Francisco was of two minds about Dorothy’s rooster. One of those minds hated the rooster, and the other loved it. Francisco was accustomed to working on his own by now, and he was surprised to find how pleasing it was to have the rooster as a companion. Just the presence of another living creature puttering around, living its own life alongside him, was intensely grounding in a way that he had not expected. This was only when the rooster was in a good mood, however. The rooster was also of two minds, as much as a chicken can be, because of its fighting past. It had not been bred to be a fighting rooster; it had just become one as it took on its mistress’s bitterness, and so the chicken was torn between its more placid self and the furious creature it had become. It would sink into the former quiet for hours at a time, pleasing Francisco, but then the light would change in the greenhouse, and the windows would become mirrors. Ragefully, the rooster would hurl itself at its own reflection with such vigor that it threatened to crack it. Blood would smear the glass, but it was only its own.
Francisco had tried many things the first day: calling to the rooster, tossing pencils at the rooster, and ignoring the rooster. Francisco, after all, preferred to remain a nonparticipant in most wars, including this one. Eventually, however, he decided that he could not sit by and watch the rooster bloody itself on the glass. He felt it was cruel for an animal to harm itself in this way, and also, it was going to be a lot of work to clean all of the glass. So when the light changed as the sun set and the low windows became mirrors and the rooster began to attack itself again, Francisco climbed from his chair, pulled on the long gloves that he wore to protect himself from the roses’ thorns, and went to the rooster. The rooster was engaged in clawing the glass and did not think to run away.
Francisco wrapped his hands around the rooster’s body, pinning its wings to it, and merely held the rooster still before the glass. The rooster was forced to stare at this other impudent bird without attacking it. The bird struggled in Francisco’s firm grip, and for several minutes, Francisco worried that the bird might actually harm itself in its fervor to escape. It clawed the air and jerked its head. Its wings were miniature earthquakes beneath Francisco’s palms as the rooster tried to free them.
Finally, the bird stilled, panting, and gazed at itself. The rooster in the glass peered back as well, full of loathing. Francisco sighed and sat cross-legged, allowed the rooster to do nothing but look at the reflection. He remained as calm as he possibly could, so calm that the rooster would be able to feel this serenity and adopt it for itself, or at the very least, to prevent anger from turning to fear. Minutes became hours, but eventually, the rooster’s expression changed as it realized that the image in the glass was only itself. Its body sagged. Its eye turned wistful. The anger had gone from its body.
Francisco released the bird, but the rooster merely slumped to the ground, still peering at itself. Dorothy would not be pleased, but Francisco was. Her rooster would never fight again.
Francisco found, however, that he had become the opposite of calm. As he had been sitting there, holding the rooster still, he had been reminded of Daniel as a baby. Although it was not usual for men at that time to involve themselves in the care of an infant, Francisco had been given the lion’s share of dealing with young Daniel’s nightmares as Rosa, Antonia, Michael, and Nana could not soothe Daniel during them. It was impossible to say what the infant Daniel was dreaming so terribly about—possibly the memory of being hacked from his mother’s body—but one night out of every ten, he would wake in an inconsolable terror. Francisco would hold the infant, saying nothing, merely breathing, for as long as it took. Five minutes, five hours. Once, while Daniel was teething, five days. Eventually, this stillness would transfer to Daniel and the baby Daniel’s breathing would grow long and match Francisco’s. Finally, he would fall back into an unfrightened slumber.
As Francisco held the rooster, he remembered all of the nights he had spent doing such a thing, and by the time the anger had drained from General MacArthur, Francisco found he could not bear the thought of Daniel in the desert any longer. He could contemplate nothing else. Leaving the rooster pensive on the floor, he fled through the night to the place that held more of Daniel than any other place in Bicho Raro: the Shrine.
When he entered the Shrine, he found Antonia already there. His wife kneeled before the sculpture of Mary and her owls, all of the votive candles burning. She, too, had finally been overcome by the horror of Daniel’s plight and there was nothing she could do to avoid thinking of him, not even cutting paper flowers at her kitchen table. Wordlessly, he joined her, falling to his knees in the rut Daniel had worn in his years of praying as the Saint.
Francisco said nothing, growing ever quieter in his distress, and Antonia said nothing, growing ever angrier in her own. They were both destroyed imagining the young man who had occupied this Shrine only a few days before.
Antonia, too, began to recall Daniel as a child. As a baby, Daniel had been as much a hellion as he had been in his teen years. He would chomp on Antonia’s breast and feed dirt to himself and tip over his cradle with himself in it and eat the hair off the barn cats if they got into the house. In many ways, though, Daniel’s terribleness had been a blessing. If he had been a sweet baby, Antonia’s grief would have never allowed her to look at him, imagining only what it would have been like for her sister-in-law to raise him for herself. But since he was awful, Antonia would say, “It was lucky Loyola died so that she never had to suckle a demon at her breast,” and spend all her moments with him and love him ferociously.
