The Royal Family by William T. Vollmann Read Free Book Online

life . . .
    You’re the angel, not me, he said, finishing his beer. The waitress looked at him as she took the bottle away, and he nodded. Irene hadn’t finished hers yet. She was extraordinary to gaze on, but he didn’t know why, her face being in fact puzzlingly ordinary in each of its parts; it was the affection and gentleness that animated it which made her so sweet to look at.
    How’s life at home? he said.
    You know how it is, she said.
    Sure, he said. Should we try the fugu?
    After he’d paid the bill he helped her on with her raincoat which was yellow like a child’s and walked her past the sharp-cornered marble pillars of hotels pimpled with raindrops, their lamps reaching smeary fingers of light up into the cool grey sky. Tourists were hurrying out of closing shops. He glanced down into the Tenderloin and saw the folded neon leg of a woman winking but never unkinking.
    Please don’t tell any of this to John, his sister-in-law was saying.
    Don’t worry, honey. The car is up this way.
    You know, I told my mother about you. She thinks it’s funny that you and I are so close.
    Have you told her how you feel about your marriage?
    That would hurt her too much. I always tell her I’m so happy, John’s so good to me . . . Because, you know, when he was making me cry before we got married, she told me to break it off, but I wouldn’t . . .
    A big drunk black man sauntered up to them and shouted in Irene’s ear: I’m gonna fuck you up, you slanteyed stinking Chink, stinking Chink—
    Tyler put his right arm tightly around her and slipped his left hand into his coat pocket where the pistol was. —Don’t feel bad, sweetheart, he said to her, never taking his eyes off the man’s face. You’re not Chinese, so he’s not talking about you.
    He led her around the man, who stood there swearing and muttering.
    Her hand was fiery with hot sweat. Her fingers were squeezing his with all their strength. He could not stop himself anymore. He brought her fingertips to his lips and begin to lick the hot, delicious sweat.
     

| 16 |
    Now Irene was gone. He almost couldn’t bear it.
    Driving across the cable car tracks, which offered rain-light more glancing than the tips of hustlers’ cigarettes, he heard someone yelling from the direction of Glide Memorial but couldn’t see a soul. He spied a man and a woman doing business by a grating. He saw a woman, drunk, shaking her dead-snake hair and spreading her fingers from which raindrops fell as if she were a Calico hundred-shot assault pistol ejecting bulletcasings onto the concrete. He turned on the windshield wipers to control this very fine rain like sooty static crawling down the building-fronts, and discovered directly in front of him a man slowly walking as though his feet hurt, dragging an immense vinyl gripsack; he braked until that man was out of the street. He rolled down the window and drove to Turk and Leavenworth, where a callipygian woman snailed her way through the rain, too wet to bother lowering her head anymore. Rain began to dribble down onto the passenger seat. He saw a single darkly brilliant strand of Irene’s hair on the headrest. Somebody honked behind him, but the orange hand of a DON’T WALK sign thrust itself balefully into his perceptions. He rolled up the window. The light changed. Advancing west on Turk Street, he saw a man drinking from a styrofoam cup and gazing at the reflection of his shoe on the pavement; then he saw a man whose raincoat resembled some sea mammal’s skin, sleeping in a puddle of urine and rain.
    He saw Domino go skittering into the parking garage, shot three souvenirs of her with the four hundred millimeter lens, and noted down the time and frame numbers on the surveillance report form on his clipboard.
    He drove up to North Beach to see if Irene’s living room window were still lit. It was not. Perhaps John had come home and they were already fucking, but he didn’t think so because she’d told him that