Authors: Claire Vaye Watkins
The colony.
And beyond that, in terrain not yet subsumed by the dune, an anorexic wannabe orphan languishes in a vintage car on the shore of a sulfur lake, abandoned with the nameless child she took. Through playing house, dying of thirst.
When Luz came back it was her body that came first, tugging her behind it. Her skin was screaming. Her lips split, clefts puttied with scabs. The flesh around her nose was raw to cracking, like the plates along the bottom of a dry ancient sea, no moisture left to yield. The insides too, surely, for the simple, vital intake of air stung. Her fingers were swollen beyond bending, waxy and violet-tinged. Crimps of black vein ventured near the surface. Her windpipe was evidently collapsed, for she could not breathe, not exactly. Her tongue surged unavailingly against her palate, her airway clamped shut by her own forgetting how to talk to the different parts of herself.
She breathed, finally, though what passed through the flattened airway was altitude-thin and hot; it dissipated before making it all the way to the bottom of her lungs. Eventually, she did breathe deeply, and then the woozy smell of diesel came to her.
She was lying in a nest of dust-crusted pillows in a long dim narrow
room. Its gently domed ceiling was low, and colored the last pale shade available to green before green becomes taupe, a shade insisting so obstinately on tranquility that it was surely blended for asylums, an interior decorator’s attempt to divorce the mad from their madness. Below the domed ceiling, the walls of the long room—it was more a hallway—were lined with blankets, swelling and slackening like sails. Behind the blankets was surely a row of high windows encircling the room, for these backlit the blankets, which were two-tone and faded, depicting scenes of vanished nature: wolves howling, a mustang and foal rearing, a mountain range foregrounded by evergreens.
Luz shivered. The shadow of the starlet’s slip was writ onto her by sunburn, but the dress itself was gone and she was naked save for a quilt laid over her, its batting leaking from the eroded cloth. She was chilly, though it took her a long time to recognize the sensation and to understand what to do about it. She pulled the quilt around her. The pillows beneath and about her were in fact couch cushions, filmed with a silky white dust that rose from them when she shifted.
She thought: Ig.
She rolled to prop herself up and cracked her elbow instead on some hard surface that gave a hollow clang at the blow. She burrowed one fat, blood-glutted hand into the cushion nest and felt a floor of rubber and a neat row of rivets.
Luz concentrated on breathing. Behind the blankets the open windows rattled gently. At the far end of the room, above a patchwork of more hanging blankets, was painted a silhouette of a dove—no, not a dove, a bluebird, for there were the words astride it,
BLUE
and
BIRD
. And beside that a placard with two hands reaching for each other and scripted beneath them,
BE SAFE
. On the ceiling was a skylight hatch made from ancient yellowed plastic and on the floor a black rubber strip ran from beneath the bluebird and back to her, and as it ran the
room was not a room but a bus, a school bus with the seats ripped out: the accordion door, closed, the long metal arm attached to it with its lever mechanism, the first aid kit mounted on the wall, the elevated driver’s seat upholstered in olive green and flanked by many mirrors. In one mirror Luz caught a glimpse of her own face. It made her a little unsteady, her reflection, because the angle was all wrong and so were the eyes: small and lashless, bolstered by plump cheeks where Luz’s cheeks were pointy and hollow. The plump cheeks lifted a little now, and Luz touched her own face. She was not smiling.
The driver’s seat creaked, and down on the long, slanting gas pedal, the toes of a bare foot curled then relaxed. The eyes in the mirror watched, still.
When Luz opened her mouth, her lips crackled. “Hello?”
A rusty scrape came from inside the apparatus of the driver’s seat.
“Where’s my girl?” Luz’s voice was not her own. “I had a girl with me.”
“Shh,” went the eyes in the mirror.
“A toddler. Where is she?”
The figure—a woman—turned in the seat now. She slowly extended both her bare feet—fat, pink bottoms black, grazed by the soiled hem of a flowing, wrinkled white skirt—into the aisle. She was topless, with wide hips crowned by rolls and a soft paunch resting on her waistband.
She clutched a bundle of cloth to her chest. “Easy,” the woman said.
Luz caught her tone. “Oh, God.”
The woman stood. She was massive, her head threatening the ceiling of the bus. Her hair hung lank and greasy and gold-flecked from beneath a filthy bandanna. Another was cinched around her neck. The woman came toward Luz. Her gait was tender, but not tentative.
