The Saint of Bicho Raro sat in the Shrine and listened to Tony DiRisio approach.
The Shrine was the oldest building in Bicho Raro. It had been designed and built by Felipe Soria, a member of the family now spoken of only in hushed tones. He had arrived in Bicho Raro on a large honey-colored horse and in a large honey-colored hat and promptly began work on a roadside altar after claiming that the Virgin had appeared to him with instructions to do so.
On the first day, he’d completed the stucco walls for a small structure the size of his stallion’s box stall, and the other Sorias had been pleased. On the second day, he’d torn free a section of abandoned railroad and melted it into a beautifully intricate metal gate, and the other Sorias had been pleased. On the third day, he’d fired one thousand ceramic tiles with the heat of his own belief and installed a roof made of them, and the other Sorias had been pleased. On the fourth day, the Virgin had appeared again, this time surrounded by owls; he’d carved a statue of her in this state to place inside the Shrine, and the other Sorias had been pleased. On the fifth day, he’d made a rich pigment from some sky that had gotten too close to him and used it to paint the Shrine’s exterior turquoise, and the other Sorias had been pleased. On the sixth day, he’d held up a passenger train, robbed the passengers, killed the sheriff on board, and used the sheriff’s femurs to fashion a cross for the top of the shrine. The Sorias had not been pleased.
On the seventh day, Felipe Soria had gone missing forever, which was why the Sorias now spoke of him only in whispers.
When he was young, Joaquin had once told his mother, Rosa, that he’d seen Felipe Soria wandering the desert outside Bicho Raro, but Felipe would have been one hundred and thirty years old, so no one believed him. The Sorias were long-lived (except when they suddenly weren’t), but such an age would have been exceptional even for a Soria.
As Judith Soria Costa escorted Tony to the Shrine, the current Saint of Bicho Raro kneeled inside its small interior. He had run all the way from the box truck in order to have time to prepare himself (spiritually) to perform the miracle and prepare himself (physically) to appear as the Saint. He did not have to do this, as even Sorias in poor standing with God remained miraculous, but he believed that the more spiritually prepared he was during the ritual, the more likely the pilgrim was to be completely healed. The miracles, he felt, were just as much about healing his own mortal spirit as theirs.
Daniel Lupe Soria had not always been on the path to holiness.
As a child, he’d been so terrible that Rosa Soria had sent him twice to be exorcised. He’d been so terrible that he’d chased a field of sheds out into the road one week and burned down a herd of cattle the next. He’d been so terrible that the cowboys at the neighboring ranch still used his name as a cuss word. In his teens, he and his school friends had decided to steal a painting of the Santo Niño de Atocha from a church outside Alamosa. As the disguised child Jesus gazed reproachfully from inside the frame, Daniel had carried the icon outside to where his friends waited in their truck. As he descended the few stairs, however, the painting grew heavier and heavier until he was compelled to put it down. His friends jeered, but they could not move it either. As Daniel had tried to decide if they should just leave the painting where it sat on the sidewalk, he’d seen an inscription on the back: Donated by an anonymous benefactor, for all the crooked saints.
Feeling suddenly and surprisingly heavy with the weight of both religious paintings and remorse, Daniel could not bring himself to abandon the painting to the elements his crime had exposed it to. He decided to wait with it until the priest returned in the morning, even if it meant confessing his theft. His friends abandoned him, but still Daniel waited. The wind began to kick up dirt, and still Daniel waited. A storm blew in, and hail began to fall, and he covered the painting with his body to protect it, and still he waited. As the hailstones pounded him, the frivolous and selfish nature of his childhood exploits hit him with equal pain. With each blow of the hail, he repented of another misdeed. Then the sky cleared and Daniel found that he could easily lift the painting: a miracle.
He’d returned it to its place in the church and had been the Saint of Bicho Raro ever since. He still had a divot in his shoulder from the first hailstone that had hit him that night, a physical reminder that regret stings.
Now, as he waited for Tony to come to him, he fell once more into prayer. He had been praying all day, stopping only to go out with Beatriz and Joaquin. The day of prayer was not unusual, as Daniel began to pray when the sun rose and often continued praying after the sun had set, setting out words and lighting candles for his family and each of the pilgrims who had already come and each of the pilgrims who were still on their way to him.
It was unusual for the Saint to pray for himself.
Now Judith’s voice came to him from outside the Shrine. She was asking the pilgrim, “Are you prepared to change your life?”
“Yeah, yeah,” the pilgrim replied.
The Saint turned back to his prayers. Some saints had a profound relationship with God or the Holy Child or a particular saint, but Daniel preferred to direct his prayers toward Mother. This figure in his mind was both the Virgin Mary and his own mother, the one he had never known, having been delivered from her dead body as a newborn. So now he prayed, Mother, help me to help this man. And he also prayed, Mother, help me.
