Rust (9 page)

He watered the spider plant that had been hanging in the office window for five years, emptied the garbage can—which as usual overflowed with the takeout coffee cups of his Saturday customers—and then went outside to collect the trash that had blown against the fence or into his small parking area, or perhaps been thrown there by passersby, over the weekend. He checked his appointment book, which looked healthy with jobs for the week, slipped into his work coveralls, which he left on a hook on the bathroom door, and settled down in his chair to watch for Margaret. He wanted to see her as she approached, take in, in a relaxed manner, the way she moved toward his door, experience the burst of energy that he imagined she would bring to him.

He rocked back in his rolling office chair so his feet dangled a few inches above the floor. It was a crazy thing, he mused, how much a middle-aged man, a father and a grandfather for God’s sake, could look forward to seeing a skinny middle-aged woman, one who had already made it clear she had no interest in him, stroll around a corner. And it wasn’t because she was trying to attract his attention, either. Margaret wasn’t working much on her appearance, he had to admit.
Chicanas
tended to put more time into it, with their polished nails, gold earrings, high heels, and tight pants designed to show off their rounded hips and fleshy thighs, which they were proud of and rightly so; while Margaret looked, both days he’d seen her, as if she hadn’t changed her jeans in a week and had no plan to. She wore baggy T-shirts that hid whatever equipment she had, and her long hair looked like it might not object if she dragged a comb through it more often.

Within ten minutes, she appeared on Barelas Road, coming at a fast clip, a walking speed that the new people from the East seemed to think was normal. To Rico, she looked as if she was in a big hurry, though she was actually five minutes early and there wasn’t really an official starting time anyway. She wore dark sunglasses like the Blues Brothers along with her usual outfit, and she carried a shoulder bag big enough for a weekend trip to Las Vegas, Nevada.

“Yo, Rico,” she said as she came in, “here I am, reporting for duty.”

“They really say that over there in New York? Yo?” he responded. “I thought that was only for the movies.”

She laughed, a lovely sound that he had never heard before.

“Nope, all real,” she said. “That and more.” He had made no move to get up from his chair, so she added, in a conversational tone, “Ever been to New York?”

“
Mira
, I don’t leave the South Valley unless I have to. I get lost in downtown Albuquerque.”

Margaret smiled. Downtown Albuquerque consisted of a couple of square blocks of courthouses, a fourteen-screen cineplex, a few oddball businesses—such as a men’s hat store and a Holocaust museum—and some restaurants that seemed to wrap it up by ten
P
.
M
., even on the weekend. It had pool halls and an Institute of Flamenco. Many of the buildings were painted with murals that looked left over from the sixties—big smiling suns, elongated androgynous humans falling through the cosmos, hot cartoon babes carrying signs that read “No glove, no love,” and such like. Margaret adored it. Walking along Central Avenue was like entering a time warp or a dream that someone she didn’t know had had a long time ago.

She fished into her bag and brought out a notebook, a pen, a bottle of water, and a scrunchie for her hair. Rico, with all the women in his life, was well versed in hair accoutrements, and he even knew the mythology associated with each one, such as why they protected the hair follicle from split ends or breakage, though he had no specific idea how such knowledge came to him. Probably through osmosis during the dinner table discussions he tuned out.

“You can hang your bag on one of the hooks in the garage,” he said, finally standing up and moving in the direction of the work bays. She followed him, her step light and ready, as if she were on the verge of breaking into a run just to get there faster. He intended to emphasize safety first, warn her about the danger of serious flash burns from exposure to the hostile ultraviolet light in arc welding, about hot metal and the way it sears through flesh and ignites any combustible material, about vapors locked inside of some container you might have cause to cut or weld that explode like rockets and drive a man or an acetylene tank or anything else in the vicinity straight through the wall or roof. All welders had horror stories, and Rico knew for a fact that most were true, but when he turned to face her and saw her standing there, her notebook and pen in hand like a schoolgirl, he couldn’t bring himself to start off by scaring her.