Now these memories of Daniel choked Antonia, and she began to rage in the Shrine. Ordinarily, Francisco would have said nothing or would have removed himself, which only would have increased her anger. For years he had been saying nothing or removing himself. But now, he recalled General MacArthur and Daniel and, in the same way, put his arms firmly around his wife. He turned her to the mirror that was opposite the sculpture of Mary and held her there. She looked at herself, at her twisted face, and at Francisco’s tear-lined face, and at Mary and her owls behind them both, reminding her what the Sorias were really meant to do. Minutes passed like this, with Francisco still and Antonia rigid.
Antonia’s anger died inside her. She collapsed against Francisco and for several minutes they wept together.
“Look at us, Francisco,” Antonia said. “Look what we’ve become.”
Francisco pressed his lips together. “I don’t want to. I’m too ashamed.”
Daniel’s presence in the Shrine was so potent that they found themselves speaking English, as they would have if he’d really been there with them. They realized it at the same moment and shed more tears.
“What can we do?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
They clung to each other still. Judith had thought that if she convinced them to dance on the stage as they had when they first met, her mother and her father would fall back into each other’s arms, and she was not quite wrong. But it was not the hundredth blow of wind to knock the barn over, merely the ninety-ninth. This place, the Shrine, reminded them of who the Sorias really were. To turn away from this calling was to ruin themselves. Francisco and Antonia were both so choked up with unperformed miracles and their own darkness that they had nearly destroyed themselves.
In this way, losing Daniel’s parents had begun to tear them apart, and in this way, losing Daniel brought them back together.
Outside the Shrine, they could hear owls shuffling and calling, sensing the presence of a looming miracle—in this case, the untended darkness inside both Francisco and Antonia resonating against the unused saintliness inside Francisco. But they were not pilgrims, they were Sorias, and they had both seen for themselves that Soria darkness was a harder thing. Both thought of the wooden Soria family housed in another shed nearby. Of Daniel, lost in the wilderness.
“We cannot orphan our daughters,” Antonia said wildly.
The door to the Shrine flew open.
Both Antonia and Francisco jumped in guilt and shame.
“Rosa,” Antonia said. “Rosa, I can explain.”
But Rosa Soria, her round and beautiful form lit by headlights behind her, was there neither about the owls on the roof nor Daniel in the desert.
“Come to Eduardo’s truck and listen to the radio,” Rosa said. “Tell me who it sounds like to you.”
It was inevitable that the other Sorias would hear the radio station eventually. In past years, when the family had stayed up late enjoying one another’s company, it would have taken no time at all, because the assembled members would have noticed the cousins’ absence. But because the Sorias had slowly parted, falling into their individual sadness, it took a late-night trip to uncover the secret.
Eduardo and Luis had gone to Alamosa to play cards and on returning had seen the pilgrims gathered close together. It looked like a witch’s gathering, with Tony the giant at their center, a fire pit at his feet. Although he was married to Judith Soria, Eduardo Costa had an outsiders’ understanding of the pilgrims. This meant he usually did not think of them at all, and when he did, he thought about how they were uncanny, he thought about his wife’s family’s legendary history in Mexico, and he thought probably this proved that God was real, and if not God, at least the devil. Up close, they made him uneasy, and so it was with suspicion that he drew his beloved stepside truck close to them.
When he exited, he realized the pilgrims weren’t truly gathered around Tony or the fire—the real focal point was a radio.
“Hola hola hola, it is Diablo Diablo again, tiptoeing through the night with just fifteen volts and a dream. We’ve got a great show for you tonight. Our theme is gonna be love. I know what you’re saying—‘The theme for every night on this show is love, Diablo Diablo!’—but I don’t mean love like that. Not a-kissing and a-hugging, my friends. We’re talking love like for your mother, for your brother, for your sister, for your auntie. So what have we got, what have we got coming up? I’ve got some love letters—not love like that! Not love like that! You wait—that listeners have written for me to read on air. I’ve got another entry from my cousin’s journal. And I’ve got some fresh new music shipped in from a friend back east who’s got an ear for what’s hot. I know it’s late, but stay tuned and stay awake, because here we go. Let’s get under way with a classic from Trío Los Panchos.”
Eduardo instantly recognized Diablo Diablo’s voice. Joaquin! he thought. His fancy and useless sixteen-year-old cousin by marriage, a disc jockey! Eduardo was no fool, and he had heard some pirate radio in this time, and he knew at once that that was what he was listening to. Because Eduardo was a proper macho of the kind who was much prized at the time and because a pirate radio carried an element of risk to it, this raised Joaquin’s esteem in Eduardo’s eyes by several degrees. Before Joaquin had been merely ridiculous to him, but now Eduardo revised all of the memories he had of him to include his role as a pirate DJ. Now his strange sense of fashion seemed like a coy nod to Joaquin’s secret life. His hair was a wink. Eduardo was an old-fashioned cowboy; Joaquin was a radio cowboy. This was to change their relationship for the rest of their lives.
“Where is Joaquin broadcasting from?” Judith asked.
“Shhhh,” Nana hushed.
