Gold Fame Citrus

by Claire Vaye Watkins

  “Arsenic poisoning,” the man said. He retreated to the shade inside the teepee and gestured with his jumpy hand for Ray to join him. “You’re Luz’s man.”

  Ray shrugged. “I was.”

  “I’m Jimmer.” He extended his hand.

  “Ray.”

  “Back from the dead. Where are they keeping the dead these days?”

  “Limbo Mine. You know it?”

  “Not from experience.”

  “Glad to hear that.” Ray tried to avoid staring at Jimmer’s face.

  “Domestic dispute?”

  Ray nodded.

  Jimmer nested a cloth inside a fisherman’s cap and donned it. “Luz said you were a surfer. Do I recall that correctly?”

  “Used to be.”

  “Well, let’s not sit here staring at each other.”

  Jimmer instructed Ray to shoulder two flattened oblong petals of tin, each with four holes punched in it, two loops of rope tied through these. Together, they walked into the dune sea.

  “See those?” Jimmer pointed back across the shrinking valley, toward the troubling range where clouds made a calico of the sky. “Gonna have a helluva sunset tonight. One upside to those mountains.”

  They walked on, the colorless sand sucking at their feet. After some time Jimmer pointed at a steep crescent peak two ridges over. “That’ll do,” he said. They pressed on, drizzling sweat. Struggling up the final slope, Ray’s calves began to spasm. “I wouldn’t mind a lift,” he said. “A towline, even.”

  “They’ll install all those soon as this thing stops.”

  “You think it’ll stop?”

  “Never.”

  They reached the top of the big ridge, lungs screaming.

  “Air is stingy up here,” said Jimmer.

  Ray said, “I feel it.”

  The sheets of tin were baking as Ray laid them on the sand. Jimmer showed him how to bind his feet to his board with the rope loops, across the toes, around the ankle and back across the heel. They sat this way, on the lip of the dune, tin obelisks strapped to their feet, the colony below miniature in the shadow of those wicked granite teeth beyond, until Jimmer said, “After you, young man.”

  Ray stood and leaned down the dune. The sand shifted beneath him, ceded to gravity, and he slid. He glided, faster and faster, beating his arms for balance until the dune bit the edge of his board and threw him down. He came up cackling. Jimmer followed after, bit it, came up shouting, “Goddamn it, that’s important!”

  Onward they slid. They trembled. They tumbled. They moved first like tentative leaves falling softly from the summit, then in wide dreamy arcs, and finally swift and daring as diving swallows. Sensation throbbed in their groins, their abdomens, their inner ears and trembling glutes. It was a kind of flying, gliding across the sand, swishing down and the air suddenly nipping, cooling where they sweated, which was everywhere. They crowed Wheeee at the summit and Again at the base. When they fell they somersaulted, coating themselves with albino dusting. When they gathered speed they thrust their giddy fists into the air, for it was a surprise every time. They carved the dune and climbed it again, climb and carve and fly and sing, letting loose all the joyous cries that might have otherwise died inside them.

  In time, Jimmer and Ray sat at the summit, panting. Ray surveyed the colony below, looking, he realized, for a way out.

  “I can’t tell you how long I’ve been waiting to do this,” Jimmer said. “I went snowboarding once, as a kid. Once. Course I mighta dreamt it. Always wanted to move somewhere with snow.” He made an hourglass of his hand, let sand slip through. “But I had a nice little homestead. I had a canyon all to myself. I put a statue down there when my boy went, then another, built a bridge, a walkway, carved a scene into the cliffside, I couldn’t stop. Wife left; I hardly noticed. Though she would say I’m the one who left.”

  “What happened to it?” asked Ray. “Your canyon?”

  “The dune came and took it. What I remember most was how quiet it was. I’d always wanted to go out there with a shotgun. Blow it all to smithereens. But the dune just slipped over it, like a clean bedsheet. Merciful, I guess I thought.”

