There used to be an enormous and fine barn at Bicho Raro, capable of housing two hundred bales of hay, twelve horses, a small tractor, and twenty-four barn swallows. The siding had been amber brown and the roof was gloriously red. It was, in fact, the very barn Pete was scavenging for the dance floor’s boards. Shortly after it had been built, the wind nudged it, as it nudged all things in the San Luis Valley. Nothing happened, because the barn was very securely built. The wind nudged it for all that week, and still nothing happened. The wind nudged it for ninety-nine weeks in a row, and still nothing happened; the barn did not budge. But on the one hundredth week, the wind nudged the barn and the barn fell onto itself. It was not that the one hundredth week of nudging was any stronger than the previous weeks. It was not even that the one hundredth week of nudging was what had actually knocked the barn over. The ninety-nine weeks of nudging were what had truly done the job, but the one hundredth was the one around to take the credit.
We almost always can point to that hundredth blow, but we don’t always mark the ninety-nine other things that happen before we change.
Things felt different in the box truck that night; things felt like change. Some of this was because their population had altered by one. Beatriz, Joaquin, and Pete were jammed together like crayons in a box as the truck lumbered slowly out into the dark. Beatriz wasn’t much of a talker, and Joaquin wasn’t feeling like being civil, and Pete wasn’t one to start a fire in a room that didn’t seem to be in the mood for smoke, so for quite a while the only sounds in the truck were the rumbling of the engine and the squeaking of the seats and the nearly inaudible thump of hearts when Beatriz’s and Pete’s fingers accidentally jostled together.
“Do you like music, Oklahoma?” Joaquin finally asked, more aggressively than one might have ordinarily, and more aggressively than one might have thought, considering the truck’s cramped cab was pressing their shoulders together hard in a familiar sort of way.
Pete missed the tone. “I like Patsy Cline an awful lot.”
“Patsy Cline,” Joaquin echoed.
“Who’s Patsy Cline?” Beatriz asked.
“Oh, you know who she is,” Joaquin said dismissively. He threw a significant twang into his voice but otherwise did not attempt to make it musical. “I’m always walkin’ after midnight, searchin’ for you.”
Beatriz shook her head, no closer to recognition.
“Craaaaaaazzy,” Pete sang.
Technically, he was not a very good singer, wavery and low, but he was pleasantly heavy on the syllables in the way that Johnny Cash was, and Beatriz was charmed by it. Moreover, the tune was recognizable. Beatriz said, “I know that one.”
Pete had a thing for crooners. He liked Patsy Cline, and he liked Loretta Lynn. Women with deep voices and a sense of history, singing in low, round tones over plucked and syrupy steel guitars. Once, one of his mother’s brother’s father-in-law’s friends had stayed at their house in Oklahoma after blowing the engine of his new Impala on a cross-country trip, and while there, he’d told stories of meeting Patsy Cline back in Virginia. She’d been tough and funny. She’d called everybody Hoss, and drank like a man. Pete had taken an instant shine.
Joaquin was perfectly fine with Patsy Cline, in reality, but he was still angry about his father’s admiring tone when speaking of Pete, so he couldn’t find it in him to be kindly about his musical choice.
“We don’t have Patsy Cline on the list for tonight,” Joaquin said in an even ruder tone. He did not know that Pete hadn’t been told yet what they were going into the desert to do, so his statement didn’t make a lot of sense to Pete.
“That’s quite okay, sir,” Pete said with a smile. “I don’t only like Patsy Cline.”
Beatriz caught that sir in midair, like a bird, and studied it in her mind. For some, a sir in this situation might have been used for an equally rude effect, sarcastically spitting politeness at the party who had wronged them. For others, it might have been automatic, someone who said sir so often that it didn’t mean anything at all. For Pete, it was launched with deference. I’m no threat, that sir declared, with a peacekeeping smile. You’re still king of the castle. Antonia’s dogs were always fighting among one another, and the battles ended when one rolled onto its back to show it had no fight in it. That was Pete’s sir in this particular exchange. Beatriz found this unfair, as Pete had done nothing wrong, but also frustrating, as Pete would think Joaquin was always petulant, which was far from the truth.
The kindness made Joaquin crosser, because there’s nothing like knowing that you were just a heel to a nice person to make you even madder at them.
