The Royal Family

by William T. Vollmann

  I don’t suppose you’ve seen a small thin black woman, he began hopelessly, about forty-five years old, who—

  Missouri looked him over scornfully. —If you got to have more than one person in order to survive, you don’t belong out here.

  And you’ve been alone your entire life, said Tyler in a tone of almost nasty defiance.

  Oh, I lasted almost six months with one partner once, said Missouri. He went into one detox place and said he’d be back in ten minutes, but after three hours he never come out so I took off.

  Maybe they wouldn’t let him out.

  Maybe, said Missouri. But I’ll tell you a better one. I know one guy up there in Oregon. He woke up there in a boxcar and found everything gone: his food, his duffel bag, his wallet, his knife, his money—not to mention his partner of twelve years. He expected that, so he didn’t mind too much, but what really pissed him off was that his partner even stole his dog. Now that’s low.

  Yeah, that is, Tyler agreed. So where are you headed today?

  Oh, north. Generally north. Well, I’ve gone as far back as Cleveland by freight. I know how to do it. From Indiana, everywhere east is great because the cities are so close together you just need to go a few miles to escape the cops and jump the state line, but out here you got three or four hundred miles between towns, so you gotta hop a freight; you gotta be an expert so that they don’t get you.

  Tyler rubbed his chin. —Who’s after you?

  You heard about that Tent City down there in Arizona? That’s where they take all the homeless people and put ’em like in a prison camp. I don’t want to go there. Salt Lake’s building one, too. Everywhere you go now, they’re out to get you.

  I think God’s been closing in since the get-go, Tyler said. I think pretty soon we’re not going to have anyplace left to run.

  You’re one of them religious nuts, said Missouri complacently. I live and let live myself. But if you think prayin’ for me’s gonna do any good, why, then, you just send up a prayer for old Missouri. I ain’t never turned down anything free, even something I can’t see.

  Have you run into a small thin black woman who—?

  You already asked me that, sonny. I’m not interested. Hey, you got any tobacco on you?

  You already asked me that, said Tyler.

  No, I didn’t.

  All right, so you didn’t. I was just checking on you.

  On the embankment, the locomotives of the long, long train shrieked brassily past, and then the train began to slow.

  Which way’s this one going? asked Tyler.

  Check the first two numbers on the lead car. Didn’t you even know that? If they’re even, it’s going east or west. If they’re odd, it’s north or south, just like the highway. This one’s going north.

  The train was going much more slowly now, and Tyler saw the square mouth of an open boxcar coming toward him. He slid his pack over his shoulder and got ready to jump into it.

  They got a change off in Phoenix, Missouri said. Then it gets a local. They got a nice mission there in Phoenix where you can eat decent.

  I’m not much into decency anymore, said Tyler.

  Hey, you got any tobacco on you?

  You never asked me that.

  I hate boxcars, Missouri said. You got all this metal here that gets hot in the sun. Round about four or five in the afternoon, you get cooked.

  Well, I like the view from a boxcar, said Tyler.

  I always try to catch a grainer with an air compressor, Missouri said, trailing after him. But really I’m too old for this.

  The train stopped. Tyler threw himself up onto his boxcar.

  Can’t get inside them car carriers anymore, Missouri went on, looking up at him, in no hurry to board. —Used to be paradise. They put a couple gallons of gas in every tank, so on a cold night you could hop right in, turn on the heater and the radio, and later on tear the speakers out, rip off the cassette decks and sell everything . . . Where’s your spike?

  Without waiting for an answer, he snatched up one of his own and pounded it into the groove beside the boxcar door, so that Tyler would not be lethally trapped by any sudden lurch.

  Thank you, Tyler said.

  I seen some Mexicans, the old man said, I seen how they died in a boxcar. They pounded their hands bloody, trying to get out, but nobody heard. Sun cooked ’em to death.

  A loud hiss almost woke up the two sleeping tramps.

  Getting ready to move, Missouri shouted. Or maybe he’s just testing his brakes . . .

  You’d better grab your grainer, said Tyler, and the older man started and scurried down the track.

  | 554 |

  The brakes hissed again. Then the train began to move. His heart thrilled with joy. He was somewhere in northern California again. The hot strip of daylight, sand, gravel, trees, wires and skies unwound, anonymously strange. Every now and then he could glimpse a striped signal bar and a line of automobiles waiting for his train to finish occluding them. He felt a sense of borrowed power, that the train could interrupt so many people. It was only mid morning, but the temperature felt like it might breach a hundred. His skin was hot and sweaty. He dwelled inside the humming rattling roar of trainness. The train began to accelerate, and with dreamlike surprise he saw Sacramento: midtown, a signal tower, a brief ring of tunnel-darkness, graffiti; here stretched the yard he’d walked through on that first night; they were making up a long train at perpendiculars to him on the embankment behind; the train rattled in his teeth. Edging closer to the boxcar door, he gazed deliciously out as he flashed across the bridge with the river so lovely below and a guy on the bank fishing and then he was rushing through Coffee Camp; two cyclists waved from the pedestrian bridge—a whiff of steaming anise, and then Coffee Camp was gone . . .

