Authors: Claire Vaye Watkins
DALLAS
Of course he wanted us to see. He knows exactly what he’s doing at all times.
THE GIRLS
And there was nothing to do but watch.
CODY
I keep seeing it in my mind, even now. I don’t know why, except that it was one of those few moments when you are in it and above it at the same time. One of those rare moments when you know you’re swinging on a hinge in your life.
DALLAS
Things were changing, or were just about to, and everyone could feel that.
JIMMER
And down comes this cowboy harbinger.
CODY
Some wild man out of the dune. How he survived I don’t know. Stumbling down the slope and grinning. Fucking
grinning
.
THE GIRLS
We saw him and we saw her see him and we saw him see him.
JIMMER
A triangle of very high-pitched energy, and all of us caught inside it.
CODY
That step she took was it, looking back.
DALLAS
Levi put Luz down and she took one step away from him, a big step, bigger than seemed possible.
THE GIRLS
We saw it, yes. A divot in the sand where she had been, and another where she stood now.
JIMMER
And the sand between these absolutely pristine. That was crucial, from my perspective.
DALLAS
Levi’s arms still raised in the shape of her.
JIMMER
It was finished in that step, though its finishing took some time.
THE GIRLS
It hurt to witness, honestly.
CODY
And we all stayed there, even after she took Ig and the three of them walked to the Blue Bird. We stood waiting to see where to go, I guess.
JIMMER
Until the sand whispered around our ankles.
DALLAS
After we moved the Rambler we were drawn back to the Blue Bird, waiting.
CODY
We stayed there until bonfire, like the day Luz came, except Dallas was with us, pacing.
THE GIRLS
Locked out of her own place, which wasn’t right.
JIMMER
Pacing foretells ill fortune. Doubly when the pacer is a mother.
THE GIRLS
When Luz came out it was dark and she was a different woman. The baby held her hand.
CODY
She did seem changed, I guess you’d say.
JIMMER
Like she’d found a sachet of bird beaks in the eaves and had emerged to fling them out.
THE GIRLS
We needed so much from her.
DALLAS
But all she said was,
He’s asleep.
Luz told the rubberneckers outside the Blue Bird that Ray was asleep and took Ig on one of their old walks around the transmuted colony, surveying the new high plain.
Luz chawed some brute root as she walked, feeling the fungal juices leech into her gums before she spat, taking in the new territory. Here and there among the structures were haystack clumps of dead roots, half-entombed in sand. “What is?” asked Ig, and Luz said she did not know. The harvest moon was fat and orange overhead. Ig said, “What is?” and thereafter never tired of whispering its name.
What did it mean to have Ray back? All the anger she’d succored to starve her grief had boiled off upon seeing him, and she was not sure what would fill that space. She was waiting for it perhaps, weaving through the domes and shanties in their new constellations, looking for what would grow in her now that he’d made room.
The bonfire was somber that night, musicless and sparsely attended. The fire itself was paltry, though Ig still grunted her wanting
it, staggering toward the blaze in her light-ups and whining tragically when Luz picked her up. Luz was sad not to see Levi there, and her sadness revealed that she’d come looking for him. She could continue looking—she had seen the silhouette of his dome out on the edge of the colony—but knew she would not.
Instead, she lingered on the periphery with Ig in her arms, gazing into the fire. Comparisons insisted. Ray’s crescent hip bones and Levi’s heaving, hair-damp chest. Ray’s flat feet and the cracked yellow callus where the two smallest toes on Levi’s right foot once were. Where Ray was riding waves, Levi was half-buried; where Ray was whisking along whitecaps, Levi was hunkered. Where Ray was leaning into the curves, Levi was arms outstretched. Where Ray was brittle grapevine, Levi was boulder. Where Ray was a liquid slug sluicing down the canyon, Levi was the Amargosa’s solid sandstone foot. She was drawn to Levi the way Ig was drawn to fire—she should fear him but did not. Meanwhile, going back to Ray was like rolling down a hill.
