Authors: Claire Vaye Watkins
“Eee,” tried Ig.
He brought Ig closer, her small mouth agape, agog, and as he did he pulled on the frond. There was a sound then, an incongruous sound, like the tearing of very delicate fabric. Gossamer, or cheesecloth. A crepe-ish rip, and the massive hairy yucca swayed, somehow. Luz and Ray staggered back and the tree fell between them, sending up a dry veil of dust. Ig said, “Uh-oh.”
“What the fuck?” said Ray. He pressed his foot to the felled thing and where he pressed the trunk collapsed, papery. Ig laughed like a hiccup. They investigated the broken stump and found it completely hollow, save for some dry, twiny marrow inside.
Luz pushed carefully on the trunk of another towering yucca and it too crumpled to the ground, setting Ig agiggle.
“They’re dead,” Luz said. “All of them.” Dead, without moisture enough to rot.
“The groundwater’s gone,” said Ray, though he’d promised he wouldn’t.
Luz plucked a yucca tine from its socket, then another and
another, revealing an arid cavity inside the tree. She looked out over the miles and miles of pale lifeless specimen. This was no forest but a cemetery. Ray felled another plant husk and crushed it beneath his boots, its desiccate death rattle vastly satisfying. Ig reprised her hiccup laugh and clapped. She had never clapped for them and so Luz clapped, then toppled and crushed another tree. Ig clapped again, triumphantly.
“Watch this,” said Ray, and then held Ig aloft as he kicked the spindled torso of an adolescent yucca to dust. The baby went hic, hic, clap, clap.
“Watch
this
,” said Luz, hoisting a sandstone to her shoulder and shot-putting it clear through the stout trunk of a grandfatherly yucca.
“Bah!” said Ig, clapping like mad.
“Here,” said Ray. He handed Ig over to Luz. He set himself, took a breath, leapt into the air, yipped and torqued a kung fu–type roundhouse kick through the body of a massive hollow plant, splintering it profoundly and sending the spidery head to the ground. Ig laughed and clapped and laughed and clapped.
They continued like this, crushing large swaths through the papier-mâché forest, trampling the flimsy giants, pulverizing the ghostly gray cellulose carcasses and sending up great clouds of dust and cinder. Desiccation vibrated in their sinews, destruction tingled in their molars. Finally, they stood breathing in a clearing of their own gleeful debris, no night breeze chilling them in their sweat. A supernatural stillness overtook them, the fear they had tried to laugh away.
Ray picked up a silvery shred of yucca skin and gave it to the baby.
Ig said, “What is?”
“I told you,” said Luz, starting back toward the road. “A very bad omen.”
—
In the womb of a dream Luz is hiking along a rocky ridge with William Mulholland and Sacajawea through no country she’s ever seen, and though Mulholland has on inappropriate footwear and spiny somethings are everywhere, they are making good time. There is a tang of frost in the air and in the ravine below tremble the heads of plum-colored cottonwoods. Mulholland, his Irish
R
s bubbly, is talking up home birth, a position Luz supports, though she also has a little devil in her, a little devil who lives in her throat, who makes a hammock of her hyoid bone, the only bone in the body that connects to no other bones, said her homeschooling anatomy coloring book. This devil, suspended in his web of ligaments anchored distally to the tongue, says, “It doesn’t add up, Willy,” and Mulholland says, “I invite you to look at the facts. We rank fortieth in the world in infant and mother mortality. Behind Cuba!” Luz has no hat on suddenly, and the tree-size lilacs in the ravine are swooning, swooning. Sacajawea is a bronze statue on her back and on Sacajawea’s back is Jean Baptiste, stillborn, marbled with blue. Willy Mulholland is saying, “Hospitals are designed for death.” Willy Mulholland is saying, “Septic! Septic!” Sacajawea’s bronze body scorches—what’s become of that frost tang? In the ravine there is a creek running with shreddy brown blood and Willy Mulholland is saying, “Isn’t it amazing what a little light can do?”
—
She woke near dawn, the car stopped and Ray gone. Ig’s seat was empty, too. Luz found Ray filling the gas tank with Ig on his hip. Luz offered to take her.
“She needs to be changed,” said Ray, handing her over.
“Are you stinky, Ig?”
Ig said nothing.
“Be careful,” said Ray again. Luz turned to walk around the front of the car and stopped. Up ahead, maybe twenty yards from the nose of the Melon, the road disappeared. Luz squinted in the dim—
Crow’s-feet!
screeched a makeup girl who prescribed ground pansies with garlic juice for Luz’s eyebags.