And he had a second lesson planned in his mind, a lecture of sorts in which he would outline and briefly explain the types of welding—fusion, gas, TIG and MIG electric, brazing, and soldering—and also throw around all the technical terms she could ever hope for; but something told him that Margaret needed her initiation by fire, not words, and right then and there he scrapped all the ideas he’d come up with about being a good teacher and just pointed to the low rider he was currently working on.

“The guy who owns this wants to put some big-ass tires on it,” he said, “real fat, and they’ll stick way out from the sides if I don’t shorten the axles. So that’s what I’m doing this morning—cutting out a chunk of the axle and then welding it back together. You can watch.”

“Can I ask questions?” She sounded so businesslike that Rico almost laughed.

“Yeah, but I might not answer right away if I have to focus on what I’m doing.”

She nodded and said, “Okay, no problem.”

It was a strange experience for Rico to have any woman, and this woman in particular, in his shop. Rosalita rarely came here, and his daughters only stopped by every blue moon when they happened to pass along Fourth Street and felt a sudden urge to say hello to their Papi. A woman changed the atmosphere in the garage, invaded it somehow without meaning to. She made it feel like a radio was playing even though there wasn’t one. It would take getting used to, this sense of double the usual presence.

“Come here. I’ll show you how to set up,” he said.

Margaret moved to his side and paid strict attention. She was a person who liked to learn something new. The first time she’d entered an oil painting class, for example—from the moment the teacher arrived in the studio—she’d felt perilously close to bursting into tears and she had to work hard to overpower them, knowing that very few teachers, or fellow students for that matter, would automatically recognize them for what they were—little watery statements of happiness and gratitude. Such gratitude brought with it the image of a door opening, a door she hadn’t previously known existed, and Margaret always hoped that she might find freedom behind it. Consequently, she rushed into learning as if she were simultaneously running out of a burning building.

In that, Donny had told her, she was like her mother, who had impatiently learned to read before kindergarten, who took to scampering, her arms extended out to the side, along the tops of railings like a tightrope walker, who actually convinced him to scrounge up the money to send her to a wilderness training program in Utah when she was only fifteen. Regina, Margaret thought, was more a daredevil than a model student like she was, but Donny told her that it was the same passion taking a different form, and she believed him.

So when Rico started in, Margaret opened herself totally to the lesson, which came at her fast even though he delivered it in that crazy New Mexico accent she had always—from the first time she heard it in their old stand-up act—assumed was a Cheech and Chong joke. Donny, a big fan of comedy, had one of their records from the early seventies, and every time they listened to it together, they howled with laughter. Donny lamented the demise of real stand-up, which had been replaced, he said, with what he called drive-by humor.

Standing in Rico’s garage, Margaret felt as if she’d stepped into a tornado of important information, and she was immediately swept up in it: this is how you mark a full acetylene cylinder; this is how you mark an empty one; this is why you never tilt it or lay it down; this is how you secure it using chains; this is why you crack the valve to blow out dust in a regulator; this is the chart that lists the melting points of various metals; this is the chart that shows which goggles you need, depending on the job; this is why you don’t overheat lead when you solder; this is the range of electrode sizes used in arc welding. On and on it went, Rico just chatting away as he set up his equipment, and Margaret hanging on to the details by her fingertips.

Rico hoisted the low rider up on his hydraulic lift and pointed out areas he had already welded. He did quite a business with the low rider subset, diehard motorheads who fixated on every detail. He did bodywork, too. In fact, he said, he liked aluminum body TIG welding more than anything else because aluminum felt so pliant under his fingers. For small art projects, Margaret would probably braze and solder most often, which was something she could do on that cement pad in her yard, he added, but big welding jobs were out. Too many sparks. Too many things to catch on fire—including her.

