Rust

by Julie Mars

  Rico let her be, even as several minutes ticked by. She drank it in, as if she had been wandering out in that desert sand for years and had finally found a watering hole. When she returned to the car and got in, she had looked at him, the whole vista beyond him visible through the passenger window, and said, “I’m gone, Rico. I’m blown away.” Rico had nodded once and said nothing, though later, after they had driven in silence perhaps ten miles farther into this landscape, she had said, “Thanks for letting me stand there by myself,” and he had replied, “When you see something like that for the first time, anybody’d want to be alone with it.”

  Margaret had read that when Native Americans view a landscape, they see themselves in it, as one part of it, rather than perceiving it as spreading out like a fan before them. She had never understood that, being in the world naturally rather than standing apart from it, wondering what was going to pounce. But today, as she stood in awe by the side of the road, she’d had her first inkling. She had noticed that birds she assumed were hawks were lazily circling the valley, with its strange dirt towers and its snaking arroyos, and for better or for worse, she had felt a part of it, the whole design, including both the hawk and the mice scrabbling through the dirt, dreading the moment when a bird-shaped shadow enveloped them.

  As they’d driven farther, past rock formations that, in layers, revealed the history of the planet, into the little village of San Isidro, where a police car was parked on the side of the road by a dangerous curve with a blow-up cop at the wheel, through the shabby Jemez Indian pueblo where corn grew green in the river valley, and into the red rocks, as high as New York City buildings and as orange-red as poppies, Margaret had felt truly transported. Before they even got to Jemez Springs, she pulled off the road into a turnout to the left, where the shallow river wound close. Margaret opened the back door and Magpie bounded out and headed straight to the water for a good drink. The river tumbled by at a fast clip. On the bottom, rocks and pebbles, smoothed by time and water, glowed.

  “She looks like a wolf out there,” said Rico. And it was true. With the river swirling around her ankles and her great head dipped down to slurp up the fresh mountain water, the freshest she had ever had in her life, Magpie appeared as wild and free as the landscape itself. Perhaps it was that wildness, inspired by river rapids and craggy mountains striped horizontally and a dog that looked like a wolf, that explains what happened next. Margaret stepped out of her flip-flops and, fully dressed, stepped into the river and laid herself down on her back among the glistening pebbles on the bottom. Her hair fanned out behind her as she closed her eyes. Rico, on the shore, immediately stooped down to undo his boots, strip them off along with his white athletic socks and his T-shirt, and follow. Just as he hit the water, he had a thought: I would follow this woman anywhere. This surprised him because he was not known for following. He had established himself as not-a-follower, growing up in the wake of Fernando.

  He moved toward her and sat in the river beside her, and when she opened her eyes, so green they looked like mossy river rocks, he said, “We ought to bring an inner tube up here and ride this river back to Albuquerque.”

  “Yes,” Margaret had said.

  Just hearing a yes from her startled Rico, sent a hot sensation along the wires of his spine that completely negated the water so cold that, no doubt, his dick had shriveled up to next to nothing, which made it easier not to try to kiss her. But he needed to move into her in some way, nestle inside her spirit so she could get used to him, and he wanted to do that. He wanted to say something meaningful, but what came out of his mouth was, “This water is fucking freezing, Margaret.”

  “Yes,” she said again. “Yes.”

  She had let her arms drift along with the current and now they were above her head as she lay there. Rico couldn’t help but look, though he tried to do it surreptitiously. A wet T-shirt was a beautiful thing on a woman, and besides, he had never had one hint of her body underneath all the baggy clothes she wore. Now he saw that her breasts were small and her ribs were visible, even through the shirt, though perhaps that had something to do with the way her arms were raised up. Her shoulders were narrow, and so were her hips. The opposite of Rosalita, he thought, who had not one straight line on her body.

  The arrival of Rosalita into his mind, even for one short moment of compare and contrast, created a ribbon of guilt that wanted to wrap itself around him. What was he doing, sitting among the pebbles in the middle of the Jemez River on a Tuesday afternoon at the very moment when, usually, he would be closing up shop for the day? What was he doing peeking at the tits of a white woman who had lain herself out in the shallow water like a fish? It felt wrong and it also felt right, and there was Rico, right in the middle.

  “Margaret . . .” he said, suddenly overcome with a desire to tell her everything—especially about last night. “Last night I fucked my wife for the first time in four years,” he could say, “and in a way I wish I hadn’t, even though it was good, even though I fell into her like rain.” But, with her head half underwater, her ears covered and only her face above the river line, Margaret hadn’t even heard him say her name; and when she suddenly sat up, her nipples erect and beads of water like diamonds running down her face, caught in her eyelashes, dripping from her chin, everywhere, he forgot about everything except her.

  “Did you ever notice how your skin can be cold, but some other part of you way inside can be warm?” she asked.

  “To me cold is cold,” said Rico.

  “But do you feel a need to get away from it?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Right about now.” He stood up. His blue jeans were so waterlogged they felt heavy, and when he climbed out of the river onto a big flat rock on the shore, little puddles and streams formed all around him. The sun was hot, and it dried the drops off his chest and arms before Margaret even scrambled up onto the rock next to him and stretched out on her stomach.

