by Julie Mars
But there he was in her mind, Rico Garcia, like a slow motion trapeze artist keeping pace with her as she gently rocked from side to side. Perhaps she responded to the sadness she saw so clearly in his eyes, though it was not the kind of sadness that cried out for rescue. It was the kind that built up over time until it simply was. She had it herself and she knew it, but green eyes were different than brown eyes. They suggested the hope that associates itself with springtime, the hint of growth and possible abundance. Brown eyes had seen too much. They appeared on the older souls, Margaret thought, the ones who were compelled for good reason to batten down the hatches from the first moment they arrived in life.
Margaret opened her eyes and glanced down at Magpie, in whose mud-brown eyes she had been lost many times. “You want to try to get in the hammock, Mag?” she asked, knowing that it was probably not an easy thing for a dog to accomplish. But Magpie declined. She rolled over on her back, her four legs pointing skyward and her long tongue hanging out the corner of her mouth until it almost touched the ground next to her head. Margaret shifted onto her stomach and reached down to pat the silver fur on her dog’s belly. “We might have a new friend,” she said. “We’ll have to see.”
1974
WHEN THE night is very dark and the silence is as penetrating as it ever gets, he crosses his hands over his heart and thinks of the woman he loves. This brings a pain so searing that only his intense need for privacy prevents him from moaning, thrashing, beating his head into the concrete wall.
She had been sitting next to him on a bus, her overnight bag—with tiny round mirrors embroidered into it—wedged into the tight space between them. It had been a long ride, and she was sleeping, her head pressed into his shoulder and her hair, which smelled of lavender, stuck along the length of his upper arm in the sweat. He had been nervous. Wired. His eyes, hidden by dark glasses, moved from one side of the winding road to the other.
One more hour, and it would be done, he thought.
One more hour.
But before the hour passed, the bus had stopped. Men in uniforms got on. They walked straight down the aisle and yanked him to his feet. He had seen them coming, and he slid the bag onto the floor, tried to kick it under the seat.
She had woken up then, sat up the way he had seen her sit up a thousand times, fully alert, and he had heard her catch her breath.
They were pushed down the aisle of the bus. Pushed off it.
All the people riding the bus had looked down or looked away as they were shoved past.
Behind them, one of the officers bent down low to retrieve the bag from the floor. He carried it in front of him, as if it smelled bad.
She had reached for his arm. Her fingernails dug in, drawing blood.
She screamed his name as they were placed in two separate police vans.
He had tried to fight his way to her, but he had been knocked down to the dirt, threatened with a gun.
He has not seen her again.
He presses his hands into his heart and tries not to move.
ON SUNDAY, Margaret woke up moody. After she had taken her morning shower, for example, she threw her towel to the floor and studied her naked body in the mirror on the back of the bathroom door. This was a sure sign of a coming storm. Whenever she experienced the urge to stand outside herself and technically review her body, which in these moments she tended to equate with her cage, her jail cell, or her hostage closet, she was already in trouble. It meant the restlessness, the discontent, was upon her, and she was trapped in it. Over the years, she had experimented with all the usual ways out—alcohol, exercise, drugs, sex, furious painting sessions, various shrinks, even a short-lived dip into transcendental meditation, but nothing worked. Often she would get itchy and begin to scratch herself in search of a little relief, a quasi-solution which had left unsightly scars on her arms, shoulders, and upper back. When she’d worked at the Stereophonic Lounge, she would become impatient and snap at bar patrons, but fortunately it was a place where the regulars protected her at these moments—loudly warning each other and even the newcomers to tread lightly when ordering drinks because the bartender was seriously on the rag. Sometimes she intentionally broke something, though over the years she had learned to make it something unimportant or at least replaceable.
The one thing that did help—if she could find her way there—was to connect this foul internal weather in some soulful way to her parents, who, she reasoned, must have felt something similar when they took off for India. Surely, nothing else but this, nothing less than this, could have made them get on the train-to-the-plane in New York and disappear forever. The only time she could forgive them, or even understand, was when this wild restlessness rushed over her. In those moments, if she could keep her vision clear and find something brand new to do, the tornado moved on with minimal wreckage.
