The Royal Family (82 page)

Well, there was one thing he could think of that she could do.

The man peeled ten sticky five-dollar bills apart, fanned them, and laid them down on the counter. —I like to talk first, he said. You mind if I talk first?

You’d better talk to me then, said Smooth. You see, you won’t get far talking to her.

The man leaned forward earnestly, wiped the sweat from his forehead, and let air out of his mouth with a farting noise. —Well, he said, I was raised never to be ashamed of who I am or what I do, and so I don’t mind telling you that I’m a slapper. That’s my job, and I’m proud of it. I work for Mr. Brady. Have you heard of him? Don’t say you haven’t, or I’ll slap you. I’m hired to slap the babes around when they get out of line—only with an open hand, of course, never hard enough to really hurt ’em or knock ’em down. A good slap is a slap you can see, though, a nice red handprint all up and down the cheek. They don’t take it personally when I do it, because they know it’s just my job. A lot of ’em like me. Sometimes, if I feel there’s a little trust going between us, I kid around with ’em a little bit. I slap ’em on the ass, which coming from me is a compliment. Anyway, that’s all I got to say. Where’s the retard bitch?

He watched the man go in, and the door closed. He heard the man lock the door on the inside. There was a long silence, and then suddenly the sound of a slap. She screamed. Suddenly the screeches were muffled; the slapper must have stuffed her nightie or something into her mouth; then he heard the slaps as crisp and even as metronomic ticktock, heard her grunt trying to scream, heard the bed start creaking.

One of my better ones, the slapper said, coming out. A nice red handprint like a flower.

The men went in and used her until their penises bowed like ducks’ necks. They left little blotches of snow in her golden grass. A boy whose cheeks were burned purple in some industrial accident kept twisting around to look at the bedroom door when
he
went home. The entrepeneur said to himself: Everyone is defective; to live is to be imperfect. Didn’t I once go kissing with a Mexican girl even though her legs were as hairy as tarantulas? —In these calculations he emulated the sixteenth-century Hochelagans, who were very greedy of wampum, which they used in all their ceremonies. To get it they would kill a man and slit deep gashes in his body, which they then lowered into the river for ten to twelve hours. Upon hauling up the corpse, they could be confident that certain shellfish would have crawled inside these numb white cuts. From their exoskeletons the wampum was made. —He did not particularly enjoy the gashes which the clients were now making in his sweetheart’s soul, but at least she got to eat, lots of canned ravioli and gushy bland Noodle-Oh’s . . . After a while he had money in the bank; then a taxidermist bought her outright, paid so well he couldn’t refuse; oho, he was getting his own back now in love’s unending war!

The next one was a subnormal Vietnamese girl with a flat golden face and wide black eyes. How he wanted to kiss her and swallow gobs of her heavenly spit! But, in keeping with a more gradualist approach, he presented her with a smooth whiplike twig of sweet birch to chew ten times so as to extract the rootbeer essence (and he counted each slow chew, his eyes never abandoning her eyes, so that she kept shrugging and smiling), and presently she disgorged the green mass of chewed fibers into her hand, and oozed it into his hand, and he popped it into his mouth, chewing and chewing, testing the birch taste overlain by her thick hot saliva, which his tongue prised from the fibers—he did not care about her germs. Her parents had sold her for five hundred dollars. In the end he had to let her go. Too intelligent—and, besides, her ischiocavernosi muscles, which in men allow erection and contract in women to shrink the clitoris, failed to perform as guaranteed. The slapper took her off his hands.

