While Pete was eyeballing Tony’s new stature, Beatriz was finally discovering Daniel’s letter.
Daniel was not much of a letter writer. He was a slow reader and a slower writer, often reversing letters inside a word and sometimes transcribing numbers facing the wrong direction. His ears were more cunning than his hands, so he was easily distracted by any noises while he worked. He could not write while anyone was speaking to him, or else he would accidentally pen the words he heard spoken. In fact, before he was the Saint of Bicho Raro, he and his friends had driven into town after dark to paint the side of the local grocery. They were painting the grocery because the owner’s son had spoken unfavorably of the Soria family during the school day, and they were arriving after dark because they presumed correctly that the grocer did not want his building painted. Daniel, the bravest, was given the role of painting, and so he began to slowly apply the words (in Spanish for his friends, who were not bilingual like the Soria children) as the others kept watch, being careful to not form the letter e backward. He had intended to paint the proverb ¡Vivir con miedo, es cómo vivir a medias!—A life lived in fear is a life half-lived!—but his fellows, too drunk and jolly to cleave close to that noble sentiment, began to softly chant as Daniel painted, knowing how his letters would obey them rather than him. He ended up decorating the building instead with ¡Vivir con mierda, es cómo vivir a medias!, which has a different meaning, as the corruption of only two letters transforms miedo from fear to shit.
This difficulty in writing had followed Daniel into his young adulthood, so when Beatriz got a letter from him, she knew immediately that something was amiss. He would not have written if there had been any other way to convey his meaning.
She had stepped on the letter as she’d descended the ladder. The paper had provided less grip than the rung and so her foot had slipped and she’d nearly fallen. She jumped to the ground to avoid twisting her ankle—and there it had been before her eyes. She opened it, saw Daniel’s handwriting, and closed it back up again, quick. The sight of so much of Daniel’s handwriting was as troubling as the sound of his voice had been the night before.
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 bring 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.