Rust

by Julie Mars

  His daughters had never seen him cry before, except for a few tears he quickly brushed away at his father’s funeral. He sat there, wearing one of his best shirts. He’d had a great dinner. It seemed impossible to have it all end like this. He felt so sapped of strength that he couldn’t even get up and leave, so he just sat there as his daughters descended on Rosalita like a pack of wolves.

  “Why are you making Papi cry?” Maribel yelled, while Lucy ran to his side and threw her arms around his neck. “Don’t listen to her, Papi,” she said. “She can be such a bitch; she really can,” and Ana turned to her mother and said, “Happy now?” before she got up from the table, reached down to lift Jessica out of her high chair, and stalked off toward the house. Just before she got there, she turned around and fired off one more round at Rosalita. “Everyone has a right to have friends, whether you like it or not!” she yelled, a rare event for Ana; and then she opened the kitchen door and went in, slamming it behind her with such gusto that the whole house seemed to shake.

  “I didn’t mean it the way it sounded,” Rosalita said in a low voice.

  “Do you ever listen to yourself? The way you talk to us?” Maribel yelled back.

  “That’s enough, mi hija,” he said, very quietly. Then he added, to nobody in particular, “I’m going to walk your abuelita back to her casita now.” He got up and made his way around the table, where he helped Elena get to her feet. They started down the little path through the deadly nightshade to her house. Lucy and Maribel watched them go off toward the corner of the lot. Rosalita sat in her place with a blank look on her face as her daughters walked away from her, back to the house, and disappeared inside.

  Rico did not want to talk once they got into Elena’s kitchen, which she understood very well. She made him a cup of tea, and together they sat in front of the television for two shows. Then she said she was ready to go to bed. “Rico, mi hijo, you sleep right here on the couch if you want to,” she said. “Give yourself a little time. Rosalita, too.”

  “Gracias, mi madre,” he replied. “I think I will.”

  Elena found a fluffy pillow, some sheets, and a blanket in the closet, and brought them to her son. Then she kissed him on the cheek and went to bed.

  Rico stripped off his nice shirt and hung it from the back of a kitchen chair. He stretched out on the couch in the dark as if he needed to recover from a bad beating. Why he felt that way, he was not sure.

  In the morning, he went into the house to get dressed for work. Rosalita was sitting up in bed when he let himself in the bedroom door and hung up his shirt in the closet.

  “Rico,” she said. “I . . .”

  “Not now, Rosalita,” he responded. “I have to go to work.”

  She simply nodded once.

  Rico left.

  He could not remember a worse day in years, maybe in his whole life. He felt sick inside.

  Sick of everything.

  1994

  WHEN HE gets off the bus three days later, Vincent steps into the bright blue sky. It seems to be everywhere. He hasn’t seen the color blue so clearly since he was a young man, before all the trouble came to him. It feels like the perfect thing in which to disappear.

  He buys himself a gallon of water and sets out.

  He hitchhikes, and in the beginning he gets rides. He stretches out in the back of two different pickup trucks and watches the industrial sprawl of Gallup vanish, the garages and warehouses and cheap restaurant chains replaced by sand and rocks and silence.

  He is deeply tired.

  When he’s dropped off at the corner of one dirt road, there is nothing in sight anywhere, except desert rocks like cathedrals in the distance and birds circling overhead. “Watch out for rattlesnakes,” says the driver of the truck, a Navajo grandfather who wears a baseball cap with “army” written across the front. “Don’t let the bobcats see you.” The man takes off, and, after the sounds of his truck dim and then disappear, Vincent is left in the total silence with nothing but the blue sky for company.

  He finds it soothing.

  He takes out Thomas’ map and stares at it.

  He still has about sixteen miles to go.

  He starts walking, taking it slow because the sun is high in the sky, and there is nothing between him and it but air.

  At times, he feels like giving up, just laying himself down by the side of the road and calling it the end of one long day. But he keeps on.

  He reaches Alice Yazzie’s door.

  He knocks.

  An old Indian lady answers. She has no fear in her eyes.

  “I have a message from Thomas,” he says, and he collapses.

  WHEN MARGARET had shown up in his shop, Rico was so tied up in knots that he could barely acknowledge her, which, he noticed, she seemed to take in stride once he assured her she wasn’t the cause of his bad mood. She simply went to work and left him alone. He focused on his work, too. It had always been a way to get his mind off things, a skill he had particularly perfected in the past four years. But today, even as he performed the routine garage tasks that comprised his Saturdays, he could not put what had happened last night completely out of his mind. Breaking down and crying like a baby in front of all his girls was not a proud moment for him.

  What had bothered him about Rosalita’s snide remark, which, he acknowledged, was not as bad as it could have been, was that he had been trying hard to come to terms with what to do about his feelings for Margaret. What better way, he had thought, than simply to treat her as someone who had a role with the Garcias: a family friend. He had considered it for a long while before his suggestion that they invite her for dinner. He had somehow not considered the possibility that such a suggestion would be met with bitter sarcasm.

