Home > All the Crooked Saints(2)

All the Crooked Saints(2)
Author: Maggie Stiefvater

“Do you think they might be tracking us?” Joaquin asked hopefully. He did not want to be pursued by the government, but he wanted to be heard, and he longed so badly for the second that he felt it was his duty to assume the first was inevitable.

Beatriz had been sitting by the transmitter, fingers hovered vaguely over it, rapt in her own imagination. When she realized that both Joaquin and Daniel were waiting for her to answer, she said, “Not if the range hasn’t improved.”

Beatriz was the second-oldest cousin. Where Joaquin was noisy and colorful, Beatriz was serene and eerie. She was eighteen years old, a hippie Madonna with dark hair parted evenly on either side of her face, a nose shaped like a J, and a small, enigmatic mouth that men would probably describe as a rosebud but Beatriz would describe as “my mouth.” She had nine fingers, as she had cut one of them off by accident when she was twelve, but she didn’t much mind—it was only a pinkie, and on her right hand (she was left-handed). At the very least, it had been an interesting experience, and anyway, it wasn’t as if she could take it back now.

Joaquin was in the box-truck station for the glory of it, but Beatriz’s involvement was entirely for intellectual gratification. The restoration of the truck and construction of the radio had both been puzzles, and she enjoyed puzzles. She understood puzzles. When she was three, she had devised a retractable, secret bridge from her bedroom window to the horse paddock that allowed her to cross barefoot in the middle of the night without being stabbed by the goat’s head burrs that plagued the area. When she was seven, she had devised a cross between a mobile and a puppetry set so she could lie in bed and make the Soria family dolls dance for her. When she was nine, she had begun developing a secret language with her father, Francisco Soria, and they were still perfecting it now, years later. In its written form, it was constructed entirely from strings of numbers; its spoken form was sung in notes that corresponded to the mathematical formula of the desired sentiment.

Here was a thing Beatriz wanted: to devote time to understanding how a butterfly was similar to a galaxy. Here was a thing she feared: being asked to do anything else.

“Do you think Mama or Nana are listening?” Joaquin (Diablo Diablo!) persisted. He did not want his mother or grandmother to discover his alternate identity, but he longed for them to hear Diablo Diablo and whisper to each other that this pirate DJ sounded both handsome and like Joaquin.

“Not if the range hasn’t improved,” Beatriz repeated.

It was a question she had already posed to herself. The signal of their first broadcast had reached only a few hundred meters, despite the large TV antenna she had added to the system. Now her mind ran along each place the signal might be escaping before it got to the antenna.

Joaquin looked surly. “You don’t have to say it like that.”

Beatriz did not feel bad. She hadn’t said it like anything. She’d just said it. Sometimes that was not enough, however. Back home at Bicho Raro, they sometimes called her la chica sin sentimientos. Beatriz did not mind being called a girl without feelings. The statement seemed true enough to her. “Anyway, how could they? We took the radio.”

They all peered at the transistor radio pilfered from Antonia Soria’s kitchen counter.

“Small steps, Joaquin,” Daniel advised. “Even a small voice is still a voice.”

This was the third and oldest cousin in the truck. His given name was Daniel Lupe Soria and he was nineteen and his parents had both been dead for longer than he had been alive. On every knuckle but his thumbs he had an eye tattoo, so that he had eight of them, like a spider, and he was built a little like a spider, with long limbs and prominent joints and light body. His hair was smooth and straight, down to his shoulders. He was the Saint of Bicho Raro, and he was very good at it. Beatriz and Joaquin loved him very much, and he loved them as well.

Although he knew of Beatriz and Joaquin’s radio project, he had not previously accompanied them, as he was usually very busy with the matter of miracles. As the Saint, the coming and going of miracles occupied most of his thoughts and actions, a task he took great pleasure in and greater responsibility for. But tonight he grappled with a matter of personal importance, and he wanted to spend time with his cousins to remind himself of all the reasons to practice caution.

Here was a thing he wanted: to help someone he was not allowed to help. Here was a thing he feared: that he would ruin his entire family because of this private desire.

“Even a small voice is still small,” Joaquin countered crossly.

“One day you will have become famous as Diablo Diablo and we will be the pilgrims, going to see you in Los Angeles,” Daniel said.

“Or at least in Durango,” Beatriz revised.

Joaquin preferred imagining a future in Los Angeles to a future in Durango, but he didn’t protest further. Their faith was enough for now.

In some families, cousin doesn’t mean anything, but that wasn’t true for this generation of the Sorias. Even as the relationships between the older Sorias rubbed sand into pearls, these three Soria cousins remained inseparable. Joaquin was fanciful, but in this truck, they enjoyed his outsized ambition. Beatriz was remote, but in this truck, Daniel and Joaquin did not need anything more from her than what she easily gave. And everyone loved the Saint of Bicho Raro, but in this truck, Daniel was able to be simply human.

“Here. I’ll check the range now,” Beatriz said. “Hand me the radio.”

“Hand it yourself,” Joaquin replied. But Beatriz merely sat quietly until he passed it to her. There was no point trying to wait out Beatriz.

“I’ll come with you,” Daniel said quickly.

Back in Bicho Raro, there was a pair of twin goats named Fea and Moco who had been born under notable circumstances. It is common for goats to have twins and sometimes even triplets, so it was not notable that Fea and Moco were twins. What was unusual was that Moco was born first and then Fea’s mother decided that she did not have the energy or interest in giving birth a second time in the same night. So although Fea would have been just as happy being born minutes after her twin, she remained in her mother’s womb for months while her mother worked up the motivation to birth again. Finally, Fea was born. Her additional time in the womb, away from the sun, had turned her coat jet-black. Although to the outside eye, Fea and Moco appeared to be merely siblings or even unrelated, the two of them remained as close as twins, always attentive and fond of each other’s presence.

This was the way it was with Beatriz and Daniel. As close as Joaquin and Beatriz and Daniel were, Beatriz and Daniel were closer still. They were both quiet on the inside and outside, and they both had a hungry curiosity for what made the world work. But there was also the closeness created by the miracles. All of the Sorias were gifted with the ability to perform miracles, but into every generation, there were born a few who were more suited to the task than others: They were stranger or holier than other people, depending upon whom you asked. Daniel and Beatriz were the most saintly at the moment, and as Beatriz wanted desperately to not be the Saint, and Daniel wanted little else, balance was achieved.

Outside the truck, the cold desert sky pushed up and out and away, a story without ending. Beatriz shivered; her mother, Antonia, said she had the heart of a lizard—and it was true that she had a reptile’s preference for the claustrophobia of heat. Although Beatriz had a flashlight tied up in the hem of her skirt, she didn’t retrieve it. She was not remotely worried about the FCC, but she nonetheless did not want to call attention to their location. She had a strong feeling, in the way a Soria does sometimes, that there were miracles afoot, and she had been told, in the way all Sorias are told, that there were consequences for interfering with miracles.

So they walked in the near-dark. The light of the partial moon was quite sufficient to pick out the silhouettes of spiky bayonet and spindly manzanita and raggedy creosote bushes. Juniper released a damp, warm smell and Russian thistle tugged at Beatriz’s skirt. Far-off light from Alamosa browned the horizon, looking natural from this far away, like a premature sunrise. From the radio, Diablo Diablo said look, said wait, said listen, here’s a single you’re not going to believe, a hot little number that hasn’t gotten enough play from the big guys.

   
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