Claire Watkins - Gold Fame Citrus

But Ray smiled and his kind mouth once again soothed Luz. “We’re stick-it-out people,” he said, but what he really meant, she knew, was they could be Mojavs together.

Ray brushed a hank of hair from her eyes and said, “You look like I know you.” Had he seen her before? Luz said maybe and sheepishly described the decaying billboard surveying Sunset Boulevard, her in sweatshop bra and panties, eyes made up like bruises, crouched over a male model’s ass like she was about to take a bite out of it. Get those freaky teeth, the art director had not even whispered. One papery panel peeling off now, so her bare legs looked shrunken, vestigial. “The zenith of my career,” she said. “Minus a commercial for wine coolers.”

Ray said, “No, somewhere else,” then Luz kissed him.

After, there was more silence between them, but it did not feel like silence. It felt like peace.

Ray asked, “What about you? You going to evac?”

They took you by bus. Camps in Louisiana, Pennsylvania, New Jersey. No telling which you’d end up at and anyway it didn’t matter. It was temporary, they said. The best thing you could do for the cause. She knew better, but she was scheduled to go anyway. The suitcase beside her was filled with novels and wads of designer clothes, the hatbox heavy with her savings. But she hated crowds, hated every human being except this one beside her. She suddenly and fiercely did not want to get on a bus tomorrow. She wanted to fall in love instead. Frightening herself, she said, “I was.”

So Ray took her home, to the gutted Santa Monica apartment complex from which his friends staged their small resistance. They had sex on Ray’s bedroll in the laundry room. After, he said, “I need you to promise me we won’t talk about the war.”

She said, “Promise me we won’t talk about the water.”

He said, “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

—

Now, dusk was coming to the dry rills of raindance. Luz followed Ray along the berm and, though it scared her, into a man-high rusty corrugated drainage culvert, where the berry man was supposed to be. Inside, a stench met them, fecal and hot. Something scraped about back in the darkness, something screeched. As the light at their backs wilted, Luz put one hand to her mouth and groped for Ray with the other. This was, she realized, probably not a good place to be a woman.

The starlet’s sandals began to slice into Luz’s heels again and she stumbled. “You okay?” Ray whispered. She nodded though she was dizzy and hot and there was a new pressure on the underside of her eyebones, and though Ray surely could not see her nodding in this semiterranean dark.

Soon, Luz’s pupils dilated wide enough to accept Ray’s silhouette ahead of her. She clung to him with one hand and traced the other along the metal wall of the pipe, flinching at its rust splinters and steadying herself as she lurched over knee-high sediment dunes and dry knolls of sewage. The culvert forked into a smaller pipe where Ray had to stoop. The sounds went human now; voices of people gathered to haggle and score ricocheted down the tube.

Fresh socks here, all-cotton socks.

Ovaltine, whole can, hep!

Luz and Ray continued, the culvert soon clogged with the crowd’s collective fetid lethargy. Wherever the pair walked, bodies blocked their path. Luz would have liked to hear some Spanish, to be reminded of her mother, but even here there was none, influx long ago turned to exodus. Ray lightly lobbed the words blueberries and Seattle into the darkness and what came back was Not me, white boy. Deeper, brother, and then, Um-hm. Careful. He nasty.

Finally Ray called blueberries and was tossed Here, son . From the darkness materialized a shirtless, ashy-skinned daddy-o, bald head glistening, tiny mouth gnawing on a black plastic stir straw. Beside him stood a Filipino with scarred hands and a backpack.

The daddy-o held a drained cola can aloft in the darkness. “King County blues. One-fifty.”

Ray took the can and examined it. He handed it to Luz. A handful of berries padded inside the aluminum. She put the can to her nose and thought she smelled the dulcet tang of them.

“Give you seventy-five,” said Ray.

The daddy-o bowed reverently to the can. “All due respect, son, these is some juicy-ass berries. Juicier than juicy pussy.” He winked at Luz. “Can’t give them up for less than a hundred.”

“Eighty then.”

“Eighty,” the daddy-o said to his partner. He sucked his teeth.

The Filipino said, “Used to be a nigger could make a living in this city.”

“That’s all I got,” said Ray, though it was not.

“All you got, hmm,” said the daddy-o. He reached out to retrieve the can from Luz. She handed it over, but instead of taking the can from her, the daddy-o torqued his long-nailed index finger through the starlet’s tennis bracelet, still strung like dewdrops around her wrist. He yanked, but the bracelet held. Luz pinched her breath in her throat.

“I doubt that,” said the daddy-o.

“Hey,” said Ray, but Luz was saying, “Take it,” her fingers panicking against the mean little clasp.

The daddy-o flung Luz’s own hand back at her. “The fuck you think I am?” To Ray he said, “Two hundred.”

Ray gave the daddy-o two bills he’d brought from the hatbox they stored in the starlet’s drained redwood hot tub, took the can of berries and pulled Luz away. Her head was swooning and her sense of direction had left her. She wanted to flee on her own but was not sure she could find her way back through the culverts. It was all she could do to follow Ray, who kept dissolving into the darkness then rematerializing to tug her along. “Christ,” he whispered, meaning Christ, be more careful , and Christ you’re stupid , and Christ, I love you and you’re all I have and therefore you have an obligation to take better care of yourself . Luz gazed ahead, needing a glimpse of the daylight they’d left, but she saw only bodies, bodies. Someone trampled the heel of her sandal and she stumbled. She needed to get away from these fucking people, but they were everywhere. Then, mercifully, Ray led her into a dark, clear space.

Her eyes slowly registered the solid perimeter of people they’d broken through. Their mouths hung open, dumb, staring at her. No, not staring at her. Luz followed their gaze and saw beside her an old woman sitting on a collapsible metal lawn chair. She wore a dress that in its day had been festooned mightily but was now threadbare and freckled with cigarette burns. She wore watersocks, and dug into each of her livery shoulders was a huge macaw, one red and one blue.

Luz stood and watched the birds, fearfully transfixed. The circle of bodies pressed in closer. The red macaw pinched a nut or a stone in its beak, working at it with its horrid, digit-like black tongue. It twitched its head. It blinked its tiny malarial eye.

Suddenly Luz was breathing everyone else’s foul, expelled air and Ray was angry and gone and there was only so much air down here and everyone was sucking it up and where was he? Had he not heard of girls carried up out of the canal into one of the vacant houses whose dry private docks jutted overhead, homes once worth three and four and five million and now, every one of them, humid with human fluids? Had he not been with her the night she’d seen a woman stumble out of one of the houses, used and bewildered, and start to make her way back down to the canal and the music, only to be dragged back up again?

Luz stepped back from the birds and collided with a sickle-thin teenager. He wore a white T-shirt with some meanness written on the front in marker, and sagging holes where the sleeves should have been. Through these holes flashed his tattooed cage of a chest. There was a long tear up one leg of his jeans and along it dozens of safety pins arranged like staples in flesh. He held a rope, and at the end of it was a short-haired, straw-colored dog, wheezing. The boy laid his rough hand on the bare skin between Luz’s shoulder blades. He rubbed.