—
One night, during the later late show, Sal said, “I don’t suppose you want to do any of the other cellmate stuff either?”
“Like what?”
“You know . . . HJ, BJ, RJ?”
Ray remembered guys in the barracks who announced their success by shouting “Here comes the cream sauce!” In high school some boys had a race in the back of the school bus. Supposedly they each let it off into a Dixie cup and the last one to finish had to drink it. Ray had not been invited to the back, had sat in the front of the bus with the girls and the born-again boys, a brush-off somehow repaired years later with Lonnie, when this new friend who thought he was so special asked Ray to please touch him, to please taste him, and Ray did, marveling how willing we become when simply asked nicely.
Ray was actually considering telling Sal this, was imagining how thrilled the kid would be to finally engage in what he called “genuine bondage,” when Luz appeared on the TV. Fragile and folded in another man’s arms, she looked shyly at the camera, as if by accident, then away. She laughed. They were on a beach, Luz and this man and their chums, all laughing and drinking wine coolers around a fire.
“That’s her,” said Ray. “My girl.” But when Sal looked, Luz was gone and Ray was once again a foolish young deserter whose pride was still wounded from not being invited to a circle jerk in the back of the school bus.
She’d been laughing a laugh he’d never seen before and could not hear. Perhaps she laughed that way before they met. Perhaps he had extinguished it, if not with his presence then with his leaving. He knew it was a trick of the light, the camera, the music and the jumpy cuts, but she’d been having so much fun there. He’d never seen her have that kind of fun. She was throwing her head back with abandon, and even as Ray could hear the director saying, Throw your head back with abandon, he wondered why he’d never glimpsed that gesture or its cousins in all their time together.
That night and for many after he dreamed of Luz in all the ways he’d never seen her. In a robe, pouring coffee and wiping the sleep crud from her eyes. In a party dress wrapping a gift, asking him to put his finger on the knot so she could make a bow. Repotting a plant, a smudge of soil on her forehead. Curled in sleep beside Ig on a blue, velvet-looking duvet, Ig reminding him of all the ways to say Come home.
One night, Sal came down to Ray’s bunk and held Ray as he wept. “Is it your girl?” he whispered.
“My family,” Ray managed. He was not sure whom he meant—it was becoming increasingly difficult to tell who was make-believe, who was waiting for him and where. He wished he’d told his mother it was a dream catcher, not a prism, that would keep Lucy’s nightmares away.
“That’s tough,” said Sal, a decent clamp on his delight.
“It is,” said Ray.
Sal grew hard against him. Ray allowed this. He had not been touched in a long, long time. Sal kindly stroked Ray’s mangy hair. “You miss your people?”
“Yeah,” Ray choked. “I have a little daughter. Little tow-headed girl who needs me.”
Sal rubbed himself against Ray as he spoke. “You poor thing. I can only imagine what it’s like to have family aboveground. Being separated. Being alone. I hated being alone. That’s why I was so glad when you came.” He ground his dick into the small of Ray’s back.
“You didn’t have anyone,” Ray said.
Sal grunted. “No one. But at least I got over to see Mom here and there.”
Ray pulled away slightly. “Your mom’s down here?”
“Of course,” said Sal, reaching.
“You were arrested together?”
Sal held Ray tighter and resumed his grind. “What are you talking about, arrested?”
“Taken in or whatever,” Ray said. “Detained.”
“You don’t know?” Ray could feel Sal trembling with the giddiness of finally telling his story.
Ray was trembling, too. “I don’t. I’m sorry. Tell me.”
Sal shuddered against him. “I was born in here.”
Sal never finished his politics chess set. “No one knows any of the politicians,” he said. “Or maybe they know the name but not what the dude looks like and not, like, his job. Plus those guys all look the same.”
The project aborted, Ray asked if he could have one of the few pieces Sal had finished: Baby Dunn. Sal had carved her bundled in a blanket, little soapstone chrysalis with big watery eyes. Sal said yes, keep her forever, but Ray would not. Ray would realize he’d forgotten the talisman, left talc Baby Dunn behind in his cell, only as he was inching himself stealthily up an air duct, his satchel slung around him, licking his hands and rubbing the spit on his bare feet where the talc made them slippery.
When Ray finally reached a ceiling in the duct he found it blistering. This he could tell when he scooted his face up near and confirmed by touching the back of his hand to it, as a fireman visiting his elementary school had long ago instructed. It was either the surface of the mine or some fire was burning on the other side. But what choice had he? The air shaft yawned below, six or seven stories of it by now, his limbs were quivering, and even if he survived the fall only Limbo Mine awaited him. He heaved himself against the hatch, hulked his puny mass against it, jamming his legs against the duct best he could without falling, urged his body against this barrier, which he somehow knew was his last, heaved himself again up and out into flames.
