Rust (28 page)

He walked back to his mother’s
casita
and went in. “
Hola Elena, mi madre
,” he called as he always did.

“In here,” she responded from the living room, as if he could not figure that out.

When he entered, Elena did a very uncharacteristic thing—she turned off the television. “I’ve already seen this one. It’s a repeat,” she said, as if she had to explain. She looked at him closely, though he knew she could not see his face. “How are you today,
mi hijo
?” she asked.

“Fine,” he said, as if he was learning from Rosalita how to avoid a question.

“Fine?”

“Well . . .” He hesitated for a few seconds. “Not too bad.”

Elena laughed. “That’s more like it,” she said. “Have some tea. There’s hot water on the stove.”

Rico got up and poured himself a cup. Tonight, he added two spoonfuls of honey instead of milk.

With all the family drama in the air, with Rosalita having taken Elena into her confidence just last night and Rico’s anger because of it, with the dinner they’d all just sat through as if none of that had happened, Rico had no idea where to begin. But he knew he needed to talk to his mother about at least some parts of this whole complicated mess. But no words came, so he just sat there and sipped his tea, and so did Elena. It was easy to sit in silence with his mother.

After a while she asked, “Have you talked with Rosalita?”

“She doesn’t want to talk,” said Rico.

“How about yell?” Elena asked, and they both chuckled.

“No. I asked her to take a ride with me, and she said no. I don’t know what else to do.” He put his tea down on the tile table. “I can’t figure her out. Maybe she wants it to end between us. Maybe this is her way of making sure that happens.”

“Maybe,” Elena agreed, thoughtfully, “but the way she was crying her heart out last night over here, I don’t think so.”

“She was crying her heart out?” It took him a few seconds to absorb this. “She’s playing it cool with me.”

“Maybe she’s showing you how she feels in other ways.”

Rico thought of Rosalita climbing on top of him that morning, of the way she flung her prim summer nightgown to the far corner of the room and began to slowly rock. He thought of the way she had slid across the couch just a half hour ago to press her body right next to his, how it took some pressure off him somehow.

“I guess so,” he said, but his voice, even in his own ears, lacked certainty.

“This
gringa
woman—”

“Her name is Margaret,” Rico cut in.

“Tell me what it is about Margaret that has you so captured,” Elena said.

Rico looked at his mother. There was nothing in her tone that hinted to him of a setup, a seemingly innocent display of interest that would soon turn against the
gringa
home wrecker. And the simple truth was, he wanted to talk about Margaret in the way that people do when they are intoxicated with possibility. But where should he start? With the way the sunlight caught in her eyes so they seemed to spin like green pinwheels? With the fact that she was a bookworm, who had found him in a library book he had not even told her about? With the adorable way, he thought in retrospect, that she had hinted when they’d first met that she was an ex-NYPD policewoman out for a walk with an ex-NYPD police dog?

“She’s an artist. She wants to learn to weld,” he said instead. “She has all these pieces of crap lying around that she drags home from the junkyard, and she wants to weld them into sculptures. She asked me to teach her, and I said yes.”

Elena lifted her tea cup to her lips and blew on it even though Rico was sure it was just lukewarm. One thing he liked about his mother was that she had the capacity to wait, to let things unfold in their own time.

“She was abandoned by her parents,” he suddenly said. “They went to India and never came back. So she was raised by her grandfather in New York City. But he died, and now she doesn’t have anybody. Nobody. Except her dog.” Rico felt good talking about Margaret, and he wanted to construct a clear picture of her for his mother, one that would create the magic he felt when he was around her. So far, he was just providing the facts and that was not enough, so he added, “She makes me feel good, Elena. She asks me questions and before you know it, I’m doing something crazy like climbing over the cemetery wall to visit Fernando’s grave and—”

Elena put her cup on the table. “What?” she said, “¿
Qué dices
, Rico?”

Rico realized then, in that moment when she was so startled, that he had not yet mentioned his visit to the cemetery to his mother.

“You never visit your brother’s grave,” Elena said.

“Well, I went,” Rico said. “I told Margaret about him, and after I left here last night, I just drove around and ended up there.”

Elena began to cry. Tears washed through her hazy blind eyes and ran down her cheeks. “At last,” she said. “
Gracias a Dios
.”

Now Rico was startled. This was not a reaction he was prepared for. He hated to see any woman cry, most of all his mother.

“Now I can die in peace,” she said, barely able to get the words out, “knowing you forgive Fernando.”

“We were talking about Margaret,” Rico said, his voice rising sharply. “We were talking about me for a change.” It bothered him when his mother carried on about Fernando. It had gotten old, hearing the same story as they drove home from church week after week. “Besides, I didn’t say I forgave him. I just went to his grave.” He knew now that he would not tell her how he had fallen apart there, how he had remembered his boyhood hero with a strong feeling of love in his heart. And why not? Because here he was in a crisis of his own, a real one, and his mother was more concerned about Fernando, who was dead and gone for twenty-five years. That said it all. He stood up.

“Rico,” Elena said, “please, wait,
mi hijo
, just for a second. You need to understand something. Nobody loved Fernando, nobody but me. Even your father gave up on him. Did you know I had to beg him to go to his own son’s burial? I had to threaten to leave him if he wouldn’t get in that car with me that day. I knew you were glad he was gone too, and I can’t blame you, all the beatings you took. But all these years . . . all these years I’ve been waiting for some sign that somebody somewhere cared, and now you gave it to me.”

Rico longed to walk out the door into the night where he could be alone, but he could not turn away from his mother.

“You don’t understand,
mi Rico
, because everyone loves you—Rosalita, the girls, me, your father. Even this woman Margaret, she probably loves you too, and maybe you love her. But Fernando never had that.”

