by Julie Mars
WHEN MARGARET awoke from her nap, her body sweaty in the heat of the late afternoon sun and her throat parched, she was overcome with a need to feel a breeze on her face, even if she had to get in the car and drive seventy-five miles an hour to create one. She took a long drink of water, refilled a gallon water bottle at the sink, and opened an ancient picture book called The Wonders of New Mexico that she had found years before in a box left behind by her parents. It had become a treasure, and she had pored over it for months before she left New York. She turned to the page for Jemez Springs, which was just over an hour from Albuquerque, higher up in the mountains, at about sixty-five hundred feet. The town, with its funky bathhouse from the 1870s, its local bar that looked as if it hadn’t changed in a hundred years, and its spectacular rock mountains layered in multi-colors like some fancy dessert from Austria, seemed like an excellent destination. Plus, there was a river there, a good place to take a dog for a long walk.
Magpie, looking very alert, watched her as she studied the book on the kitchen counter. Margaret was positive that her dog could tell the future, which is why when she turned toward her and saw on her face what she called Magpie’s “Am I going?” look, Margaret said, “Yes, you are.” Magpie jumped to her feet and headed for the door, as if she’d been waiting for this moment all her life.
They got into the car, backed out of the driveway, and drove toward I-25, taking a not-quite-direct route that curved around toward Garcia’s Automotive. She felt drawn there, as if by simply driving by she could advance her knowledge of welding and perhaps, she admitted, send some calming vibrations in Rico’s direction. Something had happened to him in the past day. When he had gotten out of his truck that morning, she had seen it clearly: the Herculean effort it took to corral all his emotions and stuff them into his smile. And he hadn’t fooled her with that adjustment of his sunglasses, either. She knew he had tears to wipe away.
In that moment, with Rico coming toward her, his whole body raw with pain that she could actually feel herself, Margaret had heard something unidentifiable snap into place in her own mind. It had to do with him, obviously, but also with something from long ago, a sense of something opening or closing. It had to do with an ache she recognized, as if aches resonate forever in some parallel universe, and poor lost souls wander into and out of them in a timeless kind of way, and then sometimes recognize each other from that other world in this one. She had seen Rico, coming toward her, his tears needing to be brushed aside so he could appear to be what he was not, and she knew his truth, maybe better than he did. It had to do with witnessing an ending of some sort. It had to do with that little girl in the window of Donny’s apartment on Forty-Eighth Street, how she pressed her cheek into the glass so she could see all the way to the corner where Vincent and Regina had disappeared. It had to do with loneliness.
She had stepped back and given him room, pretended that what she had seen did not exist. But all morning, as she watched him work, as she stood slightly behind him and observed him as he expertly welded various metals together, she had the recurrent thought that some things simply cannot be put back together, no matter how hot the torch or how skilled the welder. Or perhaps they fit together, but the job looks sloppy in the end. Perhaps there are visible scars like welts. She planned to ask him, but his wife’s arrival had prevented that.
She turned right onto Barelas Road, just planning to glance at the garage as she passed, but when she did Rico was right there in the parking lot, having just stepped out of the old Buick La Sabre he had moved from inside to outside. He stood still and looked straight into her eyes, and she knew she had to pull to the side of the road and say something sociable. He came to the passenger window and leaned into it slightly.
“What’up, Margaret?”
“Nada,” she answered. “I’m on my way up to Jemez Springs to take Magpie for a long walk by the river. It looks like a beautiful place. I saw it in a book.”
“You and your books,” he smiled. “Don’t cause any trouble up there.”
“Did my books and I cause trouble around here, Rico? Things were a little tense when I left.”
He shook his head. “It wasn’t the book.”
“Was it me?”
He shook his head again. “It’s a long story.”
“Maybe you should tell it to somebody.”
“Does that help?”
“Actually, I wouldn’t know,” she smiled.
“I didn’t think so,” he replied.
They were both silent for a few beats.
