* * *
—
I told Lise about the Mormon church in Ruth, Nevada, with Jesse. It was Christmastime, spruce garlands and poinsettias everywhere. In an alcove, a baby tucked in a manger. Our bodies slotted together on the floor between the pews, our sweaty flesh rubbed raw on the carpet. Jesse whispering that we should never be apart, not ever. I agreed. He proposed. I accepted. We returned to the rec room, lit from within and hungry for cake.
I said, “ ‘I kept waiting for God to grab me by the neck.’ ”
Lise said, “By the neck?”
“That’s what Dad said, about cancer. On this CD I bought. On this iPod I lost. ‘God grabbed me by the neck and said, “This is your life. You want to live it? Or do you want to rape, pillage and plunder?” ’ The plunder is where I struggle. I just take and take and take. That reminds me.”
I gave her our dad’s lapis. I gave her our mom’s letters knowing she’d never have the time to read them.
* * *
—
Theo got Darren out of jail and G-ma’s truck out of impound. Lise drove it, crumpled and limping, out to Tecopa to bring me my phone. I plugged it in at the Crowbar. One message waited: Andy, regarding my teacup pigs.
I thanked Lise profusely over many beers. When she dropped me off, I slurred, “I need one more thing.”
“What is it?”
“Will you take me to A Little Farm?”
That night I stumbled with my charged phone up to the coyote ridge to get cell service so I could call Theo and say thank you.
We started talking almost every night. Sometimes I howled, sometimes he did. I read to him from journal entries I’d written in the blank pages of Caruthers. I said, “I feel on display there. Like living on a soundstage.”
I braced for him to say his doctor words. Instead he said, “What else?”
“I watch myself from above, unconvinced.” I struggled to read my own mad handwriting. “It says here, ‘Make peace with the middle class’ but I don’t even know what that means.” I tried to breathe. “I think maybe I could love you from afar.”
“I know you could,” Theo said. “I have no doubt about it. The question is how far.”
* * *
—
Lise and I built a pen for my Guggenheim’s-worth of teacup pigs and took a U-Haul to Big Sur to fetch them. She only had one day off so we had to hustle. On the drive up, apropos of nothing or perhaps because we’d just got first glimpse of the sea, she said, “I sort of wish I didn’t love him because then I could be free.”
I was astonished. “Did you read them all?”
She nodded, then added without apology, “And then I gave them to G-ma to read but instead I guess she burned them.”
“Burned them? How?”
“Oven,” Lise said. “An utterly Mary Lou thing to do. At first I flipped out. I kept thinking, That was the only chance I’ll ever have to know her! Then I realized how dumb that is. My body is her body. My language is her language.” She did not seem bereft.
I did not feel bereft either. For once I did not feel it.
* * *
—
Turned out the teacup pigs were regular pigs. “I guess they were babies when I met them,” I mused to Lise as she wrangled the monsters into the U-Haul.
Andy apologized for the “miscommunication” but sure did not offer me my money back. No matter! From him I wanted one thing and one thing only.
“Have you heard from Noah?” I asked as behind me Lise unscrolled the door of the U-Haul, the pigs protesting mightily at being shut in. “What’s happening with him?”
“Bro, you won’t believe it,” Andy said. “He got engaged! Going to law school.”
I didn’t believe it and didn’t need to. I had by then my own belief system, one that needed very little of actual Noah, whoever he was. It occurred to me that I was barely asking about Noah. Maybe I didn’t know a Noah. Maybe I’d made him up. My Noah lived in Joshua Tree, pollinating Joshua trees with a five-bristled paintbrush. My Noah lived up in the last sequoia. He would never love another, and the sequoia would never die.
“Good for him,” I told Andy, fake gracious as could be. “I’m so glad to hear he’s walking his path.”
* * *
—
Back on my path in Tecopa, I learned the hard way not to take the pigs for walks. Pig Willie Style got off-leash and the coyotes got him right away. I buried him in the family plot, built a stone marker and read from Caruthers.
