Gold Fame Citrus

by Claire Vaye Watkins

  I’ll be right back, tinked the tuna. I’ll be right back, whistled the wind across the lip of his open jug.

  “I always wanted to come back,” Ray said aloud, to see if it was true. “I walked so far I thought I’d make a circle and come back to you.”

  Later, stabbing at the can of tuna with the bottle opener tool on his Leatherman, working a lip open with its wire cutters, “There was a largeness on top of me, there always was. You lifted it, Luz, but also brought it right back down. Then Ig. Lifted, then right back down. I never wanted to leave her, or you. But it felt good to do it.”

  I’ll be right back. He knew it was a lie—he had never, in all his life, been right back. But what he could not discern was how far the lie extended. Did he intend to come back at all? Yes, surely. But the more he walked, the better he felt, every step if not a good decision then at least his own, so that by the time the sulfur pools disappeared behind him the scarf had lifted closer to his eyes, which must have meant he was smiling.

  It would not be so bad to die, went a story he’d told before. No, he would not be returning to that overseas desert in his mind. Instead, he stayed stateside, recalled the hollow solitary yuccas, papier-mâché and dry filament, and the time he and Lonnie broke into a sound stage in Culver City and sledgehammered the foamcore streets of New York, a city neither of them had visited nor ever cared to. He missed Lonnie. He missed the courtyard compound and the first bed he and Luz had shared. How brave she’d been then, leaving her evac ship in the sand, looking right at him as they fucked. He missed Luz then, horribly, and almost turned around. But there was the gully they’d forded, the bone-dry threshold whispering, Onward.

  Everything was a little better in retreat. From the other side of the gully it seemed possible to walk to the highway, to walk back to Santa Monica, to walk up to Point Dume and drop his satchel in the sand and tap a skinny girl on her shoulder. Approached from the rear everything was mirror image, the bad omens good ones, the impossible possible, the situation improving rather than going straight to shit. The nasty-smelling peppermints went back into their wrappers. Fingers of water stretched back into aqueducts. Lies were truths. Luz got back into his bed and never got out.

  Sometimes optimism joined him on his walk. He would find someone, or someone him. Red Cross had to come through here. Evac lorries. Ration shipments. Water trucks. Even better, they would find Luz and Ig without him and send them somewhere moist, the mossy inlet Luz talked about, the marshes and the pines. He would find them there, on a blanket in a meadow slurping smiles of watermelon.

  Sometimes gloom stepped in stride beside him. At his back the dune sea was Fort Leavenworth, growing, gaining on him. At some point he noticed he was marching. He’d always been good at that. But then the drills had made it seem so easy. Forward march. About-face. Forward march. As if going back was a kind of going forward, as open and free and boundless, all clear skies and plains. But going back was complicated. Maybe impossible. For one, there was the question of go back where? He might march back to Point Dume or San Diego, could continue to the starlet’s, to Lonnie’s, to the breakers or the brig. A sea sound took up in his ears and became cicadas dripping from the trees, the carapaces he was forbidden to touch but did.

  To look back was to join hands with ghosts, to build himself a house of past frailties and failures and all the unending ways in which he was a disappointment. Ray’s house of the past had a matching mailbox out front, and its white lettering read HOLLIS, GREENCASTLE, INDIANA. Here was the corn and here was the creek, here were tornados of gnats funneling over a baseball field. In the neighborhood where he grew up there were barbecues with half-used tins of lighter fluid beside them, folding plastic lawn furniture in every backyard except his. Here was citronella and cut grass and thunderstorms like plush black curtains falling closed overhead. Here were the train tracks and here were the blackberries he was to rinse before eating but didn’t. Here were tire forts and bottle rockets and the childproofing strip busted off a lighter. Here was the Leatherman, found in the otherwise empty drawer of a workbench, surely his father’s. Here were peeled, sharpened sticks and the back of a bus seat slashed and an adult who kept saying vandal though he was not a vandal—he was a good boy, class monitor.