“What is it you want this truck for anyway, Oklahoma?” Joaquin asked.
Pete once again explained the moving-truck business. He added, hesitantly, “I was going to go into the army, but I’ve got a hole in my heart.”
There is a certain kind of wistfulness that spills out in our voices no matter how many dams we’ve put up, and only a real monster can hear it and not be moved. It came out in Pete’s words there, and Joaquin felt all of his hostility shrivel.
He said, “Don’t all men, Oklahoma?” and then he started to sing some Patsy Cline until Pete grinned. Beatriz smiled her private smile out the window, but Pete saw it in the reflection. Their fingers touched again, but this time it wasn’t an accident.
Joaquin broke off singing. “Did Marisita tell you why she wouldn’t do it tonight?”
“She just left a reply to my note that said ‘not tonight,’ ” Beatriz said.
Joaquin did not say what he was thinking, and did not have to. Beatriz was thinking it, too. No matter how good their show was tonight, it would not be what Daniel was truly hoping for.
“Maybe tomorrow,” Joaquin said. “Hey, we could have Oklahoma ask her for us.”
Just a few days ago, neither of them would have considered this a viable option. The unquestioning caution Antonia had expressed earlier had still run through their veins as well, back then, but things were different now. The true edges of the taboo were clearly more complex than they’d been taught. Both of them eyed Pete.
“Ask who what?” he replied.
“He doesn’t know about …” Beatriz told Joaquin. She tilted her head toward the back of the truck.
Joaquin was delighted. Any remaining resentment vanished, replaced by the anticipation of the reveal. “Oh.”
His enthusiasm filled the truck for the final few minutes of the journey. When Beatriz brought the truck to a stop, Pete craned his neck, trying and failing to glimpse what made this particular patch of wilderness their destination. He was even more bemused when Beatriz and Joaquin climbed out, Beatriz with the flashlight and Joaquin with a bottle of water. The driver’s side door hung open, and Pete looked out into that square of black night. He couldn’t see anything, but he could smell the foxy, bright scent of the cold desert. It was a restless and wild smell, and it made him feel restless and wild as well.
“Come on, we need your help,” Beatriz called.
Sliding from the truck, Pete felt his way around to the back, where the cousins were waiting.
Beatriz placed her hands upon the back of the truck. She was rarely boastful or excited, as the first required an interest in other people’s esteem, which she did not often have (much to the frustration of her mother), and the second often required an element of pleasant surprise or perception of an event as extraordinary, which she also did not often have, as most events were predictable if you were paying close enough attention. But she found in this case she was feeling both boastful and excited; she was shocked to discover that she was proud of the box truck’s contents, proud enough that instead of merely opening the door with a serene face, she had to think about keeping her face serene as she opened the door.
Beatriz drew open the back of the truck.
Pete was silent for a long moment.
“What do you think, Wyatt the Riot?” asked Joaquin.
Pete said, “Well, gosh.”
Back in Bicho Raro, Tony had finally managed to operate the radio Pete had secured for him. The largeness of his hands and the smallness of the radio had presented considerable difficulty, but success had eventually presented itself. Although he had not yet managed to tune it to a clear station, he was shocked by how comforting even the sound of static was. It was not yet music, but it was about to be.
He had felt unhinged since leaving Philadelphia, a feeling that had not improved with either a miracle or a good night’s sleep. But now, as music strove through the static, he felt something like normalcy.
Suddenly, a voice sprang from the speaker.
“Hola, hola, hola, this is Diablo Diablo, roping some of those radio waves to pull my wagon tonight. We’ve got a great show for you coming up. We’ve got the Cascades and some Lloyd Price and that sweet little number by the Del Vikings, and we’re also introducing two new features I think you’re going to love. We’ve got the Weather Story, our local news told in the form of two abuelas talking about the weather, and we’ve also got the Teen Story, which is just me reading entries from the old journal I found under my cousin’s mattress, one every night until he gets himself together and comes home to make me stop. Let’s go, children. It’s going to be a devil of a night.”
Tony let out a breath that he hadn’t realized he was holding. Below him, Jennie the schoolteacher also let out a breath.
“Oh, hang me,” Tony said. “How long have you been there?”
“Oh, hang me,” Jennie replied. “How long have you been there?”
She pointed at the radio, but it was impossible to tell what she meant by such a gesture. Then she lifted her other arm to show that she had brought a bag of snacks that the two of them could share.
