The Royal Family (142 page)

Not jealous, not sick at heart, not even empty, he slept in the bushes on the West Sacramento side that night, in an abandoned camp with plenty of pieces of cardboard. He smelled bad, and he had holes in his shirt. He wanted to bathe in the river, but it was too cold. The next morning he returned to the greasy ledge where the three had been, and found the black woman’s dress, slick and silky to his touch, probably rayon, with a dozen cigarette butts beside it, and above its collar, empty air. A drunk lay above him, cackling. Pawn of providence, the drunk threw down in place of the black woman’s missing head a woman’s wadded-up panties which were now stiff and dusty and the color of mud; and this sad ball duly landed on the ledge just above the collar of that blue dress which he remembered from yesterday. Then the drunk staggered down beside him and pissed on everything. Tyler walked on, continuing beneath the belly of that strange half-living armature for tramps and trains, the river lashing and sizzling against the embankment below. Overhead came the rumbling roar as the train crossed the river.

He learned how to scoop out for himself a hollow along the riverbank laid down with cardboard and jugs, and sometimes even with a couple of coats. Nine in the morning, and he could already tell that the day was going to be as hot as Mexicali, everyone sweating and lurking in the shade. A guy in a white sombrero and grey coveralls hitched up his belt. Hiding the railroad spike underneath his shirt, Tyler went to the shelter, got his ticket, played poker for cigarettes with an old goner named Red, stood in line for two hours, and got lunch.

You have to deal with the total man, preached Reverend Bobby as they all ate. —Part of our Christianity has to deal with puttin’ food on a mon’s table. History has taught us that the church has sometimes gone overboard, like in the Inquisition days, and we have to strive for balance.

In one ear and out the other! a man muttered, furtively, like a first-grader warned by the teacher not to talk.

After lunch, Tyler went to Reverend Bobby and asked: Where did evil come from?

Satan,
mon.

Did Satan invent the Mark of Cain?

Those questions aren’t for the likes of you, said Reverend Bobby. You have your own problems to deal with. Don’t worry about technicalities.

Somebody said I have the Mark of Cain on my forehead, Reverend. I was wondering if you could see anything right here . . .

Good Lord, mon, that’s just a mosquito bite you’ve been scratchin’. That’s just—

Reverend, do I bear the Mark of Cain or not?

Do you believe you deserve to bear it?

Yes.

Then you bear it. Have you ever been baptized?

When I was christened.

That doesn’t count. You have to be baptized anew. What’s your name?

Henry.

Henry, are you prepared to receive the sacrament of holy baptism today?

I don’t know, Tyler said. I guess I’m still trying to figure out what I ought to be.

A man was sitting beside a culvert, reading his Bible by lantern light whose brightness stained his hands and knees and forehead. Every moment or two, the man swept mosquitoes away from his face. Crickets sang around him, and moths visited his lantern in its harshly lit patch of sand. Far away, a boxcar door slammed. A dog was barking in the darkness. Above him, where the gulley ended, stretched a lightless field whose laborers had at twilight resembled blurred bushes. He was reading in the Book of Chronicles about the reign of the unclean Queen Athaliah, who was overwhelmed in the end by the soldiers, captains and trumpets of righteousness; and she tore her clothes and cried treason. Then Jehoiada the priest made a channel like a long train track between his rows of captains, and he commanded:
Bring her out between the ranks; anyone who follows her is to be slain with the sword.
And he who read knew then that he should have followed his Queen and died with her; and so he wept. And the captains dragged her to the Horse Gate, which was a safely unholy place, and executed her there.
Then all the people did go to the House of Baal, and razed it. Baal’s altars and images they rent in pieces; and they slew Mattan the priest of Baal before the altars.
He crushed the mosquitoes on his face, so far from her whom he had loved, distant even from Coffee Camp where upon the river which beneath the moon was as a pale blue stone the struts of the reflected bridge formed a rake’s teeth, which combed and devoured everything as Jehoiada the priest had done. Righteousness, malignant and sure of itself, rose up against the sky.

He stood up. A barely discernible figure was approaching on the white road. Suddenly he believed that his Queen had once passed here, and he knelt to kiss the road.

A light blossomed inside a bush, and he saw two tramps, sitting unspeaking. Dogs barked. The approaching figure, which he could now see was that of a woman with a water-jug in her hand, muttered wearily: Shut up! Shut the fuck up! —And, strangely, the dogs stopped.

That gal got the power, one of the tramps said wisely.

The woman passed and was lost. Tyler said to the tramp: What’s the secret of power? What do you know?

You don’t got the right to know, the tramp said. Not yet.

You don’t know me.

When you got the right to know, you’ll know. Then you don’t got to ask. You want to know about power? Wait till you feel a cop’s boot in your face . . .

Were you ever at Coffee Camp? Tyler asked him conversationally. That’s the place, you know, where sometimes the river smells like oranges.

Yeah, yeah, you come out of California, the tramp said. You got it easy. Your kind throw their
bike
up on them boxcars. We call you rubber tramps. That’s why you don’t know about power yet. When you know, you ain’t gonna like it. You got to travel more. And I don’t just mean on earth. Look up there at them stars. More stars than skeeter-bugs. Look at that expanse up there where it’s all windy and fresh. What’s occurred to me, friend, is
enormous changes over the expanse of time.
I can’t even really express it. But I know what I feel.

So you know about good power, too, said Tyler. That’s what I want to learn about. I already know about bad power, maybe as much or more than you.

What are you talking to me for then? You ought to be talking to them stars. Then stars will tell you everything.

Thank you, friend, said Tyler.

