Rust (5 page)

Rico drove through his gate, noting that both Rosalita’s and his daughter Maribel’s cars were parked under the
ramada
he had built for shade. He pulled in next to them and turned off the engine. Sometimes living surrounded by women—his wife, three daughters, a granddaughter, and his mother—Rico felt comforted; other days he felt smothered. Such loveliness came with a high price. For every time he received an unexpected kiss on the cheek, a door was closed along the hallway and behind it was a daughter sobbing over something inconsequential. For every time they sat at the dinner table, all together, and he looked from one pretty face to the next—four generations represented right there in his kitchen—the bathroom door was closed while somebody primped behind it, for hours it seemed, sending him outside to do his business in an old outhouse on the far corner of his property, attached to an ancient one-horse barn-shed that, thank God, he had not knocked down when he bought the place. Sometimes he felt that marriage and family were nothing more than a long row of closed doors, blocking him from something far more interesting. When those moods came upon him, he found some work to do outside and just sweated it out.

“
Tamales para todos
,” he called out, as he maneuvered himself around a tricycle that his granddaughter, Jessica, had abandoned next to the front door. “
Vámonos.
Let’s eat.” This produced a flurry of activity: Rosalita quickly setting out silverware and plates, Maribel heading out the back door to collect her
abuelita
, Lucy rounding up Jessica and putting her in a high chair, and Ana closing up the big nursing textbook she was studying on the couch and slowly making her way toward the kitchen. Rico washed his hands in the kitchen sink, and dropped into his chair at the head of the table as all the women in his life settled like dust around him.

But his mind was elsewhere.

It kept drifting back to the moment when Margaret had appeared in the doorway of his shop, how the sun had conspired to place a halo around her; and he had felt, though he didn’t articulate it, that his destiny had finally found him. And later, the way she looked, so cute in the middle of all those useless engine parts laid out like precious gems. Her hair was black, her skin was pale with a few freckles even, and her eyes were as green as the leaves on the Chinese elm trees above her. He thought she was beautiful. So what if she looked half worn-out. Lots of women did.

The platter of tamales was passed from person to person, a green salad appeared on the table, and diet soft drinks were poured into colorful plastic glasses from two different sixty-four ounce bottles. When this group got ready to eat—before the chewing started—the clatter was intense, and sometimes Rico experienced it like a fog of noise over the table. Just as it would begin to clear, one voice would rise up, and it was always Rosalita’s and she always said the same thing. Rico knew it was coming. “So how was everybody’s day?” she would ask, her voice animated as if she really wanted to know, and maybe she did. But tonight Rico didn’t want to answer, and before the fog had even begun to subside, he blurted out, “Who believes in destiny?”

To Rico, it seemed as if all activity stopped for a heartbeat, the platter pausing in midair, glasses freeze-framed on their way to lips, even the disk jockey on the oldies radio station that Rosalita always had blaring took a little silent swallow before he started up again. And they all turned their heads to face him, even little Jessica.

“Rico,” Rosalita said with a curt little laugh, “eat your tamale.” But Maribel, who was optimistic by nature, her eyes wide, asked, “Papi, did you win the Roadrunner Cash?” and he had to shake his head and say, “Sorry,
mi hija
, not today,” to which she replied, “Shit,” and everybody laughed.

“I believe in destiny,” Lucy announced, somewhat urgently.

“You’ve got your destiny right there in that high chair,” Rosalita said, and Rico didn’t want to admit he heard bitterness in the words, but he did. He saw Lucy turn toward her mother, saw the way the blood moved into her neck, turning it crimson in just a few seconds. But before she could say a word in retaliation, Elena leaned over and kissed Jessica on the top of her head and said, “She’s everybody’s destiny,” and Rosalita looked down into her plate and focused all her attention on cutting her tamale.

“Why do you ask, Papi?” This was from Ana, who was looking at him curiously, as if he were a specimen in one of those medical laboratories at UNM that all the nursing students had to march through from time to time in their biology classes.

“I was thinking about it today while I was working,” he said truthfully. “Why do things happen the way they do?”

“You going philosophical on us, Papi?” Ana asked.

“It’s a fair question,” Rico replied. Part of him regretted even bringing the matter up, but a stronger part wanted to push it farther, so he added, “I want to know. Who here believes in destiny—besides Lucy?”

“It’s official,” Ana said in a loud stage whisper. “Papi’s in his midlife crisis.” Everyone laughed, and Rico did, too.

“What’s going to happen to me?” he asked.

“I’ll look it up in my psych book and get back to you,” Ana responded.

“God is in charge,” Maribel suddenly contributed, a strange intensity in her voice. “There’s no such thing as destiny, just God’s will.”

“And I think everyone has the same destiny,” Elena said. “The grave.”

Silence descended over the table like a light snowfall.

“Elena,
mi madre
, you sure know how to wreck a party,” said Rico, though he said it with a big smile in his voice.

But that night, long after everyone had gone to bed, Rico stretched out on the couch, and for the first time he thought about dying. His father had died young. His mother seemed to be well on the way, and she was only in her sixties. What words would he want etched into his gravestone, he wondered. Here lies Rico Garcia. He worked hard all his life? He never cheated on his wife? He had a madman inside him and he never let him out? He wanted more than “Beloved husband and father” and the dates of his birth and death.

Rico closed his eyes. It was late, and the house was quiet. He could hear the sound of his own heart beating. Listening to it soothed him, and he began to drift toward sleep, a process he looked forward to at the end of each long day. He enjoyed the unexplainable images that presented themselves in his mind, the way they made no sense and no apologies. Tonight he felt almost as if he were marching toward some new place far beyond the shapes and colors he saw inside his head, marching to the beat of that little trap drum in his chest. And when he had gone so far he could barely hear the beating anymore, he saw the words of his epitaph, or heard them, or maybe just felt them. He wasn’t sure how they came to him, but he knew what they said. They said, “Rico Garcia. He surprised us all.”

