All the Crooked Saints

  Beatriz agreed that the horse’s lack of humanity was indeed the obstacle, but she believed that the Saint wouldn’t be able to perform even the first miracle. Humanity, she maintained, was necessary for darkness to exist. Without an understanding of the concept of darkness, morality, or other existential subjects, the unpleasantness inside the individual could not be darkness but rather simply nature, and thus could not be cured with a miracle, or perhaps at all.

  “So that horse will be terrible forever?” Daniel had asked.

  “I do not think the darkness is about being ‘terrible.’ ” It had taken slightly longer for ten-year-old Beatriz to find the words that she needed. She had still been learning how to live with the hard truth that the most interesting parts of her thoughts usually got left behind when she tried to put them into words. There were often very long pauses as she strove for a perfect translation. “I think the darkness is about shame.”

  Daniel had contemplated the pilgrims he had already seen in his twelve years. “I think you’re right.”

  “We were nearly in agreement in the beginning,” Beatriz had added, in order to be a gracious winner.

  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.

  They had been arriving at the same pace but leaving at a far slower one. For some reason, they could not seem to perform the second miracle on themselves with the same efficiency as past generations. So they loitered in their partially changed states, benevolently draining Bicho Raro’s resources. The Sorias did not dare help. They had all been told the danger of interfering with miracles, and no one wanted to be the one to risk bringing darkness on themselves and the rest of their family.

  The simplest solution would have been to throw these overflowing pilgrims into the desert to fend for themselves. But even if Daniel had not been around to protest the ethics of this, the memory of Elizabeth Pantazopoulus stopped the rest of the Sorias. Elizabeth Pantazopoulus had rolled into Bicho Raro at some point in the 1920s, wearing a man’s striped prison uniform and bearing a bullet wound in her left arm. In the crook of her good arm, she had been carrying a long-haired cat that also had a bullet wound in one limb. She had not volunteered the circumstances that had brought her to this point; she’d merely received the first miracle and remained at Bicho Raro until her g
unshot wound had healed and the cat no longer flinched at knocking sounds. Then she had managed to perform the second miracle on herself, and was gone the next morning. The Sorias had heard nothing more from her until four years later, when a packet had arrived from New York City with three things in it: (1) a piece of paper saying simply, Thank you.—Yours, Elizabeth Pantazopoulus; (2) a bullet, presumably from either her arm or the cat’s; and (3) a pile of cash large enough to see Bicho Raro through the more difficult years of the Depression.

  You just can’t guess who will strike it big. So the pilgrims stayed, and the Sorias resentfully built a lodge.

  Beatriz moved her attention beyond Michael and the lodge to the very large, wood-paneled Mercury station wagon still parked in the dust beyond it. Making binoculars of her hands to shield her eyes from the sun, she focused on the interior. She could see Pete Wyatt’s boots through the back window; he was either sleeping or dead. To her continued surprise, the urge to place her thumb on his skin had not diminished, even though she could not even see his elbows from where she sat. In an effort to study this feeling objectively, Beatriz imagined it rising out of her mind and up into the air above the telescope, hoping to disentangle the emotion from her untrustworthy body. To her annoyance, however, it refused to float above her. Some feelings are rooted too strongly in the body to exist without it, and this one, desire, is one of them. Beatriz was aware of this form of attraction from observation but not from personal experience. She contemplated the absence of logic in the sensation and then considered the more emotional members of her family, wondering if this was what they felt like all the time.

  Beatriz watched Pete’s boots and pondered her puzzling feeling for such a duration and with such an intensity that she noticed neither the departure of the owls above her nor the arrival of Marisita Lopez below her.

  Marisita stood at the telescope’s base, one hand lifted to protect her eyes against the rain that always fell on her. The dust around her puffed and splattered under the assault of the precipitation. The butterflies on her dress moved their sluggish wings but did not fly.

  She gazed uncertainly up at Beatriz. Her errand was urgent enough to encourage her to break the rule against speaking with Sorias, but still she hesitated. This was because Beatriz could be quite frightening from the outside. Right now, la chica sin sentimientos cut a stark and haunting image up on the telescope platform. Motionless, speechless, unblinking. She was, in many ways, like the owls that had just been perched above her, particularly the ghost-faced barn owls with their inscrutable expressions.

  Marisita had come from Texas to Bicho Raro, and on the border where she lived, owls were considered with distrust. The problem lay not with the owls themselves but rather with the lechuzas, witches who could transform themselves into owls with human faces. Even though Marisita trusted the intentions of the Sorias, there was no pretending that they didn’t have otherworldly abilities. And although she did not believe the Church had been correct to drive them from Abejones, it was not difficult for her to see how she, as one of the Sorias’ troubled pilgrims, also did not belong in a church.

  It was just that Marisita was not sure that saints and witches were very different in the end.

  And Beatriz was the most saintly of the Sorias, apart from Daniel.

  Which meant that Marisita did not feel bold enough to shout up to her that Daniel Soria had given her a letter meant for Beatriz. She merely trapped the paper between the metal rung of the ladder and the metal riser and made sure that it would not fall out on its own, moving quickly so that her rain-damp hands did not spoil it.

  She didn’t know what the letter said. She had been told not to read the letter, so she had not read it. She could not know how its contents would impact them all.