He went back down into his hollow, where the mosquitoes were now not quite so greedy, and read his Bible. Then he closed the lantern-valve and looked up at the stars, longing to be alone and away from lurking humanity, from the crouchers and the sleepers, alone with ducks, crickets and stars.

Points of light came down the gulley, moving like fireflies, and he wanted to believe that it was the stars talking to him. But the lights rushed and jerked too much. Gruff voices swore, and then he heard a man pissing in the sand. On the road, he heard the clatter of a shopping cart.

The next morning the two tramps were snoring under their bush, dead drunk, and another old fellow, unshaven and lean, but with neatly slicked back hair and wearing new clothes and fine hiking boots (the reason he looked so good, as it turned out, was that he’d just gotten out of detox), sat up against a tree reading a thriller.

You heard about FREDdy? he said to Tyler.

Yeah, I heard.

You heard how that goddamned machine took away three good men’s jobs. Now on the whole train they only have two men, the engineer and the conductor or whatever the hell he’s called. Well, sometimes they have an inspector, too, but he lies low so he can catch you. Eventually they’ll get rid of all the humans. They’ll have just computers and lasers.

I’m surprised they don’t have a sensor on every boxcar, Tyler said. That way they could bust us all, no sweat.

They tried that. Had the heat-seeking kind. But when them wheels get hot, they get so hot, why, them sensors get confused. Had to rip ’em all out.

Uh huh, said Tyler, not quite believing it, sipping from his water bag.

How long you been catching out, son?

Just a couple of months. How about you?

The very first time I ever hopped a train, I must have been about ten years old. That was back in Missouri. That’s why my handle’s Missouri. My kid brother and I, we jumped on, right by the crick that ran near our house, and we rode about three miles and then walked back, just to try it. Man, we was scared!

Does your brother still ride the rails?

I ain’t seen him in about ten years. I ain’t seen my two sisters in fourteen years. But I seen my other brother recently. He’s collecting SSI, just like me. He’s a paranoid schizophrenic. I see him whenever I go home. I go home about every two years, whenever I lose my birth certificate.

Your folks still alive?

I never knew my father. My mother died years ago.
The hospital killed her,
Missouri suddenly snarled, and gazed at Tyler expectantly, waiting to be asked to tell the whole sad story, but Tyler didn’t feel like it.

I don’t suppose you’ve seen a small thin black woman, he began hopelessly, about forty-five years old, who—

Missouri looked him over scornfully. —If you got to have more than one person in order to survive, you don’t belong out here.

And you’ve been alone your entire life, said Tyler in a tone of almost nasty defiance.

Oh, I lasted almost six months with one partner once, said Missouri. He went into one detox place and said he’d be back in ten minutes, but after three hours he never come out so I took off.

Maybe they wouldn’t let him out.

Maybe, said Missouri. But I’ll tell you a better one. I know one guy up there in Oregon. He woke up there in a boxcar and found everything gone: his food, his duffel bag, his wallet, his knife, his money—not to mention his partner of twelve years. He expected that, so he didn’t mind too much, but what really pissed him off was that his partner even stole his dog. Now that’s
low.

Yeah, that is, Tyler agreed. So where are you headed today?

Oh, north. Generally north. Well, I’ve gone as far back as Cleveland by freight. I know how to do it. From Indiana, everywhere east is great because the cities are so close together you just need to go a few miles to escape the cops and jump the state line, but out here you got three or four hundred miles between towns, so you gotta hop a freight; you gotta be an expert so that they don’t get you.

Tyler rubbed his chin. —Who’s after you?

You heard about that Tent City down there in Arizona? That’s where they take all the homeless people and put ’em like in a prison camp. I don’t want to go there. Salt Lake’s building one, too. Everywhere you go now, they’re out to get you.

I think God’s been closing in since the get-go, Tyler said. I think pretty soon we’re not going to have anyplace left to run.

You’re one of them religious nuts, said Missouri complacently. I live and let live
myself. But if you think prayin’ for me’s gonna do any good, why, then, you just send up a prayer for old Missouri. I ain’t never turned down anything free, even something I can’t see.

Have you run into a small thin black woman who—?

You already asked me that, sonny. I’m not interested. Hey, you got any tobacco on you?

You already asked
me
that, said Tyler.

No, I didn’t.

All right, so you didn’t. I was just checking on you.

On the embankment, the locomotives of the long, long train shrieked brassily past, and then the train began to slow.

Which way’s this one going? asked Tyler.

Check the first two numbers on the lead car. Didn’t you even know that? If they’re even, it’s going east or west. If they’re odd, it’s north or south, just like the highway. This one’s going north.

The train was going much more slowly now, and Tyler saw the square mouth of an open boxcar coming toward him. He slid his pack over his shoulder and got ready to jump into it.

They got a change off in Phoenix, Missouri said. Then it gets a local. They got a nice mission there in Phoenix where you can eat decent.

I’m not much into decency anymore, said Tyler.

Hey, you got any tobacco on you?

You never asked me that.

I hate boxcars, Missouri said. You got all this metal here that gets hot in the sun. Round about four or five in the afternoon, you get cooked.

Well, I like the view from a boxcar, said Tyler.

I always try to catch a grainer with an air compressor, Missouri said, trailing after him. But really I’m too old for this.

The train stopped. Tyler threw himself up onto his boxcar.

Can’t get inside them car carriers anymore, Missouri went on, looking up at him, in no hurry to board. —Used to be paradise. They put a couple gallons of gas in every tank, so on a cold night you could hop right in, turn on the heater and the radio, and later on tear the speakers out, rip off the cassette decks and sell everything . . . Where’s your spike?