Rust

by Julie Mars

  As she worked on her whimsical morning sculptures, collecting twigs and sticks and stones and circling them around the base of a great cottonwood tree, Margaret’s thoughts returned again and again to the idea that standing still, remaining in that unique moment of pure potential before action was taken, was the best possible moment to live in. This confused her, for at least when it came to painting, she had often felt the power of the forward movement, but rarely the lure of its opposite.

  Margaret was used to having her dog and her thoughts as her main companions in life, along with oil paint, and therefore it was not the least bit unusual for her to simply sit down to mull over an idea or a feeling. Sometimes her mind felt so electric with activity that she could do nothing more than stand back and let it happen. Today was a day like that, and so, after she placed the last river reed on her morning sculpture, she parked herself on a tree that had keeled over into the river. The trunk was huge, and the bark had long since fallen off. Margaret walked out, which required a bit of balancing, about twenty feet over the muddy brown water of the Rio, and sat down in the crook of two branches. All around her, hearts were carved into the wood with names of lovers: Roberto + Maria, Jose + Dora, Mateo + Felecia, and so on. It seemed timeless to Margaret, who chose not to listen to the voice, cynical in nature, that wanted to raise such questions as, “Yeah, sure, Roberto and Maria. How long did that last?” Instead, she took her Swiss army knife out of her pocket. She had begun to carry it on her morning walks once it had become clear that she would occasionally need to strip bark from a sapling or cut a notch into a river reed in order to complete her day’s sculpture assignment. She placed her thumbnail in the little notch on the side of the blade and opened it. What could she add to this surprising little love fest by the river?

  She began to carve, not Rico and Margaret as one might expect, but rather “Regina + Vincent” in honor of her parents, whom she hadn’t seen in thirty-two years. It was more work than she expected, and she suddenly understood why lovers so frequently opt for initials. But Margaret was nothing if not diligent. She dug the tip of the knife into the dead wood, and after a long time, she had both names inside a heart-shaped fence. All the while she carved, she thought about her theme of the day: the strange power of standing completely still.

  By anyone’s standards, she knew very little about her mother, the wild spirit, but she was certain that Regina had never stood still, not for an instant. She was restless, Donny had said, always wanting to be somewhere else, doing something else. As a little girl in pigtails, she wanted to be grown up. “She had no use for childhood, Margaret,” Donny once said when Margaret was perhaps fourteen and pumping him for a few personal tidbits from which she could construct a mother. Then he told her a story: when Regina was just five years old—just three years before her own mother died, a victim of breast cancer at the age of thirty-two—the three of them had been sitting at the dinner table discussing Regina’s first day of kindergarten, which was fast approaching. Regina had announced, with clarity and volume, that she wasn’t going.

  “You have to go, my darling girl,” her mother had said. Her mother, Erin, was a woman who got a kick out of life, and she thought her willful daughter was adorable.

  “I’m not going,” Regina replied.

  “You don’t really have a choice. All the children have to go to school, like it or not. I had to go, and so did your daddy.”

  “That doesn’t matter. I’m not going,” said Regina. “You’re not the boss of me, and you can’t make me.”

  “Unfortunately for you, we can make you,” said Donny, not in a mean way, but in the firm father-way he thought she needed.

  Regina had pushed back a bit from the table. She had looked very pensive for, perhaps, Donny said, thirty seconds. Then she had turned to him, and very calmly asked, ”Who are you, anyway? And why are you telling me what to do?”

  Against their better judgment, both Donny and Erin had begun to laugh. Truthfully, said Donny, they tried not to, had even cast a warning glance to each other, but in the end they simply could not hold back.

  Regina, obviously angered by their laughter, which she took as aimed at her rather than appreciative of her, hollered again, “Who are you? Why are you telling me what to do?”

