All the Crooked Saints

  Beatriz did not say anything. She had thought about the possible consequences, but not in that way. That first night with Marisita, she had offered to send Joaquin away if he was afraid, because she knew the risks. If she had brought darkness on herself, she would have done exactly the same thing as Daniel and exiled herself in the desert and made sure she was not found. She was very good at puzzles, and she had been certain she could make one out of her location if it had come to it; Judith would never have found her. Beatriz weighed the benefit of saying all of this out loud and did not see any value to it, so she said nothing.

  “How can you not believe in the taboo after what happened to Daniel?” Antonia asked.

  The true answer was that Beatriz believed in the danger, but she didn’t believe in the taboo. She weighed the value of saying this and found this also useless to say out loud. She thought that by so doing she was improving the situation, but anyone who has held an argument with a silent participant will realize that silence sometimes can be more frustrating than a defense.

  This was the case with the Sorias and Beatriz. They grew more upset and said more things to both cousins while Beatriz merely listened. The more she listened, the more distressed they became, and the more distressed they became, the more she was certain she could not truly make them feel at ease with her decisions. She did not know how to apologize for a rule that she had broken after considering the risks, because although she understood why they were angry, she still was not sorry that she had done it. She understood only that she could not tell them this truth or they would be even more upset.

  “Don’t you want things to be different?” Joaquin said finally. He was only sixteen, but in this moment, he was the Joaquin he would become instead of the Joaquin he was. He was the man who would be Diablo Diablo in a bigger city, a voice to pilgrims in the night. “We spend all of our time hiding in our houses when we see a pilgrim walking by! We see them suffering and we say nothing! We smell Marisita’s cooking and we are too afraid to even tell her that it smells delicious! We starve! We starve of—of everything because we are too afraid to eat! Look at us, all standing here, because we’re afraid of them. That’s why you’re here, right? Fear!”

  “And where is your cousin Daniel, Joaquin?” Rosa demanded. She had not called him anything but Quino since he was a child and now he recoiled from his true name, although any other time he would have welcomed it. “We are not afraid because we are cowards.”

  Antonia said, “Do you think we love him less than you? He is our son. He is our Saint.”

  The grief in her voice was no greater than the grief any of them were feeling.

  “We thought,” Joaquin said, and stopped. He could not be logical and even-tempered. “Beatriz, you tell them.”

  Beatriz said, “We think the radio is making a difference. Jennie made progress yesterday after listening to the radio; she can speak in lyrics. Tonight’s program was for the twins. If they are changed by the radio, and we are still safe after broadcasting, then we’ve found a way to help heal them without causing danger to ourselves. We could help pilgrims move on so that they would not fill Bicho Raro for so long.”

  “We’re building a lodge,” Michael said.

  “We would rather have a lodge than our children turned to darkness from stupid risks,” Antonia added.

  Beatriz persisted with the most important part. “We thought if we found a way to help pilgrims, we could find a way to help Daniel.”

  Now everyone was as silent as Beatriz ordinarily was.

  “Beatriz,” Francisco whistled, sadly, finally—but she didn’t want his pity; she had merely been stating the truth.

  “Daniel wanted us to think harder about this,” she said. “He wanted us to think about why we do the things we do.

  “Hand me the keys,” Michael said. “To the truck.”

  “But Daniel!” Joaquin protested. “He’s listening. Remember the message?”

  They all remembered the message. Now it was agonizing to all of them.

  “Please,” Joaquin went on. “We can’t stop or he won’t have us to listen to. He’ll be alone.”

  Judith began to cry softly, over the impossibility of it.

  Michael held out his hand. “I’m thinking about my family who are not yet lost and that includes you, my son. Now give me those keys and do not make me take them.”

  “Please,” Joaquin said again, and he, too, was near to tears.