That made him chuckle just as he plummeted into a deep sleep, right there on the couch. For the first time since he and Rosalita got together, he never made it into the bedroom, not all night long.

1974

I
NEED
water, I need food, I need to stay alive, he thinks as he lifts his head slowly. It has taken so long, so many aching hours or maybe days, to figure this out. For all that time he has been wishing to die without allowing those words to form in his mind. But he knows it won’t happen. Nothing comes that easy for him. Ever.

In the air, interlaced with the smells of sweat and filth, the faint scent of rice with cumin hovers. He rises to his feet and begins to flow like one rivulet of dirty water toward the knot of men at the far end of the compound. There are ten toilets there, ten for a thousand men. He will find them and relieve himself. He will join the line for rice and water. He will find a way to survive.

He allows his eyes to rise to the top of the wall, a barrier so high there is nothing visible beyond but sky. No one ever escapes from here. They had impressed that, if nothing else, upon him on the first day, the day he received his number. The day he was assigned to a cell with five other men. When the darkness came and they were forced to go inside, when they all laid down at once, parts of their bodies touched each other. It was that close, that small, that unbearable.

How has this happened to him?

He cannot permit himself that question.

He cannot face the answer.

He stands behind a man whose black hair looks wet with grease. The man’s feet are bare. He wears a shirt thick with grime which is buttoned to the neck and at the wrists. The man’s right hand is mangled, scarred over. When he reaches for the tin plate, he balances it on his arm.

The rice looks as if it had been cooked in dirty water, but he eats it anyway, standing up among a thousand men, searching for one who looked like him.

White.

But he sees no one.

M
ARGARET
FELT
no sense of wariness as she moved to the kitchen door and opened it to Rico. The screen door, with its flimsy wooden frame and screen popped out in two places, now stood between them, offering very little protection. She didn’t feel she needed any, so what did it matter. Even Magpie, asleep on the floor of the living room, failed to stir.

“I’ve come to say I’m sorry for what I said last night,” Rico began. He had actually practiced a more flowery speech, but it vanished from his mind the moment he saw her. “I had the wrong idea, and I ended up making an asshole out of myself.” Here he stopped talking. He could see Margaret quite clearly through the screen, and he hoped to detect a look that indicated he’d made the right decision by returning, that they could start over again, fresh. But before he even had a moment to check, he heard more words coming out of his own mouth. “. . . which is not unusual,” he added, and then he smiled. It should be pointed out that Rico was a good-looking man. He stood just a fraction under six feet but seemed taller, perhaps because he’d inherited a slender, muscular build from his father. He had interesting angles in his face, along with high cheekbones, deep dimples, and a beautiful set of teeth, all of which gave him a certain flair, while the tattoos and the well-defined muscles telegraphed the bad boy that he wasn’t now and had never been. Back in the days when he and Rosalita had been passionate, she had said on more than one occasion that the only reason she didn’t leave him during the rocky patches was that she couldn’t bear not being able to look up and see that face several times a day. All this was meaningless to Rico, who thought he looked like every other Chicano guy his age in the South Valley. Maybe today, though, he let his smile linger a second or so longer than he would have if he hadn’t heard so many times that it could cast a spell on a woman.

“Don’t worry about it,” Margaret replied. “It’s okay.” She could have added that she’d heard comments like that scores of times from men on the subway or drunks in the bar and had never, not once, received an apology later. She could have confided that this was virgin territory, his little display of regret, and, in truth, she felt a bit stunned by it, but what for? To admit such a thing was an invitation, and Margaret tended to be stingy with her invitations. Always had been—ever since, standing at the window of Donny’s apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, she’d watched her mother and father wave goodbye from the street, never to show up again. But, invitation or not, she did feel touched by Rico, and the specific place it registered was in the tips of her fingers which moved toward the latch on the screen door and flipped it free. She opened the door and stepped outside.

Rico backed up, a wave of exhilaration, subtle but powerful, sweeping him farther away than he needed to be to let the door swing along its path. “I’d like to teach you to weld,” he said, “now that I’ve got it straight that that’s what you want.”

Margaret held her breath. Here was a dream come true, a rare event in her experience. Yet it was hard for her to accept it. She felt afraid, and she learned instantly that it was just as difficult to say the word yes as to desperately want to hear it.

“I can pay you,” she said as a way of making it easier on herself. “What do you charge?”

And now Rico had a decision to make. The idea of money exchanging hands had never once occurred to him, not in all the imagining he had done on the way over here this morning. He was used to giving everything he had to women, used to that particular feminine expectation that seemed to him to come with a chant of
more, more, more
. But here was a woman offering a fair exchange. It seemed wrong to take it—not macho enough perhaps—but he knew that that reaction was tightly wrapped up in his previous fantasies and this idea that she was his destiny, and he made a choice then and there to surprise himself and say yes to what she offered.

“How does ten bucks an hour sound?” He made more than that in the garage when he was working, but there wasn’t always work, so it evened out.

“Great,” she responded. “More than fair.”

She extended her hand to him to shake, the way two men do when a deal is struck, and he reached for it with the same gravity he would put into any deal-closing handshake. “My name is Rico Garcia,” he said, and then he added, “
a su servicio
” because that was the way Elena had taught him to introduce himself when he was a little boy. And he felt happy, like a little boy, in this moment.