“Hey, man! You ain’t no saint and I ain’t your temastiano bell-ringer! So cut the crap! I knew you back when you were in high school, man. You used to have every girl around here crazy about you! What happened to you came from ’Nam and from smoking too much weed, that’s all! So cut the shit! I was just trying to give you some manly advice this morning, that’s all.” Sullivan almost stopped grinning—about as mad as Sullivan ever got—as he stood, kicking up a little dust while walking back to Francisco’s uncle.

Francisco, in the meantime, responded to Sullivan’s cockiness by singing an alabada. He had the best voice of all the brothers in the morada, reverberant but slightly flat, which nevertheless lent itself to the lament of the alabada and reached Sullivan’s ears as he approached Pedro.

Él que nace desgraciado

desde la cuna comienza

desde la cuna comienza

a vivir martirizado.

Pedro and Sullivan shook their heads at each other, and way far away, they heard Loretta’s voice, “Shut up, Franky! You’re upsetting the hens!”

Then, it got worse. Since Caridad had returned to her traila at doña Felicia’s, she had become more despondent than ever. And Francisco—who, the more he prayed, the more raveled as tumbleweed he got about her—was further disconcerted that he couldn’t get Caridad to so much as acknowledge his presence.

Always remembering that encounter between his penitente brothers and Caridad, Francisco did not dare approach her directly, for fear that she held a grudge against him for trying to force her out of her cave. Grown men had not been able even to budge her, so why should he, despite all the yearning in his heart, expect to persuade her to even glance his way?

Francisco felt himself powerless to his desire—which he nonetheless tried to justify by equating it with his spiritual calling. So he got it into his head that even if the Hunter’s Trap did not seem to notice him, it would bring his torment some relief if he could at least stay close to her. So, figuring that nobody would ever be wise to him, he did just that.

It was a tedious exercise and if the truth be known, boring most of the time, since Caridad hardly left her trailer and on most days the furthest she traveled was the few yards between her trailer and doña Felicia’s. Yet Francisco was a relentless devotee and he did not complain, even to himself, of the endless hours he spent on the hard ground behind the agaves and hedgehog cactus surrounding doña Felicia’s trailer complex.

Doing nothing but keeping in proximity to his beloved, he meanwhile made friends with the little lizards that squirmed up his legs, surely mistaking them (because his limbs would inevitably go numb after a few hours in the same position) for trees, and with the cicadas and beetles and other lowly things that crawled about.