Pete worked.
He began to work as soon as he tossed his bags into the room he was to share with Padre Jiminez, and he worked without pause all day long. He worked for six hours straight, pausing only to suddenly divert his path when he caught sight of Beatriz Soria, waiting until the coast was clear and his heart was safe before he began work again.
“New boy!” called Robbie, one of the twins, who could not remember his name. “Come talk to us.”
Pete said, “I can’t. I’m working.”
“Pete?” Marisita called as he walked through Bicho Raro, his arms full of boxes. “Will you be stopping for almuerzo?”
Pete said, “I can’t. I’m working.”
“You’re making me tired to look at you,” said mossy Theldon from his seat on the porch. “Take a load off.”
Pete said, “I can’t. I’m working.”
Antonia had set Pete on tasks that required little skill but much sweat. Pete found himself digging out collapsed irrigation ditches and picking individual nails out of the driveway, sweeping unoccupied (and sometimes occupied) wasp nests out of eaves, and plucking malevolently red Colorado potato beetle larvae off the tomato and potato crops.
The last of these tasks nearly broke him. As relentless as Pete was, the Colorado potato beetle was more so. As fast as he could destroy them, they made more of themselves. He did not know that the Colorado potato beetle, also known as the ten-lined potato beetle, was also currently persecuting the East Germans. Plagues of potato beetles were blamed upon American planes. Communist propaganda shouted that the Sechsbeiniger Botschafter del Wall Street (six-legged ambassadors of Wall Street) would eat them out of house and home and right into capitalism. East German schoolchildren were sent into the fields to pluck larvae, just as Pete was doing, and they, too, learned to hate the small, fleshy, scarlet creatures.
It was possible that this particularly unwinnable game might have broken Pete’s will to work, but luckily for him, a thunderstorm came in, fast and roaring. The desert caught his attention with a puff of dust and weeds, so he just had time to take cover in the six-stall barn before the rain really began to come down. Inside the barn, Pete began to shovel manure and sweep the aisle. It was hard work, but it was better than the never-ending drudgery of beetle picking.
Inside, it was dim and comforting, either because of or despite Pete not being raised around horses. There were only two horses in the stable at the moment—three if you counted the one the mare was carrying inside her—but they were all terrible horses. The mare was a savage creature kept mostly because she was the fastest barrel racer to come out of Colorado in a generation. She was so mean that she even killed her own name, and now people just pointed to her. They kept breeding her, hoping that she’d throw a foal with all the speed and none of the malice, but so far, no dice. They had great hopes for the foal she was carrying now, but the truth was that the tiny filly inside her would, in six years, bear the state’s current barrel-racing champion out of a competition and through the display window of a local furniture store.
The other horse in the barn was Salto, a saddlebred stallion that one of the pilgrims had come riding in on five years before. He was a very fancy horse, it turned out, one of the last of a very rare bloodline, and so although the Sorias were not particularly interested in saddlebreds, he was nonetheless valuable for his progeny. Every so often, people would come from very far away to breed their mares to him and would pay an enormous sum for this privilege. And so he remained. The only problem with Salto was that he was extremely high-strung and would not respect a fence. He had to remain in his box stall day in and day out, and as he was so anxious and excitable, he had to wear a small bit of padding strapped between his ears to prevent him from rearing up and murdering himself on the ceiling of his own stall. Michael had put a radio in the stable to soothe Salto and prevent him from attempting escape.
Pete was looking at Salto when he realized that he was not the only human in the barn. There was another man scrubbing buckets in one of the empty stalls. To break the silence and to be friendly, Pete said, “Crazy weather, right?”
Pete did not know it, but he was talking to Luis the one-handed, who was not actually one-handed but was called that because his left hand was a full one-inch wider than his right. Luis used the spread of those left fingers to great advantage: He was the finest guitar player in a fifty-mile radius and no one could catch a baseball like he could. There were two things that people did not know about Luis: First, that he was a collector of gloves. He bought two pairs of gloves each time, as he needed two different sizes, and he kept the too-small left gloves in a box that he stored between his mattress and the wall. Second, Luis the one-handed was a great romantic, and he daydreamed that there existed a love of his life who also had mismatched hands, and that his useless left-hand gloves would one day fit her. So he kept those gloves in a box like a stack of prewritten love letters, waiting for the heart that was longing to read them.
“It’s a big change from Oklahoma,” Pete tried.
“Llueve a cántaros,” said Luis.
This exchange was unproductive as Luis the one-handed did not speak very good English and Pete was from Oklahoma and had only loneliness as his second language.
They both shrugged, and, his bucket scrubbing done, Luis went into the hayloft to nap until the rain was over.
So Pete worked with only the galloping rain on the roof for company. He was happier than he’d been in a while. Although homesickness still plucked at him, his overall mood had been so poor in the days leading up to his exodus from Oklahoma that everything else seemed brighter in comparison.
