Rust (3 page)

He has not slept for three days. When he closes his eyes at last, not caring what happens to him anymore, no matter what it is, everything stops and the world goes black. He does not know how many hours have passed when he opens his eyes again.

He faces the concrete wall, a whitewashed wall that has turned dark grey. The sun, beating down from overhead, cuts a dividing line across the dirt floor. The heat feels like a hot iron pressed against his back. He pulls his shirt down and sits up. Two feet away from him, a filthy man in rags squats to shit in the dirt. The smell sickens him.

I cannot do this, he thinks.

M
ARGARET
COULD
feel Rico’s heat, how it switched from steam to burning shame in an instant, how out of control he was, as if a flash fire had ignited inside him and was burning him to the ground, right at the edge of her concrete pad with all those rusty parts strewn far and near. She felt herself detach, her calmness moving inward while a more engaged self suddenly floated upward, far above the scene, coming to rest in one of the highest branches of the Chinese elms, the one that shaded her work area and had the “No Trespassing” sign nailed to it. She had all the time she needed in that one split second to evaluate the words he had said, and she could have chosen to reach out to him with a kind, soothing remark, or even a witticism that dispersed his comment into little remnants, like fireworks on their way to nothingness. Or she could have chosen to stare at the ground, as if she were digging a hole with her eyes and burying the moment in it. She was a bartender, after all, adept at sidestepping arrows and darts of sexuality, letting them fly past her no matter how excellent the aim.

But something had shifted deep inside of Margaret as she tore out of the east, slipped silently through the factory towns of Ohio, crossed the Mississippi with hardly a glance to the right or left, and then stampeded over the plains, the engine of her Dodge Colt Vista straining like a horse forced to run too far too fast. So focused was she on the highway ahead, and then the center line disappearing in one long stripe behind her, that she hardly noticed the fine mist that rose from her pores like a tiny rainstorm in reverse. Perhaps she mistook it for sweat, because the car was hot, hot as hell, so hot she wore two bandanas to catch the drips, one around her neck and one around her hairline, which also helped keep her long black ponytail from blowing into her eyes. Yet she never passed a wrist across her forehead, never wiped her palms on her summer drawstring pants. What seeped upward from deep inside through her skin, or perhaps was sucked out of her body by the high speed, the heat, and the intensity of the highway, were tears she never shed. These tears, frozen inside her for so long, melted in the heat, and washed away her willingness to give even one more inch.

Margaret had given inches and feet, yards and miles, for thirteen years behind the bar. And the night she cashed out for the last time and then dumped out her tip jar on the wooden tabletop in the back booth of the Stereophonic Lounge and counted up the quarters and dollar bills, it had hit her like a sledgehammer, how much she had given. She had never allowed herself to acknowledge it before, what it cost her every night to smile, banter, pretend that every man who sidled up to the bar was magnetic, defer to every woman, play the game of bartender. She’d had her last drink—a margarita made from freshly squeezed limes—served to her with fanfare by Mitch, the owner of the Lounge and a good friend in a casual way, feeling as if she were in a slow motion car wreck, a feeling that persisted on the drive home and made her wary of changing lanes or taking the curves of the BQE at high speed.

There she was at thirty-seven, five years past the last defensible moment, in her own opinion, that a woman should be a bartender, and what did she have to show for it? Her small savings, some good bar stories, a few intimate moments or months with musicians who had gone on to become great and sometimes famous, who, she was certain, hadn’t thought of her in years. She had a storage bin in Queens packed with paintings and drawings, some of which she knew were garbage and some of which she thought were worthy of a wall in the Whitney, a whole show perhaps, though she knew she’d never get one. They documented the underworld she lived in, had always lived in, ever since she was a child, shuffled off at five years old to live with her grandfather while her parents backpacked for a year through India. They never came home. Even the cards, letters, and little gifts—like tiny elephants carved from onyx and gauze shirts with mirrors embroidered into the edges—stopped arriving in the mailbox.

Her grandfather, Donny, a bartender himself at an Irish joint called the Bit O’ Blarney on the waterfront in lower Manhattan, enlisted the help of the State Department to find them, but the trail went cold in Goa, and after a few years he gave up. “They probably got into drugs, honey. Vincent was a big hash head, and, really, your mother was, too, after she got wrapped up with him,” he told her, years later, when she suddenly, at age sixteen, expressed a burning desire to know the truth. “Over there, you get into something like that, there’s no telling what could happen. We’ll just never know. That’s how it is.”

So she was used to important things disappearing: her mother, with her raven hair and restless energy; her father, who, she remembered vaguely, was a painter like her, hanging canvas after canvas on the brick walls of some loft with grimy windows near Chinatown where they’d all lived long ago; Donny, who died of a heart attack, keeled over on the job, before she’d even turned nineteen. Radical change seemed normal to her. Lives combusted, singeing the edges, even of memories.

Which, perhaps, was part of the reason why Margaret often described herself, when someone would seriously ask, as a person who’d spent her whole life sitting on a hot stove, trying to get off. She also felt her skin was too tight. And she was one of those rare people who sensed, very genuinely, that she had somehow gotten in her own way just by being born. No matter how hard she tried, she could never sidestep herself and get free. All this was normal for Margaret. She lived with it like other people live with emphysema or rheumatoid arthritis. There was no point in asking, Why me?

She watched Rico as he turned and crossed her yard, his ponytail picking up the rays of sun and turning it shades of blue and purple along the black strands. He hurried, as if he were running away from something terrible. His back, in his mechanic’s coveralls, was straight to the point of stiffness, and she knew without looking that his hands were clenched by his sides, that they had to pry themselves open to reach for the door handle on his truck or insert the key into the ignition. The engine turned over. It was quiet, perfectly tuned. He pulled away slowly, as if caution were his middle name.

