Rust Read Online Free

bartender himself at an Irish joint called the Bit O’ Blarney on the waterfront in lower Manhattan, enlisted the help of the State Department to find them, but the trail went cold in Goa, and after a few years he gave up. “They probably got into drugs, honey. Vincent was a big hash head, and, really, your mother was, too, after she got wrapped up with him,” he told her, years later, when she suddenly, at age sixteen, expressed a burning desire to know the truth. “Over there, you get into something like that, there’s no telling what could happen. We’ll just never know. That’s how it is.”
    So she was used to important things disappearing: her mother, with her raven hair and restless energy; her father, who, she remembered vaguely, was a painter like her, hanging canvas after canvas on the brick walls of some loft with grimy windows near Chinatown where they’d all lived long ago; Donny, who died of a heart attack, keeled over on the job, before she’d even turned nineteen. Radical change seemed normal to her. Lives combusted, singeing the edges, even of memories.
    Which, perhaps, was part of the reason why Margaret often described herself, when someone would seriously ask, as a person who’d spent her whole life sitting on a hot stove, trying to get off. She also felt her skin was too tight. And she was one of those rare people who sensed, very genuinely, that she had somehow gotten in her own way just by being born. No matter how hard she tried, she could never sidestep herself and get free. All this was normal for Margaret. She lived with it like other people live with emphysema or rheumatoid arthritis. There was no point in asking, Why me?
    She watched Rico as he turned and crossed her yard, his ponytail picking up the rays of sun and turning it shades of blue and purple along the black strands. He hurried, as if he were running away from something terrible. His back, in his mechanic’s coveralls, was straight to the point of stiffness, and she knew without looking that his hands were clenched by his sides, that they had to pry themselves open to reach for the door handle on his truck or insert the key into the ignition. The engine turned over. It was quiet, perfectly tuned. He pulled away slowly, as if caution were his middle name.
    “So much for that,” she said to Magpie, who was sprawled out on her side nearby. Magpie’s eyes drifted toward the street, where Rico’s truck had just disappeared. They paused there, as if they could see something more than just thin air.

    R ICO DROVE to the corner, where there was a stop sign, which he didn’t need to see to feel like stopping. He wanted to stop everything. Sometimes, when he was working on a car, brazing a rusty exhaust pipe or welding a lift kit bracket onto the frame of a ’92 Bronco, a sensation would come over him, like the shade that creeps over a man taking a nap in a hammock when a cloud passes overhead and blocks the sun. There was darkness to it, and a change in temperature. The change was subtle, but for the colder. Whenever this would happen, he would stop what he was doing because he knew this sensation, whatever it was, dulled his concentration and made him sloppy.
    Rico looked both ways, carefully, and then crossed the intersection and pulled to the curb. He had both hands on the steering wheel, his eyes peering through the windshield as if he were gunning it along I-40 with the whole desert spread out before him. In his peripheral vision, he saw an old woman raking up last year’s leaves in her tiny front yard. She worked slowly, as if it was fine to take all day to finish the job. She never glanced up from the work at hand.
    What had just happened? Rico wanted to take some time to backtrack. He had a need to get the events of the day into some form of order, make some kind of accurate map of them, so he could think clearly. It was better for him to nail it all down. If he didn’t do it now, it would only get harder. She had come