Rust (26 page)

She dumped a bucket of fresh parts onto the concrete pad and started to work. She chose gears for the head, and long railroad bolts for arms. She found screws for fingers and unidentifiable bits of machinery for ears and eyes. Feverishly, she worked her way into three dimensions, as if she knew her mental concepts had been flat for too long and needed to be multiplied by themselves, squared or cubed in her mind as well as her fingers, and now it was happening.

Creating artwork in three dimensions was far beyond her skill level for the moment, yet she could imagine a future self able to do it with ease, and she rushed toward her. By Monday, she would have all the parts figured out, and she would transport them intact to Garcia’s Automotive and learn how to weld this unexpected self-portrait together permanently. She needed rusty nails. Pawing through her parts to no avail, she got in her car, Magpie in the backseat, and drove to Coronado Wrecking. She parked under a shade tree.

“Be right back,” she said to Magpie, who was not allowed to get out of the car at the junkyard.

By this time they were used to seeing her. The woman at the desk, a middle-aged lady who looked far too put together to work in a junkyard—what with her decaled nails, pressed jeans, and print blouse—was on the phone, and just waved as Margaret signed in and let herself out the back door into the acres and acres of old sinks and bathtubs, massive wooden doors, assorted construction materials, cars, and machinery. Carrying her orange bucket from Home Depot and a pair of thick work gloves, she passed through the huge metal shed that contained thousands of doors and out the other side, into the realm of scrap metal.

Sometimes, when she entered Coronado Wrecking, Margaret felt that she was stepping into a post-modern cathedral. It took her breath away to see the dirt roads disappearing around the mountains of junk, a few pilgrims attempting to pillage, sack, and raid. It felt right for Margaret to be here, collecting what had been relegated to uselessness and reshaping it into something else. Within each section of the yard there was no particular order, and she had to poke around for a while before she found a pile of nails, small bolts, and nuts. She collected all there were, perhaps a quarter of her bucket, and headed back to the office to dump them on the scale.

“That was fast,” said the woman with the decals on her nails as she weighed the parts. “Three dollars.”

“I have my dog in the car,” Margaret explained as she straightened out three crumpled bills from her pocket. “I don’t want to leave her too long.”

“No, you don’t want to do that in this heat,” said the woman as she tilted the scale back into Margaret’s bucket, and then presented her with a receipt. “Well, see you next time.”

“It’ll be soon,” Margaret said, and then, because she couldn’t help it, she added, “I finally started welding today. My first time.”

“Congratulations, honey,” said the woman, smiling in such a way that Margaret knew she meant it.

When she got back in the car and turned on the radio to
Evening Edition
, she knew it was after five. That surprised her. Since she had been in New Mexico, time had changed, both shrunk and stretched. She had never inhabited time in this way, this no-job, no-classes, no-responsibilities way, and she liked it. Even if by the standards of the consumer world she was living a minimalist, if not a monastic life—where her major purchases were consistently made from a junkyard—it seemed luxurious to her, and she was grateful for it every single day.

But today she had told Rico she needed to get a job. She knew when she said it that it was a distraction, created in the moment to help her keep herself hidden, but something had backfired. It was as if the concept of “getting a job” was sitting in the back of the bus, and when he had asked her what was wrong, she had suddenly dragged it up to the driver’s seat and forced it to sit down. Once she’d done that, it had taken the wheel, and now she was heading for the workplace. This was probably a good thing. She was all alone in the world, with no one to bail her out if she got in trouble, and could not afford to kid herself about her finances, though she had done well so far. Tomorrow, she thought, she would visit Roadrunner Courier Service and see what happened. If not tomorrow, then Friday.

She happened to be passing Fourth Street, the turn she would take to go to Garcia’s Automotive, which naturally made her think of Rico. Rico of the acetylene torch. Rico of the TIG and MIG welding apparatus. Rico of the heat and flames and melting metal. Rico of the dragon tattoo and the dead brother. Rico of the “Come over here and kiss me.”

It certainly wasn’t as if Margaret had never heard that line before. Such comments were frequently fired like rockets into the air at the Stereophonic Lounge, where flirting with the bartender was a favorite sport. She had responded to Rico in exactly the way she would respond to any other guy: with a playful putdown and a change of subject. And, like the guys on the barstools, he had taken it in good humor and adapted immediately to the new conversational direction.

But that sentence kept ringing in her ears.

She wouldn’t mind kissing him.

Margaret knew a thing or two about kissing. Some women didn’t take it seriously. “It’s just a kiss,” she had heard them say, as if kisses were unimportant and therefore dismissable. Dismissable kisses, Margaret had noted, were usually illicit, conducted on the sly by married people or lovers whose partners would not think of a kiss with someone else as innocent. She had never seen it that way either. To her, to kiss was more like opening the door to a raging fire in the hallway. Everyone knows better than to do that. Everyone knows that when you open the door, the fire rushes in and consumes you. Once she was kissed, and, more importantly, once she kissed back, she was never the same again. A man had made his way inside her, and, once there, he could do damage. He could refuse to leave. He could fill her with hope and then walk out the door. He could disappear to India forever. Anyway, she barely knew Rico. He was her teacher and perhaps her friend. He was also a married man.

She needed to erase “Then come over here and kiss me” from her mind and from her ears, too. “Change the fucking channel,” she suddenly said out loud, as if her mind were a radio and she could adjust it at will. It was a phrase she had heard teenage girls in New York use, kids she’d sat next to on the subway, when their faces were lit with exasperation.