  “Beatriz! Beatriz Soria! I have something for you!” she shouted, but only in her mind. Marisita often said things only in her mind. This is not generally an efficient way of speaking, as very few people are mind readers, apart from Delecta Marsh, who had received mind reading as a result of the first miracle back in 1899. But Delecta was long dead, shot by an immediately excommunicated and now-also-dead abbot, and so in reality, Marisita merely twisted her hands together and hoped that Beatriz might notice her and come for the letter.

  She did not, and Marisita grew no braver.

  Marisita began to cry, just a little. Her tears were not only from anxiety. They were the kind of tears that come easily because earlier tears have already smoothed the path for them. The night before, when Tony and Pete had arrived, she had been considering a terrible decision. The decision was this: whether or not she should walk out into the desert without any food and proceed until she could no longer remember who she was. If you think this sounds like a painful way to die, know that Marisita had also considered this and decided upon it for that very reason; it was, she thought, what she deserved. But now Daniel had given her this mysterious letter to deliver, and he had told her it was important. She could not go into the desert until she knew what it meant.

  She felt trapped in between. She had not truly wanted to go the night before, but she hadn’t wanted to stay, either. It was this, in addition to her fear of Beatriz, that squeezed yet more tears from her.

  The tears didn’t make her any braver, however, so she left the letter clinging to the ladder, waiting to be discovered.

  Beatriz, it began, I am in love with Marisita Lopez.

  Pete Wyatt woke as a stranger in the world of miracles.

  He was neither a saint nor a pilgrim. He was just a kid waking too late in the morning in the back of a stranger’s egg-yellow Mercury.

  Wiping the sweat from his forehead, he slithered into the boastful sunshine outside. The settlement’s appearance surprised him. It was not at all what he’d imagined in the darkness the evening before. Bicho Raro by night was a god; Bicho Raro by day was a man. In the raw daylight, it was a place people lived—a place where a young man could work for a box truck.

  One would think this unveiled truth would be encouraging, but it had the opposite effect on Pete. His journey before now had felt like a dream, and a dream can always be changed into something else. But when you are awake, the truth is bright and stark, not as willing to bend to the mind’s will. So now Pete truly faced the reality of the plan he had made. He pressed a hand to his heart again and wondered if he had made a mistake. Perhaps, he thought, he had overestimated himself. Perhaps a place this vast and an adventure this curious were only for those without holes in their hearts.

  Closing his eyes, he thought of his father.

  George Wyatt was a man of action. George Wyatt had been supposed to die in the womb, as his umbilical cord had been wrapped around his neck, but he’d decided that death was not for him and had chewed himself free. He’d been born two weeks early, his baby hands still clutching the ragged stump of his umbilical cord, his baby mouth already full of teeth. He’d been the weakest of his eight siblings, but he’d begun lifting weights as a toddler and by the time he was fifteen, he could lift all of his siblings at once. His family had been dust-poor and he was meant to be, too, but he’d signed himself up for the army and worked hard. He saved a full colonel from choking on his rations in the field by punching him in the face and telling him to snap out of it and was made an officer.

  George Wyatt would not have allowed himself to be disheartened at this early stage.

  Pete opened his eyes. Resolve straightened his spine. He would search for someone who knew about his deal to work for the box truck.

  Back in Oklahoma a few years before, he had enjoyed a brief stint as a firehouse fund-raiser. After a particularly difficult winter, the town’s only fire truck had gone out of commission; an excess of chimney fires and poverty had clogged the fire truck’s hose with prayers and despair and it had split from end to end. Pete had taken up a successful collection to replace it, going from door to door with a smile and a pledge sheet.

  He knocked on doors now with the same vigor but got a very different
response. Although he was certain there must be people inside the buildings, every door remained closed to him. He got the sense that he was being watched, too, that eyes were on him through the windows, eyes that disappeared as soon as he squinted in their direction. At one point he even heard a baby cry out, hurriedly shushed as he knocked on Rosa Soria’s camper door.

  The problem was that he looked like a pilgrim. All of the Sorias knew that pilgrims had arrived the night before, and all of the Sorias knew that a miracle had taken place. They assumed that Pete had received the miracle alongside Tony, and therefore they would not risk speaking to him. Ordinarily, Daniel might have risked it, but today he was as absent as the others.

  Pete did not know why he was being avoided, only that he was. He did the only thing he could think to do: He began to work.

  He chose the log lodge site for his attention. Michael had made himself scarce as soon as Pete began to move about Bicho Raro, and it is difficult to jump usefully into the middle of someone else’s tasks without instruction, but Pete had a lot of practice helping. Good helping is generally about taking quick and accurate stock of another’s needs, and that was what he did now. He saw that dimensions for the lodge had been marked out, and he also saw that some holes had been started, and that it was slow going because of the rocky soil. He thought about what the unseen architect of this project might need, and then he began to move all the rocks from inside the dimensions of the lodge to the outside.

  The occupants of Bicho Raro watched him work. They watched him remove enough rocks to fill the wheelbarrow parked by the lodge site. They watched him remove enough rocks to pile one cairn, then two cairns, then three. They watched him remove enough rocks to begin to build a small structure beside it. He did not have the material to build a roof or put in glass windows or hang a wooden door, but he built four walls and a fireplace in the corner and had just begun on decorative windowsills when he ran out of rocks.