Gold Fame Citrus

by Claire Vaye Watkins

  Luz shivered. The shadow of the starlet’s slip was writ onto her by sunburn, but the dress itself was gone and she was naked save for a quilt laid over her, its batting leaking from the eroded cloth. She was chilly, though it took her a long time to recognize the sensation and to understand what to do about it. She pulled the quilt around her. The pillows beneath and about her were in fact couch cushions, filmed with a silky white dust that rose from them when she shifted.

  She thought: Ig.

  She rolled to prop herself up and cracked her elbow instead on some hard surface that gave a hollow clang at the blow. She burrowed one fat, blood-glutted hand into the cushion nest and felt a floor of rubber and a neat row of rivets.

  Luz concentrated on breathing. Behind the blankets the open windows rattled gently. At the far end of the room, above a patchwork of more hanging blankets, was painted a silhouette of a dove—no, not a dove, a bluebird, for there were the words astride it, BLUE and BIRD. And beside that a placard with two hands reaching for each other and scripted beneath them, BE SAFE. On the ceiling was a skylight hatch made from ancient yellowed plastic and on the floor a black rubber strip ran from beneath the bluebird and back to her, and as it ran the room was not a room but a bus, a school bus with the seats ripped out: the accordion door, closed, the long metal arm attached to it with its lever mechanism, the first aid kit mounted on the wall, the elevated driver’s seat upholstered in olive green and flanked by many mirrors. In one mirror Luz caught a glimpse of her own face. It made her a little unsteady, her reflection, because the angle was all wrong and so were the eyes: small and lashless, bolstered by plump cheeks where Luz’s cheeks were pointy and hollow. The plump cheeks lifted a little now, and Luz touched her own face. She was not smiling.

  The driver’s seat creaked, and down on the long, slanting gas pedal, the toes of a bare foot curled then relaxed. The eyes in the mirror watched, still.

  When Luz opened her mouth, her lips crackled. “Hello?”

  A rusty scrape came from inside the apparatus of the driver’s seat.

  “Where’s my girl?” Luz’s voice was not her own. “I had a girl with me.”

  “Shh,” went the eyes in the mirror.

  “A toddler. Where is she?”

  The figure—a woman—turned in the seat now. She slowly extended both her bare feet—fat, pink bottoms black, grazed by the soiled hem of a flowing, wrinkled white skirt—into the aisle. She was topless, with wide hips crowned by rolls and a soft paunch resting on her waistband.

  She clutched a bundle of cloth to her chest. “Easy,” the woman said.

  Luz caught her tone. “Oh, God.”

  The woman stood. She was massive, her head threatening the ceiling of the bus. Her hair hung lank and greasy and gold-flecked from beneath a filthy bandanna. Another was cinched around her neck. The woman came toward Luz. Her gait was tender, but not tentative. From the bundle hung a pale spindle leg. Long toes. Hard bulb of knee.

  “No,” Luz said. “No.”

  The giantess came at her still.

  “Get away,” said Luz, loud.

  “Shh,” said the woman again, kneeling with some difficulty beside Luz. “She’s eating.” She leaned close—Luz smelled a sourness rising from her—and there, in the wad of cloth was Ig, suckling the giantess’s left breast.

  Luz felt her breath come back to her, and other things with it: relief, joy, the weight of responsibility, a seasick sensation born of both having and having not failed the baby. Ig caught her with one gray eye but continued suckling, her mouth twitching rabbity and the breast plumb against it. Luz touched her head but pulled back when she saw the scabs along Ig’s hairline. “Is she okay?”

  “Hungry. Goes to town whenever she gets the chance.”

  They watched the child in silence awhile. “I’m Dallas,” whispered the big woman.

  “Luz,” said Luz. “That’s Ig.”

  “Ig,” said Dallas, fondly.

  “There was a man with us,” said Luz. “Did you find him?”

  Dallas shook her head no. “Drink this.” She passed Luz a green glass bottle filled with cloudy liquid.

  Luz smelled it.

