All the Crooked Saints

by Maggie Stiefvater

  “Two days of water,” translated the financier, who had once spent a year in Frankfurt chasing success.

  Felipe Soria leaned close.

  “Fight, my cousin,” he whispered in Daniel’s ear. “Quien quiere celeste, que le cueste.” No one had to translate this for Daniel: He who wants heaven must pay. He pressed his thumb into Daniel’s other shoulder, and Daniel cried out. When Felipe removed his hand, he had left a divot that matched the one the hailstorm had left him with.

  Then they were gone, and Daniel was left alone, in the dark, but alive, for now.

  Pete worked.

  He got up at first light because Padre Jiminez yipped and paddled his legs in his sleep and because the floor beside Padre Jiminez’s bed was hard and cold and also because Pete’s mind kept returning to Beatriz and also because Pete was good at working and liked doing it.

  As no one else was around to direct him otherwise, Pete decided to simply continue work on the stage. He had barely stepped out into the cold, thin air, however, when Antonia appeared before him. She had not been sleeping either. After seeing her daughter and Pete dancing on the stage the night before, she had stayed awake all night long feverishly cutting paper flowers to occupy her mind. When the sun rose, she looked down and realized that she had constructed piles of black paper roses, all but one of them marred by tears. She had stormed out to meet Pete the moment she saw him get up. Now she stood before him in the early blue light and raged at him for several minutes while he mutely accepted it. Finally, as the sun began to cast long morning shadows behind the buildings, she spat on the ground and gave him his task: Finish the small house that he had begun to construct the first day he had arrived.

  “Padre Jiminez can live there when you’re done,” she said. “And then you can have his room.”

  Pete was bruised by her raging, but he recognized this small kindness and was surprised by it. Tentatively, he admitted, “I thought you were angry at me.”

  “Angry? At you?”

  “For dancing with Beatriz.”

  It had not even occurred to Antonia that he might take ownership of her undirected anger. Her surprise over this passed swiftly away from shock, took an inexplicable side trip through grief over Daniel, and finally arrived at yet more anger. She snapped, “I’m not angry at you or Beatriz!”

  “Ma’am, do you mind me asking who you’re angry at, then?”

  As Antonia Soria opened her mouth, dozens of names filled the space behind her teeth, waiting to be said. But in that moment, as she saw Pete’s guileless face and, behind him, the outline of Francisco’s greenhouse and, in it, its sleepless occupant looking back at her, she realized that the only name that was true in that space was her own.

  “Just get to work, Wyatt,” Antonia said. “I’m going back to sleep.”

  But Pete did not just get to work. He meant to, but as he crossed the early-morning quiet of Bicho Raro, his attention was snagged by the sight of Tony rummaging in the back of the box truck.

  He changed course immediately.

  Tony had gotten up even earlier than Pete and Antonia. The moment it was light enough to see, the very first thing he had done was seek out the source of the radio program he had heard the night before. He had several clues. For starters, he knew it had to be someplace that Joaquin Soria, a sixteen-year-old boy, was capable of reaching each night. He knew it had to have some kind of antenna apparatus, and that an antenna of the size required for such a sound would be difficult to hide in a small space. And most importantly, he had been dozing only lightly the night before when Joaquin and Beatriz and Pete came back, and so he had seen them climb out of the truck. There were some advantages to being a giant.

  When Pete found him, Tony had the back of the truck wide open and was in it up to his shoulders. He was thrilling over what he found inside. All of the things that frustrated Beatriz about the makeshift station—the ingenious work-arounds, the repurposed equipment—delighted Tony. As a radio personality, he didn’t touch anything like this. The station he worked at was vast and polished, with two friendly Serbians to make sure it was all performing well as he did his show. It had been a very long time since he had been near the guts and organs of radio. Now he reached his oversized arm in the truck and gently prised out components to examine.

  “Did your mother raise you to be a sneak and a thief?” Pete asked.

  Tony removed his arm from the truck and turned to Pete. “Did your mother raise you to be a Boy Scout?”

  “Yes,” said Pete.