The Tecopa Hot Springs were highly esteemed by the desert Indian, who always advertised the waters he believed to have medicinal value. In the Coso Range he used the walls of a canyon approaching the springs for his message. The crude drawing of a man was pictured, shoulders bent, leaning heavily on a stick. Another showed the same man leaving the springs but now walking erect, his stick abandoned.
The Tecopa Springs are about one and a half miles north of Tecopa and furnish an astounding example of rumor’s far-reaching power. Originally there was only one spring and when I first saw it, it was a round pool about eight feet in diameter, three feet deep and so hidden by tules that one might pass within a few feet of it unaware of its existence. The singularly clear water seeped from a barren hill. About, is a blinding white crust of boron and alkali. There Ann Cowboy used to lead Mary Shoofly, to stay the blindness that threatened Mary Shoofly’s failing eyes. When the whites discovered the spring, the Indians abandoned it.
Later it became a community bath tub and laundry. Prospectors would “hoof” it for miles to do their washing because the water was hot—112 degrees, and the borax content assured easy cleansing. Husbands and wives began to go for baths and someone hauled in a few pieces of corrugated iron and made blinds behind which they bathed in the nude. A garment was hung on the blind as a sign of occupation and it is a tribute to the chivalry of desert men that they always stopped a few hundred feet away to look for that garment, and advanced only when it was removed.
Today you will see two new structures at the spring and long lines of bathers living in trailers parked nearby. They are victims of arthritis, rheumatism, swollen feet, or something that had baffled physicians, patent medicines, and quacks. They come from every part of the country. Somebody has told them that somebody else had been cured at a little spring on the desert between Shoshone and Tecopa.
Some live under blankets, cook in a tin can over bits of wood hoarded like gold, for the vicinity is bare of growth. It is government land and space is free. Some camp on the bare ground without tent, the soft silt their only bed. “Something ails my blood. Shoulder gets to aching. Neck stiff. Come here and boil out” . . . “Like magic—this water. I’ve been to every medicinal bath in Europe and America. This beats ’em all.”
You finally turn away, dazed with stories of elephantine legs, restored to perfect size and symmetry. Of muscles dead for a decade, moving with the precision of a motor. Of joints rigid as a steel rail suddenly pliable as the ankles of a tap dancer.
Here they sit in the sun—patient, hopeful; their crutches leaning against their trailer steps. They have the blessed privilege of discussing their ailments with each other. “Oh, your misery was nothing. Doctors said I would never reach here alive. . . .”
An analysis shows traces of radium.
From the ridge, the wreckage of the Tecopa house shone in the moonlight. Glittering glass, the rusted coils of mattress. I told Theo about them, and about the plastic yellow slide still bolted to a low branch of salt cedar. I told him how long the plastic would last and how we girls had played in junkyards and cemeteries, climbing trash that would outlast us, the bones of broken machines, a rust-red chassis rolled and half-buried in the wash, its doors perforated with bullet holes. I told him about caches of tin cans and lids with lizards living all through them, the sun-brittle pornography I found in the heap, the copy of Charl
otte’s Web disintegrating.
. . . the woods, the woods! They’ll never-never-never catch you in the woods!
The ash of memory coated everything. Tecopa was in my hair, my body, my ridiculous shoes. I said, “It’s fucking depressing here. I mean, objectively. Death is all around! But that’s what makes you feel so alive.” I told him that I’d been trying to practice being alone, not needing so much, taking care. That I wanted to be better to him than I’d been, but not all the way good.
“The wife thing,” I said, “I struggle with that. I don’t want to be a dirtbag.”
“You’re not a dirtbag,” he said. “Loving people is never a wrong thing.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I appreciate that. I do. I feel like I made you say it because I needed to hear it so bad. So, thank you. But that’s not the way in which I’m a dirtbag.”
“In which way are you a dirtbag?”
“I’m a dirtbag because I can’t come back.”
Theo was quiet, then said, “Maybe we can come to you.”
* * *
—
So, though I’d solemnly vowed never to return to my mother’s cursed city, I met Theo and Ruth at the Las Vegas airport. The first thing Theo said, he said in a barely recognizable imitation of Sir Elton John.
“Las Vegas, I’ve come home!”
