Avenue of Mysteries (41 page)

Juan Diego must have looked a little foolish, touching the top of his head as he limped (just slightly) away; he was wondering where his party hat had gone, not recalling how Miriam had removed it from his head with as little wasted motion as she’d expended in taking off hers.

By the time Juan Diego had climbed the stairs to the second floor, he and Miriam could hear the karaoke music from the beach club; the music was faintly audible from the outdoor balcony of the Encantador, but not for long. The distant karaoke music couldn’t compete with the eviscerating sound of the Nocturnal Monkeys—the suddenly throbbing drum, the angrily combative guitar, the harmonica’s piteous wail (an expression of feline pain).

Juan Diego and Miriam were still outside, on the balcony—he was opening the door to his hotel room—when the lead singer, that girl from
the grave, began her lament. As the couple came inside the room and Juan Diego closed the door behind them, the sounds of the Nocturnal Monkeys were muted by the soft whir of the ceiling fan. There was another concealing sound: through the open windows—the breeze through the screens was offshore—the insipid karaoke song from the beach club was (mercifully) the only music that they could hear.

“That poor girl,” Miriam said; she meant the lead singer for the Nocturnal Monkeys. “Someone should call an ambulance—she’s either giving birth or being disemboweled.”

These were exactly the words Juan Diego was going to say before Miriam said them. How was that possible? Was she a writer, too? (If so, surely not the
same
writer.) Whatever the reason, it seemed unimportant. Lust has a way of distracting you from mysteries.

Miriam had slipped her hand into Juan Diego’s right-front pants pocket. She knew he’d already taken the Viagra tablet, and she wasn’t interested in holding his mah-jongg tile; that pretty little game block wasn’t
her
lucky charm.

“Darling,” Miriam began, as if no one had ever used that old-fashioned endearment before—as if no one had ever touched a man’s penis from inside his pants pocket.

In Juan Diego’s case, in fact, no one had touched
his
penis in this way, though he’d written a scene where such a thing happened; it unnerved him, a little, that he’d already imagined it exactly this way.

It also unnerved him that he’d forgotten the context of a conversation he’d been having with Clark. Juan Diego couldn’t remember if this had happened after or before Miriam’s gecko-stabbing arrival at their dinner table. Clark had been elaborating about a recent writing student—she sounded to Juan Diego like a protégée-in-progress, though he could tell Josefa was skeptical about her. The writing student was a “poor Leslie”—a young woman who’d suffered, somehow, and of course there was a
Catholic
context. But lust has a way of distracting you, and suddenly Juan Diego was with Miriam.

•
19
•

Boy Wonder

Across the top of the troupe tent for the young-women acrobats was a ladder bolted horizontally to two parallel two-by-fours. The rungs were loops of rope; eighteen loops ran the length of the ladder. This was where the skywalkers practiced, because the ceiling of the acrobats’ troupe tent was only twelve feet high. Even if you were hanging by your feet from the loops of rope, head down, you couldn’t kill yourself if you fell off the ladder in the troupe tent.

In the main tent, where the circus acts were performed—well, that was another matter. The exact same ladder with the eighteen rope rungs was bolted across the top of the main tent, but if you fell from that ladder, you would fall eighty feet—without a net, you would die. There was no net for the skywalk at Circo de La Maravilla.

Whether you called it Circus of The Wonder or just The Wonder, an important part of the marvel was the no-net part. Whether you meant the circus (the
whole
circus) when you said La Maravilla, or if you meant the actual
performer
when you said The Wonder—meaning La Maravilla herself—what made
her
so special had a lot to do with the no-net part.

This was on purpose, and entirely Ignacio’s doing. As a young man, the lion tamer had traveled to India and had first seen the skywalk at a circus there. That is where the lion tamer also got the idea of using children as acrobats. Ignacio acquired the no-net idea from a circus he saw in Junagadh, and from one he’d seen in Rajkot. No net, child performers, a high-risk act—the skywalk proved itself to be a real crowd-pleaser in Mexico, too. And because Juan Diego
hated
Ignacio, he had traveled to India—he wanted to see what the lion tamer had seen; he needed to know where Ignacio’s ideas came from.

