Beatriz also carried a shotgun. She did not think she would have to use it, but the world seemed like a more dangerous place than it had only a few days before.
“Joaquin,” she ordered, “please point that flashlight where we’re going.”
Joaquin was caught equally between a fear of invisible wild animals and detection by the FCC, and so he alternately pointed the light where they were walking and into his palm when he felt they were too obvious to prying distant eyes. “I heard that sometimes Soria darkness will attack other Sorias, even without interference.”
“All the more reason to see it coming. Who told you that?”
“Nana.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Okay,” Joaquin admitted. “It’s just this: I saw Mama tell her about Daniel, and Nana immediately got up and locked her back door. What do you think about that?”
Grudgingly, Beatriz had to admit that Joaquin’s thesis was not a bad one. Joaquin made a triumphant noise not in keeping with secrecy.
“If you’re going to shout, you might as well point the flashlight so we can see!” Beatriz ordered.
Distant thunder made them pause.
Joaquin ran an anxious hand over his hair and cast an anxious glance at the sky. “Are we going to be killed?”
“Unlikely,” Beatriz replied.
Although the sky above them was clear, lightning was visible on the horizon: a storm, many dozens of miles away—in a place as flat as this high desert, weather was often something that happened to other people. Beatriz was not particularly worried about being struck by that storm’s lightning, although she did devote a passing thought to the antenna connected to the box truck; they would turn back to take it down if the storm got too close. A lightning strike would be potentially deadly to the station.
“Can we make the signal stop crackling like that?” Joaquin asked.
“Not tonight,” Beatriz replied. “It needs more work.” This reminded her of Pete Wyatt and how she was not at all sure how much more time she had with the truck. She felt obliged to tell Joaquin all of this, and did, in a low voice, so that she could still have one ear on the signal strength.
After she was through, Joaquin kicked the dirt, but not hard, because he didn’t want to dirty his paisley pants, and he also cursed a little. “Pete Wyatt!”
Joaquin didn’t know much about Pete Wyatt, but he was not a fan. This had nothing to do with Pete Wyatt and everything to do with Michael, who had actually stopped working in order to sing the praises of Pete’s work ethic to Rosa and Joaquin. He began with small gestures, complimenting Pete’s quick ability to grasp the meat of any new job, and then moved out from there to admiring how hard Pete worked even under the harsh rain, expanded further to how satisfying it was to see a young person who actually appreciated the land, and then ultimately ending up with a somewhat tone-deaf statement that Pete was the son every man deserved but never had.
Joaquin, as the son that Michael may not have deserved but definitely actually had, was less than thrilled by the statements. His mother, Rosa, defended Joaquin, but not in a way that brought Joaquin any satisfaction.
“If only Joaquin could bring himself to work at anything like Wyatt does,” Michael said.
“Oh, you know Quino,” Rosa replied, “he is a gentle boy and he will come into his own one day!”
“When I was Joaquin’s age, I knew what I wanted to do with myself, and that was leave a print on the world with the dint of my labor,” Michael said.
“We need soft men, too. Sweet gentle boys whose mothers love them just the way they are!”
“I never see Joaquin doing anything but oiling his hair. A man is more than his hair.”
“He is also his mustache,” Rosa agreed. “But Quino is still just a boy and soon enough he will have a mustache. Not like yours, of course. You cannot expect that of anyone, even your own son. But he will have his own sort.”
This infuriated Joaquin. He did not want to be a soft, gentle man who had accomplished nothing. He was not a soft, gentle man who had accomplished nothing. He longed to tell them that he already had plans, and that he was going to be a radio DJ, Diablo Diablo, and that one day they would compare Pete Wyatt to him and find Pete wanting.
“I’ll talk to him,” Beatriz said. “Pete, I mean.”
“What are you going to say?”
“I think that will depend on him. I—”
Quick as death, Joaquin halted and held a hand out to Beatriz, snatching her to a standstill. Everyone has two faces: the one they wear, and the one that is beneath it. Joaquin quite suddenly wore the latter.
Beatriz stopped. She gently lifted the shotgun.
