The Royal Family

by William T. Vollmann

  You like to touch that? she finally said.

  So much, he said.

  She put her hand on his hand and drew her fingers across his as he masturbated her.

  A moment later she moaned. That animal happiness of hers thrilled him.

  But then she said: It’s making me nervous.

  Sometimes he called her on the phone to give her compliments. As soon as he had hung up, he felt sad and miserable inside. Once he called her back five minutes again and she seemed just as happy to talk to him as ever. He felt happy, too. Then the conversation ended, and he hung up and felt miserable again.

  | 502 |

  Speak when spoken to, you little bitch, chuckled Domino, slapping Sapphire across the face.

  Doan hit back! whispered Beatrice, for whom running away had not worked out.

  | 503 |

  Mr. Brady? said Tyler.

  How the fuck did you get my number? This is an unlisted number. This is a business number.

  Unfortunately, it was in a new CD-ROM product that just arrived today, said Tyler.

  Wait a second, said Brady. Do I know you?

  Do you know me, boss, or do you just believe that you know me, or do you believe that I believe that you believe that I know you?

  Henry fucking Tyler! boomed Brady in high delight. This San Francisco voice reminded him that he had fond memories of the Ritz Carlton Hotel, of the bells from Grace Cathedral mingling with the trolleycar bells. —Well, how the blazes are you, old son?

  Can’t complain, Mr. Brady. And you?

  I personally am doing quite well, said Brady. This Feminine Circus thing, well, everyone just loves it. Feminine Circus is going places, son.

  Well, how about that, said Tyler.

  We ran a lot of marketing experiments, said Brady. We tested the product within an inch of tolerance. And you know what, Henry?

  What? said Tyler.

  The goddamned product held up.

  Well, I’ll be, said Tyler.

  Cut to the chase now, said Brady. What do you need?

  Where’s the Queen, Mr. Brady?

  Which Queen? laughed Brady. Don’t tell me that even you ended up falling for that horseshit you snookered me with . . .

  That’s a mixed metaphor, boss. Well, no. I guess it could just be an odd one.

  I don’t have time to screw around, said Brady.

  Okay, boss, but I do. So where’s the Queen?

  What do you really want? Brady said wearily.

  I want the Queen back. I want my Queen.

  You’re a nutcase, Brady growled. Falling for some skanky little black bitch who never even existed. It’s not going to happen, Henry. Take a hint. You’re nuts. You’re in dreamland. Now, let me ask you something. Are you just a nut, or are you going to make yourself a dangerous nut?

  I’ll say just one word more, Tyler said. Please.

  This is embarrassing, said Brady. Now, Henry, I’m sorry for you, but I’m going to have to let you go now . . .

  | 504 |

  Toward the end of November he dated Beatrice again. (Outside, two kinky-looking, fat-buttocked cops were helping a weeping woman into an ambulance, the one at her elbow, leading her up the ramp; nobody was in any hurry so any other passengers must have died.) He asked about the Queen. Beatrice whispered that she was too afraid to revisit that subject, but Strawberry was up in Sacramento now, and Sacramento was far enough away from Domino and Brady that Strawberry might feel safe . . .

