William Vollmann - The Royal Family

You’re the best, Detective Collins, said Tyler cheerily. I certainly understand your situation, yes siree. Detective Collins, I want you to know that I am your slave.

Sighing, he unpeeled the tape and wrapped it around another business card. Then he got the magnifying glass and looked at the index fingerprint to get the secondary code. A ridge count of nine: inner loop, then. Now for the sub-secondary. He didn’t have both thumbs, so he couldn’t get the major division. He counted ridges on the thumb print, to get a partial key, then computed the second sub-secondary.

The phone rang.

She knew what you’re doing, said Smooth. Our Queen’s no fool.

Tyler grimaced.

Have you got a match yet?

Detective Collins was not disposed, said Tyler drily.

Oh, she’s a piece of work, said Smooth. She doesn’t like pedophiles, either. Let me give you another number. This is Detective Roy Gardner. No “i” after the “d.” You can mention my name.

You’re an amateur, said Detective Gardner, inspecting Tyler’s tentative alphanumeric fractions. Well, you got the whorl group right. Secondary and sub-secondary correct. All right. Leave this with me and call me tomorrow.

No match, said Gardner happily on the following day. She’s not in our files. She’s not in the FBI files, either.

What’s your name again? said the tall man.

You know my name, said Tyler.

What’s your name? said the tall man.

Henry.

I don’t want no trouble, said the tall man. You wait here and I’ll see if she want to talk with you.

Tyler scratched his chin and said: While we’re at it, Justin, what’s your name?

Aren’t you the wiseass.

Alone now, Tyler sat in that world-famed rendezvous, the Wonderbar, and beside him sat his fears.

The tall man returned and said: Not today. We all got too much shit goin’ on today to show you any heart…

That night Tyler was sad, and Smooth dreamed that his niece Darcy was a small child again, and that it was Christmas and he had given her a doll which resembled her. Suddenly he saw that Darcy had crawled into the fireplace and was silently convulsing and burning on the coals. He rushed up, removed the screen, and reached in with his bare hands to save her. His arms burst into flames. When he pulled her out, he found that it was not the real Darcy at all, but only the Darcy-like doll, which Darcy had rejected and thrown into the fire.

This is the heart of it, the scared woman who does not want to go alone to the man any longer, because when she does, when she takes off her baggy dress, displaying to him rancid breasts each almost as big as his head, or no breasts, or mammectomized scar tissue taped over with old tennis balls to give her the right curves; when, vending her flesh, she stands or squats waiting, congealing the air firstly with her greasy cheesey stench of unwashed feet confined in week-old socks, secondly with her perfume of leotards and panties also a week old, crusted with semen and urine, brown-greased with the filth of alleys; thirdly with the odor of her dress also worn for a week, emblazoned with beer-spills and cigarette-ash and salted with the smelly sweat of sex, dread, fever, addiction — when she goes to the man, and is accepted by him, when all these stinking skins of hers have come off (either quickly, to get it over with, or slowly like a big truck pulling into a weigh station because she is tired), when she nakedly presents her soul’s ageing soul, exhaling from every pore physical and ectoplasmic her fourth and supreme smell which makes eyes water more than any queen of red onions — rotten waxy smell from between her breasts, I said, bloody pissy shitty smell from between her legs, sweat-smell and underarm-smell, all blended into her halo, generalized sweetish smell of unwashed flesh; when she hunkers painfully down with her customer on a bed or a floor or in an alley, then she expects her own death. Her smell is enough to keep him from knowing the heart of her, and the heart of her is not the heart of it. The heart of it is that she is scared. She is scared like the Ellis Street Korean woman in the white halter-top who charged twenty for a blow job or sixty for an hour of converse with her incredibly tight and dry vagina, moaning with pain as her clients fucked her (unless, of course, she could take the sixty and run); she’d been raped by a white guy two weeks before and then dropped off half naked in the street; she said it didn’t hurt in her cunt as much as it had hurt in her heart; for a year she had been carrying pepper spray which another white guy, a nice one, had bought for her, but she didn’t dare to use it when some big tall black gangster in the Tenderloin mugged her, which happened almost every week; gimme your dough, bitch! the tall man would command, and she’d obey. (His name was Justin. He’d not yet joined the Queen.) And every one of those other semi-clean or rotten-crotched women is scared. Each one walks in fear, waits alone — please, she does not want to go alone! Read from her list of if-onlys (which of course includes more important wishes connected with money, drugs and sleep): She needs a friend to go with her. She needs someone to watch her. Maybe she has a sweet young black boyfriend with rasta dreadlocks who if he could look up from the video games at the liquor store might find out where the man is taking her. Maybe she has a business type boyfriend, older, wiser, crueler or not, who talks with her there on the sidewalk in a low and angry voice. Their guardianship is not enough. The sweet young boyfriend, whom she doesn’t make wear a rubber, couldn’t accompany her even if he felt willing, because that would scare off the trick, and even were the trick one of those happy sloppy middle-aged exhibitionists who’d let her boyfriend in while he did her, she still wouldn’t want the boyfriend to see her naked with another man; she’d have to yell at him: Hey! Stop watching or I’m gonna beat you up again tonight! — The older business boyfriend would definitely scare off the trick. She’s alone. She waits for money or death. The heart of it is the fear, because she knows that sooner or later she will get raped, gaffled, and sodomized again and the last time a man did that to her it really hurt; she had to go to the hospital to shit blood for weeks and it permanently messed up her insides. Sooner or later she’ll get AIDS or she’ll get put away by the cops again or she’ll end up inside separate plastic bags in widely spaced dumpsters. In short, she needs the Queen.

A trick went up the stairs of the Odin Hotel with Lily; and the manager, after having buzzed them into the dark green moldy stinking lobby, slammed the grating behind them and then advanced on Lily, snarling: Bitch, you gotta pay your fuckin’ rent, bitch!

Don’t you call me a bitch!

You don’t interrupt me in front of my Mom, bitch! he cried, and then the trick saw the tiny creature which cowered in the corner — evidently the manager’s mother, although the trick would not have imagined that the manager could have had a mother.