All the Crooked Saints Read online

  Beatriz preferred to do her hard thinking in private whenever possible, so she moved quietly away from the radio telescope, behind the buildings of Bicho Raro and over to the box truck. There was not much room beneath the truck, but she nevertheless managed to slide herself beneath it with some wiggling of first her hips and then her shoulders. Then, in the safety of that dim, small space, she sighed and opened the letter back up again.

  She read it. She read it again, because the letter asked her to. She read it a third time. The letter didn’t ask for that, but twice had not been enough.

  Beatriz,

  I am in love with Marisita Lopez. It was an accident.

  Last night after I was done with Tony, I helped her. That wasn’t an accident. I couldn’t be a coward and watch her suffer anymore.

  The darkness has already started to come to me.

  I am going away from Bicho Raro to the wilderness, where it can’t hurt anyone but me. I am worried that if I stay, the family will be tempted to help me, and bring darkness on themselves, too. I cannot live with that.

  I am telling her to give this letter to you and no one else because you are the only one I can trust to be reasonable instead of kind. I’m trusting you to make them understand they can’t try to find me. You better wait several hours before telling anyone to give me a head start just in case. Please. It’s what I want. Read this another time so you see how much I mean it. This is only my fault and no one else should get hurt. Maybe I will be able to beat it and you will all see me again.

  I am sorry, but I am taking the kitchen radio. Maybe I’ll be able to pick up Diablo Diablo in the evenings, and it will be like you two are there with me.

  Please don’t tell Marisita that I love her. I don’t want to make her any more hurt than she already is.

  Daniel

  Several of the words were spelled incorrectly and he had left out a few of them and his emphatic but messy underline for emphasis had nearly crossed out a few syllables, but Beatriz figured it out.

  For several long minutes she remained under the truck, gazing at the lacy rust next to the wheels. The truck would not have ordinarily rusted so soon, not here in the dry heat of Bicho Raro, but earlier in the year it had been parked too close to Marisita’s lodgings and had been flooded with the salt water of her tears.

  Beatriz always carried a pen and one or two pieces of notebook paper folded into fourths, and now she removed them from her pocket. Previously, she had kept a stub of a pencil instead of the pen, as she preferred the feeling of its scratching—it felt quivery and alive as it shuddered across the paper—but once she had been knocked over by the cows when they escaped their paddock and had impaled her arm. Now she carried a pen. It was more inanimate but also more easily hooded.

  Rolling onto her stomach, she began to jot down thoughts in the numbers of her secret language. How long, she mused, had Daniel been in love with Marisita Lopez, and how had it even happened? They’d been told their entire lives to keep their distance from the pilgrims, and one couldn’t fall in love without getting close. Perhaps, she wrote, he was wrong. Perhaps he only felt he was in love with Marisita.

  But Beatriz immediately crossed this out. Daniel knew himself and his emotions in a way that no one else in Bicho Raro did. If he said he was in love, he was in love. More to the point, she wrote to herself, using increasingly small numbers to preserve her paper, love would not be what killed him. He would need water in the desert, and food. He would need shelter from the bitter night cold and the attentive afternoon sun. It did not seem to be possible to bring him food or water without violating the taboo. There was also the question of his darkness. Darkness came in all shapes and sizes, and it was difficult and unpleasant to imagine what might have been lurking inside Daniel. They had all been told that a Soria’s darkness was more dangerous than an ordinary pilgrim’s darkness, and Beatriz had seen some fairly ominous manifestations. There was, Beatriz wrote, the possibility that his darkness was fatal.

  After she recorded this thought, she had to put the pen down in the dust.

  With a cluck of her tongue, she picked it back up. What she worried was that if she, the girl without feelings, was tempted to ignore Daniel’s warning and search for him in the high desert, with the risk of bringing darkness upon them all, then the more passionate of the Sorias would be even more tempted. A pragmatic worry also pressed on Beatriz: If Daniel did not return, it would fall to her to be the Saint. Like all of the Sorias, she could manage the miracle. But when a real saint performed it, it was important. Spiritual. To Beatriz, it was a thing she could do, like brushing her teeth or changing oil in the truck.