  “Look, kid, untwist yourself, I’m not hurting anything. You’re absolutely lousy when you lose your sense of humor. I was just looking.”

  “Why?”

  Tony turned back to the truck. “Why not?”

  Pete was ready to launch into an explanation of how the truck belonged to someone else and it was considered rude to rummage through other people’s property, but before he even said it, he realized that Tony already knew these things quite well.

  “I need you to give my box of records to that kid, if they haven’t melted to pancake batter,” Tony said. His voice was muffled inside the truck. “Diablo Diablo. They’re new, new stuff. Tell him he better listen to them all, because he needs some fresher music.”

  “Shhh. I think his identity’s a secret.”

  “Kid, nothing’s a secret when you broadcast it on AM radio. Tell him—tell him I want to help him.”

  “Are you sure?” Pete asked. “That sounds suspiciously like a nice thing to do, which doesn’t sound like you.”

  “Look, there’s your funny bone; I thought you’d lost it. Tell him I want to see his script for tonight. Tell him who I am.”

  “I thought that was a secret. Like Diablo Diablo.”

  Tony pulled his head out of the truck to face Pete with all of his height. Pete could not know it, because he had never known him before he had gotten burned out at the radio station, but Tony currently looked more like his normal self than he had in years, even at twenty feet tall. The life had returned to his eyes. “Are you going to do it, or not?”

  Of course Pete was going to do it. He agreed under the condition that Tony cease and desist his trespassing, and then he returned to work.

  By then, the rest of Bicho Raro had woken. Everyone, pilgrims and Sorias alike, heard Jennie enthusiastically practicing her new skill. As the radio blared from her bedroom, she spoke loudly and independently in fragments of lyrics heard minutes before.

  “Oh, what a beautiful morning!” she greeted Padre Jiminez.

  “Life is sweet! It may sound silly, but I don’t care!” she told Robbie.

  “I’m gonna fix this world today,” she told Pete as she marched past the little house.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Pete replied, and she merely grinned instead of repeating what he said.

  Her enthusiasm was catching, and no one caught it harder than Joaquin. By midday, both he and Beatriz had found their way to Pete’s worksite and kept him company in their own way. Beatriz sat silently out of the way, constructing a dipole cage antenna, admiring how Pete had stripped off his T-shirt as the work grew harder. Joaquin paced on top of a beam, prattling endlessly with increasingly grandiose ideas. He was in bright spirits. For the first time in his young life, he felt he was doing what he was truly meant to do. He was proud of last night’s broadcast and hoped that Daniel really had been able to hear it. He was also more than willing to take credit for Jennie’s improvement. He was full of pride, too, that his audience had widened to include the pilgrims.

  “Our broadcast could heal them all,” he said.

  This was such a boastful statement that Beatriz finally broke her silence. “It may have been coincidence. She may have been just about to make a breakthrough anyway.” When Joaquin pouted, she added, “I’m not saying the radio wasn’t part of it. I’m merely saying it requires another trial.”

  “What kind of trial would satisfy you?”

  “Something very specifically directed with the i
ntent of helping, so we could measure the results and know it was from us.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  Beatriz put down her antenna. “For instance, if you prepared a program specifically for the twins, highlighting what they needed to heal themselves. Then, if they improved quickly, that would be a result.”

  Joaquin shivered where he sat, both with the thrill of having such a direct effect and with the residual fear of breaking a long-held taboo in such a dramatic way. “But with the purpose of it hidden,” he said. “No names mentioned. So no one would realize it was someone from Bicho Raro.”

  Pete spoke from inside the half-finished house. “Also, if you don’t use any names, everyone who has a problem sort of like theirs will think you were talking straight to them.”

  Joaquin was so overcome with the idea of it that he had to drink two of his bottles of water in a row to cure the sudden dryness of his mouth. This felt like the future to him. This felt like real radio.

  “Show me the inside of the house,” Beatriz told Pete. She did not really want to see the interior, but she had been thinking hard as Joaquin spoke, and wanted to speak to Pete alone about these thoughts. As she suspected, Joaquin did not notice this strategy. He continued pacing on the beam, contemplating his grand show, as Pete joined Beatriz inside the little house.

