The Royal Family (87 page)

Oh, I’m so tired of this, said the Queen. Dom, you
know
you don’t have to stay if you don’t want to stay. You sleep on it, okay? Henry’s waitin’ on me now.

You see? said Domino to the world. Nobody pays attention to me. They just . . .

She’s a real asshole, Chocolate confided to Bernadette. She thinks just ’cause she be eatin’ out the Queen’s ass she gonna always have that house slave position. Well, she was a plantation nigger once just like the rest of us.

That’s right, said Bernadette. That’s right.

I
hate
that blonde bitch. An’ she be kickin’ her friends goin’ up every rung of that ladder. Well, in this life we all gotta go back down that ladder, too. An’ it’s harder to kick your friends on the way down, ’cause they be watchin’ to grab you ankle an’ pull you.
Domino
she calls herself. She be nothin’ but a doggy style ho.

And the two women chattered happily on in this vein, but unlike Domino they took care that their Queen did not hear.

The Queen had agreed to meet him at Zapateca’s Bar on Mission Street, a place he’d never been before, a rather ordinary place whose low dark ceiling was dusted with glitter and smoky atmosphere like some concretion of the loud Spanish-language songs with which the battle-axe behind the bar sang along. At 7:00 on that Tuesday night there were a couple of pool players and a man kissing a woman’s ear at a table and two men at the bar gazed in morose parallels at the brightest spot of all, which was the back-lit shelves of booze bottles, most of which were almost empty.

Tyler sat facing a calendar from the Firearms Training Academy.

Well? she said.

It’s pretty bad, he said.

So you scoped it out for me, said the Queen. You did your job. What a good boy. C’mere, baby.

He got up and kissed her.

Allrightie now, said the Queen, slowly unwinding his gold chain from her wrist. Now tell me what’s goin’ on.

He saw a john whispering something into Beatrice’s ear, and he saw Beatrice slap the john’s fat stomach and gape her half-toothless mouth in a scream of laughter that cut through the smoky sounds; she was immensely pleased with herself.

He buys girls, he said. And then guys come in and fuck ’em and sometimes torture ’em to death. Everybody pretends it’s not real.

You’re so sweet, she said. Henry, you know I love you. What else’ve you been doing with yourself?

Tyler knelt. Slowly he took off her shoes. He massaged her feet

And then all these vigs. He’s behind that, too. There’s a morality sweep going on, said the Queen, standing suddenly, making him stand. —It’s so strange, she went on. Well, not so strange. Moses says
thou shalt not kill,
but then he stones a man to death for gathering wood on the Sabbath.

I don’t know about that stuff. I don’t understand it. It’s just politics, he muttered, narrowing his tired eyes.

I wish we had more time to plan it and shit. Just for the fuck of it we can . . . we can . . . oh, Henry, it’s gonna be over so soon, she said.

Tyler felt a lump in his throat. —I thought you were—well, magic, he said. I mean, that’s—

Sure, but the Chosen People always win. The ones on God’s side. The ones on Jesus’s side. I don’t wanna talk too much. You were good, Henry. We all were.

When Tyler was small, his parents had brought him to some vast city which must have been Los Angeles (funny that he couldn’t remember John’s presence) and he recollected walking with them at night through a crowd of happy people gazing into lighted shopwindows of everything—and it seemed that the lights and happiness would go on forever but suddenly Tyler’s family arrived at a dark desolate place where a man glared at them and they were all alone. Later he understood that all light, everywhere, must burn out, but the reason that the Tenderloin fascinated him was that it combined the dark desolation with the shiny rouged and glowing-skirted merchandise. And now the future was like that, pitch-hued all the way to substancelessness, with an evil substance lurking in between time’s atoms.