  It did not feel like enough.

  If only the process was easier on the pilgrims. Often they journeyed for hundreds of miles to Bicho Raro and were already wearing thin on optimism by the time they arrived. Then, when the Saint performed the first miracle, many pilgrims found their newly visible darkness just as daunting as invisible darkness—possibly more so. Despair, that opportunistic companion, slunk in, preventing them from examining themselves to perform the second miracle necessary for complete healing. And of course the Saint could not interfere. It was important, then, that the pilgrim’s emotional healing be well set in motion before the first miracle ever took place, with prayer and counseling and atmosphere. With holiness, Daniel would say. Legend had it that the greatest Soria saint of all, Catalina de Luna Soria, was so holy that the first and second miracles always happened right on top of each other, the darkness appearing only to be almost immediately vanquished by the euphoric pilgrim. It was hard to imagine that now, with Bicho Raro brimming with unhealed pilgrims.

  It was beginning to be uncomfortable beneath the truck. Beatriz’s shoulder blades pressed up against the exhaust. Her hair tangled in a drivetrain component. The world outside the truck was growing louder as well. A shovel pinged against rock, and Antonia’s voice lifted. She had set Pete Wyatt to work, and the sounds of their industry intruded into Beatriz’s thoughts.

  Beatriz tried to write down a scenario where she successfully filled Daniel’s shoes, but it was not a pleasant thought exercise for either her or any future pilgrims. Beatriz had acted as the Saint only once, during the brief time before Daniel had repented of his sins, and after Michael had stepped down as Saint to lose himself in mundane work. Although not eager to take on the role, she had been universally suggested as Michael’s replacement because of her otherworldliness. Shortly after, a smart-looking financier had arrived in a smart-looking car with New York plates. Everything about him was in order; he did not even appear to have darkness inside him. But he was there for the miracle, and so she performed the miracle. Because of Beatriz’s pragmatism, there was no ceremony or mystery, but because of her Soria blood, it worked anyway. The hair on the financier’s head swiftly grew and curled, cascading long and lank around his face, and at the same time, his beard swiftly grew and curled, cascading long and lank down his chest. His clothing melted away, leaving him naked as the day he was born.

  “This is unacceptable,” the financier said, reaching to cover himself with the rug he had sat upon. But it, too, melted away when it touched his skin, leaving him once more naked and unshaven before Beatriz. He grasped for a wall hanging of Mary, but when the Virgin also vanished in his hands (a pity, as it was an heirloom), the truth of his miracle dawned on him. The miracle had reduced him to a primitive man, bare-bodied and shaggy-headed.

  With poisonous anger, the financier turned upon Beatriz. This was no miracle, he told her. This was merely witchcraft, and not very good witchcraft at that. In previous generations, he continued, she would have been burned, or stoned, or worse. He went on to say that he could not imagine what sadistic pleasure she took in ruining successful men but he certainly hoped she was not angling for money since his finances had been in his pockets, which her curse had melted away. Beatriz could only quietly listen as he coldly berated her. She could not even remind him of his own role in the second miracle, lest she br
ing the darkness upon herself.

  Finally he stood, naked of his dignity, his still-growing beard covering his manhood. With a last snarl in her direction, he stormed out of the Shrine and into the night, leaving his fancy car behind. He never returned for it; eventually, Luis sold it to a man he knew across the border. Rumors of him wandering the desert had joined those of Felipe Soria. Together, they were the wild men of Colorado.

  Beatriz had never performed a miracle again.

  “Beatriz, Judith’s looking for you,” Joaquin said, on one knee beside the truck.

  Most people pass by box trucks without checking underneath them for other people, so it may seem surprising that Joaquin found Beatriz there. But Joaquin had many years of practice looking for Beatriz, and he knew to search for her in all of the places you might hope to find a cat or a venomous lizard—on top of roofs, hooked on tree branches, stretched in the dust beneath trucks.

  “Hey. I see you under there. I said, Judith is looking for you.”