  The structure was more impressive than Beatriz had expected, considering its humble origins. Now that Pete knew the little house was going to be completed instead of torn down, he took its construction more seriously. It had to earn its place among all the other buildings here if it was going to stand for any length of time. He liked the sense of Soria history and memories he had heard so far, so he had begun to build as many Soria memories and feelings into it as he could manage. He used some of the optimism from the already scavenged barn to support the floorboards, and he tinted the windows with some of the handsomeness of thought from Francisco’s greenhouse, and he took some of the warm sentiment from Nana’s garden for the grout between the stones. He had not meant to add his own steadfastness, nor any of his new love, but those traits had also nonetheless joined the others. This is the way of our work: We cannot help but color it with the paint of our feelings, both good and bad.

  Beatriz felt all of this inside the house. Her feet stood on memories and light streamed through memories onto her and dust drifted down from the memories in the roof supports. In a low voice, she said to him, “I have an idea and I’m afraid if I don’t say it to you, I might say it to Joaquin, and I think that would be very unwise.”

  She was a little surprised at herself for even telling Pete, but she knew that to give words to Pete was to give them to a vault.

  “Okay,” said Pete.

  “I don’t think Joaquin is wrong that the radio can help the pilgrims. I think what they have always needed is someone to guide them through, even though we are not allowed. We’ve seen so many pilgrims come through and we’ve learned how they solve their problems, but we can’t share any of this knowledge with them. I don’t think this was the way it always was, but I don’t have any way of knowing that. Anyway, if it is true—if Joaquin’s program helped Jennie last night, and if it helps the twins tonight as I think it might, then”—Beatriz lowered her voice even further, and Pete leaned into her so that she could barely speak the words into his ear—“then we might also be able to reach Daniel and help him heal himself.”

  Because while Joaquin had been discussing the radio show, he had been pacing beside the pilgrims’ lodge site and thus thinking about the pilgrims currently overflowing Bicho Raro. But Beatriz had been thinking about a different pilgrim: Daniel.

  Pete straightened. “It’s all right to be upset,” he told her.

  This frustrated Beatriz, who could not understand why he would say such a thing. “I’m not upset. I am telling you the facts.”

  She did not realize that both of these things could be true.

  “All right,” Pete said.

  “I’m not.”

  “I said, all right,” Pete repeated. He didn’t want to annoy her, so he hurried on. “Here’s what I think. I think you should tell Joaquin what you just told me.”

  “And if I’m wrong? Then it’s false hope.”

  Pete wasn’t much for speeches, but he’d been thinking on one sort of like this since Antonia had given him an earful before the sun had even come up. So he laid it out for her. “Well, I reckon that’s what you just told me the problem was with the pilgrims, right? There’s an awful lot of things that go on here that don’t get said. A lot of shut doors and closed eyes, just to be on the safe side. Maybe if you want things to change, you should start in yourself. Tell him what you’re thinking. You might just find that it’s already occurred to him, too. Everybody’s thinking about Daniel, aren’t they?”

  Beatriz was quiet for a long moment, processing his words. In that quiet, she could feel the prickle of an oncoming miracle, but she couldn’t tell if it was a Soria miracle or merely the potential miracle of a life-changing radio station in a box truck.

  “I think,” she said, finally, “I think you might be right.”

  In this way Beatriz left the house a slightly different person than she had entered it. This was to become a hallmark of this house once it was finished, although Pete did not know it yet. She signaled for Joaquin to leave off his pacing on the beam, and when he did, she quietly shared her hopes for the radio’s potential. Joaquin drank a bottle of water, and then he drank another one. He would have drank a fifth one, but he didn’t have one.

  Eventually, he muttered, “I feel like I need to write a really good show for tonight.”

  Pete said, “I know someone who wants to give you a hand.”

