The Royal Family

by William T. Vollmann

  A masculine Christian name, that of John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, explains my Oxford English Dictionary; hence, from early ME. times one of the commonest in England. Also used as a representative proper name for a footman, butler, waiter, messenger, or the like. John’s also a priest; he’s John-a-dogs the dog-whipper (a very unlikely occupation for this John, who loves Mugsy); he’s John-of-all-trades, which might well be true; in my slang dictionary he’s a dried fish and a policeman; on the San Francisco streets he’s a customer of prostitutes. John, in short, is Everyman. Deny him life, and we’d be compelled by all statutes of consistency to reduce the Evangelist first to torpor, then to the veriest non-existence.

  John himself, I am sure, would plead the real and essential nature of his own being, without disfiguring himself with the least tic or twitch of affectation. And whatever he says, he means. In a word, John was born with the gift of sincerity.

  Thus the conception of River City, hanging in the air like a rainbow mist, engaged John’s sincerity. Our Sacramento boy had swum, waded, waterski’d, rafted, fished, and frogged all around town. He believed in the riverine nature of his home town and even thought he understood it. John daydreamed less than most, but sometimes when he was tired or when Mr. Singer exasperated him, he let his mind rise higher than the Transamerica Pyramid, then higher still, the fish-blue fog of San Francisco gradually getting as white as the paint on the fuselage of a brand-new airplane, then blue beyond the clouds’ white fur, and even before Captain John has activated the FASTEN SEATBELTS sign the eyes of lordly passengers already begin to be beguiled by farmland checkerboards—surprising how many farms are still left, squatting on their squares of green and brown! Now to the south one can see the wide silver shining of the wet Delta. In spring the fields are so lushly green as to approach turquoise. Summer quickly comes to blast them. —Ladies and gentlemen, in preparation for landing, please raise your innermost barriers and insure that your souls are securely stowed beneath your feet and that your mindlessness is in full, upright, LOCKED position; welcome to Sacramento, where, low to the ground, it’s all so sad and dull.

  But to John it was not dull, and he refused to believe in the sadness.

  Maybe it wasn’t sad. John’s Sacramento nostalgia proceeded with the abnormal smoothness of the riverbank’s curve—so many rivers! Or were they just a couple of rivers doubling? Amidst bright fields those darkly tree-lined, dishwater-colored rivers offered strange light. To Henry Tyler, needless to say, the rivers meant less than those river-trees, which resembled the hair on the Queen’s armpits.

  It was the middle of March. John knew so well that the fresh Christmas-colored leaves of riverberry bushes were now sweating in the sun of Sacramento, the smell of dead fish ascending from blue mud-banks, the damps of spring not yet burned away by the summer’s golden anger. Wasn’t it right about this time last year that Irene had told him she was pregnant?

  You want to look in on Mom this weekend and then drive back through the Delta?

  I want to have a torrid time, Celia said with what she hoped to be a sensual pout. Will it be torrid?

  Come on, said John impatiently. Tell me yes or no.

  Maybe, said Celia, licking her lips.

  Laughing, John looked at his watch, accepting her complaisance in advance. When can you leave? he asked.

  On Friday? Six o’clock.

  Four, said John, drumming his fingers.

  Oh, four-thirty, I guess. But that means I . . . What should I bring?

  The hell with that. Just throw a few clothes in a suitcase and go. But you’ll need a nice dress to cheer up Mom. Well, you’ll be in your work clothes. You can wear that burgundy blazer I bought you. And we’ll take Mom out to dinner if she’s well enough and then maybe we’ll spend the night in Rio Vista or Walnut Grove. Or maybe we’ll just get an early start on Saturday. Mom needs company, you know, and I ought to mow the lawn. You can take Mom grocery shopping. And then we’ll head for the Delta. You’ll love it. You’ll absolutely love it. It’s like another world down there, Celia, it’s . . .

  It’s what?

  Oh, forget it, said John, remembering from his boyhood the funny old bartender at Al the Wop’s bar in Locke, and the gas station attendant at Walnut Grove like an emperor, commanding each motorists to slow, to advance, to halt. He wanted Celia to be surprised, to discover all these wonders for herself.

  You’re smiling, said Celia. What are you thinking about?

  You’ll see when we get to Locke. In Locke they all remember me. One time Homer Fessendon and Charlie Wong and Sam Smith and I drove down there and stapled Monopoly money to the ceiling of China Mike’s. Even Hank was there. And Ronnie the barkeep . . . oh, it’s all too funny. You’ll see.