The
came-from
part was a major aspect of Juan Diego’s life as a writer.
A Story Set in Motion by the Virgin Mary,
his India novel, had been about where everything “comes from”—in that novel, as in much of Juan Diego’s childhood and adolescence, a lot came from the Jesuits or the circus. Yet no novel by Juan Diego Guerrero was set in Mexico; there were no Mexican (or Mexican-American) characters in his fiction. “Real life is too sloppy a model for good fiction,” Juan Diego had said. “The good characters in novels are more fully formed than most of the people we know in our lives,” he would add. “Characters in novels are more understandable, more consistent, more predictable. No good novel is a mess; many so-called real lives are messy. In a good novel, everything important to the story comes from something or somewhere.”

Yes, his novels
came from
his childhood and adolescence—that was where his fears came from, and his imagination came from everything he feared. This
didn’t
mean he wrote about himself, or about what happened to him as a child and adolescent—he didn’t. As a writer, Juan Diego Guerrero had imagined what he feared. You could not ever know enough about where real people
came from
.

Take Ignacio, the lion tamer—his depravity, in particular. He could not be blamed on India. No doubt he’d acquired his lion-taming skills at the Indian circuses, but taming lions wasn’t an athletic ability—it definitely wasn’t acrobatic. (Lion-taming is a matter of domination; this appears to be true in the case of male
and
female lion tamers.) Ignacio had mastered how to
look
intimidating, or he had that quality before he ever went to India. With lions, of course, the intimidation part was an illusion. And whether or not the domination worked—well, that depended on the individual lion. Or the individual lionesses, in Ignacio’s case—the
female
factor.

The skywalk itself was mostly a matter of technique; for skywalkers, this entailed mastering a specific system. There was a way to do it. Ignacio had seen it, but the lion tamer wasn’t an acrobat—he’d only married one. Ignacio’s wife, Soledad, was the acrobat—or
former
acrobat. She’d been a trapeze artist, a flyer; physically, Soledad could
do
anything.

Ignacio had merely described how the skywalk
looked
; Soledad was the one who taught the young-women acrobats how to do it. Soledad had taught herself to skywalk on that safe ladder in the troupe tent; when she’d mastered it without falling, Soledad knew she could teach the girl acrobats how to do it.

At Circus of The Wonder, only young women—just the girl acrobats, of a certain age—were trained to be skywalkers (The Wonders
themselves). This was also on purpose, and entirely Ignacio’s doing. The lion tamer liked young women; he thought that prepubescent girls were the best skywalkers. Ignacio believed that if you were in the audience, you wanted to be worried about the girls falling, not thinking about them sexually; once women were old enough for you to have sexual thoughts about them—well, at least in the lion tamer’s opinion, you weren’t so worried about them dying if you could imagine having sex with them.

Naturally, Lupe had known this about the lion tamer from the moment she’d met him—Lupe could read Ignacio’s mind. That first meeting, upon the dump kids’ arrival at La Maravilla, had been Lupe’s introduction to the lion tamer’s thoughts. Lupe had never read a mind as terrible as Ignacio’s mind before.

“This is Lupe—the new fortune-teller,” Soledad was saying, introducing Lupe to the young women in the troupe tent. Lupe knew she was in foreign territory.

“Lupe prefers ‘mind reader’ to ‘fortune-teller’—she usually knows what you’re thinking, not necessarily what happens next,” Juan Diego explained. He felt insecure, adrift.

“And this is Lupe’s brother, Juan Diego—he’s the only one who can understand what she says,” Soledad continued.

Juan Diego was in a tent full of girls close to his age; a few were as young as (or younger than) Lupe, only ten or twelve, and there were a couple of fifteen- or sixteen-year-olds, but most of the girl acrobats were thirteen or fourteen. Juan Diego had never felt as self-conscious. He was not used to being around athletic girls.

A young woman hung upside down from the skywalking ladder at the apex of the troupe tent; the tops of her raw-looking bare feet, inserted in the first two rope rungs, were flexed at rigidly held right angles to her bare shins. She swung back and forth, her forward momentum never changing, as she stepped out of one rope rung, rhythmically moving ahead to the next—and, never losing her rhythm, to the next. There were sixteen steps in the skywalk, start to finish; at eighty feet, without a net, one of those sixteen steps could be your last. But the skywalker in the acrobats’ troupe tent seemed unconcerned; an insouciance attended her—she looked as relaxed as her untucked T-shirt, which she held to her chest (her wrists were crossed on her small breasts). “And
this,
” Soledad was saying, as she pointed to the upside-down skywalker, “is Dolores.” Juan Diego stared at her.

