by Julie Mars
Rico, on the other hand, was working hard, maneuvering the car inches one way and inches the other along the edges of the deep ruts. He was so focused that he didn’t even notice when Margaret stole a few private moments to study his profile. El rey, she thought, as she noticed the color of his lips, a shade somewhere between salmon and burnt sienna, and his long black ponytail, gathered into a rubber band. He looked so strong, his hands gripping the wheel as if it were trying to get away from him. He seemed permanent and big, bigger than just a man, though perhaps that had to do with the rock formations in the distance which made everything seem magnificent. She wanted to reach out, touch him, place her fingers on his forearm where the veins rose like rivers leading everywhere. She felt it in her hands, this desire to make contact, to feel his warmth like sunlight as she touched him, but she knew better.
“How far have we gone since we made the turn?” she asked.
Rico glanced down at the odometer. “7.6 miles.”
“Keep your eye peeled for the coffee can,” Margaret said. “It says here it’s 8.1 miles.”
“Good,” said Rico. “This is some fucking crazy road we’re on.”
“That it is,” Margaret responded.
It took eight minutes to travel the last half mile, and then they saw it: the bullet-ridden Chock full o’Nuts coffee can and the long driveway off to the left. Rico made the turn. An adobe building, low to the ground and almost invisible, sat in the distance, perhaps two hundred feet. The hard-packed driveway was actually in better shape than the road, and Rico drove to the door and shut off the car. The cloud of dust they had raised took its time to settle down.
“Made it,” Rico announced.
Neither made a move to get out of the car.
“There doesn’t seem to be a welcoming committee,” Margaret remarked, staring at the door, which had not opened. “Let me go knock.”
“I’ll come with you,” Rico said, as if he did not want her out in all this emptiness on her own. They both stepped out of the car, and Rico came around to her side. “Let’s pretend to be Jehovah’s Witnesses,” he said, and Margaret laughed. It rang out in the stunning silence like a rifle shot.
Together they approached the house, which showed no sign of life whatsoever. When they got closer, they saw a note, written on an old brown paper bag, tacked to the door. It read, “Please put boxes inside. Door is open. Money is on the table. Thank you.”
Margaret knocked anyway and called, “Hello, anybody here?”
There was no answer, so Rico turned the doorknob and the door swung inward. It was dark inside, and when Rico pushed the door wider, a patch of sunlight appeared on the dirt floor like a painting of a white triangle.
“Hello?” Margaret called again, but no one answered.
The house was just one tidy room with a wood stove in the middle, an old couch and armchair, and a wooden table with four mismatched chairs. An iron bed was pushed into the corner with a Navajo blanket in muted colors folded across the bottom. Kerosene lanterns were placed here and there, and gallon jars filled with beans and rice and dried herbs lined several homemade shelves along one wall. A five-gallon water bottle was upended on a ceramic base with a spigot, and six more water bottles were lined up against the wall behind it in the little kitchen area, which included a small stove and a sink basin with no faucets and a pail under the drain. Two framed portraits of children in Indian boarding school uniforms, decades old, hung on the wall, but nothing else. Narrow windows kept out the sun in the summer and the cold in the winter. “It’s a National Geographic moment,” Margaret whispered as she stepped inside, where it was ten degrees cooler.
On the table was a smooth round rock, and peeking from underneath it was a stack of twenty-dollar bills. Margaret crossed the room and picked them up. She counted it out: $220. “All here,” she said. It was time to unload the car, muscle the two big boxes into the house and back the car out of the driveway, but she was captivated by this strange place. “I didn’t know people still lived like this,” she said to Rico. “No electricity, no water. Wow.”
“Pretty basic,” Rico replied. “Propane stove, though. At least they can cook. And a good wood stove for heat.”
Margaret crossed to a window in the back and peered out. “Look, there’s an outhouse,” she said. “I’ve never seen a real one before.”
“You’ll have to make a visit,” Rico said, not adding that he himself had one in his backyard.
