Authors: Claire Vaye Watkins
The dry wash of the Rio Grande awakened something in him, and from that moment onward his ears were reattuned to the gift delivered him in Salt Lake City the day he nearly froze to death. He could hear the ancient murmurs of the sand in the basin, which ferried outward, to the Sandias and the mesas, the raspy voice of the escarpment, the gentle caress of the gully, the open arms of a canyon, the groans of
the boulders along the foothills. He summited Sandia Peak along a trail weaving between the towers of the useless ski lift, in conversation along the way with the mountains themselves, nodding his gratitude to every secret burrow and tomb. He had purpose, then. He had meaning and a reason for being. Did she know what he meant?
Luz did.
—
Levi told her this while they rode in a pedicab chariot, its tugging tricycle rigged with huge tires off an ATV. He told her this while another man pedaled, while she watched the desert and the sweat spot at the man’s neck bleed down to his rump, until he—Cody, her host called him—finally removed the shirt. He told her as they heaved across the desert, making dust of scrub beneath them. He told her as they rode away from the colony, away from the dune sea, and then somehow, without turning, toward it again. All this after she’d said, “I need to see for myself.”
“I understand,” he’d said. “But I’m responsible for these people. It’s too dangerous to go alone.”
The chariot stopped, wedged in the sand, and Luz followed Levi into the dune.
“I have to see him,” Luz had said back in the Blue Bird world, wrapped in her dust-crusted quilt. Now she wished she hadn’t. Levi had gone silent. The knolls before them were bone white and sparkling. Dallas had Ig. Luz wanted to get back to her, suddenly, to make sure she was real. But she went onward, the dune sucking at her steps.
Levi walked slowly, his hands clasped together at his navel, the tips of his index fingers pressed together in a steeple. Luz watched as his hands began to tremble. Suddenly, his index fingers dipped toward the ground, and he halted.
“Here,” he said, but there was nothing.
“I don’t understand.”
He hesitated. “The dune, it’s always moving.”
“I know that.”
“He’s here.” Levi reached into his pocket and withdrew a cobalt scarf, balled up. He handed it to her. Inside, Ray’s ID and his Leatherman.
Luz said, “I don’t . . .”
“The dune has him.”
It came to her after some time. “You didn’t bury him?”
“He is buried.”
She unraveled the starlet’s scarf. A greasy stain dead-center. “Yes, but.”
“I apologize,” said Levi. “We should have. It’s just. We find a lot of bodies out here.”
There are three ways to learn about a character:
This from an acting coach, a big woman who wore half a dozen bright resin bracelets on each wrist and whose hair might have been called ringlets except over the years the ringlets had lost most of their coil and now scattered across her back in long, static-plagued scribbles. Three ways and three ways only, and oughtn’t Luz have thought a little more about these?
1. WHAT HE SAYS
Hoosiers aren’t quitters.
California people are quitters. No offense.
You’ve got restlessness in your blood.
Your people came here looking for something better.
Gold, fame, citrus.
They were feckless, yeah? Schemers.
That’s why no one wants them now.
I want you.
Do you want me?
You look like I know you.
You came to bed smelling like him.
You’re all right, tell me.
I think it’s time we headed up into the canyon.
It’s important to have a project, no matter how frivolous.
The Santa Anas are coming, try to keep your hands busy.
Try not to sleep so much.
Keep your eyes peeled.
Looking good, babygirl.
You surf?
Shitfuck. Jesus. You better not look.
Ten million empty swimming pools in this city.
Drink this.
Be careful.
You’re drunk.
You’re paranoid.
You’re crazy.
You’re all right, tell me.
Babygirl, don’t get like this.
You just do your best.
Who leaves their kid with strangers?
Go, now.
We’re stick-it-out people.
Be careful.
Rocks. Rocks. Rocks. Rocks.
Roxicet, oxy, fentanyl lollipops.
Brainstem, brainstump.
Don’t make any sudden movements.
We couldn’t sleep, Luz.
We’re lost.
I love you?
You’ve heard that dissertation.
We could name her Estrella.
Be careful.
I’m going for a walk now.
Be careful.
Just a little walk down the road here.
Be careful.
If you want to make Luz do something you have to make her think it’s her idea.
2. WHAT HE DOES
Dig out the shitting hole. Siphon gasoline. Impale gophers and throw them into the ravine. Keep a notebook in his pocket with lists and secret poems.
– matches
– crackers
– L
– water
Or:
– shitting hole
– garage door
– L
– water
Or:
– candles
– alcohol
– peanuts
– L
– water
Or:
– axe
– gas
– shoes
– L
– water
Or:
– charcoal
– lighter fluid
– marshmallows for L
– water
Or:
– Sterno
– eyedrops
– calamine
– kitty litter
– L
– water
Or, often, only:
– L
– water
How did his poems go? She’d read them a few times, looking for herself, but quit when she was nowhere to be found. So Ray’d gone to figment now, his papyrus shredded. She remembered some words—
resignation
,
pocket
,
kill switch
,
kitchen
,
spine
,
dispatch
. She remembered hard
C
s:
cost
and
cunt
,
costume jewelry
,
custard
, maybe. She remembered ampersands & mothers, or at least dowdy women making demands like
press your doubt / under your tongue
, or
wait & wonder / at the window
. She remembered desert words,
arroyo & ocotillo
,
Rancho Cucamonga
. But the poems looked east, she thought, or maybe backward. Either way, away from her. Then there was this couplet, chimey and risen in her now like a singular bubble from a tar pit:
Let’s bless the first to go / it will be the other’s fault.