  So your mother’s—

  Well, it’s not good. She’s not comfortable. —John glared at his watch. —They were supposed to give her medicine two hours ago. If they didn’t, they’ll hear about it from me.

  Having more than a half-memory of the purple and white wisteria flowers in his mother’s back yard in April, and likewise remembering the strangely intense perfume of her jasmine hedge, John found himself driving to Saramento in that season when, letting more luminescence into life, we set all our clocks and watches back an hour—an hour less sleep, to be sure, but John read in his Sunday Examiner-Chronicle that people used to sleep nine hours and now slept only seven—not that they didn’t complain, not that the traffic experts and economists didn’t bemoan the costs—more accidents, lower productivity—but the point was that it could be done. John got by quite well on six and a half hours of sleep—not as remarkable as the achievement of my friend Lara Lorson in Washington, D.C., who lives on four—but John wouldn’t have complained because he hated complainers. In that late spring season, John got by on even less sleep than that, because it was almost June twenty-seventh when for the rest of his life John would wake up from fearful nightmares of Irene, who’d reincarnated herself either as some dangerous animal or as a skeleton or a bleeding corpse, chasing him with intent to devour him, gnawing her way through fences, killing all his protectors, and even though John knew that it was a dream, a stupid dream, he could never awake to shake away the taint of horror that he inhaled with every stifling breath; every June twenty-seventh he’d awake feeling exhausted and anxious, his eyes locking in on the clock radio to find out whether Irene was still alive or whether 9:37 A.M., the time he’d found her in the bathroom, had already come; in fact he always awoke miserably early on June twenty-seventh, at 6:30 or before, compelled to lie half-paralyzed in his bed, watching the crawl of the second hand, and the absurdly glacial moment of the minute hand, until Irene had died again, releasing him into an abyss of loathing and self-loathing so that he could begin his weary day. The day after the Brady contracts for the Dallas franchise of Feminine Circus were drawn up to everyone’s satisfaction, John threw on bluejeans and his favorite polo shirt, setting out with the half-acquiescent Celia, whose desire to belong to him and be taken care of (or, as she liked to think of it, to be used) enhanced her availability.

  It’s all very well for Mom to think she can take care of herself, John was saying. But she’s getting old. No one wants to get old, I guess. And . . .

  Celia stared at him in amazement. She had scarcely ever heard him be so introspective.

  And Hank of course is always hanging around, said John, checking his watch and the speedometer at the same time. —He says he’s helping her but really he’s just freeloading, eating up her groceries.

  Should we stop at the supermarket?

  I already made up a list.

  I—

  She’s afraid to die, Celia. But I asked her, Mom, do you believe in Heaven? and she blinked her eyes yes. Thank God she can talk again now. And I said, well, Mom, that’s where you’re going. It’s going to be better than it is for you here.

  And do you think she agrees?

  Who the hell knows? said John. Poor Mom.

  And do you believe it
?

  Believe what?

  What you just said.

  Look, Celia. Let’s leave me out of this.

  I’m sorry.

  And you know another thing that gripes me? The way those nurses dress. Can’t you remember when all the nurses dressed in white, with those starched white caps and the class pin on the cap just so? And now they come in dressed like—I dunno, dressed crazy. And they talk on the phone to their boyfriends; they don’t turn Mom often enough; now she’s getting bedsores . . .

  They turned onto R Street, and John said: Oh, shit. Fucking Hank is here.

  Why do you worry so much about meeting him?

  Look, said John. What seems like nothing to you is not nothing to me. Enough said.

  Tyler was just getting into his car. John drove past the driveway and waited on the other side of the street with the windows up. When Tyler, not seeing him, continued to take his time, John leaned viciously on the horn. Tyler stiffened. Spying John’s car at last, he ostentatiously turned his back and got into the driver’s seat.

  He looks really sad and bitter, Celia said.

  Can we drop that subject? said John.

  Finally Tyler’s car started, and he backed out of the driveway, farting smoke. —He needs a smog check, John muttered. I wonder if he . . . —Slowly Tyler drove past them, heading toward the freeway.

  All right, great, laughed John. That asshole’s gone.

  He pulled up into the driveway. Celia got out glumly as he strode to the front door and rang the bell.

  Mrs. Tyler embraced him and said: Did you say hello to Henry?

  The snails are eating up your magnolia bushes, Mom, said John. He plucked them off where they clung like hard brown fruit, and crushed them under his heel.

