He did not know if it was better or worse that the thing remained out of sight.
Daniel mouthed a prayer. “Mother—”
“Ladies and gentlemen of the San Luis Valley,” said Diablo Diablo, “we interrupt our normal broadcast for a live interview.”
Daniel’s prayer silenced in his mouth. His hand with its spider eyes walked to the knob and turned up the volume. Static hissed in the background.
Diablo Diablo continued, “This is our first interview, so excuse us, excuse us mightily, if we experience any technical difficulties. The first man to walk a road always has to clear a few rocks. Señorita, would you tell all our listeners at home your name? For your privacy, just your first name. We don’t want anyone to stop you on the street and tell you your face is as pretty as your voice.”
Marisita said, “Marisita.”
It was obvious now that the hissing in the background was not static after all; it was the patter of rain falling around Marisita. “Welcome to our show, Marisita.”
“Marisita,” Daniel said out loud, with wonder. Then, understanding what this meant, with worry—“Joaquin.”
Diablo Diablo continued, “Let me catch our listeners up on the situation, because you will not be able to understand Marisita’s story unless you know about the Saint of Bicho Raro.”
Joaquin was not being entirely aspirational by suggesting they had an audience. Apart from Daniel, the station did actually have a few other listeners that night, including two long-distance truckers, a man in a farm truck two ranches over, an old woman with insomnia who was passing the time jarring cactus jelly while her four dogs watched her, and, by a twist of AM radio wave magic, a group of Swedish fishermen who had turned on the radio to listen to as they woke themselves up for their work of catching halibut.
“Imagine … you have a tormented mind,” Diablo Diablo said, his voice dramatic. “You barter with sadness or you fight with grief or you eat arrogance every morning with your coffee. There are saints in this valley who can heal you. You and every other pilgrim can canter to Bicho Raro to receive a miracle. A miracle, you say? A miracle. This miracle makes the darkness inside you visible in amazing and peculiar ways. Now that you see what has been haunting you, you overthrow it, and then you leave this place free and easy. Don’t believe me? Hey, hey, I don’t make the news, I just report it. There’s only one catch: The saints cannot help you tackle your darkness after you receive the miracle, or they will, ah, they will bring darkness on themselves, a worse darkness than any ordinary man’s. Or woman’s, golly.”
And now Daniel laughed out loud, helplessly, because he could hear the crack in Joaquin’s voice that meant Beatriz must have shot him a look. The familiarity of it both comforted and tormented him.
“Now, Marisita, who we have on the show tonight, was recently in the presence of a saint when darkness overtook him. That’s right, isn’t it, Marisita?”
“Yes,” Marisita said.
“And did you see what form his darkness took?”
Marisita said, “I’m sorry, I’m crying. May I have a minute?”
“Oh,” said Diablo Diablo, sounding a little cross and a lot like Joaquin. He pulled it back together. “While you have a cry, the rest of us can join you, including Elvis. Let’s have a listen to ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ ”
You can imagine the effect that this exchange had on Daniel, who was in love with Marisita. He had heard the tears in her voice and it made tears rise up in his throat as well. It was only because he knew that he had brought only so much water with him and could not spare it that he did not allow himself to weep with her.
The song drew to a baleful close, and Diablo Diablo’s voice cut in. “And we’re back. Wipe your eyes, everyone, it’ll be all right, and if it won’t, it’ll be a good story for someone else. Marisita, are you still there?”
“I am.”
“Let’s try this again. Did you see Daniel’s darkness?”
Daniel was as interested in this answer as his cousins were, as he had not yet seen whatever it was that he felt shadowing him. He was certain that Marisita had looked out the window after him as he left—he had been able to feel the familiar weight of her gaze wrapped around him. So it was possible she had seen whatever it was that watched him now.
“No, I did not,” Marisita said in her sweet, sad voice. “Nothing except for the owls. I’m sorry. I want to be able to help. But I didn’t see any change at all. It’s hard for me to imagine that he even had any darkness inside him, because he is—he was—you know how he is.”
Yes, they all knew how he was. But we all have darkness inside us. It is just a question of how much of us is light as well.
