Rust

by Julie Mars

  Margaret shook her head.

  “It’s a local band that’s been playing together for twenty-five years. They got a great piano player—guy named Arnold Bodmer.”

  “They play the blues and oldies, mostly,” added the woman, who looked more like a social worker than a rasta girl.

  “Where?” asked Margaret.

  “At the zoo. It’s great. You should go,” said the man, and they moved on. As an afterthought, he called back, “After the music’s over, you can walk around the zoo for a while. Lots of the animals are active at night.”

  Margaret didn’t have to think for very long. She had not heard live music since she’d left the Stereophonic Lounge, and she knew from her years there that music, especially the blues, would dislodge any discontent. Not that she felt discontent. She didn’t. She felt good in her new life. She went inside, found her wallet, and, slipping a twenty and a ten into her pocket, she left the house.

  “I’ll be back in a little bit,” she said to Magpie. “You take care of the house.” Magpie settled on the other side of the gate as Margaret locked it and joined in the flow of people headed to the zoo. She did not hear any monkeys or seals, but she did hear the sounds of a band doing a sound check as she joined the line, paid her twelve dollars, and followed the group to a big, beautiful green lawn with a bandstand, where everyone was spreading their blankets and setting up camp chairs. Margaret found room on a wooden bench and sat down. She was happy to see that in front of the bandstand there was a paved section, a dance floor. She watched the musicians fill the stage, at least twelve of them, including three women singers who’d progressed into middle age but were still ready to rock out. One wore over-the-knee boots and a minidress. Another wore a white leather vest buttoned up with no shirt underneath.

  They began their set with “Time,” the Chambers Brothers rendition, and even before the first five bars had finished, people spilled from the crowd onto the dance floor. Margaret was one of them. Albuquerque dances, she thought. No waiting on the sidelines here for others to break the ice. And no worrying about having a partner, either. Margaret felt like an electrical current, a live wire. She danced until she was breathless and then kept right on dancing, weaving through the gyrating crowd as if she were a piece of thread sewing them all into one good time. Men caught her eye and smiled and she smiled quickly back, but she moved on and away, not interested in stopping to talk, not interested in what might happen, if anything. She wanted to feel the music, that’s all. Just let it light her up.

  There she was, all alone in a crowd of dancers, her black hair flying like the wind at night and her feet barely touching the ground. Margaret had once seen a photograph of horses in a big race, perhaps the Kentucky Derby or the Preakness, and she had noticed that all their feet were off the ground at once. She felt that way now, on this cool desert night in New Mexico, in this place between the volcanoes and the mountains. She was flying, and there was no such thing as time. And whatever had pulled her here—the image of coyotes trotting along the riverbank, the rusty parts waiting in the junkyard to be assembled, whatever—she was grateful she had opened herself and her life up wide, as wide as the desert sky.

  When the band packed up and the revelers began to drift along the zoo paths, Margaret went home. She could not bear to see animals locked up, even if they were in what the informational signs identified as habitats instead of cages. If she could have, she would have taken them all with her, led them like the Pied Piper out of the zoo and down the city streets to her yard, where they could sleep in the hammock for all she cared. She walked home, back to her little house, where Magpie was still waiting by the gate, as if she hadn’t even thought to move.

  “Hey, big girl,” Margaret said as she undid the gate and came inside. Magpie rose to her feet and led the way to the kitchen door. But before Margaret followed, she made a slight detour to the cement pad, where the rusty parts were silent and waiting.

  “Tomorrow,” she whispered to them, and they shimmered like burnished copper in the starlight.

  1991

  VINCENT BEGINS a new life, the kind of life he had seen when he lived in New York before, lining up with men outside of shelters and soup kitchens. He waits in crowds of younger, stronger men for day jobs from Manpower. When he is not working, which is too much of the time, he walks the streets and looks into women’s faces, searching for Margaret. He has never looked at so many women in his life.

