Cyrus reached for his canteen, tilted it to lips fuller than Izzy’s—sometimes it felt as if his lips could swallow hers whole when they kissed. His Adam’s apple flexed, and muscles moved animal-like under the inked skin of his chest and arms. Rose, serpent, panther, falcon, and skull tattoos twined, pawed, and flew, and, in the case of the skull, hovered like a reminder of the fate that is certain for everyone. The skull reminded Izzy of something else, too. Of the way that, sometimes, her love for Cyrus felt like a different kind of death: even after almost nine years together, she found herself slayed by the sight of him.
She wasn’t the only one. A man that beautiful, that skilled, disturbed people somehow, especially out here in the desert where the beauty that existed was raw and harsh and often hidden. But Cyrus could build almost anything out of anything, could make almost anything grow. When you looked at him, you felt you could do these things, too. You might even start to glow like he did.
He nodded his head once at Izzy, his lips softening and peaking into a smile, and she dipped her chin in response, feeling her own lips lift and her nipples tingle. I love you, she mouthed. Not long till they’d be in bed again, their favorite pastime. But it wasn’t just the sex Izzy yearned for. She felt their love manifested in sleep, as dreams, in the words they whispered to each other like handing a candle back and forth when the desert encroached darkly outside their shack. Now, her womb pinched with desire.
Izzy, Cyrus, and their friends Seth and Nephy White had gathered in Bombay Beach to tend the “three-sisters” community garden they’d planted. Cyrus had the idea—a gift for the children. He, Izzy, Seth, and Nephy came from Salton City, Slab City, and Salvation Mountain, not here. But no one had built any gardens for them.
They had—all four—grown up on the shores of the man-made lake where movie stars once played golf, water-skied, boat raced, and fished for artificially introduced croaker. Slowly, due to pollution, increased salinity, and an overgrowth of dead algae that cut off oxygen and produced hydrogen sulfide gas, the Salton Sea deteriorated into an anoxic cesspool surrounded by mountains where the military once conducted bombing test operations. Selenium, the poisonous trace mineral present in agricultural drainage, washed into the sea and ravaged the brains, beaks, hearts, livers, wings, legs, feet, and skeletons of aquatic birds and kidneys, ovaries, spines, heads, mouths, and fins of fish.
◆◆◆
Izzy, Cyrus, Seth, and Nephy made the garden in the dust. First, they mounded dirt that Cyrus had hauled in his Silverado, then hollowed out a shallow, moon-like crater and planted corn there. When the crop was at four inches, they sowed bean seeds around it, and in the spring, they planted pumpkins at the perimeter. The prickly pumpkin leaves protected the mulch and drove animals away, the beans wound through the pumpkins, tendrilled up the corn for support, pulling nitrogen from the air and binding the sisters together.