  But here was the Leatherman and here was the seat and hadn’t he slashed it? If he was not a vandal then what of that? There were the girls in his class, sharpening Crayola crayons and, later, examining the tips of their hair. Here was the old quarry filled for swimming, the surface of the water rainbowed with suntan oil, here was the floating platform from which he dove deep enough to scare himself, deep enough for the green, sun-warmed water to turn black and arctic. Here was the metal siding and the cloth awnings and the sprinklers and the wide scratchy sidewalk and here was the family room with the piano he’d never seen anyone play. Here, the way other houses had boxes of tissues or Bibles in every room, were boxes of rubber gloves, blue for cleaning, purple for Lucy.

  Poor Lucy, his mother never let him say. In Lucy’s room his sister lolled on rubber sheets, a puddle of a person, a body without a brain, and beside her a pylon of monitors where a nightstand might have been. Here were the cleaners who came in on Mondays and Thursdays, a young husband and wife, and here were the pennies his mother had hidden in the corners—behind the dresser, balanced atop the baseboards—to test them, now in a shiny stack on the kitchen island. And here in the window was the prism, a teardrop of glass hanging from fishing line, spraying rainbows across the linoleum floor in the late afternoon. Once, when his aunt was visiting, she and his mother played old music and drank chardonnay in the sitting room and his mother said, What I’m most afraid of is that she can’t tell the difference between dreams and reality and she’ll have a nightmare and think it was me doing it to her. His sister Lucy stopped breathing every Wednesday night, when Ray went to Scouts and his mother taught him all the ways to say Come home.

  —

  Fear fueled him through the second day, fear doubled by strange sounds he’d heard in the night and by drinking down close to the last of his water. He spent the second night where he stopped, and he stopped when a massive sinkhole came into view and he hadn’t the will to circumnavigate it. He used the satchel as a pillow, untied the scarf from his neck and wrapped it around his eyes to block the audacious moonlight emanating from the dune sea. With his eyes closed he still rocked from side to side, phantom footsteps, and little lightnings of lactic acid fired in his spent legs. He tried to sleep, one hand in his pocket, curled around the Leatherman.

  For some time, Ray did not know who was older, him or Lucy. He did not remember a time without Lucy, and so he assumed she’d been there when he arrived, assumed himself the baby and the repair. Lucy’s birthdays had no cake and so no wax number atop to correct him, no balloons or streamers, as these were contaminants. It was only when Aunt Breanna was visiting for his father’s wake—Ray would have been seven then—that his mother had caught a glimpse of him peeking in on them, summoned him to her, hugged him, her breath boozy, and said, “At least you had us to yourself for a while, sweet boy.”

  According to Lonnie, this explained a lot: because of his sister’s disability and then his father’s death, the household instilled no sense of hierarchy via birth order, meaning that Ray’s environment had failed to indoctrinate him in the ways of subjugation, making him essentially impervious to hegemony. He had no impulse to dominate, nor had he developed a tolerance for domination. Lonnie had gone to an all-boys boarding school in New Hampshire, where he became an expert in hegemony and domination. Plus, he’d read his stepmother’s books about birth order and sun signs. According to Lonnie, the lack of a sense of birth order and his father’s early death had made Ray’s childhood a distinctly mortal one—the bubble of immortality that insulates most toddlers popped before it could incubate Ray’s ego for very long. All this in Taurus ascending made Ray one of a very few capable of genuine altruism.

&n
bsp; (Wow, Luz had said. That sounds so much better than martyr complex.)

  Anyway, Ray was special, was Lonnie’s idea, which was nice because as a kid Ray had felt mostly ignored. Underfoot, his mother always said, urging him out the sliding glass door with her elbows, so as not to contaminate her purple-gloved hands. Ray did not remember his father, not even his dying, though he did have a cluster of inexplicably rich friends in his memories—they had docks on the river and TVs in their rooms and one had a go-cart with a track wriggling through the woods—friends he never saw again, so maybe he’d been stowed with their parents while his father deteriorated.

  It wasn’t as if Ray’s mother refused to talk about his father. She answered anything Ray asked, but he hardly asked because it seemed there were important questions, right questions, some revelation that might be set free within him if only he could find the words. He couldn’t, and that was frustrating, and so he stopped trying. His mother told stories about his father, and so did her two sisters when they came to visit from the East Coast, but they were always the same stories: His father had once fished a grape out of Ray’s mouth that had been choking him. His father had built the deck out back but didn’t seal it right, so it was warpy. As a boy, his father broke his arm climbing onto a horse named Gidget. It was as if each of them, Ray’s mother and his two aunts, had been allotted a story or two about the man, six stories max. They asked whether Ray remembered the trip to Hocking Hills, or Turkey Run, or Nine Lakes. Sometimes he said he did; sometimes he told the truth.

