Luz, said Billy Dunn, is my cross to bear.
It was this she always landed on: her father pious and a chatterbox, maybe nervous, approached by a statesman’s underling in the hospital waiting room. Saying her name so it rhymed with fuzz before her mother, channeling Guadalajara, had a chance to correct him. Random, how she became the goddesshead of a land whose rape was in full swing before she was even born. Baby Dunn.
The ration hour came and went; Luz heard the hand pump screeching and Ray beneath her, filling his jug and hers. She lay in bed a long time, snotty and damp and staring at the dark drawn curtains and the heaps of clothing she’d mounded all over the room that were the millions of holes that pocked every hillside of the canyon, each with a tiny grainy dune at its mouth. She had thought the holes to be the burrows of chipmunks, but knew them now to be snake holes. Mammals were out. LA gone reptilian, primordial. Her father would have some scripture to quote about that.
After some time, Ray came into the bedroom and set a glass of lukewarm water on her nightstand. He stayed, silent, and Luz said, “Can you bring me John Muir?”
“Sure.” He went out, came back, and set the volume on the nightstand, beside her undrunk water. He perched himself on his edge of the bed and leaned over to touch her, gently.
“Say something,” she said. “Make me feel better.”
“I love you?”
“Not that.”
He offered the glass. “Drink this.”
She did.
He tried, “I think it was a gopher. Not a prairie dog.”
This did make her feel a little better, somehow. She rolled to face him. “What did you do with him?”
Ray bit his cheek. “Threw it in the ravine. I can go down and get it if you want.”
“No,” she said. She would have liked to bury the little guy properly—make a project of it—but she was certain that if Ray went down into the ravine he would never come back.
“Come here,” Ray said, and hoisted Luz, nude and fetal, onto his lap. He took each of her fingers into his mouth and sucked the starlet’s rings off. He extracted the feathered headpiece from her hair and began tangling and untangling it with his fingers, something she loved immeasurably. “It’s Saturday,” he said.
“I didn’t know.”
“We could go down to raindance tomorrow. Try to get berries.”
She sucked up some snot. “Really?”
“Hell yeah.”
They laughed. Ray said, Here, and led Luz from the bed and into the master bathroom. He held Luz’s hand as she stepped naked into the dry tub, a designer ceramic bowl in the center of the room, white as a first tooth. Ray went downstairs and returned with his jug. He moistened a towel at the jug’s mouth and washed her everywhere. When he was finished he left her in the tub. “Stay there,” he said before he closed the door. She stayed in the dark, fiddling with the starlet’s bracelet, the diamonds having found some improbable light to twinkle. When Ray finally retrieved her, he carried her over his shoulder and flopped her down on the bed and only when she slipped her bare legs between the sheets did she realize that the cases, the duvet, every linen was smooth. He had snapped the infinite sand from them.
The sun had gone down and the doors to the balcony were open; she imagined the sea breeze making its incredible way to them. Tomorrow they would eat berries. They lay together, happy and still, which was more than anyone here had a right to be. She could tell Ray was asleep when the twitches and whimpers and thrashes began, the blocking of nightmares he never remembered. She held him and watched the bloodglow pulse in the east, the last of the chaparral exploding.
Luz had gotten, even by her own generous estimation, righteously fucked up. This occurred to her as the sun of suns dripped into the Pacific and she found herself barefoot at the center of a drum circle, shaking a tambourine made from a Reebok box with broken Christmas ornaments rattling inside and shimmying what tits she had. Luz was not a dancer; she had never been a dancer. But here the rhythm was elephantine and simple as the slurping valves in the body—an egalitarian tune. She jigged and stomped her bare feet into the dry canal silt. She worried for Ray a flash, then let it go. He was probably well aware of her situation, as was his way. Probably watching her from the periphery of the circle, sipping the home-brewed saltwater mash she’d been swilling all day.
And why shouldn’t she swill? They had liberated the starlet’s cheery, grass-green Karmann-Ghia, which Ray called the Melon, and descended from their canyon to the desiccant city, to the raindance, a free-for-all of burners and gutterpunks caterwauling and cavorting in the dry canals of Venice Beach, sending up music from that concrete worm of silt and graffiti and confettied garbage weaving fourfold through the nancy bungalows. They’d set up camp in the shade of a footbridge with its white picket handrails ripped off and Ray had procured a growler of mash and a baggie of almonds and six cloves of garlic the pusher called Gilroy, though nothing had grown in Gilroy for a decade. Happy day, day of revelry and bash, for money still meant in Los Angeles, even in the chaos of the raindance, and—hot damn!—Luz Cortez had earned plenty of it, modeling under her mother’s maiden name until her agency fled to the squalid mists of New York, and she too old to be begged to follow.
So vibe on, sister. Shake shake shake. Don’t trip on the fact that even money will go meaningless eventually. Don’t go sour simmering on what that money cost you, on UV flashes scorching your eyes to temporary blindness or pay docked for time in the ER or old men pinching your thighs, your fat Chicana ass, the girlish flesh pudged at your armpits, putting their fingers or one time a Sharpie up in you. Yes, you have been to Paris and Milan and London and all the rest and cannot remember a thing about them. But don’t feed the negativity, though you were always too flabby, too short, too hairy, too old, too Mexican. Ass too flat, tits too saggy, nipples too big—like saucers, one said. Don’t start that old loop of, Take your shirt off, and, Turn around, sweetheart, and, Bend over, and, Put the worm in your mouth, babe, you know what to do. Don’t get caustic, even if you were only fourteen and didn’t know what to do, had never done it before, had never even kissed a boy. Don’t stir up the hunger the hunger the hunger. Don’t think it was all for nothing.
Don’t think. Dance.
Twirl! Twirl!
Because sweet Jesus money was still money, and wasn’t that something to celebrate? For now, enough money could get you fresh produce and meat and dairy, even if what they called cheese was Day-Glo and came in a jar, and the fish was mostly poisoned and reeking, the beef gray, the apples blighted even in what used to be apple season, pears grimy even when you paid extra for Bartletts from Amish orchards. Hard sour strawberries and blackberries filled with dust. Flaccid carrots, ashen spinach, cracked olives, bruised hundred-dollar mangos, all-pith oranges, shriveled lemons, boozy tangerines, raspberries with gassed aphids curled in their hearts, an avocado whose crumbling taupe innards once made you weep.
The rhythm went manic and Luz collapsed to the silt crust.
Woozy, she stood and careened stylishly through the party, up to the canal berm, the smooth, sloped concrete patch beneath the footbridge where she’d last seen Ray.
And there he was still, guarding their encampment, the growler of mash in one hand and the starlet’s bejeweled sandals in the other. The heel straps had been giving her trouble, Luz remembered now.
“I’m blotto,” she said, rubbing her forehead on his warm bicep.
“I know,” he said.
“And thirsty.”
Ray knelt and set the growler between his feet on the pitched concrete. He took one of Luz’s dirty feet in his hand and put a shoe on, then the other. Luz wobbled and steadied herself with his fine broad back. When he finished, Ray dug a ration cola from his backpack, the only drink anyone had plenty of. It was warm and flat and thick with syrup—donated because the formula was off, was the rumor. But it was wet and thi
s alone was reason enough to love him.
She sat and drank and Ray stood—he did not like to sit much—and consulted his list. Ray’s tiny notebook, looted from the back of a drugstore, was the old-timey reporter’s kind with the wire spiral at the top, such that before writing in it he should have licked the tip of his yellow golf pencil, gouged to sharpness with the Leatherman he carried.