  “It’s water,” said Dallas, “mostly. You need vitamins, too. Drink it.”

  Luz did, wiping her mouth after. “How long have we been here?”

  “More there.”

  Luz hesitated at the plastic blue barrel, its water low.

  “Go on. They found you yesterday.”

  “Who?”

  “Levi. Out walking.” She gestured to Ig, who watched them still with her one eye like a squid’s, catching light. “You want her?”

  “I don’t . . .” Luz looked at her own austere breasts, her dark nipples veering slightly away from each other. “We gave her formula.” Though she hadn’t. The can Rita gave her was somewhere in the Melon, still sealed.

  Dallas said, “I see.”

  “We had to.”

  “That’s your decision.”

  “Now she’s too old.”

  Dallas shook her head and adjusted the blankets around Ig. “I hate to see young people eating that poisonous crud. My oldest was on the breast until she was four. Kid was the healthiest little nub in Mendocino. Happy, too.”

  Luz nodded.

  “She’s back East now,” said Dallas, by way of full disclosure, perhaps, a gesture to her own motherly imperfections. Luz appreciated it, but she fixed her gaze on the fresh magenta stretch marks radiating along the woman’s brown belly. The oldest was not the child about whose whereabouts Luz was curious.

  Dallas winced. She detached Ig, turned her around, and put her other nipple in the child’s waiting mouth. “Learning with teeth does make a difference.”

  Dallas reminded Luz of the water. Luz drank, grateful that the water was warm because she was still freezing. She hugged the quilt around herself, all the while cupping Ig’s foot in her hand. She could not stop touching the baby.

  “That’s the heatstroke,” said Dallas, nodding to the quilt. “Mindfuck, isn’t it? Bet you haven’t been cold since you were a baby.”

  Baby Dunn said, “Not even then.”

  “Chemicals. You know you’re in a bad way—you know you’re close—when your brain starts thinking in terms of quality of life.”

  “Where are we?”

  A raised brow. “You don’t know?” Dallas reached up over her head, grasped a fistful of the mustang blanket and pulled. “You’ve heard of the dune sea? This is shoreline property!”

  White sun screamed into the bus, stinging Luz’s eyes. She shielded them and saw Dallas do the same for Ig. Luz decided then that this woman could never leave them.

  “Take a look,” said Dallas.

  Luz gathered the quilt around her like a clergyman’s robes and stood, dizzy, the blood in her head suddenly at low tide. When her brain accepted color again it was blue: arresting matte pops of blue spattered along an encampment of dun, blue in slabs, one-dimensional—water, she thought, though it was water as Baby Dunn had drawn it, one flat plane. Oases going snap in the wind. Between the tarps, like boulders to their lagoons, clustered camping tents, cars and bench seats from vans, structures of two-by-fours, plywood and chicken wire, a geodesic dome of PVC pipe. Large aluminum globules with windows also covered in aluminum winked beside corrugated white cuboids splashed with maroon or teal lettering: Wanderlodge, Born Free, Chieftain, Four Winds. The one called Holiday Rambler had a TV antenna swaying high overhead, a red brassiere wagging from it. Everything was covered in dust: plywood, canvas, tires, barrels and boxes and bicycles. The tip of a teepee in the middle distance. Beyond this, a wall of glittering white. Luz shivered again and pulled the quilt tighter. She looked for the top of the dune but could not find it.

  “I’m going to need one of those bikes,” she said.

  Dallas sighed. “Sit dow
n, will you?”

  “I have to find him.”

  “We need to cool you off first,” said Dallas. “You’re sick. You’re weak.” She passed Luz a plastic spray bottle. “Keep moist,” she said. “Get your blood back where it belongs.”

  “He’s out there.”

  “Have a seat.”

  “I won’t wait. It’s not possible.”

  Dallas stood. “Sit on down now, would you please?”

  “I have to find him.”

  Dallas clutched Luz’s arm with her free hand. She held Luz steady with her gaze. “Listen,” she began. Then, after some fortification, “They already found him.”

