Rust (8 page)

Margaret opened her eyes again. After Donny had died, in the absence of anyone to be especially kind to her, the sadness that came with a case of the orange broom had transformed itself to rage and often self-destruction. But sitting here, on the top of a volcano, knowing that it had once, in a fit of pique, spewed molten lava all across the countryside but hadn’t done it lately, she felt happy. She opened her backpack and took out a bottle of water, which she poured into her cupped hands for Magpie to drink from.

And then she started to draw.

N
OW
THAT
he knew for sure that there was a next step with Margaret, that it would be taken at precisely eight-thirty the following morning, Rico thought about her less. All in all, he was a man who preferred reality to fantasy, who only reverted to fantasy if there was no chance of reality anywhere in sight. When he did indulge in fantasy, he tended to be uncomfortable and was soon looking for a way out. For Rico, the tension between what he had—which he knew was a lot—and what he might be drawn into in his imagination, was formidable and worth avoiding. He didn’t want to entertain the notion that there was an unlived life to slip into, and he knew instinctively that if he visited it too often the color might drain out of his real one, a possibility that he simply couldn’t risk.

So on Sunday he did what he always did on Sunday: he got up early and took Elena to eight o’clock mass at the Holy Family Church on Atrisco Boulevard. He sat in the pew with her and performed all the requisite motions—standing, sitting, kneeling over and over again—but he was not a believer, at least not in the way she was. His mother found great comfort in the Catholic Church. She often had a rosary wound through her fingers, and she lit candles every week, even though she could barely see them and Rico had to guide her hand in the right direction. She knew all the responses, of course, and beat her heart with great vigor during what was still called in his youth the “mea culpa.” He studied her out of the corner of his eye during this part, wondering why she felt so guilty about what he knew, and she knew, she had no control over. And during the Sign of Peace, she always hugged him tightly and said,
“Te quiero, mi hijo, te quiero
,” to which he replied, “
Te quiero también, Elena, mi madre
.” It was true. He did love her rather fiercely.

It was on the drive home from church that she would usually speak quietly for a few minutes about Fernando, his older brother who had been dead for twenty-six years—more than half of Rico’s life. Rico remembered him well, and his feelings were mixed, to say the least. Perhaps it was the times, which were hard for a
cholo
born too greedy and too macho for his own good. Perhaps it was simply an accident of personality or some unavoidable genetic glitch that made Fernando turn out the way he did, which was bad—more than bad—through and through. From an early age, Rico had learned to avoid him whenever possible, to stay hidden or fuse himself to his mother or father. Even so, he took more than his share of beatings, heard more vitriol than anyone needs to, and lived his early life with only one clear goal: to be the opposite of Fernando. His daily plan included not being near his brother, not being associated with him in any way, not getting dragged into anything he hadn’t chosen for himself, not causing any heartbreak for his parents. He was seventeen when Fernando died at twenty-two, stabbed to death in the state lockup in Santa Fe, where he was doing his second bid, this one for aggravated assault and armed robbery.

When his parents sat him down and gave him the news, Rico’s first reaction was overwhelming relief, though he never admitted that to anyone out loud. How could he explain that the relief he felt was for Fernando as much as for himself or anyone else. He knew his brother could never last the way he was—it could only get worse, no matter how much praying his mother did on her knees up at the old church in the badlands of Chimayo. Fernando used to mock Elena when she made her annual pilgrimage to that little chapel, which was famous all around the world for the miracles that somebody somewhere insisted had happened there.

“Score me some smack while you’re at it,” Fernando would taunt. “You’re heading to the heroin capital of New Mexico. More overdoses there than anywhere else in the whole state, right out the front door of that church whose holy red dirt you waste your time believing in.”

“I’m going to pray for you, Fernando,” Elena would respond, calmly. “I’m going to pray you find your way.”

“I know my way already. My way is money. My way is fucking as many women as I can and getting high. My way is the party way,” he would say, and to Rico it sounded as if he wanted to drive her into the corner of the room with his words and pound her with his strange fury. He had never actually hit her, never even threatened to, though the same could not be said about Fernando and his father, who went at it until they were both bloody. Teeth were loosened and noses were broken during their fights. But Manuel could not control his son, and after a while, he accepted that and politely asked him to move out and never come home again, and Fernando obliged. No one in the family had seen him for over two years when he died. They brought the body back to Albuquerque and had a funeral service with exactly three people in attendance. They buried him in a hastily purchased family plot in a cemetery near the Big-I, where I-40, going east and west, and I-25, going north and south, intersect. Elena had kept fresh flowers on his grave until she lost her vision and could no longer drive a car to get there.

So whenever she and Rico would be cruising down Bridge Boulevard on the way home from church on Sunday, and she would say, seemingly out of nowhere, “He was a nice little boy, Fernando, smart and cute. He changed overnight when he was around eleven or twelve. I don’t know what happened to him,” Rico would pretend he’d never heard it all before. He had no memories of his brother as a nice boy, though he had distinct memories of thanking God, whether there was one or not, each and every time Rosalita gave birth to a girl. Girls could be trouble and they could cause their share of pain, but very few could match the heartache imposed by a genuine bad boy—a bad son or brother.

