Rust

by Julie Mars

  When his parents sat him down and gave him the news, Rico’s first reaction was overwhelming relief, though he never admitted that to anyone out loud. How could he explain that the relief he felt was for Fernando as much as for himself or anyone else. He knew his brother could never last the way he was—it could only get worse, no matter how much praying his mother did on her knees up at the old church in the badlands of Chimayo. Fernando used to mock Elena when she made her annual pilgrimage to that little chapel, which was famous all around the world for the miracles that somebody somewhere insisted had happened there.

  “Score me some smack while you’re at it,” Fernando would taunt. “You’re heading to the heroin capital of New Mexico. More overdoses there than anywhere else in the whole state, right out the front door of that church whose holy red dirt you waste your time believing in.”

  “I’m going to pray for you, Fernando,” Elena would respond, calmly. “I’m going to pray you find your way.”

  “I know my way already. My way is money. My way is fucking as many women as I can and getting high. My way is the party way,” he would say, and to Rico it sounded as if he wanted to drive her into the corner of the room with his words and pound her with his strange fury. He had never actually hit her, never even threatened to, though the same could not be said about Fernando and his father, who went at it until they were both bloody. Teeth were loosened and noses were broken during their fights. But Manuel could not control his son, and after a while, he accepted that and politely asked him to move out and never come home again, and Fernando obliged. No one in the family had seen him for over two years when he died. They brought the body back to Albuquerque and had a funeral service with exactly three people in attendance. They buried him in a hastily purchased family plot in a cemetery near the Big-I, where I-40, going east and west, and I-25, going north and south, intersect. Elena had kept fresh flowers on his grave until she lost her vision and could no longer drive a car to get there.

  So whenever she and Rico would be cruising down Bridge Boulevard on the way home from church on Sunday, and she would say, seemingly out of nowhere, “He was a nice little boy, Fernando, smart and cute. He changed overnight when he was around eleven or twelve. I don’t know what happened to him,” Rico would pretend he’d never heard it all before. He had no memories of his brother as a nice boy, though he had distinct memories of thanking God, whether there was one or not, each and every time Rosalita gave birth to a girl. Girls could be trouble and they could cause their share of pain, but very few could match the heartache imposed by a genuine bad boy—a bad son or brother.

  Elena would mull over the points along the path to Fernando’s demise: the dangerous crowd he found or that found him, the drugs, the fighting, dropping out of Rio Grande High—which was something Rico had in common with his brother—the first prison sentence for dealing crystal meth. When she finished her litany, tears glistening in her eyes over the fact that her son had died at the hands of a man who was much worse than even he was, Rico always said the same thing, though he honestly didn’t think his mother found comfort in it or even remembered it, week to week. He said, “Elena, mi madre, I think it’s better to get killed than it is to kill someone, and we know he was heading in that direction. We know he would’ve got there, and this way he was saved from that.”

  He meant it, too. Every time he saw the nightly news, which often featured a camera in the local courthouse recording inmate after inmate stepping up to the podium in his orange jumpsuit to be charged, Rico couldn’t help but see his brother’s face superimposed on each one; and when he heard their list of crimes, he felt sick inside, sick enough to switch the channel and say, again, that if that shit passed for news, they were really scraping the bottom of the barrel.

  It was inevitable that his spirits were sinking, or had already sunk completely, as they pulled back into the driveway after church—as if church itself was a stick Elena used to pry open the lid they all tried to keep jammed down over Fernando’s memory; and once his ghost got out, it took a while for it to evaporate again. Rico would walk his mother to her casita, promise to come back later to pick her up for a big homemade supper, and then busy himself around his property, no matter how hard he had to look to find something constructive to do. His compound was the best kept place in the whole South Valley, he thought, perhaps a bit cynically. Who else repainted the metal on the casement windows every year? Who else had upgraded from an entry gate that just got dragged along to one that slid on compact little wheels? Who else could say they hand-built not one but two buildings from the ground up, collecting the adobe by the shovelful?

  Rico opened the door to his own house, which was still quiet, though Jessica and Lucy were already up and dressed. “Buenas dias, Papi,” Lucy called from the kitchen. “How was church?”

  “The same as it always is,” he replied. “A job.”

  Lucy laughed. “If Abuelita knew how you feel, she wouldn’t make you go.”

  “Let’s make sure she never knows then,” he said, opening the door to his bedroom and tiptoeing in to strip off his church outfit and put on his work clothes. Rosalita was sprawled out on the bed, as if she automatically doubled her space the minute he got up. She was a heavy sleeper, and he took a few seconds to watch her. She had on a short-sleeved nightgown with tiny flowers all over it, and her hair, which she kept long, looked like a black cloud on the pillow. She was just thirty-nine years old and had already put in twenty-three years with him, most of them good. They had raised three daughters, facing all the problems of parenthood together as a united front, and the girls were proof that they did a passable job. But now he felt he hardly knew her. She had become a woman who would fling her legs and arms wide when she was alone in a bed, no longer a wife who wrapped herself around her man and couldn’t sleep unless he did. She rarely talked to him anymore about anything important, went along as if it were perfectly normal never to mention such things as no sex for four years, or a mother-in-law who had needs Rosalita far too often had to handle alone. It was eerie for Rico, and came with a sense of unacknowledged danger, as if her personal tectonic plates were shifting way below the surface and a tidal wave was not only inevitable but on its way.

