That night, Beatriz and Joaquin went out in the box truck with a renewed purpose. Before, the identity of their desired audience had been nebulous, distant. Now, in light of the day’s events, all of their audience was wrapped up in a single person. Daniel Lupe Soria, their beloved cousin. Daniel Lupe Soria, their cherished Saint. Daniel Lupe Soria, lost in darkness.
“This one goes out to Daniel, if he’s listening,” said Diablo Diablo. “Some light for your darkness: This is ‘There’s a Moon Out Tonight’ by the Capris.”
“There’s a Moon Out Tonight” began to croon, although there was no moon out that night. Diablo Diablo’s pretaped voice remained inside the back of the box truck as Joaquin, the body of Diablo Diablo, sat in the cab of the truck with Beatriz, listening.
Joaquin was torn every which way inside. He was a passionate person, but not good at being passionate at more than one thing at a time. On the one hand, he was thinking about Daniel’s plight. Joaquin had always admired Daniel. He did not want to be him, as all of the praying and holiness seemed as if it would conflict with Joaquin’s sense of panache, but he deeply appreciated everything his cousin stood for and all of the kindnesses Daniel had ever shown him. It seemed to Joaquin now, in misty and faulty retrospect, that Daniel was soft and vulnerable, too kindly to protect himself, a saint made for martyring. He could not imagine how the older Sorias could live with themselves, knowing that Daniel was out in the desert alone. Where was their courage?
But this was not all that Joaquin was thinking about. It felt unfair to his cousin to be anything but consumed by thoughts of him, and yet Joaquin was also guiltily thinking about the radio. Joaquin had long been obsessed with radio personalities and modern music. He listened to Denver’s KLZ-FM with both resentment and hope, comparing himself to the local personalities and measuring if he could do better. He listened to the wild howl of the border blasters’ DJs—those cowboys of the high-powered stations that screamed out from just across the Mexican border, skirting American regulations through sheer force of power. And, signal permitting, he listened to the sweet fast patter of the more famous personalities of the time, like Jocko Henderson and Hy Lit. He was an ardent follower of American Bandstand, that daytime Philadelphia-based television show featuring teens dancing to the latest hits. The Sorias did not have a television, so twice a week, Joaquin rode into town with Luis and watched it on Elmer Farkas’s television before hitching a ride back home, an arrangement that had been established during the school year and had not yet expired. This program formed the basis for most of Joaquin’s hair and clothing decisions. He studied the screen diligently for evidence of fashions that had yet to reach southern Colorado (most never would) and did his credible best to duplicate them. For this progressive attitude, he received considerable ridicule from his family, which he never appeared to notice (although he did). He dreamed of a day when he would be infamous behind the microphone, Diablo Diablo, devil of the airwaves, and teens would be looking to him to set trends.
Joaquin tried to make himself think only about Daniel, but here in the box truck, the radio could not help but intrude.
Beatriz, however, had only one thought in her head. This was unusual because she was ordinarily likely to hold many thoughts in her head and, unlike Joaquin, was good at it.
The one thought was Pete Wyatt.
Over the course of the day, Beatriz had learned that Pete—he of the potentially soft elbow skin—was in Bicho Raro to work for the very same truck they were sitting in now. Her first impression had been that this deal wasn’t fair, which she almost immediately rejected as her personal bias, and then revisited when she considered that actually, after a consultation with the facts, it really wasn’t fair. The truck, after all, had been a wreck before this summer, overgrown and inoperable, and Beatriz had spent many long hours restoring it to life. Surely that gave her some claim to it. She didn’t blame Pete for this conundrum; he could not have known before making the work arrangement that Beatriz was going to restore the truck. But it didn’t erase the conflict.
It would not have mattered if the truck hadn’t been their only way to communicate with Daniel.
Annoyed at the impasse, she opened the passenger door.
“Where are you going?” Joaquin asked.
“I’m checking the range.” During the course of the afternoon, Beatriz had double-checked her soldering job on each connection—this was when Pete had glimpsed her earlier. Although there was no way to find out if Daniel and the kitchen radio were anywhere within the listening radius, she could at least do her best to cast the signal as far as possible. Both cousins were desperate to communicate with him safely.
