William Vollmann - The Royal Family

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.

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…

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.

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 gaining 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.