by Julie Mars
She looked so sincere that Rico felt called upon to come up with something smart. But he had never talked about welding to anyone, not because he was against it, but because no one had ever brought it up. Where should he start? Margaret waited silently while he searched for an entry point.
“Well,” he finally began, “most people who’re just starting out fuck up because they don’t keep the base metal hot enough. You have to get it to the melting point and then keep it there, keep it steady. So the best thing to do is burn up some pieces on purpose, overheat them till they’re useless, just wreck them, until you start to get the feeling of what’s just the right amount of heat, not too much and not too little, and that takes time to figure out and it changes depending on what you’re welding. So you’re always keeping right on the edge, balancing, trying not to lose the edge and—”
As he spoke, it was as if there was another Rico emerging, one who had actually formulated quite a few theories, based on personal observation, and was actually able to get the words out in some way that passed for sensible. The more he talked, the more he wanted to say, as if Margaret had forced him to squeeze through the skinny center of some hourglass, and once he did, everything had widened and he had become giddy with all the room there was inside him. Every once in a while, Margaret would stop him and ask a few questions, but mostly she listened intently. He talked nonstop until she pulled off I-25 at Avenida César Chávez, drove up over the bridge above the old railroad yard, and arrived in front of Garcia’s Automotive. She turned off the engine. For a second, Rico considered continuing, perhaps opening the garage door to take her inside for some hands-on experience, but he knew that would come soon enough, the next morning in fact; and he felt obligated to go home to Rosalita and whatever was in store for him there. He had never shown up late without an explanation, and, given the events of the day, he was certain Rosalita was stewing with images, not unlike the ones he had just lived through.
“How’s that?” he asked as a way of ending his long monologue. “Enough to get you going?”
“Amazing,” Margaret said, and Rico thought, She thinks I’m amazing.
He reached for the car door, got out, and shut the door behind him. Then he leaned in the window. “We on for tomorrow?”
“Definitely,” she said in her New York accent that he had heard before only in the movies,
“Okay, see you then.” He knocked twice on the door, then stepped back from it.
“Okay, see you then,” she called. “Great day, Rico.”
She drove off with images of melting points and molten metal and torches spitting fire and sparks.
1990
A NEW warden arrives. A woman. She’s progressive and experimental. She introduces meditation classes into the prison. She makes bathing mandatory once a week. She puts the prisoners on work details and they clean the place until it’s shipshape. She conducts clothing drives and suddenly the men wear donated madras shirts and worn dress pants.
She releases Vincent.
After sixteen years.
“You have been here too long,” she says in her accented English. “I can’t even find paperwork on your case.”
Vincent stands in front of her desk, stunned.
“Go and collect your things,” she says in a kind voice, and even as he’s hearing it, it occurs to him that this is the first female who has spoken to him in all these years. “We can arrange transportation for you to Bombay, where you can go to the American consulate,” she says. But Vincent says, “No, thank you.”
He has to find Regina, and he thinks she must be in a prison here in Goa.
“How will you live?” the warden asks.
“I don’t know yet.” Vincent smiles a little when he says that. Just a little, because he is ashamed of his teeth, several of which are missing now. She gives him 500 rupees.
He leaves the prison with exactly three items, besides the clothes on his back: the strip of photos of Regina and Margaret, the St. Christopher medal, and the map to Alice Yazzie.
When the gate closes behind him, and he is herded into a van for the drive into Siruguppa, he feels like he is sleepwalking. He wonders if he’s dreaming.
RICO WAS already in his shop, open for business, at five to eight the next morning. He made himself a fresh pot of dark roast coffee and sat down with a strong café con leche. Sitting at his desk, staring out through the big window, he felt like a captain at sea steering his ship through crashing waves. His job was to make it into port intact. That was the most he could hope for.
