Claire Watkins - Gold Fame Citrus

“I know,” he said.

“And thirsty.”

Ray knelt and set the growler between his feet on the pitched concrete. He took one of Luz’s dirty feet in his hand and put a shoe on, then the other. Luz wobbled and steadied herself with his fine broad back. When he finished, Ray dug a ration cola from his backpack, the only drink anyone had plenty of. It was warm and flat and thick with syrup — donated because the formula was off, was the rumor. But it was wet and this alone was reason enough to love him.

She sat and drank and Ray stood — he did not like to sit much — and consulted his list. Ray’s tiny notebook, looted from the back of a drugstore, was the old-timey reporter’s kind with the wire spiral at the top, such that before writing in it he should have licked the tip of his yellow golf pencil, gouged to sharpness with the Leatherman he carried.

Luz snooped in Ray’s notebook whenever possible, skimming his secret poems and skate park schematics and lists. Ray was a listmaker. He did not live a day without a list; Luz had never made a list a day in her life — their shtick. His lists went:

— matches

— crackers

— L

— water

Or:

— shitting hole

— garage door

— L

— water

Or:

— candles

— alcohol

— peanuts

— L

— water

Or:

— axe

— gas

— shoes

— L

— water

Or:

— charcoal

— lighter fluid

— marshmallows for L

— water

Or:

— Sterno

— eyedrops

— calamine

— kitty litter

— L

— water

Or, often, only:

— L

— water

“Hey,” said Ray, batting her with his notebook. “I heard of a guy who has blueberries from Seattle.”

“Seattle,” she whispered, the word itself like rain. “Can I come?” She had never been on a procurement mission, as Ray called them.

“You want to?”

Luz squealed in the affirmative and finished her ration cola. Then they set off, hand in hand, Ray’s eyes as phosphorescent as the day she witnessed him birthed from the sea.

Ray had the blazing prophet eyes of John Muir, and like John Muir, war had left him nerve-shaken and lean as a crow. The ocean had restored him. The way he told it, a city of a ship bearing the emblem of the motherland deposited him in the riverless West, at San Diego. He was released — honorable discharge, had medals somewhere — but the whole way back he’d been jumpy, sleepless, barely keeping the darkness at the edges. Nothing soothed him until he heard the white noise of the breakers. So instead of going home to the heartland he liberated a surfboard from someone’s backyard and made his home in the curl. He had a mind to surf through all crises and shortages and conflicts past and present. He would make a vacuum of the coast, nothing could happen there, even the things that had happened before he was born. He was surfing the day they pronounced the Colorado dead and he was surfing the day it was dammed, a hundred years before. When some omnipotent current ferried him northward toward LA, he allowed it. He surfed as that city’s aqueducts went dry. He surfed as she built new aqueducts, wider aqueducts, deeper aqueducts, aqueducts stretching to the watersheds of Idaho, Washington, Montana, aqueducts veining the West, half a million miles of palatial half-pipe left of the hundredth meridian, its architects and objectors occasionally invoking the name of Baby Dunn. Ray surfed as concrete waterway crept up to Alaska, surfed as the Mojave and the Sonoran licked the bases of glaciers. He was surfing each time terrorists or visionaries bombed the massive unfilled aqueduct canals at Bend and Boise and Boulder and Eugene. He surfed as states sued states and as the courts shut down the ducts for good. He surfed as the Central Valley, America’s fertile crescent, went salt flat, as its farmcorps regularly drilled three thousand feet into the unyielding earth, praying for aquifer but delivered only hot brine, as Mojavs sucked up the groundwater to Texas, as a major tendril of interstate collapsed into a mile-wide sinkhole, killing everybody on it, as all of the Southwest went moonscape with sinkage, as the winds came and as Phoenix burned and as a white-hot superdune entombed Las Vegas.

Then, one day, Ray emerged from the thrashing oblivion of the Pacific at Point Dume, and there was a chicken-thin, gappy-toothed girl sitting in the sand beside a suitcase and a hatbox, crying off all her eye makeup.

Seawatery, gulping air and clutching his board to him, Ray approached her. What was the first thing he said? Luz could not now remember, but it would have been sparkling. She did recall his hands, gone pink with cold, and his pale aqua prophet’s eyes, and herself saying in response, “I haven’t seen anyone surfing in years. I forgot about surfing.”

His hope naked, Ray asked, “You surf?”

She smiled thinly and shook her head. “Can’t swim.”

“Serious? Where you from?”

“Here.”

“And you can’t swim?”

“Never learned.”

They sat quiet for a time, side by side in the sand, hypnotized by the beckoning waves.

“Where are you from?” she said, wanting to hear this wildman’s voice again.

“Indiana.”

“Hoosier.”

“That’s right.” He grinned. He had an incredibly good-looking mouth.

“Why’d you come here?”

“I was in the military.”

“Were you deployed?”

He nodded.

“What did you do?”

He shrugged and snapped a seaweed polyp between his fingers. “You’ve heard that dissertation.”

He said his name and she said hers and then they sat again in quiet. At their backs, gone coral and shimmering in the sun’s slant, was a de-sal plant classified as defunct but that in truth had never been funct. They’d heard that dissertation, too.

Luz asked, “You going to evac there, Indiana?”

“Nah.”

“Where, then?”

“Nowhere.”

“Nowhere?”

“Nowhere.”

He told her about the sea and his needing it and then, when she suggested Washington State, he said California had restored him, that he would not abandon her. And eventually he told her too about the younger sister born without a brain, only a brainstem — so much like brain stump —that she was supposed to die after a couple of weeks, but she was twenty-one now and a machine still breathed for her, which made Luz think iron lung even though that was not quite right. The wrong mote of dust could kill her, said Ray. One fucking mote. And because of this his mother was always cleaning, cleaning feverishly, cleaning day and night, cleaning with special chemicals the government sent. She didn’t want Ray around. “It’s too much for her,” he said. “Anyway they’re screening pretty heavy in Washington now, and the only skills I have I never want to use again.”

“You’ve got charm,” she said. “Charisma.”

“I think they’re maxed out on charisma.”

“You can surf.”

“You know, I put that on my application.”

“What happened with it?”

“An orca ate it, actually.”

People always claimed they were staying, but Ray was the first person Luz believed. “So what are you going to do?” she asked.

“Some people I know have a place. Even if they didn’t, Hoosiers aren’t quitters. California people are quitters. No offense. It’s just you’ve got restlessness in your blood.”

“I don’t,” she said, but he went on.

“Your people came here looking for something better. Gold, fame, citrus. Mirage. They were feckless, yeah? Schemers. That’s why no one wants them now. Mojavs.”

He was kidding, but still the word stung, here and where it hung on the signage of factories in Houston and Des Moines, hand-painted on the gates of apartment complexes in Knoxville and Beaumont, in crooked plastic letters on the marquees of Indianapolis elementary schools: MOJAVS NOT WELCOME. NO WORK FOR MOJAVS. MOJAVS KEEP OUT. A chant ringing out from the moist nation’s playgrounds: The roses are wilted / the orange trees are dead / them Mojavs got lice / all over they head.