The Royal Family

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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.

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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.