William Vollmann - The Royal Family

But sometimes he still had Irene, for instance washing the dishes from a multicourse Korean meal she’d cooked in her mother’s house while the relatives sat around the table eating melon slices and sugarcoated sunflower seeds, trying to decide some recalcitrant teenager’s future, the cousin sitting tired from helping his parents all day, watching Korean television news about high school violence and auto accidents. The cousin had realized that all grls were hysterical. — I’m just not a good female handler, he said mournfully to his sister, who was getting ready for her week-long basketball tournament. The uncles, the tired old grocery store owners and dry cleaners, almost ready for retirement, cracked peanuts while the baby crawled upstairs, reaching for the dog while everybody laughed…

He remembered all the times he’d phoned and phoned but she never called back, the time above all when the three of them met for dinner and she’d never said a word to him, nor he to her. John prattled on. Irene answered, upholding her part of the conversation in a perfectly acceptable way, although Tyler, listening, thought that she seemed far less submissive than usual; her “I thinks” and “maybes” had been stricken out, so that she now spoke with the blunt authority of Koreans among equals; in fact, he sensed almost a contentious edge to her voice, a pulsing anger beneath the translucently banal membrane of her words. She was wearing a white sweater. Later, he’d remember its weave very well. Irene’s long inky hair occasionally entered his vision. He kept his gaze on her shoulder (she was sitting across from him); he couldn’t bear to look into her face. — What’s wrong? said John. Are you sick? — I’m OK, he said, looking into John’s face; at the same moment, Irene leaned forward, coming accidentally into view, so that he saw her grimace. Her pale face was so beautiful that he actually thought for a moment that he was going insane. He staggered to his feet and went to the men’s room, standing for a long time with his face in the sink, the cold water playing over his neck. He dried himself on his shirttails and went back. Amidst his terrifying love for Irene there now flowered a swift hatred, strengthening by the second; she could have at least greeted him when they met, or asked him how he was. He was bleeding inside from her cruelty. And then he reminded himself that he’d been the evil one, and should be grateful to her for not telling on him to John. The hatred disappeared. (John was saying something to him. He felt very lightheaded. He said: I’m sorry. My mind went blank.) He said to himself: Well, I can always go pick up a whore, and indeed, just that day on Ellis Street he’d met a stinking girl who lived in the Lincoln Hotel and who had begged him for money for epilepsy medicine, a favor he’d granted her; she’d said God bless you and kissed him with her reeking herpid lips; she’d said: If you ever need a woman, if you ever want somebody like me… and he didn’t want her but the fact that someone, at least, was willing to take him, made the pain recede. He tried to concentrate on the stinking woman with the herpid lips while they sat there in the restaurant. It took forever for the bill to come. He could feel Irene’s hatred now. There was no mistaking it. She despised him. She had avoided him and would go on doing so. She never wanted to see him again. He had sinned against her. She’d never forgive him. There was nothing he could do. After it was finally over, he and John punched each other’s shoulders half-heartedly, telling each other to be good, and then he looked up into the doorway where Irene, already turning away, but forcing herself to accomplish this one gesture for the sake of elementary politeness, fluttered her hand in a listless, resentful wave.

He went to San Francisco, and all the shelters he knew about were full. On Irene’s birthday he had to sleep in the street, in an alley south of Market. Two other men were already there, both of them black, and he asked them to help him. He was looking for a slender little black woman, maybe in overalls and suspenders.

Oh, it’s not so bad, one of them said. Lots of pussy around here. Trash can pussy, I call it.

That’s nice.

What’s your name?

Henry.

Henry, you a sharin’ type?

Sure.

Good. ’Cause if pussy come my way, if I got it, I share it.

Her name was Africa. And her shot-caller was a tall man named Justin. She…

Probably skipped all the way to Spokane by now, bro. Forget her. Keep your eye on reality. In this place we all gotta watch each other’s backs.

What’s your name?

Marcus.

So, Marcus, you telling me we have a few bad people around here?

When I first laid down on the streets, every night I wondered would I wake up alive. It goes farther back in your mind as the years go by, but it’s still there. I’ve had guns pulled on me, machetes pulled on me. But I used to teach martial arts, thanks to God’s grace. That man with the gun, I tripped him, slammed him into the wall. His buddy ran off. The store owner across the streets called the cops, and I’m glad to say the guy got five years in jail straight off…

Tyler sighed.

Don’t sweat it, bro, said the other man. Marcus always dwells on the bad side. Actually the best thing is the easiness, so to speak. You can leave your stuff, take a shower. A thief comes by, next guy will get him.

Does that mean you trust me? he asked in surprise.

Sure, we’re apprehensive about everyone at first, Henry. Don’t take it personal. But nobody gonna try to coerce you. Trust is building. We give you the rope to hang yourself.

A little more rope is all I need, he muttered, turning his face away from the garbage can.

He wanted to embrace life more and more. While his new brothers still snored, he buried his head in the garbage can, smelling John’s odor, the strong, sweaty scent he remembered so well from their boyhood. At John and Irene’s he’d once opened the laundry can with its dead frog smell. There’s been Irene’s panties with the precious golden dot of dried urine; he’d never forget that. Before the tramps woke, he reached deep into the hot, wet, stinking garbage with both hands and shoveled it over his face, feeling closer than ever to his adorable Queen.

The easiest course would have been to forget all about the Capp Street girls, but the next morning he walked down there in his heel-flapping shoes to satisfy himself one more time that nobody knew anything about the Queen, and his absurd hopes were burning like cigarette-ends in an ashtray. First he walked slowly past the fences and zigzag grillwork of Valencia Street where now a man stood holding a greasy cardboard sign which read HOMELESS — PLEASE HELP ME and where long ago Tyler used to meet the false Irene, who’d always stuck her abscessed tongue in his mouth, then mumbled: Hey, can you gimme five dollars? Just five. Or ten would be okay, ’cause then I could really really truly get well for a couple hours… — and her diseased body had been red and white just like one of these tacqueria-fronts. Here he was, gaping at a row of white-painted grilles between Fourteenth and Fifteenth, with the low whitish skyscrapers of the inner Mission District to remind him that things might well endure for a time. He hesitated, however, to wander far from his obligations. Perhaps he had never belonged here. He yearned to be safely back at Coffee Camp, or, better still, on a boxcar on a long, long train hitched to at least three or four locomotives so that he knew he was going somewhere far away because that was how you did an extended trace. But he ought to take advantage of his stay in San Francisco to get information for the details description sheet he now kept inside his cranium. At Capp and Seventeenth, the very intellectual-looking black prostitute who wore spectacles at first refused to even return his greeting since by his appearance and odor he probably possesed insufficient financial means to fulfill her expectations of life, but when he humbled himself, when he implored her, when asked after the old Queen, whom she’d never met, she relented a little and said: I don’t know about that. But Strawberry used to know her. Strawberry passed away. I found her, and it was pretty icky. The cops came and the EMT came and I told ’em to please cover her face but they couldn’t do anything till the coroner came.