“She’s fine,” he said. “Leave her.”
Luz insisted with her eyes.
“No,” said Ray. “We’re not doing this now.”
Despite Ig’s wan objections, Luz left her lying on the floor.
Outside, the sun had made its way over the walls of the fortification, burnt the dawn from the courtyard and was now doing its evil bake work above. Luz followed Rita to unit B, though the brass B was gone, leaving only two nail holes and its shadow in the lacquer. Luz had never been in unit B. She had never seen anyone go into unit B. She had never seen anyone come out. Rita unlocked the door now and jerked her head to say, as Ray had said at raindance, Go.
Luz went.
Rita shut the door behind them. It was lightless inside, all smells: desiccate cardboard, dust, hot plastic. It occurred to Luz that Rita might want to hurt her and she was fine with that. She had it coming. There could be some comfort in at last getting what was expected and deserved.
Luz stepped forward and crashed her shin into something sharp and stumbled. Rita moved toward her—Luz felt her approaching in the dark—and then easily past. From the back of the apartment came a shaft of sun, wobbling where Rita pinned a heavy drape behind a tower of cardboard boxes. All around them were boxes, the unit filled with them. A small city of boxes and heavy-duty garbage bags squatting among the boxes like fat black ticks.
Without speaking or looking to Luz, Rita began to pilfer. She wedged herself between towers of boxes, sending some swaying, heaved some boxes and bags from one pile to another. Occasionally she punched in the sides of one and stripped the packing tape from its seam. She glanced inside, extracted something, resealed it and moved on. The boxes read SYSCO and WINCO and FRITO-LAY, many smiled a logo smile, nearly all had arrows pointing skyward. Rita moved fast and methodically; she knew the boxes by heart, Luz realized. This and what came next would follow Luz into the desert.
“Take this,” Rita said, from somewhere deep within her box borough.
She gave Luz a garbage bag. It was half-full but heavy and Luz held it open like a child asking for something. “What’s this?” Inside was slick plastic in pastels, puffy teal cubes and countless doughy faces, all of them caught in the act of laughter.
Rita put more bounty into the sack. “He’s too good for you, you know. Ray.”
“I know.”
“It’s not your fault, though. He’s too good for anyone.”
Rita rifled still, and into the garbage bag went more diapers, rubber nipples, a thermometer, burp cloths, bottle of powder, bottle of oil, tube of rash cream, tube of ointment, a bushel of used onesies. Two cans of formula.
Luz said, “Why do you have all this?”
“Doesn’t matter. Here.” Rita presented Luz a car seat.
She was a good woman, Rita.
The A/C had quit outside Santa Clarita, started blowing hot, syrup-smelling smoke in what was once strawberry country. “What is?” Ig asked from the backseat, and though she knew Ray would scowl at her for it (and he did), Luz had said, “A very bad omen.” But Ig was asleep now, and because Luz did not know how to drive stick—even the phrase she found unpleasant—she sat in the passenger seat in the starlet’s slip, sweating and watching the crusty wasted fields fold past. She rolled the window down, hoping to smell the sea, but they were well inland and the wind was not cooperating and all that came in was a vicious cyclone of heat and dust that whipped her across the face with tendrils of her own dirty hair. She would never smell the Pacific again.
She rolled up the window. She’d sweated through the starlet’s slip in places—eclipses leeching from her armpits, a Rorschach line below her breasts—and the silk clung to her. She wanted to sleep—needed to—but could not. The dress she’d peeled off outside Ridgecrest was wadded somewhere on the floorboards in the backseat. She should have worn shorts, a tank top, boots. Ray had said as much before they left, but Luz ignored him. After one last round of dress-up she took Ray’s hand as they stood facing the starlet’s indifferent, cantilevered villa.
“Say good-bye with me,” she said. “Be a husband.”
Ray saluted. “Good-bye, house.”
