Rust Read Free Page A

saw the bulge in the front of his coveralls, and he walked toward her. There she was, surrounded by a hundred old rusty parts, things he knew she had no idea how to use. Carburetors and condensation pumps, tie bolts and butterfly nuts, oil pans and heavy duty towing chain. Her face was the color of apricots when they first appear on the trees in May, but her eyes, which were green, blazed at him, like the eyes of a cornered animal.
    She sat back on her heels. “What? No torch?” she said and she smiled a little, like they had a big secret between them already.
    “I got it right here for you, mama,” he said, though he didn’t mean to. They were words he had heard his older brother, Fernando, use on girls a long, long time ago, magic words that melted the girls from the vecino , causing them to lower their eyes in a way that drew Fernando toward them. But they were not his words. Truthfully, though, standing not ten feet from her, it had crossed his mind that, with her squatting down like that, she was at just the right height to blow him to kingdom come, and he had to resist the urge to reach for the zipper of his coveralls.
    Rico saw it when the words hit her, the way they knocked her speechless and disgusted her, and in that moment if he could have moved fast enough, he would have made a joke of himself, given her his most devilish smile, and saved everything. But he was too slow, always had been, his whole life, and he saw the moment pass, on its way to rust, just like everything else.
    “Sorry, buddy,” she said at last, her voice instantly drained of any color. “I just want to learn to weld.”
    And here was another opening, another place to step in and resurrect the moment, but now his face burned with shame and foolishness. “I’m sorry, too,” he said, and he meant it, but it came out of his mouth with a macho edge, like words he wanted to cut into her with a knife. So he turned and left before it got any worse, and the last thing he saw was an old tractor fender in the shape of a rusty crescent moon, which she seemed, because of the angle at which it rested against the cement pad, to be squatting in, just waiting to stand up and be counted.

1974

    H E WAKES up to the roar of one thousand men, murmuring, chanting, talking, yelling. Walled in.
    This is a nightmare, he thinks . Please.
    But the way his shoulder aches, pressed as it is into the dirt, and his shirt, which had bunched up around his neck like a noose when he’d finally collapsed and rolled to the edge of this room, these things tell him it is real. He had arrived in the back of a truck, fifty men packed in like animals. They were chained to one another at the ankles. Only a few were able to shove their way to the long benches that lined either side of the truck bed to sit. It had been a long ride. Dusty. He had kept his head lowered, refusing to look through the open sides of the truck at the city, then its edges, and then the green countryside.
    Finally, they had spilled out. They were pushed through a gate.
    Into this room. A pen, really. One word above the door was in English: “Processing.”
    He has not slept for three days. When he closes his eyes at last, not caring what happens to him anymore, no matter what it is, everything stops and the world goes black. He does not know how many hours have passed when he opens his eyes again.
    He faces the concrete wall, a whitewashed wall that has turned dark grey. The sun, beating down from overhead, cuts a dividing line across the dirt floor. The heat feels like a hot iron pressed against his back. He pulls his shirt down and sits up. Two feet away from him, a filthy man in rags squats to shit in the dirt. The smell sickens him.
    I cannot do this, he thinks.
    M ARGARET COULD feel Rico’s heat, how it switched from steam to burning shame in an instant, how out of control he was, as if a flash fire had ignited inside him and was burning him to the ground, right at the edge of her concrete pad