The building was not really the problem. The pilgrims were the problem.
There is a plant that still grows in Colorado today called the tamarisk. It is also called the salt cedar. It is not a native plant. In the 1930s, a dust storm had arrived in the middle of the United States and raged for years. To keep all the states between Colorado and Tennessee from blowing away, farmers had planted millions of tamarisk shrubs to hold the ground down. Once its job was done there, the enterprising tamarisk had packed its bags and moved to the southwestern corner of the United States to stay. In bloom, it is very lovely, with tiny pink flowers made beautiful by their unusual combination of tender color and physical durability. When it is not in bloom, it is an enormous plant of extreme hardiness, so suited to growing in Colorado that when it is present, no other plant can compete with it. Massive, unwieldy roots dig deep into the soil, drinking all the water and using all of the salt, eventually making the only suitable neighbor for tamarisk yet more tamarisk.
This is what the pilgrims had become at Bicho Raro.
They had been arriving at the same pace but leaving at a far slower one. For some reason, they could not seem to perform the second miracle on themselves with the same efficiency as past generations. So they loitered in their partially changed states, benevolently draining Bicho Raro’s resources. The Sorias did not dare help. They had all been told the danger of interfering with miracles, and no one wanted to be the one to risk bringing darkness on themselves and the rest of their family.
The simplest solution would have been to throw these overflowing pilgrims into the desert to fend for themselves. But even if Daniel had not been around to protest the ethics of this, the memory of Elizabeth Pantazopoulus stopped the rest of the Sorias. Elizabeth Pantazopoulus had rolled into Bicho Raro at some point in the 1920s, wearing a man’s striped prison uniform and bearing a bullet wound in her left arm. In the crook of her good arm, she had been carrying a long-haired cat that also had a bullet wound in one limb. She had not volunteered the circumstances that had brought her to this point; she’d merely received the first miracle and remained at Bicho Raro until her gunshot wound had healed and the cat no longer flinched at knocking sounds. Then she had managed to perform the second miracle on herself, and was gone the next morning. The Sorias had heard nothing more from her until four years later, when a packet had arrived from New York City with three things in it: (1) a piece of paper saying simply, Thank you.—Yours, Elizabeth Pantazopoulus; (2) a bullet, presumably from either her arm or the cat’s; and (3) a pile of cash large enough to see Bicho Raro through the more difficult years of the Depression.
You just can’t guess who will strike it big. So the pilgrims stayed, and the Sorias resentfully built a lodge.
Beatriz moved her attention beyond Michael and the lodge to the very large, wood-paneled Mercury station wagon still parked in the dust beyond it. Making binoculars of her hands to shield her eyes from the sun, she focused on the interior. She could see Pete Wyatt’s boots through the back window; he was either sleeping or dead. To her continued surprise, the urge to place her thumb on his skin had not diminished, even though she could not even see his elbows from where she sat. In an effort to study this feeling objectively, Beatriz imagined it rising out of her mind and up into the air above the telescope, hoping to disentangle the emotion from her untrustworthy body. To her annoyance, however, it refused to float above her. Some feelings are rooted too strongly in the body to exist without it, and this one, desire, is one of them. Beatriz was aware of this form of attraction from observation but not from personal experience. She contemplated the absence of logic in the sensation and then considered the more emotional members of her family, wondering if this was what they felt like all the time.
Beatriz watched Pete’s boots and pondered her puzzling feeling for such a duration and with such an intensity that she noticed neither the departure of the owls above her nor the arrival of Marisita Lopez below her.
Marisita stood at the telescope’s base, one hand lifted to protect her eyes against the rain that always fell on her. The dust around her puffed and splattered under the assault of the precipitation. The butterflies on her dress moved their sluggish wings but did not fly.
She gazed uncertainly up at Beatriz. Her errand was urgent enough to encourage her to break the rule against speaking with Sorias, but still she hesitated. This was because Beatriz could be quite frightening from the outside. Right now, la chica sin sentimientos cut a stark and haunting image up on the telescope platform. Motionless, speechless, unblinking. She was, in many ways, like the owls that had just been perched above her, particularly the ghost-faced barn owls with their inscrutable expressions.
Marisita had come from Texas to Bicho Raro, and on the border where she lived, owls were considered with distrust. The problem lay not with the owls themselves but rather with the lechuzas, witches who could transform themselves into owls with human faces. Even though Marisita trusted the intentions of the Sorias, there was no pretending that they didn’t have otherworldly abilities. And although she did not believe the Church had been correct to drive them from Abejones, it was not difficult for her to see how she, as one of the Sorias’ troubled pilgrims, also did not belong in a church.
It was just that Marisita was not sure that saints and witches were very different in the end.
And Beatriz was the most saintly of the Sorias, apart from Daniel.
Which meant that Marisita did not feel bold enough to shout up to her that Daniel Soria had given her a letter meant for Beatriz. She merely trapped the paper between the metal rung of the ladder and the metal riser and made sure that it would not fall out on its own, moving quickly so that her rain-damp hands did not spoil it.
She didn’t know what the letter said. She had been told not to read the letter, so she had not read it. She could not know how its contents would impact them all.
“Beatriz! Beatriz Soria! I have something for you!” she shouted, but only in her mind. Marisita often said things only in her mind. This is not generally an efficient way of speaking, as very few people are mind readers, apart from Delecta Marsh, who had received mind reading as a result of the first miracle back in 1899. But Delecta was long dead, shot by an immediately excommunicated and now-also-dead abbot, and so in reality, Marisita merely twisted her hands together and hoped that Beatriz might notice her and come for the letter.
She did not, and Marisita grew no braver.
Marisita began to cry, just a little. Her tears were not only from anxiety. They were the kind of tears that come easily because earlier tears have already smoothed the path for them. The night before, when Tony and Pete had arrived, she had been considering a terrible decision. The decision was this: whether or not she should walk out into the desert without any food and proceed until she could no longer remember who she was. If you think this sounds like a painful way to die, know that Marisita had also considered this and decided upon it for that very reason; it was, she thought, what she deserved. But now Daniel had given her this mysterious letter to deliver, and he had told her it was important. She could not go into the desert until she knew what it meant.
She felt trapped in between. She had not truly wanted to go the night before, but she hadn’t wanted to stay, either. It was this, in addition to her fear of Beatriz, that squeezed yet more tears from her.
The tears didn’t make her any braver, however, so she left the letter clinging to the ladder, waiting to be discovered.
Beatriz, it began, I am in love with Marisita Lopez.
Pete Wyatt woke as a stranger in the world of miracles.
He was neither a saint nor a pilgrim. He was just a kid waking too late in the morning in the back of a stranger’s egg-yellow Mercury.
Wiping the sweat from his forehead, he slithered into the boastful sunshine outside. The settlement’s appearance surprised him. It was not at all what he’d imagined in the darkness the evening before. Bicho Raro by night was a god; Bicho Raro by day was a man. In the raw daylight, it was a place people lived—a place where a young man could work for a box truck.
One would think this unveiled truth would be encouraging, but it had the opposite effect on Pete. His journey before now had felt like a dream, and a dream can always be changed into something else. But when you are awake, the truth is bright and stark, not as willing to bend to the mind’s will. So now Pete truly faced the reality of the plan he had made. He pressed a hand to his heart again and wondered if he had made a mistake. Perhaps, he thought, he had overestimated himself. Perhaps a place this vast and an adventure this curious were only for those without holes in their hearts.