  It bothered him because his attempt to turn Margaret into a family friend as a way to neutralize his strong attraction was, in his mind, a creative solution. He imagined his whole family, whether they knew it or not, helping him to stay put. Letting go of the privacy between him and Margaret was a sacrifice. So when he suggested dinner, he felt as if he was giving something important away, something he wanted for himself yet knew he had to share. But Rosalita had thrown her napkin onto the table and made a comment which felt like a blow to him, one that he was too weak and too stunned to return.

  That moment had gone by so fast and hit so hard that he still felt floored by it. At the table his frustration—to his dismay—had turned to tears. He knew right then that no matter what solution he tried, he simply could not win. His creative compromise was rejected without discussion, and he felt both helpless and misunderstood. He accepted finally that he would have to choose, that he could not have it all.

  When his daughters—all of them—had risen to his defense, it both comforted and appalled him. Because what kind of man cries at the dinner table and then stands by while three young girls fight his battle? All mixed up in that was the shock he felt at the hostility they displayed toward their mother. All these years, as Rosalita had drifted around in her black cloud of regret or whatever it was, Rico had worked doubly hard to keep the family united for the benefit of the girls. But when he saw them turn on her, it became instantly clear that they had not been fooled for a moment, and Rosalita’s distance, her impatience, her confusion, and her tension had affected them all, more than he knew or thought possible. So the moment of support from his daughters, which should have made him feel comforted, had just added to his sense of failure. He had not protected them. And they had turned on their mother, so he hadn’t protected her, either.

  Walking Elena back home, as she held onto his arm as she always did, he suddenly felt old and broken, like she was. Just before he had opened the door to her casita and stepped through, he had glanced back at the patio, and there was Rosalita, all alone at the table with nothing but the remnants of the family feast. His heart had gone out to her. But sometimes in life you turn away and let the person sink. He had gone inside with his mother, staring at those cop shows as if watching murders
was a form of relief. He hadn’t wanted to go home, back to his own bed, and he hadn’t wanted to talk to Rosalita in the morning, though one glance at her made it clear she’d had an awful night. She looked ten years older.

  Once, a long, long time ago, when the police had showed up at their house, Rico had seen them at the end of the driveway and he’d had a moment when he could have slipped into the room and removed the half-ounce of cocaine, as well as the handgun Fernando carried when he went out late at night. Rico could also have warned his brother so he would have been spared jail time. Fernando could have disappeared out the back door, passed through the missing board in the fence, and taken off down the alley. But Rico stood in the window instead and watched the cops close in on the house. It’s time to face up to who you are, mi hermano, he had thought. Here come the cops to show you who you have become.

  That moment had come back to him and he knew it had to do with Rosalita sitting there alone at the picnic table. She certainly was no Fernando, but she had been less than honest with her family, him, and maybe herself; and though he felt deeply sorry for her, he could not help her.

  When he had gone to work, opened the shop and exchanged a few pleasantries with the first of his customers, he had felt locked up in a dark room. Later, the one thing he could see clearly was that he was going to Gallup with Margaret the next day. That is, if she would let him. He was doing that for complicated reasons that had nothing to do with Margaret or his feelings for her. It had to do with standing up as a man to Rosalita. He was working hard to manage himself and his feelings, and there she was, putting him down. He simply could not put up with that.

  So when Margaret had shown up with her boxes of junk and gone to work, Rico had already known that he would invite himself along for the ride to the Indian rez. It was the only direction he could go if he wanted to retain any self-respect.

  As soon as he saw her there, in her goggles and gloves, welding all those bolts and springs into that crazy-looking sculpture, he began to feel lighter, as if she were maybe welding his identity back into place.

  Plus, the idea of being alone with her in a car for a whole day was appealing, because things he wanted to ask her and tell her were piling up inside him. Maybe he would tell her everything, all the things that had happened since he met her just one week ago. So when the moment was right, he simply said the word “we,” and he felt better.

  She had said, “I’m okay by myself, Rico. I’m always okay by myself,” and he had replied, “Just this once.”

  They resonated in his ears, those words, after he said them. Just this once.

  Just this once he was stepping outside the lines of his life.

  Just this once he was turning his back on the rules.

  Just this once he was doing what he wanted to do, and fuck the consequences.

  BEFORE MARGARET’S eyes, the self-portrait was born.

  She fired up the torch and her fingers flew from part to part. Even the cumbersome gloves were not a hindrance. She moved into an altered space and time, and it simply began to happen.

  It had taken her a long time to formulate a theory on her art. She had finally articulated it in a coffee-shop moment to Nick when she was already more than ten years into her painting life.

  “Okay,” she said, “it’s like the painting is already done, so my hands know where to go, and all I have to do is stay out of the way and let them work. I have to keep the thinking out of it. And I can’t look back.”

  “What do you mean—it’s already done?”

  “It’s like it’s mapped out already.”

  “Are you talking about in your subconscious mind or something?” Nick asked. “Because I’m not convinced there is one.”

