That was when Antonia Soria realized that she knew who he was.
Antonia was the one who had originally proposed the idea of labor-for-truck to Pete’s aunt, sometime after Josefa had been cured with her second miracle, but sometime before she had left Bicho Raro. They were always short of hands, and it seemed to Antonia to be an ideal solution for disposing of the broken-down box truck.
Antonia put down her scissors.
Whenever she had a spare moment, she constructed elaborate paper flowers so realistic that sometimes even the flowers forgot they were not real and wilted for want of water. It was a painstaking process that required hours of concentration, and being made to stop in the middle put her in a terrible rage. Her desire to officially hire Pete warred with her hatred of interruption. The former won, but was a bitter victor.
Here was a thing Antonia wanted: to suck honey off a man’s finger. Here was a thing she feared: that she would forget to shout at one of her family members and this family member’s lack of care would lead to her house catching on fire.
With a furious exhalation, she rose from her paper roses. Securing her hair in a smooth bun, she pinched her cheeks a few times before marching out to Pete.
“Are you Josefa’s boy?” she asked.
Pete had one remaining stone in his hand, which he put down in a hurry. He could see that she was angry and thought that he was the reason. “Her nephew, ma’am. Pete Wyatt.”
“Watt?”
“Wyatt.”
Antonia’s annoyance at being interrupted faded as she looked at the structure he had started.
“Shake my hand,” she told Pete, and he did. “Antonia Soria.”
“Sora, ma’am?”
“Soria.” Now she studied him closely. “Are you sure you don’t have darkness in you?”
“No, ma’am, I’ve just got a hole in my heart.”
“That hole in your heart going to kill you if you work too hard?”
The doctor who had diagnosed Pete, a man also named Pete, had explained that the hole in his heart was vulnerable to extremes of emotion—like shock, fear, and the complicated feelings one has when discovering other people want you dead, and generally all the things one might expect to encounter in the army. Pete the doctor told Pete the patient that as long as he lived in moderation and avoided situations where unexpected extremes of feeling might come at him, he would never notice the lack. As his parents and younger brother, Dexter, looked on, Pete the patient had asked if he could simply train his mind and join the army anyway. Pete the doctor had said he was afraid not; Pete the patient would always be the weakest link. Then he wrote, Unfit for duty.
Pete thought about this again, and he thought about Beatriz and the desert. Then he said, “No, I don’t think so, ma’am. It’s only shock that does it.”
“Good. Very good,” Antonia repeated. “Come on. I will show you where you’ll put your boots at night.”
As Pete fetched his bag from the car, Antonia spared a bitter glance at her husband Francisco’s greenhouse. He was visible through the glass. While his wife spent her nights making paper flowers so beautiful they seemed real, Francisco spent his days growing real flowers so beautiful they seemed fake. Although the San Luis Valley was a good place to grow sturdy potatoes and hay and tomatoes, Francisco had instead turned his attention to raising roses. There were many impediments to growing show roses in Bicho Raro—hail to knock the petals off and elk to eat the leaves and searing sun to bleach the color from them all—but as a boy, he had been struck by the perfect beauty of a Fibonacci spiral in a rose’s belly and had never lost the fire. Since then, he had been trying to breed the impossible: a black rose. He was in the greenhouse now, as he usually was, jotting notes in his tiny journal. They were numbers, although it was not arithmetic—it was a sentence written in the language he and Beatriz had invented. Translated, it meant, I believe Antonia’s dogs killed some men last night.
Here was a thing Francisco wanted: to find a pitch-black bud on one of his roses. Here was a thing he feared: being asked to do anything else.
Antonia sneered again at her husband’s figure, her temper warming again, and then she turned away. She pointed beyond the cistern. “That over there is the truck.”
Pete felt a surge of gladness over the reality of the vehicle. If he tried hard enough, he could imagine his logo painted on its stained side. “Thank you, ma’am, for this opportunity.”