  The sound of his voice and indeed all of their conversation was nearly drowned out, however, by the commotion of owls. Every Soria there knew what the birds’ carrying on meant: They were whipped to wildness by a miracle. The family searched the sky and the ground for the source of the owls’ enthusiasm, but they saw nothing but darkness.

  “Joaquin,” said Michael. He did not want to carry out his threat of taking the keys by force, but Joaquin had not moved to give them, so he started toward him. At the last moment, Beatriz stepped in front of Joaquin and relinquished the keys.

  No one felt particularly victorious. There is no joy to be had in defending inaction and fear.

  The owls soared over the family into the night and Bicho Raro fell into an unusual quiet. A feather floated past Beatriz. She could have caught this one, but she did not stretch out her hand.

  Out of the quiet darkness, two figures approached. They were silhouetted by the bold light of the truck headlights. Every Soria ceased what they were doing to watch them approach, because a process of elimination proved that they must be pilgrims, and they were.

  “Stay back,” Antonia warned them. “You know better.”

  But the pilgrims kept approaching. It was the twins, Robbie and Betsy. All of the adult Sorias recoiled. The night felt dangerous and unusual, and it seemed like anything could happen, even pilgrims attacking them with their very presence, intentionally violating the taboo.

  “Don’t worry,” Robbie said.

  “We’re just going,” Betsy said.

  “Going where?” demanded Antonia.

  “Home,” Betsy replied.

  Because they were no longer pilgrims.

  Days before, when Pete had arrived, the girls had been tangled together by a snake that wouldn’t allow them to live separate lives. Now the snake was gone. Instead, they were merely girls standing side by side, close, but not close.

  “You killed the snake,” Joaquin said.

  “No,” Robbie replied. “Well, kinda. We decided to, together, but as soon as we decided to, it just …”

  “Disappeared,” Betsy said. “While the owls went crazy.”

  Their decision to work together to be apart had set them free.

  “It worked,” Joaquin said. “Beatriz, it worked.”

  And this was yet another miracle the Sorias had not witnessed for a very long time: hope. All of the Sorias, Beatriz and Joaquin included, immediately found their eyes drawn to the Shrine where Daniel used to be. Where Daniel should have been.

  Michael handed the keys back to Beatriz.

  Buildings are not very good at remembering the people who once occupied them.

  The high alpine desert around Bicho Raro had more than its fair share of abandoned buildings, and Marisita was slowly working her way through them. Every time she thought she had searched all of the buildings within easy distance of Bicho Raro, she found another one. They came in all shapes. There were collapsed barns, of course, like the one the Sorias scavenged wood from, and old mining towns like the ones Pete and Beatriz had chased Salto through. There were equipment sheds and well houses. But there were also real houses, scattered homesteads, substantial cabins with porches and forgotten histories. Marisita was always shocked by how little she could learn about the people who had lived in them, even though some of them had been neglected only for a few years. Fabrics and rugs faded to colorlessness, glassware and knickknacks got smashed, and scents disappeared. She had heard that houses like these used to be lived in by families who were bought off by logging companies or terroriz
ed into leaving by white ranchers, but she had no way of knowing for sure. She found it depressing, how fast memories were replaced by rumors. Tragedy left behind such subtle artifacts.

  Marisita climbed through yet another empty house the day after the radio station had stopped being secret. This one had a front door (sometimes they didn’t), but it was missing the knob. Scavengers, both human and animal, had already had their way with the interior, so only a few featureless chairs remained, knocked on their sides. There was no bed, but it would have been a good place to seek shelter from the cold overnight.

  “Daniel?” Marisita called.

  There was no reply. There was never a reply. Marisita checked all four of the rooms anyway, in case Daniel couldn’t speak or was dead. When she returned to the dim entry room, she carefully righted all of the chairs, attempting to return the room to as close to perfection as it was capable of. She looked at them for a long moment, trying to imagine what kind of family would have sat in them, and then she sank into one of the chairs and cried. Water pooled around her feet and slipped between the gapped old floorboards.