  He finds a permanent job, washing dishes in a midtown restaurant. He works twelve hours days, seven days a week. His shift sets him free at midnight, and he goes home to a “Single Rooms Only” hotel, one of the few left on the Upper West Side, where he sleeps until six and then begins, day after day, to walk and walk, looking for Margaret. He calls it “pounding the beat.” His beat becomes routine: on Mondays, he stands in the middle of Grand Central Station and scans the morning rush hour crowds. On Tuesdays, he covers Wall Street. On Wednesdays, he marches around the West Village and Chelsea, and so on.

  It takes Vincent three years to save enough money to hire a private detective, a man named Snow who opened his own agency after being head of security at the Ritz-Carlton for fifteen years. Vincent pays him a two thousand dollar retainer in cash, ten and twenty dollar bills collected into a large wad and held secure with a blue rubber band. He fills out a form, feels devastated to notice that there is next to nothing on it when he’s done: just her name, Margaret Donnery; her age, twenty-seven; her date of birth; her last known address; her last available photo, which Snow scans on his computer from the faded photo strip Vincent still carries in his wallet, and still looks at every morning before he takes the stairs down from the second floor of the hotel and begins to pound the beat.

  It takes no time for Snow to burn through the retainer.

  “I checked out every Margaret Donnery in the tristate area by phone,” says Snow. “I did a search of the national databases. Nothing.” He pauses. “On the plus side, I checked all the death registers, all the way back to when you left. There’s nothing there for Margaret. And for the record, her grandfather died when she was eighteen, so she didn’t end up a ward of the state, either.” Snow stands up. “Sorry I couldn’t help.”

  Vincent feels unable to get out of the chair. He grips its wooden arms like wreckage in the middle of the sea. “What if I got more money,” he mumbles.

  Snow shakes his head. “Save your money,” he says. “Get on with your life.”

  “What if there’s no life to get on with?” he asks as he gets up and, without waiting for an answer, makes his way to the door, takes the elevator down six floors, and steps out into the pouring rain.

  He loses heart after that. With nothing left to live for, he feels himself dying.

  He thinks about it for a long time.

  Then he decides to fulfill Thomas Yazzie’s last request. He does it so he can die knowing he did one thing right. Just one thing right. He stares at the map to Alice Yazzie’s house, way out in the middle of nowhere, somewhere northeast of Gallup, New Mexico.

  He quits his job and packs the sum total of his belongings into a knapsack.

  He walks all the way to Port Authority.

  He gets on a bus to New Mexico.

  AT SIX in the morning, Margaret and Magpie left the house for a long, long walk by the Rio. They strolled past all of Margaret’s spontaneous outdoor sculptures, some of which had been added to by strangers, some of which had been knocked down, some of which remained intact, waiting for the wind or rain or person that might alter their fate. Margaret actually called to each one. “Hello stones and sticks!” she would say, “Hello, branches and reeds!” But today, rather than stop and work, she wanted to press on, down the Rio. After perhaps two miles, the little footpath shrunk to half its already narrow width, and she and Magpie had to walk single file and often push shoulder-high weeds off to the side. Still, they kept going, on and on for another half-mile, until the path wound down right along the riverbank, and Margaret found
herself in a field of sunflowers that grew so close together it was impossible to even consider passing between them.

  “Look at this,” she said to her dog. “We’ve hit the wall. A wall of sunflowers.” The best way to see them was clearly from the middle of the Rio. Margaret walked to the edge of the bank and looked down. The water was shallow and she wasn’t worried about being swept away by the gentle current, but it was brown, the color of chocolate milk, and she wondered what was in it besides mud. Anything could be in a river, particularly one that wound past national laboratories where such items as nuclear bombs were built. Sewage was probably dumped in this river too, and who knew what kind of algae and sludge might grow in the waters as they sat waiting for release in dam after dam upriver? Margaret was woefully uninformed about the state of nature, being a city person her whole life who took it for granted that a trip to the hospital for protective shots against disease was mandatory should anyone fall into the East River or the Hudson. She herself had been ordered off the beach at Rockaway when crates of medical debris had ridden the waves to shore. Routinely, she had seen the filth and junk collecting along the waterline around the whole of Manhattan when she’d taken walks along its shores long ago with Harold. Once they’d seen a family of tiny yellow ducks paddling at the river’s edge around what Harold called a “Styrofoam iceberg,” one of many that had washed up on the shore. It was sad, the filth and pollution.

