The Royal Family

by William T. Vollmann

Ah, so it is, said Smooth, flicking his driver’s license down onto the glass counter. The man took it between two fingers and studied it with all the weary thoroughness of an immigration agent inspecting passports. Then he unlocked the counter and took out the dark, gleaming thing with its walnut grips.

  Beautiful, said Smooth. But I might not have the guts, you see.

  Oh, yeah, said the man. That’s almost new.

  How much?

  Three twenty-nine.

  Uh huh, said Smooth wisely, setting the gun down. At once, the man secreted it under glass again.

  Those homeless people still living in the tunnels around the corner? he asked.

  Nope.

  I see, said Smooth, looking the man in the face. And why’s that?

  Why do you want to know?

  Business reasons, Smooth explained.

  There’s nothing, the man said. Just the traces of ’em. Just the traces of people having been there.

  (Down the counter, an 1898 silver dollar caught Smooth’s glance.)

  We’ve been around fifty years, the man volunteered unexpectedly. Them homeless, they’ve been around fifty thousand years.

  Shame on you, said Smooth with a wink. I’ve told you a million times not to exaggerate.

  The man smiled politely.

  Of course you never saw a small black woman named Africa in one of those tunnels, Smooth said. Of course you never went inside . . .

  Nope.

  How much for that Ruger? said Smooth.

  You can have it for four hundred. It’s a 1945 original.

  I didn’t know they had Rugers in 1945.

  Nope, said the man.

  Well, said Smooth, raising his left eyebrow. Then why not three hundred?

  Nope.

  He took out his wallet. —Here’s two seventy-five for the Browning.

  Three hundred.

  Nope! screamed Smooth gleefully.

  | 526 |

  Tyler set off the metal detector. —If you do that three times I’ll have to arrest you, joked the deputy. Now go stand over there.

  All right, said Tyler. Once you arrested me, I guess I wouldn’t set it off anymore, would I?

  Striding across the new granite flagstones, he arrived at the computer printout and looked up the name, XREF, floor, cell, and pod number. There was no release date. At considerable taxpayer expense they’d installed an aquarium and sandblasted the rock wall with kitschy foliage.

  Beaming lawyers turned their backs to the public who had to wait. There were two lines, one for the public and one for the lawyers. The line for the lawyers moved. The one for the public didn’t.

  Another lawyer appeared.

  The old lady ahead of Tyler said: I’ve been waiting for my entire lunch hour to see my daughter. I’ll probably have to leave soon. Can you hold my place while I feed the parking meter?

  Sure can, ma’am.

  I’m going to be late for work. Excuse me. Thank you, sir.

  She hobbled out. When she returned five minutes later, the public line had not moved an inch, and another lawyer with a big fat grin had stepped into the fast line.

  Look what just walked in, the old lady said. There goes another fifteen minutes.

  Half an hour later another lawyer walked in, and the old lady said: Screw this! and walked out.

  An hour later, Tyler had reached the head of the line.

  What is it? said the policeman behind glass.

  I’m here to see Daniel Clement Smooth, please, said Tyler. This is his reference number, his floor, his cell, and his pod number.

  Oh, today’s his court date, said the cop. No visits allowed today. Come back again another day.

  | 527 |

  Tyler called his friend Buddy Lopez at the public defender’s office. Perhaps Lopez wasn’t quite his friend after all, for it took him awhile to place Tyler. Finally he said: Okay, I get it. Yeah. You’re the one who . . . Hey, didn’t I help you out on the Louise Nugent case?

  No, lied Tyler, I kind of figure I helped you out.

  You did? What did you do for me?

  I got you the tape that proved that Louise was hit over the head before she slit that guy’s throat.

  And how did you do that?

  No offense, chum, said Tyler, but if your memory’s really that bad, you’re going to forget it all before the next time I call you. So let’s just say I told you and you already forgot. How does that grab you?

  Why, you impudent sonofabitch. What do you want?

  You familiar with the Dan Smooth case?

  What about it? That asshole doesn’t need a public defender. He’s got a house. He’s got assets. Let him liquidate his assets and hire an attorney. Scuttlebutt is, they have him dead in the water. Crimes against children and all that. That’s gonna be one helluva case. Pretty juicy details if you ask me. Hey, you know what I heard? In that compound of his on Q Street, they found three dildoes covered with blood. They’re doing the DNA tests now. And you wanna hear the kicker? These dildoes are tiny, man. They had to’ve been used on kids. Little kids.