  They said it was going to be a bad year for slugs and snails, said Mrs. Tyler.

  They’re not kidding. Oh, my God, they’re all over the place. They’re eating you out of house and home, Mom.

  It’s terrible, Mrs. Tyler said.

  We’re going to have to do something about this, John said grimly, spreading white snail-poisoning powder, bending and stretching. Celia, who was allergic, leaned against the car.

  Look at this, Ceel! Up here! No wonder these leaves look like hell.

  Imagine how many more there must be at night, said his mother in her now customary trembling voice.

  A very scary thought, Mom.

  They drove to the farmers’ market under the freeway and Celia mixed in among smiling old Japanese men who were slowly picking through flashing and rolling tangerines while a tiny Asian girl sat on the concrete plucking off stems. Celia bought two pounds of the fruit, and a pound of Fuji apples from the boys in caps and sweatshirts, while John commanded two pounds of live clams to be clicked into a plastic bag because his mother loved clams, and then for himself and Celia he bought a huge-eyed goldeneyed American mackerel. —Okay! shouted a Japanese in a yellow rubber apron. Buffalo fish! Seeben tweeny five! —No, thanks, said John.—Oh, yes! cried the oyster salesman. These are very fresh. —Forget it, said John. —Right here! Best asparagus in town! Five dollars! Taste the difference! —Fine, said John. Ceel, give him five dollars.

  They had already passed the so-called executive airport and the Sky Riders Motel. Soon they would enter the shining muck of ricefields.

  Sunglasses, said John.

  Celia reached in the glove compartment as her lover, going thirty-five in a twenty-five-mile-an-hour zone, rolled down the window.

  All the pear blossoms will be gone by now anyway, he warned.

  How do you know?

  Because they don’t last forever, idiot.

  To Celia herself, to whom John’s open exuberance gave hopes that matters might finally be decided between them one way or another, this journey smelled strange and wild, and she began to feel almost afraid. John resembled her in his soul. She understood that now. He had immense expectations. In her own life, most expectations had been disappointed, but she refused to give them up; she’d rather be bitter than cynical. She could not really understand why this drive was so important to John, and she knew that if she questioned him too much his exultation would simply vanish into anxious vindictiveness like fog-devoured Ocean Beach in San Francisco, where homebody Irene had once sat with folded legs before the television, reading an article about a woman who had a liposuction.

  What kind of hedge is that? she asked ingratiatingly.

  I have no idea, John laughingly shrugged. Generic hedge.

  And so they entered fog, and sun-yellow mustard fields, then tall wet grass and the water tower, after which Sacramento lay behind them and they were in Freeport where the wide, bright flat world of the Delta commenced. To John, the Delta was the loveliest place in the world, whose loveliness was compounded by other people’s failures of appreciation. He needed no protection from any bad thoughts there, because it was a heavenly maze whose exit passageways were themselves deliciously langorous and misleading, like Celia’s endless lists; and John for his part epitomized the Delta by its crown jewel, Grand Island, which was surrounded by low river-channels and which offered roads like Moebius strips: easy to follow one all the way around and end up somewhere else; easy likewise to turn off a road and go away and away and away and end up where you started . . . John had had a dream the night before about being here. (Celia for her part dreamed that she was in bed with a strange man in a grey suit who was very worried about something. The man climbed on top of her and began to fuck her, but when he was finished, blue stuff like some strange new toothpaste came out of him.) John dreamed that he was opening a jewel box filled with rubies, and that Celia had played with the precious stones as a happy child would play with beach pebbles, and then behind the rubies, in the bottom of the box, lay a plate glass window through which the entire Delta was inexplicably passing. —There’s Cliff’s Marina, John said in the dream. See the sign that says LIVE CRAYFISH? —Uh huh, said Celia, playing with her rubies. (I just want to sit on the beach and stare, or maybe read and dream and then swim in warm water somewhere, she had confided to him that night before they fell alseep.) The wide silvery river was very still. Birds and fog hung about them as their dream-window flashed along the levee top, showing them orchards, brown spring fields, and the occasional palm tree. When John awoke, he realized that the magic panorama must have taken place in March or early April at the latest, when the hot blasts of present time had not yet withered anything. Apples and pears promised themselves through blossoms as white as the now sunny river, and they’d already come into Hood, elevation twenty-three feet above sea level, whose attractions included HOME MILK and Skittles’s bar. A fat dog was lying on his side by the drugstore. Wet muck under the flowering orchards reflected the blossoms. After Hood came Courtland and then flowering orchard-tops by the trestle bridge, then a yellow steel drawbridge attended by river-smell; after that came Galt, and finally Locke, whose elevation was thirteen. John woke up smiling.

