Rust (34 page)

“Rico, am I bothering you being here?” she asked.

“No. I got some shit on my mind is all,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

“
Sí, claro
,” he said.

So she turned around and went back to work. It was easy for Margaret to give Rico the privacy he needed. She focused on her work, and Rico had to interrupt her to ask for her car keys so he could move her car into the work bay. He actually laughed when she turned to him because she had the look of a mad scientist, and there on the workbench, right before his eyes, the female from hell was shaping up.

Margaret reached into her pocket. “Want me to drive it in?”

“No, I got it,” Rico said. Then, with a nod in the direction of the workbench, he asked, “You got a name for it yet?”

“Yeah,” she said. “It’s called, ‘Unraveling the Wad Used to Get Through Life.’ ”

Rico laughed. “Jesus, Margaret,” he said.

Margaret threw him the car keys. He caught them and went outside for the Dodge. All day long, customers had come and gone from the shop. Some waited in the office; others disappeared and returned later. Their conversations were just a buzz in the background to Margaret, who felt as if her own blood was flowing out through the flames and the melting metal, and taking form before her eyes. She welded on each tiny piece with a breathless combination of precision and come-whatmay, making mistakes and plowing right on anyway. So what if the female figure’s ears were cockeyed and her right eyeball bulged out past the brow ridge? So what if the right shoulder and left were different lengths, and one hand seemed to be raised in a blessing while the other looked more like a rodeo rider waving to the crowd?

It was after four when she finally took a break, her shoulders and lower back aching. She poured herself some stale coffee and sat in Rico’s office chair. He still had two more cars to work on before quitting time, though hers was obviously done, parked outside again in the spot usually reserved for customer pickup. She was about half finished with her coffee when Rico came into the office and sat down on the desk.

“So what time are we leaving for Gallup in the morning?” he asked.

Margaret absorbed the question for a few seconds before she said, “We?”

“Yeah. I don’t want you taking that drive by yourself.”

“Why? Is something fucked up with my car?”

“No, it looks good. I changed the oil, checked the fluids and tires, gave it a good going-over. It’s not about the car.”

Margaret sat forward in her chair. “You mean you just want to go? Like, for the ride?” This was not the picture she had of her adventure into the wilderness north of Gallup, and she needed a moment to see if her imagination could accommodate such a vast change.

“Just this once,” Rico said.

“I’m really okay by myself,” Margaret said. “You know, Rico, I’m always by myself.”

“I know,” he said, “But just this once I want to go with you.”

So Margaret said, “Okay.”

L
AST
NIGHT
, when Rosalita had said, “She seems like a very nice little
gringa.
Maybe she could just move in with us,” for Rico everything froze in place. Even though it just lasted a second, it was long enough for the viewers of the scene, in this case his mother, daughters, and granddaughter too—though she was too little to understand anything except the sharp tone in her
abuela
’s voice—to acknowledge that something important had suddenly fallen apart and might never work again. If they had been watching a movie, somebody might move to the television to impatiently hit the “play” switch five or ten times. But there in the yard, with no possibility of that, there was the simple truth of their real life.

Maribel was the first to recover. “What’s going on?” she demanded.

Rico wiped his mouth with his paper napkin and pushed back from the table.

“Papi? Mommy? What’s going on?” Maribel repeated.

Rico might have expected to feel enraged in a moment like this, blindsided in the middle of a relaxed family dinner on the back patio by his own wife, the very woman he was trying so hard to understand. He felt speechless, though he fervently wanted to say the right words, the ones that would restore everything to what it had been just a few moments ago. He also felt defeated and sad, as if there were no room left for him at this table full of women. He wanted to give up, that was all. Just give up. Last night, Rosalita had accused him of being moody, and maybe she was right, because right now, as he sat with his paper napkin crumpled up in his hand, a wave of sadness so profound crashed over him that he felt his eyes fill with hot tears.

His daughters had never seen him cry before, except for a few tears he quickly brushed away at his father’s funeral. He sat there, wearing one of his best shirts. He’d had a great dinner. It seemed impossible to have it all end like this. He felt so sapped of strength that he couldn’t even get up and leave, so he just sat there as his daughters descended on Rosalita like a pack of wolves.

“Why are you making Papi cry?” Maribel yelled, while Lucy ran to his side and threw her arms around his neck. “Don’t listen to her, Papi,” she said. “She can be such a bitch; she really can,” and Ana turned to her mother and said, “Happy now?” before she got up from the table, reached down to lift Jessica out of her high chair, and stalked off toward the house. Just before she got there, she turned around and fired off one more round at Rosalita. “Everyone has a right to have friends, whether you like it or not!” she yelled, a rare event for Ana; and then she opened the kitchen door and went in, slamming it behind her with such gusto that the whole house seemed to shake.

“I didn’t mean it the way it sounded,” Rosalita said in a low voice.

“Do you ever listen to yourself? The way you talk to us?” Maribel yelled back.

“That’s enough,
mi hija
,” he said, very quietly. Then he added, to nobody in particular, “I’m going to walk your
abuelita
back to her
casita
now.” He got up and made his way around the table, where he helped Elena get to her feet. They started down the little path through the deadly nightshade to her house. Lucy and Maribel watched them go off toward the corner of the lot. Rosalita sat in her place with a blank look on her face as her daughters walked away from her, back to the house, and disappeared inside.