  Margaret laughed. “Why don’t you just forget about the labels for a few minutes, Nick.” This was during the phase when Nick was married, when he and Margaret would meet and he would itemize his complaints about his wife and her middle-class expectations, her lack of understanding of the artist’s path, and her slavery to social mores. Margaret would come away exhausted and vow not to see him for at least two months. She knew very well that he could not live in a world without labels. She also thought, privately, that he’d be a better painter if he could. She was a great admirer of his work, but she admired it in the way a person might admire a great suspension bridge or the tallest building in the world. His paintings were feats, achievements. They were architectural wonders, but Margaret wasn’t captivated by them.

  Two years later, after Nick’s wife was history, Margaret had felt a strange compulsion to visit the Frick Collection on Seventieth Street to spend the afternoon silently before a particular painting by Titian called Portrait of a Man in a Red Cap. Lucky for her, there was a stone bench in front of it, and she had remained there staring so long that the edges of a male figure in the painting started to blur and all she saw was a web of color that he seemed to drop out of. It occurred to her that the whole painting had fallen from this web of color, just tumbled out of it like a raindrop that hesitates at the edge of the roof, collects itself into a shape, and then lets go. She felt as if paintings were hovering everywhere, waiting for a way in. She had called Nick and had run this idea by him.

  “Margaret, are you stoned?” he had asked.

  “Yeah,” she said, even though she wasn’t, at least, not technically. But she had spent the whole afternoon with an old master and then been catapulted ahead three centuries, out of the serenity of the Frick, into the razzle-dazzle of Fifth Avenue, and she felt as stoned as she ever had been.

  “You sound it,” he said. “Paintings hovering everywhere, waiting for a way in, huh?”

  One thing Margaret knew: this sculpture of hers had been hovering, waiting for a way in, and she could barely keep up with it. With the hiss of the oxyacetylene torch in her ears and bits of rust riding like fish in miniscule puddles of melted iron, she attached piece after piece, watching the figure’s hands take shape and her hair grow, her lips parting as if any minute they intended to start chanting, “Free at last!”

  When she finally straightened up to rest for a few seconds, Margaret was convinced that she was born to weld. When her self-portrait had gone as far as she could take it in just one afternoon, when her arms and shoulders and lower back ached so much she knew she could not lift the torch one more time, she had finally moved to the office to sit down. The last thing she was thinking about was her trip the next day for Roadrunner Courier Service. So when Rico had said, “What time are we leaving for Gallup in the morning?” it had taken her a few beats to figure out what he was talking about, and that he wanted to take the drive with her. No warning flares had suddenly lit up in her, so she had not protested.

  Almost simultaneously, she’d had the idea of taking the sculpture along. Even though the two boxes she was hauling were quite large, there was still enough room to fit it in somewhere. An idea was forming: perhaps one day when she was finished, she would make a shrine of it in the middle of the desert and leave it there. This could be a reconnaissance mission. She felt without knowing why that she wanted the next, new round of rust to begin to form on it at the Navajo reservation.

  They planned to start out around nine. Rico would drive to her house in his truck and park it in the yard. Then they would take off, with the sun at their back and the whole of I-40, which went clear to California, before them.

  Margaret had worked another hour after her short break until Rico was ready to close. She tidied up, and paid Rico for the oil change, tune-up, and the use of his welding equipment. Then she placed her sculpture on the front seat of the car, and left. A few minutes later, she pulled into her driveway. She carried her self-portrait inside, resting it against the wall in the living room. My new patron saint, she thought. The patron saint of welders.

  1994

  ALICE PULLS Vincent inside the house. She leaves him on the cool dirt floor while she soaks a dishtowel in cold water and then places it over his forehead like a medicinal compress. She
brings a bowl of water to his side and sprinkles it on his wrists and neck. She unties his hiking boots, soaks another towel, and places it like a tent over his feet. She prays over him, asking the Great Spirit for some special treatment for this white man who already looks like a ghost. She prays that he will stay alive long enough to deliver the message from her grandson who has been swallowed up by the world outside the reservation. When Vincent finally opens his eyes, she makes him sit up and she feeds him pinto beans and pours him a cup of tea that smells like dirt.

  Vincent wishes he had a happy story to tell, and, perhaps because he dreads bringing such terrible news, he allows himself to fall asleep again, immediately after Alice has helped him get up off the floor and climb into her bed. She doesn’t ask questions, doesn’t push. She observes him, as if Thomas’ story might seep out through his pores so she can absorb it.

  It takes four days for Vincent to recover and one more after that before he summons the courage to deliver the truth.

  He tells Alice the whole story while sitting next to her at her kitchen table, holding her hands. He notices that she is barely breathing. He gives her the map, turning it over so she can see the portrait he drew of Thomas at the moment of his passing. She presses it against her heart like a bandage.

  Vincent feels the spirit of Thomas in him as he falls to his knees in front of Alice, wraps his arms around her, and holds her close. Her tears saturate his old denim shirt, which she has washed out for him every other day since he’s been here. Alice asks him to walk with her, far out among the big rocks, where she wants to pray for Thomas’ spirit.

  She fills his backpack with items that she collects from both inside and outside the house. Feathers, stones, bits of string. A stack of what appear to Vincent to be old report cards. A white shirt. An oval-shaped piece of turquoise. Some water in a jar. Matches. Tobacco. The map.

  They leave at sunrise. It is a long, long walk. The sun has climbed high in the sky when she says they have arrived.