Closing his eyes, he thought of his father.
George Wyatt was a man of action. George Wyatt had been supposed to die in the womb, as his umbilical cord had been wrapped around his neck, but he’d decided that death was not for him and had chewed himself free. He’d been born two weeks early, his baby hands still clutching the ragged stump of his umbilical cord, his baby mouth already full of teeth. He’d been the weakest of his eight siblings, but he’d begun lifting weights as a toddler and by the time he was fifteen, he could lift all of his siblings at once. His family had been dust-poor and he was meant to be, too, but he’d signed himself up for the army and worked hard. He saved a full colonel from choking on his rations in the field by punching him in the face and telling him to snap out of it and was made an officer.
George Wyatt would not have allowed himself to be disheartened at this early stage.
Pete opened his eyes. Resolve straightened his spine. He would search for someone who knew about his deal to work for the box truck.
Back in Oklahoma a few years before, he had enjoyed a brief stint as a firehouse fund-raiser. After a particularly difficult winter, the town’s only fire truck had gone out of commission; an excess of chimney fires and poverty had clogged the fire truck’s hose with prayers and despair and it had split from end to end. Pete had taken up a successful collection to replace it, going from door to door with a smile and a pledge sheet.
He knocked on doors now with the same vigor but got a very different response. Although he was certain there must be people inside the buildings, every door remained closed to him. He got the sense that he was being watched, too, that eyes were on him through the windows, eyes that disappeared as soon as he squinted in their direction. At one point he even heard a baby cry out, hurriedly shushed as he knocked on Rosa Soria’s camper door.
The problem was that he looked like a pilgrim. All of the Sorias knew that pilgrims had arrived the night before, and all of the Sorias knew that a miracle had taken place. They assumed that Pete had received the miracle alongside Tony, and therefore they would not risk speaking to him. Ordinarily, Daniel might have risked it, but today he was as absent as the others.
Pete did not know why he was being avoided, only that he was. He did the only thing he could think to do: He began to work.
He chose the log lodge site for his attention. Michael had made himself scarce as soon as Pete began to move about Bicho Raro, and it is difficult to jump usefully into the middle of someone else’s tasks without instruction, but Pete had a lot of practice helping. Good helping is generally about taking quick and accurate stock of another’s needs, and that was what he did now. He saw that dimensions for the lodge had been marked out, and he also saw that some holes had been started, and that it was slow going because of the rocky soil. He thought about what the unseen architect of this project might need, and then he began to move all the rocks from inside the dimensions of the lodge to the outside.
The occupants of Bicho Raro watched him work. They watched him remove enough rocks to fill the wheelbarrow parked by the lodge site. They watched him remove enough rocks to pile one cairn, then two cairns, then three. They watched him remove enough rocks to begin to build a small structure beside it. He did not have the material to build a roof or put in glass windows or hang a wooden door, but he built four walls and a fireplace in the corner and had just begun on decorative windowsills when he ran out of rocks.
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.