William Vollmann - The Royal Family

My best friend died in my arms, the skinny woman went on in a whisper. My boyfriend shot her in the back in our house, right through the back door. I carried her off next door and she wanted me to hold her. I still have some bad dreams…

And then what happened? said Tyler.

They went to shoot my boyfriend, I think, and the gun misfired and then they arrested him.

Things happen all the same though, the angry man’s mother said wisely.

I have a headache, said the skinny woman.

What’s for dinner? said the angry man to himself. Got some hamburger, I think. Don’t know how the cheese will hold up. Soon it’ll be cooler.

Well, said Tyler starting to feel oppressed, maybe I’ll move on. What are you folks going to do now?

Relax during the night, the angry man said. Enjoy the coolness and get the labor stuff done. I’m tryin’ to get this swamp cooler to work…

Tyler peeled off his last twenty and gave it to the mother. — Maybe this’ll buy you enough gas to get your son to court and back.

The angry man looked at him with big owl eyes and said: I could sure use some help, too.

Tyler sighed.

The angry man sat there for a while and then said hopelessly: Guess I’ll go into Mom’s trailer and try to swat off all the flies.

As for Tyler, he continued on his extended trace. Ten minutes’ footwork further out into the Drops he met a thin, bespectacled, beatific man with scraggly long hair who walked steadily in the hundred and fifteen degree heat, swinging his black-greased hands, his bare torso tanned almost to negritude.

Everybody’s friendly out here, he said. Everybody works together. Even when the snowbirds come in, we are not like a big city. We don’t get involved in other people’s business. I leave my place unlocked. And if you don’t cause trouble, you don’t get trouble. You don’t have to worry about someone come up the road behind you and shoot…

Tyler nodded.

I been workin’, the man said. I do mechanic work. Sometimes the guys at the shop invite me inside where it’s cool, but I always say no. You get into air conditioning and then when you come out you gonna have a heat stroke. Anybody could be walkin’ out here and it could hit you all at once.

Yeah, it feels pretty warm, said Tyler.

Name’s Clyde.

Henry.

You find you a spot out here, you can make it. But if you don’t got tough skin, you ain’t gonna make it. I been here seven years.

You must get lots of thinking done around here, said Tyler.

Yep. I think about my past, and about my dead wife and about how to make a nickel; I’m always hustlin’…

I think pretty about much the same, Tyler admitted.

Clyde gave him a loving gaze. I can see that you do, he said.

I’m looking for someone, Tyler began hopelessly, a black lady, well, a small, slender black gal who…

I hope you find her, said Clyde.

You think she could be living here?

You got some women that live by theirselves, and one black guy, but no black gals that I know of.

How about past the Drops?

You can go nine miles down that road and then it cuts off to the right and then it goes on to Calpatria, but half a mile down from here the people stop. There’s not over seventy of us, including Slab city and all the kids…

And what about the other way?

Drop Eleven is the last, said Clyde, sincerely sorry for him, and at that moment Tyler felt that the man’s kindness was as immense as the scarlet heart on the white breast of Salvation Mountain.

What’s her name? said Clyde. The name of the gal you’re tryin’ to find.

Oh, he mumbled, Africa was her name, but she… Maybe now the Hundred Thousand Dollar Boxcar Queen would be good enough, because Africa must be dead.

Well, why don’t you sleep on it, said Clyde. If you was to ask your homeless, what does it take to get what you need, I bet they’ll all answer, an argument and a wait. But here, I could go to anyplace here and get me a ride, food and a cold drink. And it’s not so hard to get you a nickel or two. We haul scrap iron to get by.

Now the hot trees and trailers glowed in the sand as the sun began to set. A tire stood on end, now jet black like its own shadow, everything private and set back in the trees. A few silhouettes crept silently out on the sand. He knew that when morning came, scorching and dry, there’d be nobody.

Later he sat out by Salvation Mountain, with the Milky Way spread out as rich as a stain upon the sky; and stars, stars, stars! Salvation Mountain was like a groundsloth, a hunkered down elephant or maybe a snail barely poking its head out of its shell, all whitish and jigsawed in the night.

A train, dark against the darkness, barely discernible, comprised a mere shifting of the night which hissed and clicked to itself.

He drifted through Coffee Camp one night in midsummer and there were no campfires, the river silver and still, with the trestle bridge’s reflection floating on it like a fallen ladder, barely trembling, as if disturbed a little by the faint harsh voices. Across the river, a spear of city light exposed an immense bat which then vanished back into its element. The next day he walked up and down the river, but the Hundred Thousand Dollar Boxcar Queen was long gone. He was getting so bored with disappearances.

I bear the Mark of Cain, he said wearily to the next missionary.

You do not, the missionary replied. You are a white man. You are no Negro. I quote to you from Brigham Young, the second prophet of my church: Cain slew his brother, and the Lord put a mark on him, which is a flat nose and black skin.

My Queen was black, said Tyler. Therefore, so am I.

You can’t be Negro just by wishing it, man!

Oh, yes I can.

Up above the freeway where the razor-wire was, they’d cut a hole in the fence with their wirecutters. The railroad or the city had patched that one up, so they’d cut another hole. That was how life worked.

Got change for a five? a woman said.

Nope, said Tyler. Where are you headed?

I don’t answer any questions, the woman snarled. That rule comes from moi.

Oh, well, then I won’t answer any questions, either, said Tyler. How’s that for a deal?

The woman whispered into her boyfriend’s ear, who said to Tyler: I oughta gut you.

A deal’s a deal, said Tyler serenely.

The couple glared at him. Then they moved down the fence to meet their crack pusher out of earshot.

Tyler sat under the lone shade tree until mid-morning, when he was joined by a black man puffed up with balloon tricks. He could tie a balloon like a pretzel, bite off a piece of it, and somehow insert the piece into the balloon without popping anything. Then he put a cigarette lighter in his mouth, and before Tyler knew it, the cigarette lighter was inside the balloon, too! The result was called a pregnant giraffe. When the black man started to hit him up for money, Tyler ducked through the hole and clambered up the embankment, discovering a long lost hobo camp containing a rusty tin can of ashes, a frying pan with no handle, now filled with leaves, a piece of angle-iron which had served as a griddle, dirty paper plates, a plastic spoon, a scrap of cardboard which had probably been used for hitchhiking since it said TRINITY, a filthy pair of pants, and many bottlecaps, to say nothing of used condoms baked and hardened to the semblance of bottle caps, everything beaten into the gravel by some seemingly irrevocable process. Far down below, near the Salvation Army, he heard sirens. Trains shuttled back and forth. He gazed at the segmented grey horizon of gravel cars and grainers, with the ruined Globe Mill in the background, and he longed to get out of this world, just to go.