Rust

by Julie Mars

  Rico closed his eyes. It was late, and the house was quiet. He could hear the sound of his own heart beating. Listening to it soothed him, and he began to drift toward sleep, a process he looked forward to at the end of each long day. He enjoyed the unexplainable images that presented themselves in his mind, the way they made no sense and no apologies. Tonight he felt almost as if he were marching toward some new place far beyond the shapes and colors he saw inside his head, marching to the beat of that little trap drum in his chest. And when he had gone so far he could barely hear the beating anymore, he saw the words of his epitaph, or heard them, or maybe just felt them. He wasn’t sure how they came to him, but he knew what they said. They said, “Rico Garcia. He surprised us all.”

  That made him chuckle just as he plummeted into a deep sleep, right there on the couch. For the first time since he and Rosalita got together, he never made it into the bedroom, not all night long.

  1974

  I NEED water, I need food, I need to stay alive, he thinks as he lifts his head slowly. It has taken so long, so many aching hours or maybe days, to figure this out. For all that time he has been wishing to die without allowing those words to form in his mind. But he knows it won’t happen. Nothing comes that easy for him. Ever.

  In the air, interlaced with the smells of sweat and filth, the faint scent of rice with cumin hovers. He rises to his feet and begins to flow like one rivulet of dirty water toward the knot of men at the far end of the compound. There are ten toilets there, ten for a thousand men. He will find them and relieve himself. He will join the line for rice and water. He will find a way to survive.

  He allows his eyes to rise to the top of the wall, a barrier so high there is nothing visible beyond but sky. No one ever escapes from here. They had impressed that, if nothing else, upon him on the first day, the day he received his number. The day he was assigned to a cell with five other men. When the darkness came and they were forced to go inside, when they all laid down at once, parts of their bodies touched each other. It was that close, that small, that unbearable.

  How has this happened to him?

  He cannot permit himself that question.

  He cannot face the answer.

  He stands behind a man whose black hair looks wet with grease. The man’s feet are bare. He wears a shirt thick with grime which is buttoned to the neck and at the wrists. The man’s right hand is mangled, scarred over. When he reaches for the tin plate, he balances it on his arm.

  The rice looks as if it had been cooked in dirty water, but he eats it anyway, standing up among a thousand men, searching for one who looked like him.

  White.

  But he sees no one.

  MARGARET FELT no sense of wariness as she moved to the kitchen door and opened it to Rico. The screen door, with its flimsy wooden frame and screen popped out in two places, now stood between them, offering very little protection. She didn’t feel she needed any, so what did it matter. Even Magpie, asleep on the floor of the living room, failed to stir.

  “I’ve come to say I’m sorry for what I said last night,” Rico began. He had actually practiced a more flowery speech, but it vanished from his mind the moment he saw her. “I had the wrong idea, and I ended up making an asshole out of myself.” Here he stopped talking. He could see Margaret quite clearly through the screen, and he hoped to detect a look that indicated he’d made the right decision by returning, that they could start over again, fresh. But before he even had a moment to check, he heard more words coming out of his own mouth. “. . . which is not unusual,” he added, and then he smiled. It should be pointed out that Rico was a good-looking man. He stood just a fraction under six feet but seemed taller, perhaps because he’d inherited a slender, muscular build from his father. He had interesting angles in his face, along with high cheekbones, deep dimples, and a beautiful set of teeth, all of which gave him a certain flair, while the tattoos and the well-defined muscles telegraphed the bad boy that he wasn’t now and had never been. Back in the days when he and Rosalita had been passionate, she had said on more than one occasion that the only reason she didn’t leave him during the rocky patches was that she couldn’t bear not being able to look up and see that face several times a day. All this was meaningless to Rico, who thought he looked like every other Chicano guy his age in the South Valley. Maybe today, though, he let his smile linger a second or so longer than he would have if he hadn’t heard so many times that it could cast a spell on a woman.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Margaret replied. “It’s okay.” She could have added that she’d heard comments like that scores of times from men on the subway or drunks in the bar and had never, not once, received an apology later. She could have confided that this was virgin territory, his little display of regret, and, in truth, she felt a bit stunned by it, but what for? To admit such a thing was an invitation, and Margaret tended to be stingy with her invitations. Always had been—ever since, standing at the window of Donny’s apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, she’d watched her mother and father wave goodbye from the street, never to show up again. But, invitation or not, she did feel touched by Rico, and the specific place it registered was in the tips of her fingers which moved toward the latch on the screen door and flipped it free. She opened the door and stepped outside.

