William Vollmann - The Royal Family

Hundreds of ribs and chickens burned on a giant glassed-in grill. Guys in baseball caps stood squirting them with hoses. She stumbled bowlegged behind him, finger-chained by him, her face gaping and grimacing, her tongue out. He bought her a catfish on a stick. The lights were like horrid bathroom fixtures. She stopped dead to stare through glass at the hulking girls in rainbow outfits, turning corndogs in the roaring grease… They saw her and started digging each other in the ribs and pointing, mouthing at her like fishes through the glass; he almost expected her lips to move silently back, but only a thick translucent thread of drool spun out… Hands and tongues behind glass, the green and yellow depths of her lemonade cup, the bulging pale pink nipples of the prize cow hanging straight down from the hairy, veined, and distended bag — all these and more, Virginia, swamped her marshy senses like stamping horses, pounding down the ooze inside her skull and galloping on while her darling forgetfulness oozed clear and fresh back up through the mud, washing it into its old featurelessness — or so he thought until they came to the pen of the giant sow. Giant, pink, and rosy-breasted, she offered many women’s teats ranging along her in a double row, shaved and pink like a tender fat lady; and a big-eared piglet broke away from his littermates nuzzled head to toe; he scuttled down the side of his mother, who twitched her cup-nose lightyears away from her own belly; he came to the rearmost teat and she ground him viciously down beneath her hind leg so that he squealed; but the rest of the farrow, more desperate than deterred, crowded suddenly down the whole long row of teats, grunting and swarming and stepping on each other, screeching like crows, passionately sucking, but at nothing, for she wouldn’t let her milk out; then and only then the retarded girl said: Urrrrwwwh! and the great sow hunched her butt up, raised one abraded ear, turned her weary head, grunted: Urrrrwwwh! , and let go, the dimples in her side rolling like waves, the young ones lining up straight and perpendicular now to nurse amidst that happy tremendous pink quaking—

He escorted her on, past a stripe-aproned girl waving phosophorescent whips; people’s backs went ahead, walking toward the orange-glowing tents. They were hours late now. The security guards would be looking for them. A Mexican, weary and sweating, turned barbequed turkey-legs on a grill more shiny than the night, the meat glowing like fiesta condoms. He hurried her down the long bright sidewalk eyelashed with pole-lamp shadows, and there was a bench between the dance pavilion and the eggroll-on-a-stick booth where the moon teased her through the trees. He pulled her down on the dark grass white-wizened like an old dog’s coat. Her face was a little blurred by the neon lights. Million-colored reflections of whirling blinked in the stagnant river beside them, lights going down escalators as his fingers strapped her cheeks bone-tight, pulling her easy lips open so that he could thrust his tongue; seizing her hair like reins, he rode her face the way he wanted to; the crossed thighs of the woman on the next bench reflected a winking light… She beat her elbows frantically like a wounded bird. All around them, crowds sleepwalked through the lighted world as if they’d discovered the secret of happiness. The lights of the monorail rose between the trees where insects rattled. Wiping their mutual slobber from her face, he led her past another merry-go-round, now more lurid, the horses’ mouths wide open in silent screams, the studded oval mirrors like blank mouths, the caterpillar statue turning dimly in the moonlight. The moon was over the porker pavilion, the smell of pigshit inside. The bleachers were crowded. He took her down in front to watch the races. A man with a hoarse beery voice was shouting: Go, red pig! Go, red pig! Fuck you in front, blonde bitch! Get down, get down! I said fuck you down in front, blonde bitch! Go, red pig! — and a man in a cowboy hat was easing his wheelchaired wife away from her reproachfully and the drunk came storming down because she was blocking his view. The drunk knocked her down with one fast punch that bloodied her nose and she started flailing silently at the floor, huge-eyed, cracking her head again and again on the concrete while he, the brilliant one, drew out his car keys, locked his fist around them wih the longest one protruding between two fingers; then he stabbed the big drunk square in the eye once, twice, till something popped out. The drunk crashed down, curling tight around himself like a worm. Kicking him in the teeth, he leaped back, lifted her, ran with her until they’d hidden behind the couples with slurpies watching the goat being milked into the coffee can. Then they fled together, hand in hand, past luminous wheels and gears and light bulb blooms and girls screaming in the night like witches being burned; with his dull-eyed bleeding prize he retreated across that battlefield of light. Yellow skeletons of light sucked children up and down as they screamed. Ferris wheels hummed like the reddish filaments of pulsating eyeballs—

Inside she was as purple-pink and delicate as a puppy’s tongue.

