Authors: Claire Vaye Watkins
He did remember that after his father died, his mother had given away all his father’s things. Someone came and took them, even the mattress where he’d died, and as a boy Ray could see why that had seemed like a good idea. But he wondered often now what he might have had of his father’s, if he had something besides the Leatherman.
A waterfall of too-wide ties cascading from a wire hanger.
A wooden cigar box with earplugs inside.
Dog tags.
Maybe the piano had been his father’s. Maybe his sheet music was still in the bench, a favorite tune tattered.
He wondered what kind of a man he might have become with those possessions.
It occurred to him, trying for sleep near this hole in the earth, that if he died out here Ig would have none of his things to hold on to. Ray wondered: would Ig wonder about him? And if she did, would she wonder about her father or the man who took her?
In his dreams he was still walking.
—
The wind woke him. He sat up and the night was dense with darkness, somehow. Maybe the moon had gone down? He flailed in the dark a moment, the wind wail getting louder, before shoving the scarf up from his eyes. The wail was behind him, somehow, and he turned to see dune light, all ablaze and bearing down on him. He sprang to his feet too fast, and his head went instantly aswirl. He blinked, and the light honed itself, a light within the dune light, then two. Headlights, then, and the wail not the wind but some bizarre engine he had never heard before.
“Here!” he called, making
X
s with his arms overhead.
The headlights came right at him, and he shouted with joy. The vehicle bore down on him, not slowing. “Here!” he called again, afraid they would mow him down in the dark. More lights throbbed to life then, doubling the spotlight on him. Surely they saw him. Still, the truck came at him full speed, shrieking its banshee shriek. Ray waited, near-blind. He heard whoops, and the vehicle roared past him, so close he could smell its oil burning. It must have been a lorry or a jeep, because when it passed he could make out the silhouettes of roll bars, KC lights and massive tires.
In the distance, the vehicle slowed to an idle. Ray waited. Deep murmurs came to him across the desert, as though the ground was opening up beneath him. Then laughter. This was no rescue vehicle.
Ray groped for the Leatherman in his pocket and pulled it out, struggling to extract one of the small blades. He held the dinky tool in front of him, saw it quaking in the moonlight. He steadied himself and stooped to grab the satchel. Ray begged his eyes to adjust, trying to make out whether there was dry pan in front of him or the sinkhole’s chasm.
When the vehicle turned, so did Ray. He dropped the ridiculous pocketknife and ran. The whoops and cackles from the jeep suggested this decision was an entertaining one. He fled, or did the best approximation his ravaged legs could manage. The jeep roared at his heels, but did not overtake him. Ray pressed the ground away as best he could, lurching over the pan in front of him. The jeep hung back, then lunged up at him, then receded again. They were playing with him. Then, whoever they were roared up alongside him, the huge tires popping rocks up all around. Another whoop, the engine’s unreal screech, and something came down hard on his head.
—
Ray woke at dawn in the shadows of two men. His head was three times its normal size, or felt like it. He looked immediately to their truck, a Japanese hybrid deal somehow lower than when it had chased him, big regal decal on its door: BLM. No roll bars, no KC lights, lower and seemingly miniaturized. And why had they waited until sunup to collect him? Unless this was not the truck that had chased him.
The rangers gave him water, though he still had a little bit in his jug. One of them said, to no one in particular, “Most individuals who succumb to dehydration still have water on their person.”
“My girl and my child are two days’ walk back that way,” Ray said.
They only nodded. One ranger removed the blood-stained scarf from Ray’s head and handed it to him. “Got a gnarly gash here,” he said, unzipping a fanny pack and fishing out ointment and a bandage. The other searched the satchel. “Do you have a weapon in here or on your person?”
“No sir,” said Ray, and the ranger returned the satchel. He instructed Ray to get in the truck bed. Ray did. The truck had no roll bars or KC lights, but it did have a dozen heavy metal rings installed in its bed, six down one side, six down the other, for shackles, Ray realized. Also two huge barrels of fuel. The truck lurched to life; its engine sound was any other engine sound. These were not the people who had chased him.
The truck turned and sped away from the dune sea.
Ray pounded on the window. “Wrong way,” he shouted, pointing. “You’re going the wrong way!” He pounded harder on the window, gestured maniacally. “Go back!” he screamed. “Go back, go back, go back!” He tried to pry the window open, but it was sealed and reinforced with wire mesh. He shouted and shouted. The truck vaulted over the desert, unresponsive except to throw Ray to his ass.