  Who knows? said Tyler. Maybe Smooth was into consensual S & M with midgets. Innocent until proven guilty, right?

  You’re quite the party pooper, said Lopez.

  Yeah, there’s a sourpuss like me at every Roman circus. How much time do you figure he’ll do?

  Well, with time, everyone relaxes. Even a case with a lot of news coverage just becomes another matter in court with the passage of time. If you know the process, Henry, first comes the initial public outcry. The D.A. can beat his chest and demand the death penalty, and when the case gets settled, it could be for something mild the newspapers might be appalled at. And this ain’t no death penalty case, so . . .

  Five years?

  Maybe twenty, if he’s lucky. Multiple cases. Multiple victims. For something like this, maybe the statute of limitations will never run out.

  | 528 |

  Dan Smooth lay dreaming that he was watching his niece make a sand castle. She said: It’s got to be dark inside, ’cuz the King hates the sun.

  Why is that? said Smooth, resting a hand on the child’s buttock.

  I dunno. The name of this castle is Virgin Castle—no, Mayflower Castle. The name of the King is King James. That’s my daddy.

  Ah, Smooth said. Do go on.

  And this rock is Mommy and this stick is you and this stick is me. We’re the royal family. And now it’s snowing, and a big monster—a BIG monster—is going to kill everybody. First he kills Daddy, then Mommy, then the Queen, then you, then me. Now I want to make everybody alive again, but the sand castle’s too messy. Let’s make up another game.

  * * *

  •BOOK XXXV•

  * * *

  Coffee Camp

  •

  * * *

  And I will heap evils upon them; I will spend my arrows upon them; they shall be wasted with hunger, and devoured with burning heat and poisonous pestilence; and I will send the teeth of beasts against them, with venom of crawling things of the dust.

  DEUTERONOMY 32.23-24

  * * *

  •

  | 529 |

  It was just before ten o’clock when Tyler got into Dan Smooth’s car. The keychain with the pink plastic heart on it hung between his fingers. He plucked the silver-colored key from its trembling amidst copper keys large and small (more copper-mass here than the Queen’s magic charm), guided it into the angled ignition slit, slowly began turning it until the seatbelt alarm sounded and the windshield wipers began their eager idiotic arcs, rotated it farther until the motor sang, turned off the windshield wipers, clicked his lap belt buckle into the receptacle by his hip, which silenced the alarm, idled the motor for another ten seconds of conscientiousness, then shifted into reverse and backed out of Dan Smooth’s driveway far more slowly than he could have walked. Q Street lay trafficless. He stopped, shifted into drive, alone inside this latest unconscious partner, and headed northwest through midtown. The cassette in Dan
Smooth’s tape deck clicked like a shy child clearing its throat, reached its silent limit, and passed successfully through the ritual of reversal. Then a Bulgarian women’s choir began to sing sweet dirges. Half-listening, Tyler found himself already halfway across the trestle bridge, which was reflected in the river as it would have been in the fingerprinted mirror of an old Tenderloin pay phone whose metal-scaled cord had been wrenched out and twisted into an infinity sign: almost a hundred miles from the Tenderloin, he’d lost himself, found himself, lost himself, found himself now passing the sign which neither encouraged nor discouraged him from entering Yolo County. —Don’t you forget old Dan Smooth, the very same had said to him once, and he wouldn’t, not ever, although remembering was as lonely as Ocean Beach at night. —Connie, check that pink case note, Dr. Jasper had said. Can you read it to me? —Two glasses of liquid were found by deceased near his feet, replied dutiful Connie, pulling off the sheet. —Dan Smooth’s eyes were open, dark and fixed, not unlike the glass spheres in a trophy deer’s head. No more sly sidewise glances from him! Smooth gazed straight up at the ceiling, or maybe at heaven, where he doubtless would have charmed all the prepubescent angels. —Dr. Jasper stepped on the pedal of the dictaphone, picked up his scapel, and said to the world: The head is symmetrical and shows no trauma period. —Tyler, grimacing, stood with his hands folded behind his back. He hadn’t tied the green scrub gown on tightly enough.

