Rust

by Julie Mars

  Rico hoisted the low rider up on his hydraulic lift and pointed out areas he had already welded. He did quite a business with the low rider subset, diehard motorheads who fixated on every detail. He did bodywork, too. In fact, he said, he liked aluminum body TIG welding more than anything else because aluminum felt so pliant under his fingers. For small art projects, Margaret would probably braze and solder most often, which was something she could do on that cement pad in her yard, he added, but big welding jobs were out. Too many sparks. Too many things to catch on fire—including her.

  By the time they knocked off at noon, Margaret was quite overwhelmed. “I never knew it was so complicated,” she commented as she replaced a pair of protective goggles on a wall hook. “Or so dangerous, either. What am I getting myself into here?” For a long time in her art life, she had wanted to expand past the two dimensions of painting into three, to encourage her creativity to make more demands on her and take up more space, all the space it wanted. But she hadn’t really known what she was inviting. Now that the three-dimensional urge had taken hold of her, she couldn’t shake it, and didn’t want to. But today she felt a little daunted.

  Rico, on the other hand, had felt like he was blushing half the morning because no sooner would he make some kind of general explanation about welding than he’d hear an alternate meaning, some undercurrent, in his own words. His every reference to fire, to heat, to melting together seamlessly, it was all too close for comfort to the language of sex. When he was showing her the basics of electric arc welding, and he had to explain that space was necessary between the hot electrode and the metal that was waiting for it, that this space was essential for the electricity to arc in, he felt the inches between them fill with a current hot enough to melt metal—and he almost forgot to mention the part about temperature control being the single most important thing in welding. The odd thing was that, he had totally removed from his mind, as if with a cutting torch, the possibility of sex with her. But doing that had paradoxically made everything but her seem sexy, and now he felt like a horny teenager who couldn’t even look at one of those yucca plants in his own backyard, the kind that grow a thick seed stalk to the tune of two feet a day, without feeling like he needed to run off somewhere and beat his meat. Feeling this way was a blessing, of sorts. After Rosalita had turned away from him, he’d had to wrestle with his own desires for a long time; and then, as if they’d decided to cooperate with him or had given up in defeat, they simply stopped. Rico was only forty when this happened. He could get it up, but he didn’t particularly want to. For what? He never talked about it because it was embarrassing. Now, out of the blue, he was embarrassed for the opposite reason. What middle-aged man has time to worry about a constant hard-on?

  “That’s it for today,” Rico said when they finally broke for lunch. “It’s noon. I have other things to do this afternoon.”

  She dropped into his office chair, leaving him to sit down on one of the folding chairs. “Can I buy you lunch, Rico?” she asked, very casually, as if in New York women took the leading role all the time.

  “I have something I brought,” he said, and then, because he was essentially an honest man, he added, “My wife packs a lunch for me every day.”

  “Oh, you’re married?” There was no subtext of disappointment in her tone that he could detect.

  “Not legally. But for a long time. Three daughters, all grown now.”

  “And you’re still together. Wow, that’s impressive,” she said, and she seemed to look at him with the kind of respect some women show when they’re telegraphing to the man and simultaneously to themselves, Hands off! “What’s the secret?” she asked.

  “Put up with whatever gets thrown at you and keep your fucking mouth shut,” Rico said, and Margaret threw back her head and laughed again.

  “I knew it!” she said. “I just never heard anybody admit it before.” She had little lights in her eyes, like torches.

  “You never got hooked up?”

  “I’ve been hooked up, but . . .” She looked around the room as if the end of her sentence would appear by magic on one of the walls and she could read it to him. “. . . never satisfactorily,” she concluded. “I think I have a piece missing in that department. Hey, maybe you could weld one on for me.”

  He knew it was a joke, that there was not one iota of genuine suggestiveness in it, but her words hit him right in the solar plexus. Rico had been hit there in the past, mostly by his older brother, and he knew what it meant to take a physical blow so intense that the whole world stopped dead in its tracks while you made a decision about whether to fall down or stay standing. Luckily, he was already sitting, so all he had to do was respond in some way that kept this little conversational ship afloat.