Tony’s mood shifted rapidly through annoyance at being interrupted to grudging acceptance of Jennie to hatred of eating in front of others.
“I’m not hungry,” he said.
“I’m not hungry,” Jennie said. So now it was two lies, since they were both hungry.
“Isn’t it late?” Tony asked.
“Isn’t it late?”
He relented. “Fine. Just sit down.”
Her face cleared and she sat cross-legged beside the radio. “Fine. Just sit down.” She shook some of the corn snacks out of the bag onto a napkin in front of her.
“Lady, you gotta fix that problem,” Tony said. She echoed his words again and then nodded in rueful agreement. “How’d you get that way, anyway? Don’t you have any words of your own?”
“How’d you get that way, anyway? Don’t you have any words of your own?” Jennie repeated. With a sigh, she handed a corn snack up to Tony, who accepted it but left it sitting in his palm.
Diablo Diablo’s program continued. His voice took on a more intimate tone. “Here’s a thing Jack Kerouac said: ‘What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?—it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.’ If you’re missing someone tonight, know that I, Diablo Diablo, am, too. It’s an enormous sky out there with a lot of stars above it and a lot of folks underneath it, and all of us, stars and human, are missing someone in the dark. But I, Diablo Diablo, think that if we’re all out there missing someone, that means that we’re all really together on that one note, aren’t we? So none of us are really alone as long as we’re lonely.”
It is difficult to convey how mesmerizing Joaquin was in this passage, how passionate and moving, because so much of the magic was in the swing and tug of his voice, which he practiced in places where others could not hear him. If you read his words out loud, you may get an idea, but nothing is quite the same as hearing it through the speakers of a radio.
“Now I’m gonna spin you a number from last year, Del Shannon’s ‘Runaway,’” Joaquin said.
The song began to play. Tony marveled that the music still worked on him, even as a giant. It seemed to him he should have needed more music, bigger music, louder music, to fill him up now that he was this size, but instead, he found that after all of his days away from it, the music was even more effective. Even though he had heard “Runaway” countless times before, tonight he felt it move him as strongly as it had the first time he’d heard it.
“What was that? That’s Joaquin Soria!” Padre Jiminez said.
Tony and Jennie both jumped, as Padre Jiminez had approached soundlessly. Now his head was cocked intently toward the radio.
“Oh, why. What the hell are you doing here?” Tony asked.
“I heard his voice,” Padre said. He had been clear over in his room, praying before sleep, but even with the window just cracked, he had recognized Joaquin’s voice. He had excellent hearing because of his two large coyote ears. “That’s our Joaquin!”
Tony raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t he that kid in that shirt that barks?”
“Indeed indeed,” Padre Jiminez said. “How I’ve watched that boy grow over the last few years! I would recognize his voice anywhere! But he didn’t say that he was Joaquin on the radio, did he? What is he calling himself?”
“Diablo Diablo.” Tony mimicked the way Joaquin said it, accidentally throwing in a bit of his Tony Triumph voice. It sounded impressive. Jennie’s smile was full of delight.
“Oh dear,” Padre Jiminez said. “I do wish that young people would realize there are better ways to appear edgy than invoking the great destroyer of men. Perhaps the station named him.”
“No dice, Father Lassie,” Tony said. “That’s a pirate station.”
Padre Jiminez craned his head back to peer at Tony. “I don’t follow.”
“It’s an illegal station. He named himself.”
“How do you know it’s illegal?”
“No legit station has a kid DJ spinning Del Shannon at eleven p.m.,” Tony said. Even from his great height, he saw Padre Jiminez’s ears flag. “Don’t get your pants twisted. He’s getting his legs under him; it’ll be good for him, as long as he doesn’t get caught. I wonder if he built his gear himself.”
“Joaquin?” Padre Jiminez said. “More likely Beatriz. Yes, Beatriz is much more likely to have built something.”
Tony remembered Beatriz Soria felling Pete Wyatt at his feet just the day before. She’d been carrying a skirtful of wire, an odd nest that had puzzled him at the time but made sense now. Tony was provoked to interest despite himself.
“Is Beatriz into the radio?”
Padre Jiminez cocked his head. No one knew what Beatriz Soria was into. “She is a strange young woman.”
