The Royal Family (93 page)

Done? What the
fuck
am I s’posed to say?

Say your man passed away. Say he died in no pain.

How do
you
know he died in no pain, Maj?

’Cause I know. And even if I didn’t know, the whole point is to make her feel good, don’t you see? So just write it.

Maj?

What?

How you spell
dead?

How do you think you spell it? Just write it and stop bothering me. Anyway, it’s more polite to say
passed away
.

Then why don’t you write it if you’re so all-fired polite?

Well. What’s got into you today?

Just thinkin’ about what you said last night is enough to make anybody feel sour. And when Domino comes flyin’ back here with her claws out, who the hell’s gonna have to deal with it?

Look, the tall man said. You think if the Queen orders me to punch concrete and I break my hand, Queen’s gonna pay for it?

She—

Damn right she will, Domino. She’s the
good
Queen. And you’re no fuckin’ good. You understand?

Oh, go to hell.

And you know what else? They may drink
her
spit, but they all gotta kiss
my
ass, said Justin with satisfaction.
I’m
the shot-caller around here. And I’m tellin’ you right now, bitch, to go in there and get down on your knees and
’pologize.
Know why? ’Cause
you
was at fault. You wrecked that meeting last night out of your meanness. Maj had to shut youup. . .

I didn’t wreck anything, cocksucker, so don’t you tell me—

Maj wanna beat up on you, you better let her. ’Cause you just a little fool. Just a little honky fool.

What passed between Domino and the Queen nobody else knew, but when the tall man, pacing anxiously outside, reentered the tunnel at the Queen’s summons, he found the two women holding hands as they sometimes used to do, although the Queen’s face was expressionless and Domino’s wore a look of strain. (Sure, said the Queen, sometimes Domino and me, we get on each other’s nerves, but we stick together, don’t we, Dom? We help each other.)

Once the blonde learned that for her grief was precisely the same as rage, she thought that she would craze and break suddenly, but didn’t, and because she could not let the poisoned feelings out, there was an ache in her chest, a throbbing at the back of her neck, as they sought to expend themselves by wrecking her body a little, making headaches and ulcers and sleeplessness so that the next morning, sick-faced, she’d get up with her swollen pounding heart the only vital force she had, drearily raging through the day. As she contemplated the Queen, something burned even hotter in her chest and she clenched her teeth. And yet she appeared to love her more than ever, and whenever she could ran fingers and tongue across the Queen’s chocolate stomach with all its grooves and wrinkles and adipose sandbars. There were some, such as the tall man, who said that she had merely donned the mask of goodness out of necessity, and was biding her time to betray the Queen and everyone else to the vigs, and perhaps by the mask of goodness they imagined something akin to Sapphire’s face when the Queen or Beatrice had washed her and combed her hair and trimmed it so that when she gazed straight at somebody with her inhuman eyes and parted her lips as if she would speak there might sometimes be for an instant an esoteric illusion of recognition and mutuality before the saliva began wandering from between her kissable lips. Could it be that neither Sapphire, nor Domino, nor the Queen were human? What were they, then? What were they? —But Domino was orphaned, so she must have been human. Isn’t that what being human means? And if she was an orphan, wouldn’t she seek affection’s pristine balm between the breasts of her dear Queen who’d loved her even as she’d raped her, unless of course the Queen didn’t love her? But this issue, which left Tyler almost anguished to
contemplate, actually meant less to the blonde because throughout her life she could hardly continue her signatures of belief for longer than a double-flourish, and so the flickering of interpretation between love and no love had grown so habitual to her that the most ambiguous or even antagonistic act could never be proof, just as the best and most tenderest kindness of anyone could soothe her suspicions only briefly before the hairs started up again on the back of her neck and her gaunt soul growled. The pimp from whom the Queen had saved her had beaten, burned and tortured her, and yet because every week or two he’d grapple her head between his immense cruel hands and whisper that he loved her, she couldn’t fix her heart’s compass needle eternally to hatred; she couldn’t believe or disbelieve in anything, but wandered lost even when she was flat on her back and another man and then another was between her legs, urgently raping her dry womb in exchange for cash, whereas when the Queen raped her that night in Lily’s room it gave her pleasure because Sapphire was a true treasure even asleep on the pillow and now that the Queen had revealed her powers many of the other girls, including shy Beatrice, led her aside to groom her and feed her, then use her as they would use any other drug, so that wherever the Queen and Sapphire stayed, nights were punctuated by screams of pleasure as loud as gunshots. They screamed as if they were being murdered and maybe they were. And Domino cast Beatrice aside and came to Sapphire. What if she’d come back to the Queen, then, simply because she was addictive and addicted, and so she needed the retarded girl more than she hated her Queen? What license did the Queen give her to have intercourse with Sapphire? Hadn’t the Queen in effect sold Sapphire down the river by revealing her inborn skill to those who as a result could never again refrain from using her? Or was that revelation just the necessity-worship of a loving mother, so that Sapphire would be preserved once the Queen was gone?

•

You offspring of Canaan and not of Judah, beauty has deceived you and lust has perverted your heart.

