Claire Watkins - Gold Fame Citrus

Ray whispered, “We could name her Estrella.” After her long-gone mother, he didn’t have to say.

“We could,” said Luz. “Do you want to?”

“Let’s,” Ray said. “Let’s call her that.” Though they almost never would.

—

Night and the moon was high and fat as a fat face — but beautiful! — and Ig was awake with her feet raised and her fingers curled around her big toes, saying, Bab bab babby bab bab . Luz had a good feeling. The Melon and its cargo had been born of the city and now sailed along the crests and trundles of the straight-up desert. It was better than surfing, Ray said, driving at night on an empty road between the swervy prehistoric hills. They emerged from a batch of bare hillocks and saw before them a great alluvial valley, yawningly vast, the dune beyond dreadful with moonlight.

Then, an iridescent glimmer, a figure in the road. Ray downshifted, slowing the Melon, though Luz told him not to. There were patrols and worse. Bandits. Highwaymen. So she’d heard. As they approached, the figure went from in the road to alongside it, from a being to a box. A dollhouse. A storage unit. No, a booth with a sliding glass window and maps pinned to a corkboard, bleached blank. Before them a mechanical arm, spangled with reflective strips, busted at the joint and part supine on the asphalt. Ray swerved around it and the mechanism lurched, whining, raising the pinched arm so it dangled, flapped, begging amputation.

Ig laughed.

Admitted, they descended below what was once the snow line. The road took them down into an immense forest of silver yucca. On and on for miles staggered the woody skeletons, the monocrop broken only occasionally by a feathery date palm, drought-weary, bowed in half, its fruitless head laid on the lifeless ground. But the palms were rare and in the main the valley stretched on and out and up in tessellations of pale soaptree yucca, spiny heads grafted to thick and hearteningly hairy trunks.

“Look, Ig,” said Luz, twisted around in the passenger seat. “Trees!”

But Ig was a baby and could be dismissive in the baby way. She did not take note of the trees.

“Her first forest,” said Ray.

“Let’s stop.”

“A milestone!” Ray steered the Melon to the shoulder.

“Look, Ig.” Luz wanted the baby to see the forest. She wanted the baby to see every new and magnificent thing in the world. Already there was no limit to her yearning on behalf of the baby.

With the Melon’s cuckoo clock engine turned off, the valley was quiet as a shadow. Luz lifted Ig out of the backseat and went off from the road. “Be careful,” said Ray. He had been saying this lately.

Luz held Ig to her as she walked among the moon-cast shadows of the yuccas, smelling charcoal, saline. The baby went quiet, as if even she, irreverent devil that she was, recognized they were traipsing through something sacred. The yuccas were white in the moonlight and some had holes bored in their shaggy trunks, holes so perfect the wind would have whistled through them, except there was no wind. Some of their spines were gauzed with glistening webs. Surely there were creatures tricksy and nocturnal to be spotted within. Ray noted the holes, too. “Look,” he whispered at one, and Ig did.

They walked on and on through the forest, the wise firecracker heads of the yuccas motionless above. The Melon became an enamel droplet on the tarry road behind them. “These are ancient,” said Luz. “They must be.” Ray touched her elbow lightly, then scooped Ig from her. He pinched a knifey yucca frond between his fingers—“Look, Ig. Tree. Can you say tree ?”

“Eee,” tried Ig.

He brought Ig closer, her small mouth agape, agog, and as he did he pulled on the frond. There was a sound then, an incongruous sound, like the tearing of very delicate fabric. Gossamer, or cheesecloth. A crepe-ish rip, and the massive hairy yucca swayed, somehow. Luz and Ray staggered back and the tree fell between them, sending up a dry veil of dust. Ig said, “Uh-oh.”

“What the fuck?” said Ray. He pressed his foot to the felled thing and where he pressed the trunk collapsed, papery. Ig laughed like a hiccup. They investigated the broken stump and found it completely hollow, save for some dry, twiny marrow inside.

Luz pushed carefully on the trunk of another towering yucca and it too crumpled to the ground, setting Ig agiggle.

“They’re dead,” Luz said. “All of them.” Dead, without moisture enough to rot.

“The groundwater’s gone,” said Ray, though he’d promised he wouldn’t.

Luz plucked a yucca tine from its socket, then another and another, revealing an arid cavity inside the tree. She looked out over the miles and miles of pale lifeless specimen. This was no forest but a cemetery. Ray felled another plant husk and crushed it beneath his boots, its desiccate death rattle vastly satisfying. Ig reprised her hiccup laugh and clapped. She had never clapped for them and so Luz clapped, then toppled and crushed another tree. Ig clapped again, triumphantly.

“Watch this,” said Ray, and then held Ig aloft as he kicked the spindled torso of an adolescent yucca to dust. The baby went hic, hic, clap, clap.

“Watch this ,” said Luz, hoisting a sandstone to her shoulder and shot-putting it clear through the stout trunk of a grandfatherly yucca.

“Bah!” said Ig, clapping like mad.

“Here,” said Ray. He handed Ig over to Luz. He set himself, took a breath, leapt into the air, yipped and torqued a kung fu — type roundhouse kick through the body of a massive hollow plant, splintering it profoundly and sending the spidery head to the ground. Ig laughed and clapped and laughed and clapped.

They continued like this, crushing large swaths through the papier-mâché forest, trampling the flimsy giants, pulverizing the ghostly gray cellulose carcasses and sending up great clouds of dust and cinder. Desiccation vibrated in their sinews, destruction tingled in their molars. Finally, they stood breathing in a clearing of their own gleeful debris, no night breeze chilling them in their sweat. A supernatural stillness overtook them, the fear they had tried to laugh away.

Ray picked up a silvery shred of yucca skin and gave it to the baby.

Ig said, “What is?”

“I told you,” said Luz, starting back toward the road. “A very bad omen.”

—

In the womb of a dream Luz is hiking along a rocky ridge with William Mulholland and Sacajawea through no country she’s ever seen, and though Mulholland has on inappropriate footwear and spiny somethings are everywhere, they are making good time. There is a tang of frost in the air and in the ravine below tremble the heads of plum-colored cottonwoods. Mulholland, his Irish R s bubbly, is talking up home birth, a position Luz supports, though she also has a little devil in her, a little devil who lives in her throat, who makes a hammock of her hyoid bone, the only bone in the body that connects to no other bones, said her homeschooling anatomy coloring book. This devil, suspended in his web of ligaments anchored distally to the tongue, says, “It doesn’t add up, Willy,” and Mulholland says, “I invite you to look at the facts. We rank fortieth in the world in infant and mother mortality. Behind Cuba!” Luz has no hat on suddenly, and the tree-size lilacs in the ravine are swooning, swooning. Sacajawea is a bronze statue on her back and on Sacajawea’s back is Jean Baptiste, stillborn, marbled with blue. Willy Mulholland is saying, “Hospitals are designed for death.” Willy Mulholland is saying, “Septic! Septic!” Sacajawea’s bronze body scorches — what’s become of that frost tang? In the ravine there is a creek running with shreddy brown blood and Willy Mulholland is saying, “Isn’t it amazing what a little light can do?”