Luz frowned. “I meant silently.” She closed her eyes, keeping his hand in hers. Behind them, on the bridge driveway, was the Melon, loaded with diapers, rubber nipples, a thermometer, burp cloths, bottle of powder, bottle of oil, tube of rash cream, tube of ointment, bushel of onesies. Two cans of formula plus eight Sparkletts bottles filled with gasoline, two with water, a flat of ration cola, a cubic foot of graham crackers, another of dry cereal, a plastic grocery bag filled with PowerBars, canned food from Rita and Lonnie’s stash—sardines, mostly, and some tuna—scarves, sunglasses, hats, biographies, six tiny notebooks bound together with a rubber band, the hatbox with the rest of Luz’s money in it, about one hundred thousand dollars, and in the glove box a manila envelope with the name of an intersection in St. George, Utah, and Lonnie’s guy—Samuel, whom Ray was calling Sammy the Bull—and both of their original IDs, though Ray had wanted to burn his. Also in the envelope, with Sammy the Bull and Ray the Hoosier and Luz Cortez of Malibu, CA, was the birth certificate of Baby Dunn: Luz Eleanor Dunn, six pounds, nine ounces, a greasy smear of black hair atop her head, labia and teats inflamed with her mother’s hormones, a dark, spinachy meconium collecting in a rectum the diameter of a wedding band, a coat of translucent hair all over her body, setting her ashimmer in the sun of suns. A mascot before her mother would wear the velvety fuzz away, loving her. A logo before the ink on the certificate was dry.
Standing in front of the starlet’s, Ray had closed his eyes and sighed peacefully, which had made Luz feel at peace, too.
But that peace had left her now, and an irritable, fidgeting anxiety had taken over. Luz pressed her bare feet against the windshield already smudged with her footprints, then removed them. She consulted the map Lonnie had given them, an old map on which he’d traced a large oval with a question mark inside—“I think that’s where it is.” They would skirt the Amargosa to the north. Each moment she was farther from home than she’d ever been. She couldn’t get comfortable. Whichever way she arranged herself there was something to burn her: the metal tongue of the seat belt, the hot nub on the e-brake, the dash gone waxy, the scorching leather against her thighs, sweating as though still some live thing’s hide.
Her thoughts went to helpers: St. George, Lawrence, Savannah. They sounded like people who couldn’t be trusted. The Carolinas were two mean girls from grade school.
She looked back at Ig, strapped in Rita’s car seat. The seat was not the right size, maybe, and the child slept with her head rolled down and to the side at such an angle that her neck looked broken. Wisps of her yellow-white hair gone lank with perspiration. Dry cereal rings were confettied all over the backseat, one stuck to her blood-flushed cheek. Luz stretched and brushed it off, then touched the back of her hand to the child’s warm, bulbed brow.
“She’s still hot,” Luz said.
Ray glanced in the rearview mirror. “Let her sleep.”
“What if she’s hurting?”
“Wouldn’t she wake up?”
“I don’t know,” said Luz. She cupped the child’s thick, dimpled knee with her hand. “I don’t know.”
The sun at their back was dipping, finally, setting the bald and hazy mountains in the distance aflame.
“She doesn’t have a name,” said Luz. She might know how to mother the child if only she had something proper to call her.
“She does,” said Ray. “Only we don’t know what it is and never will.”
“She’s an orphan,” said Luz. “Like us.”
“We’re not orphans,” he said.
“We are, kind of. We don’t have anyone.”
“That’s true,” said Ray. This made her feel good, annihilation. She would have liked to kiss him, rest her head on his shoulder, but her
guilt would not allow it. The visit to the compound had put Lonnie’s scent on her again. But they’d both made mistakes, hadn’t they?
Luz studied the mountains ahead, watched the sunset coloring them as the things gone from them: lilac, plum, lavender, orchid, mulberry, violet. Pomegranate, one of the last to go. John Muir had written how when we try to pick out anything by itself we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. Above those spoilt purple mountains materialized a glowing wedge of light, whiter than the sun, thin, blurred, and radiant. Snow, Luz thought, unable to stop herself. She’d seen snow only once, from a train skirting the Italian Alps, but she had never touched it and already she was zigging up there, ramming her fingers into the cool blue bank until they stung, crunching the puffs of sparkling crystals in her teeth, falling backward to make angels in the airy drifts.
But there was nothing cool or blue or airy about this calcium-colored crust capping the range. It throbbed with heat, glowed radioactive with light. Luz said, “What is that?” just as the answer came to her.
Ray said it. “The dune sea. The Amargosa.”
“It’s that close?” They were barely beyond the city.
Ray shook his head. “It’s that big.”
