William Vollmann - The Royal Family

Good arithmetic, said the Queen. But why can’t you multiply?

They’re not old enough to bleed when I fuck ’em, said Smooth.

Did you get off on Sunflower’s story? said Tyler challengingly. She bleeds from both ends.

You don’t need to pick on him, Henry, said the Queen. Danny’s a good man. Sunflower’s daddy wasn’t. We would have taken care of him but Sunflower didn’t want that. Sunflower’s my baby, she cooed, kissing the woman’s dirty toes.

She turned to Tyler and said: You see what she’s about? You see why she’s good? Jesus Himself ain’t fit to pop her zit like you done. Jesus on the very cross of torture and shame never suffered like she suffered. And I don’t care how much He gave. He never gave like she did. I know her so well. Queen’s come to give her little baby her reward. My baby, my darling little baby. Queen’s heart’s gonna break.

And between the naked woman’s legs she laid five one hundred dollar bills and a baggie with enough China white for Sunflower to kill herself ten times over.

Tyler said nothing. The Queen looked him in the eye and said: It’s up to her. Gotta give her some happiness. If she don’t O.D., she can come back to me for more favors. Queen’ll always take care of her. If she wants to go into rehab she can. If she wants to sell that powder she can. But I know she gonna wanna take that happiness. I know she gonna wanna go home.

He saw that for himself, said Smooth, and Tyler realized now that the Queen, who was both very busy and very subtle, had come not only to see to Sunflower but also to judge him and perhaps to try him more deeply also. Spitting in his mouth wasn’t enough. — I can vouch for old Hanky-Panky here, Smooth went on. He saw the goodness. We don’t none of us have to be riding him. I knew his sad eyes from the first. He and Sunflower have the same sad eyes.

How many are like her? said Tyler.

She’s one of the best right now, the Queen said. Queen’s not gonna tell you all she knows, but there’s several. Well, they wear out. In this town, maybe twenty thirty forty girls are our shields. They take the pain and keep it. They help all the rest. You wanna see how much pain she’s got inside her? Look here.

Partly unzipping her sweatshirt, she reached down her neck and presently pulled out what resembled a copper penny with eyes and lightning bolts carved or engraved into it, and protruding octopus-fashion from its edges many copper wires knotted into tiny holes in the disk; the ends of the wires had been wrapped around what might have been black seeds.

Got any rubbers on you, Smooth? she said.

Let’s see now. Let’s see, the man said, thoughtfully licking his lips. Oh, here’s an old dried out one under the bed. Smells pretty fresh…

Well, whack it against the wall or something. Clean it off.

How about a plain rubber band? said Smooth. I keep one around my address book.

Yeah, that’ll do. Now, tie it around the charm, respectful like. Good. You just watch this, Henry. Don’t say nothing; don’t do nothing. Just observe. Danny, hold the rubber part. Don’t touch the copper, ’cause it’s magic. Now touch it to her. Slowly. No, wait. You do it, Smooth. But she’s used to you, Henry, so you should hold her hand. She’s gonna be scared. Okay, Danny boy. Give him a show. It’s only a show.

Dangling the copper spider by its improvised thong, old Dan Smooth, holding his breath, bent over the recumbent woman and slowly began easing it down above her ankle while the Queen stood praying: In the name of the Mother and the Daughter and the Holy Ghost! and the strands of wire began to writhe and quiver of their own accord. One touched flesh, and then the light flickered and went out, and the stinking darkness exploded with deep blue sparks and Sunflower jerked up screaming like she had that first time when her father sodomized her and in the room across the hall a radio immediately went on loud because they didn’t want to know about any screams. Tyler felt no electric shock. He held Sunflower’s hand as tightly as he could and wiped the tears from her eyes, and then the lights came back on as Dan Smooth took the talisman away and Sunflower fell back on the bed snoring.

She won’t remember nothing, said the Queen. See, that’s all the pain she has inside her. Too much for any human being to get out even by magic.

We take pride in our Queen, because she has the power, Smooth was explaining brightly. Glowing in the darkness. Talk about animal magnetism! Well, believe you me…

It didn’t hurt her, Henry, if that’s what you’re thinking, said the Queen.

What about his pain? asked Smooth, with a sickening mixture of malice and pity. Hank’d be a crybaby if he knew how — look into those eyes of his, Maj; how can we get that pain out of his eyes?

That’s what everybody asks me, said the Queen with brightly bitter humor. — As if I’m not the biggest shield of them all! Well, it’s an honor, I know.

Tyler said nothing. — Of course it’s only his second time, Smooth finally blurted, looking him up and down and shaking his head.

(Outside, in the hallway, an old woman was shouting: Fook a-you, beetch! Goddamn it! Fook-a-you! Oh, I sorry. I fook a-you today, you fook-a me tomorrow. Fook-a I sorry!)

Smooth leaned forward and whispered so that the hot wet breath tickled Tyler’s ear: Now imagine if Sunflower woke up and we knew but she didn’t know that there was a window there.

Certain appearances to the contrary, Dan Smooth was, as Dostoyevsky would have put it, an excellent man. First of all, the loathing which his so-called proclivities caused others to feel was more than counterbalanced by his usefulness to society. The police relied on Smooth, and consequently protected him, on the understanding that he would do nothing indiscreet. Indiscretion meant, for instance, raping and murdering a child. As it happened, Smooth was more bark than bite. He did not merely take pleasure in offending others (other adults, that is); he had a positive need to do so. This characteristic in no way contradicted his general spirit of friendliness and helpfulness; like most people whose thoughts or needs are a little bit odd, Smooth inspired revulsion among the homogenous masses of car-drivers, television-watchers, jurors, and baseball addicts. With children he had a way — or, rather, a quality, for “way” implies method — which drew them to him. On airplanes, infants would drop their pacifiers, reaching out to touch his nose; and when he’d bend to pick up the slobbery things, the children would strain toward his hand. — Are you ready? he’d say to the ones who could talk. — Yeah, they’d say shyly. — Are you ready? he’d whisper dramatically. Are you ready to fly? — To their parents, had they been unaccompanied by their delicious offspring, and had Smooth believed that he could get away with it (for he was realistic to the point of cowardice), he might have said with a pleasant smile: Excuse me, but would you mind if I sniffed your asshole? Dogs do that, you know. — Mostly, being the graduate of many bitter experiments, he kept to himself, and served up silence with the pleasant smile. Take a baby bird in your hands, so that it absorbs your smell, and its parents will shun it to the very death. Take an ant from one nest and drop it in another; the ant-law requires that it be destroyed. Galileo and Göring, Jesus and Socrates, eccentrics, murderers and saints — all must be neutralized by the swarming super-organism in any way possible. Only three paths for such creatures can preserve them. The first is to hide, like terrorists and hermits; the second is to be in some measure needful or powerful, like rocket-scientists, kings and jesters; the third is to defy. Dan Smooth in fact employed all of these strategies. He had many connections, but few friends, and his neighbors did not know his name. The police, as I said, found him useful; few sex crimes investigators were more thorough than Dan Smooth; and his informants in the demimonde and the holy order of pedophiles supplied him with information of a consistently high purity. The famous Kaylin Kohler case, in which a ten-year-old girl from Redding was abducted from her own home, raped, tortured, and buried alive, was solved thanks to a tip from Dan Smooth, whose electronic alias had been Ticklequick; entering a “chat room” from his personal computer, he announced his intention of trading seventy-five cubic centimeters of saliva from a twelve-year-old Caucasian boy named Rodney for an equivalent volume of urine from an African-American female of similar age — or, to quote his message in full: