Gold Fame Citrus

by Claire Vaye Watkins

  Luz approached the nothingness where the road ought to have been, turning to put herself between Ig and this void. A massive pit, perfectly round, walls sheer and plumb, like a cork had been popped from the earth, except on the lip where huge slabs of asphalt had cracked and threatened to slide off like melted icing. She could not convince herself to seek out the bottom.

  “What are we going to do?” she said.

  “Lon said this would happen,” said Ray, who smelled of gasoline. “He said there’d be trails.” He pointed to the side of the road, at the improvised detour of other Mojavs, then took Ig and changed her. Luz fetched a clean shirt from the front trunk, one Rita had contributed, with a choo-choo grinning from the chest.

  The tire-wide ruts led them worming around the sinkhole and back to the road. They rejoined the asphalt and soon left it again where another cavity had engulfed the highway. Reunion, separation. Hello, good-bye. The pits were growing, it seemed, for they were off on the trails for miles at a time and even the trails encountered other chasms, detouring the detour. Lonnie’s map lay useless on the dash. They needed only to go east, to get to I–15, Lonnie had said. I–15 would take them into St. George. No longer than a day, Ray said he’d said. But also that it would depend on the trails. Keep heading east. East was all. But without the sea, Luz had lost what little bearings she had. She would have liked to check with Ray—wanted him to say This is east in his surest voice, the voice that made things sound truer than they ever were in her mind. But they barely spoke as they drove, waiting for a trail to swerve back to where the road might be, a trail trampled by people who, for all they knew, died in its blazing.

  Instead of talking, Luz opened a plastic barrel of chalky peppermint puffs that Ray had stolen on one of his projects, her favorite kind: innards airy and white, red-striped husks with sugarsnow inside. Ig saw the candy and dropped her tortoise into the canyon between the car seat and the door, grunting. Ray frowned but Luz passed her a candy anyway. “At least take the wrapper off,” he said. “She’ll choke.”

  “I was going to.”

  “I don’t see how.”

  Luz’s technique was to pop the candies from their wrappers straight into her mouth, then imprint her front teeth into the mint before shearing off segments in good-feeling planes. Ig’s technique was to hold the mint globe in her mouth for an alarming while then spit it out, softened, and roll it around between her hands and along her bare chest and in her hair until she was wet and pink and her fingers webbed with sticky, sugary spittle. For every mint she passed back to Ig, Luz ate ten or twelve. She could not stop. Each shearing brought with it a cold-hot release, like glaciers shedding into the sea, and the sensation lured her back for more. She stuffed the wrappers in the ashtray but the ashtray got full and then wrappers would leap from the tray on the wind and whirl around the cab like locusts before zipping out the window, which annoyed Ray, so Luz let the clear, crinkled wrappers fall to the floor at her feet, where the wind was unable to lift them.

  The trail, unfurling for miles now, agitated Ray. “We have to get off this,” he would say. “This is not going to get us there.” There was a small sea of cellophane at Luz’s feet now, moving like the heat lake ever wiggling on the horizon. Luz went on shearing, grinding, building up little deposits of mint in her teeth.

  Finally, they found asphalt again—Ray exhaled with relief as the tires started their even, mellow whirring. The candies were gone and Luz was left with sores on her gums and wrappers crinkling beneath her feet and the realization that she had not offered Ray a single one.

  Ig grunted for another.

  “No more,” said Luz. “All gone.”

  Ig demanded with a whine.

  “No more, Ig. They’re all gone.”

  Ig considered this, looked Luz straight in the eye, and began to wail.

  “Here.” Luz leaned back and retrieved the tortoise from the floorboard. “Ig, here. Look, Ig. Look.”

  Ig bashed the tortoise in the head, sending him back where he came from. She bellowed, shrieked.

  “Where’s her nini?” Ray asked the rearview. Ig’s face was red now, slick and horridly disfigured by her screams. He reached behind his seat, feeling around for the nini, and the Melon surged hungrily toward the soft, bankless shoulder.

  “Jesus,” shouted Luz, reaching for the wheel.

  “I got it. Find her nini.”

  Luz groped along the baseboards and under Ray’s seat. She forced her fingers into all the spaces in the car seat and beneath it, Ig screeching and slapping at her all the while. Luz snatched one of the child’s hands out of the air and leaned in toward her small, lumpy, snot-smeared face. “No, Ig. No hitting.” Ray watched in the mirror. Ig’s eyes dilated with shock—shock and fear, surely—then squinted in resolve. With her free hand she smacked Luz in the face.

  You cunt, thought Luz. She captured Ig’s other hand and held them both in a sticky nest. She squeezed, hard, hard enough that it felt good. “No,” she said. “That is not okay.”

  Ig’s face fell to sorrow then, genuine wound and heartbreak, with real tears springing to blur her gray eyes. She pulled her hands away and covered her face with them. She sunk her head, ashamed, and wept.

  Luz went to stroke her head but the baby recoiled. Her cage of a body was trembling, seizing where Luz touched her. “I’m sorry,” said Luz, her own tears springing now. She unbuckled the car seat and, with much effort, lifted Ig from it. Ray started to speak but stopped. Luz took Ig onto her lap, limp and burbling softly. She held the child to her, all shame and need. Then, in a gesture of pure grace, Ig put her spindly arms around Luz’s neck. Luz cupped her hand to the back of Ig’s large white head and whispered love and apology and contrition and affection into her neck.

  The Melon slowed.

  Luz looked up. Before them the road went on, did not slide like melting icing into an interminable pit. It went on, on and on east to St. George, to Lawrence and Savannah, where Ig would grow up, maybe saying, I was born in California, maybe one of the last, onward into the fine future, leaving behind the starlet and Lonnie and Rita and John Muir and Sacajawea and the photographers and the nettles and the Nut, except this road—which was to lead them to . . . to what? Kudzu, maybe, and Spanish moss; hurricane season and whatever the Outer Banks were—this road went onward and buried itself beneath a thick tentacle of sand stretched out from the dune sea.

  “Fuck me.” Ray whapped the steering wheel. “Sorry, Ig.”

  Ray turned the Melon around. “We don’t have the gas for this,” he said to no one. They doubled back, then Ray pulled off onto the trail from where they’d come. This forked off along a barbed-wire fence to a washboard cattle trail, which veered south and threatened to shake the Melon apart. All the while the dune lorded over them, in front of them and behind them, to the east and to the west, somehow. A passively menacing sight and Luz could not take her eyes from it. No more than a day, Lonnie had promised, but it had been two and they were farther than they’d ever been from anything.

  They took a bald dirt track eastish. Promising for miles, until it was bisected by an ancient gully, its bed loaded with head-size boulders. Ray skidded the Melon to a stop. “We won’t make it,” he said.

  He looked as if he might cry, or shatter the too-close windshield with his hand. Ray’s deflating faith was terrifying. Disbelief was Luz’s way. Or rather Luz believed only the most absurd Disney fantasies—the canyon menagerie, the Hollywood escape—so that their failure to materialize was proof that all things would always fail to materialize. She could certify sinkholes, arsenic poisoning, a world of hot undrinkable brine. But where her mind was miserly, Ray’s heart had room for all things, all modes of being, for water and for the promises of coins. He was, she realized, the essential opposite of her father, whose meanness and fear she’d inherited, though none of his industry. How sustaining it might have been to have that room, to not be e
ver at capacity. The ultimate project: to believe. That way, when the day came—through some fermentation of will and time and miracle—when the three of them emerged from this desert and Ig plumped and spoke and lined her dolls along a windowsill and asked, “Where did I come from?” faith would surely, if Luz could begin to cultivate it now—no, cultivate was not the right word. One didn’t cultivate faith and one did not cultivate anything here, save thirst and thirst and insanity. But if she might have somehow by then made room in herself, might have evicted the photographers perhaps, erased the year she probably should have followed her agent to New York, the year she was twenty-two but writing seventeen on all her forms, faith or belief might have let her respond, without saccharine or strychnine, “God gave you to us.”

  “We can make it,” Luz said. She cajoled Ig’s limbs through their straps and buckled the apparatus over her despite the child’s whining. “Go,” she said, “before she has another meltdown.”

  Ray nodded. The Melon plunged into the wash, the three of them lurching within. Rocks pinged violently up into the undercarriage. The Melon’s European engine whirred as her wheels spun frantically in the detritus, then caught, miraculously, ejecting the car up and out of the wash. Ray and Luz cheered. Ig cried until Luz freed her and reinstalled her on her lap. Luz held Ig, smelling the slight scabby smell of her head as the trail dipped dramatically and the desert scrub shrunk away and the trail went bankless, stretching now through a vast blinding rockscape. Luz had never seen anything like the craggy bleached white rocks rippling along the side of the trail, like water froth made inanimate, capped here and there with daubs of brown.

  The sun was at its perfect apex, which it seemed never to leave. Beyond them, the blurry summits of the dunes in the distance blazed as if they made their own light. Down and down they sank, and the blanched, calcium-crusted oven of the valley broiled. Luz remembered something from her father’s idea of school, stacks of outdated trivia cards skewered on rings by subject: the lowest point in the US? Badwater. She was drinking more than her share.

  She helped Ig drink, too, though still she spilled. “I’m good,” Ray said too pleasantly when she offered. Soon, Luz had to pee.

  “Low on gas anyway,” said Ray, chewing at the skin beneath his nails. They were facing south now—she was almost positive—though they did not acknowledge this between them.

  Luz set Ig down so she might waddle around, burn off some energy. “You have her?” she confirmed, fearing the little one impaled by the jagged rock pinnacles jutting skyward in crags like parched coral. And like something once alive, the rocks crunched under her feet, more delicate than rock ought to be. She squatted, hanging her head to look between her splayed feet. She grasped a spire for balance, prepared for it to burn her. But instead, the spire snapped off in her hand. She caught herself and looked to the crushed filtrate glittering uncannily. Teeny honeycomb crystals in her palm. She peed and watched between her legs in awe as her near-brown urine melted a tunnel in the rock. She finished, shook her rump in the air diligently and on her walk back found a pure white fist-size crystal. She licked it.

  “It’s salt,” she said, marching clumsily back to the car. “It’s all salt. Ray, taste.”

  Ray had opened the hood of the Melon and was leaning inside with his shirt off, as if the little coupe was politely eating him. Ig was stooped in one of the ruts of the trail, collecting little somethings in her hand. Luz approached Ray with the rock outstretched but he did not look to her. In the dark shadow of the hood his back was angry—cords in his neck and throat pulled taut, the flanks spread across his shoulders drawing his scapula up around his ears. Obviously not the time, and she congratulated herself for realizing this. She would go show Ig instead. But before she could turn and leave Ray to his trouble, whatever it was, a scent dizzying and unmistakable confronted her: gasoline.

  She covered her mouth with her free hand, tasting somewhere beneath her dread and horror the salt residue there. “What happened?”

  “Gas tipped over. When we went through that gully.”

  She put the salt crystal to her side, not sure whether to drop it—too melodramatic—or hold it until it dissolved in her fist. “Jesus.”

  “The lid was off.”

  Their last stop. She’d pried the plastic cap from the Sparkletts bottle and whiffed from it so as not to accidentally fill their drinking jugs with gas. She’d congratulated herself, scooting the gasoline aside and reaching for water instead, silently commended her own prudence while neglecting to replace the cap. Now, a clear, greasy crescent of the fluid swayed in the once-full bottle where it lay on its side, scarves and baby clothes and adult clothes soaked, the carpets glistening with fuel.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Me too. That was our last one.”

  “What do we do? Turn around?”

  “We’ll never make it through that gully from this side. Even if we did.”

  “So, what? Keep going?”

  “Maybe there’ll be a road.”

  “How far can we get?”