Powdered horsetail, fresh yeast dissolved in boiling spring water for these nasty blackheads. Ten young, fresh nettles to drink up all this oil. Pick them away from the highway! If you would only practice the merest self-care you wouldn’t be in this chair for so long.
Luz approached the nothingness where the road ought to have been, turning to put herself between Ig and this void. A massive pit, perfectly round, walls sheer and plumb, like a cork had been popped from the earth, except on the lip where huge slabs of asphalt had cracked and threatened to slide off like melted icing. She could not convince herself to seek out the bottom.
“What are we going to do?” she said.
“Lon said this would happen,” said Ray, who smelled of gasoline. “He said there’d be trails.” He pointed to the side of the road, at the improvised detour of other Mojavs, then took Ig and changed her. Luz fetched a clean shirt from the front trunk, one Rita had contributed, with a choo-choo grinning from the chest.
The tire-wide ruts led them worming around the sinkhole and back to the road. They rejoined the asphalt and soon left it again where another cavity had engulfed the highway. Reunion, separation. Hello, good-bye. The pits were growing, it seemed, for they were off on the trails for miles at a time and even the trails encountered other chasms, detouring the detour. Lonnie’s map lay useless on the dash. They needed only to go east, to get to I–15, Lonnie had said. I–15 would
take them into St. George. No longer than a day, Ray said he’d said. But also that it would depend on the trails. Keep heading east. East was all. But without the sea, Luz had lost what little bearings she had. She would have liked to check with Ray—wanted him to say
This is east
in his surest voice, the voice that made things sound truer than they ever were in her mind. But they barely spoke as they drove, waiting for a trail to swerve back to where the road might be, a trail trampled by people who, for all they knew, died in its blazing.
Instead of talking, Luz opened a plastic barrel of chalky peppermint puffs that Ray had stolen on one of his projects, her favorite kind: innards airy and white, red-striped husks with sugarsnow inside. Ig saw the candy and dropped her tortoise into the canyon between the car seat and the door, grunting. Ray frowned but Luz passed her a candy anyway. “At least take the wrapper off,” he said. “She’ll choke.”
“I was going to.”
“I don’t see how.”
Luz’s technique was to pop the candies from their wrappers straight into her mouth, then imprint her front teeth into the mint before shearing off segments in good-feeling planes. Ig’s technique was to hold the mint globe in her mouth for an alarming while then spit it out, softened, and roll it around between her hands and along her bare chest and in her hair until she was wet and pink and her fingers webbed with sticky, sugary spittle. For every mint she passed back to Ig, Luz ate ten or twelve. She could not stop. Each shearing brought with it a cold-hot release, like glaciers shedding into the sea, and the sensation lured her back for more. She stuffed the wrappers in the ashtray but the ashtray got full and then wrappers would leap from the tray on the wind and whirl around the cab like locusts before zipping out the window, which annoyed Ray, so Luz let the clear, crinkled wrappers fall to the floor at her feet, where the wind was unable to lift them.
The trail, unfurling for miles now, agitated Ray. “We have to get off this,” he would say. “This is not going to get us there.” There was a small sea of cellophane at Luz’s feet now, moving like the heat lake ever wiggling on the horizon. Luz went on shearing, grinding, building up little deposits of mint in her teeth.
Finally, they found asphalt again—Ray exhaled with relief as the tires started their even, mellow whirring. The candies were gone and Luz was left with sores on her gums and wrappers crinkling beneath her feet and the realization that she had not offered Ray a single one.
Ig grunted for another.
“No more,” said Luz. “All gone.”
Ig demanded with a whine.
“No more, Ig. They’re all gone.”
Ig considered this, looked Luz straight in the eye, and began to wail.
“Here.” Luz leaned back and retrieved the tortoise from the floorboard. “Ig, here. Look, Ig. Look.”
Ig bashed the tortoise in the head, sending him back where he came from. She bellowed, shrieked.
“Where’s her nini?” Ray asked the rearview. Ig’s face was red now, slick and horridly disfigured by her screams. He reached behind his seat, feeling around for the nini, and the Melon surged hungrily toward the soft, bankless shoulder.
“Jesus,” shouted Luz, reaching for the wheel.
“I got it. Find her nini.”
Luz groped along the baseboards and under Ray’s seat. She forced her fingers into all the spaces in the car seat and beneath it, Ig screeching and slapping at her all the while. Luz snatched one of the child’s hands out of the air and leaned in toward her small, lumpy, snot-smeared face. “No, Ig. No hitting.” Ray watched in the mirror. Ig’s eyes
dilated with shock—shock and fear, surely—then squinted in resolve. With her free hand she smacked Luz in the face.
