The Royal Family

by William T. Vollmann

  Henry? said Domino.

  What is it, sweetheart?

  Henry, I’m sorry I puked all over your car. And I’m sorry I was nasty to you.

  Never mind, he said. No harm done.

  Henry, would it be all right if I went to sleep now?

  Sure it would.

  Henry?

  What?

  I don’t want to go back to the Queen tonight. I hate the Queen.

  I know.

  Where are we going?

  Oakland.

  Where in Oakland?

  To the Queen.

  The car reeked of vomit. He thought of Luther’s strange doctrine that sin resides in the flesh, not in the conscience, because law has power only over flesh, not conscience. Her puke was corrupt, but not her, never her.

  Henry, I’m sorry I lost my shoe.

  All right, he said. Now let me drive.

  By the time he reached the secret place among the derricks and cranes of West Oakland where the Queen was sleeping that night, Domino was stuporously snoring. The tall man came out of the shadows to claim her, laughing at the stench. —Lemme get this drunken bitch out of this faggoty car, he said. —He carried her off in his arms, then came back to Tyler and said: Queen wants me to tell you you been righteous. You one of the good kind.

  Thanks, Justin, said Tyler.

  You want to stay here, I’ll watch your car. Or if you don’t trust me you can sleep in your car.

  Looking into the tall man’s eyes, he remembered strangely from his boyhood the old trestle bridge between East and West Sacramento where you could stand on the ties, look down between your feet and see the shimmering green-brown water. If you wanted to, you could jump and maybe just thrill yourself or maybe kill yourself. He liked but was sometimes afraid of the tall man.

  Sure, he said. I trust you.

  And so the tall man led him inside the old meatpacking plant with its eternal snowdrifts of broken glass and its piss-reeking recesses which locally overpowered the atmosphere of dust, moldy lard and bankruptcy as impure as Tyler’s motives used to be for accompanying Irene and John to some stupid John kind of movie; he’d go only in order to sit next to Irene, and somehow at the last minute John would end up between them. As his pupils expanded, he began to see a massive black woman whose steel earrings were almost as big as her head. He’d never met her before, and he’d never meet her again. He saw Beatrice (who was twitching in her sleep, dreaming of the cops), Chocolate, Strawberry, Martha, the crazy whore, Yellow Bird and the new girl, Bernadette. Why weren’t they out working? —Because their Queen, pitying them, had given them all magic medicine . . . He saw Lily, who was snoring sitting up, with drool running out of her mouth. He smelled Sunflower from a distance. (But Sunflower was dead, of course; it must have been someone else he smelled.) In the darkness loomed all the other whores ranked like the end-stacked white plastic chopsticks on Jones Street: skinny and quick, or fat and sullen, or vivaciously false like those ladies who lied with every word they said. All their faces were becoming now almost as familiar to him as the stench of urine on the streets of the Tenderloin.

  This place always creeps me out, Strawberry was saying. Ever since I was a child . . .

  Hush up, sweetie, said the Queen. Ain’t nothin’ gonna happen to you in here. You never been no child in here anyways . . .

  Look what I found on Hyde Street, said Strawberry.

  What? said Bernadette.

  Well, this is a Royalbra. I wear a 42B.

  I thought you was 38.

  Well, not now. That was then. This is now.

  So how’s it compare to them Sears an’ Roebuck bras?

  I don’t like ’em any better than Sears. I don’t like that elastic strap.

  Well, if you don’t like it I’ll take it. Does it have wires?

  Yes it does.

  Well, I hate bein’ wired. You keep it, Berry. Fuck them wires. I cut the wires, an’ they still dig in my ribs.

  That’s why it takes so long to try on a bra.

  Time’s what we got plenty of down here.

  The tall man said: Henry Tyler.

  The Queen said: Henry, I’m so glad. Henry, I’m gonna take care of you.

  Evening, Maj, he said happily. But he couldn’t see her yet. It was too dark inside. She always sat back away from the door.

  Back again! said Chocolate. Know why we’re not working tonight?

  Lemme guess, said Tyler. Overdraft at the sperm bank.

  You are disgusting! she laughed. No, it’s ’cause Sunflower—

  The Queen was wearily silent.