  Beatriz had not reached a satisfactory conclusion on her scratch paper and so did not emerge.

  Joaquin picked up a stick to poke at her and then poured a little of the water from the bottle in his hand so that a slow, dusty river started moving her way. “Your mother is yelling at your father, and Judith is yelling now, too.”

  She made no move to emerge and the water stopped before it reached her, so Joaquin unbuttoned his Hawaiian shirt and hung it on the truck’s mirror to spare it from the dust and grime. Then he, too, squeezed his way under the truck to lie beside his cousin. In the background was the sound of Pete’s shovel dinging off hard soil, and chickens barking at one another. Joaquin had managed to convince Luis to acquire aftershave for him and had doused himself in it. This musk spoke more loudly than the cousins did for several minutes, and then Joaquin said, “What?”

  Beatriz handed him her notes.

  “I can’t read your—your—math recipes.”

  Beatriz handed him Daniel’s letter.

  Joaquin read it, and then he read it a second time, as Daniel had advised, and then, like Beatriz, he read it a third time. He let it flutter onto his bare chest so that he could grip his hair in his palms. The theatricality of this gesture might have convinced an outsider that his feelings were spurious, but anyone who knew how Joaquin felt about his hairstyle would have realized the opposite was true.

  “I hate them,” he said, eventually.

  Beatriz replied to this in the same even way that she replied to all of Joaquin’s untruths. “No, you don’t.”

  “Fine. It’s not their fault, they are all children of God and Mary, el alma generosa será prosperada, y el que riega será también regado, I know, I know,” Joaquin said in Nana’s quavering voice. Then, in his own: “We have to find a way to bring him water.”

  “Did you even read what he wrote?”

  “Yes, but it’s stupid.”

  “Don’t make me regret showing you.”

  “We could ask a pilgrim to bring him water,” Joaquin said, but almost immediately understood the impossibility of his own suggestion. “… if we could only speak to the pilgrims.”

  Beatriz gazed at the rust holes until they became a ruddy bug-eaten leaf and then focused into a rust hole again. To her vexation, her mind drifted to Pete Wyatt and his elbows, but her irritation dissipated when this thought solidified into an idea. “What do you know about that man who came to work last night?”

  “Man? What man? Oh,” Joaquin said dismissively. “That boy, you mean.”

  Beatriz ignored the demotion. “He’s not a pilgrim. He could bring Daniel food and water.”

  There was silence as both cousins examined this idea for fault. When neither found any, Joaquin handed Beatriz the letter and she folded it up again neatly. They both rolled out from underneath the truck. Joaquin collected his shirt but didn’t put it on; his skin was too dusty for him to risk sullying the fabric.

  Both cousins looked in the direction of Francisco Soria’s greenhouse. Voices still battled from within.

  Joaquin said, “We could wait until they’re done.”

  But Beatriz set off without hesitation. If Daniel could face his darkness head-on, she could face one of her parents’ arguments.

  At one point, the tale of Francisco and Antonia Soria had been the greatest love story to ever grace Bicho Raro, which was saying a lot.

  Love in the high desert is a strange thing. There is something about the climate—the remoteness, the severity of the seasons, the dryness of the air, the extreme beauty—that makes people feel more deeply. Perhaps without trees or cities to dampen the enormity of the feelings, they spread out hugely. Perhaps the hard-packed dust of the San Luis Valley amplifies them, like a shout into a canyon. Whatever it is, the people of Bicho Raro were no exception. Everything was bigger: anger, humor, terror, jubilance, love. Perhaps this was why the darkness of the Sorias was considered a more dangerous thing, too. It, like everything else, was deeper and more uncompromising.

  Antonia and Francisco had been born on the same minute of the same day, one hundred miles apart. They might not have met if not for the weather. In the dirty 1930s, drought had struck Bicho Raro, and the air was orange and thick from dawn until dusk. There was rarely wind, and when there was, it was also orange and thick. Temperatures seared. Cattle turned to statues in the fields and birds fell out of the sky.