“Don’t thank me yet. I don’t think it’s running.” She halted in front of a long and utilitarian adobe structure. “This is where you’ll be staying. We’re up to God’s mustache in pilgrims, so you’ll have a roommate.”
“I don’t mind, ma’am.”
“You might,” Antonia said.
The house Pete was to stay in had originally housed Daniel Lupe Soria’s family, although it would have been difficult to identify it as a family home now, because it had since been divided into tiny apartments. Inside it was dark and cool, smelling of unfamiliar foods and years of woodsmoke.
“Kitchen,” Antonia said, by way of tour. “Clean up after yourself.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Water closet,” Antonia said, opening a door. “Clean up after yourself.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“These rooms have pilgrims in them, so obviously don’t enter without an invitation,” Antonia said, gesturing to the four doors along the hall that stretched the length of the home.
“Yes, ma’am.”
To prevent stuffiness in the house, all of these doors were open, and so in this way, Pete met the pilgrims who shared the house with him.
In the first room was Jennie Fitzgerald, a slight young brunette woman who waved at him as they passed.
“Hello,” said Pete.
“Hello,” said Jennie.
He didn’t know it, but he’d just heard the result of her first miracle. It had left her with the inability to say anything but what other people had already said. She was the most obviously determined of the pilgrims to remove the darkness from herself. Since her first miracle, she had spent her days actively seeking conversation with others. Her conversation partner would speak first and then Jennie would try to reply in her own words, executing invisible techniques in an attempt to do more than simply echo. So far, the only success she’d had was in making the other pilgrims dread conversation with her, which was too bad, because she really was a nice young lady.
Pete nearly did not see the pilgrim in the second room they passed, as he blended in with the shadows of his room so well. This was Theldon Bunch. The first miracle had left him with moss furring his entire body, and now he spent his days either in the rocker in the corner of his room or under the shaded patio beside the house, reading fat paperback novels that the postman brought from Alamosa. He had the same amount of moss covering his skin as he’d had the day the miracle had created it, and he did not appear to be doing anything to combat it.
“Hello,” Pete said to him, but Theldon Bunch did not look up from his book until after Pete and Antonia had already passed.
The third room contained the glamorous California twins, Robbie and Betsy, who, after the miracle, were corded together by an enormous black snake with a head at both ends. It tangled their feet if they took too many steps away from each other, but it also snapped at them if they sat too close for too long. If one side of it was attacked, the other side came to the rescue. If it was fed constantly and kept at a continuously acceptable tension, they could carry on without noticing it. The twins had arrived at Bicho Raro alternately fighting and clinging, and remained thus. It had occurred to Beatriz, at the very least, that the solution was for a twin to hold one of the snake’s heads while the other twin killed the second head, but of course she could not suggest such a thing. So they continued to complain that the snake was too strong for them to battle on their own, and lived with it wrapped around them both.
“Hello,” Pete said to them.
He was turned slightly more
toward Robbie, so the snake head nearest Betsy jealously snapped at him. Pete’s heart leaped first, and then his body leaped second. His back hit the hallway wall and his hand slapped his dangerously shocked heart. Betsy drew the snake up short.
“So sorry,” she said, but she was looking at Robbie as if it were Robbie’s fault.
“Sure, that’s okay, miss,” Pete said, although he wasn’t sure if it really was. “I’m Pete.”
“Pete,” Betsy repeated, but she was looking at Robbie as if this, too, were Robbie’s fault. Robbie refused to look at her; they were fighting.
“Wyatt,” Antonia said, farther down the hall.
“So long,” Pete told the twins, and caught up.
Antonia had not spoken to any of the pilgrims they had passed. Pete was remembering how the Sorias had ignored him as he’d knocked on their doors and he was thinking about how now she was ignoring these people, and he was thinking it was pretty rude. He was too polite to say anything about it, though; he just kept looking over his shoulder at the three rooms they’d passed.