They went only to his eyes, his eyelids gone translucent for all the protection they brought. His eyeballs boiled on in their sockets even with Ray’s palms pressing the magma from them. Beneath him was not ash but dust, scorching all the same, the sun of suns branding his larval, cave-paled skin. He felt for the satchel where it hung from him, retrieved Sal’s liberated ten-gallon and donned it, though its shade did not register. He crawled to make his escape. He scrambled one way and then another, not certain if he was inching back toward Limbo Mine or if a guard was standing over him, smirking. All the parts of his eyes he didn’t have names for were crisp, rattling hulls. He felt the duct and the hatch he’d pushed off. He curled up beneath the hatch as though it could hide him and lay there for some time, baking and blind, listening for trucks.
None came, and eventually his brain registered the lifting of his eyelids as faint reddening, which gave way to an oscillating green-black, as though he were looking at an overcast night sky through night vision goggles. He came out from under the hatch. The first shapes he saw with his new sight were crosses, which came to him as gashes of red light. They were for the Indian massacre, some people said. For William Randolph Hearst’s stillborn babies, or for the wives he bluebearded. For the innocent victims of drunk driving, or the drunks themselves, catapulted off the shoulderless highway now buried. Be-low the crosses, he knew, the Spanish tile of Clay Castle gleamed in the sun like an oasis, and beyond that the dune sea, a laceration of light in the distance, utterly reconfigured in the months since he’d last seen it, yet as fearful, as transfixing.
Ray knew he had to move. Insisting to himself that if necessary the red-green forms materializing and dissolving before him would coalesce into a sinkhole or a truck coming, he slid down the opposite side of the hill on his ass, his limbs still noodly and light, not behaving in a predictable way whatsoever. He could not determine whether it was night or day. The sky was a pit above but also somehow aglow, the new horizon a shimmering smear and very far away.
The dune tugged him. His world was a photo negative of itself, a kind of heat vision except the world was all heat. As he walked, purples and oranges came onto the scene, first faint at the borders, then lurid. Colors he’d not seen in a long time somersaulted across his field of vision—Technicolor cells on parade, lackadaisical psychedelia, rainbows prismed then collapsing, the drought of droughts through a kaleidoscope. He knew these colors to be unreal—symptoms of a shorted-out ocular nerve, a spent rod or cone, a fried disc somewhere—but still,
they were company. He would find Luz and describe all this to her, she who had always been so hungry for color.
He walked and watched the show, occasionally slurping handfuls of corn porridge from the satchel he’d filled with it. At some point, the colors from his burned eyes seemed to repose onto the real. Auras, Lonnie said, pleased with himself somewhere. The alluvial fan beneath him was an essential beige flecked with urgent orange. One rocky wash was welcoming lavender, and so he spent the night. Behind him, the mountains concealing Limbo Mine throbbed a cautionary rust. The sun was indifferent black, or some days a deep, infinite navy. And in the distance, always, the dune sea shimmered in sublime, hypnotic, opalescent blue, the color of water at the shallow end of a swimming pool, with a pretty girl’s suntan oil sliding on its surface. His damaged sight, though he had stopped thinking of it this way, led him there.
Upon entering the dune sea, he set the modest goal of walking in only one direction. South, maybe. But even this got difficult when his footprints disappeared behind him and the ridges around him shifted from north-south to east-west. But the heartcolors stayed with him, and he continued to let them guide him. He heeded effervescent streaks of emerald, an earnest path of peach. If a valley was spiteful olive gray he went around, then watched from a distant ridge as a sandalanche slid silently to fill it. If a slope of sandy ripples shone a chirpy robin’s-egg, he climbed them as though they were the front steps of his own house.
At some point he crested a day-long dune and saw nothing but more dune. Sand stretched out on all sides and above, for he was nowhere near summiting even the foothills of the Six Sisters. But instead of terror he grasped what made these dunes a sea, and for the first time felt the serenity of that. He was as at home here as he had been bobbing on his board, seeing nothing but sky and the Pacific. A real good, deep-oblivion kind of feeling.
In this state, he carried all hurts past and present and future. He thanked his blisters, befriended his burns, watched his migraine move around his head the way he might have watched Ig pull Luz around a playground. Pain had its favorite spots—his headaches preferred the nook beneath his eyebrows, heat rash his armpits, and sting nested in the crook of his groin, probably for the shade. Ray made room for these. People and things came to him, and he pretended not to notice.
Some were hard to ignore. Lucy walking boneless was a beautiful thing. He did not turn to see Luz and Ig beside him, for fear of evaporating them, but he did slow down so Ig could keep up. He spoke to some, saying, “I appreciate the offer, Uncle Randy, but this is something I have to do myself.”
His sturdier companions were his talc hack, his satchel and his jug. Though he felt a little bad about taking it, Sal’s ten-gallon was like God’s awning overhead. He touched it when he needed to pin down what was real.
Some nights he thought he heard that worrisome banshee shriek way off, though perhaps it was imagined. Either way, he dropped immediately to the ground, made himself flat as a river stone.
He was, after everything, a Hoosier and a guest and so when he dipped his hand into the satchel and found his porridge finished he said, “If I may, sand dune, you are not going to kill me.” When his jug went dry he said, “I beg your pardon, dune sea, but I am just here to get my girls. If you would kindly. This is not my first desert, you see. I am not done with my life—I’d say I’m about halfway through. I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. I am a young white man in America and we typically do quite well here. So if you will excuse me.”