He watched the plume of dust erupt behind the truck, an earthen miasma between him and Luz and Ig. His head felt humongous. Certainly it was filling with some nasty fluids. He reached up to touch his wound but found instead the bandage, plasticky and puffy. The sun was roasting his dome, but when he tried to wrap the scarf around his head, the wind took it and sent the silk snaking off into the sky.
A grim thought came to him then.
He glanced at the cabin and, seeing only the unmoving backsides of two crew cuts, reached into the satchel. He’d stowed his driver’s license in the pocket meant for the starlet’s cell phone, which he found
empty now. The rangers must have taken it. So they knew who he was. If they did, it would be only so long before that game of institutional connect-the-dots drew a picture of a court-martial. The rings rattled in the bed. But why hadn’t they shackled him? Nothing made sense.
He searched the satchel again, groped in the cell phone pocket, discovering a rip in the deepest corner of its silky lining. With two fingers he mined the hole, probing desperately until he came up with what he wanted. Checking again whether the rangers watched him, he did what he should have done a long time ago. He rested his arm on the hot rim of the truck bed and with one effortless and almost imperceptible twitch flicked
Raymond Xavier Hollis, 6ft. 2in. 150 lbs, hair: brn, eyes: blue, organ donor, 623 Windy Lawn Lane, Greencastle, Indiana
into the truck’s billowing wake.
The truck hauled ass for a very long time. Ray guessed they were going northeast, though the dune sea seemed at times both behind and ahead of them so he could not be sure. The ground went from white to blush to rust and back again. The hills were sapped tan, then chalky green with veins of aqua, then they were lavender mountains with streaks of saffron and marigold, brown, brown and brown. Ray curled in the stingy shade of the barrels and nodded off, waking when the truck moaned into low gear. They were going up now, crawling high on the haunch of an alluvial fan. Canyon walls rose on either side of them, banded and dry, and the truck lurched steadily up the gully. Soon, it turned and climbed up and into a scooped-out space where the rocks were iron-colored and ore-stripped. The truck summited, then swayed down a sandy road. A padded quiet overtook them, accompanied by a low, smooth whirring. The plume of dust dissipated. It took Ray some minutes to realize that asphalt was beneath them.
He managed to stand again, and turn. Ahead was a bleak, nude mound crowned by crosses. At its foot, settled into the rock, was a colonial mirage: gleaming red Spanish tile roof, smooth pink adobe walls wrapped with wrought-iron balconies and studded with the nubs of roof beams, a bell tower capped by a quivering weathervane, its mustang bounding windward, everywhere archways. In the foreground was a gate of black metal and wood flanked by a medieval turret of pink stone. The truck paused at the turret’s narrow window, the driver said, “Medical,” and from behind a screen of chicken wire a hairy arm waved them through.
The truck circled around the castle. In its courtyard squatted a compound of blue-gray trailers. They passed these and descended along a wide, recessed causeway walled with Moorish tilework. What was once a moat, Ray realized. The truck stopped again at another gate, red rusted swords stabbed into the ground, cranked out now by some invisible mechanism to allow them into the castle fort.
Ray received medical attention in the cathedral ballroom where his was the only bed occupied. He spent his first several hours pleading for a search party, screaming after Luz and Ig, depicting in frantic detail the road, the path, the gully, the sulfur pools and the Melon. “Not our jurisdiction,” one of the guards said, though another said, “We’re on it, partner,” before he shackled Ray to his bed—a precaution, he said.
Ray spent most of the time thereafter on his back, counting the ballroom’s ornately scalloped rib beams overhead. From the twentieth hung a punched tin chandelier, retrofitted with sockets and flame-shaped bulbs. He continued to ask after his family, as he’d begun to call them, and the staff assured him it was being taken care of. The next day, they asked him if he could walk and when he said yes he was led down two spiral staircases—the first lustrous blond wood, the second stone. Gates of latticed iron clanked behind them, summoning high
school Poe—crypts and catacombs. The stone walls slouched, tunnels narrowed then turned white, and it got, somehow, very very cool.