  Why are you here, exactly? said Connie.

  I ask myself that every day, said Tyler. I hope I figure it out before they bring me to Dr. Jasper here.

  Well, you only have a one in four chance of ending up in this room, said Connie. More than six thousand deaths every year get signed off elsewhere in the county.

  I’m not from this county anyway, said Tyler. I mean, I was, but not now.

  Could you step to one side, please? asked Connie.

  Where are you from? said Tyler.

  Moldavia, said Connie.

  Oh, how is it over there?

  Fine, said Connie.

  And how is it over here?

  All right.

  Well, I guess we’ve covered all the bases, said Tyler. If it’s all right over here, then why don’t you want me to end up here?

  I really don’t care, to be honest, Connie said. You can step back closer now if you want.

  Nicely done, he said.

  Sorry it smells in here, said Connie. The next one over there is a little bit decomposed.

  Something to look forward to. Are you near the Black Sea?

  Sort of.

  Echoing Connie’s first unanswerable question, Dr. Jasper slashed Dan Smooth open from each shoulder to the chest, and then down to the base of the belly, in an immense, bloodless letter Y. The skin and fat was a good finger’s breadth thick. Steadily Dr. Jasper peeled and skinned away that human hide, announcing to his invisible audience: The exterior genitalia is male comma circumcised period. There is a one-and-one-fourth- by three-and-five-eighths-inch scar.

  They had brought Irene to this room which smelled like the Hotel Liverpool, which is to say like garbage, she not falling into the ranks of the six thousand who’d died unsuspicious deaths. Perhaps she’d lain naked and cut open on this very table: one chance in six. But the fat beneath Irene’s skin and inside her breasts would have been yellowish—white, most likely, not bright orange as was Dan Smooth’s. (And the Queen, had they brought her here, too, or was she still alive somewhere?) Inner color was no mystery. It all depended on blood content, Dr. Jasper would later explain.

  Then the knife went grating across the rib cage, and Connie was pressing the whirling blade of a stainless steel saw across the top of Dan Smooth’s head, her bloody gloves slowly whitening with bone dust.

  The river now behind him, the new county a tabula rasa of free opportunity, he bore right, the white round bulk of a storage tank glowing in the night like Dan Smooth’s skull. Another right, and he was parking in the lot above the launching slip. Quietly he walked down to the water, listening to the crickets. His father had courted his mother here. On the other shore, an ugly red light hung in the sky, brighter and steadier than any star—the eye of some radio tower, he supposed. He didn’t remember it, although doubtless it had unwinkingly overseen every river night for years. The pale cube of a houseboat was not quite as still as that, and its moonlit reflection even less so, continually decaying and renewing itself. The night was beautiful and smelled of water.

  An impure mixture of emotions polluted his chest. He admitted that he had always turned away from Smooth, in death as in life, that he had been disgusted by the man and in equal measure afraid of him, that his omnivorous needs had nonetheless most cheerfully taken everything which Smooth, who had done him only but good, had ever offered him; in sum, that Smooth’s death afforded him not only a car, but relief. Yet, having confessed (if only to the river and to himself) his selfishness, which had gone beyond exploitation almost to cruelty, he now with unfocused surprise discovered within himself a sincere grief, too, which stank within his soul like one of Dr. Jasper’s partially decayed patients—no doubt because it was tainted with the greenish bile of guilt. First his life had been full of Irene; then briefly the false Irene had accomodated his despair, afterwards, of course, the Queen had had him. He felt that only now was he coming to possess himself. —But how had he done wrong? —By worshiping only his own desires, came the answer. —But that was one reason why I loved them all, he protested, to help them! —a fact undeniably true—but what had he ever done for Smooth, who’d wanted to be his friend? From the prostitutes he’d taken only the worst maxims, the ways of giving not himself, but his mere shell, like that gorgeous scarlet and yellow mantle of flesh which Dr. Jasper had undone with his scapel and thrown open across Smooth’s shoulders. Hadn’t the ancient Athenians, the rich ones, gotten interred in cloaks of scarlet? That came back to him, maybe from Plutarch . . . John would know for sure. It had been so long since Tyler had done anything worthwhile, even reading, which was not worthwhile in and of itself but could dispose one to worthwhile acts. And for a moment, but only a moment, he felt that he had awakened from a long and flabby sleep. But he didn’t want to wake up anymore. —My days are late and wasted, he thought to himself. Better to float back into the river-night. The Queen had been awake; perhaps Smooth had been, too, between or behind repulsive dreams. (The Queen done offed him, said a Polk Street runaway, a scrawny little blond boy, in unshakeable and malicious ignorance.) Had Irene killed herself out of knowledge or out of dreamy fear of knowledge? Tyler, however, wanted to live life selfish and unaware like everyone else he knew—but none of his desires and pretensions were licit. After all, this had been precisely the situation of Dan Smooth.

  I must remember, he said to himself distractedly, that he helped me, never did me any harm . . .

  A sudden, incoherent anxiety lurked at his ear, as meaningless as his tears.

  So only the Queen had been awake, then. So awake, and hence so tired! For a moment he could almost hear her rich, hoarse, lilting voice.

  The skyscrapers of Sacramento, such as they were, rose white and stubby above the dark trestle bridge over which he had just driven, which made a tolerable frontier between the moon-clouds and the long thin water-fingers of orange light. Entering the wooded darkness alongside the river, he began to walk toward the bridge, loaded pistol in the pocket of his big, baggy jacket, and suddently saw a silhouette, stocky and hunched, which stood upon the riverbank, never turning round, although it must have heard his footsteps. The cool air was growing cold.

  He walked on, and the tramp rose up behind him and said: What’re you doin’ down here? Fishin’?

  Walking, he said. How about you?

  Just spendin’ the day out, the tramp said.

  He and John had caught some perch here when they were boys, so he said to the tramp: Any perch here?

  Nope, said the tramp, walking away.

  Ahead, between the trees, he saw a pale light, but when he got
to that spot, thinking to see a homeless camp, he found nothing there.

  A train whistle, rich with sadness of the longing rather than the despairing kind, drew him on until he stood beneath the bridge, almost blind to the moving of the darkness, which rumbled and squeaked westward; but at strange intervals he’d be granted the sight of vertical light-bars marching by. This train was as endless as darkness—solid it was, heavy, groaning, hissing; while beyond and below its empty purposefulness the river bled and bled from severed fingers of light, and another man stood silhouetted on the shore-sand, gazing down at a lantern, while two silhouettes went fishing. The rump of the last freight car dragged behind it a chain of silence. Foliage reappeared through the trestle’s hollow segments, and the signal rang mutely like a desk-bell at a bank or hotel lobby, while at that moment a real bell began to toll across the river. Tyler looked at his watch, but couldn’t read the dial.

  Cause of death colon compression of the neck vessels period, said Dr. Jasper. Severe emphysema comma heart disease comma unrelated to direct cause of death period. No changes consistent with . . . —as meanwhile Connie lifted off the top quarter of Smooth’s skull, withdrew a syringeful of clear cerebospinal fluid, then with crooked scissors pulled away at the stubbornly crackling meninges. Dr. Jasper, lifting his foot from the dictaphone pedal, swigged from a cup of coffee (which he held in a bloody latex glove) and said: Okay, we still have the neck to take out . . .

  Golden ripples infused the black river, finger-whirls of gods; round lights clustered on the far bank like the leaves of the tree of heaven.

  Tyler ascended the smooth-worn embankment, stepped onto the bridge, and began to walk out toward the water, pale dirty darkness far underfoot, while ahead the gleaming tracks, soberly precious, met across the river in four lines of shining silver. Dan Smooth, the Queen, and the two Irenes true and false were all in the place where parallel lines meet. Now the darkness bled and trembled into a silhouette—as unexpected and forced a differentiation as that suffered by the heart-shaped chunk of fatty ribs which Dr. Jasper had crunched out of Dan Smooth’s chest; this darkness ought to have been granted the right to remain itself, but from its flesh, without reference to the shining, burning ribs behind, nonetheless came that silhouette, approaching almost silent, a stranger, a black man with a bedroll who uttered a low, shy greeting, a murmur, and did not stop. Then darkness asserted its rights after all: The man became darkness again. Darkness smiled. Tyler stood alone on the bridge, gazing downriver at the pale yellow glowing phallus which rose from the drawbridge to the south . . .