  Donny had said, in a voice meant to imitate the wrathful voice of God coming through the clouds toward some poor sinner, “I am the man who’s taking you to school come Monday morning. And she—” here he gestured across the table toward his young wife, “—and she is the woman who’s taking you today to buy a school uniform, including the beanie that you think is stupid. I have spoken!”

  Regina had stormed off to her room and slammed the door, leaving her parents at the table, giggling like two fools.

  But he had also admitted to Margaret that he later regretted it, making his daughter go to school. Within three years, her mother was dead. Every one of those moments, all three years, were precious, and, looking back, he wished Regina had had them. And then he’d packed her up and moved from Ireland to New York City. Who knew how that had affected her?

  “Am I like her?” Margaret had asked.

  “You look like her, spitting image,” Donny replied. “But at least you can sit still.”

  What he didn’t know was that Margaret had indeed received that wildness gene, but it had gotten trapped inside her body, making her a walking cyclone, even if she didn’t seem that way.

  But now she had made a move, packed up and took off for New Mexico, a place she’d never thought about living, until the idea—inspired by the image of coyotes running along the Rio in the middle of town—took root in her mind, crowding her so much that she finally gave into it. So here she was, a bump on a log in Albuquerque as the sun rose inch by inch above the Manzano Mountains.

  “Let’s take off,” she said to Magpie, who was conked out on her side in the red mud by the river. They walked home at a brisk pace, arriving there at ten after eight. Margaret poured herself some cereal, ate it while propped up in the hammock, and then locked up the gate and started toward Rico’s.

  1990

  VINCENT GRIPS his 500 rupees as if they’re made of gold. He has no idea how much money it actually is, what he can buy with it. He doesn’t know how he will get more when they run out.

  He only knows that he must find Regina.

  He must find her and set her free.

  He wonders if she will recognize him after all these years. He has changed from a strong young man, with wild black curls, into a beaten man, skinny with missing teeth. When he looks into a mirror, which is rarely, he sees his hair has lost its color.

  Whatever might have happened to Regina, however she looks, whatever state her mind is in, he knows he can heal her. And he will. Vincent knows that he was her strength, her strong foundation, and he can be that to her again.

  He wanders the streets of Siruguppa, searching for a policeman or a police station.

  When he finds one, he collects his breath and walks inside.

  The officer at the front desk speaks perfect English.

  He says there was only one women’s prison in Goa back then, sixteen years ago. He writes down the name for Vincent. He says it is a ten-hour bus ride.

  Vincent follows the policeman’s directions to the bus station. A bus leaves for Fort Aguada in the morning. He counts and recounts his rupees. He has enough to get there, but not enough to come back.

  But why come back?

  He wanders through the streets, which are crowded, which stink of body odor and sewage going nowhere. He enters a food shop, pockets several items, pays for a liter of water with a sealed top.

  This country roars, he thinks as he tries to tune out the racket all around him.

  He spends the night in the bus station on a bench, wedged in with several other people. One woman offers him a samosa, which he accepts with gratitude. In the morning, he is the first one on the bus. He sits in the front seat.

  He watches the road, every curve, as
if he’s driving.

  “Yo, Rico,” said Margaret as she stepped through the door into Garcia’s Automotive.

  “Yo, Margaret,” he responded, warming already.

  “The new day is upon us, for better or for worse,” she said, as she dropped her bag on the floor and helped herself to some coffee.

  Rico watched her, happy to be in the same room with her. “For better or for worse,” she had said. Somehow, since she had shown up at his door, his life had gotten better and worse at the exact same time. Just a few hours ago, he had made love to his wife for the second time in two days, a fine thing after a four-year dry spell; but now he wanted to make love to Margaret, just pull the blinds and go at it on the cool concrete floor, though she had made it more than clear that that was not going to happen, and he supposed she meant what she said.

  “Last night after we got home, I went to Fernando’s grave,” Rico blurted out, surprising himself. “First time I ever went.”

