Gold Fame Citrus

by Claire Vaye Watkins

  After Levi’s performance at Marla Benoit’s opera house, Dallas and Jimmer took Ig. Dallas’s words, “We’ll take her.” A workaday phrase embedded in consolation and friendship, extended beneath the dead salt cedars, where Dallas found Luz trying not to cry. “This will pass, Luz. Levi’s riled now. He’s hurting. He gets this way. But it’s all coming from a place of love. Believe me. You three will work through this. This will pass. He just needs sleep. You too. We’ll watch Ig for the night. So you can get some rest. We’ll take her.”

  A phrase drained of meaning until filled again. Still just a thing people say when Luz and Ray fell asleep that night, curled into each other like the two lake fossils they’d found on a walk in another life up a mountain called Lookout. To consider otherwise would have been to admit their complete and profound aloneness.

  The lovers woke with acridity in their lungs, the air replaced with hot black smoke. Ray reached for Luz, assuming her asleep from her stillness, roused her, and together they made their way to the front door. The rubber aisle was melted, scalding their forearms as they crawled. Ray heard but did not feel the sizzle of his palms when he grasped the lever to open the door. It would not give. Struggling for breath, Ray managed to kick the door open. He and Luz tumbled into the cool arms of the desert dawn, coughing.

  The whole colony was there, it seemed, and together they watched the Blue Bird go phoenix, aglow in sunset colors, red-orange and throbbing. Inside, Sacajawea, John Muir, Lewis and Clark, William Mulholland, John Wesley Powell. The starlet’s scarf and Ray’s father’s Leatherman. Ig’s bed and tub and play place. The primer.

  Not until well after they escaped the bus would it occur to Ray that Luz had not been asleep, inside. Not until the adrenaline left him limp would he think to wonder why she had not reached for him. Not until they poured water down their scorched throats would he wonder why she had not reached at all, nor panicked, nor screamed. Not until after the ash flakes snowed down on them, not until after the explosion that made glass of the sand beneath, the fire flickering on the walls of the opera house, its windows like knowing open eyes. Not until after they had watched the burning bus charred to a carcass would he recall seeing her open eyes, small flames in them. Only then would Ray recall the unmoving body of his love, resigned to die.

  DALLAS

  Transfixing, the fire. Extraordinary. Even the little one felt it.

  THE GIRLS

  We watched.

  JIMMER

  We were more together there than we had been in some time.

  DALLAS

  Which is what made us see so clearly.

  CODY

  When you think of it, the trouble started with them, with Luz and then her man.

  THE GIRLS

  They were poison.

  JIMMER

  It’s true that certain combinations of individuals can be literally toxic, on a chemical level.

  THE GIRLS

  We tried to love them, but they were poison.

  DALLAS

  Except the little one.

  THE GIRLS

  We made choices—whatever else they were, they were choices.

  JIMMER

  In a context of such unity, one feels deviation as an agony.

  DALLAS

  We could sense this man turning on us.

  CODY

  Ray wanted to hurt Levi, who was us.

  JIMMER

  You could sense malice rising in him.

  DALLAS

  He screamed, but he had no voice.

  CODY

  We found out later his vocal cords were singed.

  JIMMER

  A soundless scream portends death, almost always.

  THE GIRLS

  He went for Levi’s throat.

  JIMMER

  He was after us, too, for we all felt and breathed and lived as one.

  THE GIRLS

  A beautiful feeling, harmony. It had to be protected.

  DALLAS

  Nico stepped in.

  CODY

  Straight dropped him.

  THE GIRLS

  The rest of us came like gnats to a wet eye.

  Ray welcomed the beating. The way he saw it he had all kinds of evil shit inside him and perhaps the blows might knead it out. For example: he hated Ig. He hated the time she’d had with Luz, the things she’d allowed to happen, the days she spent freely tottering about while he was entombed in a talc mine. He hated how open she was with her wants, her bare manipulations, how even her dishonesty was honest. He hated her cruelty, hated how grand it made him feel when she cast Luz aside in favor of him. He hated her for being so fond of him and for, yes, ruining his life. He hated her because it was easier than hating the bereft dust and the dropless clouds, the sun, the night, the Earth and its thin envelope of ruined air. He took the blows in silence. Their hands were his own, trembling as he struggled to give the men their inoculations. The laughing man on the TV, the dowser, Luz in everyone else’s arms. Sal and Sal’s figurines and Sal’s slut mother. His own mother and her cleaning supplies. The wet bits of cork floating in her vintage California chardonnay. Luz. Luz. Luz. Every single thing she did. His quiet hate was light and there was nothing in his life that could not absorb it and reflect it back to him at the same time, nothing that would not beget more, like the joke or legend of which he recalled only the punch line: turtles all the way down. Except Ig. To hate Ig was to stop the spiral of his rage. Her innocence was the boundary, the vessel, for to hate her was to hate himself, to allow all the blackness inside him to pool around him, to skip his lifetime’s worth of middlemen, to concentrate on her strange skin, her amphibian eyes, her haunting moans, repulse himself with them and punish himself this way.

