Beatriz squeezed between the seats to look in the back, striking her head on the roof as the Mercury experimented with gravity. Tony did not have a rope in the backseat of his car, nor in the cargo area, where Pete had spent a night. As she rummaged, Pete overtook Salto and skidded to a halt before him. The stallion, however, merely leaped over the station wagon like the cow over the moon.
“Gee,” Pete said.
As he hit the gas again, Beatriz climbed back into the front seat. She was holding a revolver—an enormous Ruger Single-Six with a dark wood grip and a long, long barrel. It would have appeared at home in a very good Western movie and was large enough to have been purchased by a man who judged cars with a tape measure.
Pete was scandalized. “You’re not going to shoot him?”
“This was in the back,” Beatriz said. “It was cocked. That’s very dangerous.”
“It’s not my gun!”
Beatriz closed it away in the glove box as Pete tried once more to block Salto with the station wagon. Again the horse sailed over them.
“Just follow him,” Beatriz said. “He’ll tire eventually.”
“What will you lead him back with?”
Beatriz held up a silk tie that she had found under the passenger seat along with a large quantity of marijuana, a fifth of whiskey, and a small stack of cash. So Pete and Beatriz and Salto traipsed over the county as the stars moved slowly overhead and the mountains told stories to themselves. An hour into the night, Salto caught the scent of mares, and his journey took on a renewed focus. The stallion led the Mercury through the maze of abandoned stick buildings that used to be a mining camp, and the force of his passion caused already weak porches to collapse upon themselves. Then he careened through a muddy creek bed that sighed as it was galloped through and then driven through. Then past an abandoned general store and an empty house with a leaning, ghost-toothed picket fence out front. Then back into the desert hills.
Antelope joined them briefly, surrounding the car with hooved animals before they remembered their wildness and disappeared into the night. Far overhead, an upwardly mobile owl that had chased the whisper of a miracle far up into the atmosphere spotted the Mercury down below and dove after it. The owl was so far above the Earth that it had thought the station wagon was small enough to be prey; once it discovered its mistake, it peeled off just before hitting the windshield.
Beatriz watched it fly away. “You don’t have darkness in you, do you?” she asked.
“Just the hole in my heart,” Pete replied.
As the night cantered on, the stallion covered hundreds of acres to a ranch many miles away, only vaguely known by the occupants of Bicho Raro. The sign over the gate read double d ranch, and the gate was closed. Salto leaped it with aplomb and disappeared between the barns as mares sang winsomely from inside one of them.
Beatriz and Pete exchanged a glance. Pete knew nothing about this ranch, because he was from Oklahoma. Beatriz knew nothing about this ranch, because she did not own any roosters. In 1962, appearing at a ranch at night without warning was a good way to get shot. But in 1962, allowing a stallion to pillage another person’s barn was also a good way to get shot. Pete and Beatriz weighed these options.
Pete stopped the vehicle.
“Lotta cars,” he said. Because there were indeed a healthy number of vehicles parked in the drive on the other side of the gate.
“A lot of lights,” Beatriz added, because each barn had a glowing orange light on it.
“Well, that’s okay,” Pete said, but doubtfully. “Because we’re not doing anything criminal.”
They clambered over the gate.
Double D Ranch was owned by a lady of some years named Darlene Purdey. She had run it for years with her lady friend Dorothy Lanks, and for decades, the two of them had done everything together: farmed, knitted, cooked, kissed, cleaned. But Dorothy had the nerve to die first, and since then, the ranch had fallen into disrepair. Either the changing weather or Darlene’s grief turned the soil to ash, and nothing would grow. Pushed by desperation and cold with bitterness, Darlene now paid the bills by running an underground cockfighting ring. Her prize fighter, General MacArthur, was undefeated, and she used him to extort money from all of the locals who came with their own roosters and betting money.
Beatriz and Pete discovered this only when Salto made a grand entrance into the barn Darlene was currently using as a cockpit. She and another rancher crouched in the middle of a ring made of cardboard and scrap wood. Two dozen other men and women of varying ages watched from the outside of the ring. Staticky music played over a radio somewhere in the building. Wood shavings and blood and Salto hovered in the air over the fight.
