Claire Watkins - Gold Fame Citrus

“Baby Dunn? What are you talking about?”

“We disrupt that narrative. It’s about showing us as humans. A chosen people.”

“You said you hated all that Baby Dunn shit.”

“Me and Ig. Videos of us gardening, taking a bath. Make them think they discovered us.”

“You and Ig? That’s insane. Don’t you realize what would happen if they saw you, her?”

Luz stood up. “You’re not getting it. We’re the rallying cry.”

Ray pressed his hands against his face then looked up at her. “Has he been taking Ig?”

“What?”

“I don’t want him alone with her.”

“What are you talking about? I’m trying to tell you how special this place is. It’s in danger. They could come any day. If we don’t do something.”

Ray stood, holding up the primer. “Says Levi.”

“We’re under assault here, Ray. I think I can help.”

“Help how ? Turning us in?”

“You’re asking the wrong questions.”

“What’s the most likely scenario here, Luz?”

Luz shook her head, disappointed. “Why is it so difficult for you to believe that I could be useful here?”

“I’m saying it doesn’t make sense.”

“You’d think that with all that you’ve seen — are still seeing — you could open yourself to the unknown.”

In fact, Ray’s visions were fading. Even now, as he watched Ig bobble around the bus, she was only faintly opal. Luz was a mute slate, and the light pressing on the blankets told him nothing. His heartcolors would be gone by sunset. Ray said, “I heard a story about him on the news, in Limbo Mine.”

Luz scoffed. “The news.” She tossed the news out the bus window.

“He’s a criminal.”

“So are we.”

“He’s a liar. A fraud.”

“You don’t want to talk to me about liars and frauds,” she said.

Ray was silent.

“He finds water, Ray. You’ve been drinking it.”

“He steals it, Luz.”

“You don’t get it. It doesn’t matter what anyone says about him.”

“He hijacks aid convoys. I saw photos of the aid convoys on fire. That’s where he gets the water.”

“He wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

“Him and his guys cracked my fucking skull.”

“No—”

“He might have killed people, Luz! There’s a missing woman—”

Luz said, “Why are you trying so hard to belittle what we have here?” She put something into her mouth.

“What is that you keep chewing?”

“It helps me breathe.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Goddamn it, Ray! You’re treating me like a fucking toy. After all this, I’m still a doll to you. It’s easier for you to imagine some criminal conspiracy than to think I could be useful.”

“It’s not about you, Luz — it’s about him.”

“I know it is! I thought you were dead , Ray.”

“You’ve said that. And I’ve said I’m sorry.”

“I will keep saying it until you understand exactly what it means. I thought you were dead. I thought you were dead because that’s what you wanted me to think.”

“I didn’t—”

“I thought you were dead. Dead, Ray!”

Ray hurled the primer to the far end of the bus. “And who told you I was? He did. He was the one on that lorry — the one who attacked me—”

“Don’t.”

“I’m fucking sure of it.”

Ig was not crying — she was watching — but Luz went to her as though she were. She lifted Ig and held her. She had never been more a mother than when she opened the back door of the Blue Bird and in a voice fossilized with resolve told Ray, “You need to find another place to sleep.”

Ray drifted through the colony. Where exactly did Luz expect him to go? He passed RVs with foil over all their windows, tents, the black hand of ash where a fire had been. He passed a man in a teepee, napping, his features obscured by sun and sand and fuchsia mottling like some new map across one side of his face. Ray walked in circles, and each time he passed the man Ray glanced at him. The sun relentless, he eventually lay in the teepee’s shrinking shadow and tried to sleep.

When he woke the old man stood above him. “You were thrashing around,” he told Ray. “Shouting things.”

“Was I?” Ray tried to blink the stains from the old man’s face, angered by the last remnants of the visions that had led him here, their whimsical obstruction.

“Arsenic poisoning,” the man said. He retreated to the shade inside the teepee and gestured with his jumpy hand for Ray to join him. “You’re Luz’s man.”

Ray shrugged. “I was.”

“I’m Jimmer.” He extended his hand.

“Ray.”

“Back from the dead. Where are they keeping the dead these days?”

“Limbo Mine. You know it?”

“Not from experience.”

“Glad to hear that.” Ray tried to avoid staring at Jimmer’s face.

“Domestic dispute?”

Ray nodded.

Jimmer nested a cloth inside a fisherman’s cap and donned it. “Luz said you were a surfer. Do I recall that correctly?”

“Used to be.”

“Well, let’s not sit here staring at each other.”

Jimmer instructed Ray to shoulder two flattened oblong petals of tin, each with four holes punched in it, two loops of rope tied through these. Together, they walked into the dune sea.

“See those?” Jimmer pointed back across the shrinking valley, toward the troubling range where clouds made a calico of the sky. “Gonna have a helluva sunset tonight. One upside to those mountains.”

They walked on, the colorless sand sucking at their feet. After some time Jimmer pointed at a steep crescent peak two ridges over. “That’ll do,” he said. They pressed on, drizzling sweat. Struggling up the final slope, Ray’s calves began to spasm. “I wouldn’t mind a lift,” he said. “A towline, even.”

“They’ll install all those soon as this thing stops.”

“You think it’ll stop?”

“Never.”

They reached the top of the big ridge, lungs screaming.

“Air is stingy up here,” said Jimmer.

Ray said, “I feel it.”

The sheets of tin were baking as Ray laid them on the sand. Jimmer showed him how to bind his feet to his board with the rope loops, across the toes, around the ankle and back across the heel. They sat this way, on the lip of the dune, tin obelisks strapped to their feet, the colony below miniature in the shadow of those wicked granite teeth beyond, until Jimmer said, “After you, young man.”

Ray stood and leaned down the dune. The sand shifted beneath him, ceded to gravity, and he slid. He glided, faster and faster, beating his arms for balance until the dune bit the edge of his board and threw him down. He came up cackling. Jimmer followed after, bit it, came up shouting, “Goddamn it, that’s important!”

Onward they slid. They trembled. They tumbled. They moved first like tentative leaves falling softly from the summit, then in wide dreamy arcs, and finally swift and daring as diving swallows. Sensation throbbed in their groins, their abdomens, their inner ears and trembling glutes. It was a kind of flying, gliding across the sand, swishing down and the air suddenly nipping, cooling where they sweated, which was everywhere. They crowed Wheeee at the summit and Again at the base. When they fell they somersaulted, coating themselves with albino dusting. When they gathered speed they thrust their giddy fists into the air, for it was a surprise every time. They carved the dune and climbed it again, climb and carve and fly and sing, letting loose all the joyous cries that might have otherwise died inside them.

In time, Jimmer and Ray sat at the summit, panting. Ray surveyed the colony below, looking, he realized, for a way out.