  The beating helped, too. He watched globules of his own blood bead black on the sand.

  Luz was unable to stop it. Eventually, the crowd dispersed of its own accord, as if each participant’s savagery had all at once run its course. They drifted away.

  Luz sat beside Ray, but did not touch his wounds. What could she have done for him that he could not do for himself? She sat; he lay. Wisconsin a mirage, burned off. They both grieved it in silence.

  At some point, Levi summoned them.

  “I’m sorry about all that,” Levi said to Ray, the pulp of him. Jimmer was with him in his dome, and Nico, too. Jimmer offered some salve. Ray, his throat singed, gestured his decline.

  “Where’s Ig?” Luz asked.

  “Yes, Ig,” said Levi. “I’m glad you asked.”

  “Where is she?” Luz asked.

  “Dal has her,” Jimmer said softly.

  “What have you noticed about Ig?” Levi asked. “What do you see when you see her?”

  Luz said nothing.

  “I know you know she’s different, Luz. Atypical, an anomaly. Do you know why?”

  “Let me see her, please.”

  “I know why.” He went on. “I believe Ig is touched. Her moaning is of the same frequency as the dune’s song.”

  Jimmer nodded his assent. “She hears this place powerfully. More so than any of us.”

  Luz said, “Levi, we’ve been through this.”

  “We’re going through it again,” Levi said. “But we’re taking a different trail this time. The direct route.”

  “What are you talking about?” though she knew. How long had she known? It was hard to say.

  “We’ll be taking Ig now.”

  “What?”

  Jimmer said, “She needs to be here.”

  Luz told them this was fucking madness. She said certainly they were insane. “Give her to you? You’re delusional.” No one seemed to hear her.

  “We can take care of her. Keep her well.” Jimmer.

  “Who is ‘we’?”

  “All of us. Eve
ryone.”

  “Not me,” said Luz. “Not Ray.”

  Ray was looking to his lap.

  Levi said, “Ray is a contagion.”

  A spasm went through the men, but Jimmer neutralized it. “Please, gentlemen.”

  “I apologize,” Levi said to Ray. “This has nothing to do with you. With either of you, really.”

  He was right, Luz knew. She was obsolete. She saw it in Ray’s eyes, in Jimmer’s twitching hand, heard it in Levi’s level voice. Luz went into her corridor again. Ray was at one end and Ig was at the other. The algebra of the situation was balancing itself in her mind. Dallas was a better mother than she’d ever be—that was true, even before Levi said, “If you leave Ig, I will let you go. More than that. I’ll give you a vehicle, food, water. I’ll show you the way out. You’ll go on with your life like you were meant to. Like you planned. The two of you.”

  There was not much else to say. Or there was plenty to say, but Ray’s vocal cords had been burned to useless, and anything Luz could say felt futile, another handful of hot sand in the mouth. These decisions had been made before this discussion—before the prairie dog crossed their threshold. So though there was much to say, they said none of it.

  “You can see her again, before you go,” Jimmer offered.

  Luz said, quietly, “I wouldn’t survive that.”

  —

  The next day there were rumors of rain. Atypically dark clouds a promise in the west, a crackling anticipation lost on Luz. She had gone into herself, Ray could see, though she made some efforts to feign okayness, even saluted the black glass smear where the Blue Bird had been and said, “Good-bye, house.”

  Ray was tired. Wisconsin throbbed dimly in the east, and he resolved to put one foot in front of the other, even though they were driving. Levi had honored his word, outfitted one of his better lorries with walls of water kegs and tarps and food. He’d made a map, all alluvial fans and gullies, the way out in the washes. After Nico delivered all this, Luz looked at the well-equipped lorry as though it injured her. “He really wants us gone,” she said.

  Ray found a pen. On the back of his hand he wrote, Don’t you?

  “Don’t I what?”

  Want us gone?

  “I do. That’s the problem.”

  On his forearm: We’re not her people.

  “No.”

  Never were.

  “No.”

  On his palm he wrote,

  You’re okay.

  “Yes.”

  You’re okay.

  We’re

  “I know.”

  You’re okay.

  We’re

  She’ll be

  “I know.”

  But these were just words she was saying.

  They were ready to go. Some people woke from their siestas and emerged to watch them leave. No one spoke. Luz and Ray dawdled a little, though they were not sure why until Dallas appeared, Ig in her arms.

