Claire Watkins - Gold Fame Citrus

Ray’s response: “If you want Luz to do something, you have to make her think it’s her idea.”

Another time — things with the friends souring, just before they’d left for the canyon — Luz had approached the gate after a ration trip and someone said, “Luz is back. Don’t make any sudden movements.”

“Can we move our stuff over here?” Luz asked now.

“What?”

“They don’t have water , Ray? What does that mean ?”

“I’d just like to know what you hope to gain here. Your goal.”

“They’re taking her rations.”

“You don’t know that.”

“That’s why I want to watch.”

Ray yielded. “If it will make you feel better.”

They fetched their things and rearranged them on the other side of the footbridge, where they could see the girl and her people. Luz could not take her eyes from the child flitting through raindance, darting around fires and garbage heaps, collecting sticks and stalks of shimmering trash into a bushel in her hand. She approached more strangers, farther and farther from her people, sometimes latching onto them as she had to Luz. She was a weird kid. She just went up to people. Yes, but it was also true that some evil was going down here and Luz knew she was the only one who could see it. For the first time in her life, she was absolutely essential. “I am acutely engorged with purpose,” she whispered. Ray told her to have some more water.

The Nut did not come after the child again. Another man with another dog had joined them and the group was now captivated by the two dogs, who often erupted in snarls. Without anyone’s noticing, the child ventured farther and farther. Luz eavesdropped on the group shamelessly and caught some of their words— whore, ream, fuck rag, cum dumpster —words Luz herself used, and whose explicitness had always delighted her, but which seemed now repugnant and unequivocally inappropriate , a word she never used.

“Did you hear that?” Luz asked after one of these affronting words reached them. But Ray was making a show of eating almonds. He was, he said, through spying on people.

Luz was not through. Not hardly. She was spellbound by the group’s filth and their relentless youth and their drug-depleted gazes — indeed, the more she watched them the more they embodied stories she’d heard of vile things happening in the Valley. Traffickers charged quadruple for children, and many hosts refused to take them, so toddlers were left to cook in cars, older kids locked in the apartments parents fled. Or the children became the currency. These tales, along with the group’s obvious and unforgivable neglect of the child, confirmed for Luz their malevolence.

Then, the child spotted Luz once more. She smiled a crooked smile, but it wasn’t until she came toward Luz, at an all-out tottersome run, that Luz recognized how she ached to hold the girl again. The baby bowled into Luz and toppled into her lap.

“Hi,” said Luz.

The girl said nothing, only stared up at Luz. With dusk her chameleon eyes had gone a milky heather, her hair dull pewter. She smelled strongly of urine.

“Are you thirsty?” asked Luz.

The child opened and closed her mouth like a carp.

“Want some water?” Luz tried, dangling her jug over the girl.

The child squealed and lunged for the water. Luz unscrewed the cap and the baby drank heartily and with some difficulty, spilling down her bare chest and letting out big wet gasps between gulps. Ray watched, trying and failing to hide his alarm at her intense thirst. Luz fetched the can of blueberries from the backpack.

“You hungry?” she said. Ray gave Luz a look and Luz said, “What?” He looked over to the Nut and the others. Luz looked, too. The Nut saw them. Luz wilted, expecting him to retrieve the girl again. Instead, he waved. It was not a friendly wave, not to give Luz permission to hold the girl or to feed her, but an ambivalent flash of the hand to signal that he didn’t give a damn what she did.

So Luz shook some blueberries out of the can and offered one to the girl. She longed for the child to take it between her corpulent thumb and index finger, but instead she jabbered something and Luz stared at her, baffled.

The girl slapped impatiently at the blanket and jabbered again.

“‘What is it?’” said Ray. “She’s saying, ‘What is it?’”

“What is it?” the girl said again.

“Blueberry,” said Luz.

The baby did not know blueberry .

“Here.” Luz took the fruit and split it in half with her thumbnail. The child looked on in amazement. Luz offered the vein-colored, butterflied meat of the blueberry to the girl and she took it into her small mouth. Immediately the child grimaced, squenched her face up in revulsion and opened her mouth. Luz cupped her hand beneath the child’s chin and the girl let the spitty fruit drop out. Luz tried a berry and found it a tasteless mucus. “Sorry,” she said. Ray chuckled a little and the girl told him to shut up. Ray balked. “Shut up!” the baby said once more, gleefully. Luz said, “Be kind,” her own mother’s line.

“What’s your name?” Ray asked.

The baby regarded Ray suspiciously and he asked her again. Then the girl made a sound like Ig .

“Ig?” asked Ray.

The girl chugged amusedly, “Ig, Ig, Ig,” like some small engine.

“Ig,” said Ray, laughing, and the girl laughed too. She dismounted from Luz’s lap and began to roll around on the concrete, saying, “Ig, Ig, Ig, Ig,” her face still flecked with black bits of blueberry skin. Ray and Luz laughed and the girl, little showboat dynamo, little ham, rolled more furiously, going, “Ig, Ig, Ig, Ig.” They were having a good time, the three of them.

Then, sudden as a ghost, the child stopped rolling and popped up and bounded back to her wretched encampment. Luz felt a great reservoir of joy drain from her.

Ray watched her go, too, saying finally, “She’s sweet.”

“I don’t like those… people,” said Luz.

“What’s wrong with them?”

Luz scowled at her Ray. “They’re high—”

“Everyone here is high. They’re letting loose.”

Luz knew he didn’t believe this. “Something’s wrong with them.”

“You’re paranoid.”

“Don’t do that to me. Having a drink doesn’t make me an idiot. I know what I feel.”

“Stop,” he breathed.

“Look at them. Please.”

Ray turned, finally. They watched the girl skipping and hopping irregularly between her people. “Keep looking,” Luz whispered, urgent with the fear that Ray would not see what she saw, burdened with the weight of his waiting. This was the last chance, she knew, the last he’d humor her this evening.

The girl got on all fours and crawled to the new dog, pressing her plank face dangerously close to the mutt’s. Ray was unfazed.

Then the child lost interest in the dog and crawled along the silt crust to the young man who had been serving as steward of the water bong. He sat cross-legged in the dirt. The girl put her head in his lap. Ray shifted and Luz felt his attention fading.

Just then, the Mojav brought his hand down on the back of the child’s head, not a blow but a grip. Palming her head, he pumped the baby’s face into his groin twice, three times. His friends chuckled and he did it again. This time he hoisted his free hand into the air, a bull rider’s pose. The group howled raucously as he mashed the baby’s whiteblond head into and out of his crotch, then released her.

Ray recoiled. “Jesus.”

The gesture sickened Luz too, because it was sickening, but also because it was so wholly validating that she felt she had somehow asked for it, willed it into being. She said, “See?”