William Vollmann - The Royal Family

(That was almost the last time he saw Chocolate. He saw her once more a month later in lacy black, limping eagerly after the tall man who, pushing a stolen shopping cart heaped with stolen women’s clothes, scarcely glanced at her. A car slowed, and the tall man said to the driver: You lookin’? —Naw, just lookin’, said the driver, and sped off. The tall man cursed. Tyler was too heartsick even to call out. He watched them vanish down Sixteenth Street.)

At the prison the other visitors were embracing their women, and when he saw Strawberry approaching him, tanned, overweight, tense and glum, he thought that she would embrace him, too, the way she always did at the Queen’s or in the Wonderbar, so he was actually stupid enough to have begun to outstretch his arms to her when he saw that she had another visitor, an old regular who sometimes entertained her down in Stockton, a half-toothless ex-con who loved Strawberry and had taken the risk of coming here — luckily, they hadn’t checked his record this morning; otherwise, he’d have been busted. — Strawberry flew into his arms, gazing apprehensively at Tyler.

Hi, Henry, she said tonelessly.

Seeing that she feared the ex-con’s jealousy, Tyler shook the man’s hand and talked exclusively to him for a moment or two, then said: Well, listen, if you two need some privacy maybe I’ll just sit over at this other table for a bit. Take your time.

Just five minutes, said the ex-con, very friendly now that Tyler had put him first.

Tyler sat gazing at nothing for fifteen minutes until Strawberry called him over.

How’s everything? he said.

Fine.

Beatrice says to tell you she loves you.

Strawberry shrugged.

Dan Smooth’s in trouble.

So what?

Are they treating you okay?

Fine.

How many girls in your dorm?

Fifty-nine. Five toilets. We get up at four in the morning for breakfast and sometimes there’s a long line for the toilet, but otherwise it ain’t bad.

Look, you’re kind of my family, so I… You got any friends in here?

I just keep to myself, Strawberry said. She sat anxiously gazing at the ex-con, so Tyler turned to him and for five minutes the two men spoke of beer and whiskey and Delta towns. Tyler asked the ex-con if he ever got into San Francisco much and the ex-con said he didn’t. Tyler told him to come to the Wonderbar and he’d buy him a drink.

Well, I don’t go drinking that much on my own anymore, the ex-con said. When Strawberry’s there I kind of keep in line. Otherwise I seem to get myself in trouble.

Yeah, I understand, said Tyler. Well, you’re a lucky man to have Strawberry to look after you.

Strawberry hung her head.

Strawberry, he said, I need to know something. There’s a lady I’m looking for — a lady I love. I think you know who she is.

Don’t, said Strawberry, weeping. Please don’t.

A guard came over to their table and said: Calm yourself down now. You don’t want to go upsetting everybody else.

Just tell me this, Tyler said. Can I keep looking? Is there any hope?

Do you have any idea what would happen to me if Domino heard that we had this conversation?

Well, said Tyler to the ex-con, I’m sure that you and Strawberry have a lot to talk about, so I’ll be on my way. Strawberry, I’ll put ten dollars in your account.

Good to know you, said the ex-con, accepting Tyler’s hand.

The Queen used to say I always kept a dirty clod of dirt in my mouth, Strawberry laughed desperately.

You miss her, too, don’t you?

She was so good to Sapphire. I used to cut out curtains from paper and glue them into little cardboard boxes to make dollhouses for Sapphire but she never played with ’em ’cause she…

Wasn’t she good to you, too? he bullied her. Wasn’t she good to all of us?

You were leaving, the ex-con said. I already shook your hand.

Tyler went out. — I want a Queen with number eighteen trisomy syndrome, he muttered with a laugh. Or a hyperactive microcephalic girl…

At eight-thirty the next morning it was sunny and cool, and while somebody with a long-handled swab washed the windows of Pancho Villa’s until they were as sparkling mirrors, a black man and a Chicana woman argued on the far side of the street. Tyler had seen the woman working on South Van Ness a couple of nights ago. The man had a stick. First they launched at one another the small arms fire of curses, gradually more highly charged. — Don’t you threaten me or I’ll tell the Queen, you S.O.B., the woman snarled, raising her arms, at which the man got her in a chokehold and started dragging her away by her neck, shaking her as a hunting dog does some still struggling duck. Joyously he shouted: There is no Queen anymore, you ignorant bitch! The old lady beside Tyler shook her head, enjoying every minute of it. When Tyler was younger he had once tried to break up a similar scene in which the man pulled a knife on the woman, but at his approach the woman had thrown one arm around the man, shaken her fist, and told him to mind his own fucking business, while the one with the knife chuckled and sneered. Now Tyler was more like the woman on the sidewalk who was enjoying herself so much, the formulaic head-shakings merely an easy sacrifice on the altar of that enjoyment, the only distinction (and, in the long view of things, not a very important one) being that he didn’t enjoy watching it at all. In short, he didn’t get involved.

The man glanced across the street, saw Tyler, and winked. He yelled: No rub wit’ the Capp Street hoes!

What’d he say, what’d he say? whispered the old lady beside him in fascination.

Well, ma’am, explained Tyler, I think he was telling me not to use condoms if I have sex with the prostitutes on Capp Street. Or else he might have been suggesting that he doesn’t believe I use condoms when I have sex with the prostitutes on Capp Street. Those are the two possibilities that occur to me. Which one do you think is right?

The man came over to them and the lady’s face slammed shut and Tyler said howdy.

Why you standing on the corner like that? the man said to him. You make me nervous. If you stand on the corner you might get popped.

That’s okay, said Tyler. My name’s Mr. Popcorn.

The black man laughed and walked away, muttering over his shoulder: You stupid honky sonofabitch.

Since that first descent into the royal tunnel now so long ago, Tyler’s wounds, trivial though perhaps they were, had never stopped bleeding; in everything he did, he left behind a dark and sticky spoor of sadness which predators could follow. Brady smelled it from the first. That was why he sent Tyler a videocassette meant to humiliate him. Having had no news of the Queen for so long, Tyler took the black plastic cartridge in his hand with helpless dread. After the football game on television cut off, superseded by the now rewound footage, static sizzled with blue harshness on the screen, and then abruptly the tunnel appeared again, or one like it. A procession was approaching. There they were, all the street whores he’d once known, proceeding down a dark passage, each with a bridle in her mouth — a detail which Brady’s slapper, who enjoyed the classics, had gotten out of Herodotus. Brady had dressed the Queen as a slave, in rags and chains. She had a black eye, and her front teeth were knocked out. It was probably all faked, just virtual reality, one of Brady’s nasty jokes. The camera zoomed in. Now he could see that the whores were being required to balance turds on their heads. Most of them were crying. The Queen wasn’t allowed to speak anymore, so she couldn’t comfort them — Brady had threatened to cut her tongue out if she did — and the turd had been placed on the back of her head so that she had to bow her face to keep it from falling. Her eyelids were like cigarette-burned curtains trying to keep out the light.