Authors: Claire Vaye Watkins
She tried to expel Ig from her mind but in came her mustard beads of poop, and rocks, rocks, rocks and,
Please can I have some water?
“What?” she managed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Tell me,” he said, tightening his grip on her ankle.
“You’re hurting me,” she said.
“I’m not
hurting you
,” he spat. “You’re hurting me. Do you know what it’s like to know the person you love is keeping something from you?” He squeezed her ankle and began to cry.
“There’s nothing,” said Luz, “I swear.” But the Nut was pacing in her brain.
Levi began to scream. “Tell me, Luz! Tell me! Tell me! Tell me! I need you. I need your voice.” He yanked her ankle to make her kick him in the face. “Goddamn it, Luz! I love you and you’re fucking killing me!”
“Stop!” she yelled. “Please!”
But he struck himself with her again and again. She tried to pull her leg back but he wrenched it and pain burst in her knee. She stopped resisting and he hit himself with her foot in the cheek, the jaw, the ears. She helped. She bashed her calloused heel into his raw ear, his nose and eye socket. He seemed delighted by this, manic and aroused.
“I’ll tell you,” she said finally, out of breath. “I’ll tell you everything.”
—
Luz calmed Levi, smoothed his hair, held his wet, blood-glutted face to her. They shared a nub of root and held each other. “Get out,” he called down the hall, and the girls did. “Take your time,” he told Luz.
She began: “We took her.”
Everything unfurled from there: gopher, raindance and daddy-o. Nut, Lonnie and Rita. Yuccas and Ray. When she was done, Levi thanked her with his body, finally. “I heard you,” she said afterward, and he said, “I know you did.”
—
By the time Luz and Levi emerged, the Rambler stood alone at the dune’s edge. The colony had rippled away without them and the group had gathered near the Rambler, waiting.
Now, with the colony gathered around, Levi stepped down from the Rambler and turned to take Luz’s hand. He had never reached for her in front of the others before. She could have floated down the two iron steps, so unburdened was she by what they’d shared, so airy with affection, but instead she took his hand.
When Luz reached the bottommost step, Levi lifted her by the waist and she wrapped her legs around him. They kissed like newlyweds, long and with their eyes closed. Slowly, the others turned to something at their backs.
Luz was euphoric, repaired, blissfully oblivious to their movement and to the movement high on the white slope of the Amargosa. She and Levi went on kissing. Whispers rippled through the colony: See there, a clot of blue, growing, descending, marching. It approached, and the crowd was silent. Luz opened her eyes, still grasping Levi with her entire body, and there, in the space of the opened crowd, wearing a brittle blue tarp around his shoulders, the starlet’s birkin, and a giant Stetson, stood Ray, her Ray.
BOOK THREE
Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlaying our hard hearts.
Charles Dickens
Rage fueled Ray through his first day of flight, tuna cans tinking in the starlet’s buttery satchel. Luz had all these rooms inside her—library, well-stocked pantry, smoky bordello, circus ring. All these wondrous rooms and yet she sat in the one that was blank, with nails poking from the plaster where portraits once hung. It had been his task to take her hand and walk her, each day, to a different room. Today the rumpus room, today the greenhouse, today the heated indoor swimming pool! Sometimes the journey took the entire day; sometimes they never got there. Sometimes he deposited her on the velvet ottoman in the solarium, certain beyond all doubt that this time she would stay. But she was never where he left her. Without him she would return to the bare plaster walls, or, worse, wander off to the root cellar, the spidery shed, the asylum. The inevitable symmetry: all those rooms had once thrilled him, especially those, but now he was done exploring.
He marched onward, keeping the dune at his back, but feeling the
need to keep turning to look at it, lest it creep up on him like the ghosts in a retro video game he’d binged on as a boy. The starlet’s scarf did its best to keep him breathing. The satchel’s lining was soft—satin, or silk even—and he stroked a hole in one pocket just to feel something besides sand dragging across his skin. Occasionally the sun stopped in the sky. That was worrisome.
He transferred the leather satchel from one shoulder to the other, his embarrassment at sporting it the first sign his rage was waning.
I’ll be right back,
tinked the tuna.
I’ll be right back,
whistled the wind across the lip of his open jug.
