Gold Fame Citrus

by Claire Vaye Watkins

  “One,” Luz said, already wanting to keep her young forever.

  Rita scoffed. “Big for one.” They sat with that awhile.

  “So what’s the deal?” Lonnie asked finally, aggressively caressing his shorn head. “Luz making some extra money babysitting?” Luz did not meet his gaze.

  Ray said, “What do you mean?”

  “I guess what I mean is the last time I saw you two you didn’t have a baby. Luz was not pregnant, so far as I could tell, you two were not in the process of cooking up a puppy. And you certainly, so far as I can recall, did not have a newborn. Did they have a newborn, Rita? Or am I demented?”

  Luz pulled Ig back from the glass coffee table, almost thankful to Lonnie for forcing the question. Did what they’d done have language in Ray’s mind? And what were the words?

  Ray’s Muir eyes were dry when he told Lonnie, “We found her.”

  Lonnie leaned back and smiled. “I know how that is. We found a Red Cross flatbed. We found a few dozen guns.”

  “It wasn’t like that,” Luz said, by which she meant, We’re not like you.

  “No, I’m into it. Upend everything. Snatch all the Montessori canyon babies from their cribs. I just wish we’d thought of it.”

  Rita muttered that all the Montessori canyon babies were gone.

  “Truth,” said Lonnie. “Where then?”

  They did not answer.

  “Don’t say it.”

  Ray rubbed his mouth.

  “Jesus,” said Rita.

  “Fuck me, Ray,” said Lonnie. “Some serious cats down there. Some serious cats even I wouldn’t want for enemies.”

  “I know,” said Ray, which was puzzling because he had never said as much to Luz, so either the genuine dangers of raindance had just occurred to him or—and this was the truth, she knew—he had been thinking it all along, those serious cats had been with him those sleepless nights in the canyon and he’d kept them to himself. Here comes Luz, don’t make any sudden movements. She was not a serious cat.

  Ray said, “We came here for a favor.”

  Lonnie leaned back on the sofa and stretched both his arms to rest atop it. “Naturally. Only reason anyone comes here anymore.”

  Ray took a breath. Luz saw how brutally he wished he were not about to say the thing he was about to say. “We’re leaving. Going on the list.”

  Rita scoffed. Ig body-slammed her tortoise self on the glass coffee table, shuddering some stones from the fountain and setting them spinning on the glass. Luz retrieved Ig, fetched her nini from the birkin and used it to coax the child into lying in her lap.

  Lonnie was still, then neatly took the dislodged Zen rocks into his hand. He looked stunned—even saddened, Luz saw, which was so unexpected and baffling that she kept watching him until she was sure that was the expression. Then she realized: he must have thought they were coming back. That they had come now to ask his permission to rejoin the complex. Of course. He’d donned his best Krishna curtains in preparation for their groveling. He was a small, needy creature who looked now as though he might utter a disgusting phrase, something along the lines of I believed in you. (Almost as unforgivable as the bald admiration he’d whispered before he’d had her, those months ago: Oh, Luz, in another life!) Luz rubbed Ig’s back and prayed he wouldn’t make a scene, though she would not have called it prayer.

  Lonnie sniffed once and dropped the stones back into the bowl, eyeing Ig as though she were a strange dog come upon them. Luz saw Ig then as Lonnie must have: stunted and off, lopsided head, eyes lolling of their own accord. She had the hot urge to scream that there was nothing wrong with Ig. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

  Finally, mercifully, Lonnie said just, “California, the failed experiment.”

  Ray tiptoed over his old friend’s withered pride and said, “We have to, Lonnie.”

  “Clearly.”

  “We need a birth certificate,” said Luz. “And an ID for Ray.”

  Lonnie raised his eyebrows at Ray. “So she knows? Good for you, brother.”

  Ray nodded. “Can you help us?”

  Lonnie flattened a seam of his curtain robe. “Can’t do it. No one can. Can’t be done anymore.”

  Ray said, “We can pay you.” They’d brought the hatbox.

  “Don’t insult me. There’s nothing I can do.”

  “Come on,” said Luz.