“Rico, could you let Magpie out and give her a drink?” asked Margaret. “I want to sit here for a minute. It’s so interesting.”
Rico nodded and stepped back into the burning heat. He opened the door for Magpie, filled her water bowl, and then unlocked the back of the Colt and surveyed the thirty feet from the end of the driveway to the door. He pulled out the hand truck and set it aside, realizing instantly that it would never work in the sand. It would take both of them to carry the heavy boxes inside. He was just about to ease the first one out of the car when he remembered Margaret’s sculpture resting on top of it. He slid it out and held it up. How odd it seemed, this nuts and bolts and rusty parts vestige of the industrialized world out here in the empty desert. He knew she wasn’t done with it, for he had seen her second box of parts tucked beneath his workbench. But already this female form, as she called it, had taken on a life. She seemed to be rising up, her arms held high. He lifted it closer and studied the joints where she had welded one piece to the next. It was amazing work for a beginner.
Not too far from the back of the car was a big rock, and Rico leaned the sculpture against it. The figure, with her arms lifted and her hair spiraling off her head at crazy angles, made him chuckle. Delightful, he thought—not a word he ever remembered using. But that’s what he felt looking at that sculpture. Delighted.
Margaret came out and joined him.
“This looks good,” Rico said. “Well done.”
“It’s not actually done,” Margaret said, “but thanks, Rico. For teaching me.”
He nodded. He felt good inside, special. Together, they studied Margaret’s work, and it felt to Rico as if the woman rising was blessing them, personally, right then and there, in the middle of nowhere on the Indian rez.
“Let’s drag these boxes in,” he said. “We’ll start with the long one. Can you get inside the car and push it out?”
“Okay,” Margaret said, moving to the driver’s door, getting in, and then leaning over the seat to give the long box a mighty shove as Rico pulled. When it had moved a few feet, Margaret came outside and around the car again.
“Do you think you can carry that end?” Rico asked. “It’s pretty fucking heavy.”
“Sure,” Margaret said, but when it dropped off the tailgate it weighed more than she expected, and before they got to the house she began to lose her grip.
“Just let it drop,” Rico said, and she did.
Rico swung his side up so the box rested on its end in the dirt. With it upright, the shipping label, which had been face down in the car, was suddenly visible. “Wow, look at that!” Margaret said, out loud but mostly to herself. “Pearl Paint.”
“What is it?”
“It’s an art supply store in New York. I went there all the time. It has a great selection. Five floors.” Her voice trailed off. “On Canal Street,” she added for no real reason. “How weird is that?”
Rico looked around, a grand sweep of the silent landscape. “Yeah,” he said. “Not the first thing you’d expect to deliver out here.”
While he was saying those words, as they hovered in the air between them, that was the precise moment when Margaret’s eyes moved to the rest of the words on the shipping label. Black letters and bar codes. Right above the second line which read “c/o Roadrunner Courier Service,” there was a name, and that was where her eyes stopped. She read it again, closed her eyes, opened them, and read it again. And each time it said the same thing: Vincent Donnery. She fell to her knees.
“Margaret,” Rico cried ou
t, and his voice sounded very far away to her. “Margaret, what’s the matter.”
She looked up at him. Her sunglasses were black squares matching her hair, but her face was white, whiter than clouds, and when she spoke, her words were like an echo wafting through the canyon.
“It’s my father’s name, Rico,” she said. “Vincent Donnery.”
Rico laid the box down carefully in the dirt and came to her.
What happens in a moment that makes no sense is that everything blurs. Edges become liquid and pour like lava over the landscape until everything glows red with heat and fire. As Margaret sinks into the sand, her knees burn from the heat. Rico wraps his arms around her. He is on his knees too.
“We’ll find him,” he whispers.
And in the end, it’s easy. As easy as walking to the car and leaning on the horn, the sounds ripping through the landscape like a knife. It takes less than two minutes, just a few staggered heartbeats, until over the hill there comes a man, an old and broken man. He wears a straw hat, like Claude Monet. He is skin and bones. His face has a thousand rivers in it. His eyes are green.