  He settled on, “It’s probably the muffler,” and then she laughed again, and Rico felt like he was batting a thousand.

  “You assume I have a big mouth,” she responded, “and here I’ve never even shot it off in front of you.”

  This time he didn’t have a comeback, so he just smiled at her like he had his secrets, and she smiled back. There they were, a couple of welders, he thought, and suddenly he found himself looking forward to talking over the tricks of the trade with her in the future when they were equals instead of a teacher and student. “Let’s make a plan for your next lesson,” he said. “I was thinking three times a week for a couple weeks until you get the gist of it.”

  “Sounds good. What works for you? I have no schedule at the moment, so I’m wide open.”

  Rico was about to say Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, which seemed like a reasonable plan, but before he formed the words, he realized he didn’t want to go two days without seeing her, so instead, he said, “How about Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday mornings?”

  “Okay, good. So I’ll see you tomorrow.” She collected her bag off the floor where she had dropped it, reached in, and produced her wallet. She extracted thirty-five dollars and handed it to him.

  This was a difficult moment for Rico, reaching up and accepting the money, but he made himself do it.

  “Thanks so much. It was a great first lesson,” she said.

  He folded the bills and put them in his pocket.

  “I’m going to the library today and take out a book on metals,” she added, as she stood up and hefted her bag to her shoulder. “I can see I need to do some serious studying.” She took a few steps toward the door.

  “Margaret,” Rico said, just wanting to say her name out loud, realizing that it was the first time he had ever done so.

  She stopped her forward motion and turned to face him.

  “What the hell do you have in that bag?” he asked. “It looks like it weighs fifty pounds.”

  “Just the essentials,” she said, and then, without thinking, she lifted it off her shoulder, turned it upside down, and dumped it out on the ground between them. The contents formed a mountain of rubble: a notebook, a water bottle, a sketchbook, pens and ink, two rolls of cherry-flavored Lifesavers, a comb and brush, a wallet, a checkbook, a ring of keys, a novel, some sunscreen, Chapstick, sunglasses, a watch with only one wrist band, a folded road map of Albuquerque that appeared to be plastic-coated, even a dog collar attached to a leash. Pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters rolled away from the mound into the corners of the office, along with a cylinder of something called Rescue Remedy, which landed close to Rico’s feet.

  He reached down into the mess and picked up what could only be described as a medium-size dust bunny. Holding it between his thumb and pointer finger, he said, “I may be wrong, but I think this is something that could be thrown out.”

  Margaret chuckled as she began to collect all the paraphernalia from the floor and shoved it back into her bag. She couldn’t and wouldn’t tell him that, starting in high school, when she and her best friend, Christina, would dump their purses out on their beds a few times a week and study the contents for the purposes of trying to figure out who they were, she was a goner if anyone ever
expressed an interest in what she had in her bag. No matter how many times she looked at the contents, she could never get over the phenomenon of carting around such a big bagful of stuff. And something about Rico encouraged her to reveal herself, a little at a time. He seemed slow and steady, as if he knew the reason for this mañana attitude that was so pervasive out here in the west.

  Still, once she had rounded the corner toward her house and gained some distance to reflect on that recent moment, she was more than a little surprised at her own spontaneity. True, it had happened at the end of a long morning of listening, watching, and absorbing, when she was so filled up she probably needed to spill something off, and just the action of turning anything upside down was a relief.

  She turned into her yard, where Magpie lay sprawled on the other side of the closed driveway gate. “Hey, big dog,” she called, and Magpie began to thump her tail into the dirt without getting up or even raising her head. Margaret squatted next to her to scratch her ears and ruffle the fur of her chest and belly. She had read that once dogs passed puppyhood, their owners rarely touched any part of their bodies except the head, and she had promised herself that she would be the exception. She regularly gave Magpie leg and foot massages as if she were the uncontested queen of the canines.

  Then she walked over to the cement pad and stared for a few moments into her collection of rusty parts. Putting them together in some new form seemed daunting now that she knew that metals all melted at vastly different temperatures, which meant you had to know in what order they could be welded, as well as what could not be welded together at all. She didn’t have any idea of what metals she had represented there on the concrete pad, which were ferrous and which weren’t, or which parts, if any, could still contain vapors ready to ignite and blow her and her welding fantasy to the ends of the earth.