  The girl’s big head swiveled around a little, taking everything in. Her freckles, the divots in her head, all the injuries visited upon her in so short a time. Luz quietly took Ray’s hand.

  She wanted Ig to reach for her, to plead for her, to fling herself from Dallas’s arms and wail. She wanted this and more, more, more. Mama, I’ve got so much want in me. But Ig was silent, luminous as a candle, still and indifferent.

  Dallas said, “Say ‘bye-bye,’ Ig.”

  Ig did not.

  Luz clasped Ray’s hand tighter, for fear she would reach up and touch the baby’s soft skin, her colorless hair—it would be her undoing.

  Luz did not reach for Ig, but Ig did reach for Luz. One spindly arm outstretched between them, her grub fingers curling and uncurling. Luz watched it. Ray watched her watch it. Take it, he said in his mind, this prayer all his own. Luz stood, unmoving, as if hypnotized by the pale hand, its frank and tender need, and then she leaned back, away, forever out of reach.

  “Her name is Estrella,” she told Dallas. “After my mother.”

  Dallas nodded, then turned. As they went, Ig moaned and clucked a little, to Dallas. Luz and Ray watched them until Ig’s pale halo dissolved into the blinding glory of the dune.

  Those sounds stayed with them as they fled, though Ray—all fear and blessed anticipation—would hear nothing beneath the fearsome whine of the lorry. But Luz kept on hearing those Ig sounds, her seer’s song. She tried to hear the ways it harmonized with the dune, though what she heard was the engine working, dead scrub crunching, dry sand yielding when they dived into the wash. She tried and tried and soon all she heard was her trying, Ig crying—no, that was her. Her breath shuddered, heart thundered, and so she did not hear the actual thunder at their back, nor the sky opening up. She did not smell the rain coming.

  What she felt, beyond the painful range of Ig, was the astonishing relief of quitting. Taking her rightful position in that long line of runners and flakes. Those were her people salting mines, jumping claims, forging bond certificates, fudging the rail route, sending dudes searching for lost gollers. Following the plow and yellowing the news. Antsy pioneers, con artists and sooners, dowsers and gurus, Pentecosts and Scientologists. Muscle heads, pill-poppers, pep talkers, drama queens and commuters. Fluffers, carpetbaggers, migrant pickers disappeared, entrepreneurs in never-were garages, all those servers. She was all of them, at last. Malibu Barbie and Manzanar. San Simeon and San Quentin. Neverland Ranch and Alcatraz. She was Boyle Heights, Fruitvale, La Habra. Koreatown, Cambodia Town, Filipinotown, Japantown, Little Tokyo, Little Seoul, Little Manila, Little Saigon, Little Taipei, Little Moscow, Little Kabul, Little Arabia, Little Persia, Little Armenia, Little Pakistan, Little India, Little Italy, Little Ethiopia, Venice Beach. Drained lakes, sulfur seas, yucca forests dried to paper, redwoods blighted and departed, sequoias and pinyon pines tinder for a never-satisfied wildfire. These were her people. Speculators and opportunists, carnival barkers and realtors, imagineers, cowards and dreamers and girls. Mojavs. Eyes peeled for the flash of ore, the flash of camera, the wet flesh of fruit. Gold, fame, citrus. Every erotic currency harvested green or yellow or the profound underground black of oil gone red-brown when slid between two fingers. Clear—whatever color you want it to be. The color of diamonds kissed by light. Bathe in it, fling it into the air, carpet the desert in Bermuda and Buffalo and Kentucky blue. Blast it into the night sky, burble it at every porte cochere and waiting room atrium, adorn it with koi, trout, dolphins, killer whales. Freeze it with freezing machines and glide down atop it in the sunshine. Hold it icy against your injuries. Cut it with sugar, with liquor, with pesticide, blast for gold or gas with it, grow creatures with it. Ride it, spray it into the street, swim in it, soak in it, drink it in, piss it away.

  The flood came upon them like an animal, like a vengeful live thing, earth-colored and savagely fast. Ray took it for a sandalanche at first, as the wriggling fingers surrounded the lorry. Its true properties came to them both at the same time. They looked at each other.

  “It’s water, Ray. Is it water?”

  Ray attempted to pronounce “Everything okay,” but his withered cords did not permit it. The flood lifted the lorry. The truck was afloat, no longer their own, and silty dun water around their ankles proved it.

  Luz leaned over the edge of the lorry and baptized her hand. “Beautiful.”

  Ray braked and steered, but these efforts were as useless as his voice. He remembered some rescue training, some advice for preserving one’s aliveness. Against great pain he tried to say Stay.