Rust (20 page)

When he had said that Fernando was murdered, Margaret had seen a lead curtain drop down over Rico’s eyes, the kind that discouraged conversational probing. Yet it seemed odd to her to chat amiably about his tattoo while this more serious topic was still hanging in the air between them. She could certainly let it go, but she wanted at least to acknowledge it.

“Maybe sometime,” he had said. “Not today.” And she had nodded and smiled a little bit, a smile that said this was fine with her, and turned back around; and before she’d advanced even five steps, Rico said, “He was a good kid when he was little. He changed when he was about twelve.” He didn’t notice that he was reciting Elena’s after-church litany as if it were his own.

Margaret kept right on walking, understanding that for some topics some people would rather talk into a person’s back. “What made him change?” she asked, picking her words as carefully as she was picking her steps along the slippery rocks. “Something at home?”

“I don’t think so. I was five years younger, so what did I know about anything? He seemed like a normal brother, and then he turned into a monster.”

“Probably testosterone,” Margaret replied. “Some kids just lose it at puberty.”

“Fernando more than lost it,” Rico said.

Then he told her everything, as if once he started to talk he could not stop. He hadn’t really laid out the story of Fernando to anyone except Rosalita, and when he told her he was only twenty. The difference was when he told Rosalita—all those years ago, twenty-three if he counted—Fernando was the main character of the story, and now, telling Margaret, he was. To his wife, Rico had recounted the fistfights between his father and his brother, complete with bloody details. Now he talked about what it was like to stand in the doorway and observe them, how he had wanted to jump onto Fernando’s back to help his father, but he had been too scared to do it because he was no match for Fernando. He knew he couldn’t take whatever it was that his brother would unleash on him if he got involved. And how it was to see and hear his mother sobbing, sometimes screaming, the deep sorrow and helplessness that drove her to the church morning, noon, and night for all the good it did, then or now. How Fernando’s wildness had forced Rico to be tame, maybe too tame for his own good. Rico had spoken so many words, his throat felt dry and he needed a drink of water.

All the while, Margaret listened with careful attention. She had heard a thousand sob stories in her years behind the bar, and, like all bartenders, she had developed a way to distance herself from them. Often she imagined she was a character in a movie, a bartender with a compassionate face who listened but never thought of the story again once the scene was over. But today, that was not the case. Today, she listened with a sense of awe, as if it was important to tell a story such as this one and important to listen to it.

After half a mile, Rico fell silent.

There happened to be a big rock, good for sitting on, right in front of them, and Margaret climbed up on it with Rico right behind her. It felt as if it had been heated up just for them, and she took a moment to shield her eyes, glancing toward the setting sun.

“It’s such a sad story,” she said, looking at him for the first time since he started talking. “I feel so sad for everybody in it, including Fernando. I can’t imagine the state somebody has to reach to act like that.”

“I don’t know why I told you,” Rico said. But inside himself, he knew perfectly well why he told her. He told her because he simply couldn’t stop himself. He had no control around this woman, this
gringa
from New York. While he was walking along behind her, spilling his guts, he thought that if she had once turned around and looked at him, he would have had to run the other way—but she never did. And now, looking into her face seemed to be the most natural thing in the world. Just easy.

He hadn’t thought this far ahead, but if he had, he might’ve imagined that if this moment which should be so hard for him was easy, then he might take a chance on leaning across the distance between them to kiss her lips, pulling her toward him, skinny little thing that she was. But these thoughts never formed. Rico felt spent, exhausted, used up. However, he didn’t feel foolish—which he always thought he might if he ever opened up about Fernando—and he didn’t feel sorry he had done it.

“You’re so quiet,” Rico said after a few moments of no sound but the river moving along its chosen path.

“I’m feeling for you, Rico,” she said. “Sometimes it seems to me that every person is locked up in a prison that no one else can see. Every person.” She herself could often feel the claustrophobia, the loss of freedom, the danger, and the regimentation of prison life though there was no sign of bars in her world. Except the drinking kind, which were their own prison, of course, though that was one she managed to avoid.

“Yeah. We need a mass breakout,” said Rico.

“Maybe a riot,” Margaret suggested.

“Maybe we’re already in one,” Rico replied.

They both laughed nervously because each knew that whatever was happening between them was creating a chance to break free in some way, though their ways were different, maybe.

They sat on the rock a little longer, until dusk, and then made their way back to the car. It was seven-thirty when Margaret pulled onto the highway and headed south. The atmosphere between them, with Rico having opened up about Fernando, was hard to mistake, especially as it got darker and darker. Margaret had always felt that darkness magnified all feelings and needs. It seemed dangerous to acknowledge the intimacy that had, like a lotus blossom, opened up, but impossible to ignore it in the dark. So when she took the left turn back onto Route 550, for that last beautiful section before they re-entered Bernalillo, Margaret said, “Rico, just so you know, I have a lifelong rule against getting involved with married men. I never break it.” She took her eyes off the road for a few seconds as she said it. “Much as I might want to,” she added.

“Too late. We’re already involved.” He watched her grip on the wheel tighten noticeably. “But I can keep my hands off you, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Obviously, that was what she was worried about. Yet his words, which should have calmed her, didn’t. Perhaps she wanted to protest the ease with which he said them, though that would hardly be wise.

“Much as I might not want to,” he added. He had turned his head toward her, and when she glanced at him he saw the crescent moon, which was just rising over the top of the Sandias in the distance, reflected in her eyes.