  But she didn’t. When he finally tracked her down, she wasn’t hooking downtown or in Oak Park anymore; she was doing three months in Rio Consumnes for parole violation. Her real name was Naomi Luisa Ehernberger. Inmates whose last names began with any letter between A and M inclusive were allowed visitors on Saturday mornings, provided that their behavior had been apathetic or assiduous. He drove down from Sacramento in Dan Smooth’s car at seven on a bright cool leafy Saturday morning with scarcely any traffic to hinder him. He took Route 99 south to the exit for Elk Grove Boulevard and then pulled into the first service station he saw and got directions to the prison. The cop at the door sent him back to the car twice, the first time because he’d dared to show up with his wallet in his pocket, and the second time because there were too many keys on his keyring. These contraband items having been rendered inoffensive, the cop at the door slowly read his visiting application slip twice, disparaged his penmanship, and motioned him into the hallway where after waiting in a line of quiet patient people he met a second cop who scrutinized his application slip and sent him upstairs where after showing the application slip and his driver’s license to an old desk cop who stamped his hand WDF for Women’s Detention Facility he had the pleasure of settling into one of the many white plastic chairs which faced the television’s advertisements for wonderful cars with almost no money down and easy hazy future obligations; he stayed there for about half an hour, until they called for all persons whose hands had been stamped WDF to line up. He followed his peers across the parking lot past the high fence with the sign MALE PRISONER INTAKE to the Women’s Detention Facility upon the ivied walls of whose exercise yard another sign read NOTICE: IT IS UNLAWFUL TO COMMUNICATE WITH INMATES IN THIS FACILITY. Inside the cafeteria where he was going to meet Strawberry, another sign prohibited the inmates from attempting communication with the food servers, and Strawberry would tell him in that place the women weren’t suposed to talk to each other, either. They had ten or fifteen minutes to eat, four to a table, and the administration didn’t want any fights. Tyler showed his application slip to a pretty deputy behind glass, then went to the bathroom because the deputy had just announced that anybody who needed to use the toilet during the visit would not be allowed to come back. A hale, whitehaired old man stood straining over the toilet. Tyler heard three or four staccato drops of liquid splash into the bowl. —Weren’t hardly worth it, laughed the man with a wink, leaving the toilet to Tyler, who after a more volumetrically successful urination returned to the waiting hall to discover that beside the panoramic window-view of steel seats and telephones a door had been opened permitting egress to the cafeteria into which uncertain women in yellow or red institutional shirts were now advancing, each searching for her visitor. Later, when Tyler met Chocolate at the Wonderbar and told her where he’d been, she asked what color shirt Strawberry was wearing, and when he said yellow, Chocolate looked sad and said: She’s in the bad place. Poor thing. —Camelia Dorm, he said. —That’s the worst, Chocolate said. That’s the fishbowl place where they don’t trust you. Screws watching you everywhere.

  (That was almost the last time he saw Chocolate. He saw her once more a month later in lacy black, limping eagerly after the tall man who, pushing a stolen shopping cart heaped with stolen women’s clothes, scarcely glanced at her. A car slowed, and the tall man said to the driver: You lookin’? —Naw, just lookin’, said the driver, and sped off. The tall man cursed. Tyler was too heartsick even to call out. He watched them vanish down Sixteenth Street.)

  At the prison the other visitors were embracing their women, and when he saw Strawberry approaching him, tanned, overweight, tense and glum, he thought that she would embrace him, too, the way she always did at the Queen’s or in the Wonderbar, so he was actually stupid enough to have begun to outstretch his arms to her when he saw that she had another visitor, an old regular who sometimes entertained her down in Stockton, a half-toothless ex-con who loved Strawberry and had taken the risk of coming here—luckily, they hadn’t checked his record this morning; otherwise, he’d have been busted. —Strawberry flew into his arms, gazing apprehensively at Tyler.

  Hi, Henry, she said tonelessly.

  Seeing that she feared the ex-con’s jealousy, Tyler shook the man’s hand and talked exclusively to him for a moment or two, then said: Well, listen, if you two need some privacy maybe I’ll just sit over at this other table for a bit. Take your time.

  Just five minutes, said the ex-con, very friendly now that Tyler had put him first.

  Tyl
er sat gazing at nothing for fifteen minutes until Strawberry called him over.

  How’s everything? he said.

  Fine.

  Beatrice says to tell you she loves you.

  Strawberry shrugged.

  Dan Smooth’s in trouble.

  So what?

  Are they treating you okay?

  Fine.

  How many girls in your dorm?

  Fifty-nine. Five toilets. We get up at four in the morning for breakfast and sometimes there’s a long line for the toilet, but otherwise it ain’t bad.

  Look, you’re kind of my family, so I . . . You got any friends in here?

  I just keep to myself, Strawberry said. She sat anxiously gazing at the ex-con, so Tyler turned to him and for five minutes the two men spoke of beer and whiskey and Delta towns. Tyler asked the ex-con if he ever got into San Francisco much and the ex-con said he didn’t. Tyler told him to come to the Wonderbar and he’d buy him a drink.

