I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness

by Claire Vaye Watkins

  * * *

  —

  G-ma couldn’t walk far, so Lise offered to walk her dog, the one-eyed Chihuahua who answered to the name Bobby Flay. The terriers were assholes, Lise said, “Not my jurisdiction. Look at the anal glands on this one.”

  I fled outside with her, grateful for the excuse.

  Lise, Bobby Flay and I walked the tarry road past yards gone to dirt, crumbled breeze-block, men rolling under and out from under cars. They eyeballed us. Maybe that was my imagination. I waved to an abuela in a lawn chair. She did not wave back.

  “Who are you kidding?” Lise said, tugging Bobby Flay along. “You think these people are saying to themselves, ‘Why, there’s my neighbor in the two-hundred-dollar Uggs. She sure is one of us.’ ”

  As if in rebuke, two kids, a brother and sister it seemed, biked up to pet Bobby Flay and talk to him in Spanish. The girl had huge chestnut eyes, Ruth eyes.

  After they took off, Lise said, “I want to have a kid. I’m not gonna! But I want to . . .”

  I said she could have mine.

  She stopped. “You’re being an idiot.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” I said. I told her about the Tecopa house, told her everything. “I’m sorry I didn’t say anything sooner,” I said. “I don’t know why I didn’t.”

  We’d circled the neighborhood back to Fairway Drive.

  “So the Tecopa house might be bulldozed. That’s what you’re saying?”

  “Probably it already is.”

  “And you knew about this months ago. And you’re just romping around Cali with some brocialist? Why didn’t Mikey get in touch with me? I’m friends with him on Facebook.”

  I shrugged. “Because I’m the oldest, I guess.”

  She yanked Bobby Flay up the driveway and began to untie the ribbon looped through the hole meant for a doorknob. The nasty terriers went berserk. G-ma began shrieking at them to shut up shut up, Aunt Mo too, even Darren. I could not go back in that house and I did not want Lise to go in there, either. Before she could, I gave her the article I’d been given at the museum, the obituary.

  “What is this?”

  “Read it.”

  She left the door closed, did not go in. She handed me the leash and we walked to the curb. I sat, picked up Bobby Flay like a baby deer and nuzzled him, reading over Lise’s shoulder. The terriers shut the fuck up at last.

  DEATH VALLEY—The great deserts of the West have a past that is filled with the meandering lore of heroes. Men who came from somewhere else to carve a legacy out of this vast beautiful and terrifying land.

  Families like the Chalfants, the Fairbanks, the Browns and the Lowes. The Lee family left a long line whose members still populate the somewhat tamed but ever-changing desert. They saw riches and opportunity while wandering through this immense country—and all of them found themselves awestruck by the sheer presence of God.

  These legends, somehow or another, never got their feet unstuck, and began marrying and producing little ones, who called Inyo County home, and, several generations later, folks would whisper, “She’s from the Lee family, you know.”

  And all these heroes, who gave their names to our mountains and valleys, met the equalizer in the end. Death came to call and no one could refuse.

  Another hero of Inyo County has passed away recently. He did not come from one of the “old” families, but he left behind a small tribe of his own. Paul Watkins, miner, musician, writer, geologist, heavy equipment operator, artist with a crystal or a piece of turquoise, con man, orator, ladies’ man, died on Aug. 3, 1990, at the age of 40, following a six-year battle with cancer and leukemia.

  I waited while she read on through our mother’s telling of our father’s story. His first visit to the desert, bumped along with his two brothers and three sisters in the back of the family station wagon. Helter Skelter. Our father’s turn as star witness for the prosecution. The van fire. Music. Jewelry. Mining.

  Although Paul was “just a little guy” he was much admired for his strength and agility. I overheard this conversation in the bar one night:

  Supervisor: “Yea, get little Paul. He’s a con man but he sure can mine.”

  Foreman: “How you gonna con a rock?”

  His first marriage, to a Las Vegas girl. His book and its aftermath. At the ripe age of 25, lacking anything better to do, he took up womanizing, and, due to his good looks and way with words, he was quite successful. The dissolution of the first marriage.