—
Before it became another venue of the evac clusterfuck, the place called Limbo Mine had offered talc for pulping the world’s paper, for fire-retarding her plastics, stiffening her ceramics, matting her house paint, drying the palms of her nervy athletes, powdering the clammy bottoms of her babies. The place called Limbo Mine was in fact not one mine but a daisy chain of smaller mines—Colfax Mine, Jericho, Buena Vista, Hazen Pit, Coyote Springs, Lone Pine Pit, Dot’s Ledge, Hole in the Ground, though no one knew these names anymore. The individual mines had been bored out, linked together in a three-hundred-mile maze and hastily retrofitted for security by the Army Corps of Engineers, who then ingeniously joined them to the labyrinth of tunnels beneath Clay Castle, William Randolph Hearst’s uncompleted winter villa hidden high on the clay preamble to the eastern Sierras, and transformed into Impermanent Retention Facility Nine, the place called Limbo Mine.
Their courses having been expertly schemed by prospectors long dead, the tunnels in Limbo Mine ached to give up their talc, so that the ground beneath the detainees’ feet was green-white and silky soft enough to gouge with a fingernail, puffs rising underfoot to bleach their bottom halves, giving each the appearance of an apparition disappearing. Overhead, ventilation shafts had been garlanded from crimped iron buttresses, and from the buttresses hung lanterns illuminated by industrial glow sticks, letting off a pale jade radiance. Despite the paper masks provided them, detainees and guards alike hacked up warm chartreuse phlegm balls.
It was here that Ray was deposited when he was well enough to
walk, when he gave them a fake name and said he was trying to get to family in Wisconsin. They took him underground, via Poe stairs and bored-out tunnels and freight elevators and a tiny train, hundreds of green-glowing eyes above paper masks peering at him along the way. They deposited him finally in a cool-walled cell. Processing, they called it, a holding facility until they could locate his sponsors, which they never would because the aunt and uncle whose names he’d given did not exist in Milwaukee nor anywhere else.
Down in Limbo Mine, mostly Spanish softly echoed through the chalky caverns. Ray recalled one of Lonnie’s conspiracy theories: busloads of Mojavs arriving in the evac camps whiter than when they’d set out—immigrants and anyone who looked like an immigrant siphoned off before crossing certain state lines, the illegals deported and the legals held until their papers expired, or until nativist legislation could make them illegal. When Amnesty International confirmed the evac camps contained “thirty-one percent fewer people of Mexican and Central American descent than the population of pre-evacuation California,” the governor’s office issued a statement. A simple explanation, the press secretary said, migrant farm workers went home when drought hit, a victimless ebb in a lagging job market, simple depression arithmetic. Ray saw now how many had in fact been deposited here, in Limbo Mine, and in its innumerable sibling facilities.
Los detenidos fantasmas
—the ghost detainees.
Ray learned there was a women’s ward, and though he could never make his way to it, he spent meals and workouts describing Luz and Ig to anyone who would listen. “She’s skinny and brown, but doesn’t speak Spanish,” he said, as a means of distinction, “and the baby is very blond.” This often got a laugh.
In the mess cavern, detainees were served the ration colas and crackers Ray was accustomed to, but also a cold porridge he was not.
The porridge was concocted to supply all the water and nutrients one needed, apparently with minimal waste. “Astronauts eat it,” said Ray’s cellmate, Sal, though this perfect food of astronauts looked a lot like creamed corn from a can and produced, in Ray’s case at least, considerable waste.
Sal was young and undeniably stupid, though his stupidity was of the rare variety that provoked envy in the more intelligent, rather than contempt, for it would surely leave the boy content for all his days. Sal, a baby-faced homebody who wore a rolled felt cowboy hat and seemed to mean it, had had the cell to himself for some time. Their bunks were anchored into the soft wall, and above each Sal had carved little crannies into the soapstone. He’d also sculpted a pedestal for his chamber pot, of which he generously offered Ray the use, with a magnanimity at first lost on Ray but soon found, thanks to the elucidation provided by the space-age corn porridge. On the wall opposite their bunks Sal had carved an entertainment center where he kept a crank-powered television he’d been given for good behavior, and a collection of curios also carved from talc. Talc was a bitch medium, Sal said, as delicate as it was beautiful. Like a gorgeous woman. Sal’s specialty was chess sets, and one of the first questions he asked was whether Ray knew how to play. Ray didn’t. “Me neither,” Sal admitted, and indeed closer examination of the shelves would reveal that what he called chess sets were simply talc statues of the entire casts of popular television shows like
The Blobs
and
Star Cruiser
and
The Tabernacle Choir Sing-Along
. “I intend to sell these as souvenirs,” Sal said, without stipulating when or where or to whom.