Luz snooped in Ray’s notebook whenever possible, skimming his secret poems and skate park schematics and lists. Ray was a listmaker. He did not live a day without a list; Luz had never made a list a day in her life—their shtick. His lists went:
– matches
– crackers
– L
– water
Or:
– shitting hole
– garage door
– L
– water
Or:
– candles
– alcohol
– peanuts
– L
– water
Or:
– axe
– gas
– shoes
– L
– water
Or:
– charcoal
– lighter fluid
– marshmallows for L
– water
Or:
– Sterno
– eyedrops
– calamine
– kitty litter
– L
– water
Or, often, only:
– L
– water
“Hey,” said Ray, batting her with his notebook. “I heard of a guy who has blueberries from Seattle.”
“Seattle,” she whispered, the word itself like rain. “Can I come?” She had never been on a procurement mission, as Ray called them.
“You want to?”
Luz squealed in the affirmative and finished her ration cola. Then they set off, hand in hand, Ray’s eyes as phosphorescent as the day she witnessed him birthed from the sea.
Ray had the blazing prophet eyes of John Muir, and like John Muir, war had left him nerve-shaken and lean as a crow. The ocean had restored him. The way he told it, a city of a ship bearing the emblem of the motherland deposited him in the riverless West, at San Diego. He was released—honorable discharge, had medals somewhere—but the whole way back he’d been jumpy, sleepless, barely keeping the darkness at the edges. Nothing soothed him until he heard the white noise of the breakers. So instead of going home to the heartland he liberated a surfboard from someone’s backyard and made his home in the curl. He had a mind to surf through all crises and shortages and conflicts past and present. He would make a vacuum of the coast, nothing could happen there, even the things that had happened before he was born. He was surfing the day they pronounced the Colorado dead and he was surfing the day it was dammed, a hundred years before. When some omnipotent current ferried him northward toward LA, he allowed it. He surfed as that city’s aqueducts went dry. He surfed as she built new aqueducts, wider aqueducts, deeper aqueducts, aqueducts stretching to the watersheds of Idaho, Washington, Montana, aqueducts veining the West, half a million miles of palatial half-pipe left of the hundredth meridian, its architects and objectors occasionally invoking the name of Baby Dunn. Ray surfed as concrete waterway crept up to Alaska, surfed as the Mojave and the Sonoran licked the bases of glaciers. He was surfing each time terrorists or visionaries bombed the massive unfilled aqueduct canals at Bend and Boise and Boulder and Eugene. He surfed as states sued states and as the courts shut down the ducts for good. He surfed as the Central Valley, America’s fertile crescent, went salt flat, as its farmcorps regularly drilled three thousand feet into the unyielding earth, praying for aquifer but delivered only hot brine, as Mojavs sucked up the groundwater to Texas, as a major tendril of interstate collapsed into a mile-wide sinkhole, killing everybody on it, as all of the Southwest went moonscape with sinkage, as the winds came and as Phoenix burned and as a white-hot superdune entombed Las Vegas.
Then, one day, Ray emerged from the thrashing oblivion of the Pacific at Point Dume, and there was a chicken-thin, gappy-toothed girl sitting in the sand beside a suitcase and a hatbox, crying off all her eye makeup.
Seawatery, gulping air and clutching his board to him, Ray approached her. What was the first thing he said? Luz could not now remember, but it would have been sparkling. She did recall his hands, gone pink with cold, and his pale aqua prophet’s eyes, and herself saying in response, “I haven’t seen anyone surfing in years. I forgot about surfing.”
His hope naked, Ray asked, “You surf?”
She smiled thinly and shook her head. “Can’t swim.”
“Serious? Where you from?”
“Here.”
“And you can’t swim?”
“Never learned.”
They sat quiet for a time, side by side in the sand, hypnotized by the beckoning waves.
“Where are you from?” she said, wanting to hear this wildman’s voice again.
“Indiana.”
“Hoosier.”
“That’s right.” He grinned. He had an incredibly good-looking mouth.
“Why’d you come here?”
“I was in the military.”
“Were you deployed?”
He nodded.
“What did you do?”