“So much for that,” she said to Magpie, who was sprawled out on her side nearby. Magpie’s eyes drifted toward the street, where Rico’s truck had just disappeared. They paused there, as if they could see something more than just thin air.

R
ICO
DROVE
to the corner, where there was a stop sign, which he didn’t need to see to feel like stopping. He wanted to stop everything. Sometimes, when he was working on a car, brazing a rusty exhaust pipe or welding a lift kit bracket onto the frame of a ’92 Bronco, a sensation would come over him, like the shade that creeps over a man taking a nap in a hammock when a cloud passes overhead and blocks the sun. There was darkness to it, and a change in temperature. The change was subtle, but for the colder. Whenever this would happen, he would stop what he was doing because he knew this sensation, whatever it was, dulled his concentration and made him sloppy.

Rico looked both ways, carefully, and then crossed the intersection and pulled to the curb. He had both hands on the steering wheel, his eyes peering through the windshield as if he were gunning it along I-40 with the whole desert spread out before him. In his peripheral vision, he saw an old woman raking up last year’s leaves in her tiny front yard. She worked slowly, as if it was fine to take all day to finish the job. She never glanced up from the work at hand.

What had just happened? Rico wanted to take some time to backtrack. He had a need to get the events of the day into some form of order, make some kind of accurate map of them, so he could think clearly. It was better for him to nail it all down. If he didn’t do it now, it would only get harder. She had come into his shop. She had asked him to teach her to weld. He had made a mistake, thinking it was him she wanted. It was the fire, the torch, the skill it takes to wield the fire and the torch that she was after. She had been clear, but he had not seen it.

He dropped his hands off the wheel into his lap. It was a mistake, no more, no less. Still, if he had been right, if he had shown up in her yard and she had led him inside, taken him into her arms, and acted out every one of those fantasies he’d been having all afternoon, he would have stayed with her forever, poured his heart and soul into making her happy, fucked her till neither of them could see straight. This was something he had no idea he was ready for. In all the years since he and Rosalita had fused together, he had never, not once, been with another woman. He’d had chances, but he’d turned away, which he thought was the right thing to do. But now, something had shifted. He hadn’t even known there was a shift, but it had already happened and he had proof, how he had rushed from work directly to Margaret’s house, got a hard-on just looking at her, made a comment that no decent woman could overlook.

She had responded in a way he could best describe as neutral. “Sorry buddy, I just want to learn to weld,” she had said, and there was no mockery in it, no accusation, no judgment, and no mercy. And he had said, “I’m sorry too,” which was a perfectly respectable thing to say, the only right thing to say, but it had come out all wrong, and he saw, in that moment, his whole big plan, his whole cock-of-the-walk fantasy, crack and shatter, and all he could do was turn around and walk away.

Nothing terrible had happened, and yet he felt terrible, parked on the street, too shaken up to drive, as if he had just run over a dog and was trying to bring himself to get out of the truck and face the carnage. He glanced up. The mountains in the east formed a jagged line—up down up down—across the horizon, and the sky that dipped down to meet them was so blue it looked thick, the way a five-gallon bucket of paint looks when you first pry off the lid. He had lived here, in Albuquerque, his whole life, seen those mountains glow pink at sunset, pink like the watermelon they were named for, every day. He was used to skies like paint and mountains bursting with colors and mesas so flat they looked man-made, and the dirty Rio, and the dull brown dirt and smoky green sage of the high desert, stretched in all directions. He was used to the smell of the chiles roasting in late August and, in the winter, the piñon smoke from the chimneys of the fireplaces and kivas all around the city. He was used to work, and routine, and the way it felt to raise three daughters and live with a cold wife, but today he had learned something new about himself. Put an opportunity in front of him, even one he made up himself out of misunderstood signals, and he would go for it, tackle it, throw everything away for just one chance to change it all.

“You’re a volcano, Rico,
mi hijo,
” his mother, Elena, had teased him when he was a little boy. “
Todo por dentro
, everything under. Calm and quiet on the top, maybe a little rumbling now and then, but underneath,
el fuego
.” It had made him proud to be compared to a volcano, capable of erupting and spewing boulders, burning lava, ashes, and smoke into the atmosphere. Now it worried him. His mother lived in a little
casita
he had built for her on the three-quarter acre he owned on Riverside Drive. She was sixty-eight years old now, skinny, and almost blind from diabetes that went undiagnosed and untreated for way too long. Elena lived a small life, inside her
casita
and the yard. She seemed much older than her years. She didn’t complain. She prayed the rosary twice a day, and waited for her dead husband to come and get her.

Now, sitting alone in his truck, Rico wanted to talk to her. Since her eyes had clouded over, it had become easier and easier to tell his mother the truth of his life, something he had kept from her, even the everyday, routine problems, for two decades. But when the chill had come over Rosalita, he first waited for it to pass, then tried for one long year to warm her up, and only when he gave up did he let himself out of his
casa
to pick his way through the sagebrush and deadly nightshade to his mother’s door. She was sitting in a stream of morning sunlight at her kitchen table having a cup of mint tea.

“Elena,
mi madre
,” he had said, his way of addressing her for years now, as he came in, and she had turned in the direction of his voice and answered intently, “What’s wrong,
mi hijo
?”

“Rosalita . . . she doesn’t want me anymore. In bed I’m talking about,” Rico had said, just like that. This from a man who had never even mentioned when he came close to losing the house during a rocky spell in his garage; who never told her, or anyone else, how his heart shattered when his oldest daughter, Lucy, got pregnant at sixteen, just like Rosalita had; who hand-built Elena’s little
casita
and moved her in there over the protests of his own wife who didn’t want a mother-in-law, even a good one, in the family compound.