Varicose-legged, the ageing Queen sat drinking her beer, her veins like all the rivers. She said: Well, at least maybe we’ll snap our fingers in his face—

He stayed with her all night and she was loving in an absentminded way. At dawn her many children were all asleep in one room in the Layla Hotel down on Seventeenth Street, all except for the tall man, who was making a run with the night’s earnings to get
them a baggie of quality white girl, and she herself began yawning, lying weak and passive in his arms on the moldy itchy carpet, so he said he was going to see about some business, went downstairs to the front grating, turned back the springloaded deadbolt, and went out into the rising day, wishing to
solve
the future before it happened, to save his Queen as he had failed to save Irene, but then suddenly he thought what a relief it would be if the Queen and her entire crew disappeared from everywhere so that he could pull himself back out of the way of his own impending blight; suddenly, even the Queen herself seemed like some nightmare entity who for all her lovingness and splendidness was inevitably ruining him. What if he didn’t want to be ruined? He could call John and apologize. John would save him, if he humbled himself. But then what would he do; which doom would he find instead? What was it that he
needed
to do, in order to live with himself, and become no longer grey and sneaking? —Ah, he actually thought that his life could be fixed! He thought that only momentarily, of course, and only because at the moment he unlocked the driver’s door of his car he saw in the corner in the hot sunlight a dear little Vietnamese girl laughing and mock-boxing her father. He envied her father, yes he did. Just as Dan Smooth said, he had envious ears! He wanted to be married as his mother had advised, and he wanted to subsequently raise a child lovingly and playfully. Really he wanted the most impossible thing—namely, to be like everyone else, which was what almost everyone wanted, which meant that no one
was
like anyone else, not Tyler, not his brother, not the Vietnamese child or her father, certainly not the Queen, who of all the people he’d ever met, including Dan Smooth, was the only one who’d sincerely never wanted that, not Irene or Celia, who both did want it most desperately, not Chocolate, who at two o’clock in the morning in that hotel room as the Queen lay in his arms had been haltingly reading out the personal ads from a yellowing newspaper, saying:
SBM,
what the fuck’s that mean, Maj? Hey, Maj, you asleep?
Sor-
ree. Oh, single black male. All right. A brother. SBM, thirty-nine years old, well, that’s little old but maybe he’s saved hisself up some
money
for me to spend. Maybe he’s old enough to be faithful. Spontaneous, honest, caring, but is he handsome? Don’t say nothin’ about handsome. What do you think, Justin?

Must be butt ugly. Just like you, Choc.

Don’t you disrespect me, nigger! Honest, caring, enjoys parties, all right now, all right, swimming, outgoing, down to earth,
no drugs,
oh, so he’s
that
kind of asshole.

Then she went out, and was soon lying naked and weary after sweaty sex with a stinking old man, her arm wrapped around her head as if to hug and console it for having been kissed by someone for whom she felt no love, while Tyler drove home, pressed the PLAY button on his answering machine, which related in his brother’s curt voice: Guess you’re out of town. Mom called about an hour ago, and they’re going to send her home tomorrow at the shift change at seven-o’-clock. Anyway, that’s where we are. —I get it, muttered Tyler, throwing out threatening letters from credit card companies. He opened his solitary remaining piece of mail, which proclaimed:

STARS AND STRIPES FUNDING IS NOT A GOVERNMENT AGENCY

 

Is It Worth Three Minutes to Cut Your Payments in Half?

 

Dear
Tyler001error69 Henry G.,

 

Wouldn’t you like more cash in your pocket with a
$200,000.00
loan from Stars and Stripes Funding, Inc., at a LOW, LOW fixed interest rate of 14.99%? Consolidate your bills. No equity needed. Save thousand and thousands of dollars. Take that dream vacation,
Tyler001error69 Henry G.
Call toll free.

Then he thought: Thank God I don’t fall for that. Thank God I can say fuck you to all equity. Thank God for my Mark of Cain.

The Queen, rolling off a concrete block in the abandoned meatpacking plant, then walking like a crab, pale with dead eyes, asked Tyler of whom or what he had dreamed; and while he considered, she laid her middle finger across his wrist, in order to drink in his pulse. He had dreamed that he held a small black spider in the palm of his hand, a perfect little spider which bit him. —Ah, said the Queen, you had the spider dream! and he was afraid. That’s good, baby, the Queen whispered, sliding her long, long grey tongue into his mouth. He felt nauseous but also excited. Soon he was relearning the spidery angles and steep curves of her buttocks. Her eyes were rimmed and outlined. She leaped on him. When her orgasm came, he was terrified by her round and screaming eyes as she squatted on him, beating and scratching at his flesh.

