Rust (2 page)

P
ERHAPS
YOU
could say Rico’s hips, turned like that toward a woman, had grown rusty. They no longer moved with the rhythm that wrapped itself around a man and a woman like rodeo rope and mercilessly yanked them off their feet. His wife, Rosalita, had turned away from him four years before, slowly frozen over until all he could do in bed was stare at her back, or rather at the prim nightgown that covered it, and listen to her breathe. He was not a man to push himself on her when she said no. And the no had grown impenetrable, like cement, and finally he turned away himself. He was still in shock, knocked down flat even, by the way things change over time.

They had brought three daughters into this world, and before the youngest had even purchased her first lace bra, Rosalita had ebbed away from him, like the sea when it sucks itself out to create a killer wave. And for Rico, having a cold wife, a wife who still looked good, who still moved in those enticing ways that made her bottom jiggle, this was the wave that kept him drowning, over and over, for four years now, never having enough air in his lungs to decide what to do next.

And the
vecino
was changing, too. Anglo people arrived with their purebred dogs on leashes and water bottles hooked onto their waistbands in specially made holders. They walked along the banks of the Rio, where, two decades before, he himself had dug up the
terrones
for his house and brought them home by wheelbarrow. The sons and daughters of the
viejos,
his neighbors, sold out to white people the minute their parents died, moving like sheep to subdivisions on the West Mesa, where the houses were new and came equipped with dishwashers and microwave ovens, where streets did not flood during the monsoon season and crowing roosters were not allowed.

There he was, forty-three years old, traveling two miles to his shop and two miles home six days a week. The shop had been his father’s, a corner garage with two work bays and a little office in which, over time, he accumulated a mini-fridge, a hot plate, a desk with four drawers, an office chair on wheels, and two folding chairs. His mother had signed it over to him two weeks after his father was laid to rest, dead at fifty-six of a blood clot that hit his brain like an atom bomb.

Rico was a man who felt caged up, like a murderer serving a life sentence in a bad jail, the kind they have in Mexico where you pray to die. Many times he looked at his body, where the skin was so tight—even now that he felt old—that the veins were like road maps; and he could almost, but not quite, see what it was underneath it that wanted to break out and make a run for it but couldn’t. It was another man completely, one who never fell for the lie that wives and babies and places by the river were worth a goddamn. It was a man who turned his back on that two mile stretch from his
casa
to his shop, who had the balls to take off in his youth, maybe join the navy or find some war to fight in, maybe disappear into the dry hills of Mexico and take peyote morning, noon, and night. He felt this strongly, but he told no one, not even Rosalita, even after all these years. Long ago, when he and Rosalita were young, they spent every weekend night dancing in Enrique’s bar on Isleta and then thrashed around the bedroom like two demons from hell. Now, she was a ghost, floating through the kitchen in her long nightgown. What was the use of talking to a woman who sucked herself so far inward that she never even thought to glance in his direction?

One night, three years before, the day his middle daughter, Ana, had graduated from Rio Grande High, the first in the family line who ever finished, Rico had come home from the ceremony all shook up. His shirt had wet circles under the armpits, and he felt the blood in his neck like a snake about to strike. In the dark, he ran through the
bosque,
ran along the riverbank like a coyote, until he fell into the dirt and cried like a baby. He could still feel the loss of everything, the nothingness of his life, in the bones of his wrists and hands when they held the torch. But when he came home that night, his boots caked with mud and his new shirt ruined by the red clay of the riverbank, Rico had made a decision, and he had stuck to it ever since. He would keep order in his life, despite this part inside, this madman, who wanted to get out and tear up everything. In his shop, his tools were clean and oiled. They each had a specific place, and they were in it, always. The corners were swept, the weeds that grew up through the cracks in the sidewalk out front were pulled, and even his desk was organized, with slots prepared for receipt books, pencils, pens, and phone numbers. At home it was the same. Even Rosalita teased him about the way he hung up his shirts, always buttoning the top button so they looked alive on the hanger. For years now, Rico had just moved along, from one thing he had to do to the next, like a train across the mesa.

So he was taken by surprise by what stormed over him when he saw that woman in the doorway of his shop. In that moment, seeing her in the arc of light, he felt his life caving in, an old mine shaft that intended to collapse no matter how many miners were still inside. But in another way, he felt it open up.

“C
AN
YOU
teach me to weld?” she asked, her voice not much more than an echo.

“I can teach you anything you want to learn,” he replied, and the power in these words centered itself right in his balls, and he felt like a king.

“I want to learn to weld,” she said. “I already have the parts laid out in my yard.”