“Yes,” Diablo Diablo said bleakly. “He was a Saint.”
“I didn’t see him up close, though. He passed me a note through my door and told me not to come out,” Marisita continued. “It said he was dangerous and that I shouldn’t follow him.”
“Dangerous,” Diablo Diablo repeated, and the word thrilled over teeth. “Did you happen to see which way Daniel went when he left?”
“I looked out the window after him. I saw him going into the night. He stopped near the edge of Bicho Raro, but I don’t know why.”
This had been because Daniel had encountered Antonia Soria’s dogs. They had not yet become aware of his presence. Some were sleeping, some were dozing warily, and yet another was worrying at what was left of Tony’s white jacket. Some men might have tried to sneak past the dogs, or to trick or intimidate them. Daniel did none of these things. Instead, he prayed. He prayed to his mother that the dogs might know how he was feeling. The dogs at once began to weep. They tipped their heads back and instead of howling, they let big tears roll out of their eyes and into their fur. They wept as they understood that Daniel was afraid that he might be going into the desert to die alone. They wept as they understood that Daniel could not bear the thought that he might not see Bicho Raro or his family again. They wept as they understood that he was in love with Marisita Lopez and still, even after all of this, longed for there to be a way to spend his life with her.
As the dogs cried and whimpered, Daniel walked past them. He did not try to comfort them, because he knew there was no comfort. He could hear the strange sound of his darkness moving in the shadows on the other side of the house, but he did not flinch. He was the Saint of Bicho Raro, and he was determined to walk out of Bicho Raro without harming his home.
Diablo Diablo persisted. “You didn’t see where he went after that?”
“No.”
“Just now, you were wandering in the desert after him with no idea of where he went?”
“I had to start somewhere. I can’t imagine him out here alone. And his family can’t help him. I can do something, and so I will.”
“How long are you intending to wander?”
“As long as I need to,” Marisita said.
Daniel was overcome then, and allowed one tear to fall. He would spare one drop of his precious water for this feeling to escape him.
“As long as you need to? And what if you haven’t found him by tomorrow?”
“I will eat some of the food I packed for him and keep looking.”
“And the next day?”
“The same.”
“And the next? And the next?”
“I’m going to look for him until I find him,” Marisita insisted.
There was a long pause here, and Joaquin seemed to be struggling to find a way to put his next question into words. Finally, he merely asked it as it had first come into his head.
“Marisita, are you in love with him?”
“Yes.”
Daniel spared another drop of water. The tear fell to the dust. A pack rat raced out from the brush to grab it, certain it was a jewel because of its shine in the firelight. Daniel’s sorrow had made it tangible enough to carry, and so the pack rat bore it back to its nest, only to later find that offspring raised on a bed of sadness fail to thrive.
; Diablo Diablo said, “Marisita, there is a problem with your quest. We have a source here in the station who is telling me that if you are in love with him, you can’t look for him. If you’re in love with him, the family darkness will come on you, too, if you help him.”
Marisita did not immediately answer.
“I think you better play another song,” she finally said. “I need to cry some more.”
Diablo Diablo did not immediately answer either. Daniel suspected (correctly) that this was because he was trying to find another thematic song in his prerecorded session. He put on Paul Anka’s “It’s Time to Cry.” When it was through, he said, “Last question, Marisita: The Saint’s darkness came to him because he helped you and interfered with your miracle. How did Daniel help you?”
Daniel curled on his side, the top of his head touching the radio so he could feel the vibration of the speaker against his skin. He closed his eyes, though his blind spiders’ eyes stayed open to the night as they always did.
In a small voice, Marisita said, “I don’t want to answer this one. I’m sorry— It just, it just makes me cry too much. I can’t tell the story to someone else yet.”
“That’s all right,” Diablo Diablo soothed. After a pause, he added, in a somewhat less Diablo Diablo voice, “Marisita, he’ll be okay. He’s too good not to fight it. Maybe we can have you on the show again?”
Marisita said, “I’d like that.”
Daniel opened his eyes. But it was not very much brighter than it had been with them closed.
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.