Rust (37 page)

1998

I
T
ISN
’
T
until four years have gone by, four years of blistering heat and freezing cold, four years of wind that mercilessly kicks the sand around and rain that pounds the dirt road into a sea of mud with ruts as deep as waves, that Vincent thinks of capturing some of this intense seasonal drama in paint. It has taken him that long to feel the rhythm of this place which changes, but never changes. He asks Alice, when she goes on her annual visit to her granddaughter, Thomas’ sister Gracie and her three children in Phoenix for the month of July, to bring him some oil paints and some canvases. “Just a little starter kit,” he says, “something to play with.”

He expects nothing, but as soon as he uncaps the bottle of linseed oil, he begins to swoon. He examines the tubes of paint, sixteen of them all laid out in a row, and he feels the colors in his blood. He begins to take long walks. He sets up a makeshift easel and loses himself in what he’s finally doing again, after twenty-some years away from it.

It is Alice who suggests that they invest some of the money they live on, money that comes from the slaughter of the sheep each year, on some first-rate art supplies. “Sign Thomas’ name to them,” she says. She knows a fancy gallery near where her daughter lives in Phoenix that specializes in Native American art. She will take the paintings there herself, she says. She will dress in her long skirt and turquoise beads when she goes in for the first time.

Vincent feels neither shame nor pleasure as he agrees. They need the money, and he is used to scrabbling for it after a lifetime spent that way. He buys linen instead of canvas, buys pigments and mixes them himself. He has it all shipped to him from an art supply store in New York. When Gracie comes to pick up Alice, he has the paintings packed and ready to go.

He never leaves the home he has finally found.

Never wants to.

A
FTER
A
while, Margaret placed her feet up against the dashboard. It was a position she liked to be in in a car, but she almost never had the opportunity, because how often was she a passenger? In New York, she was one of the only people she knew who even had a car, and aside from Rico, not one person in New Mexico had ever opened the door of the Dodge Colt Vista and gotten in. Having her feet off the floor made her feel she was floating in a bubble, moving along on an air current, disconnected and free. She found it soothing.

Rico, on the other hand, was working hard, maneuvering the car inches one way and inches the other along the edges of the deep ruts. He was so focused that he didn’t even notice when Margaret stole a few private moments to study his profile.
El rey
, she thought, as she noticed the color of his lips, a shade somewhere between salmon and burnt sienna, and his long black ponytail, gathered into a rubber band. He looked so strong, his hands gripping the wheel as if it were trying to get away from him. He seemed permanent and big, bigger than just a man, though perhaps that had to do with the rock formations in the distance which made everything seem magnificent. She wanted to reach out, touch him, place her fingers on his forearm where the veins rose like rivers leading everywhere. She felt it in her hands, this desire to make contact, to feel his warmth like sunlight as she touched him, but she knew better.

“How far have we gone since we made the turn?” she asked.

Rico glanced down at the odometer. “7.6 miles.”

“Keep your eye peeled for the coffee can,” Margaret said. “It says here it’s 8.1 miles.”

“Good,” said Rico. “This is some fucking crazy road we’re on.”

“That it is,” Margaret responded.

It took eight minutes to travel the last half mile, and then they saw it: the bullet-ridden Chock full o’Nuts coffee can and the long driveway off to the left. Rico made the turn. An adobe building, low to the ground and almost invisible, sat in the distance, perhaps two hundred feet. The hard-packed driveway was actually in better shape than the road, and Rico drove to the door and shut off the car. The cloud of dust they had raised took its time to settle down.

“Made it,” Rico announced.

Neither made a move to get out of the car.

“There doesn’t seem to be a welcoming committee,” Margaret remarked, staring at the door, which had not opened. “Let me go knock.”

“I’ll come with you,” Rico said, as if he did not want her out in all this emptiness on her own. They both stepped out of the car, and Rico came around to her side. “Let’s pretend to be Jehovah’s Witnesses,” he said, and Margaret laughed. It rang out in the stunning silence like a rifle shot.

Together they approached the house, which showed no sign of life whatsoever. When they got closer, they saw a note, written on an old brown paper bag, tacked to the door. It read, “Please put boxes inside. Door is open. Money is on the table. Thank you.”

Margaret knocked anyway and called, “Hello, anybody here?”

There was no answer, so Rico turned the doorknob and the door swung inward. It was dark inside, and when Rico pushed the door wider, a patch of sunlight appeared on the dirt floor like a painting of a white triangle.

“Hello?” Margaret called again, but no one answered.

The house was just one tidy room with a wood stove in the middle, an old couch and armchair, and a wooden table with four mismatched chairs. An iron bed was pushed into the corner with a Navajo blanket in muted colors folded across the bottom. Kerosene lanterns were placed here and there, and gallon jars filled with beans and rice and dried herbs lined several homemade shelves along one wall. A five-gallon water bottle was upended on a ceramic base with a spigot, and six more water bottles were lined up against the wall behind it in the little kitchen area, which included a small stove and a sink basin with no faucets and a pail under the drain. Two framed portraits of children in Indian boarding school uniforms, decades old, hung on the wall, but nothing else. Narrow windows kept out the sun in the summer and the cold in the winter. “It’s a
National Geographic
moment,” Margaret whispered as she stepped inside, where it was ten degrees cooler.