  Now the dream was over and decayed back to moldy shadowhood, for it was mid-May and the Delta was getting hot, with double rows of trees presiding over the browning grass whose golden and silver seedheads would continue to accrete their jewels of life until the sudden day of spending came, that day yet as unimaginable as any day of bustling urban life in the Delta. Passing the sign for LIVE CRAYFISH, John floored it, honking at a farm rig which might have slowed him down. He almost wished that they had come the other way so that Celia could hear the bells clanging on Walnut Grove’s steel-decked drawbridge now splitting itself and rising away from the river-sparkle, but soon enough she would. He was getting so excited now about showing his younger self off to Celia that memories from nowhere buzzed him like little white cropduster planes.

  It’s beautiful, she said.

  There’s nothing beautiful about it, he said happily. It’s just suburban, that’s all.

  The Sacramento River was wide and pale and sparkling along the levee. On the other side stretched long furrow-etched fields, and v
ineyards whose stakes offered multiple vanishing points as the car rushed along. A speedboat whined up the river, and John smiled, remembering how he had shaken off his virginity in a speedboat. He switched on the radio, which announced a rollover on Interstate-5, nobody killed. —Lots of stupid drivers out there, he sighed, switching it off in a restless, almost anxious motion. The reflective orchard puddles in John’s dream were now yellow and rubbery-looking with algae.

  See, there are no pear blossoms, he said triumphantly. I’m telling you, they’re gone. They’ve all fallen off.

  And what kind of tree is that?

  You know, you ask me these things, and it’s frustrating, because I don’t know anything about trees.

  Passing through Courtland, John raised his arm like a maestro so that Celia would pay attention to the bells and the humming as the yellow bridge slowly parted company from itself, the bright halves straining at the sky’s sunny wind and citrus smell, and finally a solitary high-masted vessel passed through, sails furled, and then the drawbridge redescended for the sake of the queue of cars.

  This is doing so well, that white azalea, John said.

  She cleared her throat.

  Ceel, you think Mom is okay?

  Well, I . . . I guess. She seems to be, the girl said, anxious or sleepy (in fact she was thinking that Mrs. Tyler looked very poorly, and she knew that if John were to ask her whether she believed that his mother would soon die she would truthfully answer: I can’t bear the idea of it), and then they passed the orchard where John had once made love with a girl named Mary, a girl from one of these hot still Delta towns; there’d been emerald grass beneath, no puddles the way there were in spring, and he remembered sparkles on the cool blue river like the drops of sweat on Mary’s forehead; and as he drove on, Celia gazing tolerantly upon Courtland’s pale white and grey buildings, upon the tiny pillared courthouse, upon big-tired farm vehicles rolling down the levee road, John found himself longing to make love with Celia right now, perhaps beneath this palm tree whose leaves were loose, glossy, dark like an excited lover’s hairy labia; but he extricated himself from his desire by convincing himself rightly or wrongly that such lovemaking would be an act of violation and exploitation, using Celia in Mary’s place as he had used her to be Irene (strangely enough, he didn’t think of Domino, either because her image would have scalded him or because she was so unique as to be a placeholder for nobody else before or since in his life). John remembered swimming past the Levee Cafe with little blonde Isleton girls who wore baseball caps in the water; he must have been very young then. And then he’d met Allie, the one to whom he’d husked his virginity in the speedboat, and then he’d found Mary, whose skin and soul were both as white as a new houseboat on the Sacramento River. Celia cleared her throat, allergically or anxiously, he couldn’t tell. Driving past Queen Anne’s lace so tall and white, John longed for Mary frivolously and desperately. He’d met her in China Mike’s bar in Locke. Her cunt had reminded him of soft-cut brown and golden fields. Did he comprehend that this Mary who touched him now wasn’t even Mary anymore, and that Mary had never been his memory, that all he felt now was a carnal ghost like one of the shadows which sometimes came down upon his brother like flesh in a black miniskirt walking, flesh in black high heels, flesh and a black purse, flesh and long red hair or black hair or the face of a sister-in-law or a Queen, meaningless flesh, to which all flesh is susceptible, because pleasure hides death? He tried to think of Celia, who left him cold, and of Irene, who left him cold, and then Celia smiled and touched his wrist very lightly with her long sensitive fingers and he was overwhelmed by love and guilt.