“Though I do find it helps to talk to Magpie,” Margaret said at last.
Rico turned his eyes to the big dog sitting erect and watchful in the backseat. “Can I make an appointment?” he said.
Margaret laughed. “She’s got her paws full with me, but I’ll see if I can squeeze you in sometime.”
“How about now?” Rico said. And even as he said it, he knew that whether she said yes or no, he would be dropped off in some new terrain that he didn’t feel ready for, but he still waited for an answer.
“You want to take a ride to Jemez?” she asked, as if she was seeking clarification only.
“Sure,” he said, “Why not?” And then he waited.
Why not, Margaret silently repeated. There was the obvious reason, of course: his wife. But Margaret was tired of protecting people she had no intention of hurting. She wanted to act as free as she felt, so she said, “Okay, come on.”
He broke into a wide, white smile. “Let me lock up. Take me a minute.” He headed back toward the garage.
Margaret turned the engine off and the radio on. The War and Peace Report with Amy Goodman was on, but she was not in the mood for bad news from around the world, so she switched to an AM station that specialized in classic rock. This was a normal thing, she told herself, to go on a spontaneous walk with a new friend in the late afternoon on a gorgeous desert day. But it felt sharp around the edges. Besides, for Margaret, normal was singular, not plural. She had not expected this when she decided to drive past Garcia’s, but here it was. She wasn’t sure what to think, so she just turned up the radio and sang along to “Beast of Burden” by the Rolling Stones.
Meanwhile, inside the garage, Rico pulled down the service doors and locked them, shut down all his tools, and stripped off his coveralls. It was just after four in the afternoon, early to close, but he wasn’t expecting any customers back today. He glanced in his appointment book for tomorrow, and then, at the last minute, picked up the phone and called home. He was relieved when Maribel answered. “Hola, mi hija,” said Rico. “¿Cómo andas?”
“Todo está bien, Papi,” she responded.
“Can you give Mama a message for me?” Rico said, rushing on before Maribel offered to put Rosalita on the phone. “Tell her I’ll be home late tonight, after ten probably.”
“Okay,” said Maribel. Typical of a teenager, she didn’t ask for an explanation.
“See you then,” he said.
“Okay, Papi. See you later.” He hung up, locked the door, crossed the parking lot, and climbed into the passenger seat of Margaret’s car.
“Here we go,” said Margaret as she pulled out into the street. “Everybody get out of the way!”
Rico smiled. “Do I need a crash helmet?” he asked as he put on his seatbelt, and moved the seat back a few inches so he could stretch out his legs in comfort. It had been a long time since Rico rode in a car that a woman was driving. In his own family, he was the default driver and everyone knew it. He liked to be behind the wheel, in control. But today he rested his head against the back of the seat and just looked out the window. There was a lot of traffic, several lanes bumper to bumper in both directions. Where had all the people come from? Just a few years ago, the transfer from I-40 east and west to I-25 north and south had been a simple two-lane exit and it had worked fine. Now roads swirled in a complex of ins and outs that rose several stories above the landscape, and cars were coming and going in every direction at top spe
ed. His city, which he never thought of as more than a small town, was changing fast while he stood still.
As if she’d read his mind, Margaret said, “Did you know Albuquerque’s the thirty-third largest city in the United States? Which is odd when you factor in that New Mexico is one of the lowest states in terms of population, only two million people in the whole state.” She paused for a second, and then added, “though we do have more Native Americans here than any other city in the world. About forty-five thousand. And the highest number of PhD’s in the country for its population. But the lowest ranking in terms of quality of education.”
Rico looked at her. Through the window behind her, he could see the five dormant volcanoes in the distance against the bright blue sky. “Are you a history teacher or something?” he asked.
“No, I’m a bartender. Or at least I was one in New York. I’m thinking of getting out of that business.”
