Rust (4 page)

Rico had stood in the doorway, not even taking a step into the kitchen. He thought he might cry, but no tears came. And he knew he wouldn’t pound the walls and scare his mother.

“Come in,
siéntate
,” she said. “Sit with me for a while.”

Rico dropped into the chair next to her, and she reached over and placed her hand on his forearm. That’s when the tears rushed in, like a violent storm. He had collapsed over his folded arms, wedging his mother’s fingers in, and while he sobbed and sobbed, mostly silently, he felt the warmth of her touch like an electrical current, pulsing into him in a steady way that after a long while calmed him down.

“Wait a little while,” she finally said. “Women go through things. Just wait a little while and see what happens.”

That was three years ago. Nothing had happened since. Until today.

Rico reached for the ignition key and turned it. He checked his rearview mirror. He could still see the corner of Margaret’s house, her mailbox, and one of those big trees in her yard, as he pulled out into the street.

1974

N
OTHING
. T
HAT
’
S
what the days and nights are filled with. A thick, airless nothing that makes him afraid to move too much. An idea has developed in his mind: to preserve his sanity, if such a thing is even possible, he needs to stay completely still, his back pressed hard into the grey concrete wall. So hard that he might leave a permanent imprint in the shape of his upper body.

He draws his knees up, folds his arms on top of them, and rests his head there, where he can stare down into the dirt. After a while, it begins to swim before his eyes. He watches intently.

Molecules of brown dirt, helpless and trapped.

Everything helpless and everything trapped.

T
HE
NEXT
morning, Margaret and Magpie took a long walk by the river, and they saw their first coyote. They had gotten an early start, maybe six-thirty, plenty of time to get in three brisk miles and still have an hour, before the sun got too hot, for Margaret to collect sticks and stones and assemble them into a spontaneous sculpture on the riverbank, a pastime she had fallen into on their very first walk in the
bosque
. Magpie tended to find a shady spot under some giant cottonwood and sprawl as Margaret worked. Despite her size and her ferocious look, Magpie was a gentle dog—Buddha Dog, Margaret sometimes called her—and perhaps a little lazy. If there was ever an opportunity to stretch out and snooze, she took it. So when Margaret happened to glance in her direction and saw her sitting up, alert, her ears moving like radar to tune into some sound in the brush, she took note.

The
bosque
all along the river was designated as open space, forever wild, by the state of New Mexico. Margaret, who grew up in the city parks of New York, was astonished that the stretch of it by her little house was often empty in the early morning, no joggers swerving around her, no yuppies pushing high-tech strollers, no bums sleeping it off. She unhooked Magpie’s leash and they strolled along feeling like people may have felt when the world was less crowded and therefore less violent. But she had her years of wariness behind her, and she stopped what she was doing and followed Magpie’s gaze, reaching into her pocket for her keys, lacing them through her fingers like a weapon which she would use if it came to that.

But instead of a man, bent on causing trouble, she saw the coyote, or rather its head barely visible through the leaves and the splashing sunshine. Come out, let me see you, she thought, though she didn’t say a word. Instinctively, she knew that to try to make a friend of a coyote was wrong. Coyotes needed their distance from all humans. To learn to trust even one was a mistake. But she dropped to the ground, just sat there, her gaze focused just beyond the coyote so even eye contact was not an issue. Magpie remained alert, and Margaret noticed that there in that little triangle—her dog, herself, and a wild creature—she felt happier than she had in years, so alive in this moment, so sure that she was exactly where she needed to be, doing just the right thing.

The coyote moved forward into a small open space, gave them one more disinterested look, and took off downriver at a fast trot. Magpie’s head swiveled to follow, and after a few seconds, she dropped back down to the earth and sighed, as if the whole interlude had been a distraction from her nap and she was glad that it was over. Margaret closed her eyes and breathed it in, that final image of the scrawny untamed yellow dog, the way he fit into this landscape, matched it in color and even vibration so closely that he simply vanished. She felt a little fire had been lit in her heart, and it was warming her blood.

She added a long dry stick, twisted and gray, and a few black seedpods she didn’t recognize to her sculpture, and wrapped part of it in reeds from the river until it felt finished. Then she and Magpie walked home before the traffic heading over the bridge toward Avenida César Chávez had even revved up. When she got in, Margaret made a pot of strong coffee, and while it was brewing she was suddenly seized with a desire to hang up the paintings she had shipped from New York. The wooden crate, which had arrived three days ago, left in the yard while she had been at Coronado Wrecking, still remained in the same place—too bulky and heavy to move inside by herself. She went outside and dug through the tools she had stashed under the front seat of her Dodge, finally wrapping her fingers around the crowbar she had packed for just this purpose. She pried the lid off the crate and carried the paintings inside, one by one. Having no success at driving a nail into the adobe, she leaned them up against the walls in the places where they would later hang. She sat in the middle of the living room floor and looked around the perimeter of the room. So much of her life was suggested in the colors and textures, the images and backgrounds. She could get very lost in them.

On impulse, Margaret picked up the phone and dialed Nicolas Brandao, her first painting teacher at the School of Visual Arts, where she had studied for seven years. He’d been a part-timer then, barely out of art school himself, though now he was a full professor—and respected in the art world of New York too, which was no easy thing. His machine picked up on the second ring.

“Nick? It’s Margaret Shaw. I’m actually calling from—”

“Margaret, hello.” His voice sounded sleepy, though it was close to eleven in New York. “Calling from where?”