They had their ideas of what he might be doing at that moment. Although it defied his sense of nobility, Joaquin imagined Daniel huddled in a grotto like a caveman, gnawing on the desiccated leg of a kangaroo rat, his clothing already tattered rags. Although it defied Beatriz’s sense of probability, she imagined Daniel padding silently across the dusty desert, his form the opposite of Padre Jiminez’s: the body of a coyote, the head of a man.
With a shiver, Joaquin removed the keys from the ignition. He didn’t want to stay in the truck by himself; there was something more ominous about being in a dark vehicle alone than being in the dark night with Beatriz. He made sure to snatch a bottle of water, lest he dry out in the desert (he put it inside his shirt), and also the flashlight (he did not put it inside his shirt).
Beatriz had already climbed from the truck with a radio in hand. Because Daniel had taken the kitchen Motorola, they had taken the only other radio that was in Bicho Raro. This was the one Pete had heard playing in the barn earlier. Joaquin had been anxious that the horses would somehow stampede without the benefit of the radio’s static, but Beatriz had considered the likelihood of that and found the odds acceptable. Statistically, the horses had never stampeded in her lifetime; factually, it was impossible for the radio to have been playing programming for all of those hours; statistically, the horses would not stampede in her lifetime; factually, the cousins would be fine to take it for a few hours.
Beatriz also carried a shotgun. She did not think she would have to use it, but the world seemed like a more dangerous place than it had only a few days before.
“Joaquin,” she ordered, “please point that flashlight where we’re going.”
Joaquin was caught equally between a fear of invisible wild animals and detection by the FCC, and so he alternately pointed the light where they were walking and into his palm when he felt they were too obvious to prying distant eyes. “I heard that sometimes Soria darkness will attack other Sorias, even without interference.”
“All the more reason to see it coming. Who told you that?”
“Nana.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Okay,” Joaquin admitted. “It’s just this: I saw Mama tell her about Daniel, and Nana immediately got up and locked her back door. What do you think about that?”
Grudgingly, Beatriz had to admit that Joaquin’s thesis was not a bad one. Joaquin made a triumphant noise not in keeping with secrecy.
“If you’re going to shout, you might as well point the flashlight so we can see!” Beatriz ordered.
Distant thunder made them pause.
Joaquin ran an anxious hand over his hair and cast an anxious glance at the sky. “Are we going to be killed?”
“Unlikely,” Beatriz replied.
Although the sky above them was clear, lightning was visible on the horizon: a storm, many dozens of miles away—in a place as flat as this high desert, weather was often something that happened to other people. Beatriz was not particularly worried about being struck by that storm’s lightning, although she did devote a passing thought to the antenna connected to the box truck; they would turn back to take it down if the storm got too close. A lightning strike would be potentially deadly to the station.
“Can we make the signal stop crackling like that?” Joaquin asked.
“Not tonight,” Beatriz replied. “It needs more work.” This reminded her of Pete Wyatt and how she was not at all sure how much more time she had with the truck. She felt obliged to tell Joaquin all of this, and did, in a low voice, so that she could still have one ear on the signal strength.
After she was through, Joaquin kicked the dirt, but not hard, because he didn’t want to dirty his paisley pants, and he also cursed a little. “Pete Wyatt!”
Joaquin didn’t know much about Pete Wyatt, but he was not a fan. This had nothing to do with Pete Wyatt and everything to do with Michael, who had actually stopped working in order to sing the praises of Pete’s work ethic to Rosa and Joaquin. He began with small gestures, complimenting Pete’s quick ability to grasp the meat of any new job, and then moved out from there to admiring how hard Pete worked even under the harsh rain, expanded further to how satisfying it was to see a young person who actually appreciated the land, and then ultimately ending up with a somewhat tone-deaf statement that Pete was the son every man deserved but never had.
Joaquin, as the son that Michael may not have deserved but definitely actually had, was less than thrilled by the statements. His mother, Rosa, defended Joaquin, but not in a way that brought Joaquin any satisfaction.
“If only Joaquin could bring himself to work at anything like Wyatt does,” Michael said.
