Claire Watkins - Gold Fame Citrus

“Get over here,” the Nut said to the child. He gestured down the berm, and Luz became aware of a scattering of rangy, dull-eyed young men camped out on the canal bottom, shirtless and unwashed. They cradled mash growlers and other incovert alcohols; one gripped a filthy glass water bong. The straw-colored dog scavenged among them, the rope still tied around its neck but trailing now behind him. (Baby Dunn had always wanted a dog, but her father had not allowed it.) Among the men were two girls, teenagers. The first straddled a man whose age was undoubtedly a multiple of her own. His one hand pinched a filterless cigarette while the other grazed beneath the girl’s tank top. His thick arm pulled her top up and the knuckles of the girl’s spine rose as she bent to take the man’s tongue into her mouth. The second girl was heavy, with rounded shoulders, large breasts drooping into a bikini top and a doughy midsection spilling from tight jean shorts. She watched Luz through hair cespitose and greenish from ink dye, not with anger or concern, not with anything except perhaps a dullness that left her mouth slightly open. Under this dead gaze Luz realized she was still holding the child.

Luz pointed to the group. “Is that your mommy?”

The child shook her head. No.

The Nut said, “Her mommy’s not here.” The tattoo on his bicep was a smeary green cross, blurred lines and imperfect proportions. The cross came closer now as the Nut bent to take the child by the arm. The baby — as Luz had come to think of her, though she was not a baby — scrambled into Luz’s lap and flung her arms around Luz’s neck. Luz looked up at the Nut. She did not want him to take the baby, but he would, of course.

Ray laid his hand on Luz’s shoulder, protecting her from the Nut or from herself. Luz rose, forcing the child to slide from her lap. “Time to go,” Luz told her.

“No, no, no!” the girl cried.

The Nut took the child’s arm roughly and the girl screamed, “Okay!” She wrenched her tiny arm from him. “But please can I tell her a secret?”

The Nut sighed, then nodded, and Luz bent down again, letting the child up to her ear. Ray looked on. Again the girl made whispering sounds but said no actual words. When she was finished she looked at Luz and said, “Tell everyone, okay?”

Luz said, “Okay, I’ll tell everyone.”

“Then come back to me.”

Luz glanced up at Ray. “I can’t come back to you,” she said to the girl. “I have to go.”

“Okay, but please can I tell you a secret?” The Nut exhaled loudly but Luz leaned down to the girl again. The child made no breathy sounds this time, but spoke clearly: “Please may I have a glass of water?”

Luz stood and in the tone adults use to speak through children she said, “I’m sure your friends can get you a glass of water.”

The Nut once again took the girl by the arm. Before he left he told Luz plainly, “We don’t have any water.”

Luz watched him pull the baby back to the group, where he sat her down between the doughy teenage girl and the man with the bong. He said something sharp to the child, but Luz could not tell what.

Ray took Luz’s hand. “Let’s go,” he said, though his face looked as sick as hers must have. They walked away from the group, back toward their blanket. Luz looked back but already the child was out of sight, blocked by a stand of partakers. They walked on.

It was Ray who spoke first. “That didn’t seem right.”

Luz stopped. “Let’s go back,” she said.

“And do what?”

“Watch her. Make sure she’s okay.”

“Why?”

“What if those weren’t her people?”

“What do you mean?”

She took a short breath, knowing how the next part would sound. “I have a feeling.”

Ray frowned and swept a strand of hair from her eyes. “Babygirl—”

“I’m not drunk anymore,” she said, though she was not sure if that was true.

“I didn’t say you were.”

“Let’s go back, just to see if everything looks okay.” Ray ran his hand up and down her bare arm, as if she were cold. She wasn’t cold but she was trembling. “Please,” she said.

Ray looked back toward where they had left the child. “All right.”

They walked a wide loop into and out of the canal and circled back on the other side of the footbridge. They stopped where they could spy down on the area where Luz first found the girl. The canal had gone from gleaming gray and bleach-white to fireglow and a misty blue-black. They turned to face each other, pretending to talk the happy talk of young people in love.

Luz stood with her back to the canal so that Ray could look over her shoulder. “Do you see them?” she whispered.

Ray nodded. “There.”

“What are they doing?”

“The same thing. Sitting.”

“Do you see her?”

“No.”

Luz knew instantly that something unspeakable had happened to the baby, and that it was her fault. She resisted the rising urge to turn around.

Ray’s eyes raked the chaos of the canal beyond. “Wait,” he said. “There she is.”

“What’s she doing?”

“She’s playing. Running around.”

Luz could not stop herself from turning now. She spotted the child stepping softly in the hot silt, alone. Beyond her, the Nut and the fleshy girl who was not her mother and all the rest were back in their circle, taking rips from the bong, playing roughly with the dog. The thin girl was kissing a different man.

Luz and Ray watched the child — this strange, coin-eyed, translucent-skinned child. She approached a young woman with a ragged Mohawk who sat cross-legged on the concrete slope. The woman wore a crinkly purple skirt and a canvas backpack. She was topless, her breasts painted as two drooping purple daisies, her nipples the polleny yellow cores. The child hopped forward now and waved her hand emphatically in the young woman’s face.

“See,” said Ray, “she does that. Goes up to people.”

The topless woman said something and the child solemnly rose up to touch the woman’s Mohawk. She pancaked the inky flattened wall of hair between her two hands. The woman laughed, perhaps uneasily. Ray put his hand between Luz’s shoulder blades, where the Nut had first touched her. “She’s just a weird kid,” he said.

The child brought her hands to the woman’s face and rubbed it all over, as she had done to Luz, and Luz was betrayed, somehow. “You’re right,” she said.

Ray stepped toward the bonfire, urging Luz in that direction with his large hand. But after a few yards Luz shook him off. “You saw the way she grabbed me,” she said. “She was afraid.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I have a feeling. I don’t want to ignore it.”

“What do you want to do?” he asked, kindly. He was handling her. He thought she was drunk and sliding toward hysteria, though he knew better than to put it that way. They had been here before, the culvert only the most recent episode. An impromptu party at the complex where she’d sat on the waxed lip of the dry pool, tight, smoking and arguing about the drought with some of Ray’s nomad friends. They were shouting really, and Luz was shouting loudest. It was late and someone asked them to keep it down. Someone else asked them to take it somewhere else. Luz refused. Everyone there pretended to be so bohemian and radical but really they were all worried about offending everyone else and she was fucking sick of it. She informed the others that they would not be keeping it down, that they would not be going anywhere, that there were entire towns dying of arsenic poisoning and if they thought they were so hard-core, so of the earth, maybe they should forego their trips to the ration truck parked on Pico. She called her beleaguered audience, among other things, cunts and fascists and bores. One weary comrade went back to where Ray was camped, and by the sonic magic of courtyard echoes, Luz had heard her asking Ray to intervene. “She listens to you,” she’d said.