From the bundle hung a pale spindle leg. Long toes. Hard bulb of knee.
“No,” Luz said. “No.”
The giantess came at her still.
“Get away,” said Luz, loud.
“Shh,” said the woman again, kneeling with some difficulty beside Luz. “She’s eating.” She leaned close—Luz smelled a sourness rising from her—and there, in the wad of cloth was Ig, suckling the giantess’s left breast.
Luz felt her breath come back to her, and other things with it: relief, joy, the weight of responsibility, a seasick sensation born of both having and having not failed the baby. Ig caught her with one gray eye but continued suckling, her mouth twitching rabbity and the breast plumb against it. Luz touched her head but pulled back when she saw the scabs along Ig’s hairline. “Is she okay?”
“Hungry. Goes to town whenever she gets the chance.”
They watched the child in silence awhile. “I’m Dallas,” whispered the big woman.
“Luz,” said Luz. “That’s Ig.”
“Ig,” said Dallas, fondly.
“There was a man with us,” said Luz. “Did you find him?”
Dallas shook her head no. “Drink this.” She passed Luz a green glass bottle filled with cloudy liquid.
Luz smelled it.
“It’s water,” said Dallas, “mostly. You need vitamins, too. Drink it.”
Luz did, wiping her mouth after. “How long have we been here?”
“More there.”
Luz hesitated at the plastic blue barrel, its water low.
“Go on. They found you yesterday.”
“Who?”
“Levi. Out walking.” She gestured to Ig, who watched them still with her one eye like a squid’s, catching light. “You want her?”
“I don’t . . .” Luz looked at her own austere breasts, her dark nipples veering slightly away from each other. “We gave her formula.” Though she hadn’t. The can Rita gave her was somewhere in the Melon, still sealed.
Dallas said, “I see.”
“We had to.”
“That’s your decision.”
“Now she’s too old.”
Dallas shook her head and adjusted the blankets around Ig. “I hate to see young people eating that poisonous crud. My oldest was on the breast until she was four. Kid was the healthiest little nub in Mendocino. Happy, too.”
Luz nodded.
“She’s back East now,” said Dallas, by way of full disclosure, perhaps, a gesture to her own motherly imperfections. Luz appreciated it, but she fixed her gaze on the fresh magenta stretch marks radiating along the woman’s brown belly. The oldest was not the child about whose whereabouts Luz was curious.
Dallas winced. She detached Ig, turned her around, and put her other nipple in the child’s waiting mouth. “Learning with teeth does make a difference.”
Dallas reminded Luz of the water. Luz drank, grateful that the water was warm because she was still freezing. She hugged the quilt around herself, all the while cupping Ig’s foot in her hand. She could not stop touching the baby.
“That’s the heatstroke,” said Dallas, nodding to the quilt. “Mindfuck, isn’t it? Bet you haven’t been cold since you were a baby.”
Baby Dunn said, “Not even then.”
“Chemicals. You know you’re in a bad way—you know you’re
close
—when your brain starts thinking in terms of quality of life.”
“Where are we?”
A raised brow. “You don’t know?” Dallas reached up over her head, grasped a fistful of the mustang blanket and pulled. “You’ve heard of the dune sea? This is shoreline property!”
White sun screamed into the bus, stinging Luz’s eyes. She shielded them and saw Dallas do the same for Ig. Luz decided then that this woman could never leave them.
“Take a look,” said Dallas.
Luz gathered the quilt around her like a clergyman’s robes and stood, dizzy, the blood in her head suddenly at low tide. When her brain accepted color again it was blue: arresting matte pops of blue spattered along an encampment of dun, blue in slabs, one-dimensional—water, she thought, though it was water as Baby Dunn had drawn it, one flat plane. Oases going snap in the wind. Between the tarps, like boulders to their lagoons, clustered camping tents, cars and bench seats from vans, structures of two-by-fours, plywood and chicken wire, a geodesic dome of PVC pipe. Large aluminum globules with windows also covered in aluminum winked beside corrugated white cuboids splashed with maroon or teal lettering:
Wanderlodge
,
Born Free
,
Chieftain
,
Four Winds
. The one called Holiday Rambler had a TV antenna swaying high overhead, a red brassiere wagging from it. Everything was covered in dust: plywood, canvas, tires, barrels and boxes and bicycles. The tip of a teepee in the middle distance. Beyond this, a wall of glittering white. Luz shivered again and pulled the quilt tighter. She looked for the top of the dune but could not find it.