He found he was no longer afraid of losing Luz, or of loving Ig—he was content to have those two throbbing slabs of his heart outside his body, walking around. If only he could find them. All he asked was to watch them make their rounds, and occasionally to press them up to their puny kindred plugging away inside him. His vision went a-swamp. He did not know whether they were alive, and if alive where—perhaps even back at Limbo Mine, in some hidden grotto. But he pressed onward along routes of affectionate coral and welcoming teal. He did not know where he was walking but he knew why. He would, he realized, find them or spend the rest of his life looking, and this might not take so long. So be it. All he had ever needed, in that desert or this, was some say in how it went, some reassurance that he would go doing something worthwhile. A sappy idea, but not therefore false. And while his life, it seemed, had been an archipelago of ambiguity and abstraction and impossibility, here was something he could grasp: a designer bag greasy from gruel, a ten-gallon hat. My girl and my baby two days back. This was what faith looked like: a phosphorescent world showing the way, a beautiful rose-colored vulture with a cherry-juice beak weaving through the white-hot sky, circling him, then landing at his feet. When the vulture became a great blue heron and the heron a tarp, Ray shrouded himself in it—precious shade, the canvas of discarded wagons—and walked in the direction from which it came.
THE GIRLS
We knew something was going down when he kicked us out of the Rambler. Get out, he said, just like that. Like it wasn’t our monastery, our vestibule, and hadn’t we just delivered him?
JIMMER
An unnatural portrait, I admit, the girls huddled outside the Rambler that way, and the Rambler off by itself. Not right. But he couldn’t let the girl go. Baby Dunn, though she was not a baby anymore.
CODY
I thought we were to leave the Rambler with them in it. I did. The ripple was on and then done and still no one went near it. No one said not to. We just knew.
DALLAS
Ig was with me—she always was then. Luz root-gone and derelict. Shameful. I nearly knocked on the Rambler and told her so, but then they came out.
THE GIRLS
Somehow they were more than two, the two of them. Levi, who taught us that monogamy was a prison built by gynophobic capitalism, that public affection was a bludgeon unless it was extended to all. And here was the proof, her in his arms in front of all of us, ignoring the ripple.
CODY
Until then he had loved each of us with the same heart, if that makes sense.
JIMMER
Certainly the landscape had some significance. The Rambler by itself as we others rippled to that new place on the high plain, tufts of dead sagebrush all around us. Levi out in the open with this Baby Dunn wrapped around him. The sage would have cured us all, in other circumstances.
DALLAS
He’d never anointed any woman this way, though he’d had all of us.
CODY
And with all of us there, like we knew, like he wanted us to see.
DALLAS
Of course he wanted us to see. He knows exactly what he’s doing at all times.
THE GIRLS
And there was nothing to do but watch.
CODY
I keep seeing it in my mind, even now. I don’t know why, except that it was one of those few moments when you are in it and above it at the same time. One of those rare moments when you know you’re swinging on a hinge in your life.
DALLAS
Things were changing, or were just about to, and everyone could feel that.
JIMMER
And down comes this cowboy harbinger.
CODY
Some wild man out of the dune. How he survived I don’t know. Stumbling down the slope and grinning. Fucking grinning.
THE GIRLS
We saw him and we saw her see him and we saw him see him.
JIMMER
A triangle of very high-pitched energy, and all of us caught inside it.
CODY
That step she took was it, looking back.
DALLAS
Levi put Luz down and she took one step away from him, a big step, bigger than seemed possible.
THE GIRLS
We saw it, yes. A divot in the sand where she had been, and another where she stood now.
JIMMER
And the sand b
etween these absolutely pristine. That was crucial, from my perspective.
DALLAS
Levi’s arms still raised in the shape of her.
JIMMER
It was finished in that step, though its finishing took some time.
THE GIRLS
It hurt to witness, honestly.
CODY
And we all stayed there, even after she took Ig and the three of them walked to the Blue Bird. We stood waiting to see where to go, I guess.
JIMMER
Until the sand whispered around our ankles.
DALLAS
After we moved the Rambler we were drawn back to the Blue Bird, waiting.
CODY
We stayed there until bonfire, like the day Luz came, except Dallas was with us, pacing.
THE GIRLS
Locked out of her own place, which wasn’t right.
JIMMER
Pacing foretells ill fortune. Doubly when the pacer is a mother.
THE GIRLS
When Luz came out it was dark and she was a different woman. The baby held her hand.
CODY
She did seem changed, I guess you’d say.
JIMMER
Like she’d found a sachet of bird beaks in the eaves and had emerged to fling them out.
THE GIRLS
We needed so much from her.
DALLAS
But all she said was, He’s asleep.
Luz told the rubberneckers outside the Blue Bird that Ray was asleep and took Ig on one of their old walks around the transmuted colony, surveying the new high plain.
Luz chawed some brute root as she walked, feeling the fungal juices leech into her gums before she spat, taking in the new territory. Here and there among the structures were haystack clumps of dead roots, half-entombed in sand. “What is?” asked Ig, and Luz said she did not know. The harvest moon was fat and orange overhead. Ig said, “What is?” and thereafter never tired of whispering its name.
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