“He was a sick bastard,
mamacita,
” Rico said. His voice was vicious, but he addressed her the way he had in the old days, long ago. “He was cruel.”

“I know he was,” Elena whispered. “I know.” She raised her eyes to Rico’s face. “But you visited his grave,” she said. And seeing her like that, Rico moved to put his arms around her. He held her so closely he could feel her ribs beneath his hands through her old bathrobe, and he thought,
pobrecita,
she has suffered so much.

“I cried,” Rico whispered into her ear. “I cried for him,
mamacita
.”

M
ARGARET
CLIMBED
into her bed that night and stretched her arms and legs. She felt calm and quiet, full and empty, like a five-pointed star resting comfortably on the blue-black nothingness of the universe. Moments like this one, in which she was relaxed and carefree and present, were rare for Margaret, though she noticed that they were arriving more frequently since she’d landed in her little adobe house by the Rio. Maybe in some mystical manner the coyote she saw on her morning walks was bringing them to her, she thought. Maybe she had found her place at last.

She was drowsy, a state she liked to linger in as long as possible. Falling slowly asleep was like falling apart, she thought. It took you somewhere new, into the big black void where, night by night, something replenished you enough to get you going again in the morning. Stretched out in that borderland of sleep, so comfortable in her bed with Magpie breathing loudly at her feet, Margaret began to dream of great chunks and rolls of metal, all waiting for her to come claim them.

Her whole art life had been about paper and pencils, canvas and oil paint; it had been about flat, portable, and indoors. But now, mysteriously, she required industrial strength equipment, tanks of explosives, protective leather clothing, helmets, goggles, and temperatures so high that even the sound of the numbers scared her. Suddenly it was about outdoors and permanence, about standing still in the elements and slowly rusting.

Margaret awoke to the morning light and the sounds of the monkeys from the zoo. She loved the way their whoop-whoop-whoops permeated the neighborhood, made it seem, if you closed your eyes, like some jungle outpost. She had not set foot in a zoo since she’d gone to the big one in the Bronx on a class trip in the seventh grade. The caged animals there made her nervous and sad, and she refused to go back. Here, though, with the seals barking all day long and the monkeys calling out in their loud voices, the zoo seemed like it might be a friendly place, and she thought perhaps she should go for a visit instead of heading to Roadrunner Courier Service to ask about a job.

“It’s obviously a classic case of avoidance, wouldn’t you say?” she said to Magpie, who had raised her head from the bed when Margaret had first stirred. Magpie, as always, looked interested. She was an intelligent dog who understood English, Margaret was convinced, even difficult vocabulary words. “So what should I do, Mag? Fuck off all day at the zoo or try to get a job? Don’t answer me yet. Let’s think about it over coffee.”

Margaret climbed out of bed and went into the kitchen, where she ground fresh coffee beans and filled her pot with water. Then she let Magpie out and watched her make her morning circuit to the four corners of the yard, like a conscientious security guard might. She was imagining replacing the chain-link fence with a wooden one, or better yet, an adobe wall—one with an old gate and vines with an abundance of colorful flowers spilling over the top. It was just a little house, and it needed work. Maybe the owners, a couple in their late fifties who had long since abandoned this neighborhood for what they called “the Heights,” might be willing to sell it to her. Not that she had the money.

The thought of the word “money” propelled her toward her closet. She slid her fingers into the pockets of various cold weather coats and jackets that were pushed to the back, where she kept her cash. She should put it in the bank, she knew, but she had never in her life had a bank account. It simply felt better to have her money handy. Donny had kept cash all over the apartment, adding dollars here and there from his tips every night to one stash or the other, and she had carried on the tradition.

Margaret collected all of it, poured herself another big mug of coffee, and settled onto the futon couch in the living room to count up. She had $3,946 left, which could keep her—in the style she was accustomed to—for at least three more months.

But not if she bought welding equipment.

She sipped her coffee thoughtfully. Any normal person would look for a job immediately, but most normal people needed to feel secure, which was not something Margaret thought was possible in her own case. She’d had the rug pulled out from under her in too many big, important ways to believe in security. This gave her a kind of freedom that few people had, though she knew it was nothing to brag about.

She put her money back in its hiding place and went outside to stretch out in the hammock. The monkeys chattered like mad in the background, and Magpie paced the perimeter for the second time, while Margaret stared into the branches of the elm tree, imagining her self-portrait hanging there.

“I guess it can’t hurt to check it out, right Mag?” Margaret said. Magpie didn’t disagree, so after her breakfast of toast and coffee, Margaret took out the card Benito had given her and opened her Albuquerque Road Guide. She would present herself at Roadrunner Courier Service in person rather than call, a job-hunting strategy left over from her bartending days. She got dressed with slightly more care than usual, taking a crisp white blouse off a hangar and tucking it into her black jeans.

The office was on Louisiana just south of Central. Margaret was greatly amused by the way the streets were organized in Albuquerque. For example, there was a section between her Barelas home and her day’s destination known as the “presidents’ streets,” in which the north-south roads were named Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and so on, one street for each president, in chronological order. But the system petered out after Jackson, when it jumped to Truman and then disappeared completely, as if whoever had developed that street-naming strategy had grown bored with the concept or perhaps could not remember who came next after the founding fathers were laid to rest. The same thing applied to the state streets. They came in alphabetical order soon after the presidents, but quickly began to skip some states and totally ignore others. New York, for example, was miles away from the rest, in a different part of town not far from the river. On I-40, the exits jumped from Louisiana to Wyoming with no apology, and no New England states seemed to exist anywhere. It was all part of Albuquerque’s crazy charm, she thought.