  One day, however, a cool, clear breeze caught Francisco’s hair as he was digging the family sheepdog out of a sand dune that had formed overnight. It was a strange breeze—from the north, unlike the usual southwestern weather—and when he lifted his head, he could see that the breeze was carrying blue sky with it: clear blue air that a man could breathe without choking. He put down his shovel, and he and the dog followed the breeze clear out of Bicho Raro, down through San Luis, over the border to New Mexico, past Costilla, past Questa, and clear into Taos, where they were having a fiesta.

  Francisco, who had lived in the San Luis Valley his entire life and under the drought for half of that life, could barely fathom such festivities. Little girls in fiesta dresses rode painted carousel horses on a merry-go-round powered by men turning a massive wooden gear. Boys one-third his height wore crisp and dustless sombreros. The dancing was so vigorous that he felt his legs stepping out without his permission, his body an unwitting mirror. The music replaced Francisco’s blood, and he felt he could do anything. That was when the blue sky stopped, right over Antonia Alamilla, who was dancing in a white dress. He saw now that it was not blue sky at all, but rather a blue balloon whose string was tied around her wrist. When she saw Francisco in his dust-covered overalls, she immediately stopped dancing and declared, in facile Spanish, “I love dogs.”

  The rest of the townspeople looked on in shock. No one had heard Antonia speak since she’d been born, and once she had met Francisco, she did not stop. He asked her to be his wife, and when they were married in Bicho Raro two months later, Antonia’s tears of joy coaxed rain from the sky and ended the decade-long drought.

  But that was before.

  On the day Beatriz climbed beneath the box truck to think, it was precisely one week before Francisco and Antonia’s fiftieth birthdays. In honor of such a distinguished occasion, Judith had proposed a massive celebration; this was the reason she and Eduardo had returned the night before, to help prepare for such a feast. But Francisco and Antonia’s union was becoming ever more fretful; unbeknownst to Judith, they had stopped talking to each other almost entirely.

  Or rather, Francisco had stopped talking to Antonia. Once Antonia had begun to speak to Francisco, she had not decided to stop simply because he was not listening.

  The yelling Joaquin had heard was because Antonia and Judith were confronting Francisco in his greenhouse. The greenhouse was a laboratory for plants, as Francisco believed in being scientific about his quest for the art of the black rose. A system of narrow metal pipes delivered precious water precisely where he intended it to go, and reflectors were a
ttached to shutters so that he could direct the sun similarly. There were not only roses but also delicate lettuces that grew in a vertical grid arranged above an old claw bathtub, and secretive mushrooms that flourished in an old set of printmaker’s drawers. Francisco stood among them, his hands covered in soil, his clothing covered with soil, but his hair impeccably oiled back. He had only a very few things he required to be in their places, but those things were non-negotiable.

  “People will not come all this way just for you to stay in here with your roses!” Antonia told him. “And do not say that there are plenty of other people here!”

  “No one is even asking you to help with the preparations!” Judith added.

  “Although she would be well within her rights,” Antonia continued. “She and Eduardo came back entirely for this. We only ask for you to promise to appear for one day out of the year. That is not so much for a wife to ask!”

  “And don’t say that your roses won’t bear it!” Judith said. “We are supposed to be your roses!”

  Judith was near tears at this point. Terror had accompanied her dreams that night, even though she had slept tangled with Eduardo’s warm body. She could not stop thinking of the pilgrims lurking so close to her mother’s home. All her life, Antonia had warned her shrilly of the dangers of the unhealed pilgrim, and Judith had forgotten what it was like to spend every minute alongside them. She did not know how her sister, Beatriz, could bear it—but then again, her sister had no feelings, and fear was a feeling.

  “We were your roses,” Antonia countered hotly.

  Beatriz and Joaquin arrived at this moment, and for the first time, Francisco made a sound. He said, “Close the door! The humidity!”

  “What was that?” shrilled Antonia. “Do you believe this is a game?” Because, to her, it had not sounded like he had spoken. It had sounded as if he was making light of the situation by whistling. This was what Beatriz’s invented language sounded like when it was articulated aloud. Since it was mathematical, it was far more usable in musical form than with words.