  Margaret had just seated herself on the folding chair. “You did? That’s big.” She was leaning slightly toward him and her green eyes, so intent upon his, made him feel for a moment that everything in the whole world had an emerald green tint. “How was it?”

  “I got shook up,” Rico said. “Started crying and everything.” Why was it so easy to talk to this woman? To admit things to her that he would normally keep to himself?

  “Crying is good,” she said with conviction. “I’ll bet you’ve both needed that for a long time.”

  “Both?”

  “You and Fernando,” she said. “Both.” She was quiet for a few moments, and so was Rico. Then she added, “My grandfather used to say that when you cried for somebody, your tears found their way to them no matter where they were, and they suddenly thought of you and a little firecracker of love went off and the sparks found you, wherever you were. He said that’s why you always feel better after you cry.”

  Rico considered this. He had a sudden image of a wise old white guy, somebody big like John Wayne, sitting in a rocking chair with a miniature Margaret on his knee. “And when did he tell you this?” he asked, with a smile just beginning to form.

  “Oh . . .” Margaret hesitated for just a second and then said, “when my parents dumped me off with him when I was five and then disappeared. In the beginning, I cried all the time. He came up with a lot of stories about why crying was good, and I still remember them and I still believe them, every one.”

  Rico noticed that she had shifted in her chair and averted her eyes from his when she spoke. He knew instinctively that it wasn’t the original event, but the telling of it that put her on the spot. Margaret has trouble opening up to me, he thought, and I have trouble closing down.

  “Where did they go?” he asked.

  “India. They never came back.”

  “Something happened to them. Something bad.” He said this with authority.

  Margaret turned her green gaze on him. “Donny—that’s my grandfather—he tried to find them for a long time, a couple of years or more, but he never got anywhere. After a while, he gave up.” She stood up suddenly. “It’s okay, Rico. I’m over it. Let’s weld.” She turned and headed into the work bay before Rico had even gotten up out of his seat.

  “What are we doing today?” Margaret asked as she pulled her hair back in a burgundy scrunchie and slipped a pair of goggles around her head like a hairband. “Another axle? Or the bodywork?”

  “I got you set up over here,” he said.

  “You mean I’m going to start?” He could hear the excitement in her voice. “Wow!” she added, taking a protective leather apron off a hook and slipping it over her head. Then she began to dig through her big bag and came out with a few charts, obviously copied from one of her how-to books, that provided information on melting temperatures and the like. She had pasted them onto cardboard, and now she propped them up against the wall at the back of the workbench. She hooked a pen onto one. “In case I need to make notes,” she said.

  Rico found this all very amusing, her enthusiasm. Watching her get organized, he could see the little girl she had been, listening to her abuelo’s stories about how tears work, soaking them up. She was a person who soaked things up. All you had to do was watch her to see it happening. She had soaked up the story of Fernando, and somehow, by giving it to her, he had freed himself to visit his brother’s grave. It was so mysterious, so unexpected.

  It was not lost on him that he had now heard the first and only tidbit of truly personal information about her, this woman he felt he knew inside out for no good reason. She had been abandoned by her parents. As a father himself, Rico could not imagine such a thing. He had not been separated from his daughters for more than three days in their whole lives. Even on those three overnights—in Las Vegas, Nevada, to be specific—he suffered so much, missed them so thoroughly, that he was tempted to suggest to Rosalita that they pack up and go home. The neon lights of the Sin City were no match for the sparkle in his daughters’ eyes. Even now he lived in dread that one of them would take it into her head to move out on her own. Rosalita said it was inevitable, while Rico stood in his backyard and imagined three more casitas on it.

  Margaret had read enough and watched Rico enough to know the steps, and he had already told her, just last night, that the first order of business was to learn to control the temperature of the base metal. He had already set up his smallest oxyacetylene torch, bolted a steel plate to the edge of the workbench, and collected bits and pieces of mild steel, forged steel, cast brass, and cast iron for her to practice on. She used a clamp to secure her first piece of mild steel and then turned to Rico. “Should I just have at it?”

