“Okay,” said Pete, but he didn’t go. Instead, he tapped on one of the Mercury’s windows. “I wasn’t looking through your stuff or anything, but when I was sleeping back there, I kept hitting my head on that box, so I looked in it to make sure I hadn’t hurt anything in it. I’ve never seen that many records in my life!”
Tony had forgotten that he had the promotional records in the back of the Mercury, though, and now he felt a little bad about it. Not because he thought the station would miss them—he’d only taken ones that were duplicates or singles his producers would never play—but because it wasn’t good for them to be subjected to direct sunlight. “That’s because you haven’t lived very long. You got a record player?”
“You saw everything I came here with. How’d you end up with all them, anyway?”
“Pass,” Tony said. “Hard pass. Not answering.”
“Pass? Why? Wait, did you kill someone over them?”
Tony burst out laughing. “Kid, you really have got more corners than a box full of boxes. I work in radio. Don’t tell anyone.”
“Why not?”
Tony was impatient with this question, as he felt it was the kind of question only asked by someone who had never experienced either fame or notoriety. “Because I said so.”
“Sure, whatever you say. Like a DJ?”
Because Pete didn’t seem too awed, Tony grudgingly answered, “Yeah.”
“You’d think a DJ would be the last person to break the radio in their own car.”
“Yeah, you’d think, wouldn’t you? Now seriously, flake off before I regret telling you.”
Tony had been watching Pete closely to see if this confession had changed anything, but Pete was less interested in Tony’s past career than he was in his own future safety. “I oughta get some sleep anyway. Is the coast clear?”
“Of what? Those damn dogs?”
“No, a girl,” Pete said. It had not occurred to Pete that he had actually weaponized Beatriz’s appearance by avoiding her the way that he had; if only he had approached her calmly during the day, he would have been fine.
“You mean that girl?” Tony asked.
Pete turned.
“I need to talk to you,” Beatriz said.
Not a lot of people know that there is a great salt lake and accompanying salt plain in Oklahoma; most folks are only familiar with the famous one in Utah. But the one in Oklahoma is no shoddy thing. Just a spit north of Jet, Oklahoma, the great salt flats start, the enormous and impressive remainder of a massive saline lake. Like the salt flats in Utah, they are white as snow and as flat as a board, but unlike the salt flats in Utah, Oklahoma’s salt flats have treasure buried beneath them. Tiny crystals known as hourglass crystal grow here and nowhere else in the world, and if you are the sort to dig for treasure, you can bring your whole family to dig them up. Just make sure you hose your vehicle down afterward, because salt’s not good for any set of wheels.
Pete’s family had gone to dig up these rare selenite crystals one spring not long ago, and Pete remembered the unrelenting sun, the grit of salt and sand caught in his pants legs, the intimate joy of finding a crystal and holding it to the light to see the hourglass of time within it.
“Look, I told you, he’s waking up,” Tony said.
The image of Oklahoma’s salt flats slowly became the starry sky over Bicho Raro.
“I need you to go,” said a mild female voice. It was Beatriz, though Pete’s gaze had not yet focused on her. “It’s dangerous for us to speak.”
“Fine, lady,” Tony said. “My legs want to get out of here for a while anyway.” The ground rumbled as he stepped over them both and walked into the night.
Pete and Beatriz were left alone.
Pete went to press his hand to his chest, only to discover that he had already done it, so he pressed a little harder. He was lying on his back in the gritty dirt, and from the vague ache on the back of his head, he guessed (correctly) that he had gotten there in an expedited way. Beatriz was crouched beside him, holding her skirt carefully to keep the wires she had collected inside the makeshift holder. The air smelled like roses for no reason that either of them could tell. This was because Luis had emptied a wheelbarrow of spent blossoms from Francisco’s warehouse in this field, and Pete had made an accidental bed of them.
“You fainted,” Beatriz told him.
He looked at her through slitted eyes, worried about his heart, but it seemed that now that the sight of her had knocked him on his back in the dirt, looking at her more didn’t seem to cause any more hurt. You can only get shocked so many times by the same thing, after all. He said, “I’ve got a hole in my heart.”
“Do you fall down a lot?”
“Only when I’m surprised.”
“Do a lot of things surprise you?”
“Not really.”
Because Pete was still dazed from striking his head on the rose-petal-strewn ground, he didn’t offer his name nor ask hers, and he did not think to begin polite conversation. And because Beatriz was already uncomfortable about the truck and because she was not as empathetic as someone else might have been in the situation and because she was trying not to look at his elbows, she did not think to introduce herself or even allow Pete to stand up as she raised the sore subject of the truck’s ownership. Instead, she merely explained that she had heard he was working for the truck but that her mother had not realized when she made the deal that Beatriz had resurrected it and gotten it running again and was using it for her own purposes. Only at the end of this monologue, when he was still looking at her dazedly, did she realize she had not solicited his thoughts.
“And so I’m open to your thoughts,” she finished.
Pete said, “Antonia—your mother—told me it wasn’t running.” But even as he said it, he knew Beatriz’s account was true, as the truck had been parked in multiple places since he’d arrived there, which was why he had not yet been able to examine it. Because he was a kind soul, this immediately triggered a conflict. He desperately wanted the truck, of course, and was unable to imagine what he might do without it. But he also could not imagine simply taking the truck out from underneath Beatriz if she had indeed invested so much work in it; it wasn’t fair, and if Pete was anything, he was a fair person.
This dissonance distressed him so much that he thought he could feel his very core beginning to tremble. The ground seemed to be whispering softly against his spine with the movement of some deep and unwinnable debate.