  “Not far.”

  Then what? no one said.

  —

  They went on, the journey a stillborn they had to birth. The Melon’s steering wheel was a simple chrome circle—surely blisteringly hot, though Ray said nothing—with another half circle of chrome upturned inside it like a smile. The speedometer, notched with kilometers, was one eye and the other, a little smaller, was a clock stuck near three thirty. Onward they rolled, no need for speed now, through the salt fields, quiet except for the crunch of the trail and Ig whispering her Ig language. The steering wheel face grinned at them idiotically, maniacally, while Luz and Ray silently watched its third eye, the gas gauge, tick nearer and nearer the orange hash marked R.

  “What do you think that stands for?” asked Ray after some time.

  “Does it matter?”

  “I’d like us to explore it.”

  “Are you doing the thing where you ask questions just to be talking?”

  “Yes.”

  She sighed. “Refill.”

  “Reserves,” he said.

  “Replenish.”

  “Rejuvenate.”

  “Regenerate.”

  “Regurgitate.”

  “Reinstate.”

  “Reject.”

  “Restore.”

  “Rejoice.”

  “Reconnoiter.”

  “Rescue.”

  “Residue.”

  “Roam.”

  “Rome.”

  “Romans.”

  “Romance.”

  “Remnants.”

  “Run.”

  “Rest.”

  The salt rock was still in her hand somehow, but the salt fields were behind them, and Luz did not notice when they left them and so she did not get to say good-bye, and wasn’t that her shallow, selfish way? Before them was the dune: magnetic, candescent, on three sides of them, as consuming as sky. The needle leaned on R, now engorged with denotation. The trail narrowed. Shallow, boiling pools came up on either side, their waters fluorescent yellow, stinging to the eye. The smell of rotten eggs seeped into the car.

  “That color,” said Luz. “Look at the color, Ig.”

  “Ig, Ig, Ig,” said Ig.

  “Mine tailings,” said Ray. “Sulfur.”

  In the sulfur pools squatted slick, bulbous mineral hives, steam surging from their slit openings like eyeless worms surfacing, belching mustard gas into the air. The thick rankness carried Luz to her father’s living room, where she was drinking a smoothie made from fruit powder—some powder was caked at the bottom and if she put her straw too deep she’d sip up a mealy mouthful. Her father with a bolo tie and too much skin for his face held a glowy yellow specimen in his palm and said to a room of grown-ups, This is Satan’s little stocking stuffer. This is how he tells you he�
�s a-coming.

  “Brimstone,” Luz said to Ray. Together they knew the names of everything.

  The Melon lurched once, twice; something knocked around inside, then stopped. And then, casually, as if it weren’t pinpointing the specific patch in a field of poison where they would die of thirst, the car began its final, quiet, excruciating coast.

  Ray got out. Luz did too, as if there were something to be done. Ig whined after them and Luz climbed into the backseat to free her. From there she heard it, a sharp, wet bark, then another. She started and looked through the filthy windshield to Ray, pacing up and down the trail, his long legs stabbing berserkly away from the car and back again, his body atop them a live wire, convulsing, seizing, his hands clawing at his red face, wet somehow. (Spit, tears.) He screamed again, a pinched shriek like a mutt beneath a car and with it more spittle flinging from his lips, and then again, this sound slower, seeming to come from deep within him, a tremor traveling up his racked torso and bursting from his mouth. His feet skidded from beneath him and he collapsed on his back in the dirt. He lay there, trembling. The man with the specimen would have called it a possession, and Luz would have, too. A possession by rage and fear and profound, unyielding despair at this most inarguable failure.

  Ig was still in her seat, silently shaken. Then she began to cry. Luz lifted her, jouncing and cooing, and walked with her away from where Ray lay in the dirt, his chest heaving, making scary murmuring sounds. Ig wanted down, then wanted to face-plant into the lovely toxic shore beyond the trail, so Luz squatted down and wrapped her arms around her. The child leaned into the hug, and what a tremendous satiating feeling that was, better than clean water.