The Royal Family (120 page)

John, he
laid me off.
We had an agreement, and—

I’d like to see a copy of that agreement.

Now who’s spying and snooping?

I want to help you, Hank, John pleaded.

Oh, you’re the better man, Tyler said. You’ll do fine. You don’t lie to people the way I do. You make good money. You wear nice neckties. You take care of yourself and others. . .

Do you want me to forgive you or not?

What kind of forgiveness would it be, if it were up to me? Anyway, it’s too late.

How do you know what too late is?

You want to know about too late? Fine. I figure that since this is May, Irene was already five months pregnant this time last year, Tyler said defiantly.

He shook John’s hand goodbye. Celia wouldn’t look at him. He’d already dropped by the funeral parlor with his cashier’s check. It pleased him to feel that he owed John and his mother nothing now. He would make his own way, or not. He almost felt sorry for John, because it would have made John so happy to help him. Let John help Celia. He did not sleep in his mother’s house. John and Celia were there. In his motel there was a Bible in the bedside drawer, and he opened it to Genesis and read:
Abraham journeyed toward the territory of the Negeb, and dwelt between Kadesh and Shur; and he sojourned in Gerar.
Outside, he heard a train go clinking musically by. The place-names, ancient and strange, clattered in his mind like boxcars. He thought upon his doings, and was satisfied with what he had done.

Early next morning, anxious to escape from his mother’s grave, he packed his suitcase, guzzled two styrofoam cups of coffee in the lobby, checked out and drove toward the freeway, wondering whether he ought to visit Irene’s grave in Los Angeles, but somehow that seemed of no importance. His mother was gone, Irene was gone; soon the Queen would be gone.
They shall die of deadly diseases,
the motel Bible had said.
They shall not be lamented, nor shall they be buried; they shall be as dung on the surface of the ground.
He rejected this. John had invited him to breakfast. He and Celia were almost certainly still sleeping in each other’s arms. Tyler had made up his mind that the best policy would be to make Celia hate him, and to accomplish this in an unostentatious manner which would give John no grounds for suspicion. It was not that he thought himself in danger of propositioning her; he would much have preferred to win a new friend. But any such friendship would damage the pattern of his brother’s tranquility. Best to be gone, unlamented, where he could lie upon his Queen’s breast like dung.

Now he was approaching Loaves and Fishes on Sixteenth Street where the bleak-packed stones on the dirt comprised a pavement which plateaued up above the overpass by the railroad tracks which ran dully perfect beneath the clouds, and a longhaired girl wheeled her bicycle, whose basket was full of clothes, her husband or boyfriend in camouflage stopping, reaching under the fence for his bottle of beer. Tyler felt restless. His energies could settle on no firm object now that he had given up Irene’s grave. He longed to eavesdrop on this couple, or photograph them, or merely go steal mail from anybody’s mailbox. Displeased with these yearnings, he parked, locked all four doors, and walked through the underpass tunnel, in which somebody had painted the words
WHITE POWER
. Where was he going? Between Kadesh and Shur. Slowly he retraced his steps. Before he knew it, he had walked all the way to the river where it had just rained and the
anise was already shoulder high and there were purple blossoms everywhere. The water trembled with blue stains between cloud-reflections. Bending down, he picked up a little plastic liquor bottle frosted by stale crack smoke.

An old panhandler stood holding an illegible message like one of the lost Gnostic Scriptures or Dead Sea Scrolls. He glared at Tyler and said: Repent.

Repent what?

Everything, brother.

I already do.

Then you’re saved. Move on, so others can see the message.

Tyler shrugged. He moved on. Then, having considered, he returned to the panhandler and said: You know what? I don’t repent of absolutely everything. There’s a dead woman I love, and I also love my Queen. I don’t repent of either of those loves. So what do you say to that, hey?

So you’re damned. Move aside.

What about my mother? She just died.

Did she repent?

I wasn’t there.

Then why ask me? Move on.

You know what,
brother?
I’m your enemy. I bear the Mark.

I love my enemies, because Jesus told me to. Move on.

Where do you want me to move to?

Hell.

I get it, sniggered Tyler, and he wandered off, rolling his eyes.

It was a Sunday warmly fogged over. He wanted to be home even though he wasn’t sure whether home meant being with the Queen or something else. Actually, he dreaded seeing the Queen. The uneasy disorganization of her hive had begun to affect him, and the loving guidance he’d previously received from her now seemed unreasonable to demand; he was selfish; she must be tired; for her sake he wanted to go away but feared that such an act would likewise be a kind of betrayal. Suddenly he remembered how late one winter afternoon, it must have been in December, he had met her amidst the immense brick and concrete buildings south of Market, some of whose roofs bore smokestacks like giant cigarettes, or metallic whirling onions for ventilation; at sunset those cubes all had pulled down as snug, heavy, thick, and safe as a good girl’s underpants those steel accordions graffiti’d with signs and signatures resembling snarled wires—pulled down snug, yes, thereby sealing off those loading docks which on whores were known as cunts. Against the steel-shuttered face of a shop whose owner had gone to bed hours since, she who was his Queen was waiting in a long pale coatdress which came almost down to her sneakers, and she was almost smiling, with light weeping from her eyes. That was the last time he had seen her happy. (She always laced her breasts tight against her chest.)

