William Vollmann - The Royal Family

They said it was going to be a bad year for slugs and snails, said Mrs. Tyler.

They’re not kidding. Oh, my God, they’re all over the place. They’re eating you out of house and home, Mom.

It’s terrible, Mrs. Tyler said.

We’re going to have to do something about this, John said grimly, spreading white snail-poisoning powder, bending and stretching. Celia, who was allergic, leaned against the car.

Look at this, Ceel! Up here! No wonder these leaves look like hell.

Imagine how many more there must be at night, said his mother in her now customary trembling voice.

A very scary thought, Mom.

They drove to the farmers’ market under the freeway and Celia mixed in among smiling old Japanese men who were slowly picking through flashing and rolling tangerines while a tiny Asian girl sat on the concrete plucking off stems. Celia bought two pounds of the fruit, and a pound of Fuji apples from the boys in caps and sweatshirts, while John commanded two pounds of live clams to be clicked into a plastic bag because his mother loved clams, and then for himself and Celia he bought a huge-eyed goldeneyed American mackerel. — Okay! shouted a Japanese in a yellow rubber apron. Buffalo fish! Seeben tweeny five! — No, thanks, said John. — Oh, yes! cried the oyster salesman. These are very fresh. — Forget it, said John. — Right here! Best asparagus in town! Five dollars! Taste the difference! — Fine, said John. Ceel, give him five dollars.

They had already passed the so-called executive airport and the Sky Riders Motel. Soon they would enter the shining muck of ricefields.

Sunglasses, said John.

Celia reached in the glove compartment as her lover, going thirty-five in a twenty-five-mile-an-hour zone, rolled down the window.

All the pear blossoms will be gone by now anyway, he warned.

How do you know?

Because they don’t last forever, idiot.

To Celia herself, to whom John’s open exuberance gave hopes that matters might finally be decided between them one way or another, this journey smelled strange and wild, and she began to feel almost afraid. John resembled her in his soul. She understood that now. He had immense expectations. In her own life, most expectations had been disappointed, but she refused to give them up; she’d rather be bitter than cynical. She could not really understand why this drive was so important to John, and she knew that if she questioned him too much his exultation would simply vanish into anxious vindictiveness like fog-devoured Ocean Beach in San Francisco, where homebody Irene had once sat with folded legs before the television, reading an article about a woman who had a liposuction.

What kind of hedge is that? she asked ingratiatingly.

I have no idea, John laughingly shrugged. Generic hedge.

And so they entered fog, and sun-yellow mustard fields, then tall wet grass and the water tower, after which Sacramento lay behind them and they were in Freeport where the wide, bright flat world of the Delta commenced. To John, the Delta was the loveliest place in the world, whose loveliness was compounded by other people’s failures of appreciation. He needed no protection from any bad thoughts there, because it was a heavenly maze whose exit passageways were themselves deliciously langorous and misleading, like Celia’s endless lists; and John for his part epitomized the Delta by its crown jewel, Grand Island, which was surrounded by low river-channels and which offered roads like Moebius strips: easy to follow one all the way around and end up somewhere else; easy likewise to turn off a road and go away and away and away and end up where you started… John had had a dream the night before about being here. (Celia for her part dreamed that she was in bed with a strange man in a grey suit who was very worried about something. The man climbed on top of her and began to fuck her, but when he was finished, blue stuff like some strange new toothpaste came out of him.) John dreamed that he was opening a jewel box filled with rubies, and that Celia had played with the precious stones as a happy child would play with beach pebbles, and then behind the rubies, in the bottom of the box, lay a plate glass window through which the entire Delta was inexplicably passing. — There’s Cliff’s Marina, John said in the dream. See the sign that says LIVE CRAYFISH? — Uh huh, said Celia, playing with her rubies. (I just want to sit on the beach and stare, or maybe read and dream and then swim in warm water somewhere, she had confided to him that night before they fell alseep.) The wide silvery river was very still. Birds and fog hung about them as their dream-window flashed along the levee top, showing them orchards, brown spring fields, and the occasional palm tree. When John awoke, he realized that the magic panorama must have taken place in March or early April at the latest, when the hot blasts of present time had not yet withered anything. Apples and pears promised themselves through blossoms as white as the now sunny river, and they’d already come into Hood, elevation twenty-three feet above sea level, whose attractions included HOME MILK and Skittles’s bar. A fat dog was lying on his side by the drugstore. Wet muck under the flowering orchards reflected the blossoms. After Hood came Courtland and then flowering orchard-tops by the trestle bridge, then a yellow steel drawbridge attended by river-smell; after that came Galt, and finally Locke, whose elevation was thirteen. John woke up smiling.

Now the dream was over and decayed back to moldy shadowhood, for it was mid-May and the Delta was getting hot, with double rows of trees presiding over the browning grass whose golden and silver seedheads would continue to accrete their jewels of life until the sudden day of spending came, that day yet as unimaginable as any day of bustling urban life in the Delta. Passing the sign for LIVE CRAYFISH, John floored it, honking at a farm rig which might have slowed him down. He almost wished that they had come the other way so that Celia could hear the bells clanging on Walnut Grove’s steel-decked drawbridge now splitting itself and rising away from the river-sparkle, but soon enough she would. He was getting so excited now about showing his younger self off to Celia that memories from nowhere buzzed him like little white cropduster planes.

It’s beautiful, she said.

There’s nothing beautiful about it, he said happily. It’s just suburban, that’s all.

The Sacramento River was wide and pale and sparkling along the levee. On the other side stretched long furrow-etched fields, and vineyards whose stakes offered multiple vanishing points as the car rushed along. A speedboat whined up the river, and John smiled, remembering how he had shaken off his virginity in a speedboat. He switched on the radio, which announced a rollover on Interstate-5, nobody killed. — Lots of stupid drivers out there, he sighed, switching it off in a restless, almost anxious motion. The reflective orchard puddles in John’s dream were now yellow and rubbery-looking with algae.

See, there are no pear blossoms, he said triumphantly. I’m telling you, they’re gone. They’ve all fallen off.

And what kind of tree is that?

You know, you ask me these things, and it’s frustrating, because I don’t know anything about trees.

Passing through Courtland, John raised his arm like a maestro so that Celia would pay attention to the bells and the humming as the yellow bridge slowly parted company from itself, the bright halves straining at the sky’s sunny wind and citrus smell, and finally a solitary high-masted vessel passed through, sails furled, and then the drawbridge redescended for the sake of the queue of cars.

This is doing so well, that white azalea, John said.

She cleared her throat.