“Don’t get twisted, Padre,” Tony said, “but coming from you, that’s pretty rich.”
The sound of conversation attracted Robbie and Betsy, the twins. They had been quarreling in their room out of boredom, and when they heard voices outside, they went to the window. When they saw a group gathered around a radio, they incorrectly assumed that it was a party. Some arguments are better than a party, but not theirs, and so they bundled up in sweaters and joined the others by Tony.
“Keep that snake away from me,” Tony said, “or I’ll step on all three of you.”
As Diablo Diablo’s voice came back onto the radio, the sound attracted Marisita’s attention. She had just returned from yet another unsuccessful search for Daniel, and she was weary and disheartened. Because she had been out all day, she didn’t know about the message Daniel had left for her, and she feared that he might be dead or too far away for her to ever find. Now she paused just inside the Doctor’s Cabin, the door cracked. From there, she could hear the rise and fall of Joaquin’s voice. It was too far away to make out what he was saying clearly, but she recognized the cadence from her time on the show. She could also see the other pilgrims from where she stood. Tony, looming, just his feet and knees in her sight, both barely lit by the porch lights. Jennie, sitting cross-legged by the radio. The twins and Padre, busily constructing a fire pit against the cool night.
Marisita imagined herself going to where they were all gathered, with delicacies in tow. In her head, she asked them, “Room for one more? I’ve made a few things for us to eat.”
But in reality, she remained where she was, water dripping over her hands onto the floor.
She would have liked to attribute her hesitation to exhaustion, but she knew that it was more than that. If she thought about it, she could admit that if it had been a gathering of Sorias rather than pilgrims, she would have been inexorably attracted and, if not for the taboo, would have approached them at once. Marisita studied herself hard, trying to determine if it was judgment on her part. Was she biased against the pilgrims for being stuck halfway as she was? No, it was not that at all. What would be different about speaking to a Soria than a pilgrim? And then she hit upon it: It was the way the pilgrims spoke to one another. They were all aware that this was a temporary situation, and so they were cordial acquaintances, at best. Conversation skipped along the surface. She imagined the Sorias’ gatherings were less chitchat and more real, the kind of intimacy that comes from knowing people for a long time and knowing you would know them for a long time in the future, too.
Then she realized that it was really that she just missed being part of a family.
It is entirely possible to have this kind of conversation with slight acquaintances, too, but none of this current crop of pilgrims had yet realized that.
Marisita would have left the pilgrims to their chitchat and gone to bed for some fitful and guilty sleep, if she had not just then recognized that what Jennie had brought to munch on was a bag of corn snacks. Marisita did not ordinarily require other people’s things to be perfect, only herself, but corn snacks were so far from perfect that Marisita felt her own overall perfection draining.
She forgot her exhaustion and her guilt. Corn snacks.
She began to prepare food beneath her umbrellas, furiously, quickly, wanting to be able to deliver it before the radio show was over, before the others decided to go to bed. She heated up her skillet, and while she waited for that to be hot, she cut fat slices of watermelon and cucumbers and orange and squeezed lime on them, wiping the sprays of lime out of the corners of her eyes, and then she dashed chili powder and salt over them all. By then the skillet was hot enough for her to place as many fresh cobs of corn as she could fit into it. While the corn roasted, she cubed a fresh pineapple and added mint and sugar and more lime juice in the gaping mouth of the blender. While the blender ran in the background, she stirred together crema and guajillo chili pepper and mayonnaise and crumbled cotija cheese to make a thin sauce. She tore cilantro into fresh-scented shreds and added it to the bowl. Then, still waiting for the corn, she rapidly began to make colorful banderillas for those who didn’t have a sweet tooth, spearing lip-puckering pickled gherkins, salty olives, and bright pickled red peppers. And finally, the corn was roasted and she transferred it to a platter and poured the crema and cheese over it.
It had been only ten minutes since she had decided to prepare refreshments and now she had some fruit with chili and some savory banderillas and some elotes and some eye-opening agua fresca to wash it all down with. It was not perfect, but it was closer than anyone else in Bicho Raro could come to it.
She piled it all up under umbrellas in her arms and walked briskly to where the others sat.
Padre Jiminez hurried over to relieve some of the platters from her arms. He licked his lips. “You’re a miracle, Marisita Lopez.”
Now the twins’ previous assumption was correct: It was a party.