  Heat rose from the rails. He sped across dusty streets and gravel embankments, followed only by wires, going maybe forty miles an hour now, way too fast to jump. A smoldering burnt heat dried his nostrils every time he breathed.

  Now the train really started going, flashing and flickering past man-shaped wicker-wire power towers, shaking him from side to side as if he were a single pea in a collander. It rushed him past a country road where he saw more backed-up traffic. He wondered if anyone could see him. The vibration massaged him within the base of his skull and in his back which was pressed against the dusty boxcar wall, and above all in his teeth like a speedball rush; and he understood the orgasms of the Hundred Thousand Dollar Boxcar Queen. Roaring and shaking past a long cornfield, he imagined fucking her right there on the floor of the boxcar with the vibration dissolving them into each other. He thought of his own dead Queen but no longer believed in her.

  For hours, the parallelogram of sunlight in the open door kept swaying and pulsing, like his own brightly blank mind. He drank from his bag of water, which was still cool. A cropduster plane followed him, jetting what looked like flour which tumbled with slow gorgeousness. The train was slowing. He came to the doorway and gazed upon bright golden grass and fields of strange, blackened crops. On an impulse, having no idea where he was, he threw his backpack into space and then himself made the leap, falling exultantly to earth.

  | 555 |

  It was very hot. The flesh-rags of a dead cat lay stiff and flat in a ditch, reeking of mucilage. He walked for miles. Finally he came to a town, his lips cracking, and heard the blessed sound of a sprinkler. Across the road, behind a picket fence, a little blonde girl stood in the center of a green, green lawn, playing in the water. He waved, and she waved back. He was happy.

  He walked on and on, looking for a store where he could buy a cold soda. Finally he stopped at a crossroads and drank from his water bag. The water was hotter than spit from having pressed up against his back.

  Far away, he heard the whistle of a train. His soul glowed like a crackhead’s after that first hit of rock, and he began to run.

  | 556 |

  Look at that crazy tramp, a man at a gas station said. Look at him running. A hundred
and five degrees. Maybe we’ll be lucky. Maybe we can watch him croak.

  | 557 |

  There was no train. He found a hobo’s abandoned camp, where sheets of cardboard made good resting and wooden planks spanned rocks and stumps to form benches, with castoff trousers tucked underneath. He took it over, picked blackberries, and slept. In the morning he was getting low on water when his train came . . .

  | 558 |

  Now, those two guys under the bridge, they’re good people, the old hobo said.

  Groovy, said Tyler.

  The whole deal is, we put one man over there to watch the gear, and another man here to collect from the citizens. I’m explainin’ all this for your own good, so you’d better be listening.

  Tyler smiled sarcastically.

  Now, you know what this is? said the old hobo.

  A bedroll.

  Wrong. It’s a prop. The more props you have, the more money you can make. The more shit you have hangin’ off, the more scratch you have. Get a bag on a stick like an oldtime bindlestiff. Get a hat. Put patches in your pants. You dig?

  Tyler hesitated, sighed, and whispered: Props are for magic. Props keep me close to my Queen.

  For by now he had a talisman, in the manner of his departed Queen, or for that matter like any whore brooding lovingly over her crack pipe. Just as the man called Sneakers, who begged on Steiner and Haight, bore beneath his baggy jacket in the nest made by the unzipped fly of his pants a plastic cup wedged in so secretly that it was as an organ of his body—this was his change-organ, his dime-collector; all he’d gotten that day was pennies, he said, and he always lied—so Tyler learned to attach himself to a rusty railroad spike. He never forgot what both old Missouri and that superhuman trainhop-per at Coffee Camp had told him: If the boxcar doors closed on you in the desert and the train sat for a week, you were sunk. Wedge it into the track, and you owned salvation. Then you couldn’t pull it out; you had to get another spike for next time; better just to carry a spare, which he’d never use because it was his good luck charm to comfort him as he sat with legs dangling, looking out at the tracks when he was certain of being unseen, listening to night-creaks and cracks and hissings, while the whole world rumbled like a boxcar door slamming shut. So many of the homeless men he met on the road owned knives, which gave them peace of mind instead of actual safety because they had to be concealed, and often not under clothes but deep inside duffel bags—how could they save anyone when quickly assailing death came? But let something become part of you, and you feel better—which is all that matters; you have to die anyway.