This knocked Luz off balance: The dune was not atop the empurpled range before them but beyond it, beyond it by miles and miles. The white was not a rind of ice, not a snowcap, but sand piling up inland where the Mojave had been.
They watched this sandsnow mirage, hypnotized by fertilizer dust and saline particulate and the pulverized bones of ancient sea creatures, though they did not know it. Did not know but felt this magnetic incandescence working the way the moon did, tugging at the iron in their blood. Knew only that it left them not breathless but with their breaths exactly synchronized. Ray reached for Luz, took her hand as though he’d never before touched her. They went on, silently transfixed by the immaculate flaxen range looming before them.
Ray whispered, “We could name her Estrella.” After her long-gone mother, he didn’t have to say.
“We could,” said Luz. “Do you want to?”
“Let’s,” Ray said. “Let’s call her that.” Though they almost never would.
—
Night and the moon was high and fat as a fat face—but beautiful!—and Ig was awake with her feet raised and her fingers curled around her big toes, saying, Bab bab babby bab bab. Luz had a good feeling. The Melon and its cargo had been born of the city and now sailed along the crests and trundles of the straight-up desert. It was better than surfing, Ray said, driving at night on an empty road between the swervy prehistoric hills. They emerged from a batch of bare hillocks and saw before them a great alluvial valley, yawningly vast, the dune beyond dreadful with moonlight.
Then, an iridescent glimmer, a figure in the road. Ray downshifted, slowing the Melon, though Luz told him not to. There were patrols and worse. Bandits. Highwaymen. So she’d heard. As they approached, the figure went from in the road to alongside it, from a being to a box. A dollhouse. A storage unit. No, a booth with a sliding glass window and maps pinned to a corkboard, bleached blank. Before them a mechanical arm, spangled with reflective strips, busted at the joint and part supine on the asphalt. Ray swerved around it and the mechanism lurched, whining, raising the pinched arm so it dangled, flapped, begging amputation.
Ig laughed.
Admitted, they descended below what was once the snow line. The road took them down into an immense forest of silver yucca. On and on for miles staggered the woody skeletons, the monocrop broken only occasionally by a feathery date palm, drought-weary, bowed in half, its fruitless head laid on the lifeless ground. But the palms were rare and in the main the valley stretched on and out and up in tessellations of pale soaptree yucca, spiny heads grafted to thick and hearteningly hairy trunks.
“Look, Ig,” said Luz, twisted around in the passenger seat. “Trees!”
But Ig was a baby and could be dismissive in the baby way. She did not take note of the trees.
“Her first forest,” said Ray.
“Let’s stop.”
“A milestone!” Ray steered the Melon to the shoulder.
“Look, Ig.” Luz wanted the baby to see the forest. She wanted the baby to see every new and magnificent thing in the world. Already there was no limit to her yearning on behalf of the baby.
With the Melon’s cuckoo clock engine turned off, the valley was quiet as a shadow. Luz lifted Ig out of the backseat and went off from the road. “Be careful,” said Ray. He had been saying this lately.
Luz held Ig to her as she walked among the moon-cast shadows of the yuccas, smelling charcoal, saline. The baby went quiet, as if even she, irreverent devil that she was, recognized they were traipsing through something sacred. The yuccas were white in the moonlight and some had holes bored in their shaggy trunks, holes so perfect the wind would have whistled through them, except there was no wind. Some of their spines were gauzed with glistening webs. Surely there were creatures tricksy and nocturnal to be spotted within. Ray noted the holes, too. “Look,” he whispered at one, and Ig did.
They walked on and on through the forest, the wise firecracker heads of the yuccas motionless above. The Melon became an enamel droplet on the tarry road behind them. “These are ancient,” said Luz. “They must be.” Ray touched her elbow lightly, then scooped Ig from her. He pinched a knifey yucca frond between his fingers—“Look, Ig. Tree. Can you say tree?”
“Eee,” tried Ig.
He brought Ig closer, her small mouth agape, agog, and as he did he pulled on the frond. There was a sound then, an incongruous sound, like the tearing of very delicate fabric. Gossamer, or cheesecloth. A crepe-ish rip, and the massive hairy yucca swayed, somehow. Luz and Ray staggered back and the tree fell between them, sending up a dry veil of dust. Ig said, “Uh-oh.”
“What the fuck?” said Ray. He pressed his foot to the felled thing and where he pressed the trunk collapsed, papery. Ig laughed like a hiccup. They investigated the broken stump and found it completely hollow, save for some dry, twiny marrow inside.
Luz pushed carefully on the trunk of another towering yucca and it too crumpled to the ground, setting Ig agiggle.
“They’re dead,” Luz said. “All of them.” Dead, without moisture enough to rot.
“The groundwater’s gone,” said Ray, though he’d promised he wouldn’t.
Luz plucked a yucca tine from its socket, then another and another, revealing an arid cavity inside the tree. She looked out over the miles and miles of pale lifeless specimen. This was no forest but a cemetery. Ray felled another plant husk and crushed it beneath his boots, its desiccate death rattle vastly satisfying. Ig reprised her hiccup laugh and clapped. She had never clapped for them and so Luz clapped, then toppled and crushed another tree. Ig clapped again, triumphantly.
“Watch this,” said Ray, and then held Ig aloft as he kicked the spindled torso of an adolescent yucca to dust. The baby went hic, hic, clap, clap.
“Watch this,” said Luz, hoisting a sandstone to her shoulder and shot-putting it clear through the stout trunk of a grandfatherly yucca.
“Bah!” said Ig, clapping like mad.
“Here,” said Ray. He handed Ig over to Luz. He set himself, took a breath, leapt into the air, yipped and torqued a kung fu–type roundhouse kick through the body of a massive hollow plant, splintering it profoundly and sending the spidery head to the ground. Ig laughed and clapped and laughed and clapped.
They continued like this, crushing large swaths through the papier-mâché forest, trampling the flimsy giants, pulverizing the ghostly gray cellulose carcasses and sending up great clouds of dust and cinder. Desiccation vibrated in their sinews, destruction tingled in their molars. Finally, they stood breathing in a clearing of their own gleeful debris, no night breeze chilling them in their sweat. A supernatural stillness overtook them, the fear they had tried to laug
h away.
Ray picked up a silvery shred of yucca skin and gave it to the baby.
Ig said, “What is?”
“I told you,” said Luz, starting back toward the road. “A very bad omen.”
—
In the womb of a dream Luz is hiking along a rocky ridge with William Mulholland and Sacajawea through no country she’s ever seen, and though Mulholland has on inappropriate footwear and spiny somethings are everywhere, they are making good time. There is a tang of frost in the air and in the ravine below tremble the heads of plum-colored cottonwoods. Mulholland, his Irish Rs bubbly, is talking up home birth, a position Luz supports, though she also has a little devil in her, a little devil who lives in her throat, who makes a hammock of her hyoid bone, the only bone in the body that connects to no other bones, said her homeschooling anatomy coloring book. This devil, suspended in his web of ligaments anchored distally to the tongue, says, “It doesn’t add up, Willy,” and Mulholland says, “I invite you to look at the facts. We rank fortieth in the world in infant and mother mortality. Behind Cuba!” Luz has no hat on suddenly, and the tree-size lilacs in the ravine are swooning, swooning. Sacajawea is a bronze statue on her back and on Sacajawea’s back is Jean Baptiste, stillborn, marbled with blue. Willy Mulholland is saying, “Hospitals are designed for death.” Willy Mulholland is saying, “Septic! Septic!” Sacajawea’s bronze body scorches—what’s become of that frost tang? In the ravine there is a creek running with shreddy brown blood and Willy Mulholland is saying, “Isn’t it amazing what a little light can do?”
—
She woke near dawn, the car stopped and Ray gone. Ig’s seat was empty, too. Luz found Ray filling the gas tank with Ig on his hip. Luz offered to take her.
“She needs to be changed,” said Ray, handing her over.
“Are you stinky, Ig?”
Ig said nothing.
“Be careful,” said Ray again. Luz turned to walk around the front of the car and stopped. Up ahead, maybe twenty yards from the nose of the Melon, the road disappeared. Luz squinted in the dim—Crow’s-feet! screeched a makeup girl who prescribed ground pansies with garlic juice for Luz’s eyebags. Powdered horsetail, fresh yeast dissolved in boiling spring water for these nasty blackheads. Ten young, fresh nettles to drink up all this oil. Pick them away from the highway! If you would only practice the merest self-care you wouldn’t be in this chair for so long.
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