Gold Fame Citrus (16 page)

Authors: Claire Vaye Watkins

—

Luz did rise, eventually, and together the two women bathed Ig in a blue plastic barrel filleted lengthwise into a trough. A new halo of freckles at her brow, Ig at first grunted her displeasure, then wailed it, and Luz had to lean over and let the baby scratch at her, let Ig clutch her about the throat while she held her close and cooed into her white head. But soon the child grew bold and wiggly, beaching herself on
her taut belly, sitting and slapping the water while releasing high honks of joy. Strange, Luz thought, that such a sound was still possible.

“Easy,” said Luz. “We don’t want to spill.”

“Let her spill,” said Dallas, baldly charmed.

The grace of this was staggering, and Luz could barely manage. “She’s never had a bath before.”

Days passed, many of them. Barrels of water appeared and appeared again, full and clean. More fruit came, and vegetables too, and sometimes charred rounds of rustic yellow bread tasting of fire. They saw no one but Dallas, who went out sometimes, Ig whining after her. Luz never slid the blankets back after that first time, had no intention of leaving the Blue Bird bus whatsoever. Dallas said that was perfectly okay and returned with cloth, gifts, rations, once a sweet ruby grapefruit, which Ig returned to again and again despite the way it made her face collapse in pucker. The baby’s glottal moans went unremarked, her bulbed head and low heavy brow undescribed. Dallas fed them both salt crystals surely harvested from the badlands they had visited with Ray a lifetime ago.

Ig would have lived in the trough tub, but her lips went blue and quiversome after only a few minutes in even tepid water. “She’s so thin,” Luz said to no one, for Dallas would not feed Luz’s worries. Together they bathed Ig twice a day and as she built her tolerance, Ig’s rash receded and her blisters shrank. Once, Dallas was out fetching supplies and Luz left Ig quietly enthralled in her favorite bath-time game of watching a pair of stones Dallas had brought her sway to the blue bottom of the trough, then retrieving them. Suddenly, the baby shrieked behind her. Luz turned and dashed down the bus to Ig, who was squealing with delight and running circles around the trough, a puffy turd giving chase in her wake.

The first time Ig stayed tending to her sinking rocks long enough
for her fingertips to wither, she stared at them, horrified, whispering, “What is?” until Luz kissed all ten of them and said, “It’s okay.”

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Ig repeated, petting her raisins against her own lips with the same sensuous intensity she’d had at the raindance.

“She’s always been like that,” Luz said, wanting Dallas to say either that something was wrong or that nothing was.

“She’s a feeling being, is all. Probably got that from mom and dad.”

“Dad, probably.”

“He was a feeler?”

“He used to have these nightmares. He’d thrash all night. Scream, sometimes.”

“What about?”

“He never remembered. That’s what he said.”

“You didn’t believe him.”

“I don’t now. He was always wanting to protect me.”

“Hm,” said Dallas.

“What?”

“Why did he leave you out there then?”

Luz took an affronted breath. “He didn’t
leave
us.”

“Then where was he going?” Dallas was obstinately frank, and this confirmed Luz’s assumption that she’d had a difficult life. People with hard lives don’t waste time on euphemisms or manners.

“To get help,” Luz said. How ridiculous that suddenly sounded.

Dallas again said, “Hm.”

“He was being a hero. I let him. Made him.”

“You didn’t make nothing.”

“I was always needing saving. That was our deal—damsel, woodsman.”

Dallas wiped Luz’s face. “Some people got to fix everything around them before they can get right with themselves.”

Ig splashed. Luz said, “It’s just. You spend your life thinking you’re an original. Then one day you realize you’ve been acting just like your parents.”

Dallas told her story then: her father one of the last holdouts against Big Pot, his the last family farm growing organic Mendo Purps, beautiful six-footers with plum-colored leaves thick as velour and buds frosty with resin. This was the heyday of the NorCal ganja boom and Dallas—named for the site of her conception—grew up bussing tables in her mother’s vegan restaurant, getting tipped with dime bags. “I was high for all my girlhood,” she said, combing her fingers through Ig’s fine hair. “Both my daughters’, too. I try to see my oldest as a baby and I can’t. I was numb and it took them killing my pop to get me sober. Pot wars was in full swing. He was missing for ten days . . . Found him at the bottom of a dry dam. Some
Chinatown
shit.”

“There was water.”

“What?”

“In
Chinatown
,” said Luz. “In the reservoir, remember? It’s a freshwater reservoir but later they find salt water in Mulwray’s lungs?”

“Well, no water in my pop, salt or fresh, but they did knock all his teeth out with a baseball bat. Closed casket. Wanted to send a message and I got it. Packed up my mom and my girls and went to San Francisco. Got there three days before the bridges went outbound only. Still, there was no place to live. We were broke. We slept in Dolores Park. My daughter wrote an essay about it and got into Carlisle University on one of those Mojav scholarships.”

“How did you end up here?”

“Same as everyone. I was summoned.”

“I need to see him,” Luz sometimes said.

“Who?” Dallas asked, though she knew.

—

One bright, milky morning, Luz lay naked on her nest, Ig asleep beside her. Dallas was out—where, Luz did not know and did not want to know. She had this Blue Bird world pinned down: trough, cushions, rocks, blankets. It was all she could manage. She sprayed the prickle of mist on her slowly mending skin, listening to Ig’s even breathing.

Then the back door of the bus—which Luz had not known about—swung open, swamping the place in unwelcome light. Dust billowed in, its glittering particles adhering immediately to Luz’s damp skin. She reached for the quilt to cover herself, setting Ig moaning. A figure stood in the light.

“Dallas said you wanted to speak to me.”

Like every hoodwinked dreamer assembling at the stoss-side colony, like every huckster and pioneer before him, Levi Zabriskie came to California chasing a mirage. He came via Albuquerque, where he’d been recruited to conduct research for an initiative to reanimate the Southwest’s sluggish tectonics, a project he never finished and perhaps never began.

For this project Levi was granted the highest clearance level available to civilians, Clearance Zed. To attain and maintain his clearance, Levi’s friends and family were asked to file personal reference questionnaires quarterly. The questionnaires went: