“No, ma’am.”
“Now you’re being a liar and thinking I’m a pig, but that’s all right. I understand. We have rules here, Pete, but they don’t have to do with you. We Sorias must be careful with pilgrims; if we interfere with them after the first miracle, our own darkness will come down on us, and that is a terrible thing that no one would like to see, worse than any of their darkness. So that is the first rule: only room and board for the pilgrims, no other conversation, because you don’t know what will help them. Rule two, if you want a wife or you want a husband, you go outside Bicho Raro. Love is a dangerous thing already, without a pilgrim in it. Rule three, only a saint performs the miracle, and no one else around, because you don’t know when the darkness will bite like that snake you just saw. These are the rules.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Pete said. He wasn’t sure what he was expected to say, as he was not a Soria and the rules didn’t apply to him, but he also could see that it was a grave issue and wanted Antonia to see that he realized this.
“That’s why I’m not talking to the pilgrims,” Antonia said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“It’s not because I’m a pig.”
“No, ma’am.”
“That’s why no one came to talk to you, because we thought you were a pilgrim.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m telling you because all of the pilgrims know, and you should, too, so that you know what a Soria will or won’t do, and you know we’re not being rude.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good. Here’s your room,” Antonia said, closing the distance to the final doorway. “Clean up after yourself.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Pete said.
Antonia leaned toward the room but did not look inside it. “Padre, this boy will be your roommate. He can have the floor.” She was walking away before she even finished speaking. “Come find Michael or myself when you’re ready to work, Wyatt.”
The final room in the hall belonged to Padre Jiminez, a priest from northern Colorado. He was as benevolent and friendly and holy as you’d hope for a priest to be, so long as your skirt didn’t blow up in the wind. The first miracle had left him with the head of a coyote but the hands of a man. He used the first to gobble up rabbits and the second to fasten on his white collar each morning. He did try to vanquish the darkness, but he could not stop his coyote’s ears from pricking when a pretty girl came to Bicho Raro.
When Pete stepped into the doorway, Padre Jiminez was sitting at the end of a narrow mattress. The bed was made up as tidily as a business envelope, and there was nothing else in the room but a small table with a lamp on it and a cross hanging on the wall. At this sight—the spare decor, the coyote-headed man, the grimly made bed—Pete suddenly felt a second shock through him. This one was not surprise but homesickness, an understanding of how far he was from Oklahoma in every way, a fear that his plan was nothing but smoke tricks to fool himself into feeling better. The ferocity of this emotion sent an additional wave through his heart, and for the first time, Pete really believed that Pete the doctor may have been onto something, and that was a leash that felt shorter.
And so it was a somewhat more feeble version of Pete that Padre first saw—some might argue a truer version, if they are one of those who believes we are only as strong as our weakest moments. Luckily for Pete and for many people, Padre Jiminez was not one of them.
The priest leaped up and loped across the room to Pete. “Welcome, young man,” he said. He had a very crisp enunciation, because he had to work hard to get the words out around his sharp canines and lolling tongue. “Welcome, welcome, welcome!”
Pete, like many a young rural Protestant, reeled back first from the priestly collar and second from the coyote head. “Oh—sir—thank you.”
Padre Jiminez waited until the silence had become slightly uncomfortable, and then he gobbled it up with his flashing teeth. “Ah! So, have you had your miracle yet?”
“I’m just here about a truck,” Pete said. “Just here to work.”
“Is that so!”
“Just a truck.”
“No secret darkness lurking inside you?”
Pete found himself once again telling the story of his aunt Josefa.
“Of course, of course, of course,” Padre Jiminez said. “Josefa. Wonderful lady, though a little progressive. We court darkness when we swim nude.”
“Do we?” Pete asked.
“Do you?”
Pete halted the conversation and restarted it. “Are you still—do you still—are you a priest here?”
“I am always a priest in my heart. Are you a Catholic?”
“I’m a Christian.”
“Lucky,” Padre Jiminez said. “So am I. Say, you came with the man last night, didn’t you?”
Pete had not thought about Tony since waking up in his car. But the jolt of homesickness he’d just felt had the effect of softening the memory of his trip with Tony. His mind skipped over all the negative aspects and instead highlighted the camaraderie of the shared hours together.
Just a decade before, a scientist named Harry Harlow had studied the science of attachment by performing experiments on monkeys. The poor infant monkeys had been deprived of their real mothers but offered two substitutes: an artificial monkey covered with terry cloth and an artificial monkey made of wire. A terry-cloth mother is not much of a mother at all, but all of the infant monkeys agreed she was better than the wire mother. Harlow had not studied young men from Oklahoma in this experiment, but the results still held true for Pete. Padre and the other strange pilgrims felt like a wire mother to Pete, and the specter of Tony, though only a snarling terry-cloth mother, seemed to at least offer a semblance of comfort.
“Yes, I did come with him!” Pete said now. “Where is he? Is he still here?”
“Oh yes, yes.” Padre Jiminez gestured out the tiny window.
Together, they peered out the window, but Pete did not see Tony. He saw the bright day, and a swath of shade across it. Pete’s eyes followed that long, stretching shadow, deep blue in the late morning light. Shielding his eyes against the sun, he tipped his head back and then farther back, trying to clearly see what enormous structure cast it. He saw a smooth white surface stretching two stories up, with seams like enormous stitching. He did not understand the top of it, which was dark and so black as to be violet. It was not until he lowered his eyes to look at the base of the structure and saw a single, vast, bare foot that he realized what he was looking at, because he remembered clearly Antonia Soria’s dogs eating the shoe that had been on it. Now he understood that the white surface was yards of white suit and that the black that topped it was a field of shiny hair, all of it the same as he had seen it the night before, except three times larger.
“Holy moly,” Pete said. “Is that Tony?”