Her tiny feet mastered the palms of his hands as he raised her up, setting her upon his shoulders for her to command and worry at his body. His love, his life, had become as richly weird as the Queen’s hair hanging down from her bowed head in darkness.

Her pussy tasted like crack. The girls could drink from it all day and their cravings would go away. But the more they drank, the more addicted they were. (For that matter, Celia craved the sharp knife-crease of muscle behind John’s knees.) Her spit was just the opposite.

The Queen said: Maybe I’ll get pregnant.

He smiled. Tears came into his eyes. He thought of that little Vietnamese girl he’d seen playing with her father that morning and realized that something that good could happen to him and perhaps be safely hidden behind the high gates of anonymity for a long, long time until death and destruction came, and then the eyes narrowed in his grey
face and he realized that sentimentality was corrupting him. It was all false, like Hitler killing millions of human beings while weeping over the cruelty of fox-hunting. But where did such false emotions come from? He feared himself and his own unreliability. And yet weren’t such errors perhaps the necessary consequence of taking an uncharted path? He felt that he had to learn as much from the Queen and love her as greatly as he could before the vigs came, not only for her own sake, but because her love and her truth might well comprise his final chance to learn who he was, where he must go, and what was expected of him. He did not believe that he was destined to be a father now, because Irene . . . But Irene’s child . . . He sat very still, insufferably unable to think.

Domino, seeing now in him the uprolled eyeballs and pale puffy cheeks and slack-hanging lips of Sunflower in her last months of life, feared what she saw, and accordingly attacked it, sneering in her most stinging tone: Henry, don’t you even care what Maj just said? Is that shiteating grin on your face a sufficient response to anything? I think a man should be committed. Whereas
you . . .

He scarcely heard her. He felt so anxious and alone that he almost screamed.

Beatrice, whose breath was as rotten mucilage oozing and crawling with disease, coughed apologetically into his face and said: Henry, you okay? I doan know, maybe you look so sad . . .

Yeah, I’m all right, he said heavily.

And you think you gonna be pregnant, Mama? I get so happy I’m gonna light a candle for you . . .

I don’t believe it, said Tyler harshly. Somehow I just don’t figure it’s going to happen.

You know, Henry, I got to say it takes two people to create a child. I doan know my English, but I think society is coming to like thousands of years ago. All of a sudden women, they saying,
this is my body,
and I know that ’cause I said it too when I had my baby; I swear I didn’t want him. You have to remember though that there are two people involved.
I
had to get involved!

Yeah, then where’s the little brat now? said Domino, grinning elfishly as if she had her back up against some wall and were slowly upcurling her tongue at the oncoming cars and licking her lips, back and forth, back and forth, with an intensely mirthful but also lustful expression in her huge-pupiled eyes.

Yeah, Dom, so maybe I doan be no good. I know that. I’m no good. But Henry he still want to do the good thing, so we should help him. Henry, when your
novia
she talk about get pregnant, you better
believe
in case God is listening and think about sending you a baby. You want a baby? Baby gonna take away so much of your pain, Henry. You gotta
believe.
Please Henry, you—

Then where the
fuck’s
your little Mexican brat? screamed Domino, whose soul was itself as lost and sad and grimy up close as the face of Beatrice, whose belief in the Virgin, which meant belief in herself, had been reduced to mere endurance palliated but perhaps by that very token rendered more dangerous and poisonous by the sincere and unmitigated love of her Mama, her Queen as Beatrice’s hair twirled heavily down the sides of her face and she bit her thin, herpid lips to keep herself from tears, her forehead lined, the bridge of her nose doubly lined, and her huge, lost eyeballs mottled like the full moon with its faint mountains and seas.