By the time they knocked off at noon, Margaret was quite overwhelmed. “I never knew it was so complicated,” she commented as she replaced a pair of protective goggles on a wall hook. “Or so dangerous, either. What am I getting myself into here?” For a long time in her art life, she had wanted to expand past the two dimensions of painting into three, to encourage her creativity to make more demands on her and take up more space, all the space it wanted. But she hadn’t really known what she was inviting. Now that the three-dimensional urge had taken hold of her, she couldn’t shake it, and didn’t want to. But today she felt a little daunted.

Rico, on the other hand, had felt like he was blushing half the morning because no sooner would he make some kind of general explanation about welding than he’d hear an alternate meaning, some undercurrent, in his own words. His every reference to fire, to heat, to melting together seamlessly, it was all too close for comfort to the language of sex. When he was showing her the basics of electric arc welding, and he had to explain that space was necessary between the hot electrode and the metal that was waiting for it, that this space was essential for the electricity to arc in, he felt the inches between them fill with a current hot enough to melt metal—and he almost forgot to mention the part about temperature control being the single most important thing in welding. The odd thing was that, he had totally removed from his mind, as if with a cutting torch, the possibility of sex with her. But doing that had paradoxically made everything but her seem sexy, and now he felt like a horny teenager who couldn’t even look at one of those yucca plants in his own backyard, the kind that grow a thick seed stalk to the tune of two feet a day, without feeling like he needed to run off somewhere and beat his meat. Feeling this way was a blessing, of sorts. After Rosalita had turned away from him, he’d had to wrestle with his own desires for a long time; and then, as if they’d decided to cooperate with him or had given up in defeat, they simply stopped. Rico was only forty when this happened. He could get it up, but he didn’t particularly want to. For what? He never talked about it because it was embarrassing. Now, out of the blue, he was embarrassed for the opposite reason. What middle-aged man has time to worry about a constant hard-on?

“That’s it for today,” Rico said when they finally broke for lunch. “It’s noon. I have other things to do this afternoon.”

She dropped into his office chair, leaving him to sit down on one of the folding chairs. “Can I buy you lunch, Rico?” she asked, very casually, as if in New York women took the leading role all the time.

“I have something I brought,” he said, and then, because he was essentially an honest man, he added, “My wife packs a lunch for me every day.”

“Oh, you’re married?” There was no subtext of disappointment in her tone that he could detect.

“Not legally. But for a long time. Three daughters, all grown now.”

“And you’re still together. Wow, that’s impressive,” she said, and she seemed to look at him with the kind of respect some women show when they’re telegraphing to the man and simultaneously to themselves,
Hands off!
“What’s the secret?” she asked.

“Put up with whatever gets thrown at you and keep your fucking mouth shut,” Rico said, and Margaret threw back her head and laughed again.

“I knew it!” she said. “I just never heard anybody admit it before.” She had little lights in her eyes, like torches.

“You never got hooked up?”

“I’ve been hooked up, but . . .” She looked around the room as if the end of her sentence would appear by magic on one of the walls and she could read it to him. “. . . never satisfactorily,” she concluded. “I think I have a piece missing in that department. Hey, maybe you could weld one on for me.”

He knew it was a joke, that there was not one iota of genuine suggestiveness in it, but her words hit him right in the solar plexus. Rico had been hit there in the past, mostly by his older brother, and he knew what it meant to take a physical blow so intense that the whole world stopped dead in its tracks while you made a decision about whether to fall down or stay standing. Luckily, he was already sitting, so all he had to do was respond in some way that kept this little conversational ship afloat.

He settled on, “It’s probably the muffler,” and then she laughed again, and Rico felt like he was batting a thousand.

“You assume I have a big mouth,” she responded, “and here I’ve never even shot it off in front of you.”

This time he didn’t have a comeback, so he just smiled at her like he had his secrets, and she smiled back. There they were, a couple of welders, he thought, and suddenly he found himself looking forward to talking over the tricks of the trade with her in the future when they were equals instead of a teacher and student. “Let’s make a plan for your next lesson,” he said. “I was thinking three times a week for a couple weeks until you get the gist of it.”