Free Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins Page A

bowl of rocks. Here, here, here, swallowing everything, dense drapes, drapes upon drapes, drapes atop drapes, drapes intertwined with other heavier, darker, mausoleum-making drapes.
    Rita directed Luz and Ray to an L-shaped sofa in the darkened living room. She left to find Lonnie. Luz sat on the floor with Ig. She took tortoise Ig from the starlet’s orange crocodile birkin-turned-diaper-bag and presented him to human Ig with some other toys—not the kachinas, she had thrown the kachinas in the ravine. Ig did not bother with the toys. Her coin eyes rolled in their sockets, looking for Rita.
    Luz, jealous, leaned down and whispered to the child. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”
    “I wouldn’t lead with that,” said Rita, returning.
    Lonnie loped in behind her, wearing some kind of orange-gold robe, itself once a drape, Luz was sure. The robe was cinched around his narrow waist with a chain of sterling silver conchos, each faceted with a gob of turquoise. Lonnie had dressed this way on occasion, the solstice or the Fourth of July, a joke or a near-joke. But there was no joke in it now. He stood in a way that begged to be described as regal. His head was shaved though his black eyebrows were as intense as ever. A long, dense goatee hung from his chin, sculpted square and unmoving, facial hair of the pharaohs. Luz wondered fleetingly where he got the razor. A stupid question, for Lonnie was the great procurer; why they’d come.
    “Brother,” he said, pulling Ray into an embrace. He waited for Luz to stand, too. When she did he grinned and hugged her chastely.
    “You’re kidding,” Lonnie said down to Ig. “I thought for sure she was fucking with me.” He knelt and Luz fermented inwardly at the thought of him touching the baby. She’s not a baby, Ray would have said and indeed had been saying. To which Luz would reply, She’s a relative baby, meaning maybe that she was closer to being a baby than a girl, or meaning maybe that they just got her and so she was newborn to them. Ray would have said, too, Please behave yourself—was in fact at this moment saying it with his breath and his posture and his darting eyes and the taut filaments of his facial muscles, all of which served to remind her that Lonnie was the only person who could help them, and that she should be gracious, or do her best impression of someone gracious, despite the fact that in any other context she would have hated him.
    Squatting, Lonnie said to Ig, “Hello, pretty girl.”
    No, she hated him here.
    “Say hi, Ig,” said Ray. “Ig, say hi .” Ig refused. The car ride hadlulled her to sleep, and she had perhaps not forgiven them for yanking her from the buttery backseat. “Can you say hi ?”
    “She doesn’t want to,” said Luz.
    Lonnie adjusted his robes and sat at the vertex of the L sofa, Rita beside him. Ray sat at the end of the L’s long leg and Luz returned to the floor. Ig, free to do as she pleased now, crawled beyond the coffee table to Rita—she had reverted to crawling lately—and offered her Ig the tortoise.
    “She’s giving it to you,” said Luz.
    “I’m good,” said Rita, though Ig insisted and finally Rita let the saliva-softened tortoise corpse rest on her lap.
    “This is something of a novelty,” said Lonnie. “How old is she?”
    “One,” Luz said, already wanting to keep her young forever.
    Rita scoffed. “Big for one.” They sat with that awhile.
    “So what’s the deal?” Lonnie asked finally, aggressively caressing his shorn head. “Luz making some extra money babysitting?” Luz did not meet his gaze.
    Ray said, “What do you mean?”
    “I guess what I mean is the last time I saw you two you didn’t have a baby. Luz was not pregnant, so far as I could tell, you two were not in the process of cooking up a puppy. And you certainly, so far as I can recall, did not have a newborn. Did they have a newborn, Rita? Or am I demented?”
    Luz pulled Ig back from the glass coffee