It would be easy to think that the reason Pete’s failure to serve hit him so hard was because his family wasn’t understanding. But the truth was the opposite. If one lives with a brood of ogres, it is not a hard thing at all to let them down. One can even feel, perhaps, that the ogres had it coming—they were ogres, after all. But the Wyatts were not ogres. George Wyatt was a brusque and realistic man, but he was not cruel. He eyed the situation at hand and took the steps needed to correct for it. When Pete the doctor handed Pete the son back to him with the verdict of unfit for service, he surveyed the situation and told Pete, factually, that Pete would find something else to do and, in any case, he was sure that Dexter would continue the family’s military legacy, so Pete didn’t have to feel he was letting down the home front. Flor Wyatt, Pete’s mother, was married to a military man, and her mother had been married to a military man, and her mother’s mother had been married to a military man, and even back in Spain her mother’s mother’s mother had been married to a military man, and so on and so forth until the beginning of both women and the military, but she did not shame Pete’s inability to enlist. Instead, she said, “I’m sure you’ll find another way to serve your country.” And Dexter Wyatt, Pete’s slightly younger brother, who was the closest to an ogre the Wyatt family had, said, “I’ll shoot ’em for you, Pete.”
This kindness, however, only made the situation worse for Pete. It emphasized that the person who was being cruelest to Pete was actually Pete.
He knew that leaving wouldn’t change the way he felt. He didn’t pretend that he would outrun himself. But he did think he might find something to feed that voracious sense of duty inside him, unless that hungry feeling was just the gaping hole in his heart.
The box truck, he thought, had to be the answer.
Pete peered at the vehicle as he worked in the barn, looking out the windows to where it was parked at every opportunity. It was a touchstone, reminding him of what all of his new blisters would eventually be traded for. He thought he saw the back of the truck open at one point, but when he looked back out the window, it was closed again.
After a few hours of work, Pete realized that there were sounds coming from within the barn that could not be accounted for by the storm, the horses, or Luis’s snores. Following the sounds to their source, he discovered a low crawl space with a door in it. On the other side of the door, standing in the rain, was Michael Soria, Joaquin’s father.
Michael was working. He had not yet been told about Daniel, but even if he had been, he would have still been working. Ever since he had lost so much of his family to the incident with the German and the child, all he did was work from the moment he opened his eyes until the moment he closed them, taking his meals standing up and saving all of his non-negotiable body functions for the two minutes before he retired to bed. He was a very old-fashioned kind of person. Many people mistook Michael for Joaquin’s grandfather. He had already been quite old when he’d had children, and he appeared even older than he was because of his beard. Ever since the incident with the German and the child, he had stopped cutting both his hair and his beard and instead allowed them to grow as long as they wanted. Now both were so long that he had to wrap each up into a knot he secured with bands, one at the nape of his neck and one at his chin. Because his bones troubled him so much from all of his age and all of his work, he would unknot his beard and hair when he climbed into bed and, spreading it out, he would lie on top of it and find that it was the only thing that eased his aches and pains.
Here was a thing he wanted: to work. Here was a thing he feared: that he would become too feeble to work.
When Pete heard Michael, he was repairing the barn foundation in the rain. A scourge of pocket gophers had arrived at the beginning of the year with only two purposes: to make more pocket gophers and to dig their home directly beneath the barn. They had been so successful in the first pursuit that Antonia’s dogs could now subsist entirely on a diet of slow pocket gophers, and they had been so successful with the second pursuit that the barn foundation now tipped precariously, weakened by a network of gopher sitting rooms. Michael had previously performed a temporary repair by filling the holes with Rosa’s failed, rock-hard milk cakes, but the holes had outgrown Rosa’s baking habit and now he had no choice but to rebuild it properly.
Pete surveyed the situation and formed an opinion. “Need a hand?”
Michael surveyed Pete and formed an opinion. “It’s raining.”
“Yes, sir,” Pete agreed. He joined Michael in the rain, and together they worked side by side until their clothing was as soaked through as Marisita’s. They reached the end of the section Michael had hoped to finish that day, and wordlessly they began the next. They finished the next day’s section and began on the next. And so on and so forth until they had repaired the entirety of the barn’s foundation and it had stopped raining and the sun had come back out again and they both stopped to rest their hands on their knees and look at what they had done.
“You’re Josefa’s boy,” Michael said finally.
“Nephew, sir.”
“You’re here about the truck.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good,” said Michael, which might not seem like much of a reply, but put together, was more than he’d said to most anyone for years.
“Sir, do you mind me asking—” Pete began. “Do folks mostly come here for miracles?”
“Why else would they come out here?” This statement was not as dour as it sounded; Beatriz was not the only one in Bicho Raro who could be strictly pragmatic.
Pete gestured to the land around them. “Because it’s pretty.”
The desert preened and Michael regarded Pete anew. One compliments a man when one compliments his chosen home, and Michael felt nearly as good as the desert about Pete’s words. Kindly, he said, “You better get into some dry clothes now.”
Straightening up, Pete finger-combed his rain-flat hair into its usual style. “Soon. Got to pick some beetles first. See you later, sir!”
He left Michael standing there by the side of the barn, sheering off hard left to avoid a shadow he thought might be Beatriz, and then threw himself back into beetle picking. Ordinarily, Michael would have also thrown himself directly back into work, but for the first time in a very long time, Michael stood there for a full five minutes before beginning his next job, just watching Pete start on his next project. Humans have always been fascinated by mirrors, after all. Michael had never seen from the outside how it looked to work constantly to avoid feeling, and he could not look away.