Rust
RUST
J
ULIE
M
ARS
Copyright © 2012 by Julie Mars
All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.
For information, address:
The Permanent Press
4170 Noyac Road
Sag Harbor, NY 11963
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mars, Julie–
Rust / Julie Mars.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-57962-226-8
eISBN 1-57962-303-4
1. Women artists—Fiction. 2. Welders (Persons)—Fiction. 3. Fathers and daughters—Fiction. 4. Reunions—Fiction. 5. Self realization—Fiction. 6. New Mexico—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3613.A7695R87 2012
813'.6—dc23
2011048266
Printed in the United States of America.
Dedicated, with gratitude, to Joan Schweighardt
A
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
T
HANK
YOU
so much to Marty and Judy Shepard of The Permanent Press for supporting this book, of course, but also for thirty-three years of providing a very independent voice in the publishing world. Special thanks to Joan Schweighardt and Whitney Woodward, my writing partners, and to Ryan Henel for welding tips. My deep gratitude to the writers who helped me and the friends who keep me vertical: Robert Farris, Marietta Benevento, L’aura Bodmer, Kathy Brown, Starr Goode, Minrose Gwin, Jennifer Hix, Basia Irland, Marsha Keener, Jami Porter Lara, Michele Meyers, Chris Newbill, Julie Reichert, Laura Robbins, Julie Shigekuni, Mary Starling, Alexcia Trujillo, Ana and Robert Wauneka, and Maggie.
S
HE
ARRIVED
in a nineteen-year-old Dodge Colt Vista, a beater with New York plates, in which the air conditioning was shot and the backseat was wedged up with a two-by-four. She came with a dog, a German shepherd who—she claimed—was a retired drug-sniffer from the NYPD. It was a story she had invented just a few nights before when a motel owner in Amarillo hadn’t wanted to let her into a room with such a big dog. She’d looked right into his bloodshot eyes and, as if possessed or perhaps inspired, said, “That’s a retired police dog. She’s not about to cause any problems.” The motel proprietor had glanced out the office door toward the car, where Magpie sat, alert and huge in the driver’s seat, laughed, and said, “Okay. Thirty-nine bucks for a single.” In the room, which stunk of cigarettes, Margaret had scratched Magpie’s ears and encouraged her to sleep on the bed. When she drove on the next morning, the story already seemed plausible. Perhaps it was the emptiness of the landscape. She wanted to fill it with something interesting, and even a lie would suffice.
So, just days later, it was automatic, even natural, for Margaret to say no when the neighborhood children asked to pet her big scary dog. “Not unless I’m right here,” she warned. “Never come into this yard unless you see me outside first. Tell your parents.” Margaret knew the value of such a myth in such a
barrio
, and she smiled to herself as the children ran off, past skinny shotgun houses with bars on the windows, past dogs chained at the neck to trees, past old people who sat outside their front doors on folding chairs, drinking and smoking and waiting for the evening desert breeze to find its way through the iron security doors into their houses to cool them off.
She stood out, she knew, a skinny Anglo woman, all alone in a
vecino
where all she heard was Spanish. The young girls pushing strollers along the dirt strip at the edge of the street smiled shyly at her, though, and she smiled back as she unloaded three canvas suitcases, a box of oil paints, some kitchenware, two milk crates of books, and not much else. She carried these items one by one into a small adobe house with a big yard shaded by Chinese elm trees and filled with ants, the kind that pack a bad bite, the kind of bite that has you wondering, if you’re not local, if you should run fast to the hospital emergency room.
Margaret was an artist, a woman whose high hopes had flattened out on the pavement of New York, where, despite her formidable talent, she couldn’t even get a show in an unimportant gallery, where her bartending job had gotten old, and her commute into Manhattan had gotten longer and longer the farther out she moved, one step ahead of the rent hikes. Plus, her interest had evolved from painting, which was manageable in her tiny studio apartments, to sculpture, which wasn’t. And not just any form of sculpture. Margaret wanted to weld. She dreamed of acetylene torches and sparks flying in arcs onto some nonflammable flooring.
She saved money, tucking dollar bills, fives, and tens, into books, drawers, and old coffee tins all over her apartment in Far Rockaway. Fresh from work, she stretched out on her old upholstered couch at four-thirty in the morning and perfected a wish list for the next place, her personal paradise on this earth, and the first thing on it was “good junkyards,” for Margaret had fallen in love with rust, with old metal that slowly transforms itself to dust after going through a long redheaded phase. It began one winter morning when, walking Magpie along the beach just after dawn, she had found an ancient lock washed up from the sea. It was thick with rust and Margaret immediately imagined the wooden locker that had rotted away around it, setting it free to tumble in the surf for a hundred years. She had peered intensely into the grey waves, thanking them for the gift. When she turned around, the lock cradled in her woolen mitten, fog had formed, and it seemed as if the whole city, which had always been her home, had abruptly disappeared. There is nothing left for me here, she admitted to herself, and she gripped the rusty lock tighter. It was no longer bearable, all the loss, and she decided then and there, as if the deep fog had provided a moment of paradoxical clarity, to move away, to find a new place and start over, fresh. She carried the rusty lock home and placed it on her bedside table. It was the first thing she put in the car on the day she left.