“I always wanted to come back,” Ray said aloud, to see if it was true. “I walked so far I thought I’d make a circle and come back to you.”
Later, stabbing at the can of tuna with the bottle opener tool on his Leatherman, working a lip open with its wire cutters, “There was a largeness on top of me, there always was. You lifted it, Luz, but also brought it right back down. Then Ig. Lifted, then right back down. I never wanted to leave her, or you. But it felt good to do it.”
I’ll be right back.
He knew it was a lie—he had never, in all his life, been right back. But what he could not discern was how far the lie extended. Did he intend to come back at all? Yes, surely. But the more he walked, the better he felt, every step if not a good decision then at least his own, so that by the time the sulfur pools disappeared behind him the scarf had lifted closer to his eyes, which must have meant he was smiling.
It would not be so bad to die, went a story he’d told before. No, he would not be returning to that overseas desert in his mind. Instead, he stayed stateside, recalled the hollow solitary yuccas, papier-mâché and dry filament, and the time he and Lonnie broke into a sound stage in Culver City and sledgehammered the foamcore streets of New York, a
city neither of them had visited nor ever cared to. He missed Lonnie. He missed the courtyard compound and the first bed he and Luz had shared. How brave she’d been then, leaving her evac ship in the sand, looking right at him as they fucked. He missed Luz then, horribly, and almost turned around. But there was the gully they’d forded, the bone-dry threshold whispering,
Onward.
Everything was a little better in retreat. From the other side of the gully it seemed possible to walk to the highway, to walk back to Santa Monica, to walk up to Point Dume and drop his satchel in the sand and tap a skinny girl on her shoulder. Approached from the rear everything was mirror image, the bad omens good ones, the impossible possible, the situation improving rather than going straight to shit. The nasty-smelling peppermints went back into their wrappers. Fingers of water stretched back into aqueducts. Lies were truths. Luz got back into his bed and never got out.
Sometimes optimism joined him on his walk. He would find someone, or someone him. Red Cross had to come through here. Evac lorries. Ration shipments. Water trucks. Even better, they would find Luz and Ig without him and send them somewhere moist, the mossy inlet Luz talked about, the marshes and the pines. He would find them there, on a blanket in a meadow slurping smiles of watermelon.
Sometimes gloom stepped in stride beside him. At his back the dune sea was Fort Leavenworth, growing, gaining on him. At some point he noticed he was marching. He’d always been good at that. But then the drills had made it seem so easy. Forward march. About-face. Forward march. As if going back was a kind of going forward, as open and free and boundless, all clear skies and plains. But going back was complicated. Maybe impossible. For one, there was the question of go back where? He might march back to Point Dume or San Diego, could
continue to the starlet’s, to Lonnie’s, to the breakers or the brig. A sea sound took up in his ears and became cicadas dripping from the trees, the carapaces he was forbidden to touch but did.
To look back was to join hands with ghosts, to build himself a house of past frailties and failures and all the unending ways in which he was a disappointment. Ray’s house of the past had a matching mailbox out front, and its white lettering read
HOLLIS, GREENCASTLE, INDIANA
. Here was the corn and here was the creek, here were tornados of gnats funneling over a baseball field. In the neighborhood where he grew up there were barbecues with half-used tins of lighter fluid beside them, folding plastic lawn furniture in every backyard except his. Here was citronella and cut grass and thunderstorms like plush black curtains falling closed overhead. Here were the train tracks and here were the blackberries he was to rinse before eating but didn’t. Here were tire forts and bottle rockets and the childproofing strip busted off a lighter. Here was the Leatherman, found in the otherwise empty drawer of a workbench, surely his father’s. Here were peeled, sharpened sticks and the back of a bus seat slashed and an adult who kept saying
vandal
though he was not a vandal—he was a good boy, class monitor.
But here was the Leatherman and here was the seat and hadn’t he slashed it? If he was not a vandal then what of that? There were the girls in his class, sharpening Crayola crayons and, later, examining the tips of their hair. Here was the old quarry filled for swimming, the surface of the water rainbowed with suntan oil, here was the floating platform from which he dove deep enough to scare himself, deep enough for the green, sun-warmed water to turn black and arctic. Here was the metal siding and the cloth awnings and the sprinklers and the wide scratchy sidewalk and here was the family room with the piano he’d never seen anyone play. Here, the way other houses had boxes of tissues or Bibles in every room, were boxes of rubber gloves, blue for cleaning, purple for Lucy.