Rico did not want to talk once they got into Elena’s kitchen, which she understood very well. She made him a cup of tea, and together they sat in front of the television for two shows. Then she said she was ready to go to bed. “Rico,
mi hijo
, you sleep right here on the couch if you want to,” she said. “Give yourself a little time. Rosalita, too.”

“
Gracias, mi madre
,” he replied. “I think I will.”

Elena found a fluffy pillow, some sheets, and a blanket in the closet, and brought them to her son. Then she kissed him on the cheek and went to bed.

Rico stripped off his nice shirt and hung it from the back of a kitchen chair. He stretched out on the couch in the dark as if he needed to recover from a bad beating. Why he felt that way, he was not sure.

In the morning, he went into the house to get dressed for work. Rosalita was sitting up in bed when he let himself in the bedroom door and hung up his shirt in the closet.

“Rico,” she said. “I . . .”

“Not now, Rosalita,” he responded. “I have to go to work.”

She simply nodded once.

Rico left.

He could not remember a worse day in years, maybe in his whole life. He felt sick inside.

Sick of everything.

1994

W
HEN
HE
gets off the bus three days later, Vincent steps into the bright blue sky. It seems to be everywhere. He hasn’t seen the color blue so clearly since he was a young man, before all the trouble came to him. It feels like the perfect thing in which to disappear.

He buys himself a gallon of water and sets out.

He hitchhikes, and in the beginning he gets rides. He stretches out in the back of two different pickup trucks and watches the industrial sprawl of Gallup vanish, the garages and warehouses and cheap restaurant chains replaced by sand and rocks and silence.

He is deeply tired.

When he’s dropped off at the corner of one dirt road, there is nothing in sight anywhere, except desert rocks like cathedrals in the distance and birds circling overhead. “Watch out for rattlesnakes,” says the driver of the truck, a Navajo grandfather who wears a baseball cap with “army” written across the front. “Don’t let the bobcats see you.” The man takes off, and, after the sounds of his truck dim and then disappear, Vincent is left in the total silence with nothing but the blue sky for company.

He finds it soothing.

He takes out Thomas’ map and stares at it.

He still has about sixteen miles to go.

He starts walking, taking it slow because the sun is high in the sky, and there is nothing between him and it but air.

At times, he feels like giving up, just laying himself down by the side of the road and calling it the end of one long day. But he keeps on.

He reaches Alice Yazzie’s door.

He knocks.

An old Indian lady answers. She has no fear in her eyes.

“I have a message from Thomas,” he says, and he collapses.

W
HEN
M
ARGARET
had shown up in his shop, Rico was so tied up in knots that he could barely acknowledge her, which, he noticed, she seemed to take in stride once he assured her she wasn’t the cause of his bad mood. She simply went to work and left him alone. He focused on his work, too. It had always been a way to get his mind off things, a skill he had particularly perfected in the past four years. But today, even as he performed the routine garage tasks that comprised his Saturdays, he could not put what had happened last night completely out of his mind. Breaking down and crying like a baby in front of all his girls was not a proud moment for him.

What had bothered him about Rosalita’s snide remark, which, he acknowledged, was not as bad as it could have been, was that he had been trying hard to come to terms with what to do about his feelings for Margaret. What better way, he had thought, than simply to treat her as someone who had a role with the Garcias: a family friend. He had considered it for a long while before his suggestion that they invite her for dinner. He had somehow not considered the possibility that such a suggestion would be met with bitter sarcasm.

It bothered him because his attempt to turn Margaret into a family friend as a way to neutralize his strong attraction was, in his mind, a creative solution. He imagined his whole family, whether they knew it or not, helping him to stay put. Letting go of the privacy between him and Margaret was a sacrifice. So when he suggested dinner, he felt as if he was giving something important away, something he wanted for himself yet knew he had to share. But Rosalita had thrown her napkin onto the table and made a comment which felt like a blow to him, one that he was too weak and too stunned to return.

That moment had gone by so fast and hit so hard that he still felt floored by it. At the table his frustration—to his dismay—had turned to tears. He knew right then that no matter what solution he tried, he simply could not win. His creative compromise was rejected without discussion, and he felt both helpless and misunderstood. He accepted finally that he would have to choose, that he could not have it all.

When his daughters—all of them—had risen to his defense, it both comforted and appalled him. Because what kind of man cries at the dinner table and then stands by while three young girls fight his battle? All mixed up in that was the shock he felt at the hostility they displayed toward their mother. All these years, as Rosalita had drifted around in her black cloud of regret or whatever it was, Rico had worked doubly hard to keep the family united for the benefit of the girls. But when he saw them turn on her, it became instantly clear that they had not been fooled for a moment, and Rosalita’s distance, her impatience, her confusion, and her tension had affected them all, more than he knew or thought possible. So the moment of support from his daughters, which should have made him feel comforted, had just added to his sense of failure. He had not protected them. And they had turned on their mother, so he hadn’t protected her, either.