Gold Fame Citrus

by Claire Vaye Watkins

  —

  Now, dusk was coming to the dry rills of raindance. Luz followed Ray along the berm and, though it scared her, into a man-high rusty corrugated drainage culvert, where the berry man was supposed to be. Inside, a stench met them, fecal and hot. Something scraped about back in the darkness, something screeched. As the light at their backs wilted, Luz put one hand to her mouth and groped for Ray with the other. This was, she realized, probably not a good place to be a woman.

  The starlet’s sandals began to slice into Luz’s heels again and she stumbled. “You okay?” Ray whispered. She nodded though she was dizzy and hot and there was a new pressure on the underside of her eyebones, and though Ray surely could not see her nodding in this semiterranean dark.

  Soon, Luz’s pupils dilated wide enough to accept Ray’s silhouette ahead of her. She clung to him with one hand and traced the other along the metal wall of the pipe, flinching at its rust splinters and steadying herself as she lurched over knee-high sediment dunes and dry knolls of sewage. The culvert forked into a smaller pipe where Ray had to stoop. The sounds went human now; voices of people gathered to haggle and score ricocheted down the tube.

  Fresh socks here, all-cotton socks.

  Ovaltine, whole can, hep!

  Luz and Ray continued, the culvert soon clogged with the crowd’s collective fetid lethargy. Wherever the pair walked, bodies blocked their path. Luz would have liked to hear some Spanish, to be reminded of her mother, but even here there was none, influx long ago turned to exodus. Ray lightly lobbed the words blueberries and Seattle into the darkness and what came back was Not me, white boy. Deeper, brother, and then, Um-hm. Careful. He nasty.

  Finally Ray called blueberries and was tossed Here, son. From the darkness materialized a shirtless, ashy-skinned daddy-o, bald head glistening, tiny mouth gnawing on a black plastic stir straw. Beside him stood a Filipino with scarred hands and a backpack.

  The daddy-o held a drained cola can aloft in the darkness. “King County blues. One-fifty.”

  Ray took the can and examined it. He handed it to Luz. A handful of berries padded inside the aluminum. She put the can to her nose and thought she smelled the dulcet tang of them.

  “Give you seventy-five,” said Ray.

  The daddy-o bowed reverently to the can. “All due respect, son, these is some juicy-ass berries. Juicier than juicy pussy.” He winked at Luz. “Can’t give them up for less than a hundred.”

  “Eighty then.”

  “Eighty,” the daddy-o said to his partner. He sucked his teeth.

  The Filipino said, “Used to be a nigger could make a living in this city.”

  “That’s all I got,” said Ray, though it was not.

  “All you got, hmm,” said the daddy-o. He reached out to retrieve the can from Luz. She handed it over, but instead of taking the can from her, the daddy-o torqued his long-nailed index finger through the starlet’s tennis bracelet, still strung like dewdrops around her wrist. He yanked, but the bracelet held. Luz pinched her breath in her throat.

  “I doubt that,” said the daddy-o.

  “Hey,” said Ray, but Luz was saying, “Take it,” her fingers panicking against the mean little clasp.

  The daddy-o flung Luz’s own hand back at her. “The fuck you think I am?” To Ray he said, “Two hundred.”

  Ray gave the daddy-o two bills he’d brought from the hatbox they stored in the starlet’s drained redwood hot tub, took the can of berries and pulled Luz away. Her head was swooning and her sense of direction had left her. She wanted to flee on her own but was not sure she could find her way back through the culverts. It was all she could do to follow Ray, who kept dissolving into the darkness then rematerializing to tug her along. “Christ,” he whispered, meaning Christ, be more careful, and Christ you’re stupid, and Christ, I love you and you’re all I have and therefore you have an obligation to take better care of yourself. Luz gazed ahead, needing a glimpse of the daylight they’d left, but she saw only bodies, bodies. Someone trampled the heel of her sandal and she stumbled. She needed to get away from these fucking people, but they were everywhere. Then, mercifully, Ray led her into a dark, clear space.