—
Once she’d touched Ray she’d not been able to stop. They sat on the floor of the Blue Bird, her silently stroking his bizarrely soft and white fingertips and speaking only to remind him to drink.
“I thought you were dead,” she said finally. “I have to keep touching you until you’re alive again.”
“I feel very much alive,” he said.
“You look different,” she said, “but the same.” He was thinner, burnt, with new shading in his face, impossible to map. Bloody crescents where some fingernails had been. But he was hers: fine mouth and prophet eyes. Delivered her by some great benevolent hand. She could not deny that.
“You look just like I remember,” he said. Though he was burnt all over he let Ig into his lap. He kissed the baby and burbled her stomach. She squealed and pinched her fingers together and Luz taught Ray how that meant
more
.
All his months in Limbo Mine, months that had not passed in that out-of-time place, that had instead hovered, waiting, at the surface, that had shuddered behind him as he walked, came upon him then. Lost time flooded through him. His tears came—“I guess I’ve missed a lot”—and then hers. Luz asked where he had been, and through Ig’s demands and diversions he told her, told her everything, even all that was madness.
When he described the attack the night before the rangers found him, she showed him the scarf she had stuffed into the cushion. “Here,” she said, stretching the wrinkled silk taut. “Levi brought me this.”
“Yes,” he said, touching the rusty stain. “That must’ve been where they hit me.”
“Who?” Luz asked, and Ig said, “Ooo, ooo, ooo.”
Ray said, “I’m not sure.”
Luz also gave him the Leatherman. He looked at it for a very long time. “This was my dad’s,” he said.
“I didn’t know,” she said.
He took her face in his hands and they both checked to see if she would allow this. She did, but his hands felt like a skeleton version of Levi’s and soon she pulled away. They were silent awhile before Luz said, “What do I look like to you?”
Ray was confused. She added, “With your eye thing. What are you seeing now?”
“It’s sort of pink in here, pink and yellow-orange. Sunset colors, a lovely sunset, and you’re like a happy purple cloud on the horizon.”
“A happy cloud. And Ig?”
Ig was luminous, with dark, hard feet. She was the same size as when he left her, but her head was larger, with spots larger than freckles sprayed along her hairline. “Sun spots. From the Melon.” He wept again as she told the story of their afterworld.
Luz was quiet for some time. Her shimmer evaporated. She went dark as coal. “You left us,” she said finally.
“I know. I’m—”
“I mean, you left us
to die
.”
“No, I . . . Yes. I was afraid. I convinced myself I was doing it for you, but it was for me.”
“I fucking know that,” she said. “You’re not telling me any news.” She took a gash of root from her pocket and nibbled it ferociously. “Everything was like that.”
“Everything?”
“You were always convincing me I was a burden. That I needed taking care of. I felt like an infant at the end, and then you left me with one.”
“I know, babygirl.”
Luz croaked.
“I’m sorry,” said Ray. “Habit. Goddamn it, I’m sorry.” He sobbed some, binding his hands with the stained scarf. Luz had been so small on Sal’s TV, smaller still as he’d come down from the dune sea. He’d known it was her immediately, folded into another man’s arms, as she always was. He wanted to be those arms, but knew he never had been and did not deserve to be now. And yet here he was, trying, and in this way he was as selfish as ever, more. Luz was maybe happy without him—no, he would not allow for that. When he touched her, she’d softened. She was his home, and he hers—he still believed that. Finally he said, “I needed you to need me, I see that now. I thought you were my project. I was so afraid, Luz, and I didn’t know how to love
someone who didn’t need me. And you didn’t need me, and you don’t now. I know that . . . But, have me? Please have me. If you’ll have me I’ll deserve you.”
Ig wedged herself between them and let loose a high, jealous hum. “She’s been doing this,” Luz said, though this was in fact the first time she’d seen it; until now she’d only heard about it from Dallas. “Remember that moan she used to do? It’s more like a hum now.” They waited for Ig to do it again, but Ig was nobody’s wag.
Luz looked at Ray, found him repentant and tender and tired. She unwound the scarf from his hands and returned it to the cushion. “You need to sleep.”