  But staring into her collection of rusty parts was not unlike examining the contents of her handbag. It was fascinating to Margaret, an identity scattered there, waiting to be assembled.

  1974

  “PRISONS ARE different here, man. They keep you locked up for years without even charging you with anything. Nine out of ten of the inmates in this shithole have never been charged. No Legal Aid lawyers to help stupid American hippies who deal drugs, either.” The man pushes his long blonde hair back off his forehead. “You gotta find a way to cope, man.”

  They are the first words he has heard in English after what he thinks, if his counting is right, is seventeen days and nights. The words hit him hard, in the stomach, like a sucker punch. “How long have you been here?” he asks. His voice sounds odd, like someone else’s.

  “I don’t know. I stopped counting. Years.”

  He doesn’t want to believe it, but even a peripheral glance at this man before him, so dirty, his skin baked and cracked like the deserts to the north, tells him it is true.

  “How do you keep on doing it?” he finally asks. “Get up every day and do it?”

  “What else is there?” the man says, and he laughs. His teeth are stained, brown. A few are missing. He extends his hand—a simple gesture, so familiar—and says, “I’m Will.”

  “Vincent.”

  Strange, but there in the hot sun, he can’t think of anything more to add.

  “Come on, man,” Will says. “Let’s find a place in the shade to sit down.” He starts off, through the crowd of men squatting in the dirt. “There’s a guy from France here, too,” Will says over his shoulder. “Jean Pierre. I’ll introduce you.”

  Vincent follows, barely able to keep his balance as he picks his way through wave after wave of prisoners. All adrift.

  AS MARGARET walked to the library, she smiled to herself. It was not even a mile away from her little adobe house, but even so, one after the other, she crossed streets named Iron, Lead, Coal, Silver, Gold, and Copper, as if the whole city were laid out to remind her of the metals of the world, just in case she forgot what her next step was as an artist. Never before in her life had she felt such a sense of humor in a city, as if it were compelled to play a joke on her. She wanted to learn to weld, and who should she stumble across but Rico Garcia, whose blackboard was the underside of an old car that had to be chopped to accommodate fat tires. She wanted to go to the library, and every corner presented her with a street sign pointing the way to the very subject she was on her way to research. How did something like that happen?

  Maybe I belong here, she mused, and that idea caused her to stop dead on the corner of the old Route 66 and look around. Albuquerque was a dusty, working class city, sprawled out in a big natural basin that gave it some protection from wind and weather but also caused the yellow smog to lie just above the building tops in the heat of the summer. On the streets, men wore cowboy hats, cowboy boots, and big silver buckles on their belts, and they weren’t on their way to a costume party either, as she had assumed for the first few days after she arrived. Prairie dogs popped up and took over school yards and vacant lots, the professional baseball team was enigmatically named the Isotopes, and each and every meal served in a restaurant seemed to be automatically accompanied by either red or green chile. How could a New Yorker, born in Chinatown and raised on Forty-Eighth Street between Eighth and Ninth avenues, adjust to all this vacant space? Even the sidewalks downtown were all but deserted, right in the middle of the work day.

  Margaret entered the Main Library on the corner of Copper and Fifth Street, which felt like libraries everywhere: cool, quiet, and somehow undisturbed and ancient. She intended to consult a librarian immediately, to be efficiently pointed toward the stacks where the secrets of metals were revealed after having been categorized according to the Library of Congress or the Dewey Decimal System. But on the way to the main desk, she passed a table full of new library acquisitions, where she noticed a coffee-table book on low riders. She opened it and thumbed through. The pages contained glossy, four-color photographs as carefully staged as any in a fine art magazine, and she found herself absorbed enough in the images to begin, here and there, to read the printed commentary that accompanied them. Within a few pages, she read, “This classic 1966 Chevy Impala utilized three different welding techniques. The frame was arc welded, the exhaust system oxyacetylene welded, and the aluminum body TIG welded by Rico Garcia, a master welder known throughout the Southwest as ‘el rey’ when it comes to low riders.”