A desert is a lot like an ocean, if you replace all of the water with air. It stretches out and out and out in unfathomable distance and, in the absence of sunlight, turns to pure black. Sounds become secrets, impossible to verify as true until the light returns. It is not empty merely because you cannot see all of it. And you know in your heart that it isn’t—that it is the opposite of empty once it is dark, because things that do not like to be watched emerge when all of the light is gone. There is no way to know the shape of them, though, until your hand is on them.
Something was there in the desert.
The creature was moving slowly among the distant brush, dark against the night-purple horizon, nearly human-shaped. There was a rattling or hissing as it moved, like dry beans shaken gently in a pan.
Joaquin was suddenly reminded of Nana locking her back door. Beatriz was suddenly reminded of long-lived Felipe Soria, wandering forever, looking for that femur-made cross, and of the furious businessman she had failed to help, tangled in his beard.
Diablo Diablo said, “If there wasn’t a moon out there before, there is one now. Coming up next we’ve got something to put a smile on that moon’s face.”
At the sound of his voice, the figure stopped.
Every head turned toward the radio. It continued to prattle on in a way that we do not notice when we are not trying to be silent in the desert night. Diablo Diablo said, “The moon loves company, so get your teeth ready.”
The creature stepped toward them.
It was difficult to terrify Beatriz Soria, for the same reason that it was difficult to get her angry. Fear and rage are not very different when you think about it, two hungry animals that often hunt the same prey—emotion—and hide from the same predator—logic. So Beatriz’s surfeit of logic usually protected her from terror. (Although it easily delivered her to anxiety. Anxiety was merely another brand of her usual considered thought, after all, just one that refused to go away when she asked it nicely or was trying to sleep.) Beatriz’s fear, though, required enough information to conclude that almost certainly something bad was going to happen, and also that the something bad was awful enough that it could not be easily remedied, and that rarely happened.
So Beatriz was not afraid in this moment, but only because she didn’t have enough information to be afraid.
“The flashlight,” she said, without taking her eyes from the figure.
Joaquin did not require information to be afraid and was accordingly out of his mind with fear. He managed to collect himself just enough to point the light directly at the intruder.
Butterflies moved their wings slowly in the flashlight’s beam.
It was not Felipe Soria, nor Daniel’s darkness.
It was Marisita Lopez.
Marisita’s ever-present wedding dress and the weighty bag upon her back had created the strange silhouette the cousins had spotted. The hissing sound was nothing but the sound of the raindrops dashing against the tumbleweed and brush around her.
Joaquin recoiled. She was not a monster, but she was a pilgrim, and that was just as dangerous.
Beatriz, however, scrutinized Marisita. This was the first time she had seen the young woman since reading Daniel’s letter, and she was now trying to see Marisita through Daniel’s eyes. As anything but a pilgrim, because Daniel m
ust have seen past that to fall in love with her.
Joaquin twisted his fingers in Beatriz’s sleeve and tugged.
But Beatriz lingered. “Were you running away into the desert?”
“Beatriz,” Joaquin hissed.
“I—I am looking for Daniel. The Saint,” Marisita said. “I couldn’t—I couldn’t imagine him out there without supplies.”
This was what filled the overfilled bag she carried. Marisita had thought very hard about what Daniel might need, and had taken quite a long time to assemble it into the pack. Here was what she had brought: ten cured sausages, a pot of cheese, twelve avocados, three oranges, two cups of lard, a small pile of tortillas, four tins of beans, cornmeal, a skillet, one hundred matches, three pairs of dry socks, four clean shirts, a harmonica, a small blanket, a pocketknife, a paring knife, a votive candle, a hairbrush, a bar of soap, a notebook that was only halfway used up, a pen, three cigarettes, a sheep-collared coat, a cup for water, a pellet gun, a flashlight, and a small satchel of Francisco’s rose petals in case Daniel needed to smell it in order to cure homesickness.
The tenderness of this gesture finally provided Beatriz a window into Marisita’s heart. For the first time, she began to see Marisita as not merely a pilgrim but rather a person, and not just a person, but someone who showed her care for someone else in intensely practical ways.