  For the first time, the word seemed right to Ray, especially here, in sight of those toothy peaks, so forbidding opposite the soft swooping embrace of the dune sea. The heartcolors had left him now, but the sun had set, and as Jimmer predicted, the clouds snagged on the new range, aflame. Ray did not miss his visions—he missed Luz, wanted to ask Jimmer the secret to keeping her, though he thought he knew. When he’d been able to pry her away from Levi, the old Luz surfaced. In the weeks since he returned, Luz and Ig had spent every night with Ray in the bus. He didn’t want to know all that had happened between Luz and the dowser—didn’t blame her, no, but didn’t want to know the details, either. She’d tried to tell him sometimes, in the dark, but he’d stop her. It doesn’t matter, he’d say. It all happened for a reason, she’d say. But really Ray did not want to invite the man between them that way. And though he would never say so, it was, he supposed, a story he knew from before, the same that sent them up into the canyon. But this new devotee Luz was bristling, unpredictable, and he didn’t want to spook her. Nights together or no, something pulled her back to Levi, Ray knew, and he had been intent on giving her no reason to follow that pull—no guilt and no conditions. Everything clean between them. But that was ruined now.

  Below, someone had started a fire. Black smoke helixed skyward and disappeared. Nearby, on a big, palm-flat rock, was the dome Ray knew belonged to Levi. Alone, apart, the first time it’d been so, Jimmer said. The dome glowed from within as darkness came, lovely, Ray had to admit.

  —

  Luz tried to nap but the Blue Bird was poisoned, the bad air from the fight pressing heavy on her. She tidied up the bus, returned the abused primer to the glove box and took Ig for a walk.

  Levi’s dome had been relocated to a flat, rust-red rock from which radiated tremendous heat. In the center of the dome was a pile of stones baked in a nearby fire. Luz entered and was immediately surprised by the intensity inside; she had not known it could get hotter.

  Levi lay nearly naked on his stone floor, shining. “Sweat lodge,” he said. “The heat in this rock was absorbed before you or I were born. Slow the heart rate. Essentialize the thought processes. Reduce to its basicmost pathways. Go through fight or flight and out the other side. To clarity and truth.”

  He invited her to disrobe and feel it. She felt a primal urge to do just that. The happiest slivers of her girlhood had been spent on a beach towel on a rhombus of dead lawn in Pasadena, thinking of nothing except absorbing the sun, of the air moving around her setting a chill to the sweat shimmering on her upper lip, of evading the sundial trajectory of the finger of shade cast by the single palm in their neighbor’s yard, of an insect screaming near her ear or a snowball of sweat rolling from the scoop of her sacrum into her butt crack. But mostly, there on the towel, she had wondered what she would look like one day, when she was tan or when she was thin, and would there be lines here or creases here? Would there be unwelcome hairs, cellulite pocking? In all her hours lying in the sun and thinking, she had never concentrated on important things, never asked herself difficult questions. She wished now that she had.

  Her impulse to join Levi was tempered not only by Ig on her hip, cranky from her truncated nap, but by the pair she’d passed as she’d entered the dome, a girl called Rachel, sex-flushed, and Cody, who failed to meet Luz’s gaze, squeezing Ig’s bare foot instead. Though Luz knew she had no right to be hurt, she was.

  Levi tipped water over the rocks, and they watched it hiss instantly to steam. “You’ll want to sit,” he said. “Heat rises.”

  She sat across from him and tried to coax Ig into her lap, but the girl was interested only in climbing on and off Levi’s cot. “Let her,” Levi said.

  Luz began. “I’m sorr
y I haven’t been by. Since . . . Ray . . .”

  “We don’t own each other, Luz.”

  “I know. It’s just . . . complicated.”

  “Complications are human inventions.”

  “I know,” she said, “but I’m feeling—”

  “Come over here.”

  “I just wanted to tell you—”

  “I can’t talk to you when you’re way over there.”

  Luz moved close enough to feel a swell of heat coming off him. “You’re burning up,” she said.

  “That’s the idea,” he said. “Important decisions to be made. I’m going deep within for answers.” He meant the wall of rock coming at them, she knew, and other decisions too.

  Luz said, “He’s Ig’s father.”

  Levi put his hand on the back of her neck and shook his head. “So you’re lying to me? Closing off again?”