  It was during this time that I met Paul. He was tending at the Crowbar in Shoshone when I came in. I was absolutely floored. Love at first sight.

  I returned to my job in Las Vegas and could not stop thinking about this man, whose name I did not even know. Finally, I drove to Shoshone and feeling more than a little foolish, found Paul and introduced myself to him. We were married two years later. In 1984 we had a daughter, Claire Vaye Watkins. Paul began working for the county road department, the Caltrans. Paul hated both jobs with a passion and we both began to drink more and more. I found myself pregnant again.

  The cancer. The trips to LA for diagnosis and treatment, courtesy of volunteers piloting “Angel Flights.” The outpouring of financial and moral support from the community back home. I often wondered where I’d have been if I was in a city and a stranger to my neighbors, as I so often had been in Las Vegas.

  The remission.

  The Visitor’s Center. The paper. The Chamber of Commerce.

  The cancer’s return. Bone-marrow transplant and chemotherapy. Graft-versus-host disease.

  After ten months of this grueling ordeal, it became obvious Paul’s life was coming to an end. After a week-long struggle with the huge medical institution, I was able to fulfill a promise I had made to Paul—that he not be left to die among strangers in the hospital.

  The discharge to Malibu, to die surrounded by friends and loved ones.

  Paul gave away his special stones and gifts to those he had wanted to. He talked at length with his two daughters, bidding them farewell . . .

  He died peacefully while holding my hand at 3 p.m. August 3, 1990, at the young age of 40.

  Goodbye, sweet Prince. May you find the God you’ve sought for so many years.

  “Where’d you get this?” Lise asked through tears.

  I told her.

  “So you went out there—yesterday? And didn’t bother to check on the house?”

  “Essentially.”

  “Didn’t even drive by?” Without waiting for an answer, she scooped Bobby Flay from my lap, hustled up the driveway and chucked him into the house, shouting “I’M BORROWING YOUR TRUCK G-MA!”

  To me she said, “Get in. My car won’t make it over the pass.”

  * * *

  —

  It was Christmas Eve, the only night this city is still. It had always been my favorite Las Vegas moment, the orangey glow of the streetlights on the wide asphalt avenues, sometimes snow falling. It wasn’t snowing now.

  Lise did not seem soothed by the silent city. She was quiet but trembling, wouldn’t look at me. Hypnotized, I watched a bolo tie (Grandpa Joe’s?) sway from the rearview mirror until the city disappeared behind the range and I could feel her breathe again. We passed the Christmas Joshua tree. Willie Nelson came on the radio. “On the Road Again,” the song we used to sing in this truck with Darren and G-ma on the way to Zion. It seemed to me our sleeping bags should still be in the bed. I turned to check but the bed was empty.

  Lise glanced at me.

  I said, “What’s the last thing you want to hear when you’re going down on Willie Nelson?”

  She was unamused.

  “It’s Christmas,” I said.

  “You stole that joke from David Sedaris,” she said. Then, “G-ma’s right. You’re hurting Theo.”

  “You talked to him?”

 
“He’s my brother.”

  “I’m glad you’re talking to him. I’m glad he has someone. Glad you have each other.”

  Lise said, “I want him to be in our family still.”

  “I’m not trying to be rid of him.”

  “But you’re going to divorce him?”

  I said I didn’t know.

  She whipped the swaying bolo off the rearview and flung it at my feet. “Well,” she said, “you should probably fucking figure it out.”

  * * *

  —

  Stampmill Road, the road to the Tecopa house, the so-called Watkins ranch, is less a road than a gravel wash choked with tamarisk. On our approach we met a new blockage, some strange form. A gigantic iron arch, upon inspection. Some Mad Max Burner deal welded of mining equipment, rusted tools and car parts. It probably spewed fire. A 1980-something Mercedes was parked beneath the arch, blocking the road. The car was filled to the windows with dirt. “Artists or tweakers?” Lise asked.