  Rico backed up, a wave of exhilaration, subtle but powerful, sweeping him farther away than he needed to be to let the door swing along its path. “I’d like to teach you to weld,” he said, “now that I’ve got it straight that that’s what you want.”

  Margaret held her breath. Here was a dream come true, a rare event in her experience. Yet it was hard for her to accept it. She felt afraid, and she learned instantly that it was just as difficult to say the word yes as to desperately want to hear it.

  “I can pay you,” she said as a way of making it easier on herself. “What do you charge?”

  And now Rico had a decision to make. The idea of money exchanging hands had never once occurred to him, not in all the imagining he had done on the way over here this morning. He was used to giving everything he had to women, used to that particular feminine expectation that seemed to him to come with a chant of more, more, more. But here was a woman offering a fair exchange. It seemed wrong to take it—not macho enough perhaps—but he knew that that reaction was tightly wrapped up in his previous fantasies and this idea that she was his destiny, and he made a choice then and there to surprise himself and say yes to what she offered.

  “How does ten bucks an hour sound?” He made more than that in the garage when he was working, but there wasn’t always work, so it evened out.

  “Great,” she responded. “More than fair.”

  She extended her hand to him to shake, the way two men do when a deal is struck, and he reached for it with the same gravity he would put into any deal-closing handshake. “My name is Rico Garcia,” he said, and then he added, “a su servicio” because that was the way Elena had taught him to introduce himself when he was a little boy. And he felt happy, like a little boy, in this moment.

  “I’m Margaret. Margaret Shaw,” she said, and she smiled and Rico felt like all the stars in the sky were on his side.

  “We’ll start on Monday,” he said. “Come by my shop in the morning.”

  “What time do you get there?”

  “Eight, eight-thirty.”

  “I’ll be there at eight-thirty,” she said. “On the dot.”

  “Bueno. See you in a couple days,” he replied, and then he turned and walked away. He climbed into his truck, feeling sure of his direction, the way he had when he laid the first cement step on the walkway to his house just after he bought his piece of property. Even then, his neighbors had stood at the fence, peering in, and said, “Rico, you vato loco, who puts in a walkway before a house?” Rico had not bothered to reply. What was the use of explaining that this was something he could do right now, get it done, if others couldn’t see that already? What was the use of explaining that his vision blurred when it swep
t past the immediate moment and the few that followed? Rico had lived his whole life as a man without a long-range plan. He had enough to do just managing the day.

  On the other hand, he remembered, vividly, each and every instant that had passed already, as if they were carved into stone tablets which could never wear away. He often wondered how he could possibly have enough room in his head for all the memories, large and small. He remembered the birth of each daughter, of course, the hours of agony Rosalita went through, swearing up and down each time that she was finished with giving birth;, but he remembered, just as clearly, the little dresses each daughter wore for the first day of kindergarten. He remembered the entire sermon Monsignor Frank gave at his father’s funeral mass, and he could still recite the times tables he learned in the third grade. He remembered the sound of the Rio when the dams were open and the water eddied through the roots of the cottonwoods that had fallen over at the edge of the bank, just as well as he recalled the look on Elena’s face when he’d told her Rosalita was pregnant and they were planning to move in together without the benefit of holy matrimony. So many moments lined up behind him, each one lit with a spotlight any time he chose to turn it on, and yet the future was nothing but shadows. Except that now, there was one little beam shining brightly, and if it had a label it would’ve been, “8:30 Monday morning.”