  “No, I—”

  “That’s not you talking—it’s him. He’s toxic. I’ve seen the two of you together. He’s poisoning you.”

  “He’s not,” said Luz.

  “Listen to yourself. Look at you.” He pointed to her crossed arms and her folded legs, her yielding shoulders and drooping head. “You’re all walls, all barricades. Your body’s a prison.”

  She uncrossed her arms but had nowhere to put them. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Anything.” He retrieved a pouch drooping with dried, dark roots. “Here.” She added a nub to the one gone pulpy in her mouth.

  “I’ve never been with you,” she said, “on a dowsing. I’d like to see that.”

  “I’m going to touch you,” he said.

  “Wait, Levi. Please. Will you take me with you one day?”

  He kept touching her. “Don’t you want to get back to where we were?”

  Luz wanted to get back there, she did, even if she didn’t know where it was. But wherever it was, Ray would not be there. She looked to Ig.

  “Let her be,” said Levi.

  As if to counter, Ig yanked Levi’s blanket from his roll and nearly toppled the cot. “No, Ig,” said Luz. “Stop.”

  Ig began to cry.

  “She’s too hot in here,” said Luz, pushing Levi’s hands away. “She didn’t get a nap.”

  Luz tried to comfort Ig. The child’s face was flame-red and slick as the flesh of some lost fruit. The tantrum continued, frenzy and agitation rippling like waves through the baby’s whole body. She flailed, would have flung herself atop the scorched stones had Luz not restrained her. “Shhh,” Luz tried. She didn’t know what the fuck she was doing and never had.

  Levi peeled a tendril of root from the pouch. “Give her this.”

  Ig screamed on. Luz hesitated to take Levi’s offering and hated that she did. She could not seem to escape herself—Ray’s return was proof of that.

  She took the root and presented it to Ig. Miraculously, Ig paused in her rage, accepted the root and, as with everything, inserted it into her mouth. “Good girl,” said Levi, his hands on Luz again, making promises.

  Soon Ig was suckling quiet and wide-eyed on the cot—“That’s her mind’s knot untying,” Levi said. “Perfectly natural.”

  Luz let Levi undress her, then slid atop him.

  After, heat-sick and dizzy, she said, “You’ll take me with you? I want to see you work.”

  Levi sighed. “Not now, Luz.”

  “Please,” she said. “I need to see for myself.”

  Levi handed her the pouch of root. “Do you hear yourself?” he said. “You have doubt pouring off you. I can’t bring you. I can’t have you contaminating the process.”

  Luz lifted Ig, spaced-out and silent, from the cot.

  “I need peace now,” Levi said, and Luz showed herself out.

  —

  Jimmer rebuilt his cathedral canyon for Ray, there on the high white slopes of the dune sea, recasting each statue and sculpture, repainting each mural, rearranging each altar, reigniting each candle. Ray listened and watched the luminous dome below. Shapes moved inside, inky against the light. Ray did not allow himself to speculate on who the shapes might be. But then Luz emerged from the dome, Ig limp on her hip.

  Jimmer stopped talking. He’d seen Luz too and with his silence sanctified Ray’s dejection. Jimmer did not need to say what he said next. It was a fact both men knew and both would have preferred not to have aloud and airborne between them, for they also knew that for all the glee and speed and colossal fun of the day, this would be what they remembered, what it all led to, the utterance undoing all else, the tug of the first thread. The knowledge would make Ray lie when Jimmer descended back down to the colony, make him say he only wanted to enjoy the quiet a little longer. It would keep Ray up in the dune that night. But like Ray, Jimmer had his little one on his mind, his cathedral and his son. He was brimming with everything still unsaid, of and to the child who was no longer. He wanted to say his name, which was the name of the grandfather who’d taken no interest in the boy. Jimmer felt the boy’s arm too yielding where Jimmer yanked it, his freckled shoulder abandoning its socket. Jimmer touched his own tongue to the boy’s gummy red pit, a tooth yanked free too soon. He felt all things going, and though it was obvious and unnecessary and too late, he told Ray, “Son, you’re not safe here.”

