Daniel had grinned. “Nearly.”
On the day after Tony’s miracle, Beatriz was alone as she climbed to the platform above the layer of dark dust. Then, as the sun slowly began to warm her cold blood into movement, she watched her home come to life. She could see most of it from her perch, as Bicho Raro occupied a fairly small footprint. There was a dusty, bare parking area at its heart. Buildings gathered around this like hands around a fire. Only a dozen or so were still standing: three houses, three barns, her father Francisco’s greenhouse, her aunt Rosa’s camper, three sheds, the Shrine. The dirt drive led through these, past a cistern, and then out to Highway 160, the only paved road for miles. Both the drive and the highway were barely better than the surrounding scrub, which one could drive through, too, if your vehicle was eager. One might even end up doing it even with an uneager vehicle if the night was thick enough, because there was not a lot of difference between the cracked asphalt and the dusty expanse it cut through. It was easy to lose your way without headlights (which is true of a lot of life).
Surrounding all of this was the high desert that Pete had fallen in love with, and that had fallen in love with him. It was broken only by scurfy tamarisk and sage and near-invisible twists of barbed wire until it got to the mountains.
Beatriz observed it all from her perch, paying less attention to the nature and more attention to the small humans moving below her. She did not particularly enjoy physical labor, but she found it satisfying to watch other people engaged in it. She liked to watch the things they did that were unnecessary. It is, after all, not the tasks people do but the things they do around the edges of them that reveal who they are.
For instance, from the dish’s platform, she could see her second cousin Luis repairing some barbed wire that the cows had run through during the last big thunderstorm. He was cutting out some sections and restretching others. Every so often, however, he would move his fingers in the air and she would know that he was practicing his guitar in his mind. She could also see Nana working in the tomatoes behind her house. She was on her ancient hands and knees, weeding, but twice Beatriz saw her sit back on her rump and place a raw, fresh tomato in her mouth to savor. Beatriz also saw her aunt Rosa (Joaquin’s mother) carrying peppers and the baby Lidia back to her home for cooking—the peppers, not the baby. Rosa’s steps were slowed by pausing to sing and plant kisses into the top of Lidia’s head; Beatriz knew from experience that this ratio increased throughout the course of the day until no work got done and only kisses were given.
A tremolo cry pulled Beatriz’s attention from the ground to the sky just above her. Squinting against the brightness, she discovered that several owls had gathered on the rim above her head, their talons making familiar scratching sounds against the metal. The group was made up of multiple species: two barn owls, a barred owl, and a small owl of a kind Beatriz had not seen before. Most people, in fact, had not seen this kind of owl before, as it was the rare buff-fronted owl, a native of distant Peru. Because of how surely the miracles appealed to owls, Beatriz, like all the Sorias, was used to their presence, although, unlike most of the other Sorias, she had spent many long hours wondering if the owls’ attraction to miracles was beneficial or harmful. There was, after all, a large difference between the way flowers drew hummingbirds and the way artificial light compelled moths.
A banded feather drifted down. Beatriz snatched for it, but the action of snatching displaced both air and feather, and it continued its slow descent to the ground below.
“Why are you still here?” she whistled in her invented language.
The owls didn’t startle at her voice. Instead, they continued to stare at her in their wide-open way. The buff-fronted owl that had come so far turned its head on one side to better study her. She was not sure that they were the same owls from the night before after all, though if that was true, she wasn’t sure what they were being attracted to.
“No darkness here,” she whistled. “No miracles, anyway.”
Their gazes continued to be so purposeful that she looked back to the ground to see if another pilgrim had arrived without her knowing. But the only person she saw was Michael, Rosa’s husband, thrusting a shovel into a patch of dirt. For as long as Beatriz had known him, he had done nothing but work or sleep. To understand Michael, you only had to understand the project at hand, which in this case was the log lodge Beatriz had mentioned the night before. Currently, the lodge was only four pieces of wood sunk into the ground. It was merely the promise of a building, and had grown no further not because of Michael’s unwillingness to do the work but rather because it was a point of contention, questioned at every stage. Judith was not the only one who argued that it didn’t need to be built.
The building was not really the problem. The pilgrims were the problem.
There is a plant that still grows in Colorado today called the tamarisk. It is also called the salt cedar. It is not a native plant. In the 1930s, a dust storm had arrived in the middle of the United States and raged for years. To keep all the states between Colorado and Tennessee from blowing away, farmers had planted millions of tamarisk shrubs to hold the ground down. Once its job was done there, the enterprising tamarisk had packed its bags and moved to the southwestern corner of the United States to stay. In bloom, it is very lovely, with tiny pink flowers made beautiful by their unusual combination of tender color and physical durability. When it is not in bloom, it is an enormous plant of extreme hardiness, so suited to growing in Colorado that when it is present, no other plant can compete with it. Massive, unwieldy roots dig deep into the soil, drinking all the water and using all of the salt, eventually making the only suitable neighbor for tamarisk yet more tamarisk.
This is what the pilgrims had become at Bicho Raro.