Gold Fame Citrus Read Online Free Page A

on.
    “Your people came here looking for something better. Gold, fame, citrus. Mirage. They were feckless, yeah? Schemers. That’s why no one wants them now. Mojavs.”
    He was kidding, but still the word stung, here and where it hung on the signage of factories in Houston and Des Moines, hand-painted on the gates of apartment complexes in Knoxville and Beaumont, in crooked plastic letters on the marquees of Indianapolis elementary schools: MOJAVS NOT WELCOME. NO WORK FOR MOJAVS. MOJAVS KEEP OUT. A chant ringing out from the moist nation’s playgrounds: The roses are wilted / the orange trees are dead / them Mojavs got lice / all over they head.
    But Ray smiled and his kind mouth once again soothed Luz. “We’re stick-it-out people,” he said, but what he really meant, she knew, was they could be Mojavs together.
    Ray brushed a hank of hair from her eyes and said, “You look like I know you.” Had he seen her before? Luz said maybe and sheepishly described the decaying billboard surveying Sunset Boulevard, her in sweatshop bra and panties, eyes made up like bruises, crouched over a male model’s ass like she was about to take a bite out of it. Get thosefreaky teeth, the art director had not even whispered. One papery panel peeling off now, so her bare legs looked shrunken, vestigial. “The zenith of my career,” she said. “Minus a commercial for wine coolers.”
    Ray said, “No, somewhere else,” then Luz kissed him.
    After, there was more silence between them, but it did not feel like silence. It felt like peace.
    Ray asked, “What about you? You going to evac?”
    They took you by bus. Camps in Louisiana, Pennsylvania, New Jersey. No telling which you’d end up at and anyway it didn’t matter. It was temporary, they said. The best thing you could do for the cause. She knew better, but she was scheduled to go anyway. The suitcase beside her was filled with novels and wads of designer clothes, the hatbox heavy with her savings. But she hated crowds, hated every human being except this one beside her. She suddenly and fiercely did not want to get on a bus tomorrow. She wanted to fall in love instead. Frightening herself, she said, “I was.”
    So Ray took her home, to the gutted Santa Monica apartment complex from which his friends staged their small resistance. They had sex on Ray’s bedroll in the laundry room. After, he said, “I need you to promise me we won’t talk about the war.”
    She said, “Promise me we won’t talk about the water.”
    He said, “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
    —
    Now, dusk was coming to the dry rills of raindance. Luz followed Ray along the berm and, though it scared her, into a man-high rusty corrugated drainage culvert, where the berry man was supposed to be. Inside, a stench met them, fecal and hot. Something scraped about back in the darkness, something screeched. As the light at their backswilted, Luz put one hand to her mouth and groped for Ray with the other. This was, she realized, probably not a good place to be a woman.
    The starlet’s sandals began to slice into Luz’s heels again and she stumbled. “You okay?” Ray whispered. She nodded though she was dizzy and hot and there was a new pressure on the underside of her eyebones, and though Ray surely could not see her nodding in this semiterranean dark.
    Soon, Luz’s pupils dilated wide enough to accept Ray’s silhouette ahead of her. She clung to him with one hand and traced the other along the metal wall of the pipe, flinching at its rust splinters and steadying herself as she lurched over knee-high sediment dunes and dry knolls of sewage. The culvert forked into a smaller pipe where Ray had to stoop. The sounds went human now; voices of people gathered to haggle and score ricocheted down the tube.
    Fresh socks here, all-cotton socks.
    Ovaltine, whole can, hep!
    Luz and Ray continued, the culvert soon clogged with the crowd’s collective fetid lethargy. Wherever the pair walked, bodies blocked their path.