  Domino’s sick, he said to them all.

  Remember in that other underground place I kept sayin’ there was somebody there? said Strawberry in that dreamy druggy voice. Like spirits or something? I miss the place, creeps and all.

  Outside, the tall man was on one haunch, with his legs crossed, the bill of his cap practically stabbing into Domino’s sleeping face as he sat watching Tyler’s car. He muttered: See, I don’t even rate around here.

  | 132 |

  Mostly the Queen’s world was as slow as the Mexico of Beatrice, where homeless men lay on rice sacks on the sidewalk, their arms above their heads, and couples chatted in the hot dust beside stop signs, where the same fire engine with a broken windshield might sleep for months under the wide-streeted blocks of trees, and old sofas and chairs sat out in near-rainless yards. Strawberry told Chocolate the same story for the fifth time. Chocolate, pretending to listen, lay on a strip of foam rubber trying to screw up her courage to beg the Queen for an extra rock of crack even though she’d just had her turn. Beatrice, to whom the story was not directed at all, sat listening with her mouth open. Beatrice loved stories more than almost anyone. She stared into Strawberry’s face, gradually wiggling closer and closer until Chocolate wrinkled her nose because Beatrice smelled bad; but Strawberry, seeing that she had an audience, felt happy and proud enough to revamp her tale with mythic grandeur so beautiful that she herself believed it, and because Chocolate was not listening and Domino was out futilely peddling pussy to early afternoon drivers, nobody could spitefully deflate the story which thus emerged wet and new from its cocoon of facts and probabilities, becoming ever more beautiful until it finally fluttered overhead to shine like a luna moth on the ceiling of the abandoned warehouse until even Strawberry grew tired and realized at last that Chocolate was tired and then only Beatrice sat gazing at Strawberry longing for more in just the same way as Chocolate gazed at the Queen who opened heavy-lidded eyes, sighed, and crooked her finger at Chocolate who squirmed forward to receive her Queen’s saliva in her mouth; this substance, as I believe I have attested, possessed a narcotic and almost psychotropic effect; five minutes later the black woman was lying on her back, slowly licking her lips as her eyes happily glazed. It might be thought that this drug, being both free and moderately addictive, would have replaced cocaine or heroin or even meth in the whores’ list of staples, and indeed they did all partake, even Domino, not without a certain revulsion at their dependence upon another human being, but all of them except Sapphire knew that however much their Queen loved them, and they her, to remain with her all the time would have been stagnation, even death; and, indeed, her very secretions discouraged it; drink three times a day, and you were in heaven; six times, and you began to feel nauseous; ten times, and you vomited. So the whores were compelled to do as is foreordained for all, and go out into the world to live and to prowl. Where their Queen was, there grew sanctuary for every outcast, and even a little more, but not much more. How could there be? Where could Lord Cain rest forever, except in the tomb? This is not to imply that they could not be at least as contented as Irene lying under a blanket on the sofa next to John, watching romantic thriller videos which oozed soft piano music while she slowly got paler and sleepier until her eyes closed and her pale long fingers gripped the cushion, John frowning, half bored but unwilling now to turn it off before he learned how the plot turned out. Chocolate felt good;
Beatrice felt good . . . Beyond Sapphire’s writhing fingers on bare knees, Sapphire’s wriggling toes speaking like the upraised beaks of hungry baby birds, the Queen sat in darkness, her thoughts gone southwest toward Beatrice’s country with its nested ranges of beautiful grey or maybe someplace even farther past greyish black mountain in rows upon yellow sand so far away, where her regal spirit could look down the swells and bulges of gravel-mountains to the blue and yellow horizon, where she might walk upon a salt lake as smooth and hazy as a dream—Beatrice’s Mexico or the desert Africa of her own enslaved ancestors? It didn’t matter. She was beyond reach, like the crazy whore, who muttered: I kinda had this fever of kleptomania . . . She was who she was, beyond expediency or even consequences, like Domino whose menstrual period hadn’t come and who kept feeling queasy, like beautiful black Chocolate with her scabs and scars who wore no underpants under her miniskirt, and, sitting down on somebody’s steps on Capp Street to negotiate with a john, would often spread her legs so that he could see the fuzzy darkness; then she reached in to scratch-scratch-scratch, the implied warning of verminous contagion negating her little advertisement.

