He shook his head.
“The trucks, Ray.”
“They don’t come up here.”
“They will. Eventually they will.”
Luz watched Ray’s face where it hovered in the glassy black, hollow, ghostly. He clenched his jaw, his impression of a Marine. “I won’t let them,” he said.
“There’s nothing you can do, bub.” She touched him. “We need to get legit.”
Just then, a thin little wailing came to them from Ig’s pen. Ray nearly sprang up, but Luz tethered him down—“Wait her out”—and they sat still as wolves, with Ig calling out in her Ig language. Ray made prayer hands and tugged on his lips with them. It hurt him to leave her this way, Luz could tell. It hurt them both, physically, her voice twine tethered to their bellies, looped around the nodes and coils of their hearts, lungs, bowels. Already, that was so. Finally, the child settled into silence.
Luz whispered, “We’ll have a chance, on the list.”
“Put ourselves on it? Volunteer?”
She nodded.
“Our part for the cause.”
“I’m serious, Ray.”
“What about her?”
Luz said, “We’ll get her a birth certificate.” Their old group had ways of procuring such documents.
“Luz, I can’t—”
“We’ll say we’re married.”
“Luz—”
“That we got married in the church.” It surprised Luz, how happy even the prospect of this lie made her. She had not thought of herself as someone who wanted to be married, let alone married in a church, but apparently she was.
“Luz, I have to tell you something. Will you listen?” Ray took in a slow, bottomless breath and looked Luz in the eyes. He giggled.
It was not a sound she would have guessed was in him. He gasped shallowly, embarrassed, and out burbled more giggles. “I—he he heh—I can’t go. Ha ha! I can’t go on the list.”
“What?”
“I mean, heh, look—ha ha!” His eyes were wide and manic. “There’s just nothing—ha ha!” He clasped his hands over his mouth. “I’m sorry. I can’t stop. I’m afraid. But I’m being serious—hee hee hee!”
Luz said, “I don’t . . .”
Ray pressed his face between his hands. “Okay: in the service—heh. Hee hee! Okay: I was in medical school. Did I tell you that?” He had not. “But I quit. Dropped out. Went into the service. I was a medic, sort of. Guys would come to me, all fucked up. All fucked up. I didn’t know what to do. I gave a few of them pills. Standard. I took them, too. So we could sleep. Hee hee—we couldn’t sleep, Luz. More guys came to me. More and more. I gave them what we needed. We took Roxicet, oxy, fentanyl lollipops. Whatever I had.” He stopped giggling. “They were just so fucked up. Everybody was.”
Luz watched his shapes moving across the glass wall. “Lollipops?”
“We were on leave—in San Diego,” his voice on the upswing, as if San Diego were a friend they had in common, “and one of the guys, his buddy had been busted on patrol with morphine patches plastered all over his ass cheeks. They were going to get me. I mean, I’m the only one with a case of fucking made-in-the-USA morphine patches. Fort Leavenworth.” Then, when she clearly did not know what the words Fort or Leavenworth had to do with any of this, he said, “Prison. Military prison. I, well, you know . . . ran.”
They watched each other in the glass.
“Ass cheeks?” said Luz. She was just saying words.
“We used to do that—the sweat helps. Zaps it into your system.”
Time had gotten woozy under them. It was hard to tell how long they went without speaking. Ray was waiting for something from her, she realized, so she said, “You’re.” It was all she could summon.
“AWOL, I guess you’d say,” then one loud, hard laugh burst from him, “Bah! Goddamn it.”
“Shh,” Luz said, meaning, Don’t wake her.
“I’m sorry. I should have told you, but . . . I’m sorry.”
She was putting things together now. She looked up. “We can’t evac.”
“Not without a clean ID.”
“And if we try—”
“They’ll arrest me. Take her for sure.”
This was true, and unthinkable.
The wildfires pulsed behind them, and beyond those the Oregon militiamen cleaned their fingernails. The gatemen at Lake Tahoe changed shifts, one pausing to pluck a tendril of red thread from the other’s uniform. Everything here was ash. Chalkdust and filament. Everything here could be obliterated with a wave of her hand, and she waved her hands all the time.