  Well, I don’t go drinking that much on my own anymore, the ex-con said. When Strawberry’s there I kind of keep in line. Otherwise I seem to get myself in trouble.

  Yeah, I understand, said Tyler. Well, you’re a lucky man to have Strawberry to look after you.

  Strawberry hung her head.

  Strawberry, he said, I need to know something. There’s a lady I’m looking for—a lady I love. I think you know who she is.

  Don’t, said Strawberry, weeping. Please don’t.

  A guard came over to their table and said: Calm yourself down now. You don’t want to go upsetting everybody else.

  Just tell me this, Tyler said. Can I keep looking? Is there any hope?

  Do you have any idea what would happen to me if Domino heard that we had this conversation?

  Well, said Tyler to the ex-con, I’m sure that you and Strawberry have a lot to talk about, so I’ll be on my way. Strawberry, I’ll put ten dollars in your account.

  Good to know you, said the ex-con, accepting Tyler’s hand.

  The Queen used to say I always kept a dirty clod of dirt in my mouth, Strawberry laughed desperately.

  You miss her, too, don’t you?

  She was so good to Sapphire. I used to cut out curtains from paper and glue them into little cardboard boxes to make dollhouses for Sapphire but she never played with ’em ’cause she . . .

  Wasn’t she good to you, too? he bullied her. Wasn’t she good to all of us?

  You were leaving, the ex-con said. I already shook your hand.

  Tyler went out. —I want a Queen with number eighteen trisomy syndrome, he muttered with a laugh. Or a hyperactive microcephalic girl . . .

  | 505 |

  At eight-thirty the next morning it was sunny and cool, and while somebody with a long-handled swab washed the windows of Pancho Villa’s until they were as sparkling mirrors, a black man and a Chicana woman argued on the far side of the street. Tyler had seen the woman working on South Van Ness a couple of nights ago. The man had a stick. First they launched at one another the small arms fire of curses, gradually more highly charged. —Don’t you threaten me or I’ll tell the Queen, you S.O.B., the woman snarled, raising her arms, at which the man got her in a chokehold and started dragging her away by her neck, shaking her as a hunting dog does some still struggling duck. Joyously he shouted: There is no Queen anymore, you ignorant bitch! The old lady beside Tyler shook her head, enjoying every minute of it. When Tyler was younger he had once tried to break up a similar scene in which the man pulled a knife on the woman, but at his approach the woman had thrown one arm around the man, shaken her fist, and told him to mind his own fucking business, while the one with the knife chuckled and sneered. Now Tyler was more like the woman on the sidewalk who was enjoying herself so much, the formulaic head-shakings merely an easy sacrifice on the altar of that enjoyment, the only distinction (and, in the long view of things, not a very important one) being that he didn’t enjoy watching it at all. In short, he didn’t get involved.

  The man glanced across the street, saw Tyler, and winked. He yelled: No rub wit’ the Capp Street hoes!

  What’d he say, what’d he say? whispered the old lady beside him in fascination.

  Well, ma’am, explained Tyler, I think he was telling me not to use condoms if I have sex with the prostitutes on Capp Street. Or else he might have been suggesting that he doesn’t believe I use condoms when I have sex with the prostitutes on Capp Street. Those are the two possibilities that occur to me. Which one do you think is right?

  The man came over to them and the lady’s face slammed shut and Tyler said howdy.

  Why you standing on the corner like that? the man said to him. You make me nervous. If you stand on the corner you might get popped.

  That’s okay, said Tyler. My name’s Mr. Popcorn.