  Rico parked in his usual spot behind Garcia Automotive, unlocked the security gates, and went right to work. Saturdays were always the easiest, the day his customers showed up for routine oil changes and tire rotations. They sat in his office with their takeout cups from the Barelas Coffee House, thumbing through old magazines or just staring out the front windows at the foot traffic waiting for him to finish. He worked with speed and efficiency, and he always kept his mind on the job. But today was different. His mind drifted. He had never taught anyone to weld, and now, as he replaced the drain plug on an oil pan or poured the dirty oil into the recycle barrel, he found himself wondering how to start. His own father had taught him to weld so long ago that Rico could not remember the sequence of lessons, and he took his skill so much for granted that he never broke down the steps, one by one. He wanted to present the material in an orderly manner, lay it out in such a way that Margaret would grasp the basics quickly. But not too quickly, he smiled to himself.

  “You got a shit-eating grin on your face, bro’,” said Benito Aragon, a man Rico had known since they were both eight years old. He carried a bag from the corner grocery store in the crook of his arm. “There’s only one thing puts a shit-eating grin like that on a man’s face, bro’,” Benito continued, stepping farther into the garage. He placed the bag on the concrete floor and pushed his sunglasses up onto the top of his head. His shaven head had progressed to the stubble stage, and he wore a pair of long, baggy red satin shorts that made him look like a wannabe basketball player for the UNM Lobos.

  “Don’t talk to me about eating shit, you sick fuck,” Rico responded.

  Benito placed his hand dramatically over his heart. “You killed me, bro’,” he said, and then he stepped forward and he and Rico shook hands, a complicated series of movements left over from their teenage years that ended in a stylized hug. They saw each other every couple of months, usually when Benito was walking home from the mercadito with a six-pack and stopped in the garage. “So who is she?” Benito persisted. “I know you, Rico.”

  “You don’t know shit, Benito.”

  “When I see my man smiling at the recycle barrel, I know what I know.”

  Rico laughed. In thirty-five years, he had never confided one personal bit of information to Benito and he was not about to start, but he did feel compelled to say something, so he settled on, “I was thinking about teaching.”

  “Teaching or teachers?” Benito replied. “Oh, I got it, I got it. You suddenly remembered that student teacher we had for New Mexico history in the ninth grade, right? Miss McKenzie? Better known as Senorita Double-D. No wonder you were smiling.” Benito cleared a spot on Rico’s workbench and hoisted himself up to sit there. “She was the only reason I finished the ninth grade.”

  “You finished but you didn’t pass,” Rico reminded him.

  “How could I? I only went to one class. But go ahead, ask me something about New Mexico history.”

  “Who’s the governor?”

  “You mean now? Fuck if I know.”

  Rico figured there was a fifty-fifty chance that was true. Benito had his hands full: first he’d married a bitch-on-wheels who convinced him to sign over his truck to her, and then packed it up with everything they owned and took off. His second wife came with four kids, the youngest of whom had promptly been hit by a car—a drunk driver—and was now paralyzed from the waist down and in a wheelchair. The driver did six months in county. That was ten years ago, and Rico knew that Benito still harbored fantasies of killing him and dumping his sorry carcass in the middle of the desert for the vultures to finish off.

  Benito stayed for two oil changes and even helped rotate the tires on an old ’75 Caddy in mint condition. Then he ambled on down the block, stopping to watch a pickup basketball game his son was playing in, wheelchair and all.

  MEANWHILE, MARGARET busied herself by hanging a hammock between two elm trees in her yard. She had bought the hammock from a Mexican street vendor at an outdoor mercado on Old Coors Boulevard for twenty dollars, and she had no idea whatsoever if that was a good price or a ripoff fit for a gringa from New York. It was woven in bright tropical colors and came with a little pillow sewn into one end, as if it were important to the weaver to point the resting person in one direction only. Margaret felt a stab of guilt as she twisted the substantial hooks into the flesh of the big trees in her yard. It seemed selfish and wrong to wound them in such a way, but she pressed on. She had never had a yard, a tree, or a hammock to hang in her whole life, and it seemed magical. It was not the magic of travel billboards or subway ads, though, which seemed to focus on couples in bathing suits, margaritas, and white-tipped waves in the background. This was the magic of being off the ground and also horizontal, of staring upward through a maze of leaves and seeing patches of pure cerulean blue, of having the supreme luxury of time and space. She would become a woman resting in a hammock under a Chinese elm tree not far from the Rio Grande. She would hear the monkeys from the zoo as she daydreamed.