She made a right onto Eighth Street and headed home. The neighborhood was familiar to her now: the homeless woman, dressed in a raggedy trench coat with her short-haired dog on a leash, sat on a swing in a corner playground. Teenage boys with shaved heads worked on cars parked on the street. Young girls in revealing tops pushed strollers along sidewalks where weeds sprouted in the cracks. She had entered into nodding relationships with several neighbors, thanks to her walks around the block with Magpie. Little by little, Albuquerque was becoming home, even if she had only passed one short season here, just part of one summer, though in some ways it felt much longer. She parked her car in the driveway, locked up the gate for the night, and lost herself in rusty parts. It was already dark when she finally noticed that she was working in the dim glow of the one streetlight that lit the alley behind her house.

She went inside and turned on the bathwater. While it ran, Margaret washed her filthy hands in the bathroom sink. Brownish water, the color of dirt and rust, circled the drain, rinsing off her fingers in lighter and lighter shades until it ran clear. From the time she was little, she had always enjoyed the process of cleaning up. The idea that her body could be restored to its pristine state pleased her. Perhaps it was a reaction to Catholic school, where the nuns were always harping on the ways in which black marks were etched into a person’s soul, possibly forever. It was unfair, she thought, especially the idea of Original Sin, which meant you arrived as a babe in arms with a soul already black with crimes you didn’t even commit.

“Did Mommy and Daddy leave because of me?” she had asked Donny over and over for months after she’d first been deposited at his door.

“No, my darling,” he had said. “They left because they’re young and selfish and they want to see the world. Some people are restless like that, and your mother is one of them. They love you with all their hearts.”

“Did I do something wrong?”

“No, Margaret. You’re a wonderful little girl. You did everything right. Every single thing. Don’t you be thinking it’s your fault because it isn’t.”

But at night, in her bed, Margaret would make promises to God: If you bring them home, I promise I will never cry again. I promise I will not whine. I won’t ever wake them up when they want to sleep, and I won’t ever touch Daddy’s paintings before they’re dry. And . . .” Her litany went on and on though God never responded, and once it became obvious that her parents were gone for good, Margaret could actually feel her own black soul, right in her chest, heavy with the sins which drove her parents from her. Perhaps as compensation, she became the cleanest child in the whole world. She scrubbed and washed with such vigor that Donny sent his neighbor, Mrs. Sullivan, on a special mission to find the gentlest possible soap, and washcloths with next to no texture. He replaced his own fingernail brush, which had coarse bristles, with a soft nylon one, and he took to limiting the amount of time she could spend in the tub. Looking back, Margaret was amazed and touched by his sensitivity, by the small things he noticed about her and acted upon with love.

She glanced up from the sink and looked into her own eyes in the mirror. It was one of the things Donny had taught her to do when she was a child. “Look into your own eyes long enough, and you’ll always know what to do,” he had said. So there she was, staring into her green eyes in the bathroom mirror as the tub filled with water and steam collected on the edges of the mirror. She knew her eyes connected her to her own truth, just as Donny had said. She also knew that the truth she was looking for had to do with Rico, with his “Come over here and kiss me,” and with the defenses she’d layered around her, just to get through life.

A
LL
AFTERNOON
, Rico concentrated completely on the work he had to catch up on in the shop. He turned up the radio to cancel out any thoughts of Margaret, and he ignored the sense of emptiness that settled like dust in the shop the moment she walked out the door. He liked her ways, how she put his tools back in precisely the right places and even restacked the remaining pieces of metal and moved them to the back of the workbench so he’d have room to work there if he needed it. He liked the way she looked him in the eyes when she paid him. He wanted to do things for her—like tune up that old car of hers, especially if she ended up working for the courier service.

By five-thirty, he was exhausted and he shut everything down with a sense of relief. A look at his appointment book, though, warned him he’d be busting hump for the next three days. It wasn’t until he climbed into his truck and pulled out of the parking lot that he thought of Rosalita. So far, he had not even told her about going to Jemez Springs with Margaret or visiting Fernando’s grave. They had made love that very morning with all of that—where he had been until one in the morning and what he had been doing—hanging heavy in the air between them, and neither mentioned it. He found it very odd and somehow exciting.

Rico drove slowly over the speed humps on Riverside Drive. Wilfredo was out in the driveway shooting baskets. He waved and called out, “Rico, want to play?”

“Maybe later, Wilfredo,” Rico answered. “I’m just getting home and I’m starved.”

“Okay, maybe later,” the boy responded.

Rico pulled into his driveway and parked. He hesitated for a few seconds, perhaps storing up some equilibrium before he headed inside. When he opened the front door, the smell of
arroz con pollo
enveloped him. It was so normal, so right, to enter his house full of women and smell the dinner cooking.

“Is that you, Rico?” Rosalita called. “Dinner’s almost ready.”

Her voice sounded natural, too. He moved to the kitchen door and looked in. Rosalita was fluttering around the stove. Elena was already at her place at the table, which was in the process of being set by Mirabel, and Jessica and Lucy were visible through the screen door, playing with a bright red kickball in the backyard.

“I’m going to take a quick shower,” Rico said.

Rosalita looked up from the pots and pans. “
Cinco minutos
,” she said, raising a wooden spatula in his direction like a saber.

“
Cinco minutos
,” he repeated, already retreating from the kitchen doorway.

In the bathroom, which he had tiled himself in seafoam green, he stripped off his clothes and undid his long ponytail. His hair was as thick and straight as Margaret’s, though not quite as long. Rosalita usually trimmed off a good four or five inches a year in the spring. Otherwise, all he did was wash it, comb it straight back, and gather it into a rubber band. He paused to examine himself in the mirror for a second while the shower water warmed up. He looked like a man ready for anything—muscular and trim and even a little bit wild, like an Indian from the old western movies, with his black hair loose and flowing over his shoulders.