“Oh, you know Quino,” Rosa replied, “he is a gentle boy and he will come into his own one day!”
“When I was Joaquin’s age, I knew what I wanted to do with myself, and that was leave a print on the world with the dint of my labor,” Michael said.
“We need soft men, too. Sweet gentle boys whose mothers love them just the way they are!”
“I never see Joaquin doing anything but oiling his hair. A man is more than his hair.”
“He is also his mustache,” Rosa agreed. “But Quino is still just a boy and soon enough he will have a mustache. Not like yours, of course. You cannot expect that of anyone, even your own son. But he will have his own sort.”
This infuriated Joaquin. He did not want to be a soft, gentle man who had accomplished nothing. He was not a soft, gentle man who had accomplished nothing. He longed to tell them that he already had plans, and that he was going to be a radio DJ, Diablo Diablo, and that one day they would compare Pete Wyatt to him and find Pete wanting.
“I’ll talk to him,” Beatriz said. “Pete, I mean.”
“What are you going to say?”
“I think that will depend on him. I—”
Quick as death, Joaquin halted and held a hand out to Beatriz, snatching her to a standstill. Everyone has two faces: the one they wear, and the one that is beneath it. Joaquin quite suddenly wore the latter.
Beatriz stopped. She gently lifted the shotgun.
A desert is a lot like an ocean, if you replace all of the water with air. It stretches out and out and out in unfathomable distance and, in the absence of sunlight, turns to pure black. Sounds become secrets, impossible to verify as true until the light returns. It is not empty merely because you cannot see all of it. And you know in your heart that it isn’t—that it is the opposite of empty once it is dark, because things that do not like to be watched emerge when all of the light is gone. There is no way to know the shape of them, though, until your hand is on them.
Something was there in the desert.
The creature was moving slowly among the distant brush, dark against the night-purple horizon, nearly human-shaped. There was a rattling or hissing as it moved, like dry beans shaken gently in a pan.
Joaquin was suddenly reminded of Nana locking her back door. Beatriz was suddenly reminded of long-lived Felipe Soria, wandering forever, looking for that femur-made cross, and of the furious businessman she had failed to help, tangled in his beard.
Diablo Diablo said, “If there wasn’t a moon out there before, there is one now. Coming up next we’ve got something to put a smile on that moon’s face.”
At the sound of his voice, the figure stopped.
Every head turned toward the radio. It continued to prattle on in a way that we do not notice when we are not trying to be silent in the desert night. Diablo Diablo said, “The moon loves company, so get your teeth ready.”
The creature stepped toward them.
It was difficult to terrify Beatriz Soria, for the same reason that it was difficult to get her angry. Fear and rage are not very different when you think about it, two hungry animals that often hunt the same prey—emotion—and hide from the same predator—logic. So Beatriz’s surfeit of logic usually protected her from terror. (Although it easily delivered her to anxiety. Anxiety was merely another brand of her usual considered thought, after all, just one that refused to go away when she asked it nicely or was trying to sleep.) Beatriz’s fear, though, required enough information to conclude that almost certainly something bad was going to happen, and also that the something bad was awful enough that it could not be easily remedied, and that rarely happened.
So Beatriz was not afraid in this moment, but only because she didn’t have enough information to be afraid.
“The flashlight,” she said, without taking her eyes from the figure.
Joaquin did not require information to be afraid and was accordingly out of his mind with fear. He managed to collect himself just enough to point the light directly at the intruder.
Butterflies moved their wings slowly in the flashlight’s beam.
It was not Felipe Soria, nor Daniel’s darkness.
It was Marisita Lopez.
Marisita’s ever-present wedding dress and the weighty bag upon her back had created the strange silhouette the cousins had spotted. The hissing sound was nothing but the sound of the raindrops dashing against the tumbleweed and brush around her.
Joaquin recoiled. She was not a monster, but she was a pilgrim, and that was just as dangerous.
Beatriz, however, scrutinized Marisita. This was the first time she had seen the young woman since reading Daniel’s letter, and she was now trying to see Marisita through Daniel’s eyes. As anything but a pilgrim, because Daniel must have seen past that to fall in love with her.
Joaquin twisted his fingers in Beatriz’s sleeve and tugged.
