Padre Jiminez noted the complexity of this exchange. Priests are a bit like owls in that some of them also have a sense for when miracles are afoot, and he was having that suspicion now. Some priests fly like owls, too, like Padres Quintero, López, and Gonzalez, who all received the gift of slow-motion flight as a result of the first miracle when they arrived to Bicho Raro together in 1912, but Padre Jiminez was not one of them.
He said, “Sometimes it is good to be hungry.”
Night fell, and the stars sauntered out.
Night fell, and the owls opened their eyes.
Night fell, and Beatriz had not yet cornered Pete.
This came as a shock to Beatriz, who had promised Joaquin that she would talk to him about the truck’s fate. She kept glimpsing Pete and then losing him, which was not an easy thing to do in Bicho Raro. It seemed particularly impossible since Judith had assigned Pete to a single, specific task in a single, unmoving location: building a low wooden dance stage, ideal for staging a romantic birthday celebration, ideal for reminding Francisco and Antonia of the circumstances of their first fortuitous meeting. He worked diligently on that all day, setting legs into the ground and building a framework to rest upon the legs and scavenging boards from the side of a collapsed barn to be the stage itself. Even though he did not seem to ever take a break from this task, every time Beatriz tried to catch him at it, he vanished. She searched for him near the barn he’d picked over and she searched for him near the skeletal stage and she searched for him at all the places in between and was bemused to find him in none of these places. Then she would turn and find him back in the place she had just been. She could not understand it. Beatriz could not know that this was because of Pete’s decision to avoid her at all costs.
He was so eager to keep from experiencing the jolt to his heart at the sight of her that every time he saw her heading across Bicho Raro, he did a quick about-face on his own journey. The closest brush yet came as night moved in. This was after stars had replaced the sun and the sunset was only three colors laid thin on top of each other at the horizon. He was headed back to his room when he saw Beatriz across the open space between the main buildings. First her shadow, cast long and dangerous by the porch light behind her, and then the rest of her.
Pete did a quick turn and marched back the way he had come, glancing quickly behind himself all the while. Beatriz was wearing a flowered dress that was made short by the way she was using it—she had gathered it up into a makeshift basket in front of her and filled it with a strange nest of wires and metal rods and limber twigs. She was not looking at him, but nonetheless, she was cleaving to his path so unerringly that it felt as if she was following him. He scuttled into the darkness between two cabins, tripping over something in the blackness (Antonia’s dog bowls), and when he looked back, she had turned that way as well. He ducked around the back of the cabin, but she remained behind him. He hurried down the path past the goat pasture, but when he looked over his shoulder, he saw that he had come no closer to losing her than before.
Pete’s heart was already thudding dangerously, but suddenly he imagined that she might truly be following him with intention, that she might be trying to speak to him, and the idea of that became voluminous in his mind.
His heart lurched again.
With a gasp, and pressing his hand against the beleaguered organ in his chest, Pete broke into a run around the side of a barn, darted quickly across the yard on the opposite side, before vaulting a low set of scrubs. The night stretched up and covered his eyes, so he misjudged the jump. He crashed directly into something solid, which turned out to be the enormous toe of Tony’s shoe.
“Hey, kid,” Tony said. “Thanks for sparing me the trouble of kicking you.”
Pete gasped, “Shucks,” but couldn’t get anything more out, draped as he was across the shoe, holding his chest and waiting for his heart to once more become invisible inside him.
“Where’s the fire?” Tony asked.
“I—” Pete slithered down to sit in the dust. He peered up and up and up at Tony’s face, barely visible in the dying light, lit only by the porch lights. “Fire?”
“It’s an expression. Kid, you’re so straight you make rulers look bad. I meant, why were you running?”
“I think I almost died!”
“Me, too,” Tony said. “Of boredom.”