Mr. Brady, inspired by his slapper’s purchases, set out to grasp the money-gods’ knees. (His dreams told him where to go. Sometimes he saw sluggish wormy things behind his closed eyes.) Just as Paris is the city of pampered, rat-faced, self-indulgent little lapdogs whose shampooed beards reach down to the cobblestones, so Los Angeles is (at least in its parochially western way) the city of big money—oh, money with strings attached, mind you; money on elastic cords, money on chains, but investors are like that. Landing in that spread out place of greedy dreams, he always thought (as he never did when driving) of the Beatles singing:
There’s a FOG up-on El-AY- ay-ay . . .
because of the disembodied descent, and this time there really was a fog which they never broke through; when he inhaled the air with its customary flavor of burned tires he could feel it stretching hottish-coolish whitish tendrils down his throat and into his lungs; that was how it had been with Smooth’s octopus-minded wife, who’d sodomized every orifice of his soul
until he gagged. The fog never really lifted, not on the way to the hotel, certainly not inside the hotel itself with its foggy-dim walls faintly marbled like cunt-hairs on flypaper; Brady threw himself down into the pastel-shrouded bed just to feel something, and sank into nothing silently. Striding across the ankle-deep carpeting, he rolled back the noiseless glass door and went out to stare at pool, palms, fountain, and beach, the soft hues of sand and sky and sea all averaging out to that of the carpet . . .

He put on his tuxedo, and became at once some some high-shouldered tropical bird with a long and narrow tail.

In the conference suite he found the immortals, the great ones who gazed down upon the rest—representatives of an entire Klavern: the Exalted Cyclops and all twelve Terrors. They sat at the table in their leisure suits, waiting to learn why he’d disturbed their repose. Too rich and high even to be generals in love’s great war, they’d sidelined themselves, devouring the smoke of deathless zeroes; that was their ambrosia, for only mortals may enjoy the incarnadine prize. (In Paris they owned the lapdogs; they were the necktied men beneath the awnings of the brasseries, gazing out at the ambulations of the public of which they were no longer a part.) He delved into their minds to see where their first inclinations lay, but, thunder-browed and flatulent, they sat in their splendor, equally prepared to accept or deny. He explained to them how some kisses suck spit, just as alcohol sucks ink from clogged pens. He spoke to them of what needed to be done, were he to bring his plan to glory. He strove to feed them his craving of sundown times when retarded girls would be ready like goats muzzled so that kids could play (he’d seen them at the fair, trying to rub their muzzles off against the bars of their cages; failing, they became very still and silent).

Next he gave them a multimedia teaser. He flashed image after image of retarded girls drooling with their legs spread, the projector cycling in and out of brightness like a seal’s dark nostrils winking open and shut. One of the gods, incognito in blue sunglasses and a red tie, cleared his throat and worked a calculator, murmuring: Ten percent rooms for conventions, ten for the high rollers, forty percent for tourists on travel packages and forty for individual reservations . . . Actually if we take the kids—we’ll call ’em “Ringmasters” here—ages three to sixteen . . . actually a good idea . . . Then he snapped his fingers and the forensic team were invited in.

The forensicists fed biscuits to a police puppy, watched the whole carousel twice more, and exclaimed to one another:

And the head formation is quite uncharacteristic. It could be Mayan, late Mayan.

Refer it to the Kloncilium . . .

And then this famous—I don’t think it’s Olmec at all—Henry Manes makes a good point . . .

Oh, come on, Fred; don’t get hung up on some jade knee-clutcher in Oaxaca . . .

Knee-clutcher? Well, I grant you it’s jade, but a
cache
of jade, absolutely
classic
jade. A lot of the Costan Rican jades are classic Maya.

And the chief forensicist sighed to himself: . . . Those multi-tiered altars! Altars, oh, my balls! Always studded with monstrous faces; usually too big to chip out; you gotta leave ’em—well, sometimes, it’s true, a guy might find jeweled eyeballs to prise out, or a figurine that could conceivably come loose with a crowbar’s help . . .

The gods sat yawning, frowning and tittering among themselves. They knew what the clients would be giving up: that special happiness when a girl can sit looking at you nodding very very fast, looking you in the eye, smoothing her skirt over and over where
it bridges her succulent thighs. The retarded girls would certainly not do that. But Brady pressed his case with color photographs. Directly addressing the Imperial Wizard (an action not undertaken lightly), he spoke of exotic cretins whose vaginas were as dark and sandy as crocodile-mummies. He mentioned his idea for a certain foil-covered room with small portholes. He didn’t hesitate to describe to them a girl he’d once met in Napoli, a girl with hair the hue of a haystack and greenish-blue eyes who sat staring out the train window with interlaced fingers resting on her purse, her long legs crossed, her green wool jacket buttoned up to her throat, and the hair seemed what most attached her head to her shoulders. He whispered with a wink:
What if we cut her hair off?

