Claire Watkins - Gold Fame Citrus

He walked and watched the show, occasionally slurping handfuls of corn porridge from the satchel he’d filled with it. At some point, the colors from his burned eyes seemed to repose onto the real. Auras, Lonnie said, pleased with himself somewhere. The alluvial fan beneath him was an essential beige flecked with urgent orange. One rocky wash was welcoming lavender, and so he spent the night. Behind him, the mountains concealing Limbo Mine throbbed a cautionary rust. The sun was indifferent black, or some days a deep, infinite navy. And in the distance, always, the dune sea shimmered in sublime, hypnotic, opalescent blue, the color of water at the shallow end of a swimming pool, with a pretty girl’s suntan oil sliding on its surface. His damaged sight, though he had stopped thinking of it this way, led him there.

Upon entering the dune sea, he set the modest goal of walking in only one direction. South, maybe. But even this got difficult when his footprints disappeared behind him and the ridges around him shifted from north-south to east-west. But the heartcolors stayed with him, and he continued to let them guide him. He heeded effervescent streaks of emerald, an earnest path of peach. If a valley was spiteful olive gray he went around, then watched from a distant ridge as a sandalanche slid silently to fill it. If a slope of sandy ripples shone a chirpy robin’s-egg, he climbed them as though they were the front steps of his own house.

At some point he crested a day-long dune and saw nothing but more dune. Sand stretched out on all sides and above, for he was nowhere near summiting even the foothills of the Six Sisters. But instead of terror he grasped what made these dunes a sea, and for the first time felt the serenity of that. He was as at home here as he had been bobbing on his board, seeing nothing but sky and the Pacific. A real good, deep-oblivion kind of feeling.

In this state, he carried all hurts past and present and future. He thanked his blisters, befriended his burns, watched his migraine move around his head the way he might have watched Ig pull Luz around a playground. Pain had its favorite spots — his headaches preferred the nook beneath his eyebrows, heat rash his armpits, and sting nested in the crook of his groin, probably for the shade. Ray made room for these. People and things came to him, and he pretended not to notice.

Some were hard to ignore. Lucy walking boneless was a beautiful thing. He did not turn to see Luz and Ig beside him, for fear of evaporating them, but he did slow down so Ig could keep up. He spoke to some, saying, “I appreciate the offer, Uncle Randy, but this is something I have to do myself.”

His sturdier companions were his talc hack, his satchel and his jug. Though he felt a little bad about taking it, Sal’s ten-gallon was like God’s awning overhead. He touched it when he needed to pin down what was real.

Some nights he thought he heard that worrisome banshee shriek way off, though perhaps it was imagined. Either way, he dropped immediately to the ground, made himself flat as a river stone.

He was, after everything, a Hoosier and a guest and so when he dipped his hand into the satchel and found his porridge finished he said, “If I may, sand dune, you are not going to kill me.” When his jug went dry he said, “I beg your pardon, dune sea, but I am just here to get my girls. If you would kindly. This is not my first desert, you see. I am not done with my life — I’d say I’m about halfway through. I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. I am a young white man in America and we typically do quite well here. So if you will excuse me.”

He found he was no longer afraid of losing Luz, or of loving Ig — he was content to have those two throbbing slabs of his heart outside his body, walking around. If only he could find them. All he asked was to watch them make their rounds, and occasionally to press them up to their puny kindred plugging away inside him. His vision went a-swamp. He did not know whether they were alive, and if alive where — perhaps even back at Limbo Mine, in some hidden grotto. But he pressed onward along routes of affectionate coral and welcoming teal. He did not know where he was walking but he knew why. He would, he realized, find them or spend the rest of his life looking, and this might not take so long. So be it. All he had ever needed, in that desert or this, was some say in how it went, some reassurance that he would go doing something worthwhile. A sappy idea, but not therefore false. And while his life, it seemed, had been an archipelago of ambiguity and abstraction and impossibility, here was something he could grasp: a designer bag greasy from gruel, a ten-gallon hat. My girl and my baby two days back. This was what faith looked like: a phosphorescent world showing the way, a beautiful rose-colored vulture with a cherry-juice beak weaving through the white-hot sky, circling him, then landing at his feet. When the vulture became a great blue heron and the heron a tarp, Ray shrouded himself in it — precious shade, the canvas of discarded wagons — and walked in the direction from which it came.

THE GIRLS

We knew something was going down when he kicked us out of the Rambler. Get out, he said, just like that. Like it wasn’t our monastery, our vestibule, and hadn’t we just delivered him?

JIMMER

An unnatural portrait, I admit, the girls huddled outside the Rambler that way, and the Rambler off by itself. Not right. But he couldn’t let the girl go. Baby Dunn, though she was not a baby anymore.

CODY

I thought we were to leave the Rambler with them in it. I did. The ripple was on and then done and still no one went near it. No one said not to. We just knew.

DALLAS

Ig was with me — she always was then. Luz root-gone and derelict. Shameful. I nearly knocked on the Rambler and told her so, but then they came out.

THE GIRLS

Somehow they were more than two, the two of them. Levi, who taught us that monogamy was a prison built by gynophobic capitalism, that public affection was a bludgeon unless it was extended to all. And here was the proof, her in his arms in front of all of us, ignoring the ripple.

CODY

Until then he had loved each of us with the same heart, if that makes sense.

JIMMER

Certainly the landscape had some significance. The Rambler by itself as we others rippled to that new place on the high plain, tufts of dead sagebrush all around us. Levi out in the open with this Baby Dunn wrapped around him. The sage would have cured us all, in other circumstances.

DALLAS

He’d never anointed any woman this way, though he’d had all of us.

CODY

And with all of us there, like we knew, like he wanted us to see.

DALLAS

Of course he wanted us to see. He knows exactly what he’s doing at all times.

THE GIRLS

And there was nothing to do but watch.

CODY

I keep seeing it in my mind, even now. I don’t know why, except that it was one of those few moments when you are in it and above it at the same time. One of those rare moments when you know you’re swinging on a hinge in your life.

DALLAS

Things were changing, or were just about to, and everyone could feel that.

JIMMER

And down comes this cowboy harbinger.

CODY

Some wild man out of the dune. How he survived I don’t know. Stumbling down the slope and grinning. Fucking grinning .

THE GIRLS

We saw him and we saw her see him and we saw him see him.

JIMMER

A triangle of very high-pitched energy, and all of us caught inside it.