Moments after their persecutor beat it, a police cruiser arrived and began an active pursuit of the fleeing caca boy. Stacie, Tiffany and Yadira froze while the cruiser sped by, the blue light on its roof revolving slowly. The officers inside the cruiser gave the three of them a casual once-over, but continued in the direction of the fleeing boy and the report of a car alarm.
When they were certain the cruiser had rounded the corner, they lugged the toads to Cushing Street.
They had made up their minds.
“When we find the Santa Cruz River we’re leaving these suckers,” said Tiffany.
“Oh yeah,” said Stacie.
From Cushing they trudged toward to Granada Street.
“If we make a right turn here, the river will only be a block farther,” said Yadira.
As they reached Granada, the three long-suffering coeds distinguished flickering candlelight directly across the street.
“There, there, go there. The river is just beyond it,” Stacie panted. “I know where we are!”
The source of the fabulous light seemed to be hundreds of candles burning yellowish and warm. A sharp, waxy smell drifted in the warm night breeze.
Seeking the source of the yellow glow, they crept like silly spies toward the outside of a thick adobe wall. Pockmarks abounded on the crumbly brown structure. A few steps more and they were brought up in front of an opening, which showed that all that was behind the wall was a large dirt lot shrine filled with hundreds of candles. They realized they were at the Wishing Shrine, La Tiradita, and the dry bed of the Santa Cruz River lay less than fifty feet beyond the back wall of the plaza.
Everywhere candles flickered so that the shrine shivered, fuliginous and sultry. In the light of the shrine the three girls with their pails could be seen, creeping by the open doorway, staring in at the vast greasy pools of wax on the soil around votive piles. On the walls various messages were pinned and statuettes of Christian saints crumbled like partly dismembered dolls. Charms showing silvery arms, legs and heads were pinned to silk banners, and the floor of the plaza was bare dirt with a kind of prickly pear which was shaped like cow’s tongues licking up at the dark sky. Round rocks gathered in odd circles here and there, surrounding small wrought iron candelabras that stuck out of the bare earth with iron work that curled like blackened ferns. Taller candle stands huddled together at the back of the plaza where an iron cage held more candlesticks in front of a crumbling niche, which looked like a barbecue pit and was filled with glass bottle candles.
Unfortunately for the three girls, their dozy faces making a slow, open-mouthed tour past the oily candles and black iron curlicues of the entrance instantly attracted the attention of the shrine’s resident madwoman. Her name was Delia Pantoja. After her job at Emilio’s Dulceria and Piñata store (where she excelled at selling misshapen purple dinosaurs piñatas and gawky yellow birds piñatas to pothering young grandparents) she nearly always stopped at the shrine and devoured a Hamburger Wheel Deal, remaining at La Tiradita until eleven. Self-appointed tour guide and recorder of the century-old weird tales of the shrine, her gradual madness had long since estranged her from Mr. Pantoja, their five children, and most of their thirty grandchildren. Their disapproval did not concern her; they failed to recognize a calling when they saw it. Besides, the anguish of the wishful sinners delivered greater entertainment value than TV shows with all their shouting.
Her madness developed into a talent. Her disorderly mind ripened the weird, magnified the absurd, gathered and stewed the silly.
Her life’s wish was to witness one of the shrine’s strange occurrences so that she might tell a tale firsthand that would thrill her audience and make their hairs stand on end. Once when she was ten and lived in Nogales, Sonora she accompanied her five aunts on a journey to buy pan dulce. Suddenly shots rang out. Everyone scattered, and she noticed something strange. Beneath the trim on her anklet, red was spreading. Blood soaked her little white anklet. It was the defining moment in her life that forced the split between sanity and madness. That anklet, stained with her own bright red blood, thrilled her. The fact that she became the center of attention for fifty-four relatives didn’t hurt either. When another aunt claimed to have said a prayer for her full recovery at the Wishing Shrine and when she moved north years later, she began to hang about the old shrine like its persecuting spirit. She had dinner among the frantic messages and prayers, reading each one with her lips moving and clapping her hands at certain comments about unfaithful husbands, wearing always her smeared powdery pink lipstick and a very obvious blonde wig. For clothing, she favored young looking styles, skinny jeans and clogs. She wore a black glossy tank top in the summer nights and a heavy pink sweater in the winter.
“Girls—come in, come in. You're just in time for a tour,” said Delia happily.