And she kept purring and cawing as he spread her thighs apart; she opened her mouth in surprise and grunted when he stuck it in; and she was so beautiful, even more so than the innocent girl, so beautiful that he could see that he was about to come almost right away; when he came it was as perfect as when he used to water the shrubs at the dream house, and from the hose came a rainbow, the gold band the widest, then the blue; when he turned the hose away the rainbow endured for half a second or so and then vanished; it seemed that the last drops falling out of empty air were gold or blue—

The girl lay in the back seat sleeping with her hands over her ears, flushed, glistening with sweat, her bare arms almost white in the sunlight, her hair bleached to the color of old bones. He whizzed her down the freeway between golden grass hills once virgin, now spiked down with wireboned power towers whose cables shattered the sky into meaningless polygons; he was taking her past where the gold and green hills turned yellow and blue. Surer now than all the spurting worms, he could unmask his memories of the long drive in lost years with his octopus-minded ex-wife; how he’d ridden silent and stunned in her hands’ grip, knowing nothing other than that he was being borne away; now he was in charge, rushing an equally silenced prize home to his new lair, his treasure-house of all good things. The hacienda-roofed gas stations and motels rejoiced his heart; he knew they’d trip up any pursuers, while away their eyes to slow them while he continued to speed his loved one to the place where even the sky’s blueness bleached out. There was a spider on the back of his neck which became fingers, and then she was crooning and playing with his hair. He felt her hot breath on the back of his neck. She kept trying to make him pay attention to her. He wanted to pull over and suck the tongue right out of her mouth, but there wasn’t time yet, not till he’d hidden beyond these almond orchards with the real estate developers’ obscene signs already dooming them as they stood; once the trees had been cut down the police would be able to see farther, so he shot her through yellow tunnel light the color of lemon drops while she giggled and played with his hair and started gently smacking the top of his head making bird-noises in rythmn with the slaps; he pressed the gas pedal down a little more to explode them through the new buffer towns walled into compartments by rival developers, each tract with its own replicated roof; that was all that could be seen from outside, the wall rendering these neighborhoods into spurious Babylons of monotony — divine sites for a seraglio; even the inmates wouldn’t know where they were; as for the authorities, they’d but be baffled like thieves in the “Arabian Nights,” eye-wandering that skyline of roofs along the endless road, locking wills with the palm trees that peeked over the wall… She insinuated herself forward between the seats so that he couldn’t see behind him and she tried to take his hand off the steering wheel to play with; when he wouldn’t give it to her she started poking him and giggling. With alert spider-lashed eyes he peered into his rear-view mirror to make sure that no one was stalking him; then he twisted into a rest area, stopped, undid the seat belt, got into the back seat and started kissing her as he’d wanted to do, dragging her down while she flapped her elbows in pleasure; he was wondering how to take her to the bathroom but just then she wet herself, so why bother. He put his hand up her sodden dress and she liked it; then he thought he heard a siren and leaped away from her, wiping his hands; he strapped her to the seat with a lap belt and handcuffed her wrists so that she couldn’t poke him anymore; then it was back to the golden hills crammed with sparkling cars, the yellow fever-hills of dying grass and barbed wire and planes, the hills eaten up by lethal new towns; rising out of his body as he hurtled down the four-lane highway past blondes and Komfort trailers, he achieved the Yum-Yum billboards and American flags bulldozing themselves bigger and bigger until they lost sight of their own emptiness, shouting out long low malls and bungalows to use up the flatness of needless space through which he drove like a pilot down a runway, between earth and air, dusted dry over his sweat; the car stank of her urine even when he rolled down the windows to let in the smells of the long flat green fields while she croaked in terror and distress, not understanding why she was restrained, why she couldn’t have him; she was screaming and he had to roll the windows back up so that no one else would hear, and he heard the creaking of her struggling to get free, so he floored it to bring them faster and more safely past the blinding light of those yellow-green fields; at last he spied out the sought-for skyscrapers on their mutual horizon; he told her that they were almost there and she didn’t understand, crying and slobbering and biting her tongue and lips in a bloody frenzy of sadness as as roared past river-straddling cement bunkers, wolfpacks of houses and bridges and cranes, a dead car on the shoulder, hood up like a penis, sawmills and two-storey office cubes and more billboards and then long grey hot buildings to stupefy the skyscrapers, storage tanks, toxic factories half-camouflaged by palm trees; and, slowing down block by block, he brought her into the “nice” neighborhood where there were fewer gas stations and more houses and trees—