When they returned Ray had collected himself, risen from the ground and was now leaning against the open trunk, folding the gasoline-soaked clothes. “Did she pee?” he asked.
Luz lifted Ig and sniffed her rump. “She’s good,” she said. “She wants you.” But Ray went on, folding the gas-smelling clothes. Making piles. When the clothes were folded and sorted he lifted Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea and Francis Newlands and William Mulholland and John Wesley Powell from the starlet’s leather satchel and stacked them beside the clothes. He would not look at them. Luz was beginning to think she’d never known this man and never would.
“Is this clean?” he asked, holding a supersaturated cobalt scarf with golden links of illustrated chain strung across it.
“What are you doing?”
He had a project, a plan. He tied the scarf loosely around his neck. He put his half-full jug in the satchel, and a dirty T-shirt and three cans of tuna.
“What are you doing?” Luz said again, though she knew now. “Stop it.”
“Come here,” he said to Ig, and she did. He held her and squeezed her and she let him. He kissed Ig on her head. Again and again he kissed her. Luz wished he would stop, and that he would never stop. He tried to pass the child to Luz, but she refused.
“I don’t want you to go,” she said.
“It’s gonna be fine. I’m just going to get help.”
“Where?”
He kissed Ig again. It was horrid, his lips hesitating on her feather-soft hair the worst of omens. “It’s gonna be fine,” he said again, though it would not. “I’m just going to go ahead to a road and find someone, get some gas and get us out of here.”
“There’s nothing out there, Ray.”
To Ig, with his high, soft Ig voice, he said, “I’m going for a walk now. Just a little walk down the road here.”
Ig said, “Road here.”
“That’s right,” he said, passing the child to Luz. “Go to Mama.”
Luz took the girl on her hip.
Ray fastened the satchel. He was doing penance for the AWOL thing. He was going to leave her alone to watch their child die, to prove what a good man he was.
“We’ll go with you,” she said.
Ray stroked Ig’s head. “It’s not safe. She needs shade. Water. We can’t carry enough.” He let Ig make a fist around his index finger. “She’s too delicate. She’d slow us down.” It was unclear whom he was talking to.
Ray kissed Luz then, kissed her as if he were embarking on his morning commute, as if he were the manager at one of the burnt-out banks along Wilshire. “Please,” said Luz. “No.”
“Listen,” he said, trying words on the wordless. “I don’t . . . You won’t . . . I’m sorry. It’s just . . .” He squeezed Ig’s calf and shouldered the satchel. “Get her out of the sun, okay?”
“Please no. Please! I can’t do this by myself.” She wanted him to say, Sure you can. He used to be so good about saying what she needed to hear.
“You don’t have to,” he said.
“No,” she said.
“I’ll be right back.”
“Take more water at least,” she said through a thick sob. “Fill your jug.” She reached for the Sparkletts barrel, nearly full of water, and tugged it to the edge of the trunk. Then, epiphany.
She could not lift the barrel with Ig in her arms, and everywhere there was to put her was scalding or venomous or glistening with gasoline. She pried the plastic cap off with her free hand, saw herself tipping the whole heavy, sloshing aqua of it, spilling the only water they had onto the dry crust of the trail. Water came in three lethargic glugs, instant mud spattering against her ankles.
“Don’t,” cried Ray, righting the bottle. He grasped her wrist and pried the plastic cap from her hand. He shoved the cap back on the barrel. Between them the water disappeared into the ground. Whispering now, he said, “Don’t you fucking dream of it.”
She might have tried again—wanted badly to, wanted badly to be capable of that. She wanted worst of all to press a cold pint glass against his neck and ask him if he remembered his longboard, the two of them leaning back and riding it down Canyon Drive. Ask him to help her once more onto the handlebars of his liberated mountain bike and ride them both down the center of PCH, helixing through rivulets of melty tar, him swerving, putting little phantoms in her heart, so that he could whisper I got you.
Ray tugged the scarf up over his mouth and nose. Against the infinite cobalt of the silk his eyes were colorless, clear, already gone. “Don’t cry,” he said. “I’ll be right back,” he said, though he would not.