But Beatriz lingered. “Were you running away into the desert?”
“Beatriz,” Joaquin hissed.
“I—I am looking for Daniel. The Saint,” Marisita said. “I couldn’t—I couldn’t imagine him out there without supplies.”
This was what filled the overfilled bag she carried. Marisita had thought very hard about what Daniel might need, and had taken quite a long time to assemble it into the pack. Here was what she had brought: ten cured sausages, a pot of cheese, twelve avocados, three oranges, two cups of lard, a small pile of tortillas, four tins of beans, cornmeal, a skillet, one hundred matches, three pairs of dry socks, four clean shirts, a harmonica, a small blanket, a pocketknife, a paring knife, a votive candle, a hairbrush, a bar of soap, a notebook that was only halfway used up, a pen, three cigarettes, a sheep-collared coat, a cup for water, a pellet gun, a flashlight, and a small satchel of Francisco’s rose petals in case Daniel needed to smell it in order to cure homesickness.
The tenderness of this gesture finally provided Beatriz a window into Marisita’s heart. For the first time, she began to see Marisita as not merely a pilgrim but rather a person, and not just a person, but someone who showed her care for someone else in intensely practical ways.
Joaquin, on the other hand, had reached the end of his stamina for uncertainty. “Beatriz! Let’s go! We can’t be talking to her! This is madness! She could kill us both!”
Marisita knew the taboo as well as a Soria, perhaps better, after the events of the night before. She was already ducking away as she said, “You should! I don’t want something else terrible to happen. I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to meet anyone tonight.”
“Wait,” Beatriz said, although she did not yet know the words that were going to follow. The problem with ideas is that they never come all at once. They emerge like prairie dogs. An edge of ear, or the tip of a nose, and sometimes even the whole head. But if you look straight at an idea too fast, it can vanish back into the ground before you’re even sure of what you’ve seen. Instead, you have to sneak up on it slowly, looking out of the corner of your eye, and then and only then you might glance up to get a clear look.
Beatriz was having an idea now, but she’d only seen an ear or a whisker.
“Wait?” echoed Joaquin.
“I just—I have questions,” Beatriz confessed.
“Beatriz,” Joaquin exhorted.
“She’s the pilgrim Daniel helped,” Beatriz told him. “She’s the last one to see him. This is Marisita.”
“Oh,” said Joaquin.
There was a pregnant pause. An unusual and elegant intersection of needs and wants had formed in that moment, and they could all sense it. They all longed to talk to one another about their common interest: Daniel. As pressing as this urge was, if it had only been a desire for information, it might have died there. But there was something else. When Daniel had asked Beatriz if she ever thought they were doing it wrong, he had merely voiced an unspoken question both of them had been carrying for a while. For Daniel, it was because ethics pressed badly at him, with all of the pilgrims falling between the cracks. For Beatriz, it was the sense that the facts were being made to add up to something that was not quite true. All of these truths were being bundled together and sealed with superstition and fear instead of science and reason.
Marisita lingered, but didn’t speak. Beatriz’s mind worked busily. Joaquin’s mouth still held the shape of his last word. None of them knew precisely how far they could press this meeting.
Before he’d moved into the greenhouse, Francisco would sometimes tell Beatriz stories of scientists, like Guillermo González Camarena, the teenage inventor of the color TV, or Helia Bravo Hollis, the botanist who’d catalogued hundreds of succulent plants and founded the Sociedad Mexicana de Cactología. These great minds organized facts in new ways and performed experiments on the accepted truth, changing one variable here or there to test just how factual their facts really were. Beatriz and Daniel had been eyeing the facts they’d been given for quite a while, though they’d had no way to test them. But now—
Beatriz’s thoughts moved to the radio, which was still noisy with Diablo Diablo’s banter. It sounded as if they were still hearing Joaquin’s voice, but really, it was not Joaquin at all. It was the sound of his voice encoded onto a signal, which the transmitter then modified so that the stable-stolen radio could pick it up and play it from the speaker. It was no more Joaquin than a drawing of him would be him.
“What do you think about …” Beatriz began. The prairie dog of an idea had lifted its head from the hole. “Doing a radio interview?”