Claire Watkins - Gold Fame Citrus

“We should get someone.”

“There’s no one.”

“Red Cross.”

“They won’t come down here. Even if they did. They’ll talk to them and they’ll tell them some story and Red Cross will leave and they”—she flung her hand toward the wretched gang—“will leave.” Her hand hung in the air, trembling as if the last barrier of resistance against the force threatening to pull this child back into the endless asphalt maze of the Valley. “They’ll take her away and we’ll never see her again.”

Ray began to speak. “Listen,” he might have said, but beyond Luz the Nut came toward them. The little girl followed, stumbling to keep up.

The Nut stopped at the edge of their blanket and pushed the girl in front of him. He spoke without looking at them, chewing the raw skin around his thumbnail. “Could you guys watch her a sec?” He gestured back toward his group. “We have to do something.”

Ray began again to speak. Luz feared what was coming: Where are you going? How long will you be gone? Ray always asked the questions that needed to be asked and suddenly, fleetingly, she found this quality of his unbearable.

“Sure,” she answered before he could. “No problem.” Luz extended her arms to the girl. The child regarded the pose a moment, then leapfrogged instead onto Ray’s outstretched legs. Ray released a sitcom groan, which delighted the girl and sent her up and leaping again.

And so another nonsense game was in full swing as the Nut and his jaundiced entourage receded, bong, dogs and all, along the corridor, disappearing into the swell of the raindance.

Ray chided Luz—“‘Sure! No problem!’ You were so creepy.”—but he entertained the child with unchecked joy. The three of them played at piling little anthills of sand in one another’s hands and then played at blowing them into oblivion. They played at Ray lying still then popping his eyes open and saying boog and the girl squealing and hiding behind Luz. They played at arranging all Luz’s hair to cover her face like a curtain. The girl was a fiendish collector and loved nothing more than scouting the canal for like things and depositing them with the adults. Thus Ray’s pockets filled with pebbles and dead sticks, while Luz’s backpack became a repository for dust-chalked plastic bags and small shining sails of garbage. During her depositing the baby would sometimes do her dynamo chant: Ig, Ig, Ig, Ig, Ig. And when the child set off, Luz and Ray chugged it to each other, “Ig, Ig, Ig, Ig,” laughing in their old easy way.

An hour passed, then another, all the while no sign of the Nut or anyone from his group. Ray went responsible periodically, looking around and asking, “Where are these people?”

Beneath the silliness, they noticed an eerie adult quality about the girl. She touched. She moaned to herself. Her speech lurched forward and back, progressions and regressions. Sometimes she spoke like a miniature adult, skeptical and weary. Don’t tell anyone, okay? Other times it was only alien syllables, sending her into a rage at her own incomprehensibility. But she swung easily from tantrum to slapstick to affection, her bulbed brow leading the way. Her torso was taut as a balloon, some pressure inside, and her pale arms dangled from it like vestiges when she ran. Depositing a specimen she often paused to lay her hands on Luz or Ray. She pinched as often as she pet, though her unwashed hands did seem to favor stroking Luz’s throat, a disquieting stroke described by nothing so truly as the word sensual .

“What is that?” Luz said once, after the child had tromped off for another micro-expedition. “The way she feels everything.”

Ray nodded. “Like she’s seeing with her hands.”

Night was full-on, though it was a night obliterated by bonfire now thoroughly raging, letting off a chemical pungency where someone had heaved in a sofa. Soon the girl — whom they had started to call Ig, affectionately — tired of her collecting and began to whine and mash her fists into her eyes. Luz made a pillow of Ray’s hoodie and coaxed the girl into lying down, then took up a corner of the duvet and burritoed it over Ig’s soft body. There, the child fell into a fluttering sleep. In the distance a long, manic drum riff crescendoed, sending up trills from the partiers. Ig had been with them for hours now.

“We should have asked where they were going,” Ray said.

Luz swaddled the duvet over the sleeping girl more snugly, wishing for something more substantial to wrap around her, wishing she could free her from the putrid diaper. She laid her hand on the bundle of Ig and rubbed softly.

“Maybe they’re not coming back.” She said it nonchalantly — almost a joke — but she knew it was true. She had known it since they left.

Ray didn’t laugh. He looked at the sleeping girl, unable or unwilling to hide his pity. “Who leaves their kid with strangers ?”

“Maybe she’s not their kid.”

Ray was quiet, though Luz could tell he had plenty to say. He was doing the dutiful stoic bit that so provoked her. Around them, people scrambled to set up camp where they could get a good view of the bonfire. Luz felt herself pulled taut with the urgency that had been distending in her since the girl plowed into her life. She was close to bursting, and frantic to make Ray feel that bursting, too. She was desperate to make him desperate.

“How could someone do that?” she said.

“What?” said Ray.

“Hurt a little one.”

He frowned down at Ig, pushed Luz’s hair back behind her shoulder. He knew about the photographers, was maybe thinking of them now. “I don’t know.”

“Ray,” she said, startled to find herself near tears. “We’re going to have little ones and they’re going to be hurt.”

“You wouldn’t do that.”

“Neither would you. But someone will.”

“Babygirl, don’t get like this.”

“There’s too much hurt in the world to be avoided. More than enough for everyone.”

“You just do your best.”

She leaned into him and gripped the inner meat of his thigh. “Then let’s do it.”

He inhaled and stiffened. “Do what?”

“Our best.”

Ray looked at her, miniature bonfires winking in his eyes.

“It’s been hours,” said Luz. “Maybe they wanted us to have her.”

“You didn’t even think those were her people.”

“They abandoned her, Ray.”

“You sound like a crazy person,” he whispered.

“Don’t say that.”

“You do. You sound crazy.”

“I’m not,” she said. Was that true? She was beyond determining her own fitness and had been for some time. And yet, here she felt solid — righteous. She peered fiercely into Ray’s prophet eyes aflame. It had been such a long time since she believed in anything. “I cannot accept that there is nothing we can do. I won’t.”

An ebullient shriek went up from the crowd. The drums pounded on and the bonfire swelled with mattresses and furniture and driftwood. There was a flare in the distance, and an orb of yellow-white gaslight bloomed overhead. Then another flare, another fireball, another ripple of pandemonium traveling through the canal. Ray said nothing.

Someone detonated a round of mortars, a purely sonic cluster of explosions that left pale smoke blossoms in the starless night and woke Ig. She startled in her bundle, then sprang up, wailing. Luz tried to take hold of her but the girl scrambled away, afraid. She stood on the smooth and cracked concrete infrastructure, shuddering, her soiled diaper drooping between her bowed legs. More explosions came and Luz knew as she had known anything that the child was on the verge of tearing off into the darkness, through the dry canals to the channel that was once the Los Angeles River, streaking all the way to the black and infinite and worthless sea.