Ray wept, briefly. Luz touched his face. “We’re lost,” he said eventually, and Luz whispered, “We’re not.” But Ray said again that they were, and Luz was convinced.
And so, lost, they succumbed to sleep.
—
If Ray thrashed his nightly thrashing, Luz did not know it. She woke raw, bewildered, sore deep in her hips and in the shoulder she’d slept on. Her love was gone, already awake and away, a tiny betrayal, no matter that it happened daily. She rose, discovered Ig gone too, and searched for them in the half-light. She found Ray pacing in the indigoed backyard, holding Ig to him, speaking something into her glowy head. He looked up at Luz. His features were defeated, even his gorgeous mouth eroded by the expectation of dawn.
Ray came around to Luz, a new posture of resolve. “I’m sorry about all that, babygirl. I am.”
“I know.”
“I’ll fix it. I will. We’ll get the birth certificate, a clean ID. I’ll take care of everything.” That was what he’d been telling Ig, that he was going to get his shit together, be on top of every damn thing from here on out. Also how quickly one’s beliefs and values and principles and philosophies—all the biggies—could be reduced to a matter of paperwork. Ray said, “We’ll need to go to see Lonnie.”
Luz inhaled. “I don’t want to go there.”
“I know you don’t.” He kissed her temple. “I don’t either. But we have to.”
It was a question whether Lonnie and Rita and the others would still be at the complex, a question answered when Ray approached the building made of snagging stucco, pink like the inner swirls of a conch, so much like the inner folds of a cunt, he thought, and bashed his open hand against the metal gate, bashed as so many others had bashed when he and Luz lived here. Shapes responded in the morning haze, moving along the periphery of the courtyard. The building was constructed like many apartment buildings in Santa Monica: a two-story square with a courtyard and a pool in the center, one heavy metal gate, the architecture of fortification, of circled wagons, as if the city had known what was coming, which, it hardly needs saying, she had.
“Go the fuck away!” said the shape at the gate, hood up and bandanna pulled over its face. A new guy.
Ray said, “Be cool man, I know Lonnie.”
“Fuck you do.”
“Yes, fuck, I do.”
“Get the fuck out of here, you fuck, before I blow your fucking brains out.”
Ray sighed. “Okay, fella. Just tell him Ray’s here. Ray and Luz. Could you do that?”
The shape hesitated—scrutinizing Ig where she was on her not-mother’s hip, maybe—then receded. Luz hung back with the baby, wishing Lonnie’s face would and would not materialize behind the grating.
It did not. Instead it was Rita, Lonnie’s girl, her carroty hair tufted into berms by body soil, the green-black at the tips the last of her grown-out dye. A relief, even though Rita hated Luz now—probably everyone here did. Rita’s tiny eyes, fringed by pale lashes, squinted behind the grating, then went for a second up, where a thick swath of tar had been slathered atop the complex wall. From the tar jutted sharpened sticks and spearheads of broken glass. That was new. Rita stowed something in her billowy skirt—a weapon, they didn’t have to guess—and opened
the door.
She embraced Ray, who nodded overhead and said, “Bit overkill, don’t you think?”
Rita rolled her eyes. “I know, right?” Then she saw Ig.
She took a small step back. Rita did not come to Luz—Luz did not expect her to—only stared, vaguely horrified, at where the child clung to Luz, grunting drowsily like some lesser primate.
They hadn’t seen Lonnie or Rita in eight months. It might have been eight years. Rita had been stocky, plump as a flounder, big shelf of an ass and gigantic breasts that led her around, made her seem powerful. Luz had always been afraid of her, even when they were supposedly friends. But Rita was thin now, so thin that her tattoos seemed withered. The half-sleeve art nouveau Holy Mother on her right forearm, cherry blossoms and thick gashes of Sanskrit up the inside of her left, Johnny Cash giving the finger from the bicep, a fish skeleton fossilized along her neck, supposedly traced from an ancient urn, all sagged a little, except the asterisks signifying assholes on the spit of bone behind each ear. Even Rita’s signature bullring drooped now from her septum as though her cartilage was fatigued. She’d removed the disks from her ears and the lobes now dangled in melting Os that, Luz noted vindictively, Ig could have put her fist through.
