Claire Watkins - Gold Fame Citrus

“Take this,” Rita said, from somewhere deep within her box borough.

She gave Luz a garbage bag. It was half-full but heavy and Luz held it open like a child asking for something. “What’s this?” Inside was slick plastic in pastels, puffy teal cubes and countless doughy faces, all of them caught in the act of laughter.

Rita put more bounty into the sack. “He’s too good for you, you know. Ray.”

“I know.”

“It’s not your fault, though. He’s too good for anyone.”

Rita rifled still, and into the garbage bag went more diapers, rubber nipples, a thermometer, burp cloths, bottle of powder, bottle of oil, tube of rash cream, tube of ointment, a bushel of used onesies. Two cans of formula.

Luz said, “Why do you have all this?”

“Doesn’t matter. Here.” Rita presented Luz a car seat.

She was a good woman, Rita.

The A/C had quit outside Santa Clarita, started blowing hot, syrup-smelling smoke in what was once strawberry country. “What is?” Ig asked from the backseat, and though she knew Ray would scowl at her for it (and he did), Luz had said, “A very bad omen.” But Ig was asleep now, and because Luz did not know how to drive stick — even the phrase she found unpleasant — she sat in the passenger seat in the starlet’s slip, sweating and watching the crusty wasted fields fold past. She rolled the window down, hoping to smell the sea, but they were well inland and the wind was not cooperating and all that came in was a vicious cyclone of heat and dust that whipped her across the face with tendrils of her own dirty hair. She would never smell the Pacific again.

She rolled up the window. She’d sweated through the starlet’s slip in places — eclipses leeching from her armpits, a Rorschach line below her breasts — and the silk clung to her. She wanted to sleep — needed to — but could not. The dress she’d peeled off outside Ridgecrest was wadded somewhere on the floorboards in the backseat. She should have worn shorts, a tank top, boots. Ray had said as much before they left, but Luz ignored him. After one last round of dress-up she took Ray’s hand as they stood facing the starlet’s indifferent, cantilevered villa.

“Say good-bye with me,” she said. “Be a husband.”

Ray saluted. “Good-bye, house.”

Luz frowned. “I meant silently.” She closed her eyes, keeping his hand in hers. Behind them, on the bridge driveway, was the Melon, loaded with diapers, rubber nipples, a thermometer, burp cloths, bottle of powder, bottle of oil, tube of rash cream, tube of ointment, bushel of onesies. Two cans of formula plus eight Sparkletts bottles filled with gasoline, two with water, a flat of ration cola, a cubic foot of graham crackers, another of dry cereal, a plastic grocery bag filled with PowerBars, canned food from Rita and Lonnie’s stash — sardines, mostly, and some tuna — scarves, sunglasses, hats, biographies, six tiny notebooks bound together with a rubber band, the hatbox with the rest of Luz’s money in it, about one hundred thousand dollars, and in the glove box a manila envelope with the name of an intersection in St. George, Utah, and Lonnie’s guy — Samuel, whom Ray was calling Sammy the Bull — and both of their original IDs, though Ray had wanted to burn his. Also in the envelope, with Sammy the Bull and Ray the Hoosier and Luz Cortez of Malibu, CA, was the birth certificate of Baby Dunn: Luz Eleanor Dunn, six pounds, nine ounces, a greasy smear of black hair atop her head, labia and teats inflamed with her mother’s hormones, a dark, spinachy meconium collecting in a rectum the diameter of a wedding band, a coat of translucent hair all over her body, setting her ashimmer in the sun of suns. A mascot before her mother would wear the velvety fuzz away, loving her. A logo before the ink on the certificate was dry.

Standing in front of the starlet’s, Ray had closed his eyes and sighed peacefully, which had made Luz feel at peace, too.

But that peace had left her now, and an irritable, fidgeting anxiety had taken over. Luz pressed her bare feet against the windshield already smudged with her footprints, then removed them. She consulted the map Lonnie had given them, an old map on which he’d traced a large oval with a question mark inside—“I think that’s where it is.” They would skirt the Amargosa to the north. Each moment she was farther from home than she’d ever been. She couldn’t get comfortable. Whichever way she arranged herself there was something to burn her: the metal tongue of the seat belt, the hot nub on the e-brake, the dash gone waxy, the scorching leather against her thighs, sweating as though still some live thing’s hide.

Her thoughts went to helpers: St. George, Lawrence, Savannah. They sounded like people who couldn’t be trusted. The Carolinas were two mean girls from grade school.

She looked back at Ig, strapped in Rita’s car seat. The seat was not the right size, maybe, and the child slept with her head rolled down and to the side at such an angle that her neck looked broken. Wisps of her yellow-white hair gone lank with perspiration. Dry cereal rings were confettied all over the backseat, one stuck to her blood-flushed cheek. Luz stretched and brushed it off, then touched the back of her hand to the child’s warm, bulbed brow.

“She’s still hot,” Luz said.

Ray glanced in the rearview mirror. “Let her sleep.”

“What if she’s hurting?”

“Wouldn’t she wake up?”

“I don’t know,” said Luz. She cupped the child’s thick, dimpled knee with her hand. “I don’t know.”

The sun at their back was dipping, finally, setting the bald and hazy mountains in the distance aflame.

“She doesn’t have a name,” said Luz. She might know how to mother the child if only she had something proper to call her.

“She does,” said Ray. “Only we don’t know what it is and never will.”

“She’s an orphan,” said Luz. “Like us.”

“We’re not orphans,” he said.

“We are, kind of. We don’t have anyone.”

“That’s true,” said Ray. This made her feel good, annihilation. She would have liked to kiss him, rest her head on his shoulder, but her guilt would not allow it. The visit to the compound had put Lonnie’s scent on her again. But they’d both made mistakes, hadn’t they?

Luz studied the mountains ahead, watched the sunset coloring them as the things gone from them: lilac, plum, lavender, orchid, mulberry, violet. Pomegranate, one of the last to go. John Muir had written how when we try to pick out anything by itself we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. Above those spoilt purple mountains materialized a glowing wedge of light, whiter than the sun, thin, blurred, and radiant. Snow, Luz thought, unable to stop herself. She’d seen snow only once, from a train skirting the Italian Alps, but she had never touched it and already she was zigging up there, ramming her fingers into the cool blue bank until they stung, crunching the puffs of sparkling crystals in her teeth, falling backward to make angels in the airy drifts.

But there was nothing cool or blue or airy about this calcium-colored crust capping the range. It throbbed with heat, glowed radioactive with light. Luz said, “What is that?” just as the answer came to her.

Ray said it. “The dune sea. The Amargosa.”

“It’s that close?” They were barely beyond the city.

Ray shook his head. “It’s that big.”

This knocked Luz off balance: The dune was not atop the empurpled range before them but beyond it, beyond it by miles and miles. The white was not a rind of ice, not a snowcap, but sand piling up inland where the Mojave had been.

They watched this sandsnow mirage, hypnotized by fertilizer dust and saline particulate and the pulverized bones of ancient sea creatures, though they did not know it. Did not know but felt this magnetic incandescence working the way the moon did, tugging at the iron in their blood. Knew only that it left them not breathless but with their breaths exactly synchronized. Ray reached for Luz, took her hand as though he’d never before touched her. They went on, silently transfixed by the immaculate flaxen range looming before them.