The miracles at Bicho Raro always came in twos.
The first miracle was this: making the darkness visible.
Sadness is a little like darkness. They both begin the same way. A tiny, thin pool of uneasiness settles in the bottom of the gut. Sadness simmers fast and boils hard and then billows up and out, filling first the stomach, then heart, then lungs, then legs, then arms, then up into the throat, then pressing against eardrums, then swelling against skull and eventually spilling out of eyes in a hissing release. Darkness, though, grows like a cave formation. Slow drips from the uneasiness harden over the surface of a slick knob of pain. Over time, the darkness crusts in unpredictable layers, growing at such a pace that one doesn’t notice it has filled every cavern under the skin until movement becomes difficult or even impossible.
Darkness never boils over. Darkness remains inside.
But a Soria could draw it out and give it form. They would feel a stirring of the pilgrim’s darkness as it drew near, like the owls, and the promise of their gift inside their mouths, like a song they knew the words to. There was barely a pause between when they chose to draw the darkness out and when the darkness began to emerge.
Daniel’s head was still bowed and his eyes closed when Tony entered the Shrine. Because of this, and the dim light afforded by one hundred tiny candles, Tony did not see young Daniel Lupe Soria when his eyes grew accustomed. He saw only the Saint.
The Saint had long black hair, parted evenly to his shoulders. His face was a ragged chalk white, his brown skin painted with a pale paste made from the dust of the surrounding area. His eye sockets were smeared black like a skull. His knuckles bore a spider’s eight wide-open eyes. In this light he looked less like a human you would meet and more like a thing that you would discover. Tony noticed the Catholic artifacts in the Shrine, the rosary beads around the Saint’s neck, but they seemed to belong to a different Catholicism than the perfunctory, godless form he had practiced back in Philadelphia.
Tony suddenly realized how cold it was here in the high desert night. The owls carved beside Mary seemed to be looking at him.
“Do you have darkness in you?” the Saint asked, his eyes still closed.
Tony’s heart quailed inside him. He felt he had heard this story before, and it had ended badly for the radio DJ who’d driven his Mercury into the desert.
He thought he might just go. Leave that kid here pining after a truck and keep on driving west toward California, right into the sea.
The Saint of Bicho Raro opened his eyes.
Tony looked into them.
There were many reasons why Daniel Lupe Soria was the best saint that Bicho Raro had experienced for generations, but his eyes were on the top of the list. Eyes like his had not been seen for one hundred years. It might have been possible for someone else to look as gentle and holy as Daniel Lupe Soria did, but only if one had the right eyebrows. Eyebrows are extraordinarily important to expression. They say that if you shave off your eyebrows, babies cannot recognize you. Daniel, however, did not require his eyebrows to accomplish his mystical expression. Just his eyes alone would do the trick. They were wide-set, dark brown, and full of an otherworldly kindness that meant that not only did he love you, but any other possible otherworldly entity you believed in was looking through them and also loved you. If the Catholic Church had looked into Daniel Lupe Soria’s eyes in the nineteenth century, they would have offered to do battle with the Mexican government on the Soria family’s behalf. If the Mexican government had looked into Daniel Lupe Soria’s eyes in the nineteenth century, they would have at once become better Catholics.
“Oh,” said Tony.
He kneeled.
Daniel reached out and brushed Tony’s eyes closed with his palm. Then he closed his own again.
They both sat this way in the complicated blackness that exists behind closed eyelids. Tony imagined static playing on his radio station. Daniel imagined the rain pouring on Marisita Lopez and the trapped butterflies on her dress.
The second miracle was this: getting rid of the darkness for good.
No one wanted to see their darkness made manifest, but the reality was that it could not be fought until you saw its shape. Unfortunately, the pilgrims had to do the fighting on their own, and only then, once they had seen their darkness and learned how to banish it, could they leave Bicho Raro healed and bright. There was a law laid down among the Sorias to not interfere. If a Soria lifted a hand or breathed a word in aid, a darkness would fall on the Soria as well, and a Saint’s darkness was an even more terrible and powerful thing.
“Answer me now,” Daniel said. “Do you have darkness inside you?”
“Yes,” Tony said.
“And do you want to be rid of it?”
This is a harder question to answer than one might think at first blush. Almost no one would think it’s correct to answer this question with a no, but the truth is that we men and women often hate to be rid of the familiar, and sometimes our darkness is the thing we know the best.
“Yes.”
Outside, owls began to flap and call out. Horned owls hooted. Screech owls trilled. The barn owls gave their metallic hiss. Barred owls meowed. Spectacled owls barked hollowly. Pygmy owls peeped. The elf owls laughed nervously. The noise escalated to cacophony as the air turned ever more miraculous.
Daniel opened his eyes again.
The darkness began to appear.