“What kind of metal?” Rico knew women. He knew they couldn’t tell the difference between a piece of steel and a piece of aluminum, that they thought all the metals in the world would melt before the torch. He knew that women lived in a dream world, that they never saw the truth of the simplest thing, like what metals will bond together and which ones won’t, or how to tell what was hot enough and what wasn’t.

“Iron,” she said. “I think.”

“I better take a look,” Rico said. It sounded casual, as if the words were skidding across the ice that once in a great while formed on the river, pretending there was no dirty water underneath.

“Could you?” she asked, and, as if she owned the place, she quickly moved to his desk, and wrote down her address on his notepad. The whole time, that big dog watched Rico, her eyes communicating in the way only a big dog’s can. They said,
Stay back, old man. Stay back.

“Does that dog bite?” he asked.

“Only when I tell her to. She’s very well trained, an ex-police dog.” She said this over her shoulder so automatically that he almost believed it. But that would probably make this woman an ex-policewoman, and Rico could tell from the curve of her hips that that was not true. He could tell by the way she didn’t look around, never swept her eyes toward the bays or the closed door to the bathroom behind her.

“Can you come by today? Later? After work?” she asked, and her voice was breathless, as if she wanted to burn in the fire between them.

“Yeah. About six,” he said.

“Great. I’ll wait for you.”

I’ll bet you will, he thought. I’ll bet you’ve been waiting for me for your whole life. This thought arrived like an avalanche. It carried him away, tumbled him head first into the desire she was not able to hide. He looked at the slip of paper she’d left behind. Her name was Margaret. Rico moved to the doorway to watch her walk to the corner and turn left.

All afternoon, he worked his torch with the precision and focus of an assassin. He imagined Margaret on fire beneath him, reminding him how passion burned, how it scorched the human body from the inside out and left it wanting more. At the end of the day, he didn’t wash up. He didn’t change out of his coveralls. He didn’t call Rosalita to tell her he’d be late. He went straight to Margaret, dirty.

When he pulled up in front of her house, she was on her hands and knees on the cement pad, her rear end aimed toward the driveway, and he felt himself get hard. He climbed out of his truck not caring if she or anybody else saw the bulge in the front of his coveralls, and he walked toward her. There she was, surrounded by a hundred old rusty parts, things he knew she had no idea how to use. Carburetors and condensation pumps, tie bolts and butterfly nuts, oil pans and heavy duty towing chain. Her face was the color of apricots when they first appear on the trees in May, but her eyes, which were green, blazed at him, like the eyes of a cornered animal.

She sat back on her heels. “What? No torch?” she said and she smiled a little, like they had a big secret between them already.

“I got it right here for you, mama,” he said, though he didn’t mean to. They were words he had heard his older brother, Fernando, use on girls a long, long time ago, magic words that melted the girls from the
vecino
, causing them to lower their eyes in a way that drew Fernando toward them. But they were not his words. Truthfully, though, standing not ten feet from her, it had crossed his mind that, with her squatting down like that, she was at just the right height to blow him to kingdom come, and he had to resist the urge to reach for the zipper of his coveralls.

Rico saw it when the words hit her, the way they knocked her speechless and disgusted her, and in that moment if he could have moved fast enough, he would have made a joke of himself, given her his most devilish smile, and saved everything. But he was too slow, always had been, his whole life, and he saw the moment pass, on its way to rust, just like everything else.

“Sorry, buddy,” she said at last, her voice instantly drained of any color. “I just want to learn to weld.”

And here was another opening, another place to step in and resurrect the moment, but now his face burned with shame and foolishness. “I’m sorry, too,” he said, and he meant it, but it came out of his mouth with a macho edge, like words he wanted to cut into her with a knife. So he turned and left before it got any worse, and the last thing he saw was an old tractor fender in the shape of a rusty crescent moon, which she seemed, because of the angle at which it rested against the cement pad, to be squatting in, just waiting to stand up and be counted.

1974

H
E
WAKES
up to the roar of one thousand men, murmuring, chanting, talking, yelling. Walled in.

This is a nightmare, he thinks
.
Please.

But the way his shoulder aches, pressed as it is into the dirt, and his shirt, which had bunched up around his neck like a noose when he’d finally collapsed and rolled to the edge of this room, these things tell him it is real. He had arrived in the back of a truck, fifty men packed in like animals. They were chained to one another at the ankles. Only a few were able to shove their way to the long benches that lined either side of the truck bed to sit. It had been a long ride. Dusty. He had kept his head lowered, refusing to look through the open sides of the truck at the city, then its edges, and then the green countryside.

Finally, they had spilled out. They were pushed through a gate.

Into this room. A pen, really. One word above the door was in English: “Processing.”