  “What? What are you—”

  Dallas said, “I’m sorry.”

  “You said . . . No.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said again and meant.

  Luz might have left anyway—might have charged off into the desert like a conqueror, like John Wesley Powell on his velvet armchair strapped atop his raft, directing, with the one arm the Minie balls at Shiloh allowed him, his expedition’s deadly slide down a mile-deep canyon. Might have, like Sacajawea, given Ig a wad of leaves to gum, slung the child into her papoose and set off for home, except when she tried to lift the baby from Dallas’s arms her own quivered and the thew straps along her midback seized and Ig, perhaps sensing Luz’s unfitness, let loose one of her agonized shrieks.

  Dallas eased Ig down and urged Luz to sit beside her.

  “Your muscles are essentially suffocating,” she told Luz, meticulously reattaching the mustang blanket across the exposed streak of windows. “You might walk now. You might run. You can get out there on adrenaline. But they’ll quit on you all at once. You won’t even have a little sports car to protect you. Dying in that bucket will start to look like heaven when the birds come for you. Vultures, grackles. Never mind the movies, they won’t wait for you to die. They’ll take that child piece by piece, baby.”

  “Watch her for me then.”

  “Afraid not. Plenty of hurt in this place without signing this girlie up for more.” Dallas let the blanket fall silently over the washed-out vista beyond. She fetched another bottle of hazy water and sat beside the cushion nest. “Come. Lie down.”

  “Where is he?” asked Luz. “His body.”

  Dallas patted the nest. “Come on.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Levi found it—him. You’ll have to ask Levi.”

  “Where? When?”

  “You’ll have to see Levi.” Dallas passed her the spray bottle. “Got to cool your blood. Got to give your heart a rest.”

  Luz would not accept the spray bottle. To accept it would be to give time permission to go on. The gesture would be an after-gesture, as every gesture would now be, every gesture and glance, every meal, every milestone, every empty sob. “Did he suffer?”

  “Levi can tell you that.”

  Through tears Luz watched the light beat through the mustang blanket. It was afterlight, and though it was almost twin to forelight it was of a different quality entirely. “You keep saying that word.”

  —

  Luz went prone and stayed that way, trying to get a feel for the afterworld, the world without Ray in it. A long time passed like this. She would not remember the plates of food Dallas brought—clean leafy greens, supple strawberries and a golden smile of cantaloupe—nor would she think to ask where these came from. She would not remember the carnival of resurrection the fruits danced across her tongue, nor the paroxysmal shits they visited upon her later. She would not remember Dallas chattering to Ig, Dallas nursing Ig until she fell asleep, Dallas pointing to the child’s blisters and saying that though she was badly burned Ig was in better shape than Luz inside. She would not remember Dallas telling her to spray herself down and she would not remember Dallas misting up her left leg and down her right when Luz refused, Dallas misting from her left fingertips across her chest and neck, to her right fingertips and—because by then her left leg was dry, the skin having swallowed it, or the thirsty air—starting again. She would not remember Dallas spritzing the blankets or soaking torn segments of cloth in water and instructing Luz to lay these where the blood was closest: her neck, armpits, lower back and groin. She would not remember Dallas telling her to picture the tubes clustered near the surface, the blood coming in rusty and overhot, surging right up against the cool rags and turning beryl, turquoise, robin’s-egg. Do you feel it? Dallas hummed, those chilly vessels evangelizing out and back, the icy platelets taking that nip inward, refrigerating her baked organs, hydrating her withered inners. Do you feel it? Luz would not remember saying, Yes, yes.

  —

  Luz did rise, eventually, and together the two women bathed Ig in a blue plastic barrel filleted lengthwise into a trough. A new halo of freckles at her brow, Ig at first grunted her displeasure, then wailed it, and Luz had to lean over and let the baby scratch at her, let Ig clutch her about the throat while she held her close and cooed into her white head. But soon the child grew bold and wiggly, beaching herself on her taut belly, sitting and slapping the water while releasing high honks of joy. Strange, Luz thought, that such a sound was still possible.