  But here, standing by her new river, when she thought in terms of toxic, it felt different. To step into what might be radioactive runoff was far worse than stepping on an old syringe, or was it? Margaret, ignoring the risks, took off her socks and sneakers, rolled her yoga pants halfway up her thighs, and stepped into the water. It was colder than she expected. Magpie was right behind her, and together they sloshed out to a sandbar. Several birds went airborne as they approached. Margaret had not even seen them. When she stepped out of the water and glanced down at her legs, she appeared to be wearing a pair of mud brown socks, which made her laugh. Turning around, she saw the sunflowers from this perspective, and the vision was so glorious, so unexpected, that she simply sat down where she was and stared. “A riot of color,” she said to Magpie. Margaret was so moved by seeing so much beauty in this little hidden place that she felt inspired to contribute something immediately. She began to push the mud into a pile to make a shrine, a replica in miniature of the jagged ridges of the Sandia Mountains which she could see upriver. In front of it, she wrote “Home.” It took a few hours, and the sun was burning a swatch down the river corridor when she finally felt ready to stop. They walked home, where Margaret took a shower and scrubbed her feet and legs with antibiotic soap in hopes of fending off whatever health disaster might have floated toward her.

  There was a message on the phone machine from Nancy. The boxes had arrived at six the night before and she could pick them up any time today. So just after one, Margaret got in the car and drove to Roadrunner. The boxes were bigger than she expected. One was about the size of a very large air conditioner and the other was at least six feet long and a foot high. Leo packed them into the back of the Colt, and slid a hand truck in along the side so she could move them when she got there.

  “There’s not supposed to be anything breakable in either one,” he said.

  “No problem,” said Margaret, who wanted to appear supremely capable. She was thinking, though, that Magpie would be a bit crowded for the drive out. She was used to having ample room to stretch out and sleep.

  “What’s all that junk on the front seat?” asked Leo, who happened to be standing near the passenger door.

  “Some stuff I’m welding,” Margaret responded. She had packed up her parts in two open boxes, figuring she’d go directly to Garcia’s Automotive from Roadrunner.

  “You a welder?”

  “Not yet. Are you?”

  “I did some in the navy,” he said. “Long time ago.”

  “I might be asking you for some tips,” Margaret said.

  “Anything I can do to help,” he said, actually looking at her for the first time. “Well, have a safe trip out there. Check in with us when you get back so we know you made it.”

  “Okay,” said Margaret as she got into the car, started it up, and drove off.

  Rico had a car up on the lift and two others in the parking area when she pulled in.

  “You look busy,” she said as she came into the garage. “Are you sure it’s okay for me to be here.”

  Rico was obviously at a point in whatever he was doing where he could not stop because he barely glanced at her when he said, “It’s fine, Margaret. Just get yourself set up.”

  It took her two trips to carry in the parts. She put the first box on the floor and slid it under the workbench so Rico would not trip over it. The second one, she placed on top of the bench, as far out of the way as possible. Then she collected the goggles and gloves, and set herself up to work. All this time, Rico had not said a word. Margaret, who was used to silence, did not find that strange; though after she had been working for perhaps twenty minutes, it occurred to her that he seemed turbulent as well as subdued, and she wondered if her presence there might be a problem for him. So she paid attention to what he was doing, and the next time he stepped away from the car, she turned off the torch and faced him.