You cunt, thought Luz. She captured Ig’s other hand and held them both in a sticky nest. She squeezed, hard, hard enough that it felt good.
“No,”
she said. “That is
not
okay.”
Ig’s face fell to sorrow then, genuine wound and heartbreak, with real tears springing to blur her gray eyes. She pulled her hands away and covered her face with them. She sunk her head, ashamed, and wept.
Luz went to stroke her head but the baby recoiled. Her cage of a body was trembling, seizing where Luz touched her. “I’m sorry,” said Luz, her own tears springing now. She unbuckled the car seat and, with much effort, lifted Ig from it. Ray started to speak but stopped. Luz took Ig onto her lap, limp and burbling softly. She held the child to her, all shame and need. Then, in a gesture of pure grace, Ig put her spindly arms around Luz’s neck. Luz cupped her hand to the back of Ig’s large white head and whispered love and apology and contrition and affection into her neck.
The Melon slowed.
Luz looked up. Before them the road went on, did not slide like melting icing into an interminable pit. It went on, on and on east to St. George, to Lawrence and Savannah, where Ig would grow up, maybe saying,
I was born in California
, maybe one of the last, onward into the fine future, leaving behind the starlet and Lonnie and Rita and John Muir and Sacajawea and the photographers and the nettles and the Nut, except this road—which was to lead them to . . . to what? Kudzu, maybe, and Spanish moss; hurricane season and whatever the Outer Banks were—this road went onward and buried itself beneath a thick tentacle of sand stretched out from the dune sea.
“Fuck me.” Ray whapped the steering wheel. “Sorry, Ig.”
Ray turned the Melon around. “We don’t have the gas for this,” he said to no one. They doubled back, then Ray pulled off onto the trail from where they’d come. This forked off along a barbed-wire fence to a washboard cattle trail, which veered south and threatened to shake the Melon apart. All the while the dune lorded over them, in front of them and behind them, to the east and to the west, somehow. A passively menacing sight and Luz could not take her eyes from it. No more than a day, Lonnie had promised, but it had been two and they were farther than they’d ever been from anything.
They took a bald dirt track eastish. Promising for miles, until it was bisected by an ancient gully, its bed loaded with head-size boulders. Ray skidded the Melon to a stop. “We won’t make it,” he said.
He looked as if he might cry, or shatter the too-close windshield with his hand. Ray’s deflating faith was terrifying. Disbelief was Luz’s way. Or rather Luz believed only the most absurd Disney fantasies—the canyon menagerie, the Hollywood escape—so that their failure to materialize was proof that all things would always fail to materialize. She could certify sinkholes, arsenic poisoning, a world of hot undrinkable brine. But where her mind was miserly, Ray’s heart had room for all things, all modes of being, for water and for the promises of coins. He was, she realized, the essential opposite of her father, whose meanness and fear she’d inherited, though none of his industry. How sustaining it might have been to have that room, to not be ever at capacity. The ultimate project: to believe. That way, when the day came—through some fermentation of will and time and miracle—when the three of them emerged from this desert and Ig plumped and spoke and lined her dolls along a windowsill and asked, “Where did I come from?” faith would surely, if Luz could begin to cultivate it now—no,
cultivate
was not the right word. One didn’t cultivate faith and one did not cultivate anything here, save thirst and thirst and insanity. But if she might have somehow by then made room in
herself, might have evicted the photographers perhaps, erased the year she probably should have followed her agent to New York, the year she was twenty-two but writing seventeen on all her forms, faith or belief might have let her respond, without saccharine or strychnine, “God gave you to us.”
“We can make it,” Luz said. She cajoled Ig’s limbs through their straps and buckled the apparatus over her despite the child’s whining. “Go,” she said, “before she has another meltdown.”
Ray nodded. The Melon plunged into the wash, the three of them lurching within. Rocks pinged violently up into the undercarriage. The Melon’s European engine whirred as her wheels spun frantically in the detritus, then caught, miraculously, ejecting the car up and out of the wash. Ray and Luz cheered. Ig cried until Luz freed her and reinstalled her on her lap. Luz held Ig, smelling the slight scabby smell of her head as the trail dipped dramatically and the desert scrub shrunk away and the trail went bankless, stretching now through a vast blinding rockscape. Luz had never seen anything like the craggy bleached white rocks rippling along the side of the trail, like water froth made inanimate, capped here and there with daubs of brown.