William Vollmann - The Royal Family

’Course you can have a party, child, said the Queen.

Fuck, you look thirty, said Domino.

The same black-and-white came circling back, and this time the cops didn’t wave. Strawberry, high on crank, informed the world: Two five-o’s come an’ slam me down on the street and I do jail time for trying to knife them — oh, my lymph nodes!

Shut your face, the tall man said.

Heads up now, everybody, said the Queen. How you all doin’, officers?

Just fine, Maj. You’re going to have to break up the party. These girls are blocking traffic. If we see you here in ten minutes we’re going to have to write you up.

Lordy lordy, sighed the Queen. Okay, officers. Justin, can you help Sapphire? Beatrice, I want you to run down to that place, you know that place I was tellin’ you about…

Sapphire turned her head quickly and shyly, smiling with her pale face, and even while she smiled her tongue was hanging out.

Pull in here, pull in here, pull in here, said Domino impatiently; and the dark car crept into the sunset fog.

Are you going to tip me? she added.

Here’s five more, said the trick. You were really good. You’re always so good.

You just need a little petticoat government, that’s all, the blonde explained. And did you buy me anything?

Didn’t have enough… the trick whispered.

See you, the blonde laughed, jumping out of that long black car. A condom fell out of her purse.

Wait! called the poor desperate trick.

She ran across the street to the tall man, shouting: Justin, Justin! That sonofabitch keeps asking about you. Get his license plate number. Get his—

But the car was already speeding away.

Last week, Thursday or Friday, they hurt that girl up there, Beatrice was saying. They hurt her, and she was bleeding and everything. Why the police doan do anything about the ones taking money away from people that works? They just want us to be stealing and for us to do nothing.

Vigs, said the tall man bitterly.

Who were they, honey? said the Queen. Come an’ whisper in my ear.

They talk about some Mr. Brady, I think I see him before, the fat man with big money, one time I give him a nice blow job…

Brady’s Boys, huh? said the tall man. I heard about them in Chicago. Fuckin’ vigs.

The tall man, like the security guard at the War Memorial Opera House, who always locked his hand upon his head, leaned the resultingly reinforced elbow against a pillar, thrust his belly out and waited for time to go by, believed less in anticipating events than in seizing them when they began to appear like crow-dark ghosts and specters. From the window of darkened hotel rooms he watched light ooze down the immense brick and stone hips of the Tenderloin like a woman’s skirt slowly falling down around her fleabitten ankles. In the mouths of the Queen’s many tunnels he awaited doom. — I can’t get a fix on it yet, he muttered. Just how those godamned citizens tryin’ to fuck us up… Sometimes he squatted against the wall of the 101 Restaurant, watching. Abruptly, as if he could see his enemies, he rose and walked off, pulling the whore Strawberry by the hand.

The next morning he was walking up Eighteenth and at South Van Ness saw a cop arresting a Latino boy who pleaded: Yes, I know, but I’m sorry; you gotta trust me! and he walked on feeling terrible for the boy.

They’re all vigs, he said later. Vigs and citizens and everybody but us, all of ’em, all just one set, vigs and pigs…

Lily, peering at everyone in a half-blind fashion like an old welder, said brightly: That corner, right there, was where they found the two girls. And I saw them, too. You know, with their hands and their heads and their mouth kind of screaming. So you saw how they died.

It’s only a dream, said Smooth. Like eating pure chocolate. Nobody really dies. But nobody ever gets to eat pure chocolate. It’s always cut with strychnine. But the dream, now—

Stop eating goofballs, said Strawberry. You’re a goof.

It’s like they never ate peanut butter, Smooth explained. And I’m passing out peanut butter.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, said Strawberry.

What is real? Smooth asked her. What is true happiness?

The whore didn’t answer.

I said, do you know what real happiness is?

I thought we were talking about those dead girls, said Strawberry. Now, Mr. Smooth, I don’t mean to disrespect you, and the Queen says you’re okay, but I hope that dead girls don’t have anything to do with your happiness.

Can dead girls give head? said Smooth. Are they young enough? Are their little lips fresh enough?

God, mister, you are twisted.

Dan Smooth of course had the run of the new Sacramento coroner’s facility with its one hundred and eighty single or double tables and its special gurneys for decomposed patients, so he had seen a few things. He admired and complimented the ultraviolet lights which were used to decontaminate the room between autopsies by breaking down corpse-DNA into meaningless atoms of putrescence.

In his opinion the double homicide referred to by Lily was of the same bemusing order as the coroner’s policy on freezing bodies, which is why Lily herself thought him to be freezing cold. But Smooth said: Do you believe in the resurrection of Lazarus? And, if so, do you believe that Lazarus truly wasn’t better off dead? Do you believe that Sunflower’s in Heaven now? Do you believe it’s right what she did?

Hey, said Strawberry. I knew those girls. Those girls didn’t wanna die.

Only a few people ever saw the Queen and knew her when they saw her, and in those anxious days when the vigs began to arrive in force like gnawing vermin blind-set on uprooting every hotel in the Mission, every brickwork old massage parlor in the Tenderloin, they glimpsed her even more rarely, which is why some gaunt harsh old street men began rumoring that she was already gone; meanwhile she continued to do what she always did, hovering like a light above the waters so that no soul which rented out its flesh had to be alone any longer. Like the improverished old people in Sacramento who lurked air conditionless in their homes with the blinds pulled down against the glowing sun, she hid from vigilante-radiance, fulfilling her purpose on the dark landings of hotel stairs, wearing castoff clothes which sometimes crawled with lice or scabies; Tyler’s flesh was inflamed, scratched and bleeding now like that of all the rest of her crew; and Domino once with her saturnine humor hypothesized that the real Mark of Cain comprised scratch-marks behind the knees or around one’s crotch. The Queen smiled at this almost with docility, and Beatrice, uncomprehending, flapped a stained T-shirt up and down upon her unwashed breasts to cool them down, burning as they were with the bites of hungry insects and of lonely men. And that little figure with the old, old face, sitting on the bed in this hotel room for which Beatrice’s trick had paid for an entire night, then used merely for an hour as he had used Beatrice, then departed, giving the key into Beatrice’s hands with his own variety of secondhand kindness, that witch, that arch-Canaanite, that ancient Maj sighed, and said: Domino, go and get that T.V. in the hallway there. Bring him in and we’ll talk to him about his happiness.

And so the half-toothless old transvestite, thirty-two years of age, came in and sat down on the bed between Domino and Beatrice and said: I came to San Francisco and started whoring at sixteen. Most of the people I started out with are gone or dead. There are only three of them around now.