  Okay. C’mere. Stay on your belly. Crawl over here like a worm. Closer. Now slide your hands down back of your neck. Raise your head and look at me. Can you see me? Now I’m going to spit in your mouth. I want you to raise your head and open your mouth wide for me like a little baby bird.

  She leaned forward, her eyes hurting and confusing him, and her face descended, her eyes shining almost malignantly, and then her full lips began to open and somebody shone the flashlight on them and her lower lip began to glisten with spittle, and then a long slender thread of it crawled down from her lip, with much the same speed as a spider descending its strand, and he was shocked to find how much he wanted that spittle inside his mouth. He didn’t even know why he wanted it. Warm and thick, it began to coil round and round upon his tongue. He felt it before he tasted it. She leaned closer, her face above him like a falling planet so that she was almost kissing him. Then a foaming frothing tide of saliva spilled into his mouth as she breathed on his face. Her breath smelled like cunt. Her spit tasted like cunt.

  Later, when she let him go out, he sa
w the spider-girl advancing on her chin, on her knees and on her palms.

  | 88 |

  He drove home, dropped two credit card bills into the trash, opened an official-looking letter which crowed: IMPORTANT NOTICE! You may already qualify for our unique Debt Consolidation Loan up to $500,000 NATIONWIDE! (he filed that likewise in the garbage), and then, gazing out the kitchen window at the creeping silver ocean-fog, he tapped his ballpoint against his teeth and added to the details description sheet:

  TEETH White

  EARS Oval, L ear only pierced

  FINGERNAILS Long, unpainted, dirt under nails

  He went back to the beginning of the form, thought for awhile, and wrote:

  AGE Approx. 45.

  Then he changed it back to:

  AGE Approx. 40.

  He made other corrections:

  CLOTHING Castoffs? Sweatshirt, jeans, tennis shoes.

  JEWELRY Large hoop earring in L ear, bangles on left wrist

  PECULIARITIES Round scar on right calf (bullet wound?), abscess marks on arms, tattoo of skull on left wrist, mole on left cheek, strong smell of perfume.

  He stared at the form, which now seemed as vain to him as the scribbles on the walls of a hard-luck hotel. He felt tired and woolly-headed. The angry, anxious sadness that he felt in his chest like a hard chestnut whenever Irene occurred to him now ruled him, and, massaging his breastbone, he had to admit the evidence: There was, as Smooth had said, absolutely no reason for him to be seeking out the Queen. But the seeking was over now, and maybe something would come next to rouse either further sadness or further alarm. It was his characteristic to admit what he could not change—which is to say, he confessed it to himself if not to others. Once Irene had said to him on the telephone: I could never be angry with you, and he’d been so happy that he’d cried. Whenever she had spoken to him he had always felt eased, except that last time in the restaurant on Geary Street when her decision had already entombed her; she used to make him feel the same way that his friend Mikey did when he came back from Alcoholics Anonymous meetings; Mikey had been sober for forty-two years, but twice a week he went to A.A. and talked and listened to his own kin, then got relief; sometimes he got sick and couldn’t go, and then he turned desperate and mean. Tyler didn’t turn mean, but he knew the other feeling all too well, the feeling of no rent money, and John’s anger, and his mother’s reproach, and loneliness, loneliness above all—how he loved Irene! She was his sickness, his dear little disease. God and Irene, are you one and the same? Because I can’t find either of you. Not that I ever believed in You, God. But, Irene, I believe in you just as much even though I can’t touch you; Irene, I’ve got to get you back. Your death is an impossibility. My need proclaims that. I’m going to find you somehow, or else I’ll pretend.