  He nodded.

  “What should I make?” she asked as she studied the array of small shapes stacked up on the workbench.

  “Don’t make anything. Just try to get the feel of it for a while,” said Rico. “Y ten cuidado.”

  Margaret lowered her goggles over her eyes and slipped her hands into a pair of leather work gloves—size small—that she had bought for this purpose. “Bombs away,” she said, and then she began to weld in earnest. She did not speak at all, as if silence were required of a welding apprentice. Rico stood by and watched, ready to step in to protect her, not to mention himself and his garage, if she was headed for something dangerous. But Margaret took it slowly, adjusting the oxygen, testing the flame, watching the metal puddle as she heated it. She tiptoed into her project like a guerrilla soldier and, before long, she had attached two pieces of mild steel together. She shut off the torch and held it up like a trophy.

  “I know it’s raggedy,” she said, “but look, Rico! I actually welded something!” The rusty parts back in her yard were already crowding into the periphery of her vision, lining up, waiting to be welded, too.

  “Not bad,” Rico said. Her smile was so wide and he was so close to her that for the first time he noticed that she had a tiny chip off her right front tooth, just the tiniest chip, and he was consumed with a desire to know how it had happened. He realized in that instant, with Margaret holding up her welded piece of metal like a winning Bingo card, that, no matter what happened between them in the long run, he simply had to know everything there was to know about this woman.

  It had occurred to him that he would not see her again after today until Monday, five days away. That was their deal: Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday mornings. It was probably a good thing because, while she was a beautiful monkey wrench, she was still a monkey wrench that he personally had thrown into the day-to-day operations of his garage. He needed to keep his mind on his business, which was impossible when she was around. But he already missed her, even if she was standing just a few feet from him, her acetylene torch flaming steadily and her eyes barely blinking, so focused was she on what she was doing. Rico had a tall stool, and he went and got it for her.

  “Try sitting down,” he said. “Relax.” He could see the cords in her neck and clenched jaw, as if she, personally, had to weld the wh
ole universe back together in the next five minutes. Margaret rested her rear on the edge of the stool and kept right on working. Rico saw that she was lost to him for the moment, concentrating with such intensity that she had probably forgotten he was there. It was good to see a woman in that state. The women around his own house were easily distracted, particularly by the ringing of the phone. When the phone rang, a stampede started. This annoyed Rico, who had instituted a policy of no phone calls during dinner as a way of restoring balance.

  Just thinking of his home, his three girls, his wife, and his mother, took Rico’s breath away for a few seconds. Why? Because in increasingly bigger waves, it had occurred to him that he might chuck it all for a chance to be with Margaret. He had already imagined moving into her old adobe house, fixing it up bit by bit until it could hold up its head in the neighborhood. He’d already imagined big kettles of posole on the stove, which he would make for her, and a gravel driveway instead of a dirt one, which would cut down on the dust that blew around the yard in the wind. He’d already imagined a small bed, maybe just a single, in which they would sleep, so wrapped up in each other that it would take several seconds in the morning to figure out which arms and legs were whose.

  At the same time, he felt sick at the possibility that any of it might actually happen, for if it did, it would mean personal wreckage beyond anything nature could serve up. How in the world could a simple man like Rico, for he thought of himself as a basic, nuts-and-bolts kind of hombre, reconcile such opposing desires? How could he walk away from everything and keep it, too? And if he did walk away, how long would it take for regret to consume him?

  He glanced at Margaret, whose only interest as he did mental back flips all around her was the square of steel plate she was currently attempting to stitch via fire onto another one. It made him chuckle suddenly, his predicament. There was not a thing he could do about any of it. So he raised the Chevy Impala on the hydraulic lift and went to work. He kept half his mind on his job, while the other half noticed, with pleasure, the core of heat he experienced in his heart just having Margaret at work fifteen feet away.