Rico watched the way Margaret handled the car. Her right hand rested on the gearshift, as if she wanted to be prepared at any second to throw the Colt Vista into some higher or lower gear, and her left hand comfortably gripped the steering wheel at about eight o’clock. She drove well, changing lanes with confidence when there wasn’t quite enough time. She had the driver’s seat pushed way back, so her legs were almost extended straight to reach the pedals, and she constantly checked both her interior and exterior rearview mirrors. Watching her drive, he had the idea that she threw herself full-tilt into everything she did, which probably accounted for her memorizing all those statistics about New Mexico. She probably studied up on it long before she arrived anywhere near the state.
“You ought to become a courier,” he said, “the way you drive.”
“Are you making fun of my driving?”
“No. I’m admiring it.” He threw her a smile big enough to display those deep dimples and she returned it, along with a little lift of her eyebrows. “I know a guy who’s a courier. He drives all over the state—sometimes farther. He makes good money, too.”
Margaret was actually interested. She could just imagine herself and Magpie on the road, doing eighty-five into the sunset. Or sunrise.
“What does he deliver?”
“Mostly paperwork. But a couple times, he took some camera equipment out to a movie shoot, and he told me one time he delivered a human heart for a transplant.”
“Really? Wow.”
She found it captivating: the image of a courier tearing along the highway with, on the front passenger seat or perhaps on the floor where it would not tip over, a heart packed in ice and headed for a new chest cavity.
“That must have made him feel important,” said Margaret.
“He said it creeped him out.”
“Really? Why?”
“He just said body parts give him the creeps. When somebody says something like that, I don’t ask questions.”
“But a heart,” Margaret mused. She had once read a memoir by a woman who received a transplanted heart. Suddenly, this woman developed intense cravings for beer and honky-tonks, and she felt compelled to track down the donor of the heart in order to learn if these were his habits. She discovered the owner of the heart was a young man who died in a motorcycle accident. He had indeed been a party animal. Reading that book had inspired Margaret to wonder about hearts. Were all memories stored there? She pulled into the passing lane and whipped by a long line of cars doing about five miles an hour over the speed limit. When she pulled back in, she asked, “What do you think the heart is, Rico?”
“It’s a machine. A pump.”
“I see you’re not a romantic.”
“I’m a mechanic, not a poet.” The fact was, though, Rico could have said plenty about the heart, about the weather it has, more tempestuous than any outer storm. About how the heart can feel on the verge of bursting open, spewing love like cherry blossoms, covering a whole landscape with little white fragrant flowers with pink crosses at the center. About how it can pulsate with hatred, too, which is what he sometimes felt for Fernando, a hatred so menacing he was scared of himself. About how the flow of blood inside it can suddenly stagnate, and the heart can go numb and lifeless, and all that can be done when that happens is wait and wonder. Rico had felt his own heart ache with love, ache with sadness, ache with pride, and ache with worry. He knew the heart was more than a pump, though he had great respect for a good pump. In his current state, though, in which the four chambers of his own heart were warring with each other—one filled with happiness at being in the same car with Margaret, one back on Riverside Drive trying to find a way back to his wife, one angrily chanting “four wasted years,” and one just trying to keep the beat—Rico felt no inclination to provide details. Instead he said, “Why? What do you think the heart is?”
Margaret answered, “I don’t know. I don’t think I have one.”
“You have one,” Rico responded, “believe me.” He had an impulse to place his hand on top of hers on the gearshift, perhaps to guide her into some form of downshifting that might find them on the side of the highway where he could do something right for once and show her that she was all heart, whether she knew it or not, but in that exact instant she moved her hand to the steering wheel. Soon, she exited at Bernalillo and turned left onto Highway 550, which, according to the map, they would follow for twenty-five miles before making a right at San Isidro up into the Jemez Mountains.
The stretch of road from the exit ramp to the place to the west where the Indian reservations begin is perhaps one of the ugliest in New Mexico, with strip malls and gas stations jammed up side to side, chain drugstores and banks pressing into each other, traffic light after traffic light where Mack trucks idle noisily. And then the housing developments start, one after the other, like prisons on the side of the road.