“You read the letters.”
“I never got to meet her, so.”
Theo put Ruth down and she ran from me. I chased her through the phantasmagoric baggage claim. She could really run now. She could really talk. She had her own real body, her own smell. None of it was mine anymore. Never had been. Yet she was me, asleep in her car seat, galloping through the dust, wooing the pigs and tumbling into my lap in the garden at the Tecopa house, saying, “It hot, Mama.”
“Yes, baby, it’s hot.”
Theo got them a motel room in Shoshone. He did not invite me to stay there with them but I was welcome to use the pool. I took Ruth swimming every day. She was a natural.
Theo was not wearing his ring and not asking after mine. I sensed between us a moon’s newness, a turn, albeit buried beneath an epoch of pain. Still, there was undeniable air between us, fresh and gusting. We took long walks at sunset, bumping Ruth through the dirt in the UPPA.
“Look that moon,” she said every time she saw the moon, and every time I looked.
I kept my feelers out. What I felt was about a hundred things a day, each with engulfing intensity. I did as the poet advised, I did inside what I had done / in the world. I came to understand every word—every sensation—a message and part of a system of messages. I paid attention. The gist was let go. I did. Eventually it made everything better.
I lost my job, finagled a less fancy one, rented a jackrabbit homestead cabin cum Airbnb not far from Tecopa: five hundred square feet on five acres of creosote, a wash running through full of sea-green salt cedars and the purplest stones. My life now is a spell of love and solitude. I sit in the garden with the dolls. I walk alone in the desert. I make stuff with the rocks I find, nameless things meant only for me. I walk up the alluvial fans or in canyon shade until I have a good view of the river, or where the river used to be. I read and write and nap and teach and soak and smoke and sew and cook and fuck around on the internet and with various lovers.
On breaks I get Ruth. We walk into the mountains with plenty of water, hats, shoulders covered, sturdy shoes. We stomp so the snakes feel us coming. We eat dinner on the splintery picnic table in front of the cabin, watch the sun go down and the stars come out. I try to keep my promises. I take her to the Tecopa house. I tell her about the now and the big gnar, about everybody doing the best they can with what they have, choosing darkness, choosing light. When she asks about you, I tell her the truth. You were here, then you were gone. You died the way this river dies, not so far from where it was born. Turned into sky. Jesse, Jesse, Jesse Ray, my dead ex-boyfriend, my son, my stepson, my sister, Mom, Martha Claire. I have a daughter now. She knows your name.
Acknowledgments
The poet in “Vagina Dentata” is Bernadette Mayer. The poet in “How I Like It” is Eleanor Lerman. The poet in “Loafing Along Death Valley Trails” is Andrew Hudgins. The poet in “Your Misery Was Nothing” is Katie Peterson. Thanks to the following people for thinking with me: Anne Carson, William Caruthers, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Walton Ford, Daniel Gumbiner, Corbin Harney, Jenny Offill, Eunice Silva, Guillermo Soledad, Kim Stringfellow, Michael Ursell, Florence Vega, Brad Watson, E. B. White, and my parents, Paul and Martha Watkins. Thank you, Amargosa River, American Peace Test, Nevada Desert Experience, Basin and Range Watch, China Ranch, Villa Anita, the Shoshone Museum, and the Crowbar.
Thank you to Miriam Shearing and the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, the Lannan Foundation, the Michener Center, the University of California, Irvine, the Writing Seminars at Bennington College, Tin House, Writing by Writers Tomales Bay, and the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference. Thank you, Rebecca Saletan, Nicole Aragi, and John Freeman. Thank you to my family, friends, editors, agents, colleagues, students, neighbors, plants, and the dead. Thank you, reader.
Thank you, Western Shoshone Nation, for stopping the bombs. Thank you, Newe Sogobia, for keeping us though we continue to hurt you.
Thank you, Esmé Ofelia, for making everything better.
About the Author
Claire Vaye Watkins is the author of the short story collection Battleborn and the novel Gold Fame Citrus. She has received the Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, Watkins is a professor at the University of California, Irvine, and lives in Twentynine Palms, California.
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I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness Page 24