  He did remember that after his father died, his mother had given away all his father’s things. Someone came and took them, even the mattress where he’d died, and as a boy Ray could see why that had seemed like a good idea. But he wondered often now what he might have had of his father’s, if he had something besides the Leatherman.

  A waterfall of too-wide ties cascading from a wire hanger.

  A wooden cigar box with earplugs inside.

  Dog tags.

  Maybe the piano had been his father’s. Maybe his sheet music was still in the bench, a favorite tune tattered.

  He wondered what kind of a man he might have become with those possessions.

  It occurred to him, trying for sleep near this hole in the earth, that if he died out here Ig would have none of his things to hold on to. Ray wondered: would Ig wonder about him? And if she did, would she wonder about her father or the man who took her?

  In his dreams he was still walking.

  —

  The wind woke him. He sat up and the night was dense with darkness, somehow. Maybe the moon had gone down? He flailed in the dark a moment, the wind wail getting louder, before shoving the scarf up from his eyes. The wail was behind him, somehow, and he turned to see dune light, all ablaze and bearing down on him. He sprang to his feet too fast, and his head went instantly aswirl. He blinked, and the light honed itself, a light within the dune light, then two. Headlights, then, and the wail not the wind but some bizarre engine he had never heard before.

  “Here!” he called, making Xs with his arms overhead.

  The headlights came right at him, and he shouted with joy. The vehicle bore down on him, not slowing. “Here!” he called again, afraid they would mow him down in the dark. More lights throbbed to life then, doubling the spotlight on him. Surely they saw him. Still, the truck came at him full speed, shrieking its banshee shriek. Ray waited, near-blind. He heard whoops, and the vehicle roared past him, so close he could smell its oil burning. It must have been a lorry or a jeep, because when it passed he could make out the silhouettes of roll bars, KC lights and massive tires.

  In the distance, the vehicle slowed to an idle. Ray waited. Deep murmurs came to him across the desert, as though the ground was opening up beneath him. Then laughter. This was no rescue vehicle.

  Ray groped for the Leatherman in his pocket and pulled it out, struggling to extract one of the small blades. He held the dinky tool in front of him, saw it quaking in the moonlight. He steadied himself and stooped to grab the satchel. Ray begged his eyes to adjust, trying to make out whether there was dry pan in front of him or the sinkhole’s chasm.

  When the vehicle turned, so did Ray. He dropped the ridiculous pocketknife and ran. The whoops and cackles from the jeep suggested this decision was an entertaining one. He fled, or did the best approximation his ravaged legs could manage. The jeep roared at his heels, but did not overtake him. Ray pressed the ground away as best he could, lurching over the pan in front of him. The jeep hung back, then lunged up at him, then receded again. They were playing with him. Then, whoever they were roared up alongside him, the huge tires popping rocks up all around. Another whoop, the engine’s unreal screech, and something came down hard on his head.

  —

  Ray woke at dawn in the shadows of two men. His head was three times its normal size, or felt like it. He looked immediately to their truck, a Japanese hybrid deal somehow lower than when it had chased him, big regal decal on its door: BLM. No roll bars, no KC lights, lower and seemingly miniaturized. And why had they waited until sunup to collect him? Unless this was not the truck that had chased him.

  The rangers gave him water, though he still had a little bit in his jug. One of them said, to no one in particular, “Most individuals who succumb to dehydration still have water on their person.”

  “My girl and my child are two days’ walk back that way,” Ray said.

  They only nodded. One ranger removed the blood-stained scarf from Ray’s head and handed it to him. “Got a gnarly gash here,” he said, unzipping a fanny pack and fishing out ointment and a bandage. The other searched the satchel. “Do you have a weapon in here or on your person?”