  “Please be alive,” Marisita said, but only in her head.

  After a few minutes, she rose and took up her bag from beside the front door and left the house behind. She wanted to be back in time for the radio program. Tonight was different than all the other nights, because now that the Sorias knew Beatriz and Joaquin were running a station, they insisted that the cousins broadcast live from Bicho Raro. The single-minded goal was to reach Daniel, and the whole family wanted to be there to watch.

  Marisita had a letter in her pocket from Beatriz. It was probably soaked through, but she remembered what it said, as it was so brief: Marisita, I hope you will consider completing your interview tonight. Beatriz.

  But Marisita’s heart had not changed. She still did not want to tell her story. The thought of saying it out loud made her feel as ill as the days when her past had unfolded, and every time she relived the memories, her tears came fresh, and the rain fell harder on her and her butterflies. She thought the Sorias already probably despised her for luring their Saint into darkness. How much more would they despise her, she thought, if they knew what kind of person she was?

  She thought about the last thing Daniel Soria had told her, and remembering it reddened her eyes again, as it always did. She loved him and missed him, and she scanned the bright horizon for signs of him.

  There was no sign of Daniel, only another small house, a twin to the one she had just searched. There was a story that linked those two houses together, but it had disintegrated with the curtains. The front door fell off as Marisita opened it, startling a thread snake, also known as the blind snake, from beneath it. The dust that rose in the air reacted with the storm over Marisita so that electricity crackled. Marisita waited for it to calm, then she stepped inside. There was no furniture in the main room. There was only a shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe in the corner. Marisita crouched before the statue. Mary, her eyes softly downcast, as gentle as Daniel’s, stood upon a crudely sculpted pile of yellow roses. The words ¿No estoy yo aquí que soy tu madre? were painted among the blossoms. The rain from Marisita’s miracle speckled the ceramic, giving the appearance that the Virgin wept.

  Marisita closed her eyes and meant to pray, but instead of a prayer, she thought about the lost stories of these abandoned houses, and about Daniel, and about the struggling Soria family. She thought about how a careless or foolhardy Saint could all too easily reduce Bicho Raro to yet another one of these abandoned homesteads, a badly placed conversation sending deadly darkness through an entire family. Daniel had put them all in danger despite his best efforts to separate himself, because he had somehow forgotten how tenacious love was, even in the face of fear. She had seen it before she left that morning. His family was still afraid, and yet they rallied around hope.

  She removed Beatriz’s letter from her pocket. It was soaked, but the ink had not bled. Beatriz’s request remained intently bold.

  Marisita knew that her fear of sharing her story was selfish. She had seen how music had helped Jennie, and she’d seen how Diablo Diablo’s subtle exploration of the truth had helped Robbie and Betsy defeat their darkness. It was entirely possible that telling her story could help Daniel. They didn’t know what he needed to hear to defeat his darkness, but they knew what he wanted to hear: Marisita. And yet she was here, because it was easier for her—she had been fleeing her past for months and she knew in her heart that this had become just another way of fleeing.

  The sculpture of the Virgin had ceased praying and was instead holding her ceramic hands out toward Marisita. With a sigh, Marisita folded Beatriz’s damp letter before draping it over the Virgin’s hands.

  Marisita made a vow: If she did not find Daniel that afternoon, she would return to Bicho Raro, and she would tell her story on the radio.

  Only a few minutes later, she discovered Daniel’s lost pack of supplies. It was hung up on a strand of barbed wire, just a few threads tangled around one of the barbs. Marisita ran to it as if it might run away, and she caught it up in her arms. It still smelled like him, like the candles of the Shrine, and she held it to her face until she could feel the fabric growing saturated by the rain over her. Then she opened it and searched its contents. To her distress, she found it was full. She guessed, correctly, that this meant that he had not meant to leave it behind.

  “Daniel!” she called out. “Daniel, can you hear me?”