When he had left Elena’s casita, Rico had felt angrier than he had in years. He had always thought the concept of a person’s blood boiling was a joke, but that’s what he felt. In the night, with the sound of the cicadas on his nerves and his own house outlined in darkness—the last place he wanted to go—Rico didn’t know what to do. There was certainly no point in slamming his fist into the wall of the house or yanking up the flowers in Rosalita’s garden by the roots. There was no point in crashing into the bedroom to force her to account for what she’d done. That would only wake the girls, involve each and every person in the family in his business, and half of what made his blood hot in the first place was the idea that his own mother knew private details of his life that he had not chosen to provide to her.
He got in his truck and left. With no idea where to go or what to do, he made turns with confidence, as if he had a destination, and in the end, he arrived in the parking lot of the cemetery in which his brother Fernando was buried, not far from Margaret’s house. He had never come here on his own, not once in all the years since his death. The gates were locked, but for Rico it was easy business to climb over the fence. For just a second, as he came over the top, where the wrought-iron spikes threatened to spear him if he made a wrong move, it crossed his mind that he was about to enter the land of the dead. Outside, life went on. Inside, nothing was happening but the slow process of decomposition, if that even happened anymore with today’s embalming chemicals.
When his feet hit the dirt inside the fence, he felt noticeably alive in the quiet, his the only heart beating in the place. He remembered the way to Fernando’s grave—how they had driven for perhaps a quarter of a mile along the main driveway and then veered to the left at the Y in the cemetery road for about a hundred feet, how Fernando’s funeral procession consisted of just the hearse and one rented limo in which he, his father, and his mother sat like stones. Fernando’s grave was marked with a headstone that had an angel perched on top of it, a cherub sitting there naked and innocent, the antithesis of Fernando, if there ever was one.
It didn’t take long to find it, though he was well aware how many more graves there were now, as if the dead as well as the living were crowding into Albuquerque. Rico stood for a few moments to stare at the gravestone: “Fernando Jose Garcia,” it read. “April 10, 1960–December 6, 1982. Rest in peace.”
“Mucho tiempo, mi hermano,” Rico finally said, “but here I am.”
Why he was there was another question entirely. Perhaps while his blood boiled some ancient family DNA got dislodged from wherever Rico had buried it. Perhaps the anger he felt, the urge to smash or break something, take some action that he would undoubtedly live to regret, connected him to Fernando in the only way possible for two brothers as different as they were. Perhaps the blood ties between them were stronger than Rico knew or could have guessed. Perhaps, once he told the story of his brother to Margaret, which, he reminded himself, had happened just a few hours ago, it was inevitable that he should find his way here. For whatever reason, here he was, standing graveside paying his respects, though that might not have been exactly what he was doing. Perhaps he was paying his disrespects.
He sat down on the gravestone next to the cherub. The angel’s fat little legs dangled over the side, his ankles crossed. What now, Rico thought. He looked around. The night was dark, with only a few underpowered streetlights along the road, and a moon that was already on its way somewhere else.
His dead brother was packed into a box at his feet, where he had been for a quarter of a century. There was no one anywhere in sight, and yet Rico felt crowded. He glanced down at the cherub, sitting there with him on a gravestone that only comfortably seated one, and without stopping to think, he reached over, placed his hand alongside the angel’s head, and gave it a shove, just to test how easy or difficult it might be to send it flying across the cemetery to rest on somebody’s else’s grave for a while. It had no give in it, and he ran his fingers farther down to notice that the angel’s head rose right out of the shoulders and chest, as if whoever made the original mold from which perhaps millions of concrete angels had been poured, had anticipated this moment, when an angry brother might arrive in a cemetery and suddenly get the urge to knock its block off.
Rico gave the head a few shots with the palm of his hand, but the angel just sat there smiling. He got up and gave it a good kick with all the force in his leg, but again, nothing happened. He was about to try again, when he suddenly began to laugh. It was as if he was a character in one of those bible stories Elena loved to listen to on books on tape—the one about Paul on the road to Damascus maybe, which she had recounted to him many times over the years. All night Paul had fought, man to man, with a devil, and in the dawn it disappeared and he was freed of his devilish desires. Here was Rico, doing the reverse, trying to pick a fight with an angel and getting nowhere. It was crazy. He began to laugh louder, and suddenly he was overtaken with great waves of laughter, so much so that Rico had to sit down on the dry earth, his back resting against the gravestone, his legs splayed open on Fernando’s grave.