  “A clean ID, a birth certificate—it’s too much. Six months ago, maybe. But now . . . Everything’s contracting, everyone’s drying up. Even if I could, man, do you know what they do to us in those places? It’s not a vacation, Ray. First thing they’ll do is give you each a number, next thing is split you up, paperwork or no. Men one way, women another. Whole garrisons just for kids. ‘Boarding,’ they call it. Labor camps. Your part for the cause. Only way out is to enlist, and I gather that’s not available to you.”

  They were quiet awhile, even Ig.

  Ray said, “Another way, then.”

  Lonnie brightened. He needed to be needed. Indeed, there were endless other ways, he said, each illegal and treacherous. He got a visible charge as he listed them all, a little danger boner. One was Oregon, yes. The militia could not be everywhere. There were the tunnels, of course, dug by former dairymen with subsidized earthmovers, though the dairymen were not fond of dark complexions, and their tunnels had a habit of collapsing. “Better to drive up to Crescent City,” he said. “Hitch to the border, swim out around the seawall.”

  Ray shook his head. “Luz can’t swim.”

  Lonnie said, “I thought she was Mexican.”

  “Her mom was.”

  Lonnie inspected Luz. “And she didn’t teach you?”

  Luz was not going to bite. She focused on grazing her fingerpads along Ig’s nape.

  “She couldn’t either,” Ray said. She had drowned, Luz’s mother. She had drowned herself.

  Lonnie tugged his Osiris goatee. “The gorge, then. Hike the badlands. Take you two weeks, maybe three.”

  Ray frowned toward Ig, limp under Luz’s feather strokes. “We need something safe.”

  “You want safe, bribe your way into Tahoe.”

  “Or Napa,” Rita said. “The Vintners Society could pay people to stand around and spit.”

  Lonnie laughed, then went serious. “Maybe through Texas.”

  Ray said, “We don’t have enough gas.”

  “No one does,” said Lonnie.

  “What if we went south?” asked Luz.

  Rita snorted. “Mexico’s a war zone. A complete and utter war zone. Worse than here. Approximately a thousand times worse.”

  Lonnie squeezed Rita’s knee. “The Amargosa is blocking it anyway. They’d be stranded in Baja.”

  “It’s that big?” Ray said. “The Amargosa?”

  Rita said, “Getting bigger every day.”

  Lonnie tapped one of his conchos absently. “The Amargosa, now that’s interesting. If I was going anywhere—which I’m fucking not—I’d go to the Amargosa.”

  Rita nodded.

  “What for?” asked Luz. The Amargosa was sand, a dead swath of it blown off the Central Valley and the Great Plains, accumulated somewhere between here and Vegas.

  “There’s supposed to be a town out there,” said Ray. How did he know this? How did she not know everything he knew?

  “There is a town out there,” said Lonnie, “run by a prophet. Very spiritual place. Very primal.”

  “A town,” said Luz. “Without water.”

  “This prophet,” Lonnie said, “is descended from a long line of dowsers. Incredibly gifted. He finds the water.”

  This again. There was always some savior out in the wilderness, some senator, some patent, some institute, some cell. So familiar, this stagey faith. Luz’s father had had it; it was how he kept himself atop everyone around him. He believed harde
r in stupider things, and there was somehow authority in this. Luz exhaled audibly and rolled her eyes. Ray put his hand on her shoulder.

  But Lonnie was getting worked up. “There is water, Luz. Just because you can’t find it with concrete and bulldozers and dynamite doesn’t mean it’s not there.”

  Rita added, in a cool, inward way that made Luz miss her, suddenly, “Just because they say it’s gone doesn’t make it gone.”

  Silence then. A stalemate, a standoff, a standstill, a stillborn. A rain delay. How it was always to end, except Lonnie bounced up and announced, “Let’s do a reading.”

  From a drawer in the kitchen he fetched three golden Sacajawea dollars and his tattered catalog of hexagrams, The Book of Changes. He set these on the coffee table, beside that a mechanical pencil and a tiny top-tab spiral notebook, the same kind Ray carried for his lists and poems. Vile, to see Lonnie with it, though of course it had been Ray and Lonnie both who said, “We’re going to run some errands,” before they lobbed a cinder block through the glass doors of the Wilshire Walgreens, a box boasting POCKET SIZE among their loot.

  Lonnie fondled the coins now and told everyone to think on their worry, to project their question into the Sacajawea dollars.