  Besides, having a hammock was a family legacy of which there were precious few in Margaret’s life. In the months after her parents left for India and before they disappeared, she had received a long letter with a photograph tucked into the envelope. In it, her parents relaxed in a wide hammock, Vincent settled into it on his back and Regina on her side next to him, her face pressed into his chest and their legs intertwined. Vincent’s arms were wrapped around her, and in one hand he held a tall bottle of Kingfisher beer. He was smiling at the camera, while Regina’s face was barely visible. Vincent had written little messages on the picture, like in a comic book. Out of his own mouth came the words, “I love you, my sweet little girl!” and out of Regina’s came, “We miss you every day, every minute, every second! Don’t grow up too much before we get home!” On the back of the picture, in Vincent’s hard-to-read scrawl, it read, “Mommy and Daddy in Goa, thinking of Margaret with Grampy in New York.” Donny had hung it on the little vanity mirror in her bedroom, where it stayed for a good ten years before she finally tucked it into a box of mementoes which included all the gifts from India; and then later—after Donny’s death—his gold-plated pocket watch, his certificate of U.S. citizenship, and a small stack of family photos, mostly people Margaret didn’t recognize who lived, she assumed, in County Cork, Ireland.

  When she finally got the hammock strung up, taut and secure, she climbed in, placing her head on the little pillow and letting her arm trail over the side to ruffle Magpie’s fur from time to time. She felt like a pretty magician’s assistant in a levitation act. She felt like a new baby in a cradle of love. High above the trees were white clouds which slowly passed
over, first removing and then releasing the blue sky into the little patches between the leaves. A great peacefulness worked its way into her, maybe from the ground up, maybe from the sky down, maybe it hovered in the air at that elevation, she didn’t know. But absorbing it, she felt invited to close her eyes and gently rock in a drifty, dreamy way, and when she did, who should appear in her mind but Rico. “I got the wrong idea and made an asshole of myself . . . which is not unusual,” he had said. And the words were true and he meant them and she knew it, and something in the visual of him outside the screen had hit her hard.

  Maybe in some way he reminded her of Donny in that moment. Her grandfather had a humble streak that ran neck-and-neck with his rough-and-tough side. He would yell at her for something—which she probably deserved—and then later stand before her, filling up all the space by the side of her narrow bed, and say how sorry he was; how he didn’t know what he’d done wrong with her mother, how he had contributed to the personality of a woman who would run off and leave her daughter with a man who clearly didn’t have the skill to do a good job of raising her; how he desperately wanted to do everything differently now—first and foremost was not yelling—and then he would ask for her forgiveness. Every time it happened, Margaret felt her heart stagger until, somewhere along the line, she’d find her voice and say, “Don’t worry about it, Grampy. It’s okay,” and he would lean in and kiss her on the cheek and Margaret’s heart would ache more for him than for herself, even in those times when she felt he had been unreasonable and maybe even cruel. The truth was, she loved her grandfather three times the normal amount. She loved him as Grampy but also as a father and a mother.

  Of course, she didn’t love Rico. She had erased him the instant he’d left the yard and climbed into his truck yesterday. Erasing was a skill Margaret had, her way of keeping power. Even as a little girl in the Catholic school Donny sent her to she’d watched in fascination as the lessons of the day were erased from the blackboard, one after the other, by an energetic nun with a man’s name: Sister Mary Edwin, Sister Alphonsus, Sister Marie Peter, and so on. She had even volunteered to clap the erasers at the end of the day. She would stare into the puffs of chalk dust looking for the remnants of math or geography or religion, watch it all rise up and fall away while she held her breath and slammed the erasers together again and again. She’d gone through a phase of doing homework, all the long division problems neatly laid out, and then erasing them so the page in her notebook was as clean as she could make it. And later, in her painting, she often began with an image, a shape, a design, a mark, something that simply asserted itself on the canvas, and then spent the whole painting making it go away. She had even tried to write about it—her obsession with erasing—for one of Nick’s alter-assignments, as he called them, where he would force his students to use their lesser skills to express what went into their painting. She’d gotten an A-plus on that paper even though she was registered as an auditor, not a matriculated student, in the class. She knew about erasing—the reasons for it and the best ways to do it.