But the two were not displeased to see each other, for no reason apart from familiarity. Tony sat down, arranging himself cross-legged in a scrubby field that cows and calves had eaten down to bare earth. Slouching, he hooked one elbow on the top of the tractor beside him. The bottom of his shoeless foot was quite filthy from all his walking around on it.
“Gosh.” Pete looked all the way from Tony’s dirty foot up to his face. “You really haven’t shrunk at all.”
“Neither have you,” Tony said.
“I guess not. What’s it like being … like that?”
“I can’t smoke,” Tony said. “Cigarettes are over before they begin.”
Pete did not smoke, but he attempted to look sympathetic. “Well, is there anything I can do for you now?”
“Yeah, beat it,” Tony said. But it was habit. Pete’s company briefly took his mind off his restlessness. Ordinarily on nights like this, he would’ve put on the radio or taken the Mercury out across Sure-Kill Crawlway after all the traffic was gone. There were no highways here, though, and he was a long way off from fitting in the Mercury. “No, wait, kid. Take my Mercury to the closest town and get me a goddamn radio before I go insane. You’ve still got the keys, right?”
“Really?”
“Did I stutter? Here, take some—” Tony began to swear long and loud, because when he reached into his pocket to get some cash for Pete, he discovered that his money had become giant-size as well. He waved a dollar bill the size of a hand towel at Pete. Owls lifted off, startled by the movement. Tony railed, “Get a miracle, they said—here’s your miracle! This isn’t money—it’s a magic carpet.”
“I’ll cover it,” Pete said hurriedly. “Until you get normal again. I’ve got enough for a radio, I think.”
“Look under the passenger seat,” Tony said tragically. “Use that. Only the money. Leave the other stuff there.”
Pete’s mind filled with possibilities of what might be under the seat that he was not supposed to tamper with, but because he was an innocent sort, he was wrong about nearly all of them. “Any particular kind of radio?”
“A loud one,” Tony said.
“I’ll ask Antonia if I can take some time off tomorrow,” Pete promised. “Where is your car, anyway?”
“Oh, yeah,” Tony said, and moved slightly to reveal the Mercury behind him, the dry scrub flattened behind it.
Pete found that looking at the vehicle next to Tony produced an unusual vertigo. The Mercury, just a little too large to appear as an ordinary car. And Tony, rather too large to appear as an ordinary man. “How’d it get there?”
“I dragged it,” Tony said.
“No way.”
Tony gave the vehicle a little shove to demonstrate it, the contents of the interior rattling as he did, the car moving as easily as if three men had been pushing it. It was a magic trick that so delighted Pete that he covered a hand with his mouth and backed up several steps, kicking the ground to release some of his thrill.
“Gosh,” he said.
“Gosh,” mimicked Tony primly, but without malice. He was a performer, after all, and this small performance made him happy. He pushed the Mercury in a slow circle so that it came to rest in front of Pete. Dust swirled around the vehicle and the boy. “Some advantage to size. Hey. How’s your work? Breaking your back yet?”
“It’s good,” Pete said. “Real good.”
Tony waited, leaving a silence, as if testing the words for veracity, waiting for Pete to renege, but of course Pete had meant it. He had found the stage-building intensely satisfying, and he liked imagining the future celebrations that might make use of his d
ay’s work. Pete patted the Mercury appreciatively, still pleased at its previous journey under Tony’s grip.
“God, kid. I can’t decide if I hate or love what a square you are.”
Pete grinned for the first time. “Better love it, because it’s not changing, buddy.”
This was the moment they became friends. They became even better friends after this, because time improves on these things, but this was the moment it began. Tony sensed it, because he rubbed the back of his neck and said, “Okay, now beat it.”
“Beat it? Why?”
“Because I’m starting to think you’re all right, and I don’t want to give you a chance to say something that’ll change my mind back again.”
“Okay,” said Pete, but he didn’t go. Instead, he tapped on one of the Mercury’s windows. “I wasn’t looking through your stuff or anything, but when I was sleeping back there, I kept hitting my head on that box, so I looked in it to make sure I hadn’t hurt anything in it. I’ve never seen that many records in my life!”