What was Rita before the water went? (Before they took the water, Rita would’ve said, and Luz once, too.) She should have been the drummer in a punk band in a scene so far underground, it would never see the light of day. She should have been barefoot, murdering the double bass pedals on a cover of “Too Drunk to Fuck,” cracking her cymbals, pulverizing her sticks and chucking the splinters into the crowd. She should have been spitting blood on the boys who deposited plastic cups of liquor at her feet. But it had been a dude unloading on the double bass, her boss spitting the blood, Rita depositing the liquor and doing his grocery shopping at the nice Ralphs in the Palisades, Rita driving him to and from LAX, wiping his chow chow’s ass.
“You look like run-over dog shit,” Rita said to Ray. “Are you drinking enough water?”
Another tired joke, but Ray laughed generously. That was his way.
“Come in,” said Rita. “He thought you’d be down.”
Inside the complex, Luz saw that the trees that had once stood in the corners of the courtyard had been ripped up, which did not necessarily surprise her—pretty much all the trees in Santa Monica had been hacked down, even the landward planks of the pier had been scavenged for firewood, the carnival unmoored out on its island of pilings, the Ferris wheel unmoving, unwheeling. Rather, it was the holes where the trees had been that unsettled Luz, dark, expectant as graves. There were never so many hazards in the world as there were today. Love made you see them all.
“What is?” asked Ig.
“Holes,” said Luz.
“Oles,” said Ig.
At the center of the courtyard was the dry swimming pool, its lip glistening black with grind wax. Ray paused over the enviable glob. Chalky sky blue, a color named such before the sky went bloodred with ash, and that before blood went xanthic for want of iron. Luz waited, squeezed Ig to feel the baby resist. Beneath their shoes were the spots where Lonnie’s grandfather, the Persian Jew slumlord of Koreatown, had scattered huge hunks of rock salt along the wet concrete, wanting to mimic the popular pocking of American midcentury driveways. But the salt took forever to dissolve—no moisture—and instead of the subtle stippling of Pasadena, it left behind craters the size of unshelled peanuts. Among those craters, heartening and forgotten imprints where Lonnie’s oma had laid leaves from neighborhood trees atop the wet pour: melaleuca and magnolia and camphor and jacaranda and sweet gum, all the citizens of the so-called urban forest long since charred to carbon.
Luz would have liked to leave Ray beside the dry pool and show Ig the spot Ray had shown her, near the laundry room that had been their room, where the fossil of a spruce sprig was flanked by two gentle divots: Oma’s fingerprints, from where she’d laid the spruce. But to go to the sprig would be to go to the laundry room, would be to go to the chemical and supposedly orchid smell of an ancient half-gone box of dryer sheets, would be to slide down the greased wormhole that scent can be, to their first time, to go to Ray’s bedroll, his canvas duffel, his nine Red Cross candles lined up on a shelf beside his can opener, which she could not stop counting the night—their last in this complex—when she woke Ray and told him, I kissed Lonnie. I let him kiss me. And touch me. We—
—I know.
—I’m sorry.
—Did you want to?
—No. It just happened.
—Why?
—I don’t know. I was fucked up and flattered. I liked that he wanted me.
—Everyone wants you. It’s your job.
—Not anymore. Not like that.
—I want you.
—I know you do.
—Do you want me?
—Yes, Ray. Of course I do. It wasn’t about that. I liked that he liked me.
—Did you like it?
—No. I don’t know. Liking didn’t really come into it.
—Jesus.
And later, because she could not resist:
—How did you know?
—What?
—You said, “I know.”
Ray, disgusted: You came to bed smelling like him.
Luz had to pull it together now. They were here for a reason. Ig squirmed to be put down but Luz told her to shh.
Rita retrieved a wreath of gold keys from the folds of her skirt and unlocked the red door to the apartment she shared with Lonnie, back in the far corner of the complex.
Ray said, “You’re locking doors now?”