Cockfighting is a very old blood sport. Typically, it involves animals bred for this purpose, a particular variety called a gamecock, as ordinary roosters will often give up the fight and turn away when they realize they are going to be bested. The gamecocks generally have their combs and wattles removed to prevent their opponent from gaining an advantage, and before the fight, their owners strap a blade to one of the creature’s legs to allow it to draw blood more freely. It is illegal in many countries, including the one Pete and Beatriz were in at the moment, as it is considered cruel to encourage animals to fight to the death.
Darlene’s rooster, General MacArthur, was unusual as he was an ordinary leghorn rooster still in full possession of his wattle and comb that fought bare-legged. Nonetheless he was undefeated and was preparing to defend this title in the moment Salto burst into the fight, Pete and Beatriz quick behind him.
One does not like to generalize, but the ranchers involved in illegal cockfighting at the time shared a certain personality type, which was how Pete and Beatriz came to find themselves facing a dozen drawn weapons.
“We’re here for the horse,” Beatriz said.
Darlene Purdey said, “This is by invitation only.”
“We were just leaving, ma’am,” Pete said. “Sorry for interrupting your night.”
Salto, who had just completed a quick circuit of the barn in search of mares, now headed back for the door. Beatriz snagged his halter as he attempted to sweep past her. She maintained her composure as he dragged her a few feet.
“No one invited you or a horse,” Darlene said. Before Dorothy had died, she wouldn’t have spoken to anyone this way, nor tolerated guns pointed at even late-night visitors, but her heart had gone to salt along with her land. Now she found that bloodshed and suffering drowned out the sound of her grief, and although the past Darlene would have taken their side, the present Darlene was considering making these newcomers regret interrupting her fight.
“You want this, Dolly?” asked the man crouched in the ring with her, pulling out a revolver. This was Stanley Dunn, and his heart had been salt longer than it had been flesh.
He cocked his gun.
People had died for lesser infractions in this part of Colorado.
Outside the barn, an enormous commotion stole everyone’s attention. The sound was multifaceted: roaring and squeaking and wailing and scratching. No one in the barn besides Beatriz knew what was causing it: dozens of owls suddenly attracted to the powerful sense of a miracle in the making. The darkness in Darlene alone would have been sufficient to gather them, and with Beatriz Soria in such close proximity, a miracle seemed imminent.
There would be no miracle. Firstly, Beatriz would not perform a miracle on the unwilling. Secondly, it was forbidden to perform a miracle where other people could get hurt, even if they were all the sort of people to stand around and watch chickens kill each other for fun. Thirdly, Beatriz didn’t want to.
Pete used the distraction of the noise as an opportunity to snatch General MacArthur by his tail feathers. As the rooster pecked and kicked, Pete drew him close to his chest and took a step back toward the door.
“Don’t shoot!” Darlene shouted. “Kid, you’re going to be sorry.”
“I’m already sorry,” Pete said truthfully. “I said it before. W
e just want to go.”
Beatriz was not sorry. She did not feel that their transgression warranted the threat of physical violence. When the guns didn’t lower, she nudged Pete toward the night. She told the rest of them, “We’re leaving. Nobody shoot or my friend strangles your rooster.”
This was how Pete and Beatriz came to recover Salto and find themselves in possession of a fowl hostage. They escaped from the ranch and rode away with more horsepower than they’d arrived in: Beatriz riding Salto with a rein made of Tony’s fine black tie, and Pete riding behind her in the Mercury with a rooster in the passenger seat.
It was not until they were miles away from Double D Ranch that the two slowed their pace. Pete drove the Mercury alongside Salto, who trotted far more demurely now that he had accomplished several years of galloping in just a few hours. Dawn glimmered. They had chased and escaped all through the night; they’d run clear around Alamosa and now had to go through it to get back to Bicho Raro. Every animal that had joined them in their chase was now sleeping, and every person who had been sleeping while they were away was now awake.
Beatriz looked at Pete through the driver’s side window; he smiled.