He shrugged and snapped a seaweed polyp between his fingers. “You’ve heard that dissertation.”
He said his name and she said hers and then they sat again in quiet. At their backs, gone coral and shimmering in the sun’s slant, was a de-sal plant classified as defunct but that in truth had never been funct. They’d heard that dissertation, too.
Luz asked, “You going to evac there, Indiana?”
“Nah.”
“Where, then?”
“Nowhere.”
“Nowhere?”
“Nowhere.”
He told her about the sea and his needing it and then, when she suggested Washington State, he said California had restored him, that he would not abandon her. And eventually he told her too about the younger sister born without a brain, only a brainstem—so much like brainstump—that she was supposed to die after a couple of weeks, but she was twenty-one now and a machine still breathed for her, which made Luz think iron lung even though that was not quite right. The wrong mote of dust could kill her, said Ray. One fucking mote. And because of this his mother was always cleaning, cleaning feverishly, cleaning day and night, cleaning with special chemicals the government sent. She didn’t want Ray around. “It’s too much for her,” he said. “Anyway they’re screening pretty heavy in Washington now, and the only skills I have I never want to use again.”
“You’ve got charm,” she said. “Charisma.”
“I think they’re maxed out on charisma.”
“You can surf.”
“You know, I put that on my application.”
“What happened with it?”
“An orca ate it, actually.”
People always claimed they were staying, but Ray was the first person Luz believed. “So what are you going to do?” she asked.
“Some people I know have a place. Even if they didn’t, Hoosiers aren’t quitters. California people are quitters. No offense. It’s just you’ve got restlessness in your blood.”
“I don’t,” she said, but he went on.
“Your people came here looking for something better. Gold, fame, citrus. Mirage. They were feckless, yeah? Schemers. That’s why no one wants them now. Mojavs.”
He was kidding, but still the word stung, here and where it hung on the signage of factories in Houston and Des Moines, hand-painted on the gates of apartment complexes in Knoxville and Beaumont, in crooked plastic letters on the marquees of Indianapolis elementary
schools: MOJAVS NOT WELCOME. NO WORK FOR MOJAVS. MOJAVS KEEP OUT. A chant ringing out from the moist nation’s playgrounds: The roses are wilted / the orange trees are dead / them Mojavs got lice / all over they head.
But Ray smiled and his kind mouth once again soothed Luz. “We’re stick-it-out people,” he said, but what he really meant, she knew, was they could be Mojavs together.
Ray brushed a hank of hair from her eyes and said, “You look like I know you.” Had he seen her before? Luz said maybe and sheepishly described the decaying billboard surveying Sunset Boulevard, her in sweatshop bra and panties, eyes made up like bruises, crouched over a male model’s ass like she was about to take a bite out of it. Get those freaky teeth, the art director had not even whispered. One papery panel peeling off now, so her bare legs looked shrunken, vestigial. “The zenith of my career,” she said. “Minus a commercial for wine coolers.”
Ray said, “No, somewhere else,” then Luz kissed him.
After, there was more silence between them, but it did not feel like silence. It felt like peace.
Ray asked, “What about you? You going to evac?”
They took you by bus. Camps in Louisiana, Pennsylvania, New Jersey. No telling which you’d end up at and anyway it didn’t matter. It was temporary, they said. The best thing you could do for the cause. She knew better, but she was scheduled to go anyway. The suitcase beside her was filled with novels and wads of designer clothes, the hatbox heavy with her savings. But she hated crowds, hated every human being except this one beside her. She suddenly and fiercely did not want to get on a bus tomorrow. She wanted to fall in love instead. Frightening herself, she said, “I was.”
So Ray took her home, to the gutted Santa Monica apartment complex from which his friends staged their small resistance. They had sex on Ray’s bedroll in the laundry room. After, he said, “I need you to promise me we won’t talk about the war.”
She said, “Promise me we won’t talk about the water.”
He said, “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
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