“New Mexico. Albuquerque. I moved here.”

“Really.” It sounded like a statement, not a question or a verification of fact.

“Really.” A few seconds of silence passed, fairly comfortably.

“When? What brought this on?”

“A couple weeks ago. And I don’t know. It was an impulse.”

“Shit, I wish you’d called me before you left. I would’ve tried to talk you out of it.”

“I know. But that didn’t happen.”

They both laughed, and Nick said, “Just one more of the many things that didn’t happen between us.” Margaret heard him inhale sharply and knew he had just lit a cigarette. She could picture him settled into his old leather reclining chair, positioned so he could see a small section of the Manhattan Bridge and a patch of the East River through the buildings outside his window. “So how’s it going?”

“Good. Different. I feel inspired. I want to learn to weld.”

“And your painting?”

“Back burner for the moment, I think.”

“Margaret . . .”

“Don’t start, Nick.”

“You have so much talent. When are you going to give yourself a chance?”

“That’s what I’m doing in New Mexico. Taking my chances. I’m okay, Nick. Be happy for me.”

“Well . . . if I must.” He took another long, audible drag on his cigarette.

They had never slept together, not once in the nineteen years since they first met. Both had wanted to, but never at the same time. They were circling close in the early days, but then Donny died, and Margaret had gone into a lengthy tailspin that seriously scared Nick. Just as she was recovering, Nick fell in love and got married, a mistake it took him nine years to undo. Margaret had refused all advances during that time, a matter of principle. Meanwhile, his art star had begun to ascend, along with his ego, and Margaret, with her blue collar mistrust of sudden success, found him pretentious and phony. By the time he snapped back to reality, she was involved with a saxophone player. And so it went.

Once, long ago, he had introduced her to a gallery owner, a woman famous for jump-starting art careers. This woman had encouraged her, talked seriously with her for a whole hour, but ultimately said no, which crushed Margaret. It made no difference when Nick reprimanded her. “You know how many galleries rejected me before I got a show. Thirty-one! In three cities! So stop acting like you’re the only artist who ever got knocked down. Get up.”

But Margaret couldn’t.

It had been hard labor for her to put herself forward, collect her slides, and present herself at a gallery so revered by painters she barely felt she had the right to enter it. The owner, a woman in her late forties, wore a Dutch boy haircut and a pair of delicate Italian boots that obviously cost more than Margaret made in a whole month of full-time bartending. She had led Margaret into her office, where a projector was permanently set up. An assistant had come in to pour two glasses of sparkling water and drop Margaret’s slides into the tray. The gallery owner dimmed the lights using a switch built into her desktop. Margaret felt actual physical pain, a deep ache shaped like doubt, press into her throat as the first slide came up.

“Very Brice Marden,” said the woman. But all Margaret saw projected on the wall was her breath and blood.

“I have my influences, like any painter,” Margaret replied, her fingers closing into little fists in her lap.

“I see that,” said the gallery owner as she clicked through three more slides. “These are somewhat derivative, Margaret.” She stopped to sip her water. “Are they early work?”

Margaret forced herself to remain calm. She held her ground, knowing that art was all she had, and she could not let this businesswoman, not an artist herself after all, take it, or make it shrink and fade. But when she’d left the gallery, she’d had to lean against a nearby building for balance. The streets felt mushy and the faces of the trendy passersby were mocking. All she had to hold onto was the handle of her black leather portfolio, an expensive gift from Nick. Margaret was a person who needed—desperately—a yes, not a no. Her whole life was a wall of no: no mother, no father, no brothers, no sisters, no husband, no children, no Donny, no money to speak of, no sense of direction, no degree, no surprises, no sense of belonging, no belief in herself, no idea of the point, no power, no air in her lungs. And now, no art show, either.

It was too much for her, that’s all. And, given her reaction to that very polite rejection, she had to add fragile and weak to the rest of her list of problems, and that slim chance of a yes somewhere in the future wasn’t worth it. Yet she stayed in touch with Nick, and he stayed in touch with her, for years—just in case. Just in case so many things.

They talked for twenty minutes, Margaret sprawled on her couch with her leg flung over the back and the sun streaming in, before she was distracted by a knock on the door. She looked out the kitchen window, and there was Rico.

O
N
THE
way home from the incident at Margaret’s the night before, Rico had stopped at Modelo’s Take Out on Second Street and bought a whole bagful of tamales. He enjoyed being the provider of these little treats that made everyone happy and kept Rosalita out of the kitchen after a long day on her feet at Albuquerque High, where she worked in food prep in the school cafeteria. The aroma of green chile filled the cab of his truck with a certain type of security. It kept his mind off the trouble he felt brewing inside him, despite his efforts to make sense of it all and thereby make it disappear.

The silver lace and the scarlet trumpet vines on the chain-link fences along Riverside Drive had filled out, but not yet reached the point of spilling over. Rico liked that moment, the last days before the long spurt of chaotic growth inspired by the summer monsoons turned everything ragged at the edges. He slowed down and waved as his neighbor’s son, Wilfredo, a lively boy of eleven who reminded Rico of himself at that age, trotted by on the old nag that had lived on this block just one year less than Rico. Wilfredo rode that horse bareback along the river every evening, winter or summer. He was a boy with a big imagination who probably thought Negrita was a black stallion instead of a prime candidate for the glue factory.