Before, all five doors opening onto the courtyard were always wide open or taken off the hinges completely—all except for the storage room, unit B. No locks at the compound, no structure, only frolicsome joy and jam sessions, pranks and all-night debates, raids of merry looting and after these a Christmas-morning vibe. Anyone and everyone was free to come and go, so long as they were committed to the cause and traveled light. No rules was a rule, no labels, and no hierarchy, stressed Lonnie, who owned the place.
Now, all five doors were re-hinged, shut and outfitted with shiny new deadbolts. Rita jangled her keys. “Ch-ch-ch-changes.”
But Lonnie’s apartment was as it had always been, owing to Lonnie’s pathetic Oedipal preservation of the décor meticulously assembled by his mother, the shikse feng shui guru. Here were her star charts, her compasses, her astrolabes of brass and some of lacquered wood. Here were her gnomon, her trigrams, her incense coils gone scentless. There, her dragon head medallions, her color wheels, her innumerable bouquets of plastic bamboo, jabbed into vases half-filled with iridescent glass droplets. Here was her coffee table Zen fountain, now merely a bowl of rocks. Here, here, here, swallowing everything, dense drapes, drapes upon drapes, drapes atop drapes, drapes intertwined with other heavier, darker, mausoleum-making drapes.
Rita directed Luz and Ray to an L-shaped sofa in the darkened living room. She left to find Lonnie. Luz sat on the floor with Ig. She took tortoise Ig from the starlet’s orange crocodile birkin-turned-diaper-bag and presented him to human Ig with some other toys—not the kachinas, she had thrown the kachinas in the ravine. Ig did not bother with the toys. Her coin eyes rolled in their sockets, looking for Rita.
Luz, jealous, leaned down and whispered to the child. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”
“I wouldn’t lead with that,” said Rita, returning.
Lonnie loped in behind her, wearing some kind of orange-gold robe, itself once a drape, Luz was sure. The robe was cinched around his narrow waist with a chain of sterling silver conchos, each faceted with a gob of turquoise. Lonnie had dressed this way on occasion, the solstice or the Fourth of July, a joke or a near-joke. But there was no joke in it now. He stood in a way that begged to be described as regal. His head was shaved t
hough his black eyebrows were as intense as ever. A long, dense goatee hung from his chin, sculpted square and unmoving, facial hair of the pharaohs. Luz wondered fleetingly where he got the razor. A stupid question, for Lonnie was the great procurer; why they’d come.
“Brother,” he said, pulling Ray into an embrace. He waited for Luz to stand, too. When she did he grinned and hugged her chastely.
“You’re kidding,” Lonnie said down to Ig. “I thought for sure she was fucking with me.” He knelt and Luz fermented inwardly at the thought of him touching the baby. She’s not a baby, Ray would have said and indeed had been saying. To which Luz would reply, She’s a relative baby, meaning maybe that she was closer to being a baby than a girl, or meaning maybe that they just got her and so she was newborn to them. Ray would have said, too, Please behave yourself—was in fact at this moment saying it with his breath and his posture and his darting eyes and the taut filaments of his facial muscles, all of which served to remind her that Lonnie was the only person who could help them, and that she should be gracious, or do her best impression of someone gracious, despite the fact that in any other context she would have hated him.
Squatting, Lonnie said to Ig, “Hello, pretty girl.”
No, she hated him here.
“Say hi, Ig,” said Ray. “Ig, say hi.” Ig refused. The car ride had lulled her to sleep, and she had perhaps not forgiven them for yanking her from the buttery backseat. “Can you say hi?”
“She doesn’t want to,” said Luz.
Lonnie adjusted his robes and sat at the vertex of the L sofa, Rita beside him. Ray sat at the end of the L’s long leg and Luz returned to the floor. Ig, free to do as she pleased now, crawled beyond the coffee table to Rita—she had reverted to crawling lately—and offered her Ig the tortoise.
“She’s giving it to you,” said Luz.
“I’m good,” said Rita, though Ig insisted and finally Rita let the saliva-softened tortoise corpse rest on her lap.
“This is something of a novelty,” said Lonnie. “How old is she?”
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