He smiled is a good line for almost any kind of story. Beatriz found she liked the way he looked: sturdy and true, responsible and square. The night had left his white T-shirt dirtier than it had begun, and his neatly combed hair was no longer quite so neat—but it had only served to wear down the outer layer of kindness to reveal that there was only more kindness beneath. She smiled.
She smiled is a good line for almost any kind of a story, too. Pete found that he liked the way she looked: silent and apart, intentional and intelligent. The night had unparted her evenly parted black hair and she had a bit of chicken blood on her skin, but the disrepair of her appearance only served to reveal that her interior had remained cool and unruffled.
“I’ve never stolen anything,” Pete confessed.
“You didn’t steal that chicken,” Beatriz replied. “You repurposed him. You did steal that car, though.”
Pete was already falling in love, although he would have denied it if asked. Beatriz was, too, although she did not believe herself capable and would have denied it as well. The morning light looked good upon them both.
“We never decided what to do about the truck,” Pete said, struck into memory by the trucks parked near Alamosa’s small downtown.
Beatriz thought for a moment before saying, “I think you should come with us tomorrow night and see what we’re doing with it.”
“I reckon that sounds all right.”
“Let’s go back home now.”
“Wait,” Pete said. “I’ve gotta get Tony a radio.”
Making new roses was a long process.
When it was spring, the first pollinating season, Francisco began work early, as soon as the sun appeared to give him light to work. He moved among his roses, finding the buds that were due to open that day, and then he removed every petal except the bottom five so that he would be able to find them again. Carefully, he detached the stamen from each bud and discarded it. These would be his seed parents, the mothers. They would dictate if the new roses would be bushes or climbers, dark-leaved or light-leaved. He would have already prepared the stud roses by cutting them a day or more before and leaving them to dry so he could shake the pollen from them onto a sleeve of white paper. The stud roses, the fathers, would tell his new roses what sort of blossom to have, lending their fragrance or shape or color.
Then, in the perfect silence of his greenhouse, he moved carefully with a small paintbrush and painted the pollen carefully on each of the rose mothers’ stigmas. In the language Beatriz had invented, he marked the potential rose’s father on a tag and attached it to the mother rose. And then he waited.
It took months for the roses to form rose hips full of seeds, and then those seeds had to be chilled and kept in the dark for nearly three more months. Those that he had not lost to fungus or poor spirits he carefully planted in pots marked with their origins. Then one leaf and two leaves and three leaves would appear, and Francisco carefully policed them for disease or pests that might have snuck into his greenhouse. Then, finally, six weeks later, each fragile rose plant would produce its first, hesitant flower.
If it was not the black bloom he was hoping for, he began all over again.
Sometimes, Francisco thought that people might be roses. It was not that he disbelieved Darwin and the classification of the species. It was only that every time he carefully applied the pollen, he thought about the process, how the pollen would work its way over the rose’s stigma and then enter the egg cell and fertilize the egg nucleus, and how wondrous and strange it was that it was the same process by which we were made. Many of his days, particularly in these slow summer months, were spent engrossed in thought clouds triggered by small actions, and he lost weeks to thinking about what it might mean that so many creatures under the sun, from roses to birds to trees to sharks, came to life by the same, complex process. Even those whose process often looked quite different from the outside—like the meiosis, or cell splitting, of the sea urchin—still used much of the same raw stuff: cells, fertilizations, sharing of chromosomes. He mused on why it might be that evolution had not instead designed most of the world to share the simple asexual process sometimes used by plants such as pelargonium, a flower known commonly as storksbill. A cutting was taken from the original plant, dropped into moist soil, and left to make another plant. By the same process, to create Beatriz, he would have merely planted one of his fingers and she would have emerged later, fully formed and independent.
Why indeed, he wondered, did we need life to make more life? We took it for granted that two creatures met and mated and made another creature, when we would not expect a cloud or a fire or a cooking pot to be fashioned the same way. Yes, all of those processes required combining other ingredients as well, but without the cell, the egg—? If there was a great creator who had fashioned us in his own image, why, then, was more life not made in the same way, by merely breathing a word over a handful of dust? Instead, reproduction and love became a messy process, and messy processes meant there were many places where it could fail.
These were the thoughts that occupied Francisco’s day.