  “Easy,” said Luz. “We don’t want to spill.”

  “Let her spill,” said Dallas, baldly charmed.

  The grace of this was staggering, and Luz could barely manage. “She’s never had a bath before.”

  Days passed, many of them. Barrels of water appeared and appeared again, full and clean. More fruit came, and vegetables too, and sometimes charred rounds of rustic yellow bread tasting of fire. They saw no one but Dallas, who went out sometimes, Ig whining after her. Luz never slid the blankets back after that first time, had no intention of leaving the Blue Bird bus whatsoever. Dallas said that was perfectly okay and returned with cloth, gifts, rations, once a sweet ruby grapefruit, which Ig returned to again and again despite the way it made her face collapse in pucker. The baby’s glottal moans went unremarked, her bulbed head and low heavy brow undescribed. Dallas fed them both salt crystals surely harvested from the badlands they had visited with Ray a lifetime ago.

  Ig would have lived in the trough tub, but her lips went blue and quiversome after only a few minutes in even tepid water. “She’s so thin,” Luz said to no one, for Dallas would not feed Luz’s worries. Together they bathed Ig twice a day and as she built her tolerance, Ig’s rash receded and her blisters shrank. Once, Dallas was out fetching supplies and Luz left Ig quietly enthralled in her favorite bath-time game of watching a pair of stones Dallas had brought her sway to the blue bottom of the trough, then retrieving them. Suddenly, the baby shrieked behind her. Luz turned and dashed down the bus to Ig, who was squealing with delight and running circles around the trough, a puffy turd giving chase in her wake.

  The first time Ig stayed tending to her sinking rocks long enough for her fingertips to wither, she stared at them, horrified, whispering, “What is?” until Luz kissed all ten of them and said, “It’s okay.”

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” Ig repeated, petting her raisins against her own lips with the same sensuous intensity she’d had at the raindance.

  “She’s always been like that,” Luz said, wanting Dallas to say either that something was wrong or that nothing was.

  “She’s a feeling being, is all. Probably got that from mom and dad.”

  “Dad, probably.”

  “He was a feeler?”

  “He used to have these nightmares. He’d thrash all night. Scream, sometimes.”

  “What about?”

  “He never remembered. That’s what he said.”

  “You didn’t believe him.”

  “I don’t now. He was always wanting to protect me.”

  “Hm,” said Dallas.

  “What?”

  “Why did he leave you out there then?”

  Luz took an affronted
breath. “He didn’t leave us.”

  “Then where was he going?” Dallas was obstinately frank, and this confirmed Luz’s assumption that she’d had a difficult life. People with hard lives don’t waste time on euphemisms or manners.

  “To get help,” Luz said. How ridiculous that suddenly sounded.

  Dallas again said, “Hm.”

  “He was being a hero. I let him. Made him.”

  “You didn’t make nothing.”

  “I was always needing saving. That was our deal—damsel, woodsman.”

  Dallas wiped Luz’s face. “Some people got to fix everything around them before they can get right with themselves.”

  Ig splashed. Luz said, “It’s just. You spend your life thinking you’re an original. Then one day you realize you’ve been acting just like your parents.”

  Dallas told her story then: her father one of the last holdouts against Big Pot, his the last family farm growing organic Mendo Purps, beautiful six-footers with plum-colored leaves thick as velour and buds frosty with resin. This was the heyday of the NorCal ganja boom and Dallas—named for the site of her conception—grew up bussing tables in her mother’s vegan restaurant, getting tipped with dime bags. “I was high for all my girlhood,” she said, combing her fingers through Ig’s fine hair. “Both my daughters’, too. I try to see my oldest as a baby and I can’t. I was numb and it took them killing my pop to get me sober. Pot wars was in full swing. He was missing for ten days . . . Found him at the bottom of a dry dam. Some Chinatown shit.”

  “There was water.”

  “What?”

  “In Chinatown,” said Luz. “In the reservoir, remember? It’s a freshwater reservoir but later they find salt water in Mulwray’s lungs?”