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.