Dad put an arm out to block her and did that thing where he bent his head to the side, like he was trying to listen better to the earth or to the sky. Then, after half a minute, he put his finger to his lips and took her hand and, slowly, gingerly, they made their way through the people-hiding grass and out onto the other side.
He only did this when they’d come across something dead or something about to be dead. So Sydney made sure not to make noise with her own pack and not to look back after they’d passed whatever it was that was dying or about to be. Making sure Dad didn’t see, she slipped a holo-pen out of her pack, the size of her index finger, and clicked it, timing the button-press with the crunch of gravel under her boot. She’d go over the holo with Bambi later and they’d try to figure out what bit of newness had snuck into Sydney’s routine and broken up the sameness of the landscape and the sameness of the heat and the sameness of the trek. “You wanna see a dead body?” And Bambi would inevitably ask her what it had smelled like. Maybe hot leather with an overlay of garbage sugariness.
This part of the desert, the patrols were sparse, but if Sydney listened closely, tilted her head like Dad did, she could hear the sizzle of electric fencing, hear it before she saw the first of the pylons and the sign that said, “PRESIDIO COUNTY, TEXAS MINEFIELD AHEAD ACCESS PROHIBITED.” If you got here while it was still dark out and you couldn’t see the signs and the insect noise overpowered the fence-sizzle, you could save your life by sighting the Marfa lights, what some called will-o’-the-wisps and what others called the Chinati lights. Them three golden orbs that sometimes changed colors and sometimes popped off then reappeared elsewhere so you couldn’t tell if they were ten or a hundred miles away. Right off U.S. 90 between Alpine and Marfa. But sometimes seeing the Marfa lights meant they’d gotten too close to people that weren’t her family or the Chihuahuans. People who might sight you down the barrel of a rifle, no warning shot. She’d seen a few coyotes done that way, thankful for the grass that hid her but not for Dad, who insisted on finishing the run anyway before heading back.
No patrollers today and no white-masks, no one shouting Whiteland battle cries at them or the animals they were supposed to be sharing the desert with. Just Syd and Dad and the device Syd was pulling out of her sack, a tripod that unfurled an umbrella skeleton out of its top. With her touchpad, Sydney punched in a sequence of keys. The umbrella skeleton curled, then went sideways, like its tentacles had eyes, turning left then right then left again, before spinning so fast the legs became a blur. Then it beeped and curled in upon itself again.
Sydney was about to retract the device and slip it back into her sack when Dad grabbed her arm and did the head tilt again. Probably listening for that sizzle. The bugs were too loud for Sydney to hear anything else, so she waited. When he was satisfied, they got up and passed the sign. It took them another quarter hour of walking before they hit their bounty.
The cacti spread out in bunches before them. Clustered by type almost as though they’d been organized just for them. Sydney knew there was an air of transgression to what they were doing, but no one told them outright it was wrong. Still, she couldn’t help, at irregular intervals, looking to the sky for the glint of light off the wings of a drone.
They made a circuit, cataloging type, and Sydney, work gloves on, pulled up samples, sometimes having to cut them loose with her knife. A lightblade would’ve been quicker, but it would’ve damaged the plants beyond selling. The cacti then went into the wagon Dad had unfolded from his backpack and whose sensors allowed it to hover about seven inches off the ground.
Dad reached in Sydney’s pack and pulled out a Flex, affixing to it a blocklike device with a wrist-thick antenna angled upward. When it “plinked” a connection, he put on his salesman face.
“All right, y’all. I got your cacti. Whatever you want, I got. Straight from the You-Ess Southwest,” he said into the camera. Out of the device would pop holos of buyers in the Marketplace whose messages Dad accepted. And behind those white faces would be telltale signs of the Colonies: a bookcase seen sideways because the Flex-holder was floating in zero gravity or a canopy of stars outside a window that opened out onto inky black expanse or clean, paved streets over which sped maglev cars in perfectly orchestrated flight-lines. “Other sellers only upload photos, and we all know the feeling of getting that package in the post and it ain’t even close to what it looked like on the screen. So I’m showing you what we got right as we’re picking it.” Some of the buyers already had cacti artfully decorating the shelves of their homes or offices, and Syd always wondered if they were cacti she had picked herself or if the buyers had been conned by some faker claiming they had species that didn’t exist no more.
“Nipple beehive,” Dad continued, and Sydney pulled a nipple beehive cactus out of the wagon she dragged behind her, holding it out to the camera. In the initial broadcasts, she was only a disembodied hand holding a cactus. But one customer had caught a glimpse of her and her smile and had bought almost their entire haul that day. So Dad had tried it again, making sure his little helper got her time onscreen, and, of course, sales skyrocketed. She’d seen how his skin glowed the whole way back on days like that, so she made sure to smile for each buyer, no matter how much her mouth hurt by the end.
“And eagle claws,” Dad said, taking the orb-like specimen from Sydney and turning it over so the customer could see. “Straight from the Chihuahua Desert. Check the geotag, brother.”
“I believe you,” said the turtlenecked customer with a chuckle. “What’s that behind you? On the wagon? The one with the red petals?”