On the table was a smooth round rock, and peeking from underneath it was a stack of twenty-dollar bills. Margaret crossed the room and picked them up. She counted it out: $220. “All here,” she said. It was time to unload the car, muscle the two big boxes into the house and back the car out of the driveway, but she was captivated by this strange place. “I didn’t know people still lived like this,” she said to Rico. “No electricity, no water. Wow.”

“Pretty basic,” Rico replied. “Propane stove, though. At least they can cook. And a good wood stove for heat.”

Margaret crossed to a window in the back and peered out. “Look, there’s an outhouse,” she said. “I’ve never seen a real one before.”

“You’ll have to make a visit,” Rico said, not adding that he himself had one in his backyard.

“Rico, could you let Magpie out and give her a drink?” asked Margaret. “I want to sit here for a minute. It’s so interesting.”

Rico nodded and stepped back into the burning heat. He opened the door for Magpie, filled her water bowl, and then unlocked the back of the Colt and surveyed the thirty feet from the end of the driveway to the door. He pulled out the hand truck and set it aside, realizing instantly that it would never work in the sand. It would take both of them to carry the heavy boxes inside. He was just about to ease the first one out of the car when he remembered Margaret’s sculpture resting on top of it. He slid it out and held it up. How odd it seemed, this nuts and bolts and rusty parts vestige of the industrialized world out here in the empty desert. He knew she wasn’t done with it, for he had seen her second box of parts tucked beneath his workbench. But already this female form, as she called it, had taken on a life. She seemed to be rising up, her arms held high. He lifted it closer and studied the joints where she had welded one piece to the next. It was amazing work for a beginner.

Not too far from the back of the car was a big rock, and Rico leaned the sculpture against it. The figure, with her arms lifted and her hair spiraling off her head at crazy angles, made him chuckle. Delightful, he thought—not a word he ever remembered using. But that’s what he felt looking at that sculpture. Delighted.

Margaret came out and joined him.

“This looks good,” Rico said. “Well done.”

“It’s not actually done,” Margaret said, “but thanks, Rico. For teaching me.”

He nodded. He felt good inside, special. Together, they studied Margaret’s work, and it felt to Rico as if the woman rising was blessing them, personally, right then and there, in the middle of nowhere on the Indian rez.

“Let’s drag these boxes in,” he said. “We’ll start with the long one. Can you get inside the car and push it out?”

“Okay,” Margaret said, moving to the driver’s door, getting in, and then leaning over the seat to give the long box a mighty shove as Rico pulled. When it had moved a few feet, Margaret came outside and around the car again.

“Do you think you can carry that end?” Rico asked. “It’s pretty fucking heavy.”

“Sure,” Margaret said, but when it dropped off the tailgate it weighed more than she expected, and before they got to the house she began to lose her grip.

“Just let it drop,” Rico said, and she did.

Rico swung his side up so the box rested on its end in the dirt. With it upright, the shipping label, which had been face down in the car, was suddenly visible. “Wow, look at that!” Margaret said, out loud but mostly to herself. “Pearl Paint.”

“What is it?”

“It’s an art supply store in New York. I went there all the time. It has a great selection. Five floors.” Her voice trailed off. “On Canal Street,” she added for no real reason. “How weird is that?”

Rico looked around, a grand sweep of the silent landscape. “Yeah,” he said. “Not the first thing you’d expect to deliver out here.”

While he was saying those words, as they hovered in the air between them, that was the precise moment when Margaret’s eyes moved to the rest of the words on the shipping label. Black letters and bar codes. Right above the second line which read “c/o Roadrunner Courier Service,” there was a name, and that was where her eyes stopped. She read it again, closed her eyes, opened them, and read it again. And each time it said the same thing: Vincent Donnery. She fell to her knees.

“Margaret,” Rico cried out, and his voice sounded very far away to her. “Margaret, what’s the matter.”

She looked up at him. Her sunglasses were black squares matching her hair, but her face was white, whiter than clouds, and when she spoke, her words were like an echo wafting through the canyon.

“It’s my father’s name, Rico,” she said. “Vincent Donnery.”

Rico laid the box down carefully in the dirt and came to her.

What happens in a moment that makes no sense is that everything blurs. Edges become liquid and pour like lava over the landscape until everything glows red with heat and fire. As Margaret sinks into the sand, her knees burn from the heat. Rico wraps his arms around her. He is on his knees too.

“We’ll find him,” he whispers.

And in the end, it’s easy. As easy as walking to the car and leaning on the horn, the sounds ripping through the landscape like a knife. It takes less than two minutes, just a few staggered heartbeats, until over the hill there comes a man, an old and broken man. He wears a straw hat, like Claude Monet. He is skin and bones. His face has a thousand rivers in it. His eyes are green.

Margaret stands perfectly still, as still as the rocks around her.

Rico waits, off to the side.

The man approaches. He seems dizzy. He whispers, “Regina?”

“I’m Margaret,” she responds in a voice as clear as water.

1998

A
LICE
HAS
taught him the parts she knows of the Blessing Way.

It is all he can do: pray each morning for the well-being of his daughter, wherever she is and whoever she has become.

It is the first thing he does every morning. Before he mixes paint. Before he waters the sheep. Before he joins Alice for tea.