  Her eyes slowly registered the solid perimeter of people they’d broken through. Their mouths hung open, dumb, staring at her. No, not staring at her. Luz followed their gaze and saw beside her an old woman sitting on a collapsible metal lawn chair. She wore a dress that in its day had been festooned mightily but was now threadbare and freckled with cigarette burns. She wore watersocks, and dug into each of her livery shoulders was a huge macaw, one red and one blue.

  Luz stood and watched the birds, fearfully transfixed. The circle of bodies pressed in closer. The red macaw pinched a nut or a stone in its beak, working at it with its horrid, digit-like black tongue. It twitched its head. It blinked its tiny malarial eye.

  Suddenly Luz was breathing everyone else’s foul, expelled air and Ray was angry and gone and there was only so much air down here and everyone was sucking it up and where was he? Had he not heard of girls carried up out of the canal into one of the vacant houses whose dry private docks jutted overhead, homes once worth three and four and five million and now, every one of them, humid with human fluids? Had he not been with her the night she’d seen a woman stumble out of one of the houses, used and bewildered, and start to make her way back down to the canal and the music, only to be dragged back up again?

  Luz stepped back from the birds and collided with a sickle-thin teenager. He wore a white T-shirt with some meanness written on the front in marker, and sagging holes where the sleeves should have been. Through these holes flashed his tattooed cage of a chest. There was a long tear up one leg of his jeans and along it dozens of safety pins arranged like staples in flesh. He held a rope, and at the end of it was a short-haired, straw-colored dog, wheezing. The boy laid his rough hand on the bare skin between Luz’s shoulder blades. He rubbed.

  “Easy, sweetheart,” he said. From his mouth escaped the scent of rot.

  Something leaden and malignant seized Luz’s heartmuscle. She wrenched away. “I can’t breathe,” she said, barely.

  Ray turned. “What?”

  “I can’t breathe.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m dying.”

  He put his hand on the back of her neck.

  “I can’t breathe,” she said. “I fucking can’t breathe.”

  Ray didn’t laugh at this, though it was laughable. Luz knew it was even now, except the knowledge was buried somewhere in her beneath bird tongue and daddy-o and sweetheart asphyxiation.

  “You’re okay,” he said. “Listen.”

  She gripped his shirt in her hands and pulled. “I can’t breathe, Ray.”

  “You’re all right,” he said. “Tell me.”

  One of the birds went wrat, impossibly loud, and Luz flinched. Wrat again and she began to claw at Ray’s midsection. People were looking at them now, some laughing, and she had designs to open her boyfriend up and hide inside him.

  Ray took Luz’s two scrambling hands in one of his like a bouquet and looked her in the eye. “You’re okay,” he said again. “Tell me.”

  “I’m okay,” she said, though she was also dying.

  “Tell me again.”

  She looked at him; she breathed. “I’m okay.”

  “We’re walking,” said Ray, taking her by the shoulders.

  They walked and breathed and walked and breathed and soon a dim disk of light floated ahead of them. Ray led her to it, miraculously, Luz saying, I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m okay.

  Their blanket—a duvet meant for guests of the starlet—was still under the footbridge when they got back, another miracle. Ray sat Luz down. He passed her his ration jug. She refused it and he passed her hers.

  He watched her as she drank.

  “Thank you,” she said
after some time.

  “Do you want to go home?” he asked. He wanted to see the bonfire, she knew. He said, “It’s fine if you do.”

  What she wanted was a few Ativan and a bottle of red wine, but those days were over. It was cooler in the canal and the air was freshish, or at least it moved. The long shadows of the mansions stretched to shade them and the blanket had not been taken and there was Ray, trying. She told herself to allow these to bring her some comfort.

  “No,” she said. “Let’s stay.” She sat on the blanket and breathed. Eventually, Ray asked whether she wanted to go back to the drum circle.

  “Can we just sit here awhile?” she said.

  “Sure.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” Ray said, which was what he always said. He motioned for her to lie back and rest her head in his lap. She did. She fell asleep and dreamt nothing.