  He had not told her about the welding lessons with Margaret. Perhaps that was slightly deceitful. He didn’t know. But she had become so cut off from him, so mysteriously private and locked into herself, that it seemed unnecessary—even pathetic—to go out of his way to share something new in his life with her. He felt, and it seemed true to him even when he thought about it at length, that she didn’t care what he did as long he paid the bills and showed up at the dinner table every night like a husband and father should.

  Carefully, he hung up his dress shirt and blue jeans, creased along the legs from Rosalita’s iron, and put on an old brown T-shirt and a pair of cut-off sweat pants. As he turned back around, he saw that Rosalita’s eyes were half-open in a dreamy way, and she was watching him or at least looking in his direction. It stopped him, that look, made him consider climbing back into bed with her. But then, without even a word, she shifted her position, rolled onto her back, and just stared straight up at the ceiling.

  Rico left the room, weighted down by the broken Fernando-record he heard from Elena every week, and Rosalita’s whatever-it-was-that-was-eating-away-at-her, and a day ahead of him with nothing beyond yard work. But, he reminded himself as he pushed through the back door, there was always tomorrow.

  At eight-thirty.

  1974

  AND HE has a little girl.

  A little girl, far away, and he might never see her again.

  It is unbearable to think of her, back at home in the big city, perhaps looking out the window from a fourth floor apartment. Waiting.

  His throat constricts, closes off, and he cannot say her name, not even whisper it into the thin mat he sleeps on, face down. When he thinks of her, sweat breaks out along his hairline. He cannot breathe.

  A wife, and a li
ttle girl.

  Gone.

  Nothing left but time.

  WHEN RICO arrived at Garcia Automotive at five to eight in the morning and hoisted up the garage doors—making it official that he was open for business and glad of it—in his mind he had already laid out his lesson plan, if it could be called that, for his first student. He had an idea of what Margaret hoped to accomplish, at least in the beginning, based on the rusty parts she had so carefully situated on the concrete pad in her yard. The shapes she seemed so obsessed with made no sense to him, but he hadn’t paid any attention whatsoever to the whims of modern art, or any other art for that matter; and, besides, he didn’t need to know the why, just the how, and in that department, he was more than competent.

  He watered the spider plant that had been hanging in the office window for five years, emptied the garbage can—which as usual overflowed with the takeout coffee cups of his Saturday customers—and then went outside to collect the trash that had blown against the fence or into his small parking area, or perhaps been thrown there by passersby, over the weekend. He checked his appointment book, which looked healthy with jobs for the week, slipped into his work coveralls, which he left on a hook on the bathroom door, and settled down in his chair to watch for Margaret. He wanted to see her as she approached, take in, in a relaxed manner, the way she moved toward his door, experience the burst of energy that he imagined she would bring to him.

  He rocked back in his rolling office chair so his feet dangled a few inches above the floor. It was a crazy thing, he mused, how much a middle-aged man, a father and a grandfather for God’s sake, could look forward to seeing a skinny middle-aged woman, one who had already made it clear she had no interest in him, stroll around a corner. And it wasn’t because she was trying to attract his attention, either. Margaret wasn’t working much on her appearance, he had to admit. Chicanas tended to put more time into it, with their polished nails, gold earrings, high heels, and tight pants designed to show off their rounded hips and fleshy thighs, which they were proud of and rightly so; while Margaret looked, both days he’d seen her, as if she hadn’t changed her jeans in a week and had no plan to. She wore baggy T-shirts that hid whatever equipment she had, and her long hair looked like it might not object if she dragged a comb through it more often.

  Within ten minutes, she appeared on Barelas Road, coming at a fast clip, a walking speed that the new people from the East seemed to think was normal. To Rico, she looked as if she was in a big hurry, though she was actually five minutes early and there wasn’t really an official starting time anyway. She wore dark sunglasses like the Blues Brothers along with her usual outfit, and she carried a shoulder bag big enough for a weekend trip to Las Vegas, Nevada.

  “Yo, Rico,” she said as she came in, “here I am, reporting for duty.”

  “They really say that over there in New York? Yo?” he responded. “I thought that was only for the movies.”

  She laughed, a lovely sound that he had never heard before.

  “Nope, all real,” she said. “That and more.” He had made no move to get up from his chair, so she added, in a conversational tone, “Ever been to New York?”

  “Mira, I don’t leave the South Valley unless I have to. I get lost in downtown Albuquerque.”

