Claire Watkins - Gold Fame Citrus

Yet Luz yearned for menagerie, left the windows and doors open day and night to invite it, even when Ray complained of the dust, even when he warned that the Santa Anas would drive her insane. Maybe true, for here was this varmint scurrying in her head. Here, finally, was a brave creature come down to commune in the house that wasn’t theirs — it didn’t belong to anyone! — and what had she done? Booted the little fellow in the gut and locked him away.

Air hazy and amber with smoke. Malibu burning, and Luz’s old condo with it. Ticks clinging to the dead grass. Sand in the bedsheets and in her armpits and in the crack of her ass. Jumping bugs nesting in the mattress, all the more pestilent for being probably imagined. Some ruined heaven, this laurelless canyon.

Luz had read that they used to fight fires by dangling giant buckets from helicopters, filling the buckets at a lake and then dumping the water on them. The skies were batshit back then: bureaucrats draping valleys under invisible parachutes of aerosols, engineers erecting funnels to catch the rain before it evaporated, Research I universities dynamiting the sky. Once, an early canyon project, Luz and Ray hiked up the mountain called, horrifically, Lookout, and came upon a derelict cloud seeder, one of those barn-size miracle machines promised to spit crystalline moisture-making chemicals into the atmosphere. Another time they hiked up a back ridge and picnicked above that colorless archipelago of empty and near-empty tanks strung throughout the city. They ate crackers and ration cola and told stories about the mountains, the valley, the canyon and the beach. The whole debris scene. Because they’d vowed to never talk about the gone water, they spoke instead of earth that moved like water. Ray told of boulders clacking together in the ravine, a great slug of rubble sluicing down the canyon. That’s what geologists called it, a slug, and Luz was always waiting for the perfect slug, slow and shapeless and dark, filling all spaces, removing all obstacles. Scraping clean their blighted floodplain.

Ray often went up to the ridge with the notebook he kept in his pocket, but Luz had not been back. Some things were beyond her, such as opening the door to a seldom-used library walled with biographies of Francis Newlands and Abraham Lincoln and Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea and William Mulholland and John Muir (whom she had her eye on) and capturing the small gnawing mammal inside.

She went back to the starlet’s closet, dumped a pair of never-worn espadrilles from their box and brought the empty box to the yard. “I think there’s a prairie dog in the library,” she told Ray.

Ray stopped his hammering. “A prairie dog.”

Luz nodded.

“How’d it get in there?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you put it in there?”

“More or less.”

“When?”

“Can you get it out?”

“Leave it,” he said, turning back to the half-pipe skeleton. Ray was not a reader. He used to read the newspaper every morning, but now that the newspapers were gone he said he was through with the whole reading and writing thing, though Luz had read the secret poems in his notebook.

“It’s not… humane,” she said, offering him the box. “Plus it’s probably crapping everywhere.”

He sighed, unbuckled his tool belt — some long-gone handyman’s — took the shoe box and loped into the house. She followed. He paused outside the library door. “How big was it?”

“Like, a football? I think it was rabid,” she lied. She was beginning to feel ridiculous.

He slid the library door closed behind him. Luz listened. The canyon was hot and still and so was the house. Then came a clamorous ruckus from the library. Ray said, Shitfuck. He said, Jesus.

He emerged like a wildman character making an entrance in a play, vexed and slamming the door behind him.

Luz asked, “Where’s the box?” Ray raised a silencing hand and strode from the foyer into the cavernous living room. Luz followed. He paced madly for a minute before seizing upon the sooty black poker by the fireplace and returning to the library.

Luz sat on the second step of the staircase and waited. There was more ruckus, a crash, the screeching of a desk chair shoved along the exposed concrete floor. Swears and swears. Then quiet. She wanted to open the door but would not.

“Did you get it?” she called eventually.

The door slid open a sliver and Ray’s red and sweaty head poked out. “You better not look.”

