Rust (35 page)

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.

B
EFORE
M
ARGARET
’
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

A
LICE
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.

Alice takes the backpack and asks him to wait for her. She disappears down a narrow path between boulders that barely allow sunbeams to slant through. He hears her voice, her singing, but it sounds far away. He sits with his back against the rocks, and spread out before him is the whole wide world.

She does not return until the sun is halfway to the horizon line.

They walk home in silence.

At the house, she makes a simple dinner, and while they are eating it, she asks him to tell her his own story, the whole thing. Vincent feels tongue-tied. He doesn’t know where to start. And then suddenly he begins talking. He hears himself tell Alice about the fire that consumed his parents. About Regina and Margaret. About India, and prison, and the years he’s spent trying and failing to find his daughter.

He barely looks up, but he feels Alice listening to him.

He knows he has never been listened to so intently, and it almost scares him.

When he finishes, he finally raises his eyes to hers. Her face is timeless and still, like the rocks they have visited, like the quiet here, broken only by the howls of the coyotes in the distance.

“You need a home,” she says. “Stay here.”

Vincent experiences a convulsion of sorrow, but the very next morning, he begins to build a shack just over the ridge. He builds it out of rocks and old boards which, Alice says, have been piled against the house since the last time Thomas visited, when he himself had thought of building a place.