What was happening to him? Here he was, in the middle of a quiet cemetery, laughing like a hyena from the zoo when his life was in an uproar. For the last ten years of his brother’s life, Rico had made it a mission to avoid him whenever possible; and now he was here at his grave, his hands resting in the pale desert grass that had taken root in the dirt where Fernando’s body was lowered one unusually warm day in December many years ago. Margaret had said she felt sorry for Fernando. “I can’t imagine the state somebody has to reach to act like that,” she had said. Now, collapsed against his grave, Rico remembered Fernando before he went bad, when he was still a good brother, one who taught him how to swing a bat, who made him root beer floats with vanilla ice cream, who let him crawl into bed with him when Rico’s bad dreams came. Rico had loved his older brother then, idolized him, even. Fernando seemed like the strongest boy in the world, the boy who was always there for protection. Remembering this, Rico’s laughter changed, and suddenly he was sobbing, great wails that took his breath away. I never cried for my brother, he thought. And now suddenly he was.
He had not arrived home until well after midnight. He came in, bleary-eyed and dirty, and took a long hot shower. The house, with all his girls, was silent. He sat at the kitchen table in the dark for a while, and then he went into the bedroom where Rosalita appeared to be sound asleep. She was facing the wall, her body turned away from his side of the bed. She wore a nightgown that, in the dim light, made it look like her shoulders were covered with miniature roses.
As gently as possible, Rico pulled back the summer spread and sheet and settled next to her. It was a relief to stretch out. Rosalita did not stir. Her breathing was so rhythmic that he thought she might just be pretending to sleep, but if that was so, so be it. Let her sleep or pretend to sleep, he thought, not unkindly. It was easier for both of them either way.
But in the morning, before she got out of bed for work, she pressed herself up against his back and circled her arm around his waist. “Rico,” she whispered into his neck, “I did something terrible, and I need to tell you. I was so upset last night that I talked to Elena. I told her too much. I told her everything. I didn’t mean to, but I did. I’m sorry, Rico.”
He had not been dreaming when she woke him. He had been in the delicious nothing of deep sleep, and he felt disoriented for being pulled away from it. “I already know,” he mumbled without turning toward her.
“I’m sorry,” she repeated.
“Rosalita,” he said, not knowing where the words were coming from, “I think we’ve gotten to the stage where anything goes.” Her arm around him tightened slightly, and Rico felt her whole body against his, her leg pushing itself in between his legs, and her foot running down the length of his calf to his ankle. He felt her breasts flattening against his back. Then her arm around his waist began to drop down slowly until her hand found his cock, which was half hard anyway, and she began to stroke him. He thought of stopping her, but why? It felt good.
“Fuck me,” she whispered.
Rico shifted onto his back and Rosalita moved on top of him. She still wore her nightgown, but once she lowered herself onto his cock, she stripped it off and threw it toward the corner of the bedroom. Rico reached for her breasts as she began to slowly shift her hips back and forth. She seemed to have all the time in the world, the way she barely moved, as if even the tiniest rocking put her into some state that she wished to cherish for a while before she moved on. Her eyes were closed, her hair untamed, like a mane, and backlit by the sun that was just beginning to slant its way in the window.
She had been so far away for so long, as if her spirit and her body were living different lives, but now they had reunited and she was solid again like she always had been. Rosalita was formed from the earth, made from mud and rivers and vegetation that grew slowly. She was like an animal, living in nature and feeling every right to be there, alive and present. She was the coyote asleep in the river reeds, the stray cat suckling kittens under somebody’s storage shed, the snake finding its way to the well where the water is pure and cold. He loved her. He did. He always had.