—
The light went on forever out here, and so it was a long, long time before he disappeared. “Where him go?” Ig asked a few times, dry-eyed. Luz was the only one weeping.
“To get help.”
“Elp?”
“Help.”
Horse and wagon part.
Luz knew enough to stay in one place. That was the thing lost people never did but she would do and they would be rescued because of it. “It has nothing to do with inertia or helplessness,” she told Ig. “Or fear.” And to prove it she took the girl on slow walks in one of two directions: back, in the wake of the Melon, the way Ray’d gone, or forward. They paced the trail so ceaselessly and so slowly—Ig was ever distracted by a clod or a rock—that Luz might have forgotten which way was which if not for the Melon gazing blankly ahead. As they walked Luz watched the horizon, too, watched it until it went meaningless, until she could no longer distinguish the valley floor from the dune field marching across it, nor the smeary peaks of the dunes from the white sky. At home base—this she called it for Ig’s sake, somehow—she thought to pinch the starlet’s clothes in the rolled-up windows, but even in the shade the car became an oven, so she rolled them down again.
She opened the trunk to check the Sparkletts barrel, then conferred with the stopped clock on the dash. She promised Ray and Colonel John Wesley Powell that she would adhere to a strict regimen: a swig for Ig every hour, one for herself every three.
Dawn and dusk they could move finally. Diurnal as Muir’s mammals, they ventured out walking or embarking on a project. She stacked her biographies in the driver’s seat. She swept the peppermint wrappers from the floorboards. She removed Rita’s car seat and set it in the road carefully, as though she might return it one day. Ig had tortoise Ig and her Russian nesters and free rein of the backseat. Luz read to her and Ig parroted some words: Axe. Beaver. Shoshone. Rapids. Fur. River.
Luz vowed that they’d get a good nap routine going. That’s what the creatures here did, yes? She’d read something about lizards sleeping in the shadows of barbed-wire coils. Owls burying themselves in the sand. She took the corner of a scarf in her mouth and sucked until it was wet, then ran it along Ig’s hot neck. She fanned the girl with books. Still, the child was the color of the mountains from the starlet’s balcony, the color of flames and waiting cinders. She had heat rash in the crook of her legs and rosy polyps speckled across her crotch. Luz taped the soiled diapers into dumplings and tossed them way out into the sulfur pools. When some unseen tide brought them back, she practiced not acknowledging her severe and persistent preference to be the first of the two of them to die.
Ig did wilt into a nap sometimes, but Luz could not get her eyes closed all the way. When she did manage, Ig burst into her dreamlessness, lurching Luz into consciousness only to find Ig asleep, a cracker in each fist. The child detested protein, was surviving on starch and salt. Luz slurped sardines, spines and all. She drank the oil. The water she saved for the baby. She let her own saliva puddle in her mouth and swallowed it, trying to coax her brain back from the sunstroke on which it was so hell-bent.
The water, she knew, was trying to drive her mad. It was important to maintain the upper hand. She resisted checking the trunk when she could, which she often couldn’t. When
she did open the trunk—because she thought she’d heard the jug fall, because it had likely been an hour—she braced herself, and still the level was always lower even than she’d feared. Many times, Luz felt compelled to dump the last of it so the goddamned waiting would be through.
When the Melon’s doors got incredibly heavy she left them open, even though Ig might tumble out and swan-dive into the stinking chemical lake. There was no breeze. The mustard gas from the vents expanded as released. What was it her father said about sulfur? When you smell sulfur, you know Satan has been coming round. Billy Dunn worked on oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico and sometimes, he said, they drilled too far and very suddenly the platform might fill with that rotten egg smell and that was, he said, brimstone coming straight up the pipeline from hell.
When she poured the last rivulet of water into Ig’s sippy cup the quickness of it shocked her, though the shock registered somewhere behind the stabbing sensation in her eyes and the hot, constant pulse inviting her to ram two sticks deep into the soft spots behind her own earlobes.
