Avenue of Mysteries (45 page)

Baby, the male dachshund, peed on the dirt floor of the tent every night. Pastora, the female sheepdog, whined ceaselessly. Estrella had to sleep in the dogs’ troupe tent, or Pastora would never have been quiet—and Estrella snored. The sight of Estrella sleeping on her back, her face shadowed by the visor of her baseball cap, gave Lupe nightmares, but Estrella said she couldn’t sleep bareheaded because the mosquitoes would bite her bald head; then her head would itch and she couldn’t scratch it without removing her wig, which upset the dogs. During Perro Mestizo’s quarantine, Alemania, the female German Shepherd, stood over Juan Diego’s cot at night, panting in the boy’s face. Lupe blamed Vargas for “demonizing” Mongrel;
poor
Perro Mestizo, “always the bad guy,” was once more a victim in Lupe’s eyes.

“The asshole dog bit Señor Eduardo,” Juan Diego reminded his sister. The asshole-dog idea was Rivera’s. Lupe didn’t believe there were asshole dogs.

“Señor Eduardo was falling in love with Flor’s penis!” Lupe cried—as if this new and disturbing development had
caused
Perro Mestizo to attack the Iowan. But this meant Perro Mestizo was homophobic, and didn’t that make him an asshole dog?

Yet Juan Diego was able to persuade Lupe to stay at La Maravilla—at least until after the circus had traveled to Mexico City. The trip mattered more to Lupe than it did to Juan Diego; scattering their mother’s ashes (and the good gringo’s ashes,
and
Dirty White’s, not to mention the remains of the Virgin Mary’s enormous nose) meant a lot to Lupe. She believed Our Lady of Guadalupe had been marginalized in Oaxaca’s churches; Guadalupe was a second fiddle in Oaxaca.

Esperanza, whatever her faults, had been “bumped off” by the Mary Monster, in Lupe’s view. The clairvoyant child believed the wrongness of the religious world would right itself—if, and
only
if, her sinful mother’s ashes were scattered at the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe in Mexico City. Only there did the dark-skinned virgin, la virgen morena, draw busloads of pilgrims to her shrine. Lupe longed to see the Chapel of the Well—where Guadalupe, encased in glass, lay on her deathbed.

Even with his limp, Juan Diego looked forward to the long climb—the endless stairs leading to El Cerrito de las Rosas, the temple where Guadalupe
wasn’t
tucked away in a side altar. She was elevated at the front of the sacred El Cerrito, “The Little Hill.” (Lupe, instead of saying “El Cerrito,” liked to call the temple “Of the Roses”; she said this sounded more sacred than “The Little Hill.”) Either there or at the dark-skinned virgin’s deathbed in the Chapel of the Well, the dump kids would scatter the ashes, which they’d kept in a coffee can Rivera had found at the basurero.

The contents of the coffee can did not have Esperanza’s smell. They had a nondescript odor. Flor had sniffed the ashes; she’d said it wasn’t the good gringo’s smell, either.

“It smells like coffee,” Edward Bonshaw had said when he’d sniffed the coffee can.

Whatever the ashes smelled like, the dogs in the troupe tent weren’t interested. Maybe there was a medicinal odor; Estrella said anything that smelled like medicine would put off the dogs. Perhaps the unidentifiable smell was the Virgin Mary’s nose.

“It’s definitely not Dirty White,” was all Lupe would say about the smell; she sniffed the ashes in the coffee can every night before going to bed.

Juan Diego could never read her mind—he didn’t even try. Possibly Lupe liked to sniff the contents of the coffee can because she knew they would be scattering the ashes soon, and she wanted to remember the smell after the ashes were gone.

Shortly before Circus of The Wonder would travel to Mexico City—a long trip, especially in a caravan of trucks and buses—Lupe brought the coffee can to a dinner party they were invited to, at Dr. Vargas’s house in Oaxaca. Lupe told Juan Diego that she wanted a “scientific opinion