  She parked the truck and we heard dogs barking. Plywood, chain link and barbed wire ringed what had once been our nearest neighbor, someone too old then to possibly be alive now. Whoever lived there now, their dogs did not sound happy and they did not sound small.

  I said, “Maybe we should go back. This is somebody’s house.”

  “It’s ours,” Lise said, approaching the compound, which truly looked like a kiddie pornographer’s doomstead, or worse. Lise located an illuminated doorbell inset in a mannequin’s belly button and rang it. We heard voices on the other side of the chain link. The dogs swarmed behind the gate, a pack of huge loping hounds with moppish lap dogs underpaw, mutts all. They barked like mad but their tails were wagging, I saw now. Behind the dogs, eventually, emerged a woman. Thank God, a woman! A pretty one, even—a ruddy white Pre-Raphaelite with brunette ringlets whispering away from her face, maybe twenty. We told her who we were: her former neighbors, in short. That we’d once lived down the road they’d blocked. She unlocked the gate, let us in, then cinched the chain closed behind us with a heavy-duty padlock.

  I said, “You sure are locking up tight.”

  “It’s for the dogs,” she said.

  “Coyotes?” asked Lise. “They got a few of our dogs when we were kids.”

  “Coyotes,” she confirmed, “and people too.” She patted the eager collie mix aswirl at her feet. “Long story.”

  She led us along a narrow path. The labyrinth seemed mostly trash and bamboo in the darkness, though in the morning I would see that what I first registered as a run-of-the-mill Mojave Desert junkyard was an elaborate cloister of sculptures and paths made from casino debris and discarded Vegas kitsch. She led us to a plush red carpet laid over what felt like gravel and then through a gauzy sort of tunnel of prickly plants, then a boneyard of dead neon. Lise took my hand from habit.

  At some point we were indoors, though it was not easy to tell when that happened. The house, or cabin—it had no trailer creak—was maximalistic to the point of mania, at once decadent and trashy, every surface bedazzled, too much to take in, phantasmagoric, a never-ending dinner party. I gave in to the blur of colors and textures and structures, focusing finally on the table beneath a humongous chandelier, where our hostess invited us to sit.

  “It’s Tiffany,” said a voice belonging to another woman—person—a queenly femme person I had not noticed, poised regally at the far end of the table in a completely sincere caftan.

  Lise complimented the chandelier, said it looked familiar.

  “Used to be in the lobby at Caesars.”

  We learned more about where we were, an art farm called Villa Anita, an ever-changing and extemporaneous livable sculpture built by a collective of mostly women artists, two of whom sat with us: Deena, the Pre-Raphaelite who’d let us in the gate, and the magnificent Carlotta, older than Deena by at least three decades, and divine. The two were lovers, I sensed. Also, that Carlotta was in charge. She summoned an androgynous mothlike person, J, from the studio in the back of the cabin where they’d been making jewelry.

  J was maybe also Carlotta’s lover, I thought, listening to their happily codependent patter. “Baby,” Carlotta faux-beseeched J, “drinks, please—wine and beer!” J complied gamely. Meanwhile, Deena took a fluffy lapdog named Tito into her arms and went to fetch someone called Erin from “somewhere on the back forty.” Soon she returned with Erin, still wearing their welding mask. The group fed us, brought us drinks, told us stories. Carlotta was a fashion designer and photographer. They shot billboards, owned a nightclub—“I pioneered putting girls in cages!” Carlotta once cut Mick Jagger’s hair. She and J flipped Debbie Reynolds’s house for $80,000. Erin had lived in a tree in West Virginia for a year. Carlotta was once invited to a lunch with Michael Jackson, who was considering hiring Carlotta to design him some clothes, but there was a very young boy at the restaurant with Michael, so Carlotta and assistant turned around and left.

  They took us through the years they spent transforming a foreclosed railroad tie house into Villa Anita. They made it up as they went along, a maze of bottle walls, bottle cottages, gardens and groves, revamped trailers, outdoor showers, horse trough plunge pools. They let the objects lead the way. If they came into a fishing boat they tipped it skyward into a cathedral. Whenever they went to Vegas they filled a Hertz truck with Las Vegas detritus. Used to be, in the seventies, that they’d have to haggle with the thrift stores, but now managers begged them to trundle away what they couldn’t sell.

