Claire Watkins - Gold Fame Citrus

Ig wedged herself between them and let loose a high, jealous hum. “She’s been doing this,” Luz said, though this was in fact the first time she’d seen it; until now she’d only heard about it from Dallas. “Remember that moan she used to do? It’s more like a hum now.” They waited for Ig to do it again, but Ig was nobody’s wag.

Luz looked at Ray, found him repentant and tender and tired. She unwound the scarf from his hands and returned it to the cushion. “You need to sleep.”

—

Now, with Ig gone slack in her arms and the few people tending the dying bonfire giving her a wide berth, Luz wanted to take her own advice, wanted to sleep — but where? She remembered what the others said, about the dune curating, about being open to signs and omens. Why had she not accepted its grace sooner — why had she slid into her old stingy self?

Levi’s dome summoned from the desert. Instead, she walked beyond the encampment, away from the dune sea. Among the sandy clumps of roots she came upon a downed tree, long dead, its branches burnt to nubs and its silvery trunk twisted like a hank of wet hair. Tomorrow someone from the colony would find it and hack it up for firewood. Everything she saw would go that way, someday.

—

Ray woke late that night, terrified. Luz and Ig were asleep beside him in the school bus, but from somewhere nearby came an atrocious and familiar yowl. He made his way outside and through the shanties and tents and RVs toward the strange banshee sound he’d learned to fear in the desert. At the edge of the colony, he found the source of that sickening shriek: a gangrenous-colored lorry, with roll bars and K.C. lights, Luz’s man and another tending to it.

Rage rose in Ray like water in a basin. Luz’s man was big, his bigness the first and second and third thing you noticed about him. He had wide meaty hands and a beefy face that shone violently in the dawn. His buddy — weasely and quick, the kind of guy who noticed everything — said something to him and the bastard turned, saw Ray, and waved.

You look just like I remember, Ray had told Luz, his only lie. Something was different about her, not just her darkened skin or wind-thinned hair or the sand all over her. Beneath all that, she was caved in, fervent. Manic but vacant. A little mad, maybe, or just saddled with a mighty hurt, Ray would have said if Sal or Uncle Randy asked after her. Suddenly it was clear that the big man was to blame not only for Ray’s injuries but Luz’s too.

Ray waved back.

Luz’s big man and his helper mounted the lorry and tore off into the dune sea.

—

Out beyond the colony, a formation of red, wind-rounded stones rose from the husks of chaparral. A few days later, when he was well enough, Ray invited Luz and Ig to accompany him to the formation.

There, Luz found herself answering the questions she’d so often asked when she first arrived, found herself often saying the name so often said to her.

Ray helped Ig summit a boulder. “Levi. He’s the dowser? The one Lonnie told us about? He runs this place?”

“It’s so much more than that.”

Her adoration cranked a vise on Ray’s chest. But he and Luz had spent that first night together, and the three nights since, and though she’d refused his advances, the nights themselves were something. He and Luz had doled out some pain to Levi in those hours.

“He finds water,” she said.

Ig hurled herself into Ray’s arms. He said, “Tell me about him.”

Luz did, her voice shimmering with reverence, bristling with golden zeal. Ray heard it and also another, a gravelly voice from near memory. He saw in his mind a Sunday morning figure, intrepid and windblown on location, marching out the facts with steady indigo objectivity.

He’s a scientist, a naturalist. But those words are so deficient. You know that sense we always had that we were missing something? That there was something fundamentally wrong in the way we approached the natural world? You said that, once. The Amargosa looks barren but it’s teeming with life. He’s the reason all these people are here. Why they came and why they stay. He keeps all of us alive. He finds water… ephemeral rivers, nearly instant… the equivalent of coral reefs. He’s… touched. You know I scoff at this as much as you do, but it’s true… He’s walked through some dark spaces to get where he is… learned to listen to the rocks and sand and earth… the uranium spoke to him. In a hundred years we’ll have a completely different understanding of the natural world, thanks to him. He’s like Darwin, or Lewis and Clark… a seismic shift in the way we understand the environment… blending of the spiritual and the natural. Everything’s connected and he can feel the strings. I feel drawn to him, I guess, since you’ve been gone… made me grow in ways I didn’t know I could. Tenderhearted… demanding… Yucca Mountain… Operation Glassjaw… A prophet, I guess you would say. It’s like the world is bigger because of him — he can see in a different way — like you! And he’s a giver like you — he gives himself to everyone here. You would like him, Ray.

Citizens, I come to you today from the Mojave Desert. Behind me lies the Amargosa Dune Sea, the only known landmass of its kind, what geologists call a pseudo-spontaneous phenomenon, a superdune, a symbol of the drought that has wrecked the American West. It has collapsed agri-business as we know it, sending millions of refugees, known colloquially as Mojavs, fleeing the Southwest, desperately seeking shelter — and resources. It’s a landscape we all recognize, emblematic of a drama each of us is familiar with. But could this superdune be hiding a secret?… Some call him a dowser, some call him a visionary, others say he is a fugitive who may even have access to nuclear weapons … He is believed to have fled here , to the Amargosa Dune Sea, though how he might survive here remains a mystery… a whistle-blower to some, to others a disgruntled employee… accused of stealing state secrets… accused of polygamy … linked to the disappearance of a female coworker… train bombing in Albuquerque… extremist radical views… ransacking aid convoys… Sunday Java unearthed this exclusive photo in which we see the burnt frames of two lorries belonging to the Red Cross… Or is he, as some say, a prophet, possessed of a rare gift much needed in this barren, blighted wilderness? We cannot know until he is brought to justice. For now he remains… on the lam .

Ray listened to them both. Luz was trying not to hurt him, he could tell, and he was trying to determine whether she was in love with this supposed dowser. When Luz told him she had something she wanted him to see, Ray followed her back to the bus, hoping whatever it was would prove she was not. A consolation he would be denied.

She went to the glove compartment and handed him a notebook. Ray sat down and skimmed it. Luz hovered manic as a hummingbird as he paged through sketches and scrawl — a madman’s manifesto.

As he read, Ray fingered the scar at his hairline. Everything’s connected, Luz had said, and it felt so then. It seemed he could wiggle the divot of waxy tissue on his forehead and a little bell would ring at the dowser’s bedside.

Luz sat before him, her knees folded under her, expectant. “Isn’t it amazing?”

Ray did not know how to begin. “What does that mean, babygirl? To ‘liberate’ a bunch of uranium?”

“It’s a way of listening.”

Ray scratched his chin.

Luz said, “He found Ig and me that way. We’re supposed to be here.”

“For what? Why?”

“The Amargosa is a wasteland because they need it to be a wasteland, see? If Baby Dunn and her baby are here, thriving—”