“Oh this?” Before Dad could continue, Sydney had the clump of scarlet hedgehog cactus in his hands. “Now this is enchinocereus coccineus, special variant of the Mojave mound cactus you used to be able to find in Nevada and parts of Colorado. Now, blooddirt done wiped them Mojave all out, so this is the only cousin to survive. Last bit of family left here. Got the bright red and orange flowers with the green stigma and the rounded petals. Low to medium spine cover, somewhat flabby stems. Now, get this.” His voice got quiet, conspiratorial. “The clumps can have up to one hundred members, each one about ten inches long. You tryna cover some ground, really bring a room together, really brighten the place, this is your baby. Now, filling a room with these is darn near impossible, because, truth be told, there ain’t that many left, and these, like it as not, get snatched up soon as a buyer sets sight on ’em. So you gotta act fast, because there’s a bit of a queue behind you, and I guaran-damn-tee you, every single one of ’em’s gonna want this beauty here.”
“And they travel well?”
“Some of the hardier ones, yeah, they can do without light or soil, even water, for as long as about five Colony flights back and forth, but these right here are a little more delicate. You’re gonna want it fast, and shipping and handling’s where you’ll really have to think hard. Hard and fast. So what do you say?”
It went like this for the better part of two hours: Dad moving a customer up to the front of the queue, aiming their holographed face over the wagon full of wares, then pushing hard to get the buyer to pay way too much for what grew plenty here. He’d even say some of them were hundreds of years old when Sydney knew that they were as old as she was. “Radiation makes ’em that way,” Dad had told her in confidence one night, counting through their credits. But some of them actually were beautifully rare: the living rock cactus with its rosette arrangement of brown and yellow and gray triangular tubercules, Chihuahuan fishhooks, nylon hedgehogs, Ladyfingers. Whenever one of the prospective customers judged one of these ugly, Sydney’s heart leapt, because it meant a part of the haul and, to an extent, a part of her favorite zone of desert would belong to her.
There were a couple customers left in the queue when the gunshot spat a thin column of dirt up at their feet. Mid-sentence, Dad force-quit the virtual market. Sydney ducked and snapped the tarp shut over the wagon to keep their wares safe, then they were off, running at a crouch, hurrying as close to the ground as possible. Another rifleshot lifted the land by her foot, but she kept pace. They were only scaring her. They didn’t mean to kill. Which almost made Sydney slow down until she saw Dad speeding ahead, the distance between them widening. The wagon bumped against rocks and rattled and Sydney spun, still moving, to straighten it, so she had her back turned when she heard the explosion.
She started when something wet began raining down on her. Plops of red dotted the tarp like scarlet hedgehog petals.
IT was dark by the time the crunch of gravel beneath Sydney’s boots could be heard from the trailer. She was a silhouette, black against the blue, and Bambi must have heard the noise, because the screen door crashed open, and the little girl bounced on her feet on the front porch. She’d forgotten to turn the porch light on, so she heard Sydney sniffling before she saw the new red tinge to her hair. But she must have smelled something. Maybe hot leather and a garbage sugariness. Because she grew quiet.
Bambi followed Sydney behind the trailer where she unhooked the tarp and their father’s body parts tumbled to the ground.
The dandelion stems came into focus, the seed heads like moons against that part of the sky where red and blue made gray. Gutted apartment buildings and parking complexes hazed and fuzzed in the background, blurred, and the wind pitted the flowers’ orbs so that whole chunks would escape, chewed out of the mass then spat out in pieces on a breeze that brought no relief.
“Punk ass nigga.” Sydney’s face was next to Linc’s in the grass, but Linc only had eyes for the dandelions. The grass shifted, signaling movement, and she hovered over him on one elbow. “Come on.” She nudged him. “I know you got some.” A pause. “Punk ass nigga.”
“Nah, you win.” It was good to hear her voice, though.
“Busted car muffler-lookin’ ass.”
He chuckled, then pretended he didn’t.
“Baked-potato-for-a-body-ass nigga.”
“Nah, you messed it up.”
“How’d I mess it up?”
“It’s supposed to be baked-potato-for-a-body-lookin’ ass. See when you say it like that, it doesn’t make any sense?”
She nudged him again, harder this time, and he smirked. In his mind, they were on her mattress. Her face tipped on its side, sheathed in blue night, eyes that shone silver in the moonlight, and hair that was now cerulean, but copper in full daylight like a downy halo around her head, one clump coming at a slight angle across her forehead, her bottom lip just a small bit forward over the top lip beneath a short, rounded nose, those two thin lips a hard line bent upward at its middle into a shy, fighting-against-itself smile. He was surprised because Black girls didn’t have that kind of hair. “Picasso painting-lookin’ ass.”
Vines wrapped around the columns of the parking garage. In a shattered window near the first floor of a high-rise stood the trunk of a tree.
“Y equals mx plus b-lookin’ ass.”
Ghetto palms growing out of ledges and crevices.
“No-neck-havin’-lookin’ ass!”
Linc barked out a laugh and rolled on his side. It was only in the midst of his laughing fit that he realized how quiet it had gotten. “Cue ball from a game of bumper pool-lookin’ ass.”
“Fit a straw through your gap-lookin’ ass.”
“Boneless barbecue chicken with mayo on the side-lookin’ ass.”
“Dick in the butt-lookin’ ass.”
He laughed so hard he couldn’t think of another, and she rolled into him, and instinct wrapped his arms around her, held her so close that her chest pulsated against his with each chuckle, each breath, and he was reminded once again of how she had looked on that mattress in that building on that night.
She was in front of Linc at the market one Monday morning with her EBT card and her arm full of groceries and Linc had told her not to get the bread, because it would spoil easily and the markets only stocked it to look less empty and barren than they really were. She’d said a few words back in that rubbed-raw voice of hers, put her free hand to her chest, cleared her throat, and finished the thought.