He knew very well what he was doing. He was like the black boys in low V-shaped boats who sit at water level in the Nile, paddling with their arms like doggish spiders, singing American songs to tourists, then asking for money. He’d sung his song. Now he invited them to sing theirs. They nudged one another and smiled.

Alabama, where I’m from, is always short of jobs, a god said. We’ve been short of jobs forever. This would have been all women, because they’re more dextrous with their fingers. I had this crazy idea that the people in the plant should own the plant. Well, I was thirty years ahead of my time.

California is the Whoredog State, another god replied. We could increase the carrying capacity by ten percent just by bringing in this business.

There’s a Christian businessman down in Cash Flow, Arkansas, who has a very powerful Christian TV station, a god said. This fellow back there, he’s run I don’t know how many of our tapes.

The Queen of the Whores
lied
to the American people, a god was muttering. The bankers love her.

If the U.S. was not preserved, then Communism would conquer Planet Earth, a god said.

The other gods discussed their own experiences. They called in their associates and Kleagles. Then they swore to their guest to grant him the victory he asked for (in exchange for certain future offerings mutually acceptable); they said it would be done.

The next one was a hydrocephalic girl who stared with little lizard eyes, her forehead bulging like a watermelon; Brady’s scientists caressed it gently to see if it was squishy. Her saliva was light, refreshing, foamy, very faintly nutty like a bottle of Ozujsko Pivo Special (Zagrebacska Pivova). After her, Brady collected two low-eared girls, then a bullet-headed microcephalic with lovely chestnut hair who clenched her teeth and sometimes bit. The slapper kept her in line. Then he acquired a blonde girl with a doll’s face: dull blue eyes and heavy mongoloid lids which
must
have been weighted like a doll’s, enhanced by the pale cheeks, the slack lips that sucked and drooled; on that same trip he snapped up a girl with Turner’s syndrome (webbed neck, sexual infantilism), and then a bald girl whose head was shaped like a light bulb—

Brady sat on the floors of echoing hardwood rooms that smelled of lemon-wax and laughed because they were his from chandelier to windowed door to lattice-work. Then
his voice rang out in commands. The workmen assembled before him, good soldiers when money’s muster’s called. Receiving their orders, they ranged out in their smooth-geared trucks (Ah like to have a good caw undah mah ass, ya know what Ah mean?), scouring the lumberyards and wide-walled warehouses. When the lumberyards were looted, great mounds of bed-timber swelled at the curbside drops, higher than ever the Greeks raised for Patroclus’s pyre. Then they set about the work. At their lord’s command they laid down dark carpets to eat sounds and stains. With speedy rollers they painted the walls pink and yellow and blue—girl-child’s colors, cheerful, artless. Next they swung in the bed-gear on their shoulders, bolting double mattress-decks to sturdy keels, riveting everything down shipshape, studding the joists with rows of molybdenum hex-nuts in all order so that no plank would fail the rocking sailors, hammering down railings and see-through canopies, masting them with headboards, rigging them out with full waterproof sheets until those multistoried sailing ships were ready to be launched upon the seas of pleasure. In all the ceilings of that house they planted cameras to hang down watching wide-angled with a spider’s eyes. Now with powerful shaggy arms they screwed down marble toilets whose inner lids were blazoned with hearts; they heaved marble sinks and golden-glassed showers tight against the walls; cunningly they fitted the tiled nooks with silvered mirrors, slipping them flush like second skins. But all these things, necessary though they might be, would not gladden caged girls’ hearts. So now they hauled in the fabulous toy-chests, the doll-coffers replete with rubbery passive girls. They brought stuffed bears and tigers for the whores to hug, ten-foot fuzzy crocodiles for them to drool over in the rubber-sheeted beds, plastic panels with Buzzy-Scary games, building blocks, wind-up rutabagas, miniature houses with hinged roofs to peer through like gods, ruby-eyed flasher guns, rattattat pistols, modeling clay that was safe to eat, golden trucks and fishes to set their hearts in flame!