Being a pilgrim was a hard row to hoe. Nearly every person who came to Bicho Raro believed that the first miracle was the end point of their journey. They had only to make it to the point of receiving it and then their soul would rest easy. Things went pear-shaped for many when they understood it was the first of a two-step process, and as time passed, pilgrims began to fall into two increasingly disparate groups: those who performed the second miracle almost immediately after their first and those who, with every unsuccessful day following the first miracle, became increasingly unlikely to ever perform the second miracle.
Marisita Lopez was growing ever more frustrated with her status in the second group, although she was not surprised. She had a very poor opinion of herself. This was because Marisita believed in perfection, and held herself to that standard. If you’re a wise person, you understand immediately that this is not a logical goal. The conception of perfection exists only so that we have something to strive toward: Impossibility is built into it, which is why we call it perfect instead of extremely good. The truth is that only a few things in history have ever been perfect. There was a perfect sunset in Nairobi in 1912. There was a bandoneon constructed in Cordoba that perfectly captured the drama of human existence in just a single note. Lauren Bacall’s voice was unmatched perfection.
Marisita believed that a few people could reach perfection if only they tried hard enough. And as she had been trying, and had not reached it, she considered herself a failure at all times.
No one else counted Marisita as a failure. The number of things Marisita could do extremely well was a large one. She could do everything expected of a woman in the early 1960s: She could clean, and she could cook, and she could sew. But she could also play the foot pedal loom like Paganini played the violin, and it was said that the latter had sold his soul to the devil for his skill. She formed pots out of clay that were so striking that sometimes, when she went to gather clay for a new one, she discovered that the clay had eagerly already begun to shape itself for her. Her voice was so well trained that bulls would lie down when they heard her sing. She was so famed for her studied and just empathy that men and women would come for miles to solicit her as mediator in disputes. She could ride two horses at the same time, one leg on each horse, and still hold down her skirt to maintain her modesty, if she felt like it. Her segueza, developed from an ancient recipe, was so excellent that time itself stood still while you were eating it in order to savor the flavor along with you.
All of this was to say that Marisita was not perfect, but she came much closer to it than many people. But when you have set your sights on perfection, nothing less will satisfy.
The day after her radio interview, Marisita prepared for her next journey in search of Daniel. Although she had been frightened when she learned that her love for him made her vulnerable to his darkness, it hadn’t changed her resolve to search for him. After all, it was no more and no less the risk he himself had taken when he’d offered his help to her.
However, the interview had given her the moment of introspection necessary to realize that her plan to search for him incessantly, without returning for supplies, was suspiciously close to her previous decision to walk out into the desert to die. When she examined her motive for searching constantly without replenishing her supplies or health, she was dissatisfied with the imperfection she found there. Marisita modified her plan to one that would circumvent any of her previous poisonous motivation: She would search for Daniel daily, but she would also spend enough time in Bicho Raro each day to stock up on food and water and to sleep.
Before, she had wanted to go out into the desert because of despair. She vowed that now she would go out into the desert only in the name of hope. She at least owed Daniel this new purity of purpose.
Now she cooked a new batch of tortillas to take with her that day. Although she was not a perfect cook, she was so much closer to perfection than anyone else had ever seen that she had been asked to be the official cook for the pilgrims. The food she prepared smelled and looked so wonderful that the Sorias were envious—though not envious enough to risk eating Marisita’s food. (Rosa was the only Soria to cook now, as Antonia was too angry to cook and Judith had moved, and even she cooked listlessly, since Rosa herself dined only on gossip.) So her near-perfection was only for the pilgrims to enjoy. It was a difficult thing to prepare food when the sky was always raining on her, however, and so special accommodations had been prepared for her.
She already lived in a somewhat unusual home known as the Doctor’s Cabin. It was the oldest surviving building in Bicho Raro and dated from the decade when the Sorias had arrived. It had never been occupied by a Soria, however. It had been built for and by the first pilgrim to come to them in Colorado, a doctor who’d received the first miracle and then remained with them until his death. He had never confessed to the Sorias why he had come to Bicho Raro—his darkness had built up inside him after he’d won a fatal duel with another doctor over forty years before. In many ways, the Doctor’s Cabin was an appropriate home for Marisita to occupy, because the doctor worked tirelessly on healing others but never on healing himself.
It was old and crude enough that it still had a dirt floor, and after it was obvious that Marisita was not leaving anytime soon, Michael and Luis had dug a small drainage system through the cabin’s three rooms in order to funnel water away from her bed and the kitchen. This prevented the cabin from filling with water and drowning her while she slept, and also kept the kitchen counters drained while she was preparing food. A previous pilgrim, now moved on, had used clear plastic and coat hangers to construct her a series of umbrellas in varied sizes. Marisita placed these over the various elements of meals that she was preparing in order to keep everything from becoming waterlogged. It had been difficult at first to see what she was doing through the rain-spattered plastic, but, as in most things, she eventually became extremely good at it.
“How are you today, Mr. Bunch?” Marisita asked. Theldon Bunch, the pilgrim with moss growing all over his body, had lurched to her doorway as she toasted chilies for a later meal.
“Mm,” Theldon replied. He had his paperback novel folded inside out and stuffed in his armpit in a way that Marisita found painful to look at. “Is breakfast done?”
“Breakfast was hours ago,” Marisita said. “You missed it. Sleep in?”
“Time got away from me,” Theldon replied. Time was always getting away from him. “Is there any left, hon?”