Elena would mull over the points along the path to Fernando’s demise: the dangerous crowd he found or that found him, the drugs, the fighting, dropping out of Rio Grande High—which was something Rico had in common with his brother—the first prison sentence for dealing crystal meth. When she finished her litany, tears glistening in her eyes over the fact that her son had died at the hands of a man who was much worse than even he was, Rico always said the same thing, though he honestly didn’t think his mother found comfort in it or even remembered it, week to week. He said, “Elena,
mi madre
, I think it’s better to get killed than it is to kill someone, and we know he was heading in that direction. We know he would’ve got there, and this way he was saved from that.”

He meant it, too. Every time he saw the nightly news, which often featured a camera in the local courthouse recording inmate after inmate stepping up to the podium in his orange jumpsuit to be charged, Rico couldn’t help but see his brother’s face superimposed on each one; and when he heard their list of crimes, he felt sick inside, sick enough to switch the channel and say, again, that if that shit passed for news, they were really scraping the bottom of the barrel.

It was inevitable that his spirits were sinking, or had already sunk completely, as they pulled back into the driveway after church—as if church itself was a stick Elena used to pry open the lid they all tried to keep jammed down over Fernando’s memory; and once his ghost got out, it took a while for it to evaporate again. Rico would walk his mother to her
casita
, promise to come back later to pick her up for a big homemade supper, and then busy himself around his property, no matter how hard he had to look to find something constructive to do. His compound was the best kept place in the whole South Valley, he thought, perhaps a bit cynically. Who else repainted the metal on the casement windows every year? Who else had upgraded from an entry gate that just got dragged along to one that slid on compact little wheels? Who else could say they hand-built not one but two buildings from the ground up, collecting the adobe by the shovelful?

Rico opened the door to his own house, which was still quiet, though Jessica and Lucy were already up and dressed. “
Buenas dias, Papi
,” Lucy called from the kitchen. “How was church?”

“The same as it always is,” he replied. “A job.”

Lucy laughed. “If
Abuelita
knew how you feel, she wouldn’t make you go.”

“Let’s make sure she never knows then,” he said, opening the door to his bedroom and tiptoeing in to strip off his church outfit and put on his work clothes. Rosalita was sprawled out on the bed, as if she automatically doubled her space the minute he got up. She was a heavy sleeper, and he took a few seconds to watch her. She had on a short-sleeved nightgown with tiny flowers all over it, and her hair, which she kept long, looked like a black cloud on the pillow. She was just thirty-nine years old and had already put in twenty-three years with him, most of them good. They had raised three daughters, facing all the problems of parenthood together as a united front, and the girls were proof that they did a passable job. But now he felt he hardly knew her. She had become a woman who would fling her legs and arms wide when she was alone in a bed, no longer a wife who wrapped herself around her man and couldn’t sleep unless he did. She rarely talked to him anymore about anything important, went along as if it were perfectly normal never to mention such things as no sex for four years, or a mother-in-law who had needs Rosalita far too often had to handle alone. It was eerie for Rico, and came with a sense of unacknowledged danger, as if her personal tectonic plates were shifting way below the surface and a tidal wave was not only inevitable but on its way.

He had not told her about the welding lessons with Margaret. Perhaps that was slightly deceitful. He didn’t know. But she had become so cut off from him, so mysteriously private and locked into herself, that it seemed unnecessary—even pathetic—to go out of his way to share something new in his life with her. He felt, and it seemed true to him even when he thought about it at length, that she didn’t care what he did as long he paid the bills and showed up at the dinner table every night like a husband and father should.

Carefully, he hung up his dress shirt and blue jeans, creased along the legs from Rosalita’s iron, and put on an old brown T-shirt and a pair of cut-off sweat pants. As he turned back around, he saw that Rosalita’s eyes were half-open in a dreamy way, and she was watching him or at least looking in his direction. It stopped him, that look, made him consider climbing back into bed with her. But then, without even a word, she shifted her position, rolled onto her back, and just stared straight up at the ceiling.

Rico left the room, weighted down by the broken Fernando-record he heard from Elena every week, and Rosalita’s whatever-it-was-that-was-eating-away-at-her, and a day ahead of him with nothing beyond yard work. But, he reminded himself as he pushed through the back door, there was always tomorrow.

At eight-thirty.

1974

A
ND
HE
has a little girl.

A little girl, far away, and he might never see her again.

It is unbearable to think of her, back at home in the big city, perhaps looking out the window from a fourth floor apartment. Waiting.

His throat constricts, closes off, and he cannot say her name, not even whisper it into the thin mat he sleeps on, face down. When he thinks of her, sweat breaks out along his hairline. He cannot breathe.

A wife, and a little girl.

Gone.

Nothing left but time.

W
HEN
R
ICO
arrived at Garcia Automotive at five to eight in the morning and hoisted up the garage doors—making it official that he was open for business and glad of it—in his mind he had already laid out his lesson plan, if it could be called that, for his first student. He had an idea of what Margaret hoped to accomplish, at least in the beginning, based on the rusty parts she had so carefully situated on the concrete pad in her yard. The shapes she seemed so obsessed with made no sense to him, but he hadn’t paid any attention whatsoever to the whims of modern art, or any other art for that matter; and, besides, he didn’t need to know the why, just the how, and in that department, he was more than competent.