  Francisco was of two minds about Dorothy’s rooster. One of those minds hated the rooster, and the other loved it. Francisco was accustomed to working on his own by now, and he was surprised to find how pleasing it was to have the rooster as a companion. Just the presence of another living creature puttering around, living its own life alongside him, was intensely grounding in a way that he had not expected. This was only when the rooster was in a good mood, however. The rooster was also of two minds, as much as a chicken can be, because of its fighting past. It had not been bred to be a fighting rooster; it had just become one as it took on its mistress’s bitterness, and so the chicken was torn between its more placid self and the furious creature it had become. It would sink into the former quiet for hours at a time, pleasing Francisco, but then the light would change in the greenhouse, and the windows would become mirrors. Ragefully, the rooster would hurl itself at its own reflection with such vigor that it threatened to crack it. Blood would smear the glass, but it was only its own.

  Francisco had tried many things the first day: calling to the rooster, tossing pencils at the rooster, and ignoring the rooster. Francisco, after all, preferred to remain a nonparticipant in most wars, including this one. Eventually, however, he decided that he could not sit by and watch the rooster bloody itself on the glass. He felt it was cruel for an animal to harm itself in this way, and also, it was going to be a lot of work to clean all of the glass. So when the light changed as the sun set and the low windows became mirrors and the rooster began to attack itself again, Francisco climbed from his chair, pulled on the long gloves that he wore to protect himself from the roses’ thorns, and went to the rooster. The rooster was engaged in clawing the glass and did not think to run away.

  Francisco wrapped his hands around the rooster’s body, pinning its wings to it, and merely held the rooster still before the glass. The rooster was forced to stare at this other impudent bird without attacking it. The bird struggled in Francisco’s firm grip, and for several minutes, Francisco worried that the bird might actually harm itself in its fervor to escape. It clawed the air and jerked its head. Its wings were miniature earthquakes beneath Francisco’s palms as the rooster tried to free them.

  Finally, the bird stilled, panting, and gazed at itself. The roo
ster in the glass peered back as well, full of loathing. Francisco sighed and sat cross-legged, allowed the rooster to do nothing but look at the reflection. He remained as calm as he possibly could, so calm that the rooster would be able to feel this serenity and adopt it for itself, or at the very least, to prevent anger from turning to fear. Minutes became hours, but eventually, the rooster’s expression changed as it realized that the image in the glass was only itself. Its body sagged. Its eye turned wistful. The anger had gone from its body.

  Francisco released the bird, but the rooster merely slumped to the ground, still peering at itself. Dorothy would not be pleased, but Francisco was. Her rooster would never fight again.

  Francisco found, however, that he had become the opposite of calm. As he had been sitting there, holding the rooster still, he had been reminded of Daniel as a baby. Although it was not usual for men at that time to involve themselves in the care of an infant, Francisco had been given the lion’s share of dealing with young Daniel’s nightmares as Rosa, Antonia, Michael, and Nana could not soothe Daniel during them. It was impossible to say what the infant Daniel was dreaming so terribly about—possibly the memory of being hacked from his mother’s body—but one night out of every ten, he would wake in an inconsolable terror. Francisco would hold the infant, saying nothing, merely breathing, for as long as it took. Five minutes, five hours. Once, while Daniel was teething, five days. Eventually, this stillness would transfer to Daniel and the baby Daniel’s breathing would grow long and match Francisco’s. Finally, he would fall back into an unfrightened slumber.

  As Francisco held the rooster, he remembered all of the nights he had spent doing such a thing, and by the time the anger had drained from General MacArthur, Francisco found he could not bear the thought of Daniel in the desert any longer. He could contemplate nothing else. Leaving the rooster pensive on the floor, he fled through the night to the place that held more of Daniel than any other place in Bicho Raro: the Shrine.

  When he entered the Shrine, he found Antonia already there. His wife kneeled before the sculpture of Mary and her owls, all of the votive candles burning. She, too, had finally been overcome by the horror of Daniel’s plight and there was nothing she could do to avoid thinking of him, not even cutting paper flowers at her kitchen table. Wordlessly, he joined her, falling to his knees in the rut Daniel had worn in his years of praying as the Saint.