“What did you say,” Stacie asked, making the honest, but incredibly stupid, mistake of speaking to Delia. Delia was always waiting for people to walk by and say something. It didn't matter if they were talking to her or not. She always assumed that they were.
“Bueno,” thundered the weird woman, grabbing Stacie's arm and pulling her in, “what you see here, what this is right here, is La Tiradita, the Wishing Shrine.” Delia stumbled backward dramatically in her clogs with an overarching sweep of one arm that she feared had (and actually did) reveal the thick strap of her black bra. Dramatically, in a long and tedious recitation of mixed-up tales of mayhem and fervent prayers and glorious intercessions of the powers unknown in various tangled affairs of the heart, the walking, blabbering dead arose and were summoned to action in Delia’s strange tales. She tinged her Decameron Tales with subtle southwestern elements: twisting ropes, burning ranches, smoking hot pistols and wild-eyed palominos. It was a muddled recital; she loped off most of the sense and maligned the heroes.
At one point she seized an imaginary ax, and with her legs straddling her cowering imaginary victim, she whacked away, energetically dealing fourteen imaginary blows. The walking ghouls, the love repaired, shots fired into a hysterical stormy night, devilish gamblers enflamed by sexy wives, loyal sons of women murdered in Mexico trailed their stepfathers to the wishing shrine in order to stab, stab, stab him fourteen times–once for each year the boy had searched for the mother’s murderer. As for the various strangulation scenes, she enacted them also to horrible effect.
“The virgin could not escape the murderer's hands,” screeched Delia. “Pleading as she would again and again, she could not get him to release his death hold upon her neck. And so he slowly, slowly took the life away from her. She saw darkness then.”
Pools of candle grease trickled across the bone-dry earth, as did the bullshit. The stories were told rapid-fire and they made little sense anyway, but from the stories Stacie, Yadira and Tiffany did get the idea that the Catholic Church did not sanction this shrine.
As the interminable stories went on and on and Delia built on her magnificence and grandeur of her horror stories, Stacie, Tiffany and Yadira shifted their weight, glancing impatiently at each other, praying for an end to this unwanted spectral persecution, and at last Delia began to wonder what was in the pails. Delia’s voice trailed off and she decided it was time to let the three girls experience the shrine in their own fashion, while she would try to figure out why they really were there with those mysterious pails.
The simple and direct question: ‘What’s in there, chicas?’ was far too prying for a madwoman whose mind was crammed with the mysterious confused affairs of the afterlife. She snuck a glance at the pails when she stopped talking. Surely they contained bodily organs. Her mind swam in dreadful severed images: heads, pulsating hearts, oily swimming livers. Or more likely, had some witch sent them there with some part of their loved one’s body: a lock of hair, toenail clippings, spit, or vomit?
She looked again at Tiffany's pail and caught a movement. Now it was becoming clear to her. Her darting glimpses down convinced her that something living lurked in the pails. Then the answer hit. Bueno, of cours
e, the pails contained–unwanted babies. What were the three beautiful college girls planning to do with their precious ninos?
At that moment the two girls began to suspect Delia’s suspicions about what they were doing there with those pails. Telling the old mad woman that they wished to absorb some of the scribbled messages of grief and longing tacked here and there, they moved away from her.
Were the girls planning to abandon the babies, wondered Delia? She would stick around and save them.
Whispering in a conference, the three discussed how to get away easily and leave the tale-telling madwoman. These sort of serendipitous failures plagued them. And they were so close to getting rid of the poor toads.
“This is a fascinating place,” said Tiffany loudly.
The old lady nodded, but feigned disinterest in the girls. In fact she stood at a distance, but followed their every move. She was desperately trying to align her body so as to get a view of the contents of those strange pails again. Old Mrs. Pantoja squinted hard in their direction while her head seemed to be studying the wall in front of her. Something about those girls seemed odd. Their eyes were bloodshot and they acted drunk. The evilness and wickedness of college girls was well known to Delia. Stepping gingerly toward the pails, she made the sign of the cross and rolled back her eyes.
Mrs. Pantoja glanced over an edge of the pail.
She saw the hideous face—of a toad!
“Y Quala!” she screamed. “Caramba!” She fell back slightly and clutched her heart. “Ay, Chihuahua!”
The horrid faces and blinking eyes of the toads made her want to shriek. There was only one conclusion that she could make—those college girls in their ugliness had changed their babies into toads.
At the sound of her screams, Yadira, Stacie and Tiffany picked up their pails and ran. Mrs. Pantoja ran a few steps after them, but she tripped in her high clogs.