  You got to snap out of it, son, said the old hobo, about whom there was something slow and kind which reminded him of the Queen. You got to wake up. Otherwise somebody’s gonna lift everything you have or even shank you in your fuckin’ sleep. You think it ain’t happened? You think you got a guardian angel? Oh, Jesus. I’m wasting my time.

  All right, said Tyler.

  I’m turning off my generosity.

  Okay, said Tyler.

  Then he was ashamed, and said: Listen, I’m sorry. I appreciate the advice. I was just dreaming about someone I love.

  Forget it, the hobo said. They’re all just citizens. You got to keep your pride, or God’s gonna nail you.

  Oh, I have my pride, all right.

  You may have your pride, but you’re in a fuckin’ slump.

  Tyler, understanding finally that the old hobo was trying desperately to reach out to him, said: Is it a friend you’re wanting? My name’s Henry. And I’m happy to be your friend.

  He put out his hand.

  Texas Pete, said the old hobo, shaking it. You know, uh, Henry, I was in Spokane last fall and this guy named John I was tryin’ to be partners with stole my frickin’ gear. He’s just a flat-out thief. His name’s John Hayden. He’s out in Seattle someplace suckin’ off someone else. He always expected me to buy the beer.

  Sure, I’ll be partners with you if you want, said Tyler. I’ll buy drinks when I get money, and I’ll look after your bedroll.

  Oh, they won’t go after this, Texas Pete said, kicking the bedroll, but they may go after my backpack.

  The thing I need to tell you, Pete, is that I’m looking for a skinny little black gal named Africa. She may be dead, but I have to check every lead.

  You’re better off with me, Henry. Forget the bitch. I’ll be there for you. I know how to be what you need. And we’ll ride the rails from A to Z. We’ll never come back here. We’ll never stay anywhere, until we get all the way to the sun.

  Dan Smooth had read aloud from the Apocryphon of John how Cain, “whom generations of men call the sun,” was the sixth son of the lion-faced dragon Yaltabaoth. Did he believe it? Too late to ask. Was Cain the sun? Did Texas Pete have the Mark of Cain? Everything was all twisted up.

  When we get to the sun, what do you want to do there? he asked.

  Shit, fella, we gonna burn up! cackled Texas Pete, and then Tyler knew that they were brothers, lost and getting more lost, and he was happy.

  But in the nighttime, when Texas Pete tried to unzip his fly, Tyler knew he had to get away. He ran and ran until he was all the way up in Butte, Montana, by the Christian mission in sight of the rusty railroad tracks. The preacher earbanged him and then gave him soggy twice-warmed casserole. He went out. In an open shop, a welder’s spark resembled the gloomy greyish sky malignantly magnified. The tawny ruin of the Berkeley open pit mine spread out behind and above everything. He gazed at sagebrush, crushed cans and bottles on the tracks where the brown Santa Fe and the blue Montana Rail Link cars were parked, bearing sad graffiti from years ago. He read it all; he wandered cuts, embankments, and other rusty tracks, but never saw anything more Queenish than the signature of Chuck from 1958.