“Damn, I hope it’s not like this the whole way,” Margaret said as the fumes from an old pickup wafted in the windows. “This is awful.”
“Keep going,” said Rico. He knew that within a few miles, the highway would take them past the last McDonald’s and Taco Bell, past the last casino, past the last stinking eighteen-wheeler at a traffic light, and past the last of the housing developments. They would climb a hill and at the top, the clutter of the modern world would cease to exist. It would collapse into a mirage, and the whole wide world would open up before them. Margaret’s eyes would feast on the landscape, spread out in all the known shades of red and orange, brown and green, beige and blue. He could have told her what was coming, but he kept it secret, depending on it to overwhelm her, fill her heart—which she thought she didn’t possess—with joy.
1989
“THIS IS where my grandmother lives on the Navajo reservation,” Thomas whispers, handing the map to Vincent. “If you ever get out of here, find your way to her and tell her what happened to me.”
Vincent cradles Thomas’ head on his lap.
“Tell her I left this world saying her name. Alice. Alice Yazzie.”
Thomas’ eyes move away from Vincent’s.
He stares out above the prison walls and settles on a point in the sky. Vincent feels certain, in that moment, that he sees Thomas’ spirit rise up and disappear into that bright blue point and instantly become a part of the whole, the sky over New Mexico too, where Alice waits and waits and waits for her grandson to come home.
Vincent has forgotten that he is an artist, but in this moment, he remembers. He turns the map over and, on the back, he draws a portrait of Thomas, who looks serene in his moment of passing. He keeps the map in his cell, between the pages of a book of short stories by Somerset Maugham, left behind by a Brit with family connections who was quickly released.
WHEN MARGARET had heard Rico say the words, “You have one, believe me,” in response to her offhanded semi-joke about not having a heart, there was a quality in his tone of voice that reminded her of Nick, the way he would stand in front of her painting and stare into it with such intensity that she would feel compelled to give it a closer look hersel
f. This sometimes went on for minutes, while the other students in the class busied themselves at their easels and resisted the urge to gather round their teacher to get a glimpse of what held him captive.
The words that Nick would say afterward varied. Once it had been, “Jesus, I wish I’d painted that.” Another time he had turned to her and asked, “Can you take me with you in there, Margaret?” He had once mumbled, “I’m fucking breathless.” But no matter what the words were, the tone was always the same: complete, absolute certainty. Nick had told Margaret privately that he thought she was a great talent capable—if she could handle the schmoozing—of a world class art career. Those words were essentially meaningless to Margaret, who was typically more concerned with how she would pay her studio rent, or how it would affect her painting if she used nylon instead of canvas and painted with wax instead of paint. Margaret viewed the “world class career” conversations as Nick’s version of pep talks, and the simple truth was she didn’t have the pep for them. But his certainty, his belief in her, that felt different. That felt real, like Donny’s presence in her life felt real, like being more or less orphaned at five years old felt real, like having to hustle up a living felt real. Margaret appreciated the real things in her life because, to her, they were like islands in a big sea of doubt. Even if they were covered with brambles, she could climb up on them and find a place to rest.
So when Rico had said those words to her, and she had heard the certainty resonate in his voice, she had welcomed it, though she didn’t let on. She felt his certainty like a jolt through her body, and she had reached for the steering wheel with her free hand to help contain it, to close the circuit so she could hold onto it for just a few beats longer. His certainty continued to vibrate inside her as they drove along the ugly strip in Bernalillo. Then, when they hit the precise spot in the road where the urban sprawl ends and a sublime replacement begins, she had felt it wedge itself into her heart and expand it, just like the view—which went from less than nothing to everything in one single heartbeat. She’d had to pull to the side of the road. She had never seen anything like this wide open space that suddenly unfolded like a giant magic carpet at her feet. She stopped the car on the dirt shoulder of the road, climbed out, and simply stood there, stunned.