1990

T
HERE
IS
something else between the pages of the book of short stories. It is Vincent’s most precious possession: a photobooth strip of Regina, his wife, and Margaret, their daughter. Margaret is only three years old in the picture. She is like a miniature Regina with her black hair and her green eyes, though they don’t show green, either of theirs, in the series of four pictures.

The images have faded, but Vincent keeps them alive in his mind.

After all the years here, where everything he knew has disappeared and his life is one that he could never have imagined and still can’t though he lives it every day, he still dreams of Margaret and Regina, still holds them in his arms each night, still begs God to keep them safe.

Still loves them until it hurts.

W
HEN
R
ICO
pulled into his own driveway, he saw that the lights were still on in his mother’s
casita
, and he walked back there before he even checked in at his own house. As he approached her door, he heard the television, some crime show, no doubt. Elena liked to listen to the voices, though she could not see the faces of the actors with any clarity. She also missed the clues and the significant glances that were exchanged between pretty female cops with cleavage, not to mention the closeups of bloody corpses and the constant shots of autopsies in progress.

“Hola, Elena, mi madre
,” Rico called as he came in the kitchen door.

“Hola, Rico,”
she answered, not getting up. She was sitting on her old flowered couch, a cup of tea in her lap and her feet up on the coffee table. “You’re home late.”

“Sí,”
he said. “I’m going to heat up this water and make myself some tea and sit down with you for awhile.” The old Pyrex pot was still warm to the touch as he lit a match and turned on the gas. A box of Sleepytime tea was on the counter, and he opened it and dropped a teabag into a cup that was inscribed with the words “World’s Best Grandmother,” a gift from Lucy, he knew. He found the sugar bowl on the table and got a quart of milk out of the fridge in preparation.

Waiting for water to boil was a chore that Rico found agreeable, especially when the water was in his mother’s old glass pot. He liked the way the blue flame from the gas stove was visible, spread out like thin watercolor paint on the bottom of the pot. He liked the moment when the water started to dance and then commence its churning. He liked the idea that the water became vapor, a mysterious transformation. Even the steam, rising like smoke from his tea cup, pleased him.

“What are you watching?” he asked, as he entered the living room and sat down on the opposite end of the couch. A commercial for some anti-depressant drug was blaring away on the TV, so he knew they had at least thirty seconds to chat.

“A murder mystery,” she answered. To Elena, there were only two types of television shows worth watching: love stories and murder mysteries.

“You should have been a cop,” Rico said, “the way you love murder mysteries.”

“They didn’t have lady cops in my time,” Elena said.

“You know what one of my customers told me?” Rico said. “He used to be a cop in LA a long time ago, right? He told me when they first let women on the police force out there, they had to wear skirts and high heels and carry their guns in their purses. It was on the rule books, he said.”

Elena turned to look at him. “Did you believe him?” she asked.

“Why would he make up something like that?”

“You never know about people,” she said. The show came back on and Rico was relegated to silence for the next ten minutes. He often wondered how his mother coped, living in the realm of blurs and shadows. He imagined her view of the world came in patches of color and movement, perhaps the kind the monsoon rains made running down a wavy windowpane. She always seemed to be trying to see more, he had noticed. Peering, as if there was something to see through. Even now, she stared at the TV screen as if she were intent on memorizing every detail, though Rico knew for a fact that she couldn’t even tell the men from the women. He sipped his tea quietly, as he was expected to do when her shows were on.

When it ended, Elena reached for the remote and expertly cut the power.

“Rosalita was here earlier,” she said. “She walked me back home after dinner.”

Rico knew, just from the careful tone of her voice—from the way it did not make its way up and down the musical scale as it usually did—that Rosalita had probably told her everything. He could feel the space between them on the couch fill with words on their way. He waited.

“Talk to me,
mi hijo
,” Elena said.

He hesitated, trying to find the right place to begin.

“This Anglo woman, do you love her?”

Rico leaned forward and slammed his cup down on the coffee table. Some of the amber-colored liquid sloshed over the side onto the Mexican tiles he had set himself when he made this table as a birthday gift for Elena more than a decade ago. “Jesus, what was she doing talking to you about this?” he said, his voice exploding. Elena reached toward him, and the sight of her hand, hovering in the air as if she was trying to find his shoulder, or perhaps his face, and touch him—probably to calm him down—only made him more angry. He stood up. “Jesus,” he repeated.

“Rico,” Elena began, “I—”

“Give me some fucking room, Elena,” he yelled. “I need some fucking room.”

She sat back against the couch, dropping her hands into her lap.

“What the fuck did she drag you into this for?” He began to pace noisily, back and forth from the kitchen to the living room, as if by stamping his feet, like a bull in a pasture that’s too small for him, he could shake off the pressure of living in a world of women who rushed around behind his back and told each other his business before he had even sorted it out for himself. “What the fuck is the matter with her?” Even Rico was struck by the venom in his voice, not to mention the fact that he had said the word “fuck” at least four times when he usually tended to maintain decorum in front of his mother. Seeing her sitting there, tiny, with her eyes downcast and her hands folded in her lap as if she were a Catholic schoolgirl being forced to sit at attention by some nun, tore him up inside.

“Listen, Elena, I have nothing to say about this right now. That’s it.” He stood stock-still, attempting to decide where to go and what to do next.

“She was upset, Rico. She needed to pour her heart out to somebody,” Elena said calmly.