Antonia was no fool, so she stopped before the final room and put a hand on Pete’s shoulder.
“You are thinking I’m a pig.”
“No, ma’am.”
“You are. I can see it on your face.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Now you’re being a liar and thinking I’m a pig, but that’s all right. I understand. We have rules here, Pete, but they don’t have to do with you. We Sorias must be careful with pilgrims; if we interfere with them after the first miracle, our own darkness will come down on us, and that is a terrible thing that no one would like to see, worse than any of their darkness. So that is the first rule: only room and board for the pilgrims, no other conversation, because you don’t know what will help them. Rule two, if you want a wife or you want a husband, you go outside Bicho Raro. Love is a dangerous thing already, without a pilgrim in it. Rule three, only a saint performs the miracle, and no one else around, because you don’t know when the darkness will bite like that snake you just saw. These are the rules.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Pete said. He wasn’t sure what he was expected to say, as he was not a Soria and the rules didn’t apply to him, but he also could see that it was a grave issue and wanted Antonia to see that he realized this.
“That’s why I’m not talking to the pilgrims,” Antonia said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“It’s not because I’m a pig.”
“No, ma’am.”
“That’s why no one came to talk to you, because we thought you were a pilgrim.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m telling you because all of the pilgrims know, and you should, too, so that you know what a Soria will or won’t do, and you know we’re not being rude.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good. Here’s your room,” Antonia said, closing the distance to the final doorway. “Clean up after yourself.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Pete said.
Antonia leaned toward the room but did not look inside it. “Padre, this boy will be your roommate. He can have the floor.” She was walking away before she even finished speaking. “Come find Michael or myself when you’re ready to work, Wyatt.”
The final room in the hall belonged to Padre Jiminez, a priest from northern Colorado. He was as benevolent and friendly and holy as you’d hope for a priest to be, so long as your skirt didn’t blow up in the wind. The first miracle had left him with the head of a coyote but the hands of a man. He used the first to gobble up rabbits and the second to fasten on his white collar each morning. He did try to vanquish the darkness, but he could not stop his coyote’s ears from pricking when a pretty girl came to Bicho Raro.
When Pete stepped into the doorway, Padre Jiminez was sitting at the end of a narrow mattress. The bed was made up as tidily as a business envelope, and there was nothing else in the room but a small table with a lamp on it and a cross hanging on the wall. At this sight—the spare decor, the coyote-headed man, the grimly made bed—Pete suddenly felt a second shock through him. This one was not surprise but homesickness, an understanding of how far he was from Oklahoma in every way, a fear that his plan was nothing but smoke tricks to fool himself into feeling better. The ferocity of this emotion sent an additional wave through his heart, and for the first time, Pete really believed that Pete the doctor may have been onto something, and that was a leash that felt shorter.
And so it was a somewhat more feeble version of Pete that Padre first saw—some might argue a truer version, if they are one of those who believes we are only as strong as our weakest moments. Luckily for Pete and for many people, Padre Jiminez was not one of them.
The priest leaped up and loped across the room to Pete. “Welcome, young man,” he said. He had a very crisp enunciation, because he had to work hard to get the words out around his sharp canines and lolling tongue. “Welcome, welcome, welcome!”
Pete, like many a young rural Protestant, reeled back first from the priestly collar and second from the coyote head. “Oh—sir—thank you.”
Padre Jiminez waited until the silence had become slightly uncomfortable, and then he gobbled it up with his flashing teeth. “Ah! So, have you had your miracle yet?”
“I’m just here about a truck,” Pete said. “Just here to work.”
“Is that so!”
“Just a truck.”
“No secret darkness lurking inside you?”
Pete found himself once again telling the story of his aunt Josefa.
“Of course, of course, of course,” Padre Jiminez said. “Josefa. Wonderful lady, though a little progressive. We court darkness when we swim nude.”
“Do we?” Pete asked.
“Do you?”
Pete halted the conversation and restarted it. “Are you still—do you still—are you a priest here?”