Dolores was La Maravilla of the moment; she was The Wonder in
Circus of The Wonder, if only for a fleeting half-second—Dolores would not be prepubescent for long. Juan Diego held his breath.

The young woman, who was named for “pain” and “suffering,” just kept skywalking. Her loose gym shorts revealed her long legs; her bare belly was wet with sweat. Juan Diego adored her.

“Dolores is fourteen,” Soledad said. (Fourteen going on twenty-one, as Juan Diego would long remember her.) Dolores was beautiful but bored; she seemed indifferent to the risk she was taking, or to—more dangerously—any risk. Lupe already hated her.

But the lion tamer’s thoughts were what Lupe was reciting. “The pig thinks Dolores should be fucking, not skywalking,” Lupe babbled.

“Who should she be—” Juan Diego started to ask, but Lupe wouldn’t stop babbling. She stared at Ignacio.

“
Him.
The pig wants her to fuck him—he thinks she’s done with skywalking. There’s just no other girl who’s good enough to replace her—not yet,” Lupe said. She went on to say that Ignacio believed it was a
conflict
if The Wonder gave him a hard-on; the lion tamer found it impossible to fear for a girl’s life if he also wanted to fuck her.

“Ideally, as soon as a girl gets her period, she shouldn’t be a skywalker,” Lupe elaborated. Ignacio had told all the girls that the lions knew when the girls got their periods. (Whether this was true or not, the girl acrobats believed it.) Ignacio knew when the girls had their periods because they became anxious around the lions or avoided the lions altogether.

“The pig can’t wait to fuck this girl—he thinks she’s
ready,
” Lupe said, nodding to the serene, upside-down Dolores.

“What does the skywalker think?” Juan Diego whispered to Lupe.

“I’m not reading her mind—La Maravilla has no thoughts right now,” Lupe said dismissively. “But you’re wishing you could have sex with her, too—aren’t you?” Lupe asked her brother. “Sick!” she said, before Juan Diego could answer her.

“What does the lion tamer’s wife—” Juan Diego whispered.

“Soledad knows the pig fucks the girl acrobats, when they’re ‘old enough’—she’s just sad about it,” Lupe told him.

When Dolores got to the end of the skywalk, she reached up for the ladder with both hands and allowed her long legs to hang down; her scarred bare feet were not many inches above the ground when she let go of the ladder and dropped to the dirt floor of the tent.

“Remind me,” Dolores said to Soledad. “What does the cripple
do? Something not with his feet, probably,” the superior young woman said—a goddess of bitchery, Juan Diego thought.

“Mouse tits, spoiled cunt—let the lion tamer knock her up! That’s her only future!” Lupe said. Vulgarity to this extreme was uncharacteristic of Lupe, but she was reading the minds of the other girl acrobats; Lupe’s language would coarsen at the circus. (Juan Diego didn’t translate this outburst, of course—he was smitten by Dolores.)

“Juan Diego is a translator—the brother is his sister’s interpreter,” Soledad told the proud girl. Dolores shrugged.

“Die in childbirth, monkey twat!” Lupe said to Dolores. (More mind reading—the other girl acrobats hated Dolores.)

“What did she say?” Dolores asked Juan Diego.

“Lupe was wondering if the rope rungs hurt the tops of your feet,” Juan Diego said haltingly to the skywalker. (The raw-looking scars on the tops of Dolores’s feet were obvious to anyone.)

“At first,” Dolores answered, “but you get used to it.”

“It’s good that they’re talking to each other, isn’t it?” Edward Bonshaw asked Flor. No one in the troupe tent wanted to stand next to Flor. Ignacio stood as far away from Flor as he could get—the transvestite was a lot taller and broader in the shoulders than the lion tamer.

“I guess so,” Flor said to the missionary. No one wanted to stand next to Señor Eduardo, either, but that was only because of the elephant shit on his sandals.

Flor said something to the lion tamer, and received the shortest possible reply; this brief exchange happened so quickly that Edward Bonshaw didn’t understand.

“What?” the Iowan asked Flor.

“I was asking where we might find a hose,” Flor told him.