  The black man laughed and walked away, muttering over his shoulder: You stupid honky sonofabitch.

  | 506 |

  Since that first descent into the royal tunnel now so long ago, Tyler’s wounds, trivial though perhaps they were, had never stopped bleeding; in everything he did, he left behind a dark and sticky spoor of sadness which predators could follow. Brady smelled it from the first. That was why he sent Tyler a videocassette meant to humiliate him. Having had no news of the Queen for so long, Tyler took the black plastic cartridge in his hand with helpless dread. After the football game on television cut off, superseded by the now rewound footage, static sizzled with blue harshness on the screen, and then abruptly the tunnel appeared again, or one like it. A procession was approaching. There they were, all the street whores he’d once known, proceeding down a dark passage, each with a bridle in her mouth—a detail which Brady’s slapper, who enjoyed the classics, had gotten out of Herodotus. Brady had dressed the Queen as a slave, in rags and chains. She had a black eye, and her front teeth were knocked out. It was probably all faked, just virtual reality, one of Brady’s nasty jokes. The camera zoomed in. Now he could see that the whores were being required to balance turds on their heads. Most of them were crying. The Queen wasn’t allowed to speak anymore, so she couldn’t comfort them—Brady had threatened to cut her tongue out if she did—and the turd had been placed on the back of her head so that she had to bow her face to keep it from falling. Her eyelids were like cigarette-burned curtains trying to keep out the light.

  | 507 |

  I keep thinking that she’s somewhere and needs our help, he said, but I don’t even know where to look. It’s all so hopeless. Just for a second I’ll believe that she’s alive and is waiting for us to get her out, and then I’ll come to my senses and . . .

  Oh, shut up, said Smooth. Nice view, huh?

  A lady was pushing her infant in a stroller. Tyler couldn’t tell whether the baby was a boy or a girl. But to Smooth it didn’t matter.

  Sacramento’s in my blood now, Smooth said. I like this house. I like Q Street. Do you like Q Street?

  (Sacramento may be dull but it is centrally located, they say, because westward lies San Francisco only an hour and a half away, unless traffic is terrible; eastward lies skiing and waterskiing at Lake Tahoe; northeastward and southeastward we can also quickly strike the “gold country”—Tyler for his part well remembered a boyhood visit to the Empire Mine whose main shaft slanted down infinitely, buttressed and skeletonized with barrel-ribs, stays, rusty corsets fabricated according to the envisonings of long-dead engineers. Silver droplets of yesterday’s rain leaked through the soil and then transected that endless square shaft, wriggling on a beam of its cold lights. The boy smelled dirt, gravel and old metal. This was earth. This was where he must go.)

  I said, do you like Q Street? You know what the FBI calls this house? They call it the Q Street compound.

  I hope that makes you feel important.

  Don’t be a goody-goody, Henry, said Smooth, whose words remained as always long and slow and unstoppable like a string of cylindrical wine cars on some old train. —Fill up that glass of yours. I love living in Sacramento. But I don’t want to die here.
I’d rather die in San Francisco. It sounds more sinful, don’t you think?

  But is there any chance that the Queen, uh—

  That’s a perfect thought. That thought is as fresh as a young boy’s anus.

  Smooth, I—

  You had your chance and you didn’t use it, I’m sorry to say. You could have taken her somewhere if you’d really cared, but you know what, Henry? Your envious ears got in the way. You never loved her. You only loved Irene. And for once I’m not trying to be cruel; I’m just speaking the truth.

  Would you stop it?

  You want my help again, don’t you? Hey, you want me to be a bloodhound on the trail of the Queen’s abductors? Buddy, I’m a private eye from way back! Send me into any men’s room and I’ll sniff the urinal to get their traces. Are they fresh traces? I’ll wonder aloud . . . Let me see. —Somebody drank a lot of coffee recently, I’ll say to you. It’s got a real strong odor to it. How would those wine connoisseurs put it? Well, a strong Java nose, let’s say, not light and fruity at all, nothing fancy—he’s not one of your espresso men—moving on to a bold finish in the low register with overtones of beer and something meaty, maybe roast beef, maybe a hamburger. And you’ll say thank you, case closed. You’ll say—

  Oh, shut up, you twisted sonofabitch.

  She’s gone, Henry. Get it? We know that. From her prophecies. Was she ever wrong?

  Never.

  And what did she say?

  But that’s bullshit, Dan, just to give up on someone because—

  Then don’t give up. You’re the private detective. You know how to find lost people. Or at least you should know, Sherlock.

  Knowing that if he did not patiently persist and bear the other man’s insults, still another hope would be closed—remembering likewise the Queen’s fantastic notions on the virtue of undeserved suffering—he controlled his despairing rage and said: What about Domino?