It was 1955, and Texas was drying out.
It had started drying out in 1950 and would keep it up until 1957, but in 1955, they didn’t know that it would have an end. It just seemed like it would go on forever. Dust drifted over driveways and highways and filled swimming pools and elementary schools. Crops turned to black ash like a biblical punishment. The dry-eyed sky stared down as farmers burned the needles off cactuses so the cattle could eat them. Students held hands with each other on the way from the school to the bus so they would not lose each other in the dust storms. If you were the sort who liked to sing sad songs, you sang sad songs. If you were the sort who liked to stay alive, you moved to the city.
Marisita’s parents were the sort who liked to stay alive, and so, when she was nine, they moved the Lopez family to San Antonio from the ranch they had worked on for Marisita’s whole life. There were six of them: Marisita’s mother, Maria; and her father, Edgar; three younger sisters; and Marisita. There was also Max, the oldest brother, but he was sometimes not quite like family. They traded the house on the ranch for an apartment in an old hotel. Even though it was still dry out there in Texas, in the city, it was a different picture entirely. San Antonio was a modern city of half a million people. There were shopping malls, racecourses, subdivisions, highways bustling with cars. There was water—in the river, in the old gravel quarry, and in ponds in the cemetery Marisita passed on the way to school each morning. On her way home, she’d sometimes see boys fishing in the cemetery.
“What are you trying to catch?” she had shouted once.
“You, baby!” one of them shouted back, and Marisita didn’t ask after that.
There was less drought to be found in San Antonio, but there was less money, too. It was expensive to live in the city, and Maria and Edgar both worked two jobs to afford the apartment. Max was probably old enough to work, but he couldn’t—he got angry very easily, and Maria and Edgar told Marisita and her sisters that Max was working it out with God. God didn’t seem to be working through it very quickly, however, and so the Lopezes had to do without Max’s income. They managed, though, and Marisita made friends and taught herself how to be as perfect as she could.
In 1956, Elvis Presley came to San Antonio.
He was scheduled to play at the San Antonio Municipal Auditorium, the building where Edgar Lopez worked as a maintenance man. It was not as rewarding as working on the ranch, and Edgar was a lesser version of himself than he had been, but it was a paycheck. Or at least that was what Edgar told himself as he moved ever more slowly in both his body and thoughts, worn to ordinariness by the slow-motion tragedy of life. Edgar didn’t complain about his fate, but the truth was, years of doing what needed to be done and nothing else was getting to him; he was getting old.
In 1956, the King of Rock and Roll was pretty near the beginning of his career, quite a bit further away from the slow-motion tragic end of his own life, and San Antonio was unprepared for the newfound force of his fans. The plan had been for Elvis to play two shows and then sign autographs for any interested listeners. This plan was trampled by the six thousand girls who queued up hours before the show and then refused to leave after. “We want Elvis!” they chanted, as Elvis fled into his dressing room. “We want Elvis!” they chanted, lining the halls until forced to leave. “We want Elvis!” they chanted outside, as Elvis waited them out in the now-empty arena. He played a few tunes on the pipe organ while reporters and Edgar Lopez listened.
No one had seen anything like Elvis before Elvis—especially an older man like Edgar Lopez, a man who never went to concerts, a man who worked two jobs at an ever slower pace. The show was nonstop action—Elvis sang, danced, played the guitar wildly, and gyrated his hips in a way that made Edgar avert his eyes and some mothers cover their children’s eyes. Elvis was tireless. No wonder the girls screamed, Edgar thought, because they were witnessing a rock-and-roll saint.
But if Edgar had only experienced the show, nothing would have changed for Edgar himself. The show was memorable, yes, but not life changing. But that combination of events, which led to Edgar and Elvis being together in the performance hall once everyone else was gone, was life changing. Because Elvis was trapped in the San Antonio Municipal Auditorium long after his show, Edgar got to see him while not performing. While waiting for the girls to leave, Elvis sat at the organ, picking out “Silent Night” without any particular craft.
It was this that moved Edgar. He would not have been prompted to action by Elvis performing, because Edgar could tell himself that Elvis wasn’t real. But seeing Elvis afterward proved that this was indeed the work of a man. Perhaps an extraordinary man, but nonetheless a mortal like Edgar. Edgar decided he would no longer live his life in his diminished state; he would become, like Elvis, the loudest version of himself.
And so that night, after Elvis had finally gone and Edgar was cleaning up after the horde, he sang a bit of “Blue Suede Shoes” and jogged up the stairs of the municipal building with renewed vigor. He was much older than Elvis, and much less practiced at vigor, so he caught his foot sideways on one of the steps and fell all the way to the bottom, breaking his leg.
This was the beginning of the failure of the Lopezes’ fortunes. Edgar’s leg never healed correctly, and so his job prospects shrank. He spent many days in the apartment with his leg propped up. The weight of earning fell upon Maria Lopez’s shoulders. Many women would have been crushed under this newfound responsibility, but Maria Lopez became an enraged lioness in the face of bad luck. She got a third job. She bought Edgar a radio to listen to on his leg’s bad days. She joined the newly founded PASSO (Political Association of Spanish-Speaking Organizations) and campaigned fervently for better governmental representation, better health care, and labor rights. Years passed. The Lopez family scraped by.
