William Vollmann - The Royal Family

The Queen walked by swinging her purse and singing. No, it wasn’t she; it wasn’t she.

One more time and one more time he strolled the Tenderloin and actually found Strawberry, who wasn’t dead at all. He remembered her out in front of the Wonderbar, her eyes wild and glassy as she leaned against the door. Now her hair was greyer, that was all. Maybe nobody ever died. Maybe he’d find Irene, or his dearest and most adorable little Queen, the Queen of his love, the keeper of his spirit, his tender Queen.

Don’t you remember me? he said.

What the fuck? Oh, yeah. You’re the Queen’s trick. About time Maj got up off her ass and used it for something… Oh, that’s right. Maj is gone. It’s Domino now…

Strawberry, you’ve got something in your hair.

Well, why don’t you touch me? You afraid to touch me? Whatcha afraid for? I fuck everybody.

Okay, honey, he said. See, it’s chewing gum.

Honey, I hate to say this but you got some miles on your tires. Well, what the heck. You look like a nice date. Probably only do it for a couple of minutes…

Thanks.

Well, so what’s the story? said Strawberry. You want some company or what?

Uh…

Then her manner became as tight as the pussy of the skeletal whore whose face, like Beatrice’s, had been destroyed in an automobile accident, and she said to him: No hard feelings, Henry, but I need to make a little money out here. You mind moving away from me?

It was foggy in John’s neighborhood, with a white-chocolate fog that at ten o’clock in the morning persisted like a hangover. He strolled up to the front door, read on the nameplate the words J & I TYLER and found no courage, or perhaps simply no inclination, to ring the bell. Slowly he turned the corner. Half an hour later he was sitting in one of the coffee shops which had metastasized all over Union Street; and he sat among the backpacked, baseball-capped persons of leisure who, heads still glistening from the shower, read the newspaper: the President had declared tobacco an addictive drug. The FBI had found traces of explosive in a piece of the jet which had fallen into the sea. A woman of unknown name and address had been found dead on Capp Street. New cars were available for NO GIMMICKS — NO HASSLES.

The two women at the adjoining table glared at him, wrinkling their noses and fanning the air. Enraged, humiliated, he tried to stare them down. He’d truly had no ill intentions! But that didn’t matter. He lived, so he stank. Presently the manager came and said: Sir, I’m sorry, but you’ll have to leave. You’re disturbing the other patrons.

Tyler leaned toward his enemies and whispered: My body’s made of white sugar. That’s why I don’t take showers. C’mon, sweethearts, can I take a bath in your cookie jar?

He hopped a freight to Coffee Camp and then went to Loaves and Fishes to get his blue ticket for a free lunch. Then he got seconds. Drunks were sneering and scratching themselves beneath the arms. Nobody had heard of the Queen. No one knew the Hundred Thousand Dollar Boxcar Queen. He picked little grapes like blue ballbearings which left his sweaty fingers purple-black almost like railroad grime. Sitting high above the river on a log so rotten that he could scratch the word IRENE into it with his fingernail, he wondered whether this final most extended trace of his private eye career might not prove to be more than the waste that John would have thought it, because even if he could never find the Queen again, if he could at least prove her perpetual nonexistence then he would at least have destroyed one more lie in this world. He feared nothing now except a death of extended physical pain. He felt stronger and more honest than he’d ever been. Maybe he’d finally gotten to the point of living life with a flaming joy like a yellow California Northern train sliding through the yellow hills, not afraid of any risk (because anyway, no matter what you do, death will find you out), just doing whatever he wanted to do and hoping for the best. — Look at that bum, said the trackman. Yep, he thinks he’s a hundred-car train! — Naw, he’s just goin’ to south Sacramento, laughed the engineer. Just switchin’. —The engineer was wrong. Tyler hopped a freight to Bakersfield, and another to Barstow via Los Angeles. Then he kept going, his train blowing sadness along the horizon in a lovely roaring wind which must be blowing white ripples upstream back at Coffee Camp which had become his home as much as the false Irene had once become the dead Irene. Soon it would be autumn there. The grass would be getting yellow, and spiny leaves would blow down his neck; there’d be star thistles in charge of the world, but not now because he was traveling southward into summer on a train as silvery as the river seen between grape leaves. Lonely, lost, hot and thirsty, he hoboed on his way increasingly free from preconceived intentions. He was freer every day. He needed nothing except water and a few excuses. Mosquitoes crawled under his hatbrim and on his sweaty cheeks. A slam, then a deeply reverberating squeak sent him farther outward into the world, as the huge, shiny wheel-disks slowly began rotating, their shining rims ready to hew off his leg if he were careless. On his boxcar someone had written in blue paint: TO LIVE ALONE IS TO DIE ALIVE. Sometimes he slept near unmoving trains, still trains, striped pale and grey in the darkness. In the morning he always shook his shoes out in case scorpions had crawled inside. Before he knew it, he was almost in Mexico…

We’re about to get a burst of high winds, Waldo said, looking at his watch. He wore nothing but shoes, underpants and a baseball cap. — Over there, he said, that just looks like a burned-out bus, but that’s actually my command post, where I watch for all the maurauders. All the electronic things we can’t talk about, the things that go whirly-whirly and that talk to you, those are the things that are there.

Tyler had been through this patch of desert six months ago, so he remembered the vans, the broken down truck, the missile nosecone, the mattresses and sofas all monumental against the flatness like some dry Mexican necropolis of flowers and spindly gravestones, their neighbors being pyrites and granite and sedimentery rock. Waldo definitely possessed more couches and shoes and everything now. Especially he owned more vehicular hulks. Soon the Park Service would be bound to notice, and then Waldo would lose everything. Waldo, who was autistic, sweet, longhaired, gray bearded, skinny and old, would then wilt and maybe even die. On the other hand, maybe Waldo would just die right here before anything else happened. He’d been burglarized a week ago. He would be as easy to kill as Irene’s child.

The sun heated a broken sink and a rusty cylindrical tank all the way to hurtfulness. Waldo said: When it gets around a hundred twenty-five or so, when it gets iffy, you got to follow the shade around, cancel any patrols that are necessary. Take special options, with doughnuts and flying saucers in radiators, and drink lots of ice water, and no unnecessary movement.

Waldo splashed ice water over himself. He did not offer Tyler any. He never offered any guest a drink cold or otherwise. That was his way. He was not selfish, only different.

Where do you get that ice from? asked Tyler.

I get those who have transpo or whatever, Waldo said. I put up signs and signals, and they keep watch on me.

Then that frail, gentle man turned away, gazing toward the Salton Sea, which was not visible from here, his thought-radiations perhaps travelling as far as Bombay Beach, which would appear less deserted than it actually was once night came — a few streetlights came on, and two or three trailer- or house-lights shone on every block, struggling with electric automatism against the smell of the Salton Sea and all the dry, broken things. Or who knew? Maybe Waldo’s thoughts were already all the way to Mars.