She pulled up her black jeans, put on a sports bra, and slipped her arms into a baggy V-neck T-shirt. As she stepped into the kitchen, she happened to glance up through the window, where, in the distance, the tops of the five dormant volcanoes on the West Mesa quietly waited to resuscitate themselves and show the land developers, particularly those intent on putting a highway through the sacred petroglyphs, exactly who was boss. “Magpie, let’s go somewhere,” she called, and within two minutes they were both in the car backing out of the driveway. She wound her way north to Central and then headed west, racing up the Seven Mile Hill, past crumbling motels with big shiny trucks with license plates from Chihuahua, Mexico, angle-parked in front of every door. It was barely seven in the morning, and no one was stirring. Even the gas stations and mini-marts were empty. She noticed a street sign for Paseo des Volcanes and swung a hard right into what appeared to be a lunarscape. One road, the one that she was on, progressed, straight as an arrow, into the big nothing. It was completely still. Even the tumbleweeds along the barbed wire fences on either side of the road had stopped tumbling.
After a few miles, a dirt road angled off to the right toward the volcanoes, and Margaret took it. It occurred to her, as she slowed down to negotiate the ruts, that this was her very first experience of a dirt road. It seemed impossible, but there it was. She was raised in the New York City backwoods, where every square inch was paved, if not occupied by a fifty-story building. It had probably been two centuries since there was any loose dirt in the city, aside from the parks, whose footpaths were paved, too. The exact opposite of where she now found herself, she thought. Funny, but she didn’t miss the city one bit. She had always assumed it was woven into her identity, inseparable from who she was. But here in the desert, it seemed like a mirage that she had suddenly stepped out of. She parked not far from the base of the biggest volcano of them all, facing east toward the Sandia Mountains that rose up like a natural barrier between her and her past, and collected her backpack from the floor of the car. It contained a bound sketchbook, a bottle of black India ink, a Rapidograph pen, and two bottles of spring water. As she climbed out of the car, Magpie scrambled into the front seat and jumped out the driver’s door a second after Margaret. There was a large sign listing all the rules but they ignored it, particularly the leash law which seemed absurd, given all the empty space.
They had never climbed a dormant volcano before—naturally—and Margaret found it difficult to keep her footing. Broken bits of lava, centuries old, shifted, her feet slipped, and before too long she was ascending the steeper parts with one hand and sometimes two on the ground before her for balance. Meanwhile, Magpie, a city dog after all, stuck her nose under every rock, which evoked images of sand-colored scorpions and angry tarantulas on tall hairy legs, ready to strike, and Margaret had to turn her face away so as not to be neurotically overprotective. Somehow, huffing and puffing, they made their way to the top, which actually wasn’t very far, though once they got there it seemed that the West Mesa, which stretched in all directions before it met the walls of the city to the north and east, was part of another, lesser world. She found a rock with a good b
ackrest, facing east, and settled down to do some serious looking. One thing Margaret knew about herself was that her eyes went everywhere. Where other people saw a simple edge, she saw a series of shadows laid out, one more intense than the other, and a drop-off that typically pitted two radically different colors against each other. Where other people saw a tree, bare in winter, and dismissed it as such, she saw a riot of color—purples, greys, blacks, dark blues—shimmering against a sky that looked as if it had been carved in bas-relief out of library paste; where others saw the Hudson River and perhaps categorized it as a grey stripe separating Manhattan from New Jersey, she saw a shifting orgy of iridescence which could only be captured one nanosecond at a time and never fully. Her natural impulse was to hold her breath in an effort to stop everything so she could look longer and see more. “Take a breath, me darlin’,” Donny had insisted over and over again when she was a small child. “You’ll pass out of the picture if you don’t.” But Margaret held out. She tried to make time stop. But it never did. By the time she was a teenager, she gave up trying.
She started with a slow 180-degree scan, north to south and back again, just to allow the landscape to imprint itself in broad strokes of color first: the light beige sands of the mesa; the darker tan of the city of Albuquerque, low to the ground and so infused with the palette of the desert that it almost disappeared; the greenbelt along the river; the rising mountains, slate-colored in this moment; the sky, a psychedelic shade of sea-blue. Above, a few hawks rode air currents across her visual field, and a few black crows squawked from the top of weathered fence posts; while a cow, here and there, munched anemic desert grasses.