3. WHAT OTHERS SAID ABOUT HIM
He’s too good for you, you know.
So. The woodsman was a deserter, as obvious as a grammar lesson: one who deserts, and what a desert he’d made of Luz. She held Ig tight to her, kept the Leatherman and the ID on the window ledge. The scarf billowed in slo-mo. No sudden movements indeed.
Dallas had another theory. “The dune curates,” she said. “It knows who it wants to be here, brings us to it. Pushes others away. He wasn’t
right for this place, though I know it hurts you to hear it. Trust me, I know. We’re all where we’re supposed to be, believe me.”
And Luz did! The space where Ray used to be was full of surprises like that. For example, there was the relief: with Ray gone he would never tell Ig her rotten origin story, as Luz had feared and known he one day would. Ray was dead and thus the secret dead inside Luz. Though she could not be said to have honored anything in her life to this point, she would, she knew, honor Ig’s first request:
Don’t tell anyone, okay?
Another surprise came those times Dallas told Ig, “Leave Mama be. She’s not well.” Because Luz
was
well. She was waiting for the crack-up that never came. Though she did weep, of course, and her sobs puzzled Ig, drawing the baby to Luz where she’d crumpled, asking, “What is?”
“Sadness,” said Luz through a webbing of snot. “Grief.”
“Geef?” tried Ig, a new word for her. Other new ones, too:
Ouchie. Daddy.
Peas
and
Tank you
.
Uh-oh
and
Why
.
Ig knew “more,” but Dallas taught her the sign for it anyway, taught her to kiss all ten fingertips together, and soon the sign ousted the word. Dallas taught her “milk,” a nautilus fist squelching a phantom teat, a sign Dallas always saw. But Ig’s pantomimed refrain was
more, more, more
.
More,
Ig said without saying, pinching her fingertips into each other.
More,
sighing as though it gave her some release just to say, with her hands,
Mama, I’ve got so much want in me.
Mama
—Dallas’s word in Ig’s mouth, though all three of them needed it. Dallas talked through Ig, offered counsel this way. She taught Luz how to tell when Ig needed to poop or pee, watch for her squirmy tells. Dallas trained Luz to train Ig to squat in the dirt and work it out. They made a game of burying their waste, of watching their water guzzled by the dry ground. We don’t need diapers, do we, Ig? We were never meant to shit our pants, right, Ig?
Through Ig, runty conduit, Dallas taught Luz the siesta schedule with which they slept away the brutal hours. Soon Ig and Luz had gone circadian, up before dawn into early morning, then rising again for sunset and the first, sane half of night. A bronzy girl Luz’s age came with outfits: muumuu for Luz, shroud and sling for Ig, all the same gauzy white Dallas wore.
Dallas taught them how the colony existed as a perpetual motion machine, how on their rippling day those whose encampments lay closest to the encroaching mountain pulled their stakes and resettled at the farthest edge of the camp, so the shantytown rippled just ahead of the dune’s march, like the endless children’s game of stacking hands wherein the bottommost hand is removed and laid atop the topmost hand, and then the bottommost hand is removed and laid atop the topmost hand, and then the bottommost hand is laid atop the topmost hand, and then the bottommost hand is laid atop the topmost hand . . .
When it came their day to ripple, other colonists appeared. They greeted Luz, grinned at Ig. Luz surveyed them as they worked and wondered whom she was seeing. Women mostly, all in white, white robes, white muumuus like Luz’s, billowy white skirts like Dallas’s. The men seemed young—boys, really—though one was very old, with a mangled face and an earned industry about him.
Luz assumed they were to push the Blue Bird. But Dallas said, “Solar,” and the bus rumbled to the outskirts. In this way, Luz discovered order in the colony, alleyways radiating from the dune like the spokes of a wheel, sunbeams between metal and PVC and tarp, which explained why when they moved the Blue Bird it had to be parked just so.
Dallas taught Luz which questions to ask:
Couldn’t the self exist in a single word? Meaning,
water
. Meaning,
war
. And what if that word was not allowed?
Could a person promise another his dreams? If he nightmared instead, who was at fault?
What ego must have throbbed within her to believe that she could pin Ray down?
Yes, the gall. But whose?
All that time he let her think she was the flimsy one.
At night, the dunes sang.
When its roll had accumulated enough flammable debris to host a bonfire, the colony came alive after sunset. One such night, Ig was stir-crazy and Luz coaxed her into her sling, then helped Dallas roll their empty keg toward the smell of something clean burning. They entered the circle of the bonfire and the pulse of hoots and chatter slowed. There was, for just an instant, stillness. For her, Luz realized, for the squirming baby and its young mother.
The commotion picked up again, mild and soothing—no raindance racket. Someone strummed a guitar, someone urged reedy notes from an elementary school recorder. Dallas excused herself to tend to the keg, leaving Luz to jounce Ig and watch.
Soon Ig was asleep in Luz’s arms. She had not spoken to anyone, and this seemed as it should be. Firelight ghosted brilliance on the colonists where they swayed, talking. They touched each other a lot, with an easy intimacy Luz envied. Tending the fire with affection,
wrangling empty kegs, braiding each other’s dirty hair. Mojavs, undoubtedly, and Luz attempted to attach to each a Mojav story. But the word conjured hunched people scrabbling in the dirt, where these people were grimy but buoyant. Happy. They laughed. Hard to imagine them digging for brine or spraying the dune sea with tar. Hard to imagine them mourning anything.