The nights were terrifyingly beautiful, stars gaudy and tremendous, a dense and blazing laceration of them bisecting the black dome crosswise. Sacajawea would have known the name of them. The white sands of the dune fields caught the moonlight and held it. It was impossible to think these had always been here. Stars fell frequently and Luz watched for them, replaying Ray’s return in her mind, for she’d been told as a girl that the thought thought the moment you spy a shooting star always comes to be. It was a risky strategy, for her mind would move without her permission from Ray bouncing down the path in a Red Cross truck to Ray facedown and bloated in the sulfur pools. There he was one night when a falling star kept falling in a long line across the valley floor, fell and became a car on the road.
Luz sprung from the Melon and screamed at the car—“We’re here! Here! Here!” But the light continued on its path and kept on even when Luz remembered the horn. Meep! Meep! Meep! cried the Melon in the desert. Meeeeeeep! it said, and Ig woke and started to cry and Luz screamed all her voice away and all three of them were doing their part though the light was gone, and had been gone for some time.
After, she held Ig in the passenger seat, soothing her and staring at the stopped clock, waiting to see if she could feel the moment it was right.
It was the next morning or the next—time was getting shifty, smeary as the summit of the dune sea in the distance, but the two events abutted each other psychically, to be sure—when Luz spotted a dark shape floating in the sulfur pool: a bighorn sheep, bloated, its horns sawed off, though bighorns were extinct. It floated, swaying slightly in the brine. Its hoofs had been sawed, too, and there were bloody stumps where they should have been. Luz watched it a long time, Ig indifferent until Luz started tossing clods of dirt at it. Ig joined in then, selecting a clod, and then flopping her arm near her head, sending the clod into the dirt at her feet or sometimes straight up above her. She was ambidextrous, and smiled smugly when one clod finally plopped into the pool. When Luz landed sweeping underhanded arcs on the creature’s neck and taut, distended belly, Ig said, “Again,” and Luz obliged. “Again,” Ig said, “again.” Luz let herself hear, “Omen.”
“That’s right,” Luz said.
The bighorn was gone in the morning, and so was the island of diapers, and Luz had to tamp down her own tardy sense of abandonment. Ig did not cry anymore, which was not good.
You can hear them screaming, her father said, the demon pleas for mercy coming up the pipe. Maybe so, because Luz did hear things at night, or felt them. Rumblings. The ground rolling beneath her. Once, she felt something pressing on her chest and when she opened her eyes a cloudy green light quivered in the sky in front of the Melon. When she shifted in her seat, it zipped away faster than anything of this world could move.
Friends, her father was saying, and he had so many friends, have you ever sat yourself down on the porcelain throne to answer nature’s call and been engulfed by the smell of rotten eggs? Sulfur! Gastrointestinal brimstone! A portent from the demons living in your rectum!
Day, night, another day. Day. Day. Day. Why was there so much more day? Why were the nights not cool anymore? Luz asked, What season is it, Ig? Ig answered or didn’t. The child lay silent on the floorboard with the tiniest nesting doll on her bare chest, her scalp blistered and bleeding, and when had that happened? Light, she thought she heard the nameless baby who was not a baby say. As in, Let there be. And there was. More than enough light. Enough light. Enough with the light. Luz was light, she was light-headed, light within light, her head hollow as any yucca carcass, shriveled as a blueberry, filled only with hot, stupefying light she could feel ricocheting mercilessly inside. It was the last thing she felt.
BOOK TWO
A land of lost rivers, with little in it to love; yet a land that once visited must be come back to inevitably. If it were not so there would be little told of it.
