Another hand clasped over his jaw. Daniel gasped.
Water poured over his lips and into his ears. He was so shocked that he coughed on it at first. It trickled over his cracked lips and down his throat and onto his chest and it felt so good to be wet after being so dry that he could not believe he was not dreaming it, except no dream can feel as good as a drink of water when you are dying of thirst.
His relief melted, though, as he revived enough to worry that he had been found by a Soria.
“Who are you?” he asked.
Damp fingers pressed his useless eyes and smeared water and grease on his chapped lips and poured more water into his mouth. Three different voices muttered in three different languages. He could have never guessed who had come in answer to his prayer, and he may not have been able to guess it even if he had been able to see, because it was a form of miracle of the kind that even a Soria did not normally experience. The spirits of the wild men of Colorado—Felipe Soria, who had killed the sheriff for his femurs; Beatriz’s financier, who had hung himself with his own beard; and the German, who was a fox as of the time of his death—had come to him.
Who knew why they came to him then and not before or after. Perhaps they were atoning for the sins of their lives. Perhaps Daniel’s prayer was fervent enough to call them from wherever spirits lingered. Perhaps they were just passing through on their way to another traveler in distress and stopped to aid Daniel along the way. For whatever reason, they let him drink until he was full.
The financier found Daniel’s canteen and the German filled it and Felipe Soria put it in blind Daniel’s hand.
“Zwei Tage Wasser,” the German said.
“Two days of water,” translated the financier, who had once spent a year in Frankfurt chasing success.
Felipe Soria leaned close.
“Fight, my cousin,” he whispered in Daniel’s ear. “Quien quiere celeste, que le cueste.” No one had to translate this for Daniel: He who wants heaven must pay. He pressed his thumb into Daniel’s other shoulder, and Daniel cried out. When Felipe removed his hand, he had left a divot that matched the one the hailstorm had left him with.
Then they were gone, and Daniel was left alone, in the dark, but alive, for now.
Pete worked.
He got up at first light because Padre Jiminez yipped and paddled his legs in his sleep and because the floor beside Padre Jiminez’s bed was hard and cold and also because Pete’s mind kept returning to Beatriz and also because Pete was good at working and liked doing it.
As no one else was around to direct him otherwise, Pete decided to simply continue work on the stage. He had barely stepped out into the cold, thin air, however, when Antonia appeared before him. She had not been sleeping either. After seeing her daughter and Pete dancing on the stage the night before, she had stayed awake all night long feverishly cutting paper flowers to occupy her mind. When the sun rose, she looked down and realized that she had constructed piles of black paper roses, all but one of them marred by tears. She had stormed out to meet Pete the moment she saw him get up. Now she stood before him in the early blue light and raged at him for several minutes while he mutely accepted it. Finally, as the sun began to cast long morning shadows behind the buildings, she spat on the ground and gave him his task: Finish the small house that he had begun to construct the first day he had arrived.
“Padre Jiminez can live there when you’re done,” she said. “And then you can have his room.”
Pete was bruised by her raging, but he recognized this small kindness and was surprised by it. Tentatively, he admitted, “I thought you were angry at me.”
“Angry? At you?”
“For dancing with Beatriz.”
It had not even occurred to Antonia that he might take ownership of her undirected anger. Her surprise over this passed swiftly away from shock, took an inexplicable side trip through grief over Daniel, and finally arrived at yet more anger. She snapped, “I’m not angry at you or Beatriz!”
“Ma’am, do you mind me asking who you’re angry at, then?”
As Antonia Soria opened her mouth, dozens of names filled the space behind her teeth, waiting to be said. But in that moment, as she saw Pete’s guileless face and, behind him, the outline of Francisco’s greenhouse and, in it, its sleepless occupant looking back at her, she realized that the only name that was true in that space was her own.
“Just get to work, Wyatt,” Antonia said. “I’m going back to sleep.”
But Pete did not just get to work. He meant to, but as he crossed the early-morning quiet of Bicho Raro, his attention was snagged by the sight of Tony rummaging in the back of the box truck.
He changed course immediately.
Tony had gotten up even earlier than Pete and Antonia. The moment it was light enough to see, the very first thing he had done was seek out the source of the radio program he had heard the night before. He had several clues. For starters, he knew it had to be someplace that Joaquin Soria, a sixteen-year-old boy, was capable of reaching each night. He knew it had to have some kind of antenna apparatus, and that an antenna of the size required for such a sound would be difficult to hide in a small space. And most importantly, he had been dozing only lightly the night before when Joaquin and Beatriz and Pete came back, and so he had seen them climb out of the truck. There were some advantages to being a giant.
When Pete found him, Tony had the back of the truck wide open and was in it up to his shoulders. He was thrilling over what he found inside. All of the things that frustrated Beatriz about the makeshift station—the ingenious work-arounds, the repurposed equipment—delighted Tony. As a radio personality, he didn’t touch anything like this. The station he worked at was vast and polished, with two friendly Serbians to make sure it was all performing well as he did his show. It had been a very long time since he had been near the guts and organs of radio. Now he reached his oversized arm in the truck and gently prised out components to examine.
“Did your mother raise you to be a sneak and a thief?” Pete asked.
Tony removed his arm from the truck and turned to Pete. “Did your mother raise you to be a Boy Scout?”
“Yes,” said Pete.
“Look, kid, untwist yourself, I’m not hurting anything. You’re absolutely lousy when you lose your sense of humor. I was just looking.”
“Why?”
Tony turned back to the truck. “Why not?”
Pete was ready to launch into an explanation of how the truck belonged to someone else and it was considered rude to rummage through other people’s property, but before he even said it, he realized that Tony already knew these things quite well.
“I need you to give my box of records to that kid, if they haven’t melted to pancake batter,” Tony said. His voice was muffled inside the truck. “Diablo Diablo. They’re new, new stuff. Tell him he better listen to them all, because he needs some fresher music.”