“I’m going to need one of those bikes,” she said.
Dallas sighed. “Sit down, will you?”
“I have to find him.”
“We need to cool you off first,” said Dallas. “You’re sick. You’re weak.” She passed Luz a plastic spray bottle. “Keep moist,” she said. “Get your blood back where it belongs.”
“He’s out there.”
“Have a seat.”
“I won’t wait. It’s not possible.”
Dallas stood. “Sit on down now, would you please?”
“I have to find him.”
Dallas clutched Luz’s arm with her free hand. She held Luz steady with her gaze. “Listen,” she began. Then, after some fortification, “They already found him.”
“What? What are you—”
Dallas said, “I’m sorry.”
“You said . . . No.”
“I’m sorry,” she said again and meant.
Luz might have left anyway—might have charged off into the desert like a conqueror, like John Wesley Powell on his velvet armchair strapped atop his raft, directing, with the one arm the Minie balls at Shiloh allowed him, his expedition’s deadly slide down a mile-deep canyon. Might have, like Sacajawea, given Ig a wad of leaves to gum, slung the child into her papoose and set off for home, except when she tried to lift the baby from Dallas’s arms her own quivered and the thew straps along her midback seized and Ig, perhaps sensing Luz’s unfitness, let loose one of her agonized shrieks.
Dallas eased Ig down and urged Luz to sit beside her.
“Your muscles are essentially suffocating,” she told Luz, meticulously reattaching the mustang blanket across the exposed streak of windows. “You might walk now. You might run. You can get out there on adrenaline. But they’ll quit on you all at once. You won’t even have a little sports car to protect you. Dying in that bucket will start to look
like heaven when the birds come for you. Vultures, grackles. Never mind the movies, they won’t wait for you to die. They’ll take that child piece by piece, baby.”
“Watch her for me then.”
“Afraid not. Plenty of hurt in this place without signing this girlie up for more.” Dallas let the blanket fall silently over the washed-out vista beyond. She fetched another bottle of hazy water and sat beside the cushion nest. “Come. Lie down.”
“Where is he?” asked Luz. “His body.”
Dallas patted the nest. “Come on.”
“Tell me.”
“Levi found it—him. You’ll have to ask Levi.”
“Where? When?”
“You’ll have to see Levi.” Dallas passed her the spray bottle. “Got to cool your blood. Got to give your heart a rest.”
Luz would not accept the spray bottle. To accept it would be to give time permission to go on. The gesture would be an after-gesture, as every gesture would now be, every gesture and glance, every meal, every milestone, every empty sob. “Did he suffer?”
“Levi can tell you that.”
Through tears Luz watched the light beat through the mustang blanket. It was afterlight, and though it was almost twin to forelight it was of a different quality entirely. “You keep saying that word.”
—
Luz went prone and stayed that way, trying to get a feel for the afterworld, the world without Ray in it. A long time passed like this. She would not remember the plates of food Dallas brought—clean leafy greens, supple strawberries and a golden smile of cantaloupe—nor
would she think to ask where these came from. She would not remember the carnival of resurrection the fruits danced across her tongue, nor the paroxysmal shits they visited upon her later. She would not remember Dallas chattering to Ig, Dallas nursing Ig until she fell asleep, Dallas pointing to the child’s blisters and saying that though she was badly burned Ig was in better shape than Luz inside. She would not remember Dallas telling her to spray herself down and she would not remember Dallas misting up her left leg and down her right when Luz refused, Dallas misting from her left fingertips across her chest and neck, to her right fingertips and—because by then her left leg was dry, the skin having swallowed it, or the thirsty air—starting again. She would not remember Dallas spritzing the blankets or soaking torn segments of cloth in water and instructing Luz to lay these where the blood was closest: her neck, armpits, lower back and groin. She would not remember Dallas telling her to picture the tubes clustered near the surface, the blood coming in rusty and overhot, surging right up against the cool rags and turning beryl, turquoise, robin’s-egg. Do you feel it? Dallas hummed, those chilly vessels evangelizing out and back, the icy platelets taking that nip inward, refrigerating her baked organs, hydrating her withered inners. Do you feel it? Luz would not remember saying, Yes, yes.