William Vollmann - The Royal Family

Don’t they ever stop here anymore? he asked the bulls.

Why don’t you ask your friend there, chuckled the bull who’d kicked over the hobo’s Wild Turkey.

In silence, the other bull handed back everyone’s identification cards.

We’re going to have to ask you to move on, said the first bull. Technically, you know, you shouldn’t be on Union Pacific property.

I understand, officer. How about just letting us watch the next train go by? said Tyler.

All right, the bull said. But you’ll have to move up to the right of those power poles. That way you’ll be off railroad property.

All right, said Tyler. Thank you, officer.

Thank you, officer, said the hobo obsequiously.

Irene, glaring nobly at the two bulls, gathered up her belongings in silence.

Now what? she said when they reached the power poles.

What are you asking me for, sweetheart? I thought you were supposed to be telling me what to do.

Oh, that’s rich, the hobo said. You’re such an idiot. You don’t even know if you’re dead or alive.

Knock it off, said Tyler. If you’re so enlightened, how come you can’t stop being an alcoholic even after you’re dead?

Irene smiled sadly.

After a long time, the long, wheeled wall of waiting boxcars across the track suddenly clanked. Then hissing screams of steam were uttered. The engineer was testing the breaks. In a moment, the train would depart. Anxiously the three sojourners looked both ways, and found the railroad bulls gone or at least out of sight. Tyler and Irene ran across the gravel-clattering open space, knowing that the engineer could see them and hoping that he did not care. Just in time they threw themselves up into the sunstruck interior of a boxcar: yellowed old paint with brown scratches and black rust-islands all indescribably beautiful like taffy with caramelized sugar. As for the hobo, he first rabbited himself into a grainer car, then changed his mind and leaped into Tyler and Irene’s almost perambulating cave. — I still move pretty good, he chuckled. I ain’t got no complaints. — Tyler sat beside Irene on his bedroll, with his arm around her waist.

The train began to move. The whole world paraded past! And Tyler realized that this was the ultimate extended trace.

Look! said the hobo raptly, raising his arm in a Roman salute. The new courthouse! — He had civic pride.

When she was alive, Irene, who thanks to a dangerously well hidden addiction to unrealistic expectations had never known much happiness anyhow, excepting the anticipatory kind, had developed a stomach ulcer in her first half-year of marriage — fitting emblem of that marriage: painful, bloody wound. She vomited blood in secret. She didn’t want to tell John. She pitied herself, seeking out Tyler’s pity in an oblique manner obscured by layers of affection. And he’d obliged; he’d pitied her and worried about her.

I love you so much, she said then.

I love you, too, he said. You have to go to the doctor or you’ll croak.

Maybe that would be the best solution.

But where would I be? he cried out.

I love you so much, she said.

And where would Tyler have been? Why, right here! And right here was not so bad… The ceiling was corroded beach-white and sky-blue around the edges, metal semblance of some tropical heaven. And yet Irene’s expressionlessness as she stared out the open door stirred up in him an unpleasant thrill of eeriness, which rapidly sank to dreariness, as if he had hopped a freight train which was surely going all the way to Elko but which after crossing the river then backed up, turned, and went west across the I Street bridge to end in some dead switching yard in West Sacramento where, after having been slammed back and forth for a long time, he suddenly felt deadness: his locomotives had abandoned him; he was to be left amidst gravel and mosquitoes all night and maybe all the next day or even all week; his water would last two days, so he’d better come out, put his bedroll on his back, and start walking to God knows where, maybe to the Land of Nod. Irene did not care for him at all.

I love you so much, he said experimentally.

What’s the use of loving a dead person? she bitterly replied.

I don’t see what use has to do with anything.

How do you feel now, Henry?

I feel — well, tortured and confused, but I know that my unhappiness isn’t yours.

Irene was silent.

Well, he said finally, do you still love me?

I don’t remember. You didn’t call me back to love you. You just prayed that I’d come and be your angel.

That’s rich, the hobo said. You’re both just a couple of chumps.

They reached Coffee Camp and crossed the American River, then backed up near Loaves and Fishes, and the old mill towered grimly out the open door. Tyler and Irene passed rusty wire, sunlight, bowing trees, the stylized outline of a woman white on a grey siding. Irene wanted to lean out to see everything, but he gripped her arm, he said because that was how you did things when you were pulling a surveillance job, but really because he did not want her to fly away.

A glossy black locomotive bore toward them. It said TRUCKEE. The paint shone and glistened with a mirror finish, reflecting golden blobs of sunlight. Then came the long mahogany passenger cars. Irene gasped with pleasure. Through one of the windows Tyler glimpsed playing cards laid out by a sherry decanter.

Did you see that? cried the hobo. That was a blast from the past. That train sure don’t cast no shadder.

What do you care? said Tyler. You’re a blast from the past yourself.

The tarnished pigeonholes of an old mail car rattled by, gaping its many lips of canvas mail sacks.

My Daddy told me they used to dump a mailbag every five seconds an’ sort it out, the hobo said.

Oh, come on, said Irene.

No, darlin’, I swear it. My Daddy didn’t never lie to me.

Irene smiled. — I know what’s on that mailcar, Henry, she said.

What’s that? Tyler said.

All the letters I never sent you, and all the letters you wrote me that I never answered.

Maybe you’re right, he said, and just then an envelope blew out the window and into the open boxcar where Irene, laughing, snatched it up and opened it. It said: Irene, please. I want to live inside your heart, to know you, care for you, and sleep within your arms. I want to drink your spit. I want to make you happy. I think about you every day. — Irene giggled and showed it to the hobo, who said: I don’t give a fuck. — Tyler was red with humiliation and rage.

Oh, are you angry? said Irene. I’m sorry. I forgot that people who aren’t dead yet still have secrets to hide.

Just forget it, he muttered.

Henry?

What?

Will you really forget it? I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings. You’re just so funny sometimes. Oh, look!

The dining car was going by, showing off bone china and sterling silver for Irene.

A fire-red caboose made Irene smile happily, and then the train was gone.

We all shoulda caught that train, the hobo said. Train like that only comes along every hundred years. That’s the train bound straight for Jesus and his angels.

Glad I missed it, then, said Tyler. I don’t know about you.

Where were all the passengers? said Irene.

How should I know? You’re the angel. You’re supposed to have all the answers.

That was a nasty thing to say.

I’m sorry, Irene. I didn’t mean it that way.

Another strange train rushed past. First he could see the cow-catcher of the locomotive with its vertical ribs like teeth, the great number 1 inscribed on a circular window and also on a metal breast — was this the fabled Governor Stanford train back from the days when X Street was still walled with trees? He narrowed his eyes, frowning at the smoking-car, which resembled a mummy’s sarcophagus, all golden, golden, inset with nested beads, webs, zigzags and narrow figures in fields of burnished gold-leaf within blue and red boxes.