Even Theldon took part. He didn’t come out of the house very far, but he at least put his chair outside the door instead of inside it. They ate Marisita’s food and sang along to the songs, and the twins danced a little, as well as they could with the snake tangled around them. Tony veered dangerously close to Tony Triumph as he told the stories behind the music Joaquin played, but the truth was that Tony had always loved to tell people the story of music.
Padre Jiminez was the one who realized Marisita had probably not heard of the message Daniel had left for her. He gestured her close, which was a mostly unselfish impulse on his part, and told her of it as her miraculous rain sprinkled across his forehead.
“‘Marisita, I’m listening,’” he repeated. “Did you know?”
Marisita’s ears rang with shock, but her voice was quite calm. “No, Padre, I didn’t.”
“I didn’t think so,” he said with satisfaction. “Your elotes are perfection, by the way.”
“Nearly,” she whispered, but only in her head. Out loud, she said, “Thank you.”
She sat with a pretty smile on her face, but inside, she was thinking about that message, and she was thinking about how Joaquin and Beatriz had asked her to be on the show again. Although none of the songs Joaquin played were particularly punitive, she nonetheless felt as if with every minute Joaquin spent trying to comfort his cousin, she was being reminded of how she was doing nothing. Yes, she was looking for Daniel, but that was what she wanted from her. What he wanted was for her to tell her story on air. She couldn’t do it. He didn’t realize that everyone would despise her. As the pilgrims warmed to one another, somehow united by Tony’s irascible presence, she felt ever cooler. If they knew her real past, they would never call her a miracle.
In a pause in the programming, Jennie blurted out, “As I walk along, I wonder what went wrong.”
All eyes landed on her. No one knew at first why the moment felt unusual, but slowly, they began to suspect that it was because no one had prompted Jennie with any words. She’d just said it. The pilgrims looked from one to another, replaying the conversation, trying to remember if any of the others had said that phrase.
Finally, Betsy asked, “Did you say that on your own?”
“Did you say that on your own?” Jennie echoed, but she nodded furiously.
After a long night of watching the other pilgrims being closer than they had ever been before, Jennie had wanted desperately to prompt Tony to talk about what had brought him here to Bicho Raro and how such a funny and loud person found himself stranded as a giant in the wilderness. Jennie had tried to string these words together from scratch, failing, as always, and then, finally, she had burst out with the rhyming couplet.
“How did you say that on your own?” Padre asked.
“How did you say that on your own?” Jennie asked. She looked helplessly to Tony, certain that he, of everyone here, would understand what had happened. Earlier in the evening, he would have merely responded to this appeal of hers with a snappy comeback of some kind, but now he looked at her hopeful expression made haunting by the porch lights, and he genuinely wanted her to have accomplished something that night.
Tony said, “Can you say it again, doll?”
“As I walk along, I wonder what went wrong,” Jennie said.
This exchange astounded all of them. Not only had she not repeated what he’d said, but she had once again said something entirely different.
Things were changing.
“God moves!” Padre Jiminez cried, but Tony waved an impatient hand in his direction.
“Lyrics,” Tony said. “It’s lyrics from ‘Runaway.’ ”
“Someone else’s words,” Marisita remarked, “but not when they say them! Can you do another one?”
“Can you do another one?” Jennie echoed. But then she struggled for a long moment, frowning, trying to think, trying to conjure words where there had not been any just a moment before. Then she said, “No matter how I try, I just can’t turn the other way.”
“Connie Francis,” Tony said. “ ‘My Heart Has a Mind of Its Own.’ ”
“Well done, Jennie, well done! This is progress!” Padre Jiminez said, clasping her hands in his. She repeated his words, but gladly.
“I reckon you could say almost anything you need to say with lyrics,” Betsy said.
“I don’t know about that,” Robbie said.
“It’s progress!” Padre Jiminez said again.
For a minute, no one spoke. There was no music, either, because the radio programming had come to an end. But nonetheless the air was noisy with optimism and cheer, every pilgrim buoyed by just one pilgrim’s success. Then an owl hooted sleepily, woken briefly by the distant promise of Jennie’s second miracle, and they all remembered how late it was.
Jennie peered up at Tony, and he realized he was, somehow, being consulted for wisdom. He said, simply, “You’re gonna need to listen to the radio a lot more.”