Tony had forgotten that he had the promotional records in the back of the Mercury, though, and now he felt a little bad about it. Not because he thought the station would miss them—he’d only taken ones that were duplicates or singles his producers would never play—but because it wasn’t good for them to be subjected to direct sunlight. “That’s because you haven’t lived very long. You got a record player?”
“You saw everything I came here with. How’d you end up with all them, anyway?”
“Pass,” Tony said. “Hard pass. Not answering.”
“Pass? Why? Wait, did you kill someone over them?”
Tony burst out laughing. “Kid, you really have got more corners than a box full of boxes. I work in radio. Don’t tell anyone.”
“Why not?”
Tony was impatient with this question, as he felt it was the kind of question only asked by someone who had never experienced either fame or notoriety. “Because I said so.”
“Sure, whatever you say. Like a DJ?”
Because Pete didn’t seem too awed, Tony grudgingly answered, “Yeah.”
“You’d think a DJ would be the last person to break the radio in their own car.”
“Yeah, you’d think, wouldn’t you? Now seriously, flake off before I regret telling you.”
Tony had been watching Pete closely to see if this confession had changed anything, but Pete was less interested in Tony’s past career than he was in his own future safety. “I oughta get some sleep anyway. Is the coast clear?”
“Of what? Those damn dogs?”
“No, a girl,” Pete said. It had not occurred to Pete that he had actually weaponized Beatriz’s appearance by avoiding her the way that he had; if only he had approached her calmly during the day, he would have been fine.
“You mean that girl?” Tony asked.
Pete turned.
“I need to talk to you,” Beatriz said.
Not a lot of people know that there is a great salt lake and accompanying salt plain in Oklahoma; most folks are only familiar with the famous one in Utah. But the one in Oklahoma is no shoddy thing. Just a spit north of Jet, Oklahoma, the great salt flats start, the enormous and impressive remainder of a massive saline lake. Like the salt flats in Utah, they are white as snow and as flat as a board, but unlike the salt flats in Utah, Oklahoma’s salt flats have treasure buried beneath them. Tiny crystals known as hourglass crystal grow here and nowhere else in the world, and if you are the sort to dig for treasure, you can bring your whole family to dig them up. Just make sure you hose your vehicle down afterward, because salt’s not good for any set of wheels.
Pete’s family had gone to dig up these rare selenite crystals one spring not long ago, and Pete remembered the unrelenting sun, the grit of salt and sand caught in his pants legs, the intimate joy of finding a crystal and holding it to the light to see the hourglass of time within it.
“Look, I told you, he’s waking up,” Tony said.
The image of Oklahoma’s salt flats slowly became the starry sky over Bicho Raro.
“I need you to go,” said a mild female voice. It was Beatriz, though Pete’s gaze had not yet focused on her. “It’s dangerous for us to speak.”
“Fine, lady,” Tony said. “My legs want to get out of here for a while anyway.” The ground rumbled as he stepped over them both and walked into the night.
Pete and Beatriz were left alone.
Pete went to press his hand to his chest, only to discover that he had already done it, so he pressed a little harder. He was lying on his back in the gritty dirt, and from the vague ache on the back of his head, he guessed (correctly) that he had gotten there in an expedited way. Beatriz was crouched beside him, holding her skirt carefully to keep the wires she had collected inside the makeshift holder. The air smelled like roses for no reason that either of them could tell. This was because Luis had emptied a wheelbarrow of spent blossoms from Francisco’s warehouse in this field, and Pete had made an accidental bed of them.
“You fainted,” Beatriz told him.
He looked at her through slitted eyes, worried about his heart, but it seemed that now that the sight of her had knocked him on his back in the dirt, looking at her more didn’t seem to cause any more hurt. You can only get shocked so many times by the same thing, after all. He said, “I’ve got a hole in my heart.”