  Luz had chewed the whole sack of brute root and the flames were diamonds and triangles, arrows of light with pretty blue lozenges inside them. People spoke to her and she watched their faces go cubist, the features tectonic and akimbo. She walked. Bikes were sculpture in the new high country, thanks to impeding boulders and sandy sagebrush haystacks, and for a long time she stared at a pile of them, dancing. Jimmer’s teepee sprouted skyward like a beanstalk, and had she a little more energy she would have climbed it to heaven. She made a note to do that, if need be. Cody’s vans had little constellations of condensation in the corners of their windows, which were eyes wide open to all the alchemy in the world, which even Ray could not smash. She believed in something, would leap over the maybe-Sierras, smiling up at and down on her with their jack-o’-lantern teeth. She could feel ideas as they were conceived in her mind, shooting-star neuron kites with strings grazing her gray matter—a tingle breezing from one side of her skull to the other. She felt this epiphany—that ideas were physical and an attuned person could feel them—the way others felt a sneeze coming on. Which was to say there were all different ways of listening. She heard her brain whispering to her eyes, convincing them anew of such concepts as color and light. She was very still for a very long time. She was inside her own heart, kneeling in a soupy chamber, going at the wall with a ball-peen hammer. She’d cracked a hole there, in the wall between the intellectual and the sensual, and so her thoughts were sensations. She tracked a tremor of relief as it surfed a deep layer of her dermis. She could hear different parts of her going through their involuntary, invisible procedures. They were worker bees or drones, and baked, she remembered, like Dallas had said, the inside of you is baked. Her organs had been tanning, they were leathery or peeling or charred and miserly, and still valves were opening and closing, rings of muscles cinched and uncinched, flaps of skin fluttered to a silent close, and an impossible number of little fingers were waving in some acid bath, saying, Onward! Onward! Onward! Go! Go! Go! She said, Ig, Ig, Ig, but no one answered. Somewhere someone laughed and the laughter turned to smoke, which lifted skyward and made a message there, an unreadable message whose gist she was almost able to grasp. The very dust on her skin was alive, its mites crawling all over her, and if she could only be still enough she herself would be the ecosystem. It might have been one night, or three. Someone brought her a red ovary to eat and she held it in her two hands until she forgot about it but then it hatched and birthed warm liquid and in it swam smiling larvae and these belonged on her in the ecosystem of her body and so she smeared them upon herself and walked into the dune and dug a burrow where s
he would wait and see all those wondrous creatures for herself, see them hatch across her.

  This is where they found her. This is where they said her name.

  But their words were not words until the words were, “Ig is hurt.”

  “What?”

  “They think she was bitten by something.”

  “Oh Jesus.”

  “She’s with Jimmer.”

  —

  Ig’s body told the story: one whole side of her swollen to bursting and black, her left arm bloated and prosthetic-looking, unable to bend, her neck swallowed, her eye sockets screaming red seams between two bulbs of waxy flesh. Ray was with her, and Jimmer too. Ray held a peeled stick in her mouth. “It holds her tongue down.” He showed Luz where it was worst: the red-ringed punctures in the baby’s blood-glutted head and in both hands, yeasty like over-risen dough, the digits all but indistinguishable.

  “Jimmer says tarantula wasps. Or vinegaroons. She can’t eat yet, so we can’t tell whether it’s affected her sense of taste. She probably walked into a nest. You can see that some got caught in her hair. They would sting her head and she’d reach up to stop them and then they’d sting the tips of her fingers. She couldn’t understand what it was and no one was there. They would sting her and she’d reach up again. This happened over and over until she passed out. One of the girls found her this morning. Took us two hours just to get the stingers out. No one could find you.”

  “Keep pressing,” Jimmer told Ray. “Her tongue’s as big as a fist.” The baby’s throttled breathing was unbearable, only worse those moments it stopped.

  “Keep her awake,” Jimmer told Ray.

  Luz said, “What can I do? Tell me what to do.”

  No one answered. Ray began to cry, quietly, the only other sound Jimmer grinding a stone between two others until it was green dust. This he mixed with water in a gourd to make a mud. He began coating Ig’s distended body in this. “Bentonite clay,” he told Ray. “Draws the poison out. Wish I had aloe but this will have to do.”