  Ray said, “All of us?”

  Lonnie nodded. “A hexagram,” he said, “is the exponent of the moment it is cast.” Their endeavors, he said—meaning, Luz assumed, a looted journalist’s pad, a mechanical pencil whose red plastic clip was gnawed and three dollops of copper sheathed in brass and stamped with the image of a Shoshone girl kidnapped at twelve and wed at thirteen, when a Frenchman won her in a card game—would correct for their secretmost selves.

  Luz had too many worries to think on just one, and her secretmost self was not secret enough, but while it was all undeniably bullshit, she found herself trying.

  Here was one worry: Ig. She was worry pooping into an Hermès scarf, worry with skittering coin eyes, worry moaning in the daytime, worry panting at the heat, worry howling through the night. Worry strung out on ration cola, worry with its bulbed head in Luz’s lap. Worry drowsy but fighting it, always fighting it, worry worrying the gauze blooming from her mouth. Worry gathering all other worries to them. But Ig was too delicate to resent, too pearly-skinned to solve, and right now, stroking the tip of her nose with the tip of the nini, vastly too gentle, so much like a godsend.

  Lonnie shook the Sacajaweas from his hand and let them land noisily on the glass coffee table—ting ting ting—oblivious or indifferent or likely hostile to Ig so near to nap.

  The coins skittered to rest. Two Sacajaweas with two baby Jean Baptistes on their backs, and beside them a bushel of wheat—or maybe arrows?—wrapped in a blanket. Lonnie annotated the whims of the coins in his notebook. “A broken line.”

  He took up the coins again.

  Luz looked to Ray. She could see him and Lonnie in the same glance and hated herself. Would she always be so hungry? She had taken much from Ray—his home, his friends, his sleep, his sea. Was there no end to her appetite?

  Ting ting ting: Three Sacajaweas, three lady Salmon-Eaters with three Little Pompeys, as Clark had christened him, barely born. A line unbroken.

  And through that line rose the worry of worries: in what way was Ray no longer her Ray? Luz did not want to take this from him—California, all that it still meant to him—but was glad to, in a way. The sacrifice was a good sign. But what would it cost them? They were lost, yes, but lost together.

  Ting ting ting. On one coin, Janey and Pompey, and on the other, an eagle and the other the arrows. A broken line.

  “Wow,” Lonnie said. “Oh, wow.”

  Ray’s eyes were closed now and his dark lashes met in small, furred slivers. There he was, her Ray, Ray always on the move, his knees ever bouncing. Ray who took her fingers from her mouth so she would not bite them bloody. Ray with the exquisite mouth and its Indiana lapses, saying “pop” or “frigging” or that something was “funky.” Ray who once said he envied her imagination, but also that the places her mind took her frightened him. Ray who said she ought to have a project—Napping is my project, she’d say, but she had not napped since Ig. Ray who said she ought to pay attention to the ration hour, Ought to keep your eyes peeled, he said, as though hers were still coated with a glittery scrim of cosmetics, which they likely were. Ray who tethered her to rock, rock she was now ripping him from.

  Lonnie tossed the coins again. Ting ting ting. One Sacajawea looking over her shoulder at her boy or at home, beside her an eagle, beside that the blanket-bound arrows. A broken line.

  Ray with Muir’s eyes and wavesickness and a list in his pocket.

  L.

  Water.

  Ting ting ting. An eagle, his twin, and Sacajawea with her little Pomp. A broken line.

  Here was a worry: Luz. Her whole self a worry. How had her father put it? Luz is my cross to bear.

  Ting ting ting. The eagles, gliding through rings of stars, and beside them, the bouquet of wheat arrows wound with the blanket. An unbroken line.

  Lonnie moaned, as if his own wisdom pained him. He set the pad on the coffee table, the miniature sheet lined with addition sets and beside those:

  He consulted a chart, then an index, then flipped through the pages. He cleared his throat. “Chun,” he read. “The abysmal, the arousing. This hexagram connotes a blade of grass pushing against an obstacle as it sprouts out of the earth—hence the meaning ‘difficulty at the beginning.’” He looked up at them, in case they had missed this profound foreshadowing. “The hexagram indicates the way in which heaven and earth bring forth individual beings. It is their first meeting, which is beset with difficulties. The lower trigram, chên”—he tapped the pad—“is the Arousing; its motion is upward and its image is thunder. The upper trigram is the Abysmal, the dangerous.” Again, another glance, which said, Are you getting this? “Its motion is downward and its image is rain. The situation points to teeming chaotic profusion; thunder and rain fill the air.” Here, he cocked his head apologetically. “This edition’s a little outdated.”