  “We’ve been rolling in junk since the recession!” Carlotta crowed.

  Erin had been Carlotta’s assistant until bugging out to Tecopa. Now she painted and made Dalí–meets–Noah Purifoy sculptures “in the desert yonder, at sites never to be disclosed and unlikely to be come upon.” J came out to Villa on a recommendation from an art professor, made jewelry and grew food. Deena came because of Instagram and ran the social media accounts for each in the happy pack of dogs rescued from the sides of various Mojave highways: Tito, Yenta Placenta, Moose McGillicuddy, Dhillon aka Dill Pickle, Betty Magoo of the Long Island Magoos, Guido, and Dwight White or, more formally, Mr. Poodle, Mr. Puffs, or Clarence T. Puffs Esquire and several other honorifics I now forget. The outer spheres included various nomads and healers and volunteers from the internet, we were told, but those sitting around the table—Carlotta, J, Erin and Deena—were the core Villa Anita family.

  That’s what they called themselves. Lise and I glanced at each other every time they said it. Before we could get a sense of whether this was a family with a capital F, Carlotta offered to put us up for the night and I accepted.

  “Some weird people come out to your old homestead,” Deena offered, leading us to our quarters in the bottle cottage. “We’ve been protecting it for you.”

  After she left, Lise said, “What are we doing here?”

  “What’s your problem?” I said. “These freaks are offering us their bottle cottage. Be gracious.”

  Lise took in the bottle walls, the brown and green glass like gels tinting the moonlight, the dirt floor, the absurdly suggestive velvet nightclub furniture, Erin’s trippy paintings and sculptures screwed to every surface including the ceiling. “Is this a good idea?”

  I shrugged. “They’re on Airbnb. How bad could they . . . be? Anyway, it’s not like we can go down to the house in the dark. Let’s stay the night, have breakfast. We’ll go down to the house in the morning.”

  After a moment my sister consented. “We’ll make a ceremony of it,” she said.

  “Perfect,” I said, though I could think of nothing worse.

  1969

  Hi.

  It’s me again. How’s everything on your part? Everything is groovy on my part. I have just had a dream about Milan Pompa. He is cool, but does not like me. It was a bum dream and I woke up crying. But now I am happy. Weird.

  If you can’t ask Nick for a picture send me his
address and I will do it myself. How do you like this paper? I think it is boss. It is the exact same pink as the flamingos at The Flamingo. At the present it is 12:00 at night. I just woke up from that bad dream about Milan P. I wish I could tell you about all the neat people at school. Here is one: Mr. Harris. He is a teacher. He is so boss you can tell him anything.

  Well, see you later. Remember to send Nick’s address. I’ll tell you more about more people later.

  Love + Peace,

  Martha

  Dear Denise,

  Raining. Please hurry with Nick’s address. I have the letter wrote and everything! Oh, by the way even if Nick doesn’t like me I still want his address so I can change his mind. If you’re jealous and don’t want me to have a boyfriend then don’t send me his address. How are YOU? How is Jerry? How is Aunt Nancy? I like a boy named Richard. He is almost the cutest boy in the whole world. Next to Nick! At school we are having a contest to see who can write the best poem. Mine is about John F. Kennedy. I am going to win. Got to go now. See ya!

  Bye,

  Martha

  Dear Denise,

  Please pay no attention to that last letter. I have decided that I don’t want anyone but Richard. He loves me and I love him. Isn’t that boss? How are you doing with Jerry? Why does he go to a different school? Do you have Phases at your school? We do! Here is what phases I go into next year: English 5 (there are 5 Phases), Math 4, S.S. 5, Science 5. How about that? Your cousin is a genius! (Ha, ha, and ha.) Well, I got to go now. I haven’t finished my homework.

  Love + Peace,

  Martha

  P.S. Tell Nick what I said about Richard.

  P.P.S. Good luck with Jerry!

  Dear Denise,