Rust (15 page)

“No such thing as a rush,” he answered. “There’s always
mañana
”; and even as he said it it occurred to Rico that he actually lived his life that way—perhaps to his own detriment, as his four years of patience with Rosalita no doubt proved. It made him feel sheepish, and he fixed his eyes on the cement floor for a moment.

“So,” Margaret began with a little shift in her voice, as if she were preparing him for a change of subject, “how does it feel to be captured for all eternity in the pages of a book?”

“It feels like nothing,” Rico said. “I never even saw the book.”

“You never saw the
book
?” Margaret repeated. “Why not?”

“The guy who wrote it, you know, he invited me to a bookstore where he was signing it, but I didn’t go. It wasn’t like I was going to buy it. He told me it was, like, forty bucks. And after that, where would I see it?”

Margaret shook her head. “The
rey
without an ego,” she said.

“Margaret, speak English, will you?” he said. “Or Spanish.”

She shifted forward in the chair and reached down to the floor where her big bag was waiting in a pile. “All is not lost,” she said. “I just happen to have a copy on me.” She reached into the bag and extracted a book that looked, on first glance, too big to fit in there. “Ta-daaaa.”

She placed the book on the desk and opened it to a page marked with a yellow sticky note. Rico stood up to cross to the desk, bringing his folding chair with him. She had rolled her chair close to the desk too, and soon they were sitting elbow to elbow, the book spread open between them.

“Here you are,” she said, pointing to a full-color picture of Rico squatting down next to the fender of an old Impala. He wore goggles that obscured his face, but he was still recognizable with his tattooed arms and long ponytail. He leaned in to get a better look, and so did she, and that was when he heard the car pull up, stopping in front of the garage office, in front of the window where he and Margaret were framed like a painting. Rico glanced up and saw, with a thud in his heart that felt like an electrical short circuit, that it was Rosalita.

1988

V
INCENT
TEACHES
the illiterate prisoners how to speak, read, and write English. He does this to pass the time. He does it to make some form of contribution. He does it because the prison officials give him a small cell of his own, a closet really, where he is frequently visited by one of the prison cats, an orange tabby he calls Gladys. Gladys, like all the cats, helps with the rodent problem. She also helps Vincent feel more human.

He is working with his students in a corner of the prison compound, drawing the letters of the alphabet in the dirt with a sharp stick, when he sees Thomas Yazzie for the first time. Thomas lingers at the edges of the lesson. Watches. Offers nothing.

He is dark-skinned, black-haired, like everyone else, but there is something different about him. Different enough that Vincent takes notice. When the lesson is over and the men disperse, Thomas moves forward.

He is Navajo, it turns out. An ex-soldier who has seen too much and done too much and desperately needs healing. He has left the army, finished his tour of duty, received his DD-214, and headed out to see the beauty of the world as a way of counteracting what he’d seen and done.

He came to India.

He needed money, and he made the same mistake Vincent had made, fourteen long years before.

“The prisons here are different,” Vincent tells Thomas, who, he learns, arrived just nine days ago. “They keep you here for years before they even charge you with anything.” He offers his hand. “I’m Vincent,” he says. “Let’s go find a place in the shade to sit.” He begins to cross the dirt yard, stepping around squatting men who play a game involving little piles of stones and a great deal of yelling.

Thomas follows as quickly as he can.

R
OSALITA
NEVER
took her eyes off Rico’s, not from the time she opened the door and got out of her car, to the moment she stepped out of the sun and into the office of Garcia’s Automotive. Rico watched her coming with the same sense of trepidation and dread he might feel about the approach of a tornado from across the plains. He had no doubt how the former Rosalita—the Rosalita from before this morning, last night, or the past four years—would handle her entrance into a scene like this. It would involve screaming and yelling, and she might even come at him, her arms flailing. But her hot Latina blood appeared to have cooled to the point of neutrality over her long winter, and now Rico had no idea what she might do.

When she stepped across the threshold, he said, “
Hola
, Rosalita,” as if nothing at all were wrong with her finding him huddled down at his desk in the middle of the day, shoulder to shoulder, with an Anglo woman, one with long black hair, green eyes, and lips the color of peach blossoms.

“
Hola,
Rico,” she said, and her voice had a quality in it that made Margaret sit up straight and glance at him, as if she was waiting for him to present her with an explanation of what was happening.

“Rosalita, this is Margaret,” he said. Then he turned to Margaret, whose face was not more than a foot away from his, and said, “Margaret, this is Rosalita,
mi esposa.
”

“Hi, Rosalita,” Margaret said with an easy smile. “We were just looking at this book I found in the library. Rico’s in it. Come see.” She said this naturally, as if she were an innocent person, which she was, though how could Rosalita believe this. She said this in a voice that somehow reduced the visuals of this moment to unimportance, as if she had the power to take the questions hanging in the air and drive them all like a drill into the book on the desk. She even slid out of her chair and made a gesture toward it, as if it were a seat she had just been warming, waiting for Rosalita to come along.

“Rico, what’s going on here?” Rosalita said.

Rico stood up. “She just told you. We’re looking at this book.”

“It’s about low riders,” Margaret supplied. And then she repeated, “I found it in the library,” as if she had a limited vocabulary and, under tension, had to resort to repetition.

Margaret, with her years behind the bar, knew very well that, when the force field suddenly charges up between a man and a woman—and even more so, a husband and a wife—it’s time to beat feet. And, just by the nature of being a bartender and an attractive woman, especially in her younger years when the rage she felt seemed to telegraph itself as sexy wildness, she had often been the spark that ignited trouble, which she had no interest in doing anymore. She was finished with trouble, had left it behind her in New York, and now all she wanted to do was clear out fast. “Time for me to take off. Thanks a lot, Rico. I’ll leave the book so you and Rosalita can take your time looking at it,” she said, purposefully making no reference to the nature of their relationship, which truly was only teacher and student though it felt, even to her, like more. She simply hefted her bag onto her shoulder, said, “Nice meeting you” to Rosalita, and left. Both Rico and Rosalita were stone silent as she crossed the parking lot and continued up Barelas Road.