“I am always a priest in my heart. Are you a Catholic?”
“I’m a Christian.”
“Lucky,” Padre Jiminez said. “So am I. Say, you came with the man last night, didn’t you?”
Pete had not thought about Tony since waking up in his car. But the jolt of homesickness he’d just felt had the effect of softening the memory of his trip with Tony. His mind skipped over all the negative aspects and instead highlighted the camaraderie of the shared hours together.
Just a decade before, a scientist named Harry Harlow had studied the science of attachment by performing experiments on monkeys. The poor infant monkeys had been deprived of their real mothers but offered two substitutes: an artificial monkey covered with terry cloth and an artificial monkey made of wire. A terry-cloth mother is not much of a mother at all, but all of the infant monkeys agreed she was better than the wire mother. Harlow had not studied young men from Oklahoma in this experiment, but the results still held true for Pete. Padre and the other strange pilgrims felt like a wire mother to Pete, and the specter of Tony, though only a snarling terry-cloth mother, seemed to at least offer a semblance of comfort.
“Yes, I did come with him!” Pete said now. “Where is he? Is he still here?”
“Oh yes, yes.” Padre Jiminez gestured out the tiny window.
Together, they peered out the window, but Pete did not see Tony. He saw the bright day, and a swath of shade across it. Pete’s eyes followed that long, stretching shadow, deep blue in the late morning light. Shielding his eyes against the sun, he tipped his head back and then farther back, trying to clearly see what enormous structure cast it. He saw a smooth white surface stretching two stories up, with seams like enormous stitching. He did not understand the top of it, which was dark and so black as to be violet. It was not until he lowered his eyes to look at the base of the structure and saw a single, vast, bare foot that he realized what he was looking at, because he remembered clearly Antonia Soria’s dogs eating the shoe that had been on it. Now he understood that the white surface was yards of white suit and that the black that topped it was a field of shiny hair, all of i
t the same as he had seen it the night before, except three times larger.
“Holy moly,” Pete said. “Is that Tony?”
While Pete was eyeballing Tony’s new stature, Beatriz was finally discovering Daniel’s letter.
Daniel was not much of a letter writer. He was a slow reader and a slower writer, often reversing letters inside a word and sometimes transcribing numbers facing the wrong direction. His ears were more cunning than his hands, so he was easily distracted by any noises while he worked. He could not write while anyone was speaking to him, or else he would accidentally pen the words he heard spoken. In fact, before he was the Saint of Bicho Raro, he and his friends had driven into town after dark to paint the side of the local grocery. They were painting the grocery because the owner’s son had spoken unfavorably of the Soria family during the school day, and they were arriving after dark because they presumed correctly that the grocer did not want his building painted. Daniel, the bravest, was given the role of painting, and so he began to slowly apply the words (in Spanish for his friends, who were not bilingual like the Soria children) as the others kept watch, being careful to not form the letter e backward. He had intended to paint the proverb ¡Vivir con miedo, es cómo vivir a medias!—A life lived in fear is a life half-lived!—but his fellows, too drunk and jolly to cleave close to that noble sentiment, began to softly chant as Daniel painted, knowing how his letters would obey them rather than him. He ended up decorating the building instead with ¡Vivir con mierda, es cómo vivir a medias!, which has a different meaning, as the corruption of only two letters transforms miedo from fear to shit.
This difficulty in writing had followed Daniel into his young adulthood, so when Beatriz got a letter from him, she knew immediately that something was amiss. He would not have written if there had been any other way to convey his meaning.
She had stepped on the letter as she’d descended the ladder. The paper had provided less grip than the rung and so her foot had slipped and she’d nearly fallen. She jumped to the ground to avoid twisting her ankle—and there it had been before her eyes. She opened it, saw Daniel’s handwriting, and closed it back up again, quick. The sight of so much of Daniel’s handwriting was as troubling as the sound of his voice had been the night before.