Claire Watkins - Gold Fame Citrus

“Go the fuck away!” said the shape at the gate, hood up and bandanna pulled over its face. A new guy.

Ray said, “Be cool man, I know Lonnie.”

“Fuck you do.”

“Yes, fuck, I do.”

“Get the fuck out of here, you fuck, before I blow your fucking brains out.”

Ray sighed. “Okay, fella. Just tell him Ray’s here. Ray and Luz. Could you do that?”

The shape hesitated — scrutinizing Ig where she was on her not-mother’s hip, maybe — then receded. Luz hung back with the baby, wishing Lonnie’s face would and would not materialize behind the grating.

It did not. Instead it was Rita, Lonnie’s girl, her carroty hair tufted into berms by body soil, the green-black at the tips the last of her grown-out dye. A relief, even though Rita hated Luz now — probably everyone here did. Rita’s tiny eyes, fringed by pale lashes, squinted behind the grating, then went for a second up, where a thick swath of tar had been slathered atop the complex wall. From the tar jutted sharpened sticks and spearheads of broken glass. That was new. Rita stowed something in her billowy skirt — a weapon, they didn’t have to guess — and opened the door.

She embraced Ray, who nodded overhead and said, “Bit overkill, don’t you think?”

Rita rolled her eyes. “I know, right?” Then she saw Ig.

She took a small step back. Rita did not come to Luz — Luz did not expect her to — only stared, vaguely horrified, at where the child clung to Luz, grunting drowsily like some lesser primate.

They hadn’t seen Lonnie or Rita in eight months. It might have been eight years. Rita had been stocky, plump as a flounder, big shelf of an ass and gigantic breasts that led her around, made her seem powerful. Luz had always been afraid of her, even when they were supposedly friends. But Rita was thin now, so thin that her tattoos seemed withered. The half-sleeve art nouveau Holy Mother on her right forearm, cherry blossoms and thick gashes of Sanskrit up the inside of her left, Johnny Cash giving the finger from the bicep, a fish skeleton fossilized along her neck, supposedly traced from an ancient urn, all sagged a little, except the asterisks signifying assholes on the spit of bone behind each ear. Even Rita’s signature bullring drooped now from her septum as though her cartilage was fatigued. She’d removed the disks from her ears and the lobes now dangled in melting O s that, Luz noted vindictively, Ig could have put her fist through.

What was Rita before the water went? (Before they took the water, Rita would’ve said, and Luz once, too.) She should have been the drummer in a punk band in a scene so far underground, it would never see the light of day. She should have been barefoot, murdering the double bass pedals on a cover of “Too Drunk to Fuck,” cracking her cymbals, pulverizing her sticks and chucking the splinters into the crowd. She should have been spitting blood on the boys who deposited plastic cups of liquor at her feet. But it had been a dude unloading on the double bass, her boss spitting the blood, Rita depositing the liquor and doing his grocery shopping at the nice Ralphs in the Palisades, Rita driving him to and from LAX, wiping his chow chow’s ass.

“You look like run-over dog shit,” Rita said to Ray. “Are you drinking enough water?”

Another tired joke, but Ray laughed generously. That was his way.

“Come in,” said Rita. “He thought you’d be down.”

Inside the complex, Luz saw that the trees that had once stood in the corners of the courtyard had been ripped up, which did not necessarily surprise her — pretty much all the trees in Santa Monica had been hacked down, even the landward planks of the pier had been scavenged for firewood, the carnival unmoored out on its island of pilings, the Ferris wheel unmoving, unwheeling. Rather, it was the holes where the trees had been that unsettled Luz, dark, expectant as graves. There were never so many hazards in the world as there were today. Love made you see them all.

“What is?” asked Ig.

“Holes,” said Luz.

“Oles,” said Ig.

At the center of the courtyard was the dry swimming pool, its lip glistening black with grind wax. Ray paused over the enviable glob. Chalky sky blue, a color named such before the sky went bloodred with ash, and that before blood went xanthic for want of iron. Luz waited, squeezed Ig to feel the baby resist. Beneath their shoes were the spots where Lonnie’s grandfather, the Persian Jew slumlord of Koreatown, had scattered huge hunks of rock salt along the wet concrete, wanting to mimic the popular pocking of American midcentury driveways. But the salt took forever to dissolve — no moisture — and instead of the subtle stippling of Pasadena, it left behind craters the size of unshelled peanuts. Among those craters, heartening and forgotten imprints where Lonnie’s oma had laid leaves from neighborhood trees atop the wet pour: melaleuca and magnolia and camphor and jacaranda and sweet gum, all the citizens of the so-called urban forest long since charred to carbon.

Luz would have liked to leave Ray beside the dry pool and show Ig the spot Ray had shown her, near the laundry room that had been their room, where the fossil of a spruce sprig was flanked by two gentle divots: Oma’s fingerprints, from where she’d laid the spruce. But to go to the sprig would be to go to the laundry room, would be to go to the chemical and supposedly orchid smell of an ancient half-gone box of dryer sheets, would be to slide down the greased wormhole that scent can be, to their first time, to go to Ray’s bedroll, his canvas duffel, his nine Red Cross candles lined up on a shelf beside his can opener, which she could not stop counting the night — their last in this complex — when she woke Ray and told him, I kissed Lonnie. I let him kiss me. And touch me. We—

— I know.

— I’m sorry.

— Did you want to?

— No. It just happened.

— Why?

— I don’t know. I was fucked up and flattered. I liked that he wanted me.

— Everyone wants you. It’s your job.

— Not anymore. Not like that.

— I want you.

— I know you do.

— Do you want me?

— Yes, Ray. Of course I do. It wasn’t about that. I liked that he liked me.

— Did you like it?

— No. I don’t know. Liking didn’t really come into it.

— Jesus.

And later, because she could not resist:

— How did you know?

— What?

— You said, “I know.”

Ray, disgusted: You came to bed smelling like him.

Luz had to pull it together now. They were here for a reason. Ig squirmed to be put down but Luz told her to shh.

Rita retrieved a wreath of gold keys from the folds of her skirt and unlocked the red door to the apartment she shared with Lonnie, back in the far corner of the complex.

Ray said, “You’re locking doors now?”

Before, all five doors opening onto the courtyard were always wide open or taken off the hinges completely — all except for the storage room, unit B. No locks at the compound, no structure, only frolicsome joy and jam sessions, pranks and all-night debates, raids of merry looting and after these a Christmas-morning vibe. Anyone and everyone was free to come and go, so long as they were committed to the cause and traveled light. No rules was a rule, no labels, and no hierarchy, stressed Lonnie, who owned the place.

Now, all five doors were re-hinged, shut and outfitted with shiny new deadbolts. Rita jangled her keys. “Ch-ch-ch-changes.”

But Lonnie’s apartment was as it had always been, owing to Lonnie’s pathetic Oedipal preservation of the décor meticulously assembled by his mother, the shikse feng shui guru. Here were her star charts, her compasses, her astrolabes of brass and some of lacquered wood. Here were her gnomon, her trigrams, her incense coils gone scentless. There, her dragon head medallions, her color wheels, her innumerable bouquets of plastic bamboo, jabbed into vases half-filled with iridescent glass droplets. Here was her coffee table Zen fountain, now merely a bowl of rocks. Here, here, here, swallowing everything, dense drapes, drapes upon drapes, drapes atop drapes, drapes intertwined with other heavier, darker, mausoleum-making drapes.