  Rico had a dragon biting its own tail tattooed on his upper left arm. Margaret, her arms folded under her cheek like a bony pillow, studied it with interest. She herself had no tattoos even though it had been the rage in New York for at least fifteen years. She didn’t have any, mainly because she couldn’t imagine not growing to detest a permanent image on her body. If everything changed but it, it would seem unreal and mocking. And if it changed over time—drooped, for example, or spread out or faded in color—then she would be sad at the inexorable march of time and the way it wreaked havoc on the human body.

  “Tell me about your dragon tattoo,” she said, resisting an urge to touch his arm and trace the outline with her fingers.

  “I got it when my brother Fernando was murdered,” Rico said. “A long time ago.”

  The word ‘murder’ should not intrude into this environment of peace and serenity, one where clear mountain water rushes over rounded river rocks and creates a soundtrack so soothing it could probably put an insomniac to sleep in a few minutes. But somehow the hawks circling overhead, the mountains standing strong, and the overall serenity seemed able to absorb it as a fact of nature and, therefore, so could Margaret.

  “Did it help?” she asked.

  “I guess so. I never thought about it like that. I just knew I had to do it. I was only seventeen.” In fact, it had been permanently inked into his arm within a week of Fernando’s burial. He had walked down Isleta Boulevard, past the garages that specialized in frenos y mofles, past the tiny mercaditos and the new community center, to a tattoo parlor set up in the garage of an old adobe house with a yard full of dogs. Mario, the man who did the tattooing, seemed ancient to Rico though he was probably only in his thirties. The walls of his garage were covered with original tattoo designs from which to choose, but Rico had one folded up in his pocket, a page from a book he had never returned to Rio Grande High School when he had quit two years before. The book was titled One World Through the Ages. It was used in his global history class. The picture he carried—a dragon biting its own tail—was of an etching from
Europe during the period of the Crusades. Rico never read the words in the book, but he liked to thumb through it looking at the pictures.

  After they had received the phone call informing the family of Fernando’s death, after he’d finally felt able to peel himself away from his father and Elena, who was devastated, after he’d closed the door to the room he had shared with Fernando during all the years of growing up, after he had sat on his bed experiencing what could only be called waves of relief followed by waves of guilt, he had suddenly remembered the dragon image in the history book. He had searched then and there for the book, found it in a pile of stuff in the corner, opened it, and turned to the picture. Staring into the circle created by the dragon biting its own tail took Rico somewhere he desperately needed to go in that moment, though he couldn’t, then, say where.

  “Why’d you pick the dragon?” Margaret asked.

  “Fernando . . . it was like he was always eating himself alive,” Rico said. “I picked it to remind myself what happens when you do that.” But that was not all there was to it. There was something more that had to do with the peace the image had brought him the night that Fernando was stabbed to death with a shiv fashioned from a strip of stainless steel pried off the edge of a shelf in the prison kitchen.

  “There’s something hopeful in it,” Margaret mused. “It’s probably the circle. The circle’s the symbol of wholeness, something that’s complete.”

  “Says who?” said Rico.

  “Says the people who think symbolically, I guess,” she replied. “But I believe it.” Margaret had never placed a circle anywhere in her artwork, not once in all her years of painting, which began for her in the fifth grade when Sister Mary Edwin had instructed all the students to bring a big shirt to school the next day, one they could use as a smock since they were going to embark on an art project. She’d had the students push the chairs and desks against the sides of the classroom and settle themselves on the floor. The project turned out to be finger painting.

  “Not like when you were in kindergarten,” Sister said. “I want you to paint the colors you think are inside you. Now, turn away from everybody else, and don’t look at anyone else’s colors. This is self-exploration.”

  When Margaret had slopped the first handful of red on the brown paper bag—which she had spread open and cut into a vague human shape according to Sister’s instructions—she felt a bliss unknown to her before; and she wasn’t home from school five minutes before she was asking Donny to buy her art supplies. She hadn’t stopped painting since. She had heard a few years later that Sister Mary Edwin had renounced her vows and left “the blessed holy nunhood,” as Donny called it, though something about the way he said it made Margaret, even as a little child, suspect he was kidding her about something.

  Rico lowered himself down on his back on the rock so his whole front side was exposed to the sun. “Is this what you do, Margaret, when you’re rattling around by yourself? Figure out if you believe the circle is a symbol?” He asked her this with a little edge of teasing, the affectionate kind that covers up a burst of appreciation.

  “That and drive sixty miles to walk my dog,” she replied. That caused them both to glance at Magpie, who was walking along the edge of the river, sniffing in every direction. “Ready to get to it?”

  “Okay,” said Rico, though he felt he could lie on this rock forever and look at her.

  They both stood up, their clothes damp but not dripping any more, and started after Magpie. Since there was no real trail along the edge of the river, they picked their way among the rocks and sagebrush with Margaret in front. She couldn’t see his face without stopping and turning completely around, and she only did this once when she said, “Rico, I don’t want to pry, but if you want to say anything more about your brother, I want to listen.”

