Meanwhile, Francisco had seen Esmeralda and Caridad as they ran and watched paralyzed as together they leapt into the air. After getting his bearings, he went to the edge of the mesa along with the other tourists in Sky City, some in disbelief, others shouting and crying in panic, and one or two just walking over slowly to take a peek at the results down below out of curiosity. But much to all their surprise, there were no morbid remains of splintered bodies tossed to the ground, down, down, like bad pottery or glass or old bread. There weren’t even whole bodies lying peaceful. There was nothing.

Just the spirit deity Tsichtinako calling loudly with a voice like wind, guiding the two women back, not out toward the sun’s rays or up to the clouds but down, deep within the soft, moist dark earth where Esmeralda and Caridad would be safe and live forever.

Tío Pedro and Loretta would not know for a long time the whole story. But doña Felicia knew it that same night because Maria told her what she knew when the police got to Caridad’s trailer and then later more police came to see doña Felicia to tell her that her godson was found that evening, just after sunset, at the far end of his uncle’s land, dangling sorrowful-like like a crow-picked pear from a tall piñon, which was how someone had first put it and how it was remembered after that.

He was discovered by his uncle Pedro, who had been relaxing watching a video of Charles Bronson with his wife Loretta and his friend Sullivan, after a hard day of trying to set up a windmill on the ranch, when suddenly Sullivan said, “Sh-hh, shhh! Did you hear that?” Loretta quickly hit the pause button on the remote control, then all three together heard it, a tenor lament, resonating distinctly, carried across the corn fields, Loretta’s moon-harvested squash garden, the corral and thick night air and right through the screen door: “Caridad!” they heard Francisco’s voice, low and mournful. “Caridad!”

And then there was only the dissonant choir of the cicadas.

13

The Final Farewell of Don Domingo, sin a Big mitote; and an Encounter with un Doctor Invisible, or Better Known in These Parts as a Psychic Surgeon, Who, in Any Case, Has No Cure for Death

After Fe’s cremation, her father took up an old habit from his youth and got involved in the cockfights organized by compadres in the South Valley every Saturday night since Domingo was at least ten years old, which was when he first started betting. On Sundays don Domingo went to Mass with Sofia—which was not an old habit—but like the increased cockfight fever, had also resulted perhaps as a way to alleviate the pain of Fe’s brutal death.