An additional thought occupied the day following Beatriz and Pete’s all-night chase, however, because late in the morning, Beatriz tapped on the glass before letting herself into his greenhouse.
“Good morning, Papa,” she whistled in their language.
“Is it morning?” he replied in kind, not looking up from his notebook. He was not displeased that she’d come to visit. Francisco found it very difficult to work with certain forms of distraction, such as music or conversations with heightened emotions playing in the background, but he did well if people were reading to him in a fairly undramatic voice, or if the visitor had a quiet way about them. Beatriz generally had the latter, and had, upon occasion, read to him in the evenings when he had first moved out to the greenhouse.
“It is, though it doesn’t feel like it. I need to ask you a favor, and I don’t know if it is possible, so you can tell me now if it is not acceptable and I will be fine,” Beatriz said.
It had been some time since someone had asked Francisco for something he was capable of giving, but that was mostly because they had only been asking him to move back in with Antonia. He dearly hoped that Beatriz, a highly intelligent young woman, was not here to request that.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I’d like for you to keep this chicken in your greenhouse for a while.”
Beatriz was referring, of course, to General MacArthur, the fighting rooster they had repurposed just hours earlier. He was missing feathers in places from his fights, and had a wicked scar across his chest from another bird’s blade, and still had a bit of blood streaked through the pale feathers around his head.
When Francisco turned to look, Beatriz added, “I didn’t know if he will bother yo
ur plants.”
Francisco divined immediately that there was an involved story to this rooster, but also that if his daughter had wanted to share it, she would have begun it already. He said merely, “I assume there is a reason why the rooster can’t stay outside with the other chickens.”
“He has a problem with aggression,” Beatriz said. “And Rosa would not be happy if he killed her rooster.”
Francisco considered the request. Chickens would eat rose petals, but he had plenty of discarded rose petals that could be fed to a chicken so it wouldn’t bother the blooms still on the plant. Chicken manure was messy, but also very good for roses. He did not want to have to look after an animal, but he also felt his younger daughter never asked anything of him, and this was a small sacrifice to make for her.
“Leave him for the day,” Francisco said, “and I will see how he does. What is his name?”
Naturally, Beatriz did not know the rooster was called General MacArthur, as they had stolen only the chicken and not his name. She held the bird out from her chest, his wings pinned to his body, as if he might somehow have his moniker somewhere about his person.
“I don’t know,” she finally admitted.
She set him down. There was nothing about the rooster that particularly encouraged sympathy. He had been angry the night before and he was still angry now. Francisco clucked at him, but he strutted away, looking this way and that at the roses. Both father and daughter watched the rooster for several minutes.
“Is there something else on your mind, Beatriz?” Francisco asked eventually.
There was nearly always something else on Beatriz’s mind. She said the easiest of the options first. “Daniel.”
Francisco, too, had been thinking about his nephew—really, nearly his son. When Daniel had lost his parents, he had gained the combined parentage of the surviving adult Sorias at Bicho Raro. Francisco, Antonia, Michael, Rosa, and Nana had all pitched in to care for him, an unusual and excessive amount of love and ownership that led first to Daniel’s extremely bad behavior and then to his extremely good behavior. Francisco had been thinking about it in particular that day because the year had just reached the point where the sun came in bright and multicolored through the window over his desk. This window was unlike any of the other windows in the greenhouse, because when Daniel was still in his hell-sent stage, Francisco had forbidden him to spend all night out joyriding in other people’s cars. This might strike most people as a reasonable rule to make, but Daniel had found it both chafing and unfair, and to demonstrate his feelings, he had spent the night throwing rocks through every single pane in that particular window. The plants inside had perished in the night’s frost. Daniel had been sentenced the task of repairing the window as punishment. Because even that could not be done without rebellion, Daniel had sourced glass from the closest junkyard. Instead of restoring the window to its previous transparent existence, each pane was instead replaced with four or five or even six tiny tinted ones—scrounged from bottles, jars, car windows, vases, flowerpots, pitchers. He had meant to be difficult, but he had not known that in the full sunlight, the ferocity of his rebellion would be dazzling.
All the Crooked Saints Page 14