“So who is she?” Rosalita finally asked. Normally such a question comes with a scarlet edge of anger in it along with a list, being composed on the spot, of suspicions, but Rosalita’s had none of that. It barely had curiosity. In fact, as Rico scanned her tone for hidden meaning, the only word that came to his mind was defeated.

“She’s a
gringa
who wants to learn to weld,” he said. “She lives in the neighborhood.”

Rosalita sat down in the chair Margaret had just vacated. “Have you known her a long time?”

“Not even a week,” said Rico, all the time feeling as if he were walking blindfolded along the edge of a cliff.

“Are you going to teach her?”

“We already started.” It felt good to say it, Rico noticed. “Yesterday.”

Rosalita looked up at him, as if she were doing some mental calculations, and then she said, “Oh. That explains last night.”

“Now you know,” he said, echoing her exact words from just a few hours ago, and then some vindictive streak in him, the same one that everyone possesses, prompted him to continue with the rest of the words she had used on him this morning. “I hope you feel better, knowing, Rosalita.”

Some moments between lovers are like storms, where winds whip up debris that might have been settled for years, and some reach the freezing point, where, in the face of repeated cold blasts, the lovers can only run in opposite directions for cover. But some have no air in them at all. They are the quiet, suffocating ones that seem inescapable, insurmountable, and hopeless. They are the ones that feel like a trap, or quicksand, or drowning. This is exactly where Rico and Rosalita found themselves. They should have been at each other’s throats, but instead they spoke in quiet, civil tones. They should have held knives to each other’s heart, but they didn’t, because both knew that the knives were already embedded and all they could do together, at least in this precise moment, was bleed.

Meanwhile, Margaret walked home in an apprehensive mood, as if whatever Rico and Rosalita were not saying was ricocheting off the concrete block walls all around her, and she had to keep her guard up to fend it off. Back in the bar business, she had a name for what had been hovering in the atmosphere of the garage, preparing to incarnate: stingrays—or, if they were particularly vicious, killer stingrays. If she was on the receiving end, ninety-nine percent of the time the sender of the stingrays was female, though, given the right circumstances—which usually arose when a girlfriend or wife Margaret had never known existed showed up unexpectedly—males were more than capable of generating them too, and theirs were always of the killer variety. Oddly, Margaret did not know if she herself was capable of it. As she strolled the four blocks toward home, she attempted to remember any time or any place when she had shot off a round of rays toward anyone, and she simply couldn’t. She was jealous by nature, she thought, but in a more theoretical way. In real life, when the stingrays started, she erased whatever had caused them from her consciousness and just went on.

The initial scene with Rico, when he had shown up in her yard expecting her to fuck him stupid, was one she had erased, but now she felt a need to conjure it up again for the purposes of reexamination. Once you got to know Rico, she mused, he did not come across as a horndog, or even close to one. But that first impression could certainly be filed under that heading, and his wife—who was so pretty, who looked like some feisty Mexican woman in an old western movie, one who could ride a horse like a circus performer, wear her hair braided, piled up on top of her head, and tote a rifle for the purposes of running bad hombres off her land—had stepped into the scene as if she’d been there before, perhaps so many times that she had run out of energy for it. Her stingrays were present but weak. And Rico had not sent out any at all.

Margaret turned onto her own street, where an ice cream truck blasting the song “Greensleeves” at top volume was parked mid-block surrounded by children who apparently had never heard of the concept of getting in a line. They clamored around the little service window on the side of the truck, over which the owner had screwed a heavy wrought-iron grate, impatiently attempting to pass their money through the bars and receive their pre-packaged ice cream treat. Margaret had to weave her way through them. She glanced at the side of the truck where the ice cream choices were stenciled. They all came on popsicle sticks or in pointy sugar cones. She had loved pistachio ice cream as a child, primarily due to its vivid and unexpected color, though she never ate it after age five, probably because of the one clear memory she associated with it. On a hot summer day, she and her father had descended the six flights of stairs from the loft where they lived, and walked a few blocks to a sidewalk café in Little Italy. Vincent had ordered a big dishful of pistachio ice cream for her, complete with a cookie that could be used, at least for a while, in place of a spoon. That was the day that her father had told her that she would be living with Grampy for a few months while he and her mother went on a trip to India.

“Can’t I go?” she had asked, over and over, and Vincent had said no, it wasn’t a good idea. India was dirty and disease-ridden, dangerous and poor. It was no place for a little girl. “Are there any little girls there?” she had asked, and he had said yes, but they belonged there, and Margaret, just five years old, had tried to find a way to say, “I belong with you and Mommy,” but she couldn’t quite locate the right words. So she ate her bowl of ice cream instead, and she felt, with each little bite, like she was swallowing sorrow. The children around the ice cream truck showed no such sign of sorrow. They opened their treats and tossed the wrappers to the ground, where they remained, poised like a flock of pigeons waiting for a breeze.

Margaret walked a few more feet and turned into her driveway. As she passed through the gate, she called for Magpie, who ambled toward her from under an elm tree. “Hey, big girl,” she said as she squatted down to give her a hug. “How’s dogworld?” Magpie rolled over so Margaret could more easily reach her underside, and Margaret vigorously petted her for a good minute and then said, “Let’s go inside and rest up for a long walk when the sun goes down.”