Claire Watkins - Gold Fame Citrus

He frowned drowsily. “There’s militia at the Oregon border. You know that.” Washington State had stopped accepting Mojav relocation applications.

Luz said, “Idaho then. I read there’re these mountains near Boise and when the sun sets they turn purple. Every day. Something about the altitude. And in the foothills there are these marshes and in the spring they pulse this electric green. You almost can’t look at them.”

“Still?”

No, no more wetlands in Idaho, no grass whatsoever west of the hundredth. “Oh yeah,” she said. “In Idaho? Hella. Idaho’s golden . We’ll take Ig there, she can run around, spaz out. Go apeshit, like kids are supposed to. No more circling the pen.”

Ray smiled at the glass, spacey and fatigued. “That sounds nice.”

Luz wished they were not in the hallway, the ravine of the house. She could not convince him of anything in the hallway. She looked into his reflecting eyes. “They’re going to come for us.”

He shook his head.

“The trucks, Ray.”

“They don’t come up here.”

“They will. Eventually they will.”

Luz watched Ray’s face where it hovered in the glassy black, hollow, ghostly. He clenched his jaw, his impression of a Marine. “I won’t let them,” he said.

“There’s nothing you can do, bub.” She touched him. “We need to get legit.”

Just then, a thin little wailing came to them from Ig’s pen. Ray nearly sprang up, but Luz tethered him down—“Wait her out”—and they sat still as wolves, with Ig calling out in her Ig language. Ray made prayer hands and tugged on his lips with them. It hurt him to leave her this way, Luz could tell. It hurt them both, physically, her voice twine tethered to their bellies, looped around the nodes and coils of their hearts, lungs, bowels. Already, that was so. Finally, the child settled into silence.

Luz whispered, “We’ll have a chance, on the list.”

“Put ourselves on it? Volunteer? ”

She nodded.

“Our part for the cause.”

“I’m serious, Ray.”

“What about her?”

Luz said, “We’ll get her a birth certificate.” Their old group had ways of procuring such documents.

“Luz, I can’t—”

“We’ll say we’re married.”

“Luz—”

“That we got married in the church.” It surprised Luz, how happy even the prospect of this lie made her. She had not thought of herself as someone who wanted to be married, let alone married in a church, but apparently she was.

“Luz, I have to tell you something. Will you listen?” Ray took in a slow, bottomless breath and looked Luz in the eyes. He giggled.

It was not a sound she would have guessed was in him. He gasped shallowly, embarrassed, and out burbled more giggles. “I — he he heh — I can’t go. Ha ha! I can’t go on the list.”

“What?”

“I mean, heh, look — ha ha!” His eyes were wide and manic. “There’s just nothing — ha ha!” He clasped his hands over his mouth. “I’m sorry. I can’t stop. I’m afraid. But I’m being serious — hee hee hee!”

Luz said, “I don’t…”

Ray pressed his face between his hands. “Okay: in the service — heh. Hee hee! Okay: I was in medical school. Did I tell you that?” He had not. “But I quit. Dropped out. Went into the service. I was a medic, sort of. Guys would come to me, all fucked up. All fucked up. I didn’t know what to do. I gave a few of them pills. Standard. I took them, too. So we could sleep. Hee hee — we couldn’t sleep, Luz. More guys came to me. More and more. I gave them what we needed. We took Roxicet, oxy, fentanyl lollipops. Whatever I had.” He stopped giggling. “They were just so fucked up . Everybody was.”

Luz watched his shapes moving across the glass wall. “Lollipops?”

“We were on leave — in San Diego,” his voice on the upswing, as if San Diego were a friend they had in common, “and one of the guys, his buddy had been busted on patrol with morphine patches plastered all over his ass cheeks. They were going to get me. I mean, I’m the only one with a case of fucking made-in-the-USA morphine patches. Fort Leavenworth.” Then, when she clearly did not know what the words Fort or Leavenworth had to do with any of this, he said, “Prison. Military prison. I, well, you know… ran .”

They watched each other in the glass.

“Ass cheeks?” said Luz. She was just saying words.

“We used to do that — the sweat helps. Zaps it into your system.”

Time had gotten woozy under them. It was hard to tell how long they went without speaking. Ray was waiting for something from her, she realized, so she said, “You’re.” It was all she could summon.

“AWOL, I guess you’d say,” then one loud, hard laugh burst from him, “ Bah! Goddamn it.”

“Shh,” Luz said, meaning, Don’t wake her .

“I’m sorry. I should have told you, but… I’m sorry.”

She was putting things together now. She looked up. “We can’t evac.”

“Not without a clean ID.”

“And if we try—”

“They’ll arrest me. Take her for sure.”

This was true, and unthinkable.

The wildfires pulsed behind them, and beyond those the Oregon militiamen cleaned their fingernails. The gatemen at Lake Tahoe changed shifts, one pausing to pluck a tendril of red thread from the other’s uniform. Everything here was ash. Chalkdust and filament. Everything here could be obliterated with a wave of her hand, and she waved her hands all the time.

Ray wept, briefly. Luz touched his face. “We’re lost,” he said eventually, and Luz whispered, “We’re not.” But Ray said again that they were, and Luz was convinced.

And so, lost, they succumbed to sleep.

—

If Ray thrashed his nightly thrashing, Luz did not know it. She woke raw, bewildered, sore deep in her hips and in the shoulder she’d slept on. Her love was gone, already awake and away, a tiny betrayal, no matter that it happened daily. She rose, discovered Ig gone too, and searched for them in the half-light. She found Ray pacing in the indigoed backyard, holding Ig to him, speaking something into her glowy head. He looked up at Luz. His features were defeated, even his gorgeous mouth eroded by the expectation of dawn.

Ray came around to Luz, a new posture of resolve. “I’m sorry about all that, babygirl. I am.”

“I know.”

“I’ll fix it. I will. We’ll get the birth certificate, a clean ID. I’ll take care of everything.” That was what he’d been telling Ig, that he was going to get his shit together, be on top of every damn thing from here on out. Also how quickly one’s beliefs and values and principles and philosophies — all the biggies — could be reduced to a matter of paperwork. Ray said, “We’ll need to go to see Lonnie.”

Luz inhaled. “I don’t want to go there.”

“I know you don’t.” He kissed her temple. “I don’t either. But we have to.”

It was a question whether Lonnie and Rita and the others would still be at the complex, a question answered when Ray approached the building made of snagging stucco, pink like the inner swirls of a conch, so much like the inner folds of a cunt, he thought, and bashed his open hand against the metal gate, bashed as so many others had bashed when he and Luz lived here. Shapes responded in the morning haze, moving along the periphery of the courtyard. The building was constructed like many apartment buildings in Santa Monica: a two-story square with a courtyard and a pool in the center, one heavy metal gate, the architecture of fortification, of circled wagons, as if the city had known what was coming, which, it hardly needs saying, she had.