Rust by Julie Mars Page A

retrieve the bag from the floor. He carried it in front of him, as if it smelled bad.
    She had reached for his arm. Her fingernails dug in, drawing blood.
    She screamed his name as they were placed in two separate police vans.
    He had tried to fight his way to her, but he had been knocked down to the dirt, threatened with a gun.
    He has not seen her again.
    He presses his hands into his heart and tries not to move.
    O N S UNDAY , Margaret woke up moody. After she had taken her morning shower, for example, she threw her towel to the floor and studied her naked body in the mirror on the back of the bathroom door. This was a sure sign of a coming storm. Whenever she experienced the urge to stand outside herself and technically review her body, which in these moments she tended to equate with her cage, her jail cell, or her hostage closet, she was already in trouble. It meant the restlessness, the discontent, was upon her, and she was trapped in it. Over the years, she had experimented with all the usual ways out—alcohol, exercise, drugs, sex, furious painting sessions, various shrinks, even a short-lived dip into transcendental meditation, but nothing worked. Often she would get itchy and begin to scratch herself in search of a little relief, a quasi-solution which had left unsightly scars on her arms, shoulders, and upper back. When she’d worked at the Stereophonic Lounge, she would become impatient and snap at bar patrons, but fortunately it was a place where the regulars protected her at these moments—loudly warning each other and even the newcomers to tread lightly when ordering drinks because the bartender was seriously on the rag. Sometimes she intentionally broke something, though over the years she had learned to make it something unimportant or at least replaceable.
    The one thing that did help—if she could find her way there—was to connect this foul internal weather in some soulful way to her parents, who, she reasoned, must have felt something similar when they took off for India. Surely, nothing else but this, nothing less than this, could have made them get on the train-to-the-plane in New York and disappear forever. The only time she could forgive them, or even understand, was when this wild restlessness rushed over her. In those moments, if she could keep her vision clear and find something brand new to do, the tornado moved on with minimal wreckage.
    She pulled up her black jeans, put on a sports bra, and slipped her arms into a baggy V-neck T-shirt. As she stepped into the kitchen, she happened to glance up through the window, where, in the distance, the tops of the five dormant volcanoes on the West Mesa quietly waited to resuscitate themselves and show the land developers, particularly those intent on putting a highway through the sacred petroglyphs, exactly who was boss. “Magpie, let’s go somewhere,” she called, and within two minutes they were both in the car backing out of the driveway. She wound her way north to Central and then headed west, racing up the Seven Mile Hill, past crumbling motels with big shiny trucks with license plates from Chihuahua, Mexico, angle-parked in front of every door. It was barely seven in the morning, and no one was stirring. Even the gas stations and mini-marts were empty. She noticed a street sign for Paseo des Volcanes and swung a hard right into what appeared to be a lunarscape. One road, the one that she was on, progressed, straight as an arrow, into the big nothing. It was completely still. Even the tumbleweeds along the barbed wire fences on either side of the road had stopped tumbling.
    After a few miles, a dirt road angled off to the right toward the volcanoes, and Margaret took it. It occurred to her, as she slowed down to negotiate the ruts, that this was her very first experience of a dirt road. It seemed impossible, but there it was. She was raised in the New York City backwoods, where every square inch was paved, if not occupied by a fifty-story