 

Apocrypha, Susanna 56

•

On Halloween morning, two pimpled black women in bathing suits stood at the ticket machine at Civic Center trying to force in change where it said no change, and as one of the whores leaned forward on her high heels to whack the machine’s unhelpful face with the flat of her hand, a huge knife fell out of her armpit and hit the floor. —She wants to kill us all! an old man laughed. —The blade was only silver plastic.

At five o’clock that afternoon, Tyler had already left behind him Vallejo, Vacaville and the occasional weird palm tree. The soft goldengrassed hills resembled the mounds below blonde women’s bellies, while the sky ahead and above was a sharp white, because now that the forest fire season had ended, the weather would remain crisp until the tule fogs began. Tyler itemized facts: He was forty-four years old, he possessed the Mark of Cain and three-quarters of a tank of gasoline; and his mother was extremely sick. John had agreed to stay away this weekend. Evidently he now understood Tyler’s routine quite well, for those calls of his usually reached the answering machine in the early afternoon, when Tyler was likely to be out of the apartment even if he had been out late with the Queen the previous night. Tyler had not been compelled to actually speak with him for weeks. He passed a long supermarket supply truck painted with images of California fruits and salads, then found himself compelled to descend beneath two overpasses which must have marked the boundary between pastoral melancholy and human dreariness, for here he now was back, once again in the realm of malls, factory outlets, auto dealerships—immense square buildings whose ugliness reverberated all the worse than a Tenderloin hotel room’s because their cleanliness and proclamations of stupid merchandising pride proclaimed them to be the products of some plutocrat’s
choice
rather than of mere abuse and neglect. But who was he, Henry Tyler, to reject anything? Was he himself so entirely free from defects?

Now he was coming into Dixon. A sign shouted
CHEAPER!
and he didn’t care. A supermarket truck menaced him with a painting of a lobster-claw. To his right lay black-roofed white houses, all bitterly the same. The parking lot of the steak restaurant was empty. One field was alfalfa-green and the next was straw-colored like a Capp Street girl’s pus. Tyler felt that something very strange was happening to him but he could not explain it. A sign offered an untold quantity of apples for fifty-nine cents. The next sign offered apples four for ninety-nine cents. The sign after that proffered pumpkins and he didn’t see the price. On his left receded the pistachio stand where John had once taken Irene before they were married, and that was when Irene discovered that she was allergic to pistachios. Tyler had heard that story twice. His mother had said that she couldn’t believe anybody could really be allergic to pistachios; she’d insisted that Irene was really just finnicky, like those girls who claim to be allergic to earrings of any metal baser than gold. The sky was grey now like a cloud of dust. He passed fields, billboards and orchards as
California began to get darker and darker. He hated that winter darkness. Following the examples of his fellow citizens, he launched twin streams of light from his car’s yellow, goggling eyes. The white water-tower at the University of California at Davis blended in with the sky. Overhead passed a black bird whose kind he was sure he had never before seen, and whose immense black crooked wings reminded him of the Queen’s thighs flexing and twitching on the mattress as she uttered her little cries. A gas station vainly illuminated the earth with harsh yellow light similar to what is seen through shooting-glasses. A yellow sign whined
BREAKFAST
. It was not breakfast time now and so that sign was useless; maybe that was why he hated it; if you saw a whore you could always feel horny anytime but how many times a day could you eat breakfast? At least he was out of Davis now, and lemon-colored fields relaxed him in the twilight, their wholeness scarcely marred as far as the southern horizon. To the northeast a train was coming out of Sacramento quite rapidly, eating its way into the night.

Ahead now came a belt of shrubs, warehouses, restaurants and sickening yellow lights. This was West Sacramento. West Sacramento offered him storage lockers, more palm trees, walls, rental cars. Between grey trees and hedges he followed his grey path to the Sacramento River, which he crossed, glimpsing lights lying disclike upon it. A flock of birds wriggled through the night, barely distinguishable.

His mother was sleeping.

His room was now the nurse’s room, so he had to sleep in John’s old room. He set down his suitcase as quietly as he could and turned on the light. The bookshelves were crowded by John’s toy trains, the entire
Hardy Boys
series, and high school yearbooks with photographs of John in them. Tyler had thrown his own yearbooks in the dumpster when he was twenty-four or -five, unable to bear the sight of his own callow, pimpled face. Now he regretted that act a little, not so much because he missed his teenaged self as because he would have liked to gaze at the girls he remembered. Descending the creaking stairs as quietly as he could, he stole the Bible from the living room. He returned upstairs to John’s room, closed the door, then knelt on the hard floor and prayed: Hey, Jesus, if you’re out there and if you have pity on us Canaanites, send some advice my way, would you? I’m kind of at my wits’ end, as the saying goes. I don’t get what I’m supposed to do. Maybe I can turn myself in and give up my Mark and, uh . . . I’m going to open the New Testament now.

Blindly he parted the covers, then the pages. He lowered his forefinger like doom. He had reached Matthew 12.46, which ran:
While he was still speaking to the people, behold, his mother and brothers stood outside, asking to speak to him. But he replied . . . , “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother, and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in Heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother.”

Well, sighed Tyler to himself, that’s what Beatrice says, anyway.

Henry? his mother called from her room.