She picked Albuquerque on the spur of the moment when she read in a travel magazine that coyotes still run along the riverbanks right in the middle of the city. Margaret had closed her eyes then, imagining a streak, skinny and yellow-eyed, shooting toward the muddy water of the Rio Grande, as, in the background, downtown buildings pulsated in waves of desert heat. When her lease expired, she collected her dog, her car, and her eight thousand dusty dollars, saved over three long years, and took off. Speeding along the highway at eighty miles per hour in a pack of wild eighteen-wheelers, she noticed a few tendrils of hope starting to sprout, and then a ribbon of fear, and she turned the radio up louder and pressed down harder on the gas.
She had found the tumbledown adobe house near the zoo by accident—turned her head at precisely the right moment to see a small “for rent” sign in the window on a street she happened to turn down while cruising the greenbelt along the river looking for coyotes. From a pay phone in a nearby Diamond Shamrock gas station, she called the landlord, and while she waited for him to arrive, she walked Magpie up one side of the street and down the other. The neighborhood seemed lawless, with beat-up cars on blocks in dusty yards, ranchero music spilling from open doors, and the air weighted with the frenetic speech of seals and monkeys, and the infrequent roar of a bored or angry lion. But next to the house was a cement pad big enough for a one-car garage to have fallen down around it and been carted away. And, just staring in through the gate at a chain-link slider that would keep Magpie in if she remembered to lock it, Margaret imagined a welding tank and torches lined up along the edge of that cement pad. She could build a little shade structure and work out there all spring, summer, and fall. She could fill the dirt in the yard with shapes, all made of rust, and keep on making more. She could fill the whole city if they’d let her.
The house was three times the size of her ex-apartment, and she felt deep relief the moment she opened the door. The walls inside were a foot thick and rippled, like pillows; they had
nichos
carved out where she placed her rusty lock and her shell collection. She shined up the old
saltillo
tile floors with Mop & Glow, whispering “Viva Mexico” as she worked. Without knowing why, she understood the rhythms of this house, this city. She quickly learned to step around black widow spiders in the yard, and, mercilessly, she yanked up the sprawling green ground ferns with their pretty yellow flowers before they produced thorns, called goats’ heads, that got embedded in Magpie’s feet. Without effort, she remembered to draw the curtains tightly closed as the first rays of blazing western sun slanted into her living room, just after the monkeys in the zoo began to howl and the stray dogs disappeared off the street into unknown shady places for the long, hot afternoon.
When the man from the phone company finally arrived to install her phone, he brought the Yellow Pages, and she pored through the junkyard listings until she spotted an ad for Coronado Wrecking. The very next day she drove there, straight down Broadway into the throbbing sun. She made a left onto a dirt road that led her toward twenty-seven acres of junk piled into the sand dunes along the interstate highway, and she thought, Yes. Immediately, she made a three-point turn and sped to Home Depot where she bought four sturdy five-gallon buckets, and from then on she spent her days at Coronado Wrecking. Alone among mountains of junked engines, obsolete machinery, and esoteric construction equipment, she used her pliers and screwdrivers to pry off rusty parts, loading her buckets until she could barely lift them to the scale in the office, and paying pennies a pound.
She carried the buckets back to her cement pad, spilling them out with a sense of destiny. Then she laid out the pieces, a fine film of dust—rust-colored—settling into her hair, which was long and black, just like every other woman’s in this
barrio
. She forgot about looking for a job or finding a kitchen table. She forgot to unpack her pots and pans. She forgot about everything, except walking her dog, a habit she had had for eight years, every day, three times a day, no matter what.
Which is precisely what she was doing when she rounded the corner onto Barelas Road and happened to catch a bolt of blue-tipped lightning in her peripheral vision. From inside the dark cavern of Garcia’s Automotive Repair Shop on the corner, just three blocks from her house, she saw shooting sparks and she floated toward them, a woman in a serious trance. A car, a low rider painted green and gold, was up on the lift, and a man, strong armed and tattooed, stood beneath it and worked a torch, lifting the flame up and into the underbelly of that car. Margaret stood at the door, her toes crossing the line where the bright sun and the inside shade met, and a great, overwhelming lust formed in her. She wanted her fingertips to extend, to incorporate fire in them. She wanted heat, melting molten metal. She wanted to sever what was and reconstruct it into something vivid and original.
The man wore green mechanic’s coveralls with the sleeves cut off at the shoulders and a nametag embroidered with “Rico” on the pocket. He had a ponytail with a streak of silver woven through it, and the muscles in his arms had such fine definition, so many curves and shadows, that they looked like they’d been pasted onto him from some younger man. He turned toward her, aware through some ghetto-inspired psychic sense, of a strange presence too close. When he saw her outline, a small white woman with hair like pitch and a face that rivers of weariness had flooded through, her and her big dog outlined in the sunbeams so a halo was created, he thought for a moment she was the Virgin of Guadalupe come to Garcia’s Automotive Repair for a personal visitation—maybe to punish him for the “In Guad We Trust” bumper sticker he had on his truck as a little joke to himself, for Rico never trusted anything or anyone. But now he wanted to fling his welding torch into the corner and get down on his knees in front of this woman. Her lust hit him like a fist. It had been a long time since a woman looked at him with such desire. It made him straighten his shoulders and turn his hips to face her, head on.