Pete thought about this again, and he thought about Beatriz and the desert. Then he said, “No, I don’t think so, ma’am. It’s only shock that does it.”
“Good. Very good,” Antonia repeated. “Come on. I will show you where you’ll put your boots at night.”
As Pete fetched his bag from the car, Antonia spared a bitter glance at her husband Francisco’s greenhouse. He was visible through the glass. While his wife spent her nights making paper flowers so beautiful they seemed real, Francisco spent his days growing real flowers so beautiful they seemed fake. Although the San Luis Valley was a good place to grow sturdy potatoes and hay and tomatoes, Francisco had instead turned his attention to raising roses. There were many impediments to growing show roses in Bicho Raro—hail to knock the petals off and elk to eat the leaves and searing sun to bleach the color from them all—but as a boy, he had been struck by the perfect beauty of a Fibonacci spiral in a rose’s belly and had never lost the fire. Since then, he had been trying to breed the impossible: a black rose. He was in the greenhouse now, as he usually was, jotting notes in his tiny journal. They were numbers, although it was not arithmetic—it was a sentence written in the language he and Beatriz had invented. Translated, it meant, I believe Antonia’s dogs killed some men last night.
Here was a thing Francisco wanted: to find a pitch-black bud on one of his roses. Here was a thing he feared: being asked to do anything else.
Antonia sneered again at her husband’s figure, her temper warming again, and then she turned away. She pointed beyond the cistern. “That over there is the truck.”
Pete felt a surge of gladness over the reality of the vehicle. If he tried hard enough, he could imagine his logo painted on its stained side. “Thank you, ma’am, for this opportunity.”
“Don’t thank me yet. I don’t think it’s running.” She halted in front of a long and utilitarian adobe structure. “This is where you’ll be staying. We’re up to God’s mustache in pilgrims, so you’ll have a roommate.”
“I don’t mind, ma’am.”
“You might,” Antonia said.
The house Pete was to stay in had originally housed Daniel Lupe Soria’s family, although it would have been difficult to identify it as a family home now, because it had since been divided into tiny apartments. Inside it was dark and cool, smelling of unfamiliar foods and years of woodsmoke.
“Kitchen,” Antonia said, by way of tour. “Clean up after yourself.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Water closet,” Antonia said, opening a door. “Clean up after yourself.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“These rooms have pilgrims in them, so obviously don’t enter without an invitation,” Antonia said, gesturing to the four doors along the hall that stretched the length of the home.
“Yes, ma’am.”
To prevent stuffiness in the house, all of these doors were open, and so in this way, Pete met the pilgrims who shared the house with him.
In the first room was Jennie Fitzgerald, a slight young brunette woman who waved at him as they passed.
“Hello,” said Pete.
“Hello,” said Jennie.
He didn’t know it, but he’d just heard the result of her first miracle. It had left her with the inability to say anything but what other people had already said. She was the most obviously determined of the pilgrims to remove the darkness from herself. Since her first miracle, she had spent her days actively seeking conversation with others. Her conversation partner would speak first and then Jennie would try to reply in her own words, executing invisible techniques in an attempt to do more than simply echo. So far, the only success she’d had was in making the other pilgrims dread conversation with her, which was too bad, because she really was a nice young lady.
Pete nearly did not see the pilgrim in the second room they passed, as he blended in with the shadows of his room so well. This was Theldon Bunch. The first miracle had left him with moss furring his entire body, and now he spent his days either in the rocker in the corner of his room or under the shaded patio beside the house, reading fat paperback novels that the postman brought from Alamosa. He had the same amount of moss covering his skin as he’d had the day the miracle had created it, and he did not appear to be doing anything to combat it.
“Hello,” Pete said to him, but Theldon Bunch did not look up from his book until after Pete and Antonia had already passed.
The third room contained the glamorous California twins, Robbie and Betsy, who, after the miracle, were corded together by an enormous black snake with a head at both ends. It tangled their feet if they took too many steps away from each other, but it also snapped at them if they sat too close for too long. If one side of it was attacked, the other side came to the rescue. If it was fed constantly and kept at a continuously acceptable tension, they could carry on without noticing it. The twins had arrived at Bicho Raro alternately fighting and clinging, and remained thus. It had occurred to Beatriz, at the very least, that the solution was for a twin to hold one of the snake’s heads while the other twin killed the second head, but of course she could not suggest such a thing. So they continued to complain that the snake was too strong for them to battle on their own, and lived with it wrapped around them both.
“Hello,” Pete said to them.
He was turned slightly more toward Robbie, so the snake head nearest Betsy jealously snapped at him. Pete’s heart leaped first, and then his body leaped second. His back hit the hallway wall and his hand slapped his dangerously shocked heart. Betsy drew the snake up short.
“So sorry,” she said, but she was looking at Robbie as if it were Robbie’s fault.
“Sure, that’s okay, miss,” Pete said, although he wasn’t sure if it really was. “I’m Pete.”
“Pete,” Betsy repeated, but she was looking at Robbie as if this, too, were Robbie’s fault. Robbie refused to look at her; they were fighting.
“Wyatt,” Antonia said, farther down the hall.
“So long,” Pete told the twins, and caught up.
Antonia had not spoken to any of the pilgrims they had passed. Pete was remembering how the Sorias had ignored him as he’d knocked on their doors and he was thinking about how now she was ignoring these people, and he was thinking it was pretty rude. He was too polite to say anything about it, though; he just kept looking over his shoulder at the three rooms they’d passed.
Antonia was no fool, so she stopped before the final room and put a hand on Pete’s shoulder.
“You are thinking I’m a pig.”
“No, ma’am.”
“You are. I can see it on your face.”