Halfway through this process, she had a third visitor, although this one took her longer to spot. It was Jennie, the schoolteacher pilgrim who could only repeat what others said to her. She had been standing in the doorway for quite some time, trying to decide how long it would take Marisita to notice her, as of course she could not say anything original to get her attention.
“Oh, Jennie! I didn’t notice you,” Marisita said.
“Oh, Jennie!” Jennie replied. “I didn’t notice you.”
Marisita wanted to ask how long she had been there, but she knew from experience that it was pointless. She was sure Jennie wanted food, another delay that made Marisita want to snap, but she knew that she would only hear her ugly, short words echoed back at her in Jennie’s voice. So Marisita just made her another empanada with the scraps of what she’d made Pete, and then she indicated the food she had just made for Tony. “Could you bring this tray to the giant? I need to go out.”
“Could you bring this tray to the giant? I need to go out.” Jennie echoed. But she held out her hands for the tray. She seemed to be trying to say something else to Marisita, but nothing else escaped her lips.
Marisita was quite suddenly overcome with frustration with all of them. Daniel’s sacrifice hadn’t healed her, because she was too tormented by her terrible past, and Jennie couldn’t find an original word no matter how hard she tried, and Theldon kept growing moss, and they all seemed beyond hope. She missed Daniel, though she felt she had no right to. He had never been hers to miss, because she was a pilgrim, and he was a saint, and more importantly, because she would never stop being a pilgrim. She would always be Marisita and her butterflies. Tears were prickling in her eyes again, but no one would even know if she began crying once more, because this rain would never stop.
“We’re a mess,” she said.
“We’re a mess,” Jennie replied.
Marisita turned away, covering her face, and by the time she turned back around, Jennie had taken the tray of food away.
She collected her thoughts and she collected her supplies, and she went out to search for Daniel.
Tony had also been having a bad time as a pilgrim, although he’d had to endure it far fewer days than Marisita had. All he had wanted when he arrived at Bicho Raro was to find a solution to his hatred of feeling constantly watched. All he had gotten was a body that ensured that he would be constantly watched. His second morning as a giant, he had decided the best course of action was to leave.
“Hang it,” he had said, to no one. “I’m blowing this Popsicle stand.”
He currently stood an impressive twenty feet tall. Not tall as far as buildings went but very tall as far as men went, and too tall to fit into the Mercury (he tried). He would come back for the car, he decided, once he could fit into it again. He put his luggage in his pocket and looked around Bicho Raro to see if there was anyone watching him go. There was just that still, owl-eyed girl he had seen the first night (this was Beatriz). He saluted her. She waved. It was a small wave that seemed to say Do what you want.
So he left.
He limped off into the high desert on his one bare foot and one shod foot. The always-present sun painted sweat on his forehead. Dust billowed up with each step he took, but he was too tall for it to reach his face. Instead, it formed a whirling trail behind him, occasionally tossing up fitful dirt devils, before lying back obediently among the scrub. He did not look back. He only walked. Tony was not the first pilgrim to have done this—to have walked out without much of a plan other than to leave. There is something about the expanse around Bicho Raro that encourages this ill-advised wandering. Although the desert is not comforting and there are no landmarks within easy reach, something about the impossibility of it acts as a vacuum to those who don’t know their way.
“Crazy fools,” Tony muttered as he went.
He walked for the better part of the morning.
For most people, this wouldn’t have gotten them very far, but Tony’s giant footsteps took him all the way to the Great Sand Dunes near Mosca, forty or fifty miles away. The smoothly scalloped dunes were such an unexpected sight that he stopped short to evaluate them; they were a natural wonder scaled to his current size. The dunes cover more than one hundred thousand acres, the awesome offspring of an ancient extinct lake bed and fortuitous winds, and are known to produce a peculiar moaning sound under the correct circumstances. Twenty years before Tony stepped foot on the dunes, Bing Crosby with Dick McIntire and His Harmony Hawaiians had recorded a song about them called “The Singing Sands of Alamosa,” and now Tony remembered with peculiar acuity the single time that he had spun that dulcet track on his show. As he recalled its not particularly remarkable melody, the oversized bare toes of his left foot wiggled and provoked a slow avalanche of sand.
As the grains of sand slid over one another, they sang the dunes’ legendary song. It was a mournful, eerie wail, and the strangeness of it reminded Tony all at once that he had taken the craziest part of Bicho Raro—himself—with him on this walk. He stood there and cursed the unnamed woman who had approached him back in Juniata and all of her family and also his enormous Mercury, for taking him there in the first place.
The sun gleamed down upon him. He did not shrink. His stomach growled, frightening some cranes nearby. He hadn’t eaten since before the miracle and was hungry enough to be twins.
He felt the crawling sensation of being watched. Sure enough, there were two tourists at the dunes that day, a man and a woman who were married, but not to each other. They were staring up at him. As they reached slowly for their cameras, it truly sank in that this walk had been a fool’s errand. Until he found a way back to his ordinary size, there was only one option for him.
The sands slowly stopped singing.
Tony trudged back to Bicho Raro. The timing of his return was both fortunate and unfortunate, because just three moments before, Marisita had prepared food for him, and two moments before, Jennie had carried that tray of food out to where Tony had been spending his days, and just one moment before, Antonia’s dogs knocked Jennie to the ground and ate all of the food and also the tray and also the blank journal that she had been trying to write in since her miracle.
And so the moment Tony arrived back in Bicho Raro was also the moment when he noticed Jennie, who had remained wordless throughout this experience since the dogs had not spoken out loud while they took her things. Jennie could not explain to Tony why she was empty-handed. She could only stand surrounded by torn notebook pages and clumps of dog hair.
Tony’s soul was feeling bruised by the knowledge that there was no easy escape for him, so he sounded less humorous and more brusque than he ordinarily might have.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“What do you want?” Jennie demanded.
Tony was somewhat taken aback by the abusive tone in the young woman’s voice; he did not yet realize that it was a reflection of his own.
“Nothing.”
Jennie said, with the precise same tone, “Nothing.”
Tony took this as disbelief. He stared her down for a moment, and when this failed to move her, he said, “You know what, who came over here?”
Helplessly, Jennie replied, “You know what, who came over here?”
Poor Jennie would have loved to explain herself, but of course she couldn’t. Moreover, the more distressed she became, the more precisely she mimicked the tone of the original statement. So as Tony grew increasingly exasperated, so did she. Which meant the conversation may have grown more fraught if Padre Jiminez had not been making his loping way from the house to Marisita’s kitchen to steal a bite to eat and a glance of her ankles. He saw what was happening with Jennie and swung to the rescue.
“Oh hello hello hello,” Padre Jiminez said. “I’ve been looking for an excuse to introduce myself before now!”
Tony peered down at this newcomer to the conversation, saw that it was a man with a coyote’s head, and said, “Oh, Jesus Christ, it never ends.”
Padre Jiminez laughed in his high, yipping way, and then said, “I understand, I understand, but I’d thank you to not take the Lord’s name in vain as I am a priest.”
“You’re Lassie,” Tony said. This was an insult that had force in 1962, as the television show Lassie, starring a winning collie dog and the boy who loved her, had been running for eight years and was well known. Padre Jiminez’s coyote head did not bear much resemblance to a rough collie, according to the American Kennel Club rough collie breed standard at the time (“The head should be long, fairly narrow, and flat; ears small, set well back on the head, and carried semi-erect, but not pricked”), but the meaning was still clear.