Joaquin, on the other hand, had reached the end of his stamina for uncertainty. “Beatriz! Let’s go! We can’t be talking to her! This is madness! She could kill us both!”
Marisita knew the taboo as well as a Soria, perhaps better, after the events of the night before. She was already ducking away as she said, “You should! I don’t want something else terrible to happen. I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to meet anyone tonight.”
“Wait,” Beatriz said, although she did not yet know the words that were going to follow. The problem with ideas is that they never come all at once. They emerge like prairie dogs. An edge of ear, or the tip of a nose, and sometimes even the whole head. But if you look straight at an idea too fast, it can vanish back into the ground before you’re even sure of what you’ve seen. Instead, you have to sneak up on it slowly, looking out of the corner of your eye, and then and only then you might glance up to get a clear look.
Beatriz was having an idea now, but she’d only seen an ear or a whisker.
“Wait?” echoed Joaquin.
“I just—I have questions,” Beatriz confessed.
“Beatriz,” Joaquin exhorted.
“She’s the pilgrim Daniel helped,” Beatriz told him. “She’s the last one to see him. This is Marisita.”
“Oh,” said Joaquin.
There was a pregnant pause. An unusual and elegant intersection of needs and wants had formed in that moment, and they could all sense it. They all longed to talk to one another about their common interest: Daniel. As pressing as this urge was, if it had only been a desire for information, it might have died there. But there was something else. When Daniel had asked Beatriz if she ever thought they were doing it wrong, he had merely voiced an unspoken question both of them had been carrying for a while. For Daniel, it was because ethics pressed badly at him, with all of the pilgrims falling between the cracks. For Beatriz, it was the sense that the facts were being made to add up to something that was not quite true. All of these truths were being bundled together and sealed with superstition and fear instead of science and reason.
Marisita lingered, but didn’t speak. Beatriz’s mind worked busily. Joaquin’s mouth still held the shape of his last word. None of them knew precisely how far they could press this meeting.
Before he’d moved into the greenhouse, Francisco would sometimes tell Beatriz stories of scientists, like Guillermo González Camarena, the teenage inventor of the color TV, or Helia Bravo Hollis, the botanist who’d catalogued hundreds of succulent plants and founded the Sociedad Mexicana de Cactología. These great minds organized facts in new ways and performed experiments on the accepted truth, changing one variable here or there to test just how factual their facts really were. Beatriz and Daniel had been eyeing the facts they’d been given for quite a while, though they’d had no way to test them. But now—
Beatriz’s thoughts moved to the radio, which was still noisy with Diablo Diablo’s banter. It sounded as if they were still hearing Joaquin’s voice, but really, it was not Joaquin at all. It was the sound of his voice encoded onto a signal, which the transmitter then modified so that the stable-stolen radio could pick it up and play it from the speaker. It was no more Joaquin than a drawing of him would be him.
“What do you think about …” Beatriz began. The prairie dog of an idea had lifted its head from the hole. “Doing a radio interview?”
We don’t quite understand miracles. This is the way of most divine things; saints and miracles belong to a different world and use a different set of rules. It is hard to tell the human purpose of St. Joseph of Cupertino’s miraculous levitation, for instance. Whenever he was transported by faith, he was also transported by physics, often several feet into the air, sometimes in the middle of a homily. He would at times remain up there for hours, paused in mid-speech, while his fellow brothers waited for him to descend and finish his thought. It is also difficult to tell the usefulness of the miracles of St. Christina the Astonishing—after rising from the dead in her twenties, she would upon occasion hurl herself into a river and allow herself to be carried downstream into the path of a churning mill wheel. There she would be thrown in violent circles before emerging unscathed: a miracle. And then there was St. Anthony of Padua. His miracles were varied, all beyond understanding, but perhaps the most inscrutable was the miracle at the water’s edge. Finding no human company to address, he preached at the water’s edge so piously that a school of fish broke the surface to listen—a miracle difficult to understand, as fish have no souls to save and no voices to convert unbelievers.