  —

  Luz woke needing to pee. It was nearly dark but fires were glowing along the spine of the canal, the bonfire down the row throbbing brightest of all. Ray had taken his shoes off and was lying on his back. Luz sat still, studying him in the smoky light: his willowy hands, his steady chest, the tuft of black hair in the divot of his collarbone, barely visible above the neck of his T-shirt. His flat, slightly splayed feet. Everything about him suggested permanence. She rose and kissed him on the head. “I have to pee.”

  Ray started to stand.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I’m okay.”

  Luz made her way up the wall of the canal. The trench beyond was dark and balmy with stink, but she was feeling much better. She straddled the trench, lifted her dress, urinated, shook her ass some then stood up. Yes, she was feeling better. The sun had gone down and the canals were cooling off, the nap had dissolved the throb in her head, as a good nap will. She was okay. She would have some more water, eat something. There were blueberries in Ray’s backpack and mash in the growler. She was all right. They would go back down to the drum circle. They would dance. They would bonfire. She would not ruin everything after all.

  Descending the smooth dusty pitch of the canal, she looked down at the bonfire and then beyond it, where someone had set off a bottle rocket. She saw the little puff of smoke and heard the snap. Just then—at exactly the instant the snap reached her, so that the moment was ever-seared into her memory as a tiny explosion—something slammed into her knees. She looked down to see a shivering, towheaded child wrapped around her legs.

  Luz could not remember the last time she’d seen a little person. The child was maybe two years old. A girl, Luz somehow knew, though she wore only a shoddy cloth diaper, its seat dark with soil. She looked up at Luz with eyes like gray-blue nickels, sunk into skeletal sockets. Her skin was translucent, larval, and Luz had the sense that if she checked the girl’s belly she would be able to discern the shadows of organs inside.

  “Hi there,” Luz said.

  The child stared unblinking with her coin eyes.

  “Are you lost?” asked Luz. “Where’s your mommy?” The girl’s forehead bulged subtly above the brow and she pressed it now into Luz’s crotch. Luz, embarrassed, tried to pry the girl from her legs. But the child clutched tighter and let loose a high, sorrowful moan. Luz went weak with pity.

  “Shh,” she said. “You’re okay.” Luz patted her back then, unthinkingly, put her fingers in the child’s whiteblond hair, tufted like meringue at the nape.

  Luz managed to separate from the girl long enough to kneel. The girl squirmed to reestablish herself in Luz’s lap, hinged her bony arms around Luz’s neck, and sobbed. Luz held her, her dress pulled taut where her knees pressed to silt. She expected someone to come for the girl, but no one did. No one was paying any attention to them.

  Soon, the girl stopped crying. She regarded Luz a moment, curious, then reached one hand up and laid it plainly on Luz’s face, partially covering her right eye. The small hand was moist with snot or saliva, slick as a wet root.

  “Where’s your mommy and daddy?” Luz said again.

  The girl ignored the question if she understood it. She rotated her hand so it lay diagonally across Luz’s brow. The child pinched her mouth in concentration. She pressed, then positioned her other hand at Luz’s jaw and pressed again, as though getting some information from the sensation. Luz felt uncannily at ease. The raindance had slipped away and left the two of them alone in the smoky twilight, only the fires pulsing lure-like in the distance. Luz smiled, and the child smiled too, and when she did Luz felt an unbearable welling of affection, both for the girl and from her.

  Then, with her hands still at Luz’s face, the girl said, “Piz kin tim eekret?”

  “Tim eekret?” Luz tried.

  The child squenched her face in frustration. “Piz kin tell you secret?” she repeated.

  “Oh,” said Luz. “Okay.”

  The girl stretched to Luz’s ear. Luz strained to make out what she was saying until she realized that the child was not saying anything, only replicating the feathery sounds of whispers. Spuh, spuh, spuh, spuhst.

  When she finished, the girl leaned back and said gravely, “Don’t tell, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t tell anyone.”

  “I won’t.”

  Just then a figure strode through the dusk and toward them. It was Ray, looking purely mystified at Luz where she knelt on the ground, whispering with a child. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “She’s lost,” said Luz.

  “Did you ask around?”

  “It just happened.”