“I can make you a plate.” There were always beans simmering, and tomatoes didn’t take long to heat, and a few eggs made the plate look full. Theldon slouched and read his book while he waited, scratching absently at the moss growing on his cheek as he did. While Marisita cooked for him, she thought about the radio show and what she would say about her past if she did agree to be on the show again. She wondered if Daniel could hear her, and if so, how he would feel about her telling the story of him helping her. It was a very strange development to be able to speak to the Sorias in any way, and she could not quite get over the shock of having a conversation with them yesterday after weeks and weeks of being told to not so much as whisper to any of them, after a day where she had seen Daniel Soria destroyed for that very thing.
“You’re a treasure,” Theldon said as she handed the plate to him. “If there’s anything I can do.” He said this every time she handed a plate to him.
“If you ever wanted to grind the corn for me, it’s hard for me to do it without getting it wet,” she told him. She told him this every time she handed a plate to him.
“Okay, that sounds good,” he replied, and left with his plate. The exchange always ended the same way. Marisita always ground the corn herself. Time kept getting away from Theldon. Rain fell on Marisita; moss grew on Theldon.
A knock on the open door preceded the appearance of a solid-looking young man with considerable dust on his boots and white T-shirt. This was Pete, who had already been working that morning.
“Good morning,” he said. “Am I in the right place?”
“That depends on what place you are looking for,” Marisita replied.
“Antonia said that if I asked you, you might have something I could take with me to eat while I work.”
Marisita disliked the delay but liked his gentle expression. “Then you are in the right place. Take a seat.”
“Thank you, ma’am, but I’ll stand. I don’t want to get your furniture dirty—I’m a mess.”
This gesture was difficult for Marisita. She appreciated that he did not want to get her stool dusty, but seeing him standing rather than sitting made her feel that she needed to hurry as she cooked, even if he didn’t mean it that way at all. She could have asked him again to sit and could have explained that she did not mind the dust, but that seemed like it might make him feel bad about his decision to stand. So instead, she just asked him in her head and said nothing out loud. He kept standing there, making her feel urgent. She hurried.
Pete asked, “Can I do anything to help?”
“I’m going as fast as I can,” she replied.
“Oh, I didn’t mean that. I just feel strange watching you do all the work, is all.”
Marisita was surprised by how he just said this out loud, freely, and also by how it made her feel better about his question. She wasn’t sure which part startled her more: that he expressed his discomfort so easily, or that she was put at ease by the explanation. Of course, if she thought about it, she knew this was the way to do it. If a pair had come to her for advice back in Texas, she would have advised them to be free with each other no matter how foolish it seemed. She did not know why she found it difficult to take her own advice. Now, hesitantly, she tried it for herself. “I don’t mind. But I feel the same way about you standing. It makes me feel strange that you are standing instead of sitting—like I should hurry.”
It did not feel comfortable to say it out loud instead of in her head, but Pete let out a surprised laugh that was not at all put out. He clapped his hands against his dirty pants for a moment and then sat on the stool. She gave him a bowl of cherry tomatoes to eat and occupy his hands while she worked. In this way they spent a few minutes in easier quiet while Marisita finished the empanadas for Pete.
“I hope it’s not rude to ask,” Pete broke in, “but why don’t they fly away?”
The butterflies on Marisita’s dress opened and closed their wings, over and over, as water dripped over them.
“They are too wet,” Marisita explained.
“One day the rain will stop, though?”
“Perhaps.”
“Will you miss them?”
No one had asked Marisita this before, and she had to take a moment to consider the answer. It was difficult to imagine life without them. The butterflies were beautiful, but it was more that she had now been with them for so long that she could not picture what she would look like without them.
“I think I’d rather they flew away,” Marisita said.
Pete was satisfied by this answer. “Good.”
“Have you already performed the second miracle?” Marisita was surprised at herself for saying this out loud instead of simply in her head, but since she had already been forward once with Pete, it was easier the second time.
“Oh, I’m not here about a miracle,” Pete said. “I’m just here about a truck. Oh, hey, that reminds me … I feel like a total heel for asking you to do more work, but I better ask ’cause I bet he hasn’t been able to and even though we’re not buddies, I’ll feel bad if he starves. Do you know if Tony has gotten anything to eat?”
“The giant?”
“That’s the one.”
She was certain he had not eaten yesterday. In her distress, she had not cooked for anyone since Daniel’s vanishing. The other pilgrims had fended for themselves; they had a kitchen of their own, after all, and leftovers. But Tony had not been given food and could not have fit into her kitchen to cook for himself.
“I’ll make sure he gets something,” Marisita said, feeling more impatient than she sounded. Time pressed heavily on her and her mouth felt dry when she imagined Daniel possibly without water. But when she remembered that Tony probably had not eaten since the day before, guilt won out over her impatience. She could be quick. “Here’s your empanada.”
“Empanada,” Pete repeated. “Gosh, thanks. It looks great. See you later! Sorry about the dirt on the chair!”
After he had gone, Marisita hastily prepared Tony some food. She assembled a pile of crusty bolillos, a cantaloupe cut into a bright orange moon, a covered bowl of fried red beans, a thermos of creamy minguiche, two empanadas, three dark-red tomatoes from Nana’s garden, and a fried bit of beef that had looked a little friendlier the night before. Although it would have been a tremendous amount of food for an ordinary man to eat, Marisita thought it nonetheless seemed insufficient to feed a giant. It was better than eating only memories, though.
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.
“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.”