“We don’t judge here,” Padre Jiminez intoned, which wasn’t particularly true but in an ideal world would have been. “Everyone’s darkness manifests differently! Jennie here, for instance. I was about to tell you that she can only repeat what someone else has said to her in a conversation.”
“Is that true?” Tony asked.
“Is that true?” Jennie echoed.
“Well, Mary’s nipples. How would I be able to tell if you were having me on?”
Jennie cast an apologetic glance at Padre Jiminez. “Well, Mary’s nipples. How would I be able to tell if you were having me on?”
“So you see,” Padre Jiminez demurred. Tony rudely whistled the theme song from Lassie. This might have troubled another man, but Padre Jiminez had been here long enough to see that all kinds of people had all kinds of coping mechanisms. And what was happening now was that despite being made into a giant, it had not properly struck Tony before how miraculous the Sorias and Bicho Raro really were. He had performed the common mistake that many do when confronted with the idea of the miraculous: He had assumed it meant magical. Miracles often look like magic, but a proper miracle is also awesome, sometimes fearful, and always vaguely difficult to truly wrap your mortal head around. Slowly, it was dawning upon Tony that he had not contemplated the full scope of the place, that he was but one of many recipients of peculiar miracles. Padre was patient enough to wait for him on the other side of this dawning.
Tony said, “This is a madhouse!”
“The world’s a madhouse,” Padre Jiminez corrected. “This is a place to heal it. What’s your name, traveler?”
“Tony.”
Tony eyed Jennie. “What, she’s not gonna say that, too?”
“You were talking to me, not her, and the poor dear only has to repeat what’s said to her, fortunately for her,” said Padre Jiminez. “No last name to go with that Tony?”
“Nope. Just Tony.”
“Well, all right. I’m Padre Alexandro Marin Jiminez, but you may call me whatever makes you comfortable. I’m here for your spiritual enrichment.”
“From your head, it looks like you’re supposed to be here for your own spiritual enrichment,” Tony said. “I’ll handle myself, thanks.”
“Suit yourself,” Padre Jiminez said. “But it can be lonesome to be out here and not talking to anybody. Jennie, what is all of this scattered on the ground here? Is this your notebook? Is that an edge of Marisita’s flower tray? Were you bringing Tony food?”
Jennie repeated all of this back to him, but because she trusted Padre Jiminez and was a little calmer than before, she managed to make the final question mark sound like a period.
“Those dogs,” Padre Jiminez said (“Those dogs,” echoed Jennie). “We’ll get you some food, Tony.”
Tony was hungry. But he was also thinking about the thing he feared more than anything: being watched while he ate. He vowed to find a private location to feed himself when food did eventually show up. As he was quickly scouting for places that would make good view blocks, he spotted Joaquin Soria peering at him around the corner of a house. When he caught Tony looking, he vanished quickly.
Tony narrowed his eyes. “Who’s that poking around?”
Padre Jiminez didn’t turn his head; he just sniffed with his coyote nose. “Joaquin Soria. One of the younger boys.”
Tony narrowed his eyes. “Why’s he spying around?”
“Boys will be boys,” Padre Jiminez said carelessly. “Might as well get used to the Sorias, Tony. They live here, too.”
“Oh, hold it right there, Padre,” Tony said. “I’m not intending on living here. I didn’t drive all the way here to get a miracle just for the miracle to be that I’m living in someone’s backyard. This desert’s giving me a nosebleed and this sun’s giving me a headache. I’m figuring out what the hell I have to do to get myself right and get myself out of here. Right, Jennie?”
“Right, Jennie?” Jennie echoed, startled. But after a pause, she nodded, too. Because other people’s words had been the problem for so long, it had not occurred to her before that minute that sometimes, someone else’s words might be exactly what she needed to say how she felt. Later, this new knowledge would come in handy, but for right now, she felt only a hint of the value it would have for her.
Padre Jiminez noted the complexity of this exchange. Priests are a bit like owls in that some of them also have a sense for when miracles are afoot, and he was having that suspicion now. Some priests fly like owls, too, like Padres Quintero, López, and Gonzalez, who all received the gift of slow-motion flight as a result of the first miracle when they arrived to Bicho Raro together in 1912, but Padre Jiminez was not one of them.
He said, “Sometimes it is good to be hungry.”
Night fell, and the stars sauntered out.
Night fell, and the owls opened their eyes.
Night fell, and Beatriz had not yet cornered Pete.
This came as a shock to Beatriz, who had promised Joaquin that she would talk to him about the truck’s fate. She kept glimpsing Pete and then losing him, which was not an easy thing to do in Bicho Raro. It seemed particularly impossible since Judith had assigned Pete to a single, specific task in a single, unmoving location: building a low wooden dance stage, ideal for staging a romantic birthday celebration, ideal for reminding Francisco and Antonia of the circumstances of their first fortuitous meeting. He worked diligently on that all day, setting legs into the ground and building a framework to rest upon the legs and scavenging boards from the side of a collapsed barn to be the stage itself. Even though he did not seem to ever take a break from this task, every time Beatriz tried to catch him at it, he vanished. She searched for him near the barn he’d picked over and she searched for him near the skeletal stage and she searched for him at all the places in between and was bemused to find him in none of these places. Then she would turn and find him back in the place she had just been. She could not understand it. Beatriz could not know that this was because of Pete’s decision to avoid her at all costs.
He was so eager to keep from experiencing the jolt to his heart at the sight of her that every time he saw her heading across Bicho Raro, he did a quick about-face on his own journey. The closest brush yet came as night moved in. This was after stars had replaced the sun and the sunset was only three colors laid thin on top of each other at the horizon. He was headed back to his room when he saw Beatriz across the open space between the main buildings. First her shadow, cast long and dangerous by the porch light behind her, and then the rest of her.
Pete did a quick turn and marched back the way he had come, glancing quickly behind himself all the while. Beatriz was wearing a flowered dress that was made short by the way she was using it—she had gathered it up into a makeshift basket in front of her and filled it with a strange nest of wires and metal rods and limber twigs. She was not looking at him, but nonetheless, she was cleaving to his path so unerringly that it felt as if she was following him. He scuttled into the darkness between two cabins, tripping over something in the blackness (Antonia’s dog bowls), and when he looked back, she had turned that way as well. He ducked around the back of the cabin, but she remained behind him. He hurried down the path past the goat pasture, but when he looked over his shoulder, he saw that he had come no closer to losing her than before.
Pete’s heart was already thudding dangerously, but suddenly he imagined that she might truly be following him with intention, that she might be trying to speak to him, and the idea of that became voluminous in his mind.
His heart lurched again.
With a gasp, and pressing his hand against the beleaguered organ in his chest, Pete broke into a run around the side of a barn, darted quickly across the yard on the opposite side, before vaulting a low set of scrubs. The night stretched up and covered his eyes, so he misjudged the jump. He crashed directly into something solid, which turned out to be the enormous toe of Tony’s shoe.
“Hey, kid,” Tony said. “Thanks for sparing me the trouble of kicking you.”
Pete gasped, “Shucks,” but couldn’t get anything more out, draped as he was across the shoe, holding his chest and waiting for his heart to once more become invisible inside him.