Mary Austin
From space it seems a canyon. Unhealed yet scar-tissue white, a wound yawning latitudinal between the sluice grafts of Los Angeles and the flaking, friable, half-buried hull of Las Vegas. A sutureless gash where the Mojave Desert used to be. In the pixel promises of satellites it could be the Grand Canyon, its awesome chasms and spires, its photogenic strata, our great empty, where so many of us once stood feeling so compressed against all that vastness, so dense, wondering if there wasn’t a way to breathe some room between the bits of us, where we once stood feeling the expected smallness a little, but also a headache where our eyeballs scraped against the limits of our vision, or rather of our imagination, because it was a painting we were seeing though we stood at the sanctioned rim of the real deal. Instead we saw a photograph, blue mist hanging in the foreground, snow collars around the thick rusty trestles. Motel art, and it made us wonder finally how we could have been so cavalier with photography, how we managed a scoff when warned that the cloaked box would swallow a part of the soul. Although in this instance the trouble was not, strictly speaking, the filching of the subject’s soul, for while our souls are meager, nature has surplus. Yet something of the mechanism’s subject was indeed dissolved in that silver chloride, flattened then minted as those promiscuous postcards we saw now, which we could not now unsee, for we had accepted unawares a bit of the Canyon each time we saw a photograph of it, and those pieces, filtered and diluted, had accumulated in us, so that we never saw anything for the first time. Perhaps the ugliest of our impulses, to shove the sublime through a pinhole.
But scale is a fearsome thing. Scale is analogy. When understood correctly, scale expresses itself mostly in the bowels. See to the east there? See that red thread flagellum? That hair on the lens, that mote in the vision, that teensy capillary is the suicidal region’s dry vein, opened. That is the Grand Canyon, where the silty jade Colorado once ran.
Returning our gaze westward, the mind lurches vertiginous. The vast bleached gash we once took for chasm protrudes; the formation pops from canyon to mountain. Another optical lurch as strata go shadows, as mountain goes mountains.
Closer and the eyebrain swoons again: these mountains move as if alive, pulsing, ebbing, throbbing, their summits squirming, their valleys filling and emptying of themselves. Mountains not mountains. Not rock, or no longer. Once rock. Dead rock. The sloughed-off skin of the Sierra, the Rockies, so on. Sand dunes. Dunes upon dunes. A vast tooth-colored superdune in the forgotten crook of the wasted West.
—
Buried beneath:
The world’s tallest thermometer.
An iconic cohort of roadside fiberglass dinos.
Goldstone Deep Space National Laboratory.
The Calico Early Man Site, first, last and only dig of the National Geographic Society’s New World archaeology project, its excavation led by the world-class archaeopaleontologist Dr. Buzz Leonard, Ph.D., who dated Calico’s bountiful stone tool cache of obsidian flakes, chert blades, flint
scrapers, hammerstones, handstones, and knobbed querns earlier than Lucy by fifty thousand years, the new oldest evidence of Homo sapiens sapiens’s habitation in the world and thus shifting the origin of man from Africa to the Americas, relocating the cradle of humanity to Southern California, thereby upending the scientific consensus while confirming the hypothesis long-held by all southern Californians.
Buried beneath:
The Rio Tinto borax mine, birthplace of the twenty-mule team.
The Rainbow Ridge Opal Mine, from which was pulled “Black Beauty,” the largest, purest, most expensive opal in the world, whose 3,562 carats overburdened every gemological scale at the Golden State Gemological Society and Rockhounding Club in Sacramento and had to be weighed on a butcher’s scale down the street, the opal that Leland Stanford purchased, had carved into the shape of a sea lion, and presented to his wife, Jane, as a push gift upon the birth of their only son, Leland Junior, namesake of Leland Stanford Junior University.
The Potosi mine, which made the lead that made the bullets that made such quantities of blood bloom in the Mountain Meadows massacre that Brigham Young was forced to revise his grand plan for Deseret.
Buried beneath: Quartz country. Talc country. Arrowhead country. Petroglyph country. Rain shadow country. Underground river country. Ephemeral lake country. Creosote forest country. Joshua tree country. Alfalfa field country. Solar array country. Air Force base country. UFO country.
I–15, I–40, I–10 and all the unincorporated pit stops astride them: Zzyzx, Ludlow, Essex, Needles, Victorville, Barstow and Baker.
The date groves and pastel tract houses of Indio.
Snow Creek Village, a lifestyle community designed for miniature-size adults.
The movie-set city of Pioneertown, including Pappy & Harriet’s Pioneertown Palace and the Pioneer Bowl, the oldest continually used bowling alley in America, where retired movie chimps worked as pinsetters until the evacuations, when, forgotten in the chaos, they were left behind, perhaps bowled a few frames of their own before flight or entombment.
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