“Do you fall down a lot?”
“Only when I’m surprised.”
“Do a lot of things surprise you?”
“Not really.”
Because Pete was still dazed from striking his head on the rose-petal-strewn ground, he didn’t offer his name nor ask hers, and he did not think to begin polite conversation. And because Beatriz was already uncomfortable about the truck and because she was not as empathetic as someone else might have been in the situation and because she was trying not to look at his elbows, she did not think to introduce herself or even allow Pete to stand up as she raised the sore subject of the truck’s ownership. Instead, she merely explained that she had heard he was working for the truck but that her mother had not realized when she made the deal that Beatriz had resurrected it and gotten it running again and was using it for her own purposes. Only at the end of this monologue, when he was still looking at her dazedly, did she realize she had not solicited his thoughts.
“And so I’m open to your thoughts,” she finished.
Pete said, “Antonia—your mother—told me it wasn’t running.” But even as he said it, he knew Beatriz’s account was true, as the truck had been parked in multiple places since he’d arrived there, which was why he had not yet been able to examine it. Because he was a kind soul, this immediately triggered a conflict. He desperately wanted the truck, of course, and was unable to imagine what he might do without it. But he also could not imagine simply taking the truck out from underneath Beatriz if she had indeed invested so much work in it; it wasn’t fair, and if Pete was anything, he was a fair person.
This dissonance distressed him so much that he thought he could feel his very core beginning to tremble. The ground seemed to be whispering softly against his spine with the movement of some deep and unwinnable debate.
In reality, this was because Salto, driven to madness by the lack of radio in the stable, had broken through the walls of his stall and had just rioted the previously sleeping cattle gathered near the barn. They now stampeded directly toward Pete and Beatriz, the stallion at their head. He was an enormous horse, nearly eighteen hands tall, and as chestnut as a violin. The cows were red as dirt with white faces and had horns for hanging men on. There were many of them.
Beatriz did not wait for Pete to move; she simply grabbed his leg and dragged him out of the animals’ path just in time. The wire she’d gathered for her antenna scattered across the ground as she fell on her backside. Dust churned over them both, but all of their insides remained where they belonged. Pete sat up just in time to see the cattle slowly wind to a halt as they reached a fence line. Salto,
on the other hand, sailed right over it.
Beatriz had no feelings for Salto either way, but she knew as well as any other Soria that his rare and pricey seed put food on their table.
She pushed up from the ground and ran.
“What are you doing?” Pete shouted.
“Getting that horse back!”
Pete leaped to his feet, stepping hard into his boot to put it back on, as Beatriz had nearly pulled it off in her hurry to drag him free of the stampede’s path. Then he, too, broke into a run—only he ran for the Mercury.
This was the moment their love story began.
It may seem like madness for a young woman to chase a runaway horse, as a galloping horse travels at twenty-five miles an hour and a galloping woman travels at only fifteen. But runaway horses rarely have a purpose, and young women chasing them often do. When combined with the asset of a young man in a station wagon, the question of catching the horse becomes a matter of when, not if.
But when was still a long distance off.
The Mercury did not start straightaway—it turns out that it is not good for cars to be jostled by giants—and by the time Pete got the engine running and the headlights on, both Beatriz and Salto were out of sight.
“Sorry, Tony,” he said, although Tony was still quite a distance away, having given them space as Beatriz had requested. Pete headed off in the direction the horse and the young woman had gone.
Several hundred yards away, Salto was pelting across the scrub with the enthusiasm of a horse that had been kept in a stall for too many years. Beatriz was not keeping up, but she still had him in her sights by the time Pete drove up alongside her. The station wagon scuffed to a halt and without pause Beatriz climbed into the passenger seat.
“We should try to cut him off,” she said quite calmly, although she was out of breath. “Is there anything like a rope in here?”
“I don’t know,” Pete replied. “This isn’t my car.”