  Tyler’s visits gave them something to gossip about. —Here comes Henry, they said. He does that surveillance stuff.

  | 133 |

  Domino, however, rarely gossiped. She preferred solitude when she could get it, distrusting everybody in the world except for—provisionally—her Queen, who had never done her anything but good and whose evil she meticulously awaited. (There’s something so depressing about Dom, said Strawberry. She’s just like unhappy and unhealthy. Makes me want to stay away. —But she reminded Tyler of a brilliant, beautiful, unhappy girl he’d once known who wrote to him in a letter: Tomorrow I will wash my hair in rosewater and wear a yellow dress. I want to talk to you, just to hear your voice in this room. Your voice makes me think of oranges and sandalwood. Another time she wrote him: My dreams are only of one thing, and oh! my heart aches with you. He had wanted to be her one thing but he was too low and evil.)

  At four in the morning the blonde’s aching head awoke her. For a moment she could not understand where she was. The stench of her own vomit there in Tyler’s car made her desperately nauseous, and she wanted a drink of water, so she opened the door and stumbled out, waking Justin, who literally opened only one bloodshot eye. But then it seemed that she had only dreamed she’d been in Tyler’s car, for she woke up a second time on the floor of the meatpacking plant, lovingly swaddled by someone in rags and old newspapers. A spider crawled in her hair, and she squashed it. It was still dark. Her head ached worse than ever. The other girls were snoring. Lying among them reminded her of her latest stint in jail (thirty days, just because she’d forgotten to report to her probation officer one lousy time. —In felony cases they get super cautious, her public defender had said with a shrug.) Fifty-eight inmates had been caged in the dorm, some of them girls she knew, and some girls she didn’t. Disliking television, she’d slept during the daytime and stared at the ceiling at night, craving just one dose of pure white junk. The same sensations which induce salivation in others who pass by the restaurant windows of Chinatown, where roasted chickens, roasted red crackly pork strips, orange roast ducks and drumsticks dark and crunchy, hang down above silver reservoirs of steamed vegetables and sweet ricebeds, affected Domino when her mind turned toward pure coke, crack coke (also known as white girl or bump), China white, coal tar, speedball, crystal blue persuasion, quaaludes, poppers, red speed, black speed, valium, thorazine, codeine, morphine, greenbud, indica weed, brandy and beer. In Chinatown some chickens are even smoked blue-black, like old India rubber balls, and in Dominotown one could likewise find specialty items, but the staple, the regular boiled chicken, so to speak, was crack—delicious, mind-clearing, happy-making, ephemeral crack, white, white, white as the sails on the pale blue Bay on Sundays, not that crummy yellow stuff which cheapskates had cut with cornstarch . . . In the dorm Domino felt so lonely for crack that she almost screamed. She felt widowed, starved, suffocated. Sometimes she masturbated beneath the scratchy blanket, less because she felt horny than because giving herself orgasms was the one nice thing that she could make happen. If other jailgirls saw what she was doing, they kept quiet about it, probably because they were doing it, too. Every night she heard the moans. The guards let them do it. They knew they could only push the girls so far. Domino bit her lip and glared straight upward when she climaxed. Then she did it again and again, until she got bored and sore. She kept hoping that Justin or someone would bring her five dollars so that she could buy some shampoo, but no one ever came.

  At dawn she got up to beg the Queen for a fix and saw Tyler sleeping on the concrete. Scarcely knowing what she was saying, she muttered: That man’s going to kill me. He’s going to kill me, kill me, kill me.

  Oh, somebody’s awake, huh? said the Queen sleepily.

  You know what I need, Maj.

  Yeah, I know. C’mere. Come gimme a kiss . . .

  Maj. . .

  What?

  Maj, I want you to fuck me.

  All rightie, darling. Queen’s gonna . . . Oh, I’m so tired . . .

  Sorry, Maj.

  See, now you woke Sapphire. Give Sapphire a kiss, Dom. Give her a nice kiss. Okay. Now take her over an’ give her to Beatrice . . .

  L-l-l-uh . . . trilled the idiot girl.