Poor Lucy, his mother never let him say. In Lucy’s room his sister lolled on rubber sheets, a puddle of a person, a body without a brain, and beside her a pylon of monitors where a nightstand might have been. Here were the cleaners who came in on Mondays and Thursdays, a young husband and wife, and here were the pennies his mother had hidden in the corners—behind the dresser, balanced atop the baseboards—to test them, now in a shiny stack on the kitchen island. And here in the window was the prism, a teardrop of glass hanging from fishing line, spraying rainbows across the linoleum floor in the late afternoon. Once, when his aunt was visiting, she and his mother played old music and drank chardonnay in the sitting room and his mother said, What I’m most afraid of is that she can’t tell the difference between dreams and reality and she’ll have a nightmare and think it was me doing it to her. His sister Lucy stopped breathing every Wednesday night, when Ray went to Scouts and his mother taught him all the ways to say
Come home
.
—
Fear fueled him through the second day, fear doubled by strange sounds he’d heard in the night and by drinking down close to the last of his water. He spent the second night where he stopped, and he stopped when a massive sinkhole came into view and he hadn’t the will to circumnavigate it. He used the satchel as a pillow, untied the scarf from his neck and wrapped it around his eyes to block the audacious moonlight emanating from the dune sea. With his eyes closed he still rocked from side to side, phantom footsteps, and little lightnings of lactic acid fired in his spent legs. He tried to sleep, one hand in his pocket, curled around the Leatherman.
For some time, Ray did not know who was older, him or Lucy. He did not remember a time without Lucy, and so he assumed she’d
been there when he arrived, assumed himself the baby and the repair. Lucy’s birthdays had no cake and so no wax number atop to correct him, no balloons or streamers, as these were contaminants. It was only when Aunt Breanna was visiting for his father’s wake—Ray would have been seven then—that his mother had caught a glimpse of him peeking in on them, summoned him to her, hugged him, her breath boozy, and said, “At least you had us to yourself for a while, sweet boy.”
According to Lonnie, this explained a lot: because of his sister’s disability and then his father’s death, the household instilled no sense of hierarchy via birth order, meaning that Ray’s environment had failed to indoctrinate him in the ways of subjugation, making him essentially impervious to hegemony. He had no impulse to dominate, nor had he developed a tolerance for domination. Lonnie had gone to an all-boys boarding school in New Hampshire, where he became an expert in hegemony and domination. Plus, he’d read his stepmother’s books about birth order and sun signs. According to Lonnie, the lack of a sense of birth order and his father’s early death had made Ray’s childhood a distinctly mortal one—the bubble of immortality that insulates most toddlers popped before it could incubate Ray’s ego for very long. All this in Taurus ascending made Ray one of a very few capable of genuine altruism.
(
Wow,
Luz had said.
That sounds so much better than
martyr complex
.
)
Anyway, Ray was special, was Lonnie’s idea, which was nice because as a kid Ray had felt mostly ignored. Underfoot, his mother always said, urging him out the sliding glass door with her elbows, so as not to contaminate her purple-gloved hands. Ray did not remember his father, not even his dying, though he did have a cluster of inexplicably rich friends in his memories—they had docks on the river and
TVs in their rooms and one had a go-cart with a track wriggling through the woods—friends he never saw again, so maybe he’d been stowed with their parents while his father deteriorated.
It wasn’t as if Ray’s mother refused to talk about his father. She answered anything Ray asked, but he hardly asked because it seemed there were important questions, right questions, some revelation that might be set free within him if only he could find the words. He couldn’t, and that was frustrating, and so he stopped trying. His mother told stories about his father, and so did her two sisters when they came to visit from the East Coast, but they were always the same stories: His father had once fished a grape out of Ray’s mouth that had been choking him. His father had built the deck out back but didn’t seal it right, so it was warpy. As a boy, his father broke his arm climbing onto a horse named Gidget. It was as if each of them, Ray’s mother and his two aunts, had been allotted a story or two about the man, six stories max. They asked whether Ray remembered the trip to Hocking Hills, or Turkey Run, or Nine Lakes. Sometimes he said he did; sometimes he told the truth.