Claire Watkins - Gold Fame Citrus

“I can’t tell you how long I’ve been waiting to do this,” Jimmer said. “I went snowboarding once, as a kid. Once. Course I mighta dreamt it. Always wanted to move somewhere with snow.” He made an hourglass of his hand, let sand slip through. “But I had a nice little homestead. I had a canyon all to myself. I put a statue down there when my boy went, then another, built a bridge, a walkway, carved a scene into the cliffside, I couldn’t stop. Wife left; I hardly noticed. Though she would say I’m the one who left.”

“What happened to it?” asked Ray. “Your canyon?”

“The dune came and took it. What I remember most was how quiet it was. I’d always wanted to go out there with a shotgun. Blow it all to smithereens. But the dune just slipped over it, like a clean bedsheet. Merciful, I guess I thought.”

For the first time, the word seemed right to Ray, especially here, in sight of those toothy peaks, so forbidding opposite the soft swooping embrace of the dune sea. The heartcolors had left him now, but the sun had set, and as Jimmer predicted, the clouds snagged on the new range, aflame. Ray did not miss his visions — he missed Luz, wanted to ask Jimmer the secret to keeping her, though he thought he knew. When he’d been able to pry her away from Levi, the old Luz surfaced. In the weeks since he returned, Luz and Ig had spent every night with Ray in the bus. He didn’t want to know all that had happened between Luz and the dowser — didn’t blame her, no, but didn’t want to know the details, either. She’d tried to tell him sometimes, in the dark, but he’d stop her. It doesn’t matter, he’d say. It all happened for a reason, she’d say. But really Ray did not want to invite the man between them that way. And though he would never say so, it was, he supposed, a story he knew from before, the same that sent them up into the canyon. But this new devotee Luz was bristling, unpredictable, and he didn’t want to spook her. Nights together or no, something pulled her back to Levi, Ray knew, and he had been intent on giving her no reason to follow that pull — no guilt and no conditions. Everything clean between them. But that was ruined now.

Below, someone had started a fire. Black smoke helixed skyward and disappeared. Nearby, on a big, palm-flat rock, was the dome Ray knew belonged to Levi. Alone, apart, the first time it’d been so, Jimmer said. The dome glowed from within as darkness came, lovely, Ray had to admit.

—

Luz tried to nap but the Blue Bird was poisoned, the bad air from the fight pressing heavy on her. She tidied up the bus, returned the abused primer to the glove box and took Ig for a walk.

Levi’s dome had been relocated to a flat, rust-red rock from which radiated tremendous heat. In the center of the dome was a pile of stones baked in a nearby fire. Luz entered and was immediately surprised by the intensity inside; she had not known it could get hotter.

Levi lay nearly naked on his stone floor, shining. “Sweat lodge,” he said. “The heat in this rock was absorbed before you or I were born. Slow the heart rate. Essentialize the thought processes. Reduce to its basicmost pathways. Go through fight or flight and out the other side. To clarity and truth.”

He invited her to disrobe and feel it. She felt a primal urge to do just that. The happiest slivers of her girlhood had been spent on a beach towel on a rhombus of dead lawn in Pasadena, thinking of nothing except absorbing the sun, of the air moving around her setting a chill to the sweat shimmering on her upper lip, of evading the sundial trajectory of the finger of shade cast by the single palm in their neighbor’s yard, of an insect screaming near her ear or a snowball of sweat rolling from the scoop of her sacrum into her butt crack. But mostly, there on the towel, she had wondered what she would look like one day, when she was tan or when she was thin, and would there be lines here or creases here? Would there be unwelcome hairs, cellulite pocking? In all her hours lying in the sun and thinking, she had never concentrated on important things, never asked herself difficult questions. She wished now that she had.

Her impulse to join Levi was tempered not only by Ig on her hip, cranky from her truncated nap, but by the pair she’d passed as she’d entered the dome, a girl called Rachel, sex-flushed, and Cody, who failed to meet Luz’s gaze, squeezing Ig’s bare foot instead. Though Luz knew she had no right to be hurt, she was.

Levi tipped water over the rocks, and they watched it hiss instantly to steam. “You’ll want to sit,” he said. “Heat rises.”

She sat across from him and tried to coax Ig into her lap, but the girl was interested only in climbing on and off Levi’s cot. “Let her,” Levi said.

Luz began. “I’m sorry I haven’t been by. Since… Ray…”

“We don’t own each other, Luz.”

“I know. It’s just… complicated.”

“Complications are human inventions.”

“I know,” she said, “but I’m feeling—”

“Come over here.”

“I just wanted to tell you—”

“I can’t talk to you when you’re way over there.”

Luz moved close enough to feel a swell of heat coming off him. “You’re burning up,” she said.

“That’s the idea,” he said. “Important decisions to be made. I’m going deep within for answers.” He meant the wall of rock coming at them, she knew, and other decisions too.

Luz said, “He’s Ig’s father.”

Levi put his hand on the back of her neck and shook his head. “So you’re lying to me? Closing off again?”

“No, I—”

“That’s not you talking — it’s him. He’s toxic. I’ve seen the two of you together. He’s poisoning you.”

“He’s not,” said Luz.

“Listen to yourself. Look at you.” He pointed to her crossed arms and her folded legs, her yielding shoulders and drooping head. “You’re all walls, all barricades. Your body’s a prison.”

She uncrossed her arms but had nowhere to put them. “Can I ask you something?”

“Anything.” He retrieved a pouch drooping with dried, dark roots. “Here.” She added a nub to the one gone pulpy in her mouth.

“I’ve never been with you,” she said, “on a dowsing. I’d like to see that.”

“I’m going to touch you,” he said.

“Wait, Levi. Please. Will you take me with you one day?”

He kept touching her. “Don’t you want to get back to where we were?”

Luz wanted to get back there, she did, even if she didn’t know where it was. But wherever it was, Ray would not be there. She looked to Ig.

“Let her be,” said Levi.

As if to counter, Ig yanked Levi’s blanket from his roll and nearly toppled the cot. “No, Ig,” said Luz. “Stop.”

Ig began to cry.

“She’s too hot in here,” said Luz, pushing Levi’s hands away. “She didn’t get a nap.”

Luz tried to comfort Ig. The child’s face was flame-red and slick as the flesh of some lost fruit. The tantrum continued, frenzy and agitation rippling like waves through the baby’s whole body. She flailed, would have flung herself atop the scorched stones had Luz not restrained her. “Shhh,” Luz tried. She didn’t know what the fuck she was doing and never had.

Levi peeled a tendril of root from the pouch. “Give her this.”

Ig screamed on. Luz hesitated to take Levi’s offering and hated that she did. She could not seem to escape herself — Ray’s return was proof of that.

She took the root and presented it to Ig. Miraculously, Ig paused in her rage, accepted the root and, as with everything, inserted it into her mouth. “Good girl,” said Levi, his hands on Luz again, making promises.

Soon Ig was suckling quiet and wide-eyed on the cot—“That’s her mind’s knot untying,” Levi said. “Perfectly natural.”