He wrapped his arms around her and rolled over, sweeping her underneath him, where her hair spread out on the pillow like ink. Her eyes were open now and so were his, and when they kissed, neither closed them.
“Rico, mi amor,” she whispered as he pounded his confused love into her, inch by inch. And before she could say more, he kissed her deeply, so deep he could almost feel her throat with his tongue.
Later, after she had climbed out of bed, perilously close to being late for work, Rico fell into a satisfied sleep. It wasn’t until he awoke an hour later that he realized she had never asked him where he’d been until nearly one in the morning. Lying there in the tangle of sheets, he took a moment to admire her courage in the face of all this unknown. Then he got up and went to the garage, knowing that Margaret would arrive for her welding lesson in a half hour. He sat at his desk with his cup of coffee, not wanting to miss the moment when she appeared on Barelas Road, heading straight to him at her New York pedestrian clip.
MARGARET HAD awoken early, at first light, and was already walking Magpie along the bosque before it had brightened enough to be called daytime. All night long she had dreamed of welding, of the fire and heat that fuses two parts into one forever. Her dream space was filled with colors—blood red and cherry red, lemon yellow and mustard yellow, blue and violet and purple. Acetylene torches and welding rods and beads of molten metal appeared at various moments to rearrange the molecules of color and then move on, as if invisible painters or welders were hard at work behind the scenes. She woke up happy. She had been suffering from an absence of dreams for a long time. Too long. For most of her life, when she closed her eyes at night, she went to a preferable world where all events were unpredictable and people who were forever dead in this world seemed to live on. But her dreams had dried up two years before she left New York. She would climb into bed and tumble into the blackness of sleep, and that was it. After her parents and Donny, she counted loss of dreams as the biggest tragedy of her life.
Now she’d had one, all color and flames, and it tempted her to close her eyes again and go back inward, maybe stay there permanently. But when she paused to glance around her bedroom, she couldn’t help but notice that it was also a feast. She had painted the thick adobe walls a shade of sprin
g green, and the ceiling was a deep dark shade of periwinkle. Above her head, a ceiling fan with its white blades circling created a psychedelic effect as it orbited around in the great expanse of periwinkle. With her foot, she reached for Magpie, who had taken to sleeping on the bottom of the futon mattress, and ruffled the fur along her dog’s great neck.
“Let’s get up and go to the river,” Margaret said, and Magpie sighed, deeply, as if she’d had enough of a walk last night and preferred to sleep in. But once Margaret propelled herself upright, Magpie scrambled to her feet and waited by the door for Margaret to let her out. Margaret got dressed quickly. She was the rare woman who could be up and ready to go in five minutes—ten, if she took a shower, which she did not do this morning, having luxuriated in a long bath late last night.
They were perhaps a quarter of a mile into their two-mile walk when Margaret saw the coyote for the second time. Though she had no way of knowing if it was the same coyote who had captivated her a few days ago, she chose to believe it was, as if he was somehow her personal coyote, assigned to her for purposes known only to nature. He was ahead of her on the trail, close, perhaps fifty feet. He had probably been trotting along as coyotes do when he heard or smelled something amiss behind him, and had stopped to investigate because his head was turned around, back toward them, while his body faced away. Margaret stopped moving, though Magpie, who was off in the bushes investigating something mysterious, continued to thrash around, oblivious.
Margaret felt hypnotized by the gaze of the coyote. He seemed unafraid, though Margaret knew he would disappear the instant she made a move. She wanted so badly to be permitted to approach. She felt that, if he were to allow her to step toward him, it would prove she was a good person, a person even a coyote could trust. So she stayed still, and it crossed her mind that her standing still was what made him trust her even a little. Standing still had great power in its way. After perhaps twenty seconds, Magpie broke out of the scrubby growth onto the path, and the coyote turned his yellow head around and slipped into the undergrowth. Margaret walked along and was soon at the spot where the coyote had been. She imagined he was hidden, watching her, noticing the moment when her scent blended seamlessly with his.