  “Rico, am I bothering you being here?” she asked.

  “No. I got some shit on my mind is all,” he said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Sí, claro,” he said.

  So she turned around and went back to work. It was easy for Margaret to give Rico the privacy he needed. She focused on her work, and Rico had to interrupt her to ask for her car keys so he could move her car into the work bay. He actually laughed when she turned to him because she had the look of a mad scientist, and there on the workbench, right before his eyes, the female from hell was shaping up.

  Margaret reached into her pocket. “Want me to drive it in?”

  “No, I got it,” Rico said. Then, with a nod in the direction of the workbench, he asked, “You got a name for it yet?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “It’s called, ‘Unraveling the Wad Used to Get Through Life.’ ”

  Rico laughed. “Jesus, Margaret,” he said.

  Margaret threw him the car keys. He caught them and went outside for the Dodge. All day long, customers had come and gone from the shop. Some waited in the office; others disappeared and returned later. Their conversations were just a buzz in the background to Margaret, who felt as if her own blood was flowing out through the flames and the melting metal, and taking form before her eyes. She welded on each tiny piece with a breathless combination of precision and come-whatmay, making mistakes and plowing right on anyway. So what if the female figure’s ears were cockeyed and her right eyeball bulged out past the brow ridge? So what if the right shoulder and left were different lengths, and one hand seemed to be raised in a blessing while the other looked more like a rodeo rider waving to the crowd?

  It was after four when she finally took a break, her shoulders and lower back aching. She poured herself some stale coffee and sat in Rico’s office chair. He still had two more cars to work on before quitting time, though hers was obviously done, parked outside again in the spot usually reserved for customer pickup. She was about half finished with her coffee when Rico came into the office and sat down on the desk.

  “So what time are we leaving for Gallup in the morning?” he asked.

  Margaret absorbed the question for a few seconds before she said, “We?”

  “Yeah. I don’t want you taking that drive by yourself.”

  “Why? Is something fucked up with my car?”

  “No, it looks good. I changed the oil, checked the fluids and tires, gave it a good going-over. It’s not about the car.”

  Margaret sat forward in her chair. “You mean you just want to go? Like, for the ride?” This was not the picture she had of her adventure into the wilderness north of Gallup, and she needed a moment to
see if her imagination could accommodate such a vast change.

  “Just this once,” Rico said.

  “I’m really okay by myself,” Margaret said. “You know, Rico, I’m always by myself.”

  “I know,” he said, “But just this once I want to go with you.”

  So Margaret said, “Okay.”

  LAST NIGHT, when Rosalita had said, “She seems like a very nice little gringa. Maybe she could just move in with us,” for Rico everything froze in place. Even though it just lasted a second, it was long enough for the viewers of the scene, in this case his mother, daughters, and granddaughter too—though she was too little to understand anything except the sharp tone in her abuela’s voice—to acknowledge that something important had suddenly fallen apart and might never work again. If they had been watching a movie, somebody might move to the television to impatiently hit the “play” switch five or ten times. But there in the yard, with no possibility of that, there was the simple truth of their real life.

  Maribel was the first to recover. “What’s going on?” she demanded.

  Rico wiped his mouth with his paper napkin and pushed back from the table.

  “Papi? Mommy? What’s going on?” Maribel repeated.

  Rico might have expected to feel enraged in a moment like this, blindsided in the middle of a relaxed family dinner on the back patio by his own wife, the very woman he was trying so hard to understand. He felt speechless, though he fervently wanted to say the right words, the ones that would restore everything to what it had been just a few moments ago. He also felt defeated and sad, as if there were no room left for him at this table full of women. He wanted to give up, that was all. Just give up. Last night, Rosalita had accused him of being moody, and maybe she was right, because right now, as he sat with his paper napkin crumpled up in his hand, a wave of sadness so profound crashed over him that he felt his eyes fill with hot tears.