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 it 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.
Beatriz preferred to do her hard thinking in private whenever possible, so she moved quietly away from the radio telescope, behind the buildings of Bicho Raro and over to the box truck. There was not much room beneath the truck, but she nevertheless managed to slide herself beneath it with some wiggling of first her hips and then her shoulders. Then, in the safety of that dim, small space, she sighed and opened the letter back up again.
She read it. She read it again, because the letter asked her to. She read it a third time. The letter didn’t ask for that, but twice had not been enough.
Beatriz,
I am in love with Marisita Lopez. It was an accident.
Last night after I was done with Tony, I helped her. That wasn’t an accident. I couldn’t be a coward and watch her suffer anymore.
The darkness has already started to come to me.
I am going away from Bicho Raro to the wilderness, where it can’t hurt anyone but me. I am worried that if I stay, the family will be tempted to help me, and bring darkness on themselves, too. I cannot live with that.
I am telling her to give this letter to you and no one else because you are the only one I can trust to be reasonable instead of kind. I’m trusting you to make them understand they can’t try to find me. You better wait several hours before telling anyone to give me a head start just in case. Please. It’s what I want. Read this another time so you see how much I mean it. This is only my fault and no one else should get hurt. Maybe I will be able to beat it and you will all see me again.
I am sorry, but I am taking the kitchen radio. Maybe I’ll be able to pick up Diablo Diablo in the evenings, and it will be like you two are there with me.
Please don’t tell Marisita that I love her. I don’t want to make her any more hurt than she already is.
Daniel
Several of the words were spelled incorrectly and he had left out a few of them and his emphatic but messy underline for emphasis had nearly crossed out a few syllables, but Beatriz figured it out.
For several long minutes she remained under the truck, gazing at the lacy rust next to the wheels. The truck would not have ordinarily rusted so soon, not here in the dry heat of Bicho Raro, but earlier in the year it had been parked too close to Marisita’s lodgings and had been flooded with the salt water of her tears.
Beatriz always carried a pen and one or two pieces of notebook paper folded into fourths, and now she removed them from her pocket. Previously, she had kept a stub of a pencil instead of the pen, as she preferred the feeling of its scratching—it felt quivery and alive as it shuddered across the paper—but once she had been knocked over by the cows when they escaped their paddock and had impaled her arm. Now she carried a pen. It was more inanimate but also more easily hooded.
Rolling onto her stomach, she began to jot down thoughts in the numbers of her secret language. How long, she mused, had Daniel been in love with Marisita Lopez, and how had it even happened? They’d been told their entire lives to keep their distance from the pilgrims, and one couldn’t fall in love without getting close. Perhaps, she wrote, he was wrong. Perhaps he only felt he was in love with Marisita.