  This astonished Margaret, who now carried the book to a nearby leather-upholstered reading chair and sat down. Rico was famous. Of course, he had gained his notoriety in a field that she didn’t even know was a field. She had never thought about it, but if she had, Margaret would’ve voted “no” if anyone had asked her if the subject of low riders would rate its own library book. And she never thought that welders got credit anywhere for anything, even though it could truthfully be said that they held the whole world together. Not to mention the fact that, while Rico had said he often worked on low riders, he never hinted that it was the kind of craftsmanship that got him included in a book that cost—and here Margaret had to check the front flap of the book—just five cents under forty dollars. Would she have ever asked him to teach her to weld if his reputation had preceded him? She doubted it. Margaret was too sensitive to the patina of success, of making a mark that others noted and applauded, of the way—once that happened—the person was promoted to some league that was simply out of her range.

  Now, turning pages in the book and seeing Rico’s name again and again, and toward the back, an actual photograph of him at work in Garcia’s Automotive, she felt uncomfortable. She decided to simply sit in the chair and wait for the tight grip she was experiencing, particularly in her shoulders and jaw but also on her mind, to loosen, which might take a while. She couldn’t will it away, and she couldn’t relax it away, because this sense of being yanked from a happy place to a problematic one was the antithesis of relaxation. It made her nerves feel invaded by a toxic foreign substance, like acid. It made her feel as if she had to escape, when she hadn’t even known she
was trapped or locked up. And arguing logically to herself about the foolishness of her reaction wouldn’t help much either, because she knew that talking herself out of this feeling meant convincing herself that Rico’s presence in the book was less important than she wanted it to be, for his sake. She wanted to be happy for him and she was, but in some way it seemed to Margaret that when the spotlight shone on someone, it simultaneously cast her into darker shadows; there was only one way out of the shadows, and that was to disappear into them once and for all. To disappear, to be forgotten, to emerge somewhere else with all that tension and worry packed away somewhere secret—that was her cycle and her destiny.

  She glanced up. She happened to be sitting in front of a huge two-story window, and the intense sunlight outside came as a shock. It created bright shadows on the floor, patches where the old wood seemed polished to a golden gleam, one of which stretched to a point just inches away from Margaret’s feet. She closed the book, held it to her chest, and waited for the light on the floor to slowly engulf her. When it did, she got up and asked the librarian where the books on metals were, and then she lost herself in them for the whole afternoon.

  When she was ready to leave, she had a stack of books—including the oversized one on low riders—that became heavy enough as she walked home to warrant a break, and she stepped into the Flying Star Café on the corner of Silver and Eighth Street. It was inviting, with its large windows and the upholstery in its booths featuring comets, stars, and little rocket ships that seemed to suggest that the patrons could sit there and go somewhere else at the same time.

  She got in line at the counter and, suddenly realizing she was hungry, ordered dinner—a salad which included dried cranberries as well as a julienne of jicama—and then settled into a back booth to cogitate the nature of metal. Sometimes Margaret became captivated by a theory or an image or an idea, and today, as she pored over the pages devoted to metals, pages she found hard to understand even when she read them slowly and spent time studying the illustrations and pictures, a perception had formed in her mind and slowly seeped everywhere. She had no idea if it was accurate, something that would be covered in Physics 101 if she’d ever taken it, or totally erroneous, but she had arrived at the conclusion that all metals are constructed of the exact same basic material, just arranged in different ratios. She had no image for this basic material, but maybe it originated as some kind of ooze, whatever dreams are made out of, or perhaps some form of lava that erupted from a giant mind somewhere else and flowed through space onto this planet. She didn’t know. But what had occurred to her was that the secret of welding was to create little tunnels and bridges, footpaths and skyways, from one metallic landscape to the next. The point, she decided as she buttered her dinner roll and took a little bite, was to attach piece to piece in such a way that a flow was introduced, a type of communication, rather than a wall that could not be scaled or a scar so deep it lost feeling and eventually became numb.