  Sssh! said the Queen. Oh, now you done it. Now Strawberry’s awake, too. Come on upstairs with me, Dom. That’s where the rock is anyways. But you know you can’t keep shortin’ all the other girls on rock. You got to put back some of what you take.

  Oh, bullshit, said the blonde angrily.

  They went upstairs and the Queen yawned and said: Oh me oh my, am I tired. Okay, sweetie. Pull up your dress.

  Maj?

  What?

  How do I know you really love me?

  You don’t. Where’s my . . . all rightie, dear. Now bend over.

  Maj?

  You want to get laid or not? You sure got a lot of questions early in the morning.

  I need a hit.

  There you go.

  Maj, it’s all bullshit, isn’t it? What you said about Sunflower.

  I don’t bullshit, Domino.

  You promise you won’t tell anybody?

  Hey, you’re wastin’ that. Beatrice worked hard to earn that rock. Don’t let it . . .

  The way you said she was like a saint and the best of us.

  All right, bend over now, said the Queen, whose kiss was as delicate as the tiny droplets of mist on Tyler’s birdstreaked windshield as he sat on stakeout in the T.L. —And be quiet.

  Please, Maj.

  I promise I love you just as much as I ever loved Sunflower. Domino, I’m your Queen. I belong to you as long as you need me. I got to love you.

  The others don’t like me, do they?

  That’s your little cross to bear, ain’t it? Listen, Dom. Anytime you really want to, you can make friends. Inside that cussedness you’re such a good girl . . .

  Maj, I—oh, I feel so sick.

  That’s ’cause you’re pregnant, you silly silly girl. You got to go to the clinic an’ get aborted. You want me to tell Chocolate to take you?

  Not that bitch. Who does she think she is? She always—

  All rightie. I’ll tell Justin then.

  Thank you, Maj. I appreciate it. But I have to tell you something about Chocolate. She—

  Don’t be a tattletale, Dom.

  Now I get it. I bet you’re really on her side. That’s how you’ve always been, Maj. But I’m not going to—

  Lordy lordy day, the Queen muttered.

  | 134 |

  When the Queen and Domino came back downstairs, Henry Tyler was waiting. Domino brushed past him without a word and lay down again to sleep. Tyler knelt down and took the Queen’s hand.

  What is it, Henry? she said, smiling in spite of herself.

  Maj, he whispered in a low voice, what can I do to get over Irene?

 
Why do you want to do that?

  Because it hurts so much.

  Ah, said the Queen. You want to grab some of that happiness.

  Yes,Ido. . .

  She stroked his head. —You saw Sunflower. And I showed you Sunflower’s pain. I opened her up for you while she lay sleeping and showed it to you. And you still don’t understand.

  | 135 |

  Are you a lez? said Domino. I’m a lez.

  No no no, said Beatrice.

  Have you ever fantasized about being with a woman? said Domino. Have you been fucked? Have you ever been fucked?

  The Queen says—

  She’s trash, chuckled Domino, leaning her shiny teeth and shiny shiny eyes and shiny vinyl skirt over the cage. —It’s so boring, being Queen of the Whores. I’d rather be God.

  I’m ’fraid, said Beatrice. I’m ’fraid of you.

  But with the utmost tenderness, Domino lowered her pale, almost incorporeal face onto Beatrice’s; and out of habit and fear Beatrice submitted. Soon the two women were kissing each other, cheeks swallowed up in each other’s mouths, while behind them a big-breasted masturbator was screaming and kicking the cage.

  I want you to keep your authority, Domino whispered to the heterosexual girl. But I want you to give me permission to . . . through your bra . . . let me touch your nipples very very softly.

  And she kissed her. And she licked her mouth, licked her face.

  You’re a sport! Domino laughed. You’ve earned my respect.

  | 136 |

  The Queen had picked up a new girl named Bernadette, a slender black lady who resembled a beautiful cat-devil. Domino felt attracted. She went to Bernadette and said: If somebody gave you a million dollars, what would you do?

  What would I do? Shit! laughed the other woman lazily. Nobody gonna give me a mill. They’re all too cheap in this town.

  Strawberry came running. —Hey, Domino, your date’s here!