Luz put her face in the basin of her hands, then immediately lifted it. She gasped. Ray was before her. Aloft at the end of the poker, the throbbing body of the prairie dog, impaled. Its mouth was open and its forepaws twitched once, twice. Ray hustled outside.

Luz stood, queasy and overheated. She hovered above herself and saw that she was undergoing one of those moments in which she was reminded that Ray — her Ray — had, as part of his vocation, killed people.

She turned around and lurched up the stairs. She did not want to be around when he returned. Halfway up, she tripped. The floating stairs had always unnerved Luz and now they enraged her. She kicked the leaden galoshes from her feet down to the living room with some effort, staggered barefoot to the darkened bedroom, peeled off the suddenly chafing mermaid gown, climbed into the massive unmade bed and wept in the sandy nest of it.

She wept briefly for the creature, and then at great length for all her selves in reverse. First for Luz Dunn, whose finest lover and best friend was a murderer and perhaps always would be, then for Luz Cortez, mid-tier model spoiled then discarded. Emancipated at fourteen, her father’s idea, something he’d prayed on, amputated from him and from child labor laws. Then, finally and with great relish, she wept for Baby Dunn. Poster child for promises vague and anyway broken, born on the eve of some symbolic and controversial groundbreaking ceremony, delivered into the waiting blanks of a speech written for a long-forgotten senator:

Conservation’s golden child arrived at UCLA Medical Center at 8:19 this morning, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. William Dunn of San Bernardino, California. Eight pounds, eight ounces, the child has been adopted by the Bureau of Conservation, which embarks today on an heroic undertaking that will expand the California Aqueduct a hundredfold, so that Baby Dunn and all the children born this day and ever after will inherit a future more secure, more prosperous, and more fertile than our own. We break ground today so that there will be fresh water for drinking, irrigation and recreation waiting for Baby Dunn and her children…

Baby Dunn, born with a golden shovel in her hand, adopted and co-opted by Conservation and its enemies, her milestones announced in press releases, her life literal and symbolic the stuff of headlines, her baby book lousy with newspaper clippings:

GOVERNOR SIGNS HSB 4579; EVERY SWIMMING POOL IN CALIFORNIA TO BE DRAINED BEFORE BABY DUNN IS OLD ENOUGH TO TAKE SWIMMING LESSONS.

BABY DUNN STARTS KINDERGARTEN TODAY WITHOUT GREEN FIELDS TO PLAY IN.

LAST CENTRAL VALLEY FARM SUCCUMBS TO SALT: BABY DUNN, 18, NEVER AGAIN TO TASTE CALIFORNIA PRODUCE.

BERKELEY HYDROLOGISTS: WITHOUT EVACS BABY DUNN WILL DIE OF THIRST BY 24.

Now Luz was twenty-five and hung up on the logistics. Had her parents been paid? Was her envoyery prearranged or hatched last-minute? Some intern of the senator’s staked out in the maternity ward? Some go-getter do-gooder from a public Ivy, recorder in his coat pocket, scouring the waiting room for a photogenic and verbose new parent? How this young gunner must have delighted at finding Luz’s father, big German teeth, a pastor and a salesman, moved by the spirit to join the Rotary Club, to hit the gym by six every morning, to display the apple of his eye in church talent shows, to spend his wife’s financial aid on very good hair plugs. Billy Dunn would not have been in the delivery room, certainly not. Not his business to witness his wife’s woman’s body undergo its punishment. Not permitted by his temperament to acknowledge anything uterine, vaginal, menstrual, menopausal, pubescent. Not here, on the day of his only child’s birth, nor later when Luz’s mother was dead and Luz got leggy and bled purple and shreddy brown, when he could have said what was happening to her and what to do about it, when he could have said, as any man could have, what lay ahead for her. But he did not say, and instead she had stolen a plaid dishrag from the kitchen and cut it into strips with her dead mother’s scalloped scrapbooking scissors — such that the rag strips shared the peppy border of her baby book clippings — and tucked these strips up between her labia. Instead, she had learned from the other girls and from the photographers, often.