  “No sir,” said Ray, and the ranger returned the satchel. He instructed Ray to get in the truck bed. Ray did. The truck had no roll bars or KC lights, but it did have a dozen heavy metal rings installed in its bed, six down one side, six down the other, for shackles, Ray realized. Also two huge barrels of fuel. The truck lurched to life; its engine sound was any other engine sound. These were not the people who had chased him.

  The truck turned and sped away from the dune sea.

  Ray pounded on the window. “Wrong way,” he shouted, pointing. “You’re going the wrong way!” He pounded harder on the window, gestured maniacally. “Go back!” he screamed. “Go back, go back, go back!” He tried to pry the window open, but it was sealed and reinforced with wire mesh. He shouted and shouted. The truck vaulted over the desert, unresponsive except to throw Ray to his ass.

  He watched the plume of dust erupt behind the truck, an earthen miasma between him and Luz and Ig. His head felt humongous. Certainly it was filling with some nasty fluids. He reached up to touch his wound but found instead the bandage, plasticky and puffy. The sun was roasting his dome, but when he tried to wrap the scarf around his head, the wind took it and sent the silk snaking off into the sky.

  A grim thought came to him then.

  He glanced at the cabin and, seeing only the unmoving backsides of two crew cuts, reached into the satchel. He’d stowed his driver’s license in the pocket meant for the starlet’s cell phone, which he found empty now. The rangers must have taken it. So they knew who he was. If they did, it would be only so long before that game of institutional connect-the-dots drew a picture of a court-martial. The rings rattled in the bed. But why hadn’t they shackled him? Nothing made sense.

  He searched the satchel again, groped in the cell phone pocket, discovering a rip in the deepest corner of its silky lining. With two fingers he mined the hole, probing desperately until he came up with what he wanted. Checking again whether the rangers watched him, he did what he should have done a long time ago. He rested his arm on the hot rim of the truck bed and with one effortless and almost imperceptible twitch flicked Raymond Xavier Hollis, 6ft. 2in. 150 lbs, hair: brn, eyes: blue, organ donor, 623 Windy Lawn Lane, Greencastle, Indiana into the truc
k’s billowing wake.

  The truck hauled ass for a very long time. Ray guessed they were going northeast, though the dune sea seemed at times both behind and ahead of them so he could not be sure. The ground went from white to blush to rust and back again. The hills were sapped tan, then chalky green with veins of aqua, then they were lavender mountains with streaks of saffron and marigold, brown, brown and brown. Ray curled in the stingy shade of the barrels and nodded off, waking when the truck moaned into low gear. They were going up now, crawling high on the haunch of an alluvial fan. Canyon walls rose on either side of them, banded and dry, and the truck lurched steadily up the gully. Soon, it turned and climbed up and into a scooped-out space where the rocks were iron-colored and ore-stripped. The truck summited, then swayed down a sandy road. A padded quiet overtook them, accompanied by a low, smooth whirring. The plume of dust dissipated. It took Ray some minutes to realize that asphalt was beneath them.

  He managed to stand again, and turn. Ahead was a bleak, nude mound crowned by crosses. At its foot, settled into the rock, was a colonial mirage: gleaming red Spanish tile roof, smooth pink adobe walls wrapped with wrought-iron balconies and studded with the nubs of roof beams, a bell tower capped by a quivering weathervane, its mustang bounding windward, everywhere archways. In the foreground was a gate of black metal and wood flanked by a medieval turret of pink stone. The truck paused at the turret’s narrow window, the driver said, “Medical,” and from behind a screen of chicken wire a hairy arm waved them through.

  The truck circled around the castle. In its courtyard squatted a compound of blue-gray trailers. They passed these and descended along a wide, recessed causeway walled with Moorish tilework. What was once a moat, Ray realized. The truck stopped again at another gate, red rusted swords stabbed into the ground, cranked out now by some invisible mechanism to allow them into the castle fort.

  Ray received medical attention in the cathedral ballroom where his was the only bed occupied. He spent his first several hours pleading for a search party, screaming after Luz and Ig, depicting in frantic detail the road, the path, the gully, the sulfur pools and the Melon. “Not our jurisdiction,” one of the guards said, though another said, “We’re on it, partner,” before he shackled Ray to his bed—a precaution, he said.