Where was she? She closed her eyes and watched the complementary colors of all she’d seen appear on the screens inside her eyelids. It was a phenomenon that could keep her occupied for hours: open her eyes, see the green stripe of the river; close them, it turned red. Open her eyes and stare into the blue sky; close them, it turned orange. She didn’t know why, or care. She took it as a reminder that all things change constantly, depending on a million things, such as perspective, light, time, water, wind, angle, and the ability to notice in the first place. Again, she stared intensely into the sky and then closed her eyes to pleasantly drift in a sea of orange, which carried her along for a while, backward in time, and then delivered her to a memory.
Soon after her parents had dropped her off with her grandfather, she and Donny had had their first incident. Donny had long ago painted one wall of his tiny kitchen a deep shade of burgundy in an effort to tone down the morning brightness, which got on his nerves after a long night in the Bit O’ Blarney bar. He also had a broom with an orange handle which he usually left propped up against it. Margaret had found both shock and comfort in the collision of those two colors—the deep red and the fluorescent orange. She would sit at the kitchen table eating her morning cornflakes and watch them vibrate.
One day when she came home from kindergarten with Donny, who was a little short of breath from climbing the four flights to their apartment, he had unlocked the door and pushed it open, stepping back so she could enter first. Immediately, her eyes moved to the burgundy wall, but the broom was gone, and all she saw was the wide expanse of deep red, with no hope in it. She collapsed to the floor and began to sob.
“Margaret, honey, what is it?” Donny had asked, dropping to his knees beside her, so stunned he didn’t even think for a moment to collect her into his arms. “Tell Grampy what’s wrong, Margaret? Do you hurt? Tell Grampy where you hurt.”
But Margaret couldn’t utter a sound, couldn’t even raise her eyes from the linoleum floor, with its specks of blue and green and white. Waves of grief, one after the other, slammed her down and kept her there. Donny gathered her up. He sat back on the floor, holding her so tightly she finally felt safe enough to whisper, amid great splashing tears, “What happened to the broom, Grampy?” And he had held her even tighter and roared with laughter, surprising her since she felt so much in the grip of tragedy.
“Grampy swept the floor, that’s all, my darlin’,” he said. “We still have the broom,” and he got up, lifting her with him, and closed the door to the building hallway, and there behind it was the broom. “We can put it wherever you want it,” he whispered into her hair, which was damp now, as if all the exertion of crying had caused her to break into a serious sweat. “That broom is here to stay.”
“Put it where it goes,” she had sobbed, her voice shaking and her arms wrapped around her grandfather’s neck, as if he were a rock in a great sea of misery and she had to hold on for dear life.
He grabbed the broom. “Tell me where you want me to put it, honey,” he said, and she had vaguely pointed and he placed it against the wall. He had a look on his face that told Margaret, even at that young age, that he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, and she had climbed down and adjusted it; and then he had scooped her up again and carried her to the living room, which he was in the process of converting to her bedroom, and sat with her in his lap for a long, long time.
That moment between them had become a bit of a landmark, so tender that it took years for them to even make a joke about it. Margaret remembered the first joke, too. Donny had held up the broom—which by that time had lost many of its bristles—and the ones that were left stuck out at every possible angle, so using it for its original purpose was a waste of time. “Margaret, me girl, I’m afraid to bring it up, but I think we’re in desperate need of a new broom,” he had said, and she had glanced up from her bed, where she was lying on her stomach reading a school book, and growled, “That broom’s not going anywhere”; there was silence for a few beats and then they both began to laugh, loud and long, and Donny said, in his musical Irish brogue, “. . . unless you’re riding on it, me girl.” Still, he never threw it out. In fact, Margaret still had it in her storage unit in Queens. They even had a private reference for it called “a case of the orange broom.” Whenever one of them would feel unusually, unreasonably, or inexplicably sad, he or she would admit to having a case of the orange broom, and the other would be extra kind until it passed over.
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.
NOW 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.