  He went on. “But the chaos clears up. While the Abysmal sinks, the upward movement eventually passes beyond the danger. A thunderstorm brings release from tension, and all things breathe freely again.”

  Luz leaned over to check if Ig was asleep. She was not. She was lying tranquil, slack, still stroking the tip of her nose with the gauze.

  “Times of growth are beset with difficulties,” read Lonnie. “They resemble a first birth.” Rita snorted wickedly. “Everything is in motion: therefore if one perseveres there is a prospect of great success. Fascinating.”

  Lonnie turned the page. “Let’s see, let’s see,” consulting the pad. “Nine, six.” He popped another page. “Here: Nine at the beginning means: hesitation and hindrance. It furthers one to remain persevering. It furthers one to appoint helpers.” This last he said as though the word were a good friend he had not seen in a long time, the way Ray had said San Diego: Helpers! He flipped another page. “Six. Six in the second place means: difficulties pile up. Horse and wagon part.”

  He slowly closed the book. Rita said, “Hmm,” and so did Ray.

  Lonnie stacked the pad on the book and the pencil beside it and leaned back. “This is what we’ll do,” he said after some conspicuous reflection. “I have a man in St. George. If you can make it there, to Utah, he’ll get you to a train in Lawrence, Kansas. The Carolinas, I think he takes them. Ultimately Savannah.”

  “You have ‘a man’?” Luz said.

  Ray said, “Easy,” but it was too late.

  “Yes, Luz, I have a man. I have all kinds of men—”

  “Shh,” said Luz. She spread her hand across Ig’s bare back, her pinky and her thumb finding the child’s floating ribs. “I’m sorry.”

  “Damn right you are. Come here asking for a favor and criticize the way I do business—”


  “Business,” she said.

  “Ease up,” said Ray, though it was not clear to whom.

  “—playing the baby makes three up in the canyon while we’ve had to survive—”

  Lonnie went on. In fact there was no water crisis, he maintained. Theirs was a human crisis. What they called drought was merely the mechanism of a long overdue social contraction. A little agony was just what this place needed. Reintroduce hardship into the regional narrative. Sift out the posers and moneymen, the tourists, the sunbathers, the whores. Slough off the bourgeoisie! Euthanize the comfort culture! After: a pure city, liberated from its toxic pecking order, rid of its meet-ups and mixers, its principals and agents and managers murdered, a city of freed assistants, a city pure of heart.

  Luz had heard it all before. She went lichen, pressing her palm to Ig, her own flat, cool boulder. She and Ig and John Muir were slate blue and sea green. They were a tuft of moss in Yosemite before Yosemite was a dry, ruined chasm ringed by hot granite knobs. They were a spray of fungi leaning out over Crater Lake before it went entirely crater. They were lichen on stone, dormant beneath the snowpack of a hangnail glacier in a crook of the Cascades that no one knew about, that no one even knew the name of. Lonnie was saying, “. . . giving them exactly what they want . . . resist . . . endure . . . sickening.” Luz hunkered, unfurled her sagey petals, breathed through boreal ruffles, absorbed with her felt fins snowmelt and fog and mist and dew, all things moist, all things cool, and passed them to Ig.

  Lonnie said to Ray, “Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I say it? I told you about her. I told you.”

  “Told you what?” asked Luz, returned.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Ray.

  “Tell her!” cried Lonnie.

  “Things are different now.” Ray looked to Ig.

  Luz said, “Tell me, Ray.”

  He might have—Luz hoped he wouldn’t but he might have, she could see this—but Rita rose. “Come with me, Luz.”

  “Good idea,” said Lonnie. “I can’t fucking talk to her.”

  Luz did not want to go with Rita. She looked at Ray, motioned to Ig in her lap. She wanted him to come and lift them both and take them away from here.