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.
“Where’s the fire?” Tony asked.
“I—” Pete slithered down to sit in the dust. He peered up and up and up at Tony’s face, barely visible in the dying light, lit only by the porch lights. “Fire?”
“It’s an expression. Kid, you’re so straight you make rulers look bad. I meant, why were you running?”
“I think I almost died!”
“Me, too,” Tony said. “Of boredom.”
But the two were not displeased to see each other, for no reason apart from familiarity. Tony sat down, arranging himself cross-legged in a scrubby field that cows and calves had eaten down to bare earth. Slouching, he hooked one elbow on the top of the tractor beside him. The bottom of his shoeless foot was quite filthy from all his walking around on it.
“Gosh.” Pete looked all the way from Tony’s dirty foot up to his face. “You really haven’t shrunk at all.”
“Neither have you,” Tony said.
“I guess not. What’s it like being … like that?”
“I can’t smoke,” Tony said. “Cigarettes are over before they begin.”
Pete did not smoke, but he attempted to look sympathetic. “Well, is there anything I can do for you now?”
“Yeah, beat it,” Tony said. But it was habit. Pete’s company briefly took his mind off his restlessness. Ordinarily on nights like this, he would’ve put on the radio or taken the Mercury out across Sure-Kill Crawlway after all the traffic was gone. There were no highways here, though, and he was a long way off from fitting in the Mercury. “No, wait, kid. Take my Mercury to the closest town and get me a goddamn radio before I go insane. You’ve still got the keys, right?”
“Really?”
“Did I stutter? Here, take some—” Tony began to swear long and loud, because when he reached into his pocket to get some cash for Pete, he discovered that his money had become giant-size as well. He waved a dollar bill the size of a hand towel at Pete. Owls lifted off, startled by the movement. Tony railed, “Get a miracle, they said—here’s your miracle! This isn’t money—it’s a magic carpet.”
“I’ll cover it,” Pete said hurriedly. “Until you get normal again. I’ve got enough for a radio, I think.”
“Look under the passenger seat,” Tony said tragically. “Use that. Only the money. Leave the other stuff there.”
Pete’s mind filled with possibilities of what might be under the seat that he was not supposed to tamper with, but because he was an innocent sort, he was wrong about nearly all of them. “Any particular kind of radio?”
“A loud one,” Tony said.
“I’ll ask Antonia if I can take some time off tomorrow,” Pete promised. “Where is your car, anyway?”
“Oh, yeah,” Tony said, and moved slightly to reveal the Mercury behind him, the dry scrub flattened behind it.
Pete found that looking at the vehicle next to Tony produced an unusual vertigo. The Mercury, just a little too large to appear as an ordinary car. And Tony, rather too large to appear as an ordinary man. “How’d it get there?”
“I dragged it,” Tony said.
“No way.”
Tony gave the vehicle a little shove to demonstrate it, the contents of the interior rattling as he did, the car moving as easily as if three men had been pushing it. It was a magic trick that so delighted Pete that he covered a hand with his mouth and backed up several steps, kicking the ground to release some of his thrill.
“Gosh,” he said.
“Gosh,” mimicked Tony primly, but without malice. He was a performer, after all, and this small performance made him happy. He pushed the Mercury in a slow circle so that it came to rest in front of Pete. Dust swirled around the vehicle and the boy. “Some advantage to size. Hey. How’s your work? Breaking your back yet?”
“It’s good,” Pete said. “Real good.”
Tony waited, leaving a silence, as if testing the words for veracity, waiting for Pete to renege, but of course Pete had meant it. He had found the stage-building intensely satisfying, and he liked imagining the future celebrations that might make use of his day’s work. Pete patted the Mercury appreciatively, still pleased at its previous journey under Tony’s grip.
“God, kid. I can’t decide if I hate or love what a square you are.”
Pete grinned for the first time. “Better love it, because it’s not changing, buddy.”
This was the moment they became friends. They became even better friends after this, because time improves on these things, but this was the moment it began. Tony sensed it, because he rubbed the back of his neck and said, “Okay, now beat it.”
“Beat it? Why?”
“Because I’m starting to think you’re all right, and I don’t want to give you a chance to say something that’ll change my mind back again.”
“Okay,” said Pete, but he didn’t go. Instead, he tapped on one of the Mercury’s windows. “I wasn’t looking through your stuff or anything, but when I was sleeping back there, I kept hitting my head on that box, so I looked in it to make sure I hadn’t hurt anything in it. I’ve never seen that many records in my life!”
Tony had forgotten that he had the promotional records in the back of the Mercury, though, and now he felt a little bad about it. Not because he thought the station would miss them—he’d only taken ones that were duplicates or singles his producers would never play—but because it wasn’t good for them to be subjected to direct sunlight. “That’s because you haven’t lived very long. You got a record player?”
“You saw everything I came here with. How’d you end up with all them, anyway?”
“Pass,” Tony said. “Hard pass. Not answering.”
“Pass? Why? Wait, did you kill someone over them?”
Tony burst out laughing. “Kid, you really have got more corners than a box full of boxes. I work in radio. Don’t tell anyone.”
“Why not?”
Tony was impatient with this question, as he felt it was the kind of question only asked by someone who had never experienced either fame or notoriety. “Because I said so.”
“Sure, whatever you say. Like a DJ?”
Because Pete didn’t seem too awed, Tony grudgingly answered, “Yeah.”
“You’d think a DJ would be the last person to break the radio in their own car.”
“Yeah, you’d think, wouldn’t you? Now seriously, flake off before I regret telling you.”
Tony had been watching Pete closely to see if this confession had changed anything, but Pete was less interested in Tony’s past career than he was in his own future safety. “I oughta get some sleep anyway. Is the coast clear?”
“Of what? Those damn dogs?”
“No, a girl,” Pete said. It had not occurred to Pete that he had actually weaponized Beatriz’s appearance by avoiding her the way that he had; if only he had approached her calmly during the day, he would have been fine.
“You mean that girl?” Tony asked.
Pete turned.
“I need to talk to you,” Beatriz said.