Diablo Diablo’s program continued. His voice took on a more intimate tone. “Here’s a thing Jack Kerouac said: ‘What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?—it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.’ If you’re missing someone tonight, know that I, Diablo Diablo, am, too. It’s an enormous sky out there with a lot of stars above it and a lot of folks underneath it, and all of us, stars and human, are missing someone in the dark. But I, Diablo Diablo, think that if we’re all out there missing someone, that means that we’re all really together on that one note, aren’t we? So none of us are really alone as long as we’re lonely.”
It is difficult to convey how mesmerizing Joaquin was in this passage, how passionate and moving, because so much of the magic was in the swing and tug of his voice, which he practiced in places where others could not hear him. If you read his words out loud, you may get an idea, but nothing is quite the same as hearing it through the speakers of a radio.
“Now I’m gonna spin you a number from last year, Del Shannon’s ‘Runaway,’” Joaquin said.
The song began to play. Tony marveled that the music still worked on him, even as a giant. It seemed to him he should have needed more music, bigger music, louder music, to fill him up now that he was this size, but instead, he found that after all of his days away from it, the music was even more effective. Even though he had heard “Runaway” countless times before, tonight he felt it move him as strongly as it had the first time he’d heard it.
“What was that? That’s Joaquin Soria!” Padre Jiminez said.
Tony and Jennie both jumped, as Padre Jiminez had approached soundlessly. Now his head was cocked intently toward the radio.
“Oh, why. What the hell are you doing here?” Tony asked.
“I heard his voice,” Padre said. He had been clear over in his room, praying before sleep, but even with the window just cracked, he had recognized Joaquin’s voice. He had excellent hearing because of his two large coyote ears. “That’s our Joaquin!”
Tony raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t he that kid in that shirt that barks?”
“Indeed indeed,” Padre Jiminez said. “How I’ve watched that boy grow over the last few years! I would recognize his voice anywhere! But he didn’t say that he was Joaquin on the radio, did he? What is he calling himself?”
“Diablo Diablo.” Tony mimicked the way Joaquin said it, accidentally throwing in a bit of his Tony Triumph voice. It sounded impressive. Jennie’s smile was full of delight.
“Oh dear,” Padre Jiminez said. “I do wish that young people would realize there are better ways to appear edgy than invoking the great destroyer of men. Perhaps the station named him.”
“No dice, Father Lassie,” Tony said. “That’s a pirate station.”
Padre Jiminez craned his head back to peer at Tony. “I don’t follow.”
“It’s an illegal station. He named himself.”
“How do you know it’s illegal?”
“No legit station has a kid DJ spinning Del Shannon at eleven p.m.,” Tony said. Even from his great height, he saw Padre Jiminez’s ears flag. “Don’t get your pants twisted. He’s getting his legs under him; it’ll be good for him, as long as he doesn’t get caught. I wonder if he built his gear himself.”
“Joaquin?” Padre Jiminez said. “More likely Beatriz. Yes, Beatriz is much more likely to have built something.”
Tony remembered Beatriz Soria felling Pete Wyatt at his feet just the day before. She’d been carrying a skirtful of wire, an odd nest that had puzzled him at the time but made sense now. Tony was provoked to interest despite himself.
“Is Beatriz into the radio?”
Padre Jiminez cocked his head. No one knew what Beatriz Soria was into. “She is a strange young woman.”
“Don’t get twisted, Padre,” Tony said, “but coming from you, that’s pretty rich.”
The sound of conversation attracted Robbie and Betsy, the twins. They had been quarreling in their room out of boredom, and when they heard voices outside, they went to the window. When they saw a group gathered around a radio, they incorrectly assumed that it was a party. Some arguments are better than a party, but not theirs, and so they bundled up in sweaters and joined the others by Tony.
“Keep that snake away from me,” Tony said, “or I’ll step on all three of you.”
As Diablo Diablo’s voice came back onto the radio, the sound attracted Marisita’s attention. She had just returned from yet another unsuccessful search for Daniel, and she was weary and disheartened. Because she had been out all day, she didn’t know about the message Daniel had left for her, and she feared that he might be dead or too far away for her to ever find. Now she paused just inside the Doctor’s Cabin, the door cracked. From there, she could hear the rise and fall of Joaquin’s voice. It was too far away to make out what he was saying clearly, but she recognized the cadence from her time on the show. She could also see the other pilgrims from where she stood. Tony, looming, just his feet and knees in her sight, both barely lit by the porch lights. Jennie, sitting cross-legged by the radio. The twins and Padre, busily constructing a fire pit against the cool night.
Marisita imagined herself going to where they were all gathered, with delicacies in tow. In her head, she asked them, “Room for one more? I’ve made a few things for us to eat.”
But in reality, she remained where she was, water dripping over her hands onto the floor.
She would have liked to attribute her hesitation to exhaustion, but she knew that it was more than that. If she thought about it, she could admit that if it had been a gathering of Sorias rather than pilgrims, she would have been inexorably attracted and, if not for the taboo, would have approached them at once. Marisita studied herself hard, trying to determine if it was judgment on her part. Was she biased against the pilgrims for being stuck halfway as she was? No, it was not that at all. What would be different about speaking to a Soria than a pilgrim? And then she hit upon it: It was the way the pilgrims spoke to one another. They were all aware that this was a temporary situation, and so they were cordial acquaintances, at best. Conversation skipped along the surface. She imagined the Sorias’ gatherings were less chitchat and more real, the kind of intimacy that comes from knowing people for a long time and knowing you would know them for a long time in the future, too.
Then she realized that it was really that she just missed being part of a family.
It is entirely possible to have this kind of conversation with slight acquaintances, too, but none of this current crop of pilgrims had yet realized that.
Marisita would have left the pilgrims to their chitchat and gone to bed for some fitful and guilty sleep, if she had not just then recognized that what Jennie had brought to munch on was a bag of corn snacks. Marisita did not ordinarily require other people’s things to be perfect, only herself, but corn snacks were so far from perfect that Marisita felt her own overall perfection draining.