Compared to these, the Soria miracles were quite palatable. Yes, sometimes the pilgrims to Bicho Raro became impossibly ugly or fearfully radiant, intensely practical or clumsily fanciful. Some grew feathers. Some shrank to the size of a mouse. Sometimes shadows came to life and scampered around the pilgrim. Sometimes wounds formed that refused to heal. But these oddities were no random punishments but rather messages specific to each pilgrim. The darkness made flesh was a concrete puzzle that, if solved, provided the mental tools the pilgrim needed to move on.
The intention of every Soria miracle was the same: to heal the mind.
Daniel Soria had been telling himself this over and over since the night before. This trial was not a punishment, he reminded himself. This trial was a miracle.
But it did not feel like a miracle.
He was out in the high desert night, sitting cross-legged by a smoldering fire. Although it was very cold, it was a very small fire, because Daniel could not shake the image of Joaquin coming after him despite all warnings and finding him by the light of the blaze. So he kept it near-suffocated, and sat with his palms pressed against the still-warm ground.
It was so dark. Although he was curved into the small orange circle of light provided by a smoldering fire, everything he looked at appeared dull. He seemed to be having difficulty seeing light the same way he had this time yesterday. It was as if there was a gauzy curtain hung between his eyes and the fire, and two heavier curtains on either side of his vision, threatening to close. It was possible, he thought, that they had already closed a little more since he had left Bicho Raro. He did not know what he would do if he went blind out here in the wild scrub.
He knew the miracles were meant to teach the pilgrims something about themselves. Take Tony, for instance, and his newfound gigantism. Daniel figured Tony was someone famous. He didn’t recognize him personally, but he’d seen many celebrities come through Bicho Raro, and he’d gotten pretty good at noting the posturing and style that marked public figures. So Tony, suffering under the public eye as most celebrities do, had received a miracle that ens
ured he was under even more constant scrutiny. The miracle’s purpose was then clear: If Tony could learn to live as a giant, he would once again be able to live as a man.
This meant that Daniel’s narrowing vision was supposed to teach him something, but he didn’t know what it might be. He had thought that he knew himself pretty well, and yet meaning eluded him. Perhaps this darkness was meant to teach him trust, or humility, or despair. Nothing seemed obvious. Possibly an outsider might have been able to immediately identify the truth of it, just as the meaning of Tony’s darkness was obvious to Daniel. But there was no one else to observe Daniel, and he meant to keep it that way.
Daniel tried not to devote too much time to the most hopeless outcome, which was that Daniel might discover what the darkness truly meant, and still be unable to overcome it. He recalled a pilgrim from Utah whose miracle had left him with a bulbous red face and a helpless desire to gag whenever he tried to put food in his mouth. The man seemed to understand at once what this darkness stood for, because he became overwhelmed with grief and guilt. Daniel, of course, had been unable to speak to him because of the taboo, and the pilgrim had disappeared into the desert overnight. Later he was found dead, his face no longer red; the miracle had died with the pilgrim. The knowing had not helped him.
Perhaps Daniel was meant to learn how difficult miracles were.
No. He thought he knew that already.
“If there wasn’t a moon out tonight, there is one now,” Diablo Diablo said. “Coming up next we’ve got something to put a smile on that moon’s face.”
The radio had managed to snatch the signal of his cousins’ station, and though Daniel knew it would be as easy to die with the sound of Diablo Diablo playing as not, he preferred the company. It distracted him from the black at the corners of his vision, from the cold, and from the distinct feeling that he wasn’t alone. There was something out there in the night, something that had drawn near as soon as he’d broken the taboo. Although he knew that it must be a concrete form of his own darkness, it didn’t feel like an extension of himself. It felt like the concrete manifestation of the strangeness of this valley instead. Perhaps this was what was meant when they said that a Saint’s darkness was worse than an ordinary pilgrim’s. Perhaps that was the reason why he couldn’t find meaning in his miracle. Perhaps this was not healing darkness at all but rather the opposite: a hellish entity sent to caper around and gobble up a fallen saint.