  Another figure drew near them. Caved and tattooed torso, the chain of safety pins along his torn jeans. As he came closer Luz recognized the teenager who had touched her in the sewer. Several heavy chains drooped between his back pocket and a belt loop, swaying as he approached. The jagged black marker on his shirt read I knew I was a nut when the squirrels started staring. He did not seem to recognize Luz. His eyes were on the girl.

  “Get over here,” the Nut said to the child. He gestured down the berm, and Luz became aware of a scattering of rangy, dull-eyed young men camped out on the canal bottom, shirtless and unwashed. They cradled mash growlers and other incovert alcohols; one gripped a filthy glass water bong. The straw-colored dog scavenged among them, the rope still tied around its neck but trailing now behind him. (Baby Dunn had always wanted a dog, but her father had not allowed it.) Among the men were two girls, teenagers. The first straddled a man whose age was undoubtedly a multiple of her own. His one hand pinched a filterless cigarette while the other grazed beneath the girl’s tank top. His thick arm pulled her top up and the knuckles of the girl’s spine rose as she bent to take the man’s tongue into her mouth. The second girl was heavy, with rounded shoulders, large breasts drooping into a bikini top and a doughy midsection spilling from tight jean shorts. She watched Luz through hair cespitose and greenish from ink dye, not with anger or concern, not with anything except perhaps a dullness that left her mouth slightly open. Under this dead gaze Luz realized she was still holding the child.

  Luz pointed to the group. “Is that your mommy?”

  The child shook her head. No.

  The Nut said, “Her mommy’s not here.” The tattoo on his bicep was a smeary green cross, blurred lines and imperfect proportions. The cross came closer now as the Nut bent to take the child by the arm. The baby—as Luz had come to think of her, though she was not a baby—scrambled into Luz’s lap and flung her arms around Luz’s neck. Luz looked up at the Nut. She did not want him to take the baby, but he would, of course.

  Ray laid his hand on Luz’s shoulder, protecting her from the Nut or from herself. Luz rose, forcing the child to slide from her lap. “Time to go,” Luz told her.

  “No, no, no!” the girl cried.

  The Nut took the child’s arm roughly and the girl screamed, “Okay!” She wrenched her tiny arm from him
. “But please can I tell her a secret?”

  The Nut sighed, then nodded, and Luz bent down again, letting the child up to her ear. Ray looked on. Again the girl made whispering sounds but said no actual words. When she was finished she looked at Luz and said, “Tell everyone, okay?”

  Luz said, “Okay, I’ll tell everyone.”

  “Then come back to me.”

  Luz glanced up at Ray. “I can’t come back to you,” she said to the girl. “I have to go.”

  “Okay, but please can I tell you a secret?” The Nut exhaled loudly but Luz leaned down to the girl again. The child made no breathy sounds this time, but spoke clearly: “Please may I have a glass of water?”

  Luz stood and in the tone adults use to speak through children she said, “I’m sure your friends can get you a glass of water.”

  The Nut once again took the girl by the arm. Before he left he told Luz plainly, “We don’t have any water.”

  Luz watched him pull the baby back to the group, where he sat her down between the doughy teenage girl and the man with the bong. He said something sharp to the child, but Luz could not tell what.

  Ray took Luz’s hand. “Let’s go,” he said, though his face looked as sick as hers must have. They walked away from the group, back toward their blanket. Luz looked back but already the child was out of sight, blocked by a stand of partakers. They walked on.

  It was Ray who spoke first. “That didn’t seem right.”

  Luz stopped. “Let’s go back,” she said.

  “And do what?”

  “Watch her. Make sure she’s okay.”

  “Why?”

  “What if those weren’t her people?”

  “What do you mean?”

  She took a short breath, knowing how the next part would sound. “I have a feeling.”

  Ray frowned and swept a strand of hair from her eyes. “Babygirl—”

  “I’m not drunk anymore,” she said, though she was not sure if that was true.

  “I didn’t say you were.”

  “Let’s go back, just to see if everything looks okay.” Ray ran his hand up and down her bare arm, as if she were cold. She wasn’t cold but she was trembling. “Please,” she said.