—
Now, with Ig gone slack in her arms and the few people tending the dying bonfire giving her a wide berth, Luz wanted to take her own advice, wanted to sleep—but where? She remembered what the others said, about the dune curating, about being open to signs and omens. Why had she not accepted its grace sooner—why had she slid into her old stingy self?
Levi’s dome summoned from the desert. Instead, she walked beyond the encampment, away from the dune sea. Among the sandy clumps of roots she came upon a downed tree, long dead, its branches burnt to nubs and its silvery trunk twisted like a hank of wet hair. Tomorrow someone from the colony would find it and hack it up for firewood. Everything she saw would go that way, someday.
—
Ray woke late that night, terrified. Luz and Ig were asleep beside him in the school bus, but from somewhere nearby came an atrocious and
familiar yowl. He made his way outside and through the shanties and tents and RVs toward the strange banshee sound he’d learned to fear in the desert. At the edge of the colony, he found the source of that sickening shriek: a gangrenous-colored lorry, with roll bars and K.C. lights, Luz’s man and another tending to it.
Rage rose in Ray like water in a basin. Luz’s man was big, his bigness the first and second and third thing you noticed about him. He had wide meaty hands and a beefy face that shone violently in the dawn. His buddy—weasely and quick, the kind of guy who noticed everything—said something to him and the bastard turned, saw Ray, and waved.
You look just like I remember, Ray had told Luz, his only lie. Something was different about her, not just her darkened skin or wind-thinned hair or the sand all over her. Beneath all that, she was caved in, fervent. Manic but vacant. A little mad, maybe, or just saddled with a mighty hurt, Ray would have said if Sal or Uncle Randy asked after her. Suddenly it was clear that the big man was to blame not only for Ray’s injuries but Luz’s too.
Ray waved back.
Luz’s big man and his helper mounted the lorry and tore off into the dune sea.
—
Out beyond the colony, a formation of red, wind-rounded stones rose from the husks of chaparral. A few days later, when he was well enough, Ray invited Luz and Ig to accompany him to the formation.
There, Luz found herself answering the questions she’d so often asked when she first arrived, found herself often saying the name so often said to her.
Ray helped Ig summit a boulder. “Levi. He’s the dowser? The one Lonnie told us about? He runs this place?”
“It’s so much more than that.”
Her adoration cranked a vise on Ray’s chest. But he and Luz had spent that first night together, and the three nights since, and though she’d refused his advances, the nights themselves were something. He and Luz had doled out some pain to Levi in those hours.
“He finds water,” she said.
Ig hurled herself into Ray’s arms. He said, “Tell me about him.”
Luz did, her voice shimmering with reverence, bristling with golden zeal. Ray heard it and also another, a gravelly voice from near memory. He saw in his mind a Sunday morning figure, intrepid and windblown on location, marching out the facts with steady indigo objectivity.
He’s a scientist, a naturalist. But those words are so deficient. You know that sense we always had that we were missing something? That there was something fundamentally wrong in the way we approached the natural world? You said that, once. The Amargosa looks barren but it’s teeming with life. He’s the reason all these people are here. Why they came and why they stay. He keeps all of us alive. He finds water . . . ephemeral rivers, nearly instant . . . the equivalent of coral reefs. He’s . . . touched. You know I scoff at this as much as you do, but it’s true . . . He’s walked through some dark spaces to get where he is . . . learned to listen to the rocks and sand and earth . . . the uranium spoke to him. In a hundred years we’ll have a completely different understanding of the natural world, thanks to him. He’s like Darwin, or Lewis and Clark . . . a seismic shift in the way we understand the environment . . . blending of the spiritual and the natural. Everything’s connected and he can feel the strings. I feel drawn to him, I guess, since you’ve been gone . . . made me grow in ways I didn’t know I could. Tenderhearted . . . demanding . . . Yucca Mountain . . . Operation Glassjaw . . . A prophet, I guess you would say. It’s like the world is bigger because of him—he can see in a different way—like you! And he’s a giver like you—he gives himself to everyone here. You would like him, Ray.