Rust (23 page)

M
ARGARET
HAD
awoken early, at first light, and was already walking Magpie along the
bosque
before it had brightened enough to be called daytime. All night long she had dreamed of welding, of the fire and heat that fuses two parts into one forever. Her dream space was filled with colors—blood red and cherry red, lemon yellow and mustard yellow, blue and violet and purple. Acetylene torches and welding rods and beads of molten metal appeared at various moments to rearrange the molecules of color and then move on, as if invisible painters or welders were hard at work behind the scenes. She woke up happy. She had been suffering from an absence of dreams for a long time. Too long. For most of her life, when she closed her eyes at night, she went to a preferable world where all events were unpredictable and people who were forever dead in this world seemed to live on. But her dreams had dried up two years before she left New York. She would climb into bed and tumble into the blackness of sleep, and that was it. After her parents and Donny, she counted loss of dreams as the biggest tragedy of her life.

Now she’d had one, all color and flames, and it tempted her to close her eyes again and go back inward, maybe stay there permanently. But when she paused to glance around her bedroom, she couldn’t help but notice that it was also a feast. She had painted the thick adobe walls a shade of spring green, and the ceiling was a deep dark shade of periwinkle. Above her head, a ceiling fan with its white blades circling created a psychedelic effect as it orbited around in the great expanse of periwinkle. With her foot, she reached for Magpie, who had taken to sleeping on the bottom of the futon mattress, and ruffled the fur along her dog’s great neck.

“Let’s get up and go to the river,” Margaret said, and Magpie sighed, deeply, as if she’d had enough of a walk last night and preferred to sleep in. But once Margaret propelled herself upright, Magpie scrambled to her feet and waited by the door for Margaret to let her out. Margaret got dressed quickly. She was the rare woman who could be up and ready to go in five minutes—ten, if she took a shower, which she did not do this morning, having luxuriated in a long bath late last night.

They were perhaps a quarter of a mile into their two-mile walk when Margaret saw the coyote for the second time. Though she had no way of knowing if it was the same coyote who had captivated her a few days ago, she chose to believe it was, as if he was somehow her personal coyote, assigned to her for purposes known only to nature. He was ahead of her on the trail, close, perhaps fifty feet. He had probably been trotting along as coyotes do when he heard or smelled something amiss behind him, and had stopped to investigate because his head was turned around, back toward them, while his body faced away. Margaret stopped moving, though Magpie, who was off in the bushes investigating something mysterious, continued to thrash around, oblivious.

Margaret felt hypnotized by the gaze of the coyote. He seemed unafraid, though Margaret knew he would disappear the instant she made a move. She wanted so badly to be permitted to approach. She felt that, if he were to allow her to step toward him, it would prove she was a good person, a person even a coyote could trust. So she stayed still, and it crossed her mind that her standing still was what made him trust her even a little. Standing still had great power in its way. After perhaps twenty seconds, Magpie broke out of the scrubby growth onto the path, and the coyote turned his yellow head around and slipped into the undergrowth. Margaret walked along and was soon at the spot where the coyote had been. She imagined he was hidden, watching her, noticing the moment when her scent blended seamlessly with his.

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

V
INCENT
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.

“
Y
o, 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.