All of the adult Sorias listened to the broadcast. Because the cousins had taken every other radio in Bicho Raro, this meant they were assembled in and around Eduardo’s pickup truck. Rosa and Antonia and Judith and Nana were crushed inside the cab, huddled together for warmth. They did not want to turn on the heater in case the blower would drown out any of the broadcast. Francisco and Michael and Luis perched in the truck bed. They were cold, too, but they suffered it alone. Eduardo sat on the hood and smoked a cigarette. He did not believe in suffering, so he felt plenty warm.
Diablo Diablo said, “Here’s a letter from an anonymous listener. He says, ‘People always said I was lazy, a do-nothing who just took up space. My sister always thought the best of me and I feel a little bad for letting her down. She always thought I was going to turn out to be something and she used to cuss at anyone who said otherwise, and it’s too bad that I didn’t turn out to be something because I feel like all her cussing was for nothing. Of course maybe she would have cussed anyway.’”
The pilgrims had written the letters. This was one of the ideas Tony had suggested to Joaquin during the course of the afternoon. Tony, after all, had firsthand experience with how well listener participation could boost a radio station’s success. The two of them had gotten along as well as two folks could when all communication had to go through a young man from Oklahoma, particularly when they discovered they both loved the same part of radio: the intersection of music and stories.
Diablo Diablo continued, “ ‘If she were listening, I’d tell her that I really needed her cussing. I guess it didn’t make me do anything, but it made me happier while I wasn’t doing anything. Maybe one day I still will be somebody. Maybe.’ Sounds to me like this anonymous listener needs some gas in his engine. Luckily, I’ve got just the thing, I just heard it today and I haven’t been able to stop listening to it since: Here’s the brand-new ‘Loco-motion’ by Little Eva. Let’s get moving.”
A mixture of emotions filled the space around the radio in Eduardo’s truck: shock, anger, delight, pride, and finally, as owls began to circle the pilgrims, anxiety. Unperformed miracles hung thick in the air and the birds were going mad with it, swooping and calling, feathers drifting all around. There were second miracles choked up in the pilgrims and first miracles in the Sorias.
“Let’s have another pair of letters from two more anonymous listeners. Remember, those of you pricking your ears to us from home, the theme for tonight is love, and these are love letters, letters about all the strange kinds of love we feel for our family and friends. While you’re listening to these words, friends, think about what you would tell these anonymous writers. Would you give them comfort? Advice? Agreement? Or maybe just a swell little song from the Shirelles. Ah, you know what, I’m gonna spin that and we’ll be back to read the letter on the other side.”
The Sorias said nothing for the two minutes and thirty-eight seconds it took the Shirelles to ask if they would still love them tomorrow. They waited with rapt attention until Diablo Diablo returned with the letter he had promised.
“ ‘I don’t know if I love my sister or if I have to love her because we’re basically the same person. People are always saying we look alike; it’s the first thing they say. Then everything else is measured by comparison. You’re actually a little taller than your sister or She ate more than you or You read longer books than her. Nothing ever happens that’s just about me. I guess that makes me selfish, so that’s stupid. I’m glad these are anonymous.’ Have you ever felt like that, listeners, like you only exist in relation to someone else in your life? It’s a terrible feeling. People are like sweet, sweet chords—we love them when they’re playing all together nicely, like in the pretty number I’m going to spin next, but it would be a crying shame to forget what a lovely little noise a D major makes strummed on a single guitar.”
All of the Sorias in Eduardo’s truck imagined themselves first as part of the Soria song, and then as individual chords. All considered that the song they had been playing collectively was not a very harmonious one.
Diablo Diablo continued. “Hold that thought … I’m gonna read this second letter now, because it’s also from a sister to a sister. ‘I love my sister, but I also hate my sister. We fight all the time. She knows everything about me and I know everything about her, so we don’t really have anything to talk about. We just fight. Sometimes, I pretend that I have gone out and gotten myself a very exciting life with exciting friends, and at the end of the day I’ll come back to her and be able to tell her all about it and it will be nice again, but I’m too afraid to do that, actually. She likes me because she has to like me. What if nobody else does?’ ”
Nearer to the fire, Robbie and Betsy were squirming a little. They were the authors of these twinned letters, of course, and it was hard to look each other in the eye, hearing them read out loud. It is often easier to be truthful with yourself and others in writing, and that was the case here.
Diablo Diablo said, “I’ve got a song for these two sisters, but I’ve also got a piece of advice. I know what you’re saying: ‘Nobody asked you or your mama for advice.’ I know it, I know it, but it’s not from me or your mama, it’s from Frida Kahlo, offering some truth to everyone out there who can’t let go. Here’s what she said: ‘Nothing is absolute. Everything changes, everything moves, everything revolves, everything flies and goes away.’ Sisters, I want you to think about that while I sing you a song that’s a lot about love but also just a little about liberation. Here’s Brenda Lee’s ‘Break It to Me Gently.’ ”
As Brenda Lee began to croon through the speakers, Francisco suddenly put it all together. The radio, the letters, the owls swooping overhead.
He said, “The pilgrims are the listeners. They wrote the letters.”
And now, for the first time, the Sorias were directly answering their questions.