If Antonia and Francisco and Michael and Rosa had been paying attention, they would have marked that neither Beatriz nor Joaquin, the two most vocal supporters of actively helping Daniel, had spoken in favor of helping him now. As it was, only Nana noticed their quiet acceptance, and she took it for despair rather than secret collusion.
“I never said this wasn’t terrible,” Antonia said, feeling the silence of the group was castigating her for upholding their rules. “I don’t know why you are always making me out to be the bad guy.”
“I am in agreement with you, Antonia,” Michael said.
“As am I,” Francisco said.
There was a pause, and they looked sharply to Rosa, but it turned out that the gap in her agreement was only because she was removing her hair from the baby’s mouth. “Yes, yes, we must be cautious.”
The adults were soon discussing logistics in Spanish, which meant they were no longer actively soliciting the younger Sorias’ thoughts. They could not leave water for him, because that was against the rules. But if he was this close, they mused, he could get water from any of the ranches if he was willing to drink with the cattle. And if he was sensible enough to leave this message, they reasoned, then he was sensible enough to be hunting down food for his body, perhaps. Which meant instead of the elements, maybe he was only having to fight the darkness.
They were desperately wrong about just one part, however, and that was the only in that phrase—only having to fight the darkness. Yes, Daniel was fighting the darkness, but there was nothing slight about it. They were not looking for the signs of how his darkness had manifested, nor could they have, but if they had, they might have noticed how uneven the letters were, how some of them were misshapen and only legible to the optimistic. They were words crafted by a young man with fast-failing vision.
But they needed this optimism to counteract their failure to act. Imagining that Daniel was still doing all right was the only way the adults could live with their abandonment of him.
“‘Marisita, I’m listening,’” Rosa repeated, bouncing Lidia in time with the words, waiting for them to make more sense. “‘Marisita, I’m listening.’”
Marisita, I’m listening.
Finally, Beatriz and Joaquin allowed their eyes to meet, and in that look, they saw that they were both thinking the same thing: If Daniel truly was listening, they needed to put on a show that felt like a miracle.
There used to be an enormous and fine barn at Bicho Raro, capable of housing two hundred bales of hay, twelve horses, a small tractor, and twenty-four barn swallows. The siding had been amber brown and the roof was gloriously red. It was, in fact, the very barn Pete was scavenging for the dance floor’s boards. Shortly after it had been built, the wind nudged it, as it nudged all things in the San Luis Valley. Nothing happened, because the barn was very securely built. The wind nudged it for all that week, and still nothing happened. The wind nudged it for ninety-nine weeks in a row, and still nothing happened; the barn did not budge. But on the one hundredth week, the wind nudged the barn and the barn fell onto itself. It was not that the one hundredth week of nudging was any stronger than the previous weeks. It was not even that the one hundredth week of nudging was what had actually knocked the barn over. The ninety-nine weeks of nudging were what had truly done the job, but the one hundredth was the one around to take the credit.
We almost always can point to that hundredth blow, but we don’t always mark the ninety-nine other things that happen before we change.
Things felt different in the box truck that night; things felt like change. Some of this was because their population had altered by one. Beatriz, Joaquin, and Pete were jammed together like crayons in a box as the truck lumbered slowly out into the dark. Beatriz wasn’t much of a talker, and Joaquin wasn’t feeling like being civil, and Pete wasn’t one to start a fire in a room that didn’t seem to be in the mood for smoke, so for quite a while the only sounds in the truck were the rumbling of the engine and the squeaking of the seats and the nearly inaudible thump of hearts when Beatriz’s and Pete’s fingers accidentally jostled together.
“Do you like music, Oklahoma?” Joaquin finally asked, more aggressively than one might have ordinarily, and more aggressively than one might have thought, considering the truck’s cramped cab was pressing their shoulders together hard in a familiar sort of way.
Pete missed the tone. “I like Patsy Cline an awful lot.”
“Patsy Cline,” Joaquin echoed.
“Who’s Patsy Cline?” Beatriz asked.
“Oh, you know who she is,” Joaquin said dismissively. He threw a significant twang into his voice but otherwise did not attempt to make it musical. “I’m always walkin’ after midnight, searchin’ for you.”
Beatriz shook her head, no closer to recognition.
“Craaaaaaazzy,” Pete sang.
Technically, he was not a very good singer, wavery and low, but he was pleasantly heavy on the syllables in the way that Johnny Cash was, and Beatriz was charmed by it. Moreover, the tune was recognizable. Beatriz said, “I know that one.”
Pete had a thing for crooners. He liked Patsy Cline, and he liked Loretta Lynn. Women with deep voices and a sense of history, singing in low, round tones over plucked and syrupy steel guitars. Once, one of his mother’s brother’s father-in-law’s friends had stayed at their house in Oklahoma after blowing the engine of his new Impala on a cross-country trip, and while there, he’d told stories of meeting Patsy Cline back in Virginia. She’d been tough and funny. She’d called everybody Hoss, and drank like a man. Pete had taken an instant shine.
Joaquin was perfectly fine with Patsy Cline, in reality, but he was still angry about his father’s admiring tone when speaking of Pete, so he couldn’t find it in him to be kindly about his musical choice.
“We don’t have Patsy Cline on the list for tonight,” Joaquin said in an even ruder tone. He did not know that Pete hadn’t been told yet what they were going into the desert to do, so his statement didn’t make a lot of sense to Pete.
“That’s quite okay, sir,” Pete said with a smile. “I don’t only like Patsy Cline.”
Beatriz caught that sir in midair, like a bird, and studied it in her mind. For some, a sir in this situation might have been used for an equally rude effect, sarcastically spitting politeness at the party who had wronged them. For others, it might have been automatic, someone who said sir so often that it didn’t mean anything at all. For Pete, it was launched with deference. I’m no threat, that sir declared, with a peacekeeping smile. You’re still king of the castle. Antonia’s dogs were always fighting among one another, and the battles ended when one rolled onto its back to show it had no fight in it. That was Pete’s sir in this particular exchange. Beatriz found this unfair, as Pete had done nothing wrong, but also frustrating, as Pete would think Joaquin was always petulant, which was far from the truth.
The kindness made Joaquin crosser, because there’s nothing like knowing that you were just a heel to a nice person to make you even madder at them.