Excerpt from Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

She sat and drank and Ray stood—he did not like to sit much—and consulted his list. Ray's tiny notebook, looted from the back of a drugstore, was the old-timey reporter's kind with the wire spiral at the top, such that before writing in it he should have licked the tip of his yellow golf pencil, gouged to sharpness with the Leatherman he carried.

Luz snooped in Ray's notebook whenever possible, skimming his secret poems and skate park schematics and lists. Ray was a listmaker. He did not live a day without a list; Luz had never made a list a day in her life—their shtick. His lists went:

– matches
– crackers
– L
– water

Or

:

– shitting hole
– garage door
– L
– water

Or

:

– candles
– alcohol
– peanuts
– L
– water

Or

:

– axe
– gas
– shoes
– L
– water

Or

:

– charcoal
– lighter fluid
– marshmallows for L
– water

Or

:

– Sterno
– eyedrops
– calamine
– kitty litter
– L
– water

Or, often, only:

:

– L
– water

"Hey," said Ray, batting her with his notebook. "I heard of a guy who has blueberries from Seattle."

"Seattle," she whispered, the word itself like rain. "Can I come?" She had never been on a procurement mission, as Ray called them.

"You want to?"

Luz squealed in the affirmative and finished her ration cola. Then they set off, hand in hand, Ray's eyes as phosphorescent as the day she witnessed him birthed from the sea.

Ray had the blazing prophet eyes of John Muir, and like John Muir, war had left him nerve-shaken and lean as a crow. The ocean had restored him. The way he told it, a city of a ship bearing the emblem of the motherland deposited him in the riverless West, at San Diego. He was released—honorable discharge, had medals somewhere—but the whole way back he'd been jumpy, sleepless, barely keeping the darkness at the edges. Nothing soothed him until he heard the white noise of the breakers. So instead of going home to the heartland he liberated a surfboard from someone's backyard and made his home in the curl. He had a mind to surf through all crises and shortages and conflicts past and present. He would make a vacuum of the coast, nothing could happen there, even the things that had happened before he was born. He was surfing the day they pronounced the Colorado dead and he was surfing the day it was dammed, a hundred years before. When some omnipotent current ferried him northward toward LA, he allowed it. He surfed as that city's aqueducts went dry. He surfed as she built new aqueducts, wider aqueducts, deeper aqueducts, aqueducts stretching to the watersheds of Idaho, Washington, Montana, aqueducts veining the West, half a million miles of palatial half-pipe left of the hundredth meridian, its architects and objectors occasionally invoking the name of Baby Dunn. Ray surfed as concrete waterway crept up to Alaska, surfed as the Mojave and the Sonoran licked the bases of glaciers. He was surfing each time terrorists or visionaries bombed the massive unfilled aqueduct canals at Bend and Boise and Boulder and Eugene. He surfed as states sued states and as the courts shut down the ducts for good. He surfed as the Central Valley, America's fertile crescent, went salt flat, as its farmcorps regularly drilled three thousand feet into the unyielding earth, praying for aquifer but delivered only hot brine, as Mojavs sucked up the groundwater to Texas, as a major tendril of interstate collapsed into a mile-wide sinkhole, killing everybody on it, as all of the Southwest went moonscape with sinkage, as the winds came and as Phoenix burned and as a white-hot superdune entombed Las Vegas.

Excerpted from Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins. Copyright © 2015 by Claire Vaye Watkins. Excerpted by permission of Riverhead Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.