Just as the Queen’s long insectlike eyelashes upcurved whenever she nodded off, so Tyler and his car ascended into dreaminess. Wasn’t this cityscape made up of trivialities? Sometimes it was foggier than today, and the Bay Bridge’s silver girders stood alone in whiteness in much the same way that at noon Capp Street was always so wide and white, the walls of its little houses like naptime sheets. Sometimes the weather was clear, and
then the city offered itself so beautifully to his gaze, although of course what one saw of it from the Bay Bridge was only John’s San Francisco, perhaps Brady’s, not his; he didn’t belong among the financial district’s computer punchcard facades whose coldness and sharpness the fog had pasteled into utopia. He drove nearer. San Francisco’s streets were inlaid with little white apartment squares. The window-pitted faces of those skyscrapers smiled on him, almost close enough to be caressed. Passing the Harbor Terminal, he descended into the zone of billboards, riddled with an anxiety which almost made his teeth chatter. There were too many secrets inside him which might fall out with a loud rattling noise, all his fear and shame corroding off rusty metal parts of his insides, so that they might clank and give him away. He had to move on tiptoe all the time. Sooner or later he’d trip up.

He exited at the freeway at Bryant Street near the Hall of Justice where at that moment a black man in orange sat beside the chest-starred bailiff, both gazing in parallel at the huddle around the judge, and the smiling, bustling, waxy-faced public defender prepared to be Christ. Tyler meanwhile drove to Land’s End, accompanied by the coarse buzzing of a small plane over the Bay, a fishing boat not quite on the horizon, the faint smell of pines as couples sneaker-crunched the sandy path. The day became gloomy, the sky as white as Chocolate’s best tricking sweater. When he got out of the car, a stupid little bulldog with a pink bandana tied around its throat gazed at him.

Some Brady’s Boys with their shirts off were sitting in a circle on the beach with their arms across each other’s shoulders. A man was reading from the Book of Ezra:
Of the sons of Nebo: Je-i´el, Mattithi´ah, Zabad, Zebi´na, Jaddai, Jo´el, and Benai´ah. All these had married foreign women, and they put them away with their children.
Amen.

Yeah, yeah. My God is a jealous God, Tyler sighed to himself.

He went to Green Apple Books on Clement Street, opened the Buddhist Scriptures, and read:
Things do not come and do not go, neither do they appear and disappear; therefore, one does not get things or lose things.

This stunned him. He thought it one of the most amazing things that he had ever read. Thinking about his mother’s death and the Queen’s impending disappearance, he felt comforted.

But then he read:
. . . the mind that creates its surroundings is never free from memories, fears or laments, not only in the past but the present and the future, because they have arisen out of ignorance and greed.

Irene swooped into consciousness, and he rejected this teaching. He rejected everything. He refused to accept that there was nothing more than ignorance and greed to his love. Granted, he was selfish, delusional, desperate; so must his love be. But he
honored
Irene. He would go on honoring her to the last, even more now, perhaps, that he could not have her.

Things do not come and do not go.
Now in his anger he denied that also. He was a Canaanite, proud of his own pain. Irene was his pain. She had come. She would never go. He would carry her decomposing corpse on his back, fleeing God’s righteousness down the ages.

Just after the inbound L Taraval line leaves Taraval for Ulloa, its tracks curve in, along with other ingathered routes and ways, right before the Philosophers Club offers its green neon shot glass to the foggy night, gapes West Portal, whose arched palate hovers above the tooth-pillars which separate outbound and inbound lines. The gullet of that mouth goes on and on, all the way downtown to Embarcadero, where one can transfer to the beast’s intestines, the Bay Area Rapid Transit, and continue on under the Bay itself to Berkeley, Richmond, Hayward or Walnut Creek. West Portal’s long dark grooves echo with faraway voices and useless travels.

Tyler stood beside the tall man, watching a strangely crowded streetcar enter the tunnel, heading away from the sea.

Looks like everybody had the same idea, he said.

The tall man looked at him. —You mean to get out of this fucking city?

Tyler shrugged.

See, this is California, with all the beautiful pictures, and all the beautiful women, and all the rotten attitudes.

You’ve got that right, Justin.

Better believe I do.

Now hop in my faggoty car and I’ll drive you to my million dollar white man place.

Soon the tall man was drinking beers with him in the kitchen and calling him
brother.
Tyler said: Thanks, Justin. My mother just died.

The phone rang twice, stilled itself, then rang again. The tall man answered. He said to Tyler: She’ll see you now.

Dreams sought him out like hands touching Sapphire’s hands which she flutteringly pushed away. The Queen woke him up in the middle of the night, whispering: Do you love me? Are you disappointed in me? and he hugged her and they went back to sleep.

He heard the tall man stealing pills and vials from his medicine cabinet. He lay with his Queen, his dear little Queen who was sleeping now with her neck bent back and her eyes rolled whitely up in her head and her hair fluffing darkly down and back.

He dreamed that she had vanished and that he had searched for her everywhere. His brother was lecturing him, shouting: You’re a private detective who doesn’t want to know the truth. You
know
where she is.

No, said Tyler, feeling his face going pale.

Why don’t you go to Feminine Circus, you asshole? They probably have her stuffed and plasticized . . .

No, no, no!
he screamed. And the Mark on his forehead glowed as bright as the yellow sign for the Cinnabar with the inverted white blue-bordered trapezoid of Jonell’s beyond and then Bamboo Pizza’s white crest, and finally the yellow zone of Pho Hoa Hung which had once been Pho Xe Lua and beyond which crack-flames and malice shot down into darkness and sometimes whizzed up to Hyde Street, then went left past the 222
Club all the way to Turk Street where they expended themselves in misery, disappointment and drunkenness.

Okay, baby, it’s okay, the Queen was whispering, and he fell asleep again, comforted by her rich chocolatey smell.

The phone rang. —Yeah, it said. This here’s a fella lookin’ for an asset search. I got the judgment.

All right, answered Tyler. It was eight in the morning. The Queen snored softly in the crook of his arm.