Then the 1961 San Antonio Stock Show and Rodeo happened. Each year, the show opened with a Western parade, and every year, the parade grew grander as the show aged. That year, the stock show, already large, gained new fame when Roy Rogers and Dale Evans—the King of the Cowboys and Queen of the West—starred in a nationwide NBC telecast featuring the rodeo. Hundreds of cowboys trotted through San Antonio, the horses wearing fancy bridles and turquoise-crusted breastplates and elaborately tooled saddles with metal-plated horns, and the riders wearing white cowboy hats and fringed shirts and beautiful boots. Convertible cars followed them with local and national celebrities waving from inside.
Marisita, who by then had grown into an elegant and near-perfect teen, took her three younger sisters to see the parade; Edgar and Maria had been planning on going, but Edgar’s leg was having one of its bad days. Max had initially come with Marisita and the girls, but anger took him before they got there, and he stormed away into the crowd.
Maria stayed with Edgar in the apartment, listening to the sounds of the music and the horses and the applause outside. Although Edgar did not complain, Maria finally could not take it.
“Let us see the parade,” she told him.
“Ah,” he replied, “I can’t go down five flights of stairs.”
“No,” she said. “But I can carry you up one.”
It was one flight to the roof, and even though Edgar was not a small man, Maria had been carrying him in all of the other ways for half a decade. She put her arms around him, chair and all, and she carried him from the apartment and up the stairs. As the revelry grew louder outside, Maria climbed faster, fearing that she would not get to the top before the parade was over. Filled with passion by the sensation of being carried by his wife, Edgar told Maria that she needn’t hurry on his behalf; this two-person parade in the stairwell was far better than anything he might see outside. It was not that Edgar had stopped loving Maria at any point during that fraught decade of their marriage, but he had stopped saying that he loved her. Maria was so overcome by these words of his that she placed her foot wrong on the top stair.
The two of them pitched backward, and surely Maria would have died from the fall if Edgar had not broken her fall somewhat. As it was, she only broke her leg, the opposite leg from her husband, and he only got a bruise on his chest where she had landed.
Maria could not work now either, and the Lopez household suddenly became all dependents and no laborers. They came to the end of their money. They promised the rent, and promised the rent, and then they came to the end of their promises. They should have been thrown out on the street, but the landlord was kindly, and the Lopezes had been good tenants for years until now. Moreover, he noted, he had a shy son with no luck in the lady department, and he had noticed that Marisita had become a clever and lovely young woman. He suggested—if Marisita was agreeable with it, of course—that the two of them might meet. Possibly love would bloom.
The rest was left unspoken; of course, if love bloomed and a marriage came of it, he would not throw his in-laws into the street.
Marisita agreed to meet the landlord’s son. She had been, she remembered, both nervous and excited. Their landlord was a kind man, and there were many reasons why in San Antonio in 1961 he would not have been excited to introduce his son to the daughter of his Spanish-speaking tenants, and he did it anyway, without condescension. Either his son would be obviously unsuitable or he might be marvelous, and save them all.
But the problem was that he was neither.
His name was Homer, and he was neither handsome nor ugly. He was neither terrible nor wonderful. He was shy and awkward, a little shorter than Marisita, a little sweatier than Marisita. He fell madly in love with her straightaway.
Marisita did not fall in love with him, neither straightaway nor after several weeks of courting.
Now, this was no arranged marriage. No one was forcing the two together. She could have walked away. But every evening, she would return from cruising with Homer and find Edgar in his chair with his leg elevated, and Maria in the chair opposite with her leg still in its cast, holding hands across the space between them, and she would see her sisters sleeping sweetly in their beds in the next room, and they would ask her how it went, and she would have to say, “Wonderfully.”
She could not let them down.
And so the wedding was set. Marisita tried to fall in love with Homer, and then she tried to convince herself that she did not need true love to be happy, and finally she dreamed that she might not live to be very old and perhaps in the next life she could have her life for herself.
She cried when no one could see her and smiled and laughed when they all could.
The wedding was to be held in the Cathedral of San Fernando, a location made possible only by the landlord’s connections. It was a grand old building, constructed in the early eighteenth century. White pillars held up the roof, and white beams arched down the ceiling like a whale’s rib cage. Any bride would have been happy to be married in such an awe-inspiring space. It was a place for an epic love story.
But Marisita was not in an epic love story.
Homer stood at the altar and waited for her with the priest. Marisita stood at the doorway. Edgar was on her arm; he could not walk well, but he would limp down the aisle to give his daughter away if he did nothing else. Marisita could see her mother’s face at the very front of the church, and she heard her little sisters laughing around her as they waited to follow her with flower petals. Max was not sitting as he had thrown a fit over his suit and was waiting outside for someone to fetch him and tell him that he had been right all along and please would he come inside.
Marisita looked at her family, and she told herself that she was saving them all. Her tears welled inside her, but she held them back and reached for a smile.
She could not find it.
And so she ran.
She ran out of the church, and her father couldn’t follow her because of his bad leg, and her sisters were too shocked to realize that she didn’t mean to stop, and Max let her go because he never chased anything but his anger. So Marisita ran and ran and ran. She ran all through her wedding day and all through her wedding night and another day and another night, over and over, holding up her wedding dress in both hands, crying over how she had betrayed them.
Then she found herself in Bicho Raro, and the miracle rose up inside her.