  When he had said that Fernando was murdered, Margaret had seen a lead curtain drop down over Rico’s eyes, the kind that discouraged conversational probing. Yet it seemed odd to her to chat amiably about his tattoo while this more serious topic was still hanging in the air between them. She could certainly let it go, but she wanted at least to acknowledge it.

  “Maybe sometime,” he had said. “Not today.” And she had nodded and smiled a little bit, a smile that said this was fine with her, and turned back around; and before she’d advanced even five steps, Rico said, “He was a good kid when he was little. He changed when he was about twelve.” He didn’t notice that he was reciting Elena’s after-church litany as if it were his own.

  Margaret kept right on walking, understanding that for some topics some people would rather talk into a person’s back. “What made him change?” she asked, picking her words as carefully as she was picking her steps along the slippery rocks. “Something at home?”

  “I don’t think so. I was five years younger, so what did I know about anything? He seemed like a normal brother, and then he turned into a monster.”

  “Probably testosterone,” Margaret replied. “Some kids just lose it at puberty.”

  “Fernando more than lost it,” Rico said.

  Then he told her everything, as if once he started to talk he could not stop. He hadn’t really laid out the story of Fernando to anyone except Rosalita, and when he told her he was only twenty. The difference was when he told Rosalita—all those years ago, twenty-three if he counted—Fernando was the main character of the story, and now, telling Margaret, he was. To his wife, Rico had recounted the fistfights between his father and his brother, complete with bloody details. Now he talked about what it was like to stand in the doorway and observe them, how he had wanted to jump onto Fernando’s back to help his father, but he had been too scared to do it because he was no match for Fernando. He knew he couldn’t take whatever it was that his brother would unleash on him if he got involved. And how it was to see and hear his mother sobbing, sometimes screaming, the deep sorrow and helplessness that drove her to the church morning, noon, and night for all the good it did, then or now. How Fernando’s wildness had forced Rico to be tame, maybe too tame for his own good. Rico had spoken so many words, his throat felt dry and he needed a drink of water.

  All the while, Margaret listened with careful attention. She had heard a thousand sob stories in her years behind the bar, and, like all bartenders, she had developed a way to distance herself from them. Often she imagined she was a character in a movie, a bartender with a compassionate face who listened but never thought of the story again once the scene was over. But today, that was not the case. Today, she listened with a sense of awe, as if it was important to tell a story such as this one and important to listen to it.

  After half a mile, Rico fell silent.

  There happened to be a big rock, good for sitting on, right in front of them, and Margaret climbed up on it with Rico right behind her. It felt as if it had been heated up just for them, and she took a moment to shield her eyes, glancing toward the setting sun.

  “It’s such a sad story,” she said, looking at him for the first time since he started talking. “I feel so sad for everybody in it, including Fernando. I can’t imagine the state somebody has to reach to act like that.”

  “I don’t know why I told you,” Rico said. But inside himself, he knew perfectly well why he told her. He told her because he simply couldn’t stop himself. He had no control around this woman, this gringa from New York. While he was walking along behind her, spilling his guts, he thought that if she had once turned around and looked at him, he would have had to run the other way—but she never did. And now, looking into her face seemed to be the most natural thing in the world. Just easy.

  He hadn’t thought this far ahead, but if he had, he might’ve imagined that if this moment which should be so hard for him was easy, then he might take a chance on leaning across the distance between them to kiss her lips, pulling her toward him, skinny little thing that she was. But these thoughts never formed. Rico felt spent, exhausted, used up. However, he didn’t feel foolish—which he always thought
he might if he ever opened up about Fernando—and he didn’t feel sorry he had done it.

  “You’re so quiet,” Rico said after a few moments of no sound but the river moving along its chosen path.

  “I’m feeling for you, Rico,” she said. “Sometimes it seems to me that every person is locked up in a prison that no one else can see. Every person.” She herself could often feel the claustrophobia, the loss of freedom, the danger, and the regimentation of prison life though there was no sign of bars in her world. Except the drinking kind, which were their own prison, of course, though that was one she managed to avoid.

  “Yeah. We need a mass breakout,” said Rico.

  “Maybe a riot,” Margaret suggested.

  “Maybe we’re already in one,” Rico replied.

  They both laughed nervously because each knew that whatever was happening between them was creating a chance to break free in some way, though their ways were different, maybe.

  They sat on the rock a little longer, until dusk, and then made their way back to the car. It was seven-thirty when Margaret pulled onto the highway and headed south. The atmosphere between them, with Rico having opened up about Fernando, was hard to mistake, especially as it got darker and darker. Margaret had always felt that darkness magnified all feelings and needs. It seemed dangerous to acknowledge the intimacy that had, like a lotus blossom, opened up, but impossible to ignore it in the dark. So when she took the left turn back onto Route 550, for that last beautiful section before they re-entered Bernalillo, Margaret said, “Rico, just so you know, I have a lifelong rule against getting involved with married men. I never break it.” She took her eyes off the road for a few seconds as she said it. “Much as I might want to,” she added.