  Marisita found a hand-sized stone, which she set on the top of the fence post closest to her so that she would have a marker of where she had found it. Slinging the pack across her shoulders in addition to her own bag, she began to walk the fence line, looking for evidence that a young man had squeezed through. Back and forth she went, in ever-widening circles. Her mouth had not been overly dry before she found his supplies, but now, all she could think about was lowering her bag from her shoulder and taking a drink. She refused to, however, imagining how dry he must be, feeling selfish for knowing that she could take a drink at any time.

  She knew he might already be dead. She knew he might have sent out that message to her in vain.

  She called his name again.

  She did not know that he could hear her.

  Daniel was perhaps one hundred feet away from her, still curled by the brush that he had sheltered under before. When he heard her voice, his heart leaped and then fell. He longed to let her find him, to hold him, to drive away the creature that still accompanied him. He imagined her pressing her fingers to his eyelids, as if his blindness was a pain that she could ease through touch. He could hear the rain falling around her still and the sound of that water nearly drove him to weakness. But instead, he mustered his strength. Slowly, he crawled around the opposite side of the plant in order to remain hidden.

  Marisita came closer, calling. Although Daniel did not want to be found, his heart cried for her so strongly and her heart cried for him so strongly that she was pulled inexorably in his direction.

  Only feet from him, her pulse pounded so strongly that it was as if she had already found him.

  “Daniel,” she said, “I’m not afraid.”

  This was not true, but she wanted it to be true badly enough that the difference did not matter.

  There are many kinds of bravery. The one Marisita displayed right then was one of them, and the kind that Daniel displayed was another. Everything in him wanted to call to her, but nothing in him gave in to the impulse. He had risked everything in order that she might live without her darkness, and he would not give that up just because he did not want to die alone.

  Marisita hesitated. She believed that her desire to find him had invented the feeling of certainty inside her.

  “Daniel?”

  The Saint remained hidden.

  Marisita returned to Bicho Raro to tell her story.

  Lightning and love are created in very similar ways. There is some debate over how both lightning and love form, but most e
xperts agree that both require the presence of complementary opposites. A towering thundercloud is full of opposites: ice and positive charge at its uppermost point, water and negative charge at its base. In electricity and in love, opposites attract, and so as these opposites begin to interact, an electrical field develops. In a cloud, this field eventually grows so powerful that it must burst from the cloud in the form of lightning, visible from miles away. It is essentially the same in a love affair.

  The night that Marisita agreed to finish her interview, the air felt remarkably charged, prepared for either lightning or love. The wind was full of words not yet said, miracles not yet performed, and electricity not yet discharged. All of this interfered with the station’s signal. A test signal from their new broadcasting site—Bicho Raro—had traveled poorly, and even when they retried it closer to where they ordinarily broadcast, the signal remained weak. The atmosphere was simply too uncertain.

  Beatriz sat in the back of the box truck, the doors open wide, looking out at the familiar sight of Bicho Raro at sundown. The truck was parked beside the stage Pete had built. Wires snaked to the ground poles and to the antenna fixed to the truck’s roof. Another cable led to where a microphone sat in the middle of the stage. Beatriz could see several Sorias from where she sat, and well beyond them, several pilgrims, including Tony’s towering form. Very few people enjoy trying to solve a problem with an audience, and Beatriz was no exception. Moreover, the instability of the atmosphere seemed to be mirrored inside her. This was because her self-inflicted puzzles had previously had no time limit and no stakes, and this puzzle had both in spades. It was also because she had seen Marisita return with Daniel’s bag, and she knew as well as Marisita what the loss of it meant for her cousin.

  Her thoughts were as turbulent as the air. Ideas refused to come.

  “There’s no point broadcasting into a void,” Joaquin said. He sounded dramatic, but it felt warranted. There seemed little reason to encourage Marisita’s confession if Daniel had no chance of intercepting it.