  Margaret smiled. Downtown Albuquerque consisted of a couple of square blocks of courthouses, a fourteen-screen cineplex, a few oddball businesses—such as a men’s hat store and a Holocaust museum—and some restaurants that seemed to wrap it up by ten P.M., even on the weekend. It had pool halls and an Institute of Flamenco. Many of the buildings were painted with murals that looked left over from the sixties—big smiling suns, elongated androgynous humans falling through the cosmos, hot cartoon babes carrying signs that read “No glove, no love,” and such like. Margaret adored it. Walking along Central Avenue was like entering a time warp or a dream that someone she didn’t know had had a long time ago.

  She fished into her bag and brought out a notebook, a pen, a bottle of water, and a scrunchie for her hair. Rico, with all the women in his life, was well versed in hair accoutrements, and he even knew the mythology associated with each one, such as why they protected the hair follicle from split ends or breakage, though he had no specific idea how such knowledge came to him. Probably through osmosis during the dinner table discussions he tuned out.

  “You can hang your bag on one of the hooks in the garage,” he said, finally standing up and moving in the direction of the work bays. She followed him, her step light and ready, as if she were on the verge of breaking into a run just to get there faster. He intended to emphasize safety first, warn her about the danger of serious flash burns from exposure to the hostile ultraviolet light in arc welding, about hot metal and the way it sears through flesh and ignites any combustible material, about vapors locked inside of some container you might have cause to cut or weld that explode like rockets and drive a man or an acetylene tank or anything else in the vicinity straight through the wall or roof. All welders had horror stories, and Rico knew for a fact that most were true, but when he turned to face her and saw her standing there, her notebook and pen in hand like a schoolgirl, he couldn’t bring himself to start off by scaring her.

  And he had a second lesson planned in his mind, a lecture of sorts in which he would outline and briefly explain the types of welding—fusion, gas, TIG and MIG electric, brazing, and soldering—and also throw around all the technical terms she could ever hope for; but something told him that Margaret needed her initiation by fire, not words, and right then and there he scrapped all the ideas he’d come up with about being a good teacher and just pointed to the low rider he was currently working on.

  “The guy who owns this wants to put some big-ass tires on it,” he said, “real fat, and they’ll stick way out from the sides if I don’t shorten the axles. So that’s what I’m doing this morning—cutting out a chunk of the axle and then welding it back together. You can watch.”

  “Can I ask questions?” She sounded so businesslike that Rico almost laughed.

  “Yeah, but I might not answer right away if I have to focus on what I’m doing.”

  She nodded and said, “Okay, no problem.”

  It was a strange experience for Rico to have any woman, and this woman in particular, in his shop. Rosalita rarely came here, and his daughters only stopped by every blue moon when they happened to pass along Fourth Street and felt a sudden urge to say hello to their Papi. A woman changed the atmosphere in the garage, invaded it somehow without meaning to. She made it feel like a radio was playing even though there wasn’t one. It would take getting used to, this sense of double the usual presence.

  “Come here. I’ll show you how to set up,” he said.

  Margaret moved to his side and paid strict attention. She was a person who liked to learn something new. The first time she’d entered an oil painting class, for example—from the moment the teacher arrived in the studio—she’d felt perilously close to bursting into tears and she had to work hard to overpower them, knowing that very few teachers, or fellow students for that matter, would automatically recognize them for what they were—little watery statements of happiness and gratitude. Such gratitude brought with it the image of a door opening, a door she hadn’t previously known existed, and Margaret always hoped that she might find freedom behind it. Consequently, she rushed into learning as if she were simultaneously running out of a burning building.

  In that, Donny had told her, she was like her mother, who had impatiently learned to read before kindergarten, who took to scampering, her arms extended out to the side, along the tops of railings like a tightrope walker, who actually convinced him to scrounge up the money to send her to a wilderness training program in Utah when she was only fifteen. Regina, Margaret thought, was more a daredevil than a model student like she was, but Donny told her that it was the same passion taking a different form, and she believed him.

  So when Rico started in, Margaret opened herself totally to the les
son, which came at her fast even though he delivered it in that crazy New Mexico accent she had always—from the first time she heard it in their old stand-up act—assumed was a Cheech and Chong joke. Donny, a big fan of comedy, had one of their records from the early seventies, and every time they listened to it together, they howled with laughter. Donny lamented the demise of real stand-up, which had been replaced, he said, with what he called drive-by humor.

  Standing in Rico’s garage, Margaret felt as if she’d stepped into a tornado of important information, and she was immediately swept up in it: this is how you mark a full acetylene cylinder; this is how you mark an empty one; this is why you never tilt it or lay it down; this is how you secure it using chains; this is why you crack the valve to blow out dust in a regulator; this is the chart that lists the melting points of various metals; this is the chart that shows which goggles you need, depending on the job; this is why you don’t overheat lead when you solder; this is the range of electrode sizes used in arc welding. On and on it went, Rico just chatting away as he set up his equipment, and Margaret hanging on to the details by her fingertips.