Margaret stands perfectly still, as still as the rocks around her.
Rico waits, off to the side.
The man approaches. He seems dizzy. He whispers, “Regina?”
“I’m Margaret,” she responds in a voice as clear as water.
1998
ALICE HAS taught him the parts she knows of the Blessing Way.
It is all he can do: pray each morning for the well-being of his daughter, wherever she is and whoever she has become.
It is the first thing he does every morning. Before he mixes paint. Before he waters the sheep. Before he joins Alice for tea.
He has blessed Margaret every day.
For years.
RICO IS alone in the Dodge Colt Vista, heading east toward Albuquerque. The sun is setting behind him, throwing ribbons of light that turn the sand of the desert temporarily crimson. His heart is full, and he thinks what it’s full of is love, though love is an imprecise word which might not cover tremors of awe and ache and aftershock. He drives along at sixty-five miles per hour, slow for him, but it is as fast as he can make himself go, knowing that every mile separates him a little more from the middle of nowhere, which is where everything happens, or so he now thinks.
He had stood off to the side where he belonged as Vincent approached and then abruptly stopped. Margaret was standing alone, and Rico had noticed her posture—strange for such a moment—how straight and tall she was for such a small person, and the idea flashed that she was very brave, meeting her fate head on. Margaret and Vincent had faced each other from perhaps thirty feet, and Rico had felt both invisible and important, the third point in a mysterious triangle, perhaps. Magpie had moved to Margaret, her protector—like a real police dog—and kept her eyes on Vincent. In that second, paradoxically, what presented itself as an image in his mind was that windshield long ago, the one that shattered in the accident after Fernando’s death, and the way it hesitated before it fell apart; and Rico wondered exactly what was breaking now, when all he cared about was Margaret.
They began running toward each other. Vincent’s arms circled his daughter, pulling her close to him. Rico could hear his words: “Margaret, my little girl, I searched for you, I searched and searched for you, and I couldn’t find you,” and Rico was relieved to hear them, because what kind of a reunion could this be if Vincent hadn’t done at least that? Margaret did not seem to need those words, though. She had one of her own—“Daddy”—which she repeated over and over into her father’s bony chest. Rico could feel their hearts beating, pounding like Indian drums in the still air. And then tears—Margaret’s and Vincent’s and, if the whole truth be told, Rico’s too—flew through the air like comets and disappeared.
“You look just like your mother, just like Regina,” Vincent said when he peeled himself away from Margaret for a second, but, as if he couldn’t bear to look at her from even a foot away, he pulled her to him again and buried his face in her hair, which he wound around his hand. A long time passed before they stepped apart, and even then she kept a grip on his scrawny upper arm as if she were afraid he might suddenly disappear again. “Is this your husband?” Vincent had asked, when he had finally collected himself enough to acknowledge Rico.
“No, this is my friend Rico,” she answered. Her eyes, as she turned to Rico, glistened like a thousand stars, but she managed to say, “Rico, I’d like you to meet my father, Vincent.”
Rico wished, deeply wished in that moment, that he was her husband. He wanted to be the one, the man who saw her more clearly than anyone else, who stood by her and hoped and waited no matter what happened, which is what he knew very well a husband does. It takes everything a man has and more to be a good husband, and he knew that he had not earned that title with Margaret, and he never would. But a friend was an honorable thing too, an important thing. He stepped forward and shook hands with Vincent Donnery, whose green eyes had joy in them and pain too. Rico had seen eyes full of pain his whole life—Elena’s most of all, and his father’s. Rosalita’s, for the past four years. And his daughters’ as they watched him back away from them this very morning, back out of the driveway and leave. But he had never seen pain like this.
“Let’s go in the house,” Vincent said as he reached for his daughter’s hand. “Come in, come in.”
They all entered, including Magpie, who promptly stretched out on the cool dirt floor and dozed off. Vincent made tea on the old stove while Margaret and Rico settled at the table. Rico noticed that Margaret could not take her eyes off her father, even when he turned from them to reach for a jar of dried herbs, to grab a good handful which he dumped into an old porcelain teapot.
