“Not tonight,” Beatriz replied. “It needs more work.” This reminded her of Pete Wyatt and how she was not at all sure how much more time she had with the truck. She felt obliged to tell Joaquin all of this, and did, in a low voice, so that she could still have one ear on the signal strength.
After she was through, Joaquin kicked the dirt, but not hard, because he didn’t want to dirty his paisley pants, and he also cursed a little. “Pete Wyatt!”
Joaquin didn’t know much about Pete Wyatt, but he was not a fan. This had nothing to do with Pete Wyatt and everything to do with Michael, who had actually stopped working in order to sing the praises of Pete’s work ethic to Rosa and Joaquin. He began with small gestures, complimenting Pete’s quick ability to grasp the meat of any new job, and then moved out from there to admiring how hard Pete worked even under the harsh rain, expanded further to how satisfying it was to see a young person who actually appreciated the land, and then ultimately ending up with a somewhat tone-deaf statement that Pete was the son every man deserved but never had.
Joaquin, as the son that Michael may not have deserved but definitely actually had, was less than thrilled by the statements. His mother, Rosa, defended Joaquin, but not in a way that brought Joaquin any satisfaction.
“If only Joaquin could bring himself to work at anything like Wyatt does,” Michael said.
“Oh, you know Quino,” Rosa replied, “he is a gentle boy and he will come into his own one day!”
“When I was Joaquin’s age, I knew what I wanted to do with myself, and that was leave a print on the world with the dint of my labor,” Michael said.
“We need soft men, too. Sweet gentle boys whose mothers love them just the way they are!”
“I never see Joaquin doing anything but oiling his hair. A man is more than his hair.”
“He is also his mustache,” Rosa agreed. “But Quino is still just a boy and soon enough he will have a mustache. Not like yours, of course. You cannot expect that of anyone, even your own son. But he will have his own sort.”
This infuriated Joaquin. He did not want to be a soft, gentle man who had accomplished nothing. He was not a soft, gentle man who had accomplished nothing. He longed to tell them that he already had plans, and that he was going to be a radio DJ, Diablo Diablo, and that one day they would compare Pete Wyatt to him and find Pete wanting.
“I’ll talk to him,” Beatriz said. “Pete, I mean.”
“What are you going to say?”
“I think that will depend on him. I—”
Quick as death, Joaquin halted and held a hand out to Beatriz, snatching her to a standstill. Everyone has two faces: the one they wear, and the one that is beneath it. Joaquin quite suddenly wore the latter.
Beatriz stopped. She gently lifted the shotgun.
A desert is a lot like an ocean, if you replace all of the water with air. It stretches out and out and out in unfathomable distance and, in the absence of sunlight, turns to pure black. Sounds become secrets, impossible to verify as true until the light returns. It is not empty merely because you cannot see all of it. And you know in your heart that it isn’t—that it is the opposite of empty once it is dark, because things that do not like to be watched emerge when all of the light is gone. There is no way to know the shape of them, though, until your hand is on them.
Something was there in the desert.
The creature was moving slowly among the distant brush, dark against the night-purple horizon, nearly human-shaped. There was a rattling or hissing as it moved, like dry beans shaken gently in a pan.
Joaquin was suddenly reminded of Nana locking her back door. Beatriz was suddenly reminded of long-lived Felipe Soria, wandering forever, looking for that femur-made cross, and of the furious businessman she had failed to help, tangled in his beard.
Diablo Diablo said, “If there wasn’t a moon out there before, there is one now. Coming up next we’ve got something to put a smile on that moon’s face.”
At the sound of his voice, the figure stopped.
Every head turned toward the radio. It continued to prattle on in a way that we do not notice when we are not trying to be silent in the desert night. Diablo Diablo said, “The moon loves company, so get your teeth ready.”
The creature stepped toward them.
It was difficult to terrify Beatriz Soria, for the same reason that it was difficult to get her angry. Fear and rage are not very different when you think about it, two hungry animals that often hunt the same prey—emotion—and hide from the same predator—logic. So Beatriz’s surfeit of logic usually protected her from terror. (Although it easily delivered her to anxiety. Anxiety was merely another brand of her usual considered thought, after all, just one that refused to go away when she asked it nicely or was trying to sleep.) Beatriz’s fear, though, required enough information to conclude that almost certainly something bad was going to happen, and also that the something bad was awful enough that it could not be easily remedied, and that rarely happened.
So Beatriz was not afraid in this moment, but only because she didn’t have enough information to be afraid.
“The flashlight,” she said, without taking her eyes from the figure.
Joaquin did not require information to be afraid and was accordingly out of his mind with fear. He managed to collect himself just enough to point the light directly at the intruder.
Butterflies moved their wings slowly in the flashlight’s beam.
It was not Felipe Soria, nor Daniel’s darkness.
It was Marisita Lopez.
Marisita’s ever-present wedding dress and the weighty bag upon her back had created the strange silhouette the cousins had spotted. The hissing sound was nothing but the sound of the raindrops dashing against the tumbleweed and brush around her.
Joaquin recoiled. She was not a monster, but she was a pilgrim, and that was just as dangerous.
Beatriz, however, scrutinized Marisita. This was the first time she had seen the young woman since reading Daniel’s letter, and she was now trying to see Marisita through Daniel’s eyes. As anything but a pilgrim, because Daniel must have seen past that to fall in love with her.
Joaquin twisted his fingers in Beatriz’s sleeve and tugged.
But Beatriz lingered. “Were you running away into the desert?”
“Beatriz,” Joaquin hissed.
“I—I am looking for Daniel. The Saint,” Marisita said. “I couldn’t—I couldn’t imagine him out there without supplies.”