  | 559 |

  He went north to Havre on the High Line; then west to Cut Bank where the Burlington Northern railroad bull who cited him crowed: This area is patrolled real heavy. You drifters ain’t got a chance. We even got a K-9 unit out here. Sniffin’ dogs. You hear me, bum? You ain’t got a chance! —When they kicked him off the yard, a security car drove very slowly at his heels. He turned back one last time to admire the beautiful orange locomotive with its blackish-green stripes, but then the security car honked its horn. He was hungry. That night, praying to his Queen, who always helped him, he hopped a long string of grainer cars and then a man came on a motor scooter, shining a light into every orifice. By some miracle or illusion or perseverance on the part of the hunted, the motor man didn’t see him, or else saw but pitied or did not care. No dogs barked. So he rode west and south again, in just the same way that half of the old bridge in West Sacramento could swing clockwise with remorseless rusty elegance, obliging as a whore’s thighs; and then a white paddleboat might toil into the gap as the bridge continued its now needless swing, silver rail ending sharply at the green river . . . His instinct now was not to seek stale clues, but only to elude all authority and recognition because his Mark of Cain now glowed inside his reeking clothes so that he continued ever more rapidly to go and on without knowing where he was going, knowing only that this crisis could not endure much longer; soon he’d adjust or break. Lucky enough to pass through Glacier International Park without getting parked for days on a snowy siding, he crouched shivering for a long cold night of swaying and rushing before he could set foot on the earth again, by which time he was in the BN yard in Spokane. Another train, a better train, was already building up steam. Gazing coldly through steel spectacles, the engineer, blue-clad, leaned forward so that one shoulder twisted, and the song of the locomotive increased in pitch. Tyler sprinted across the gravel of the freight yard and leaped inside a boxcar’s darkness, sliding forward on his belly to read the words CHICAGO’S MOST WANTED and TURD BIRD. Crumpled scraps of clothing lay trampled into the gravel like the grisly souvenirs of Cambodian killing fields. They began to crawl behind him as the boxcar shuddered. He would find the Queen of the great eternal angels, or else he would find Irene. Wasn’t he gainin
g power over everything? On the wall was written JESUS IS LORD, so he quickly scratched below those curse-words the infinity-sign of the Mark of Cain. He passed empty plastic water bottles, then a bleached cow or deer skull buried in the embankment, an oily sheet of squashed coveralls, crinkled snakes of bleached used toilet paper, and a crumpled flattened goose with a little fat still on the bones, sharp pebbles resembling silver—anthracite, perhaps. The train trembled and began to gain velocity. Leaning out, he could see the blue-denim’d arm of the engineer shaking cigarette ash out the window of the first locomotive. And now it seemed that he was doing precisely as he wished, proceeding from the smoking mountains to the snowy mountains, and he was not afraid. For he had begun to know the trains now, to understand how to touch the rivet-scales and rust on their metal skin. Sweet forgetfulness was blooming in his mind, like a summer’s path at Coffee Camp half overgrown with goldenflowered thistles.

  But sometimes he still had Irene, for instance washing the dishes from a multicourse Korean meal she’d cooked in her mother’s house while the relatives sat around the table eating melon slices and sugarcoated sunflower seeds, trying to decide some recalcitrant teenager’s future, the cousin sitting tired from helping his parents all day, watching Korean television news about high school violence and auto accidents. The cousin had realized that all grls were hysterical. —I’m just not a good female handler, he said mournfully to his sister, who was getting ready for her week-long basketball tournament. The uncles, the tired old grocery store owners and dry cleaners, almost ready for retirement, cracked peanuts while the baby crawled upstairs, reaching for the dog while everybody laughed . . .

  | 560 |

  He remembered all the times he’d phoned and phoned but she never called back, the time above all when the three of them met for dinner and she’d never said a word to him, nor he to her. John prattled on. Irene answered, upholding her part of the conversation in a perfectly acceptable way, although Tyler, listening, thought that she seemed far less submissive than usual; her “I thinks” and “maybes” had been stricken out, so that she now spoke with the blunt authority of Koreans among equals; in fact, he sensed almost a contentious edge to her voice, a pulsing anger beneath the translucently banal membrane of her words. She was wearing a white sweater. Later, he’d remember its weave very well. Irene’s long inky hair occasionally entered his vision. He kept his gaze on her shoulder (she was sitting across from him); he couldn’t bear to look into her face. —What’s wrong? said John. Are you sick? —I’m OK, he said, looking into John’s face; at the same moment, Irene leaned forward, coming accidentally into view, so that he saw her grimace. Her pale face was so beautiful that he actually thought for a moment that he was going insane. He staggered to his feet and went to the men’s room, standing for a long time with his face in the sink, the cold water playing over his neck. He dried himself on his shirttails and went back. Amidst his terrifying love for Irene there now flowered a swift hatred, strengthening by the second; she could have at least greeted him when they met, or asked him how he was. He was bleeding inside from her cruelty. And then he reminded himself that he’d been the evil one, and should be grateful to her for not telling on him to John. The hatred disappeared. (John was saying something to him. He felt very lightheaded. He said: I’m sorry. My mind went blank.) He said to himself: Well, I can always go pick up a whore, and indeed, just that day on Ellis Street he’d met a stinking girl who lived in the Lincoln Hotel and who had begged him for money for epilepsy medicine, a favor he’d granted her; she’d said God bless you and kissed him with her reeking herpid lips; she’d said: If you ever need a woman, if you ever want somebody like me . . . and he didn’t want her but the fact that someone, at least, was willing to take him, made the pain recede. He tried to concentrate on the stinking woman with the herpid lips while they sat there in the restaurant. It took forever for the bill to come. He could feel Irene’s hatred now. There was no mistaking it. She despised him. She had avoided him and would go on doing so. She never wanted to see him again. He had sinned against her. She’d never forgive him. There was nothing he could do. After it was finally over, he and John punched each other’s shoulders half-heartedly, telling each other to be good, and then he looked up into the doorway where Irene, already turning away, but forcing herself to accomplish this one gesture for the sake of elementary politeness, fluttered her hand in a listless, resentful wave.