“Is this your house?” she suddenly asked, because now that she was inside again she recalled Nancy from Roadrunner saying that an old Indian lady lived in the house where the boxes were to be delivered.
“It belongs to the grandmother of an old friend. Let me make some tea, and then I’ll tell you the story. A long, long story.”
Driving home now, along I-40, which is primarily a straight line from California all the way to Nashville and therefore doesn’t take supreme concentration, Rico marvels at the idea that he never, not once from beginning to end, thought he should get up and leave, go for a walk or sit in the car or do something so the two of them could be alone together. He belonged, and he stayed right where he was. Perhaps it was the house, or the setting, so isolated in the great empty space of the desert, or maybe the idea that Indians always tell stories and there they were, in an Indian’s home on an Indian rez.
Vincent sat down and closed his hand over Margaret’s on the table. His appeared to be twice the size of hers. His fingernails were dirty, and age spots had spread like shadows across his knuckles. Rico was thinking, and he wondered if Margaret was, that the last time Vincent had covered her hand with his own she had been five years old. Five. And now she was thirty-seven. So much time had vanished.
The story began: how, as Donny suspected, Vincent and Regina had run out of money in Goa and had seen a chance for easy cash, just putting a hashish seller and buyer together. But everything went bad, and right about the time they thought they’d be returning home, back to their little girl for whom they both ached, they were arrested. He spoke about the years in prison, stopping now and then for a few seconds to sip his tea. He began to sob when he described how he had searched for Regina after his release, how he discovered she was dead, had been dead for fourteen years.
Rico watched Margaret receive this news. She barely breathed, but she placed her other hand on top of Vincent’s, creating a little stack of father-daughter hands on the table; and Rico choked up because he remembered, powerfully, exactly who he was: the father of three daughters. Husband to Rosalita.
Vincent had paused for a few seconds and then added, “I’m so sorry, Margaret. I’m so sorry.” She got up, moved behind him, leaned over, and kissed
the top of his head. She smoothed his scraggly hair out of his eyes and tucked it behind his ear as if he were a little boy.
Rico stared down at his own hands on the tabletop. He felt sucked into a black hole by Vincent’s story. So much tragedy made his heart convulse with sorrow, and he wondered if it would help Margaret to know all this. But he already knew the answer was yes. For just a second, he was swept back into the parking lot of Albuquerque High School where Rosalita had said, “I hope you feel better, knowing,” and he realized that he did. There were lost years for Rico and Rosalita, but many more than that for Vincent and Margaret.
“Everything is okay now, Daddy,” Margaret whispered, her voice as soft as morning light, and Rico knew that it was true.
Vincent continued his story, describing how he had arrived in New York and searched and searched for his little girl. “I even hired a detective and he came up with nothing. Nothing. He said he checked out every Margaret Donnery in the country.”
Margaret took a little breath and said, “Donny was worried about keeping custody when . . . when you and Mommy disappeared. So he just . . . well, we just used his last name from then on.” And then she added, in an Irish brogue, “To beat the bureaucracy.”
“You sound just like him,” Vincent said, and he laughed heartily. “It’s okay, honey. It’s all okay.”
The part of the story that tied them to the present moment was the story of Thomas Yazzie, who had died with a strong love for his grandmother, died blessing her. Thomas had given him a map, Vincent said, which he followed to this door, where he had remained for the last ten years and where he expected to die.
Alice was the only person in his world, he said.
Until today.
He was sixty-one years old now. Several of his teeth had fallen out. He had some kind of stomach trouble which he avoided by eating next to nothing. Four years ago, he said, he had started to paint again, nothing too taxing or innovative, just realistic desert landscapes. Alice had taught him how to pray for the well-being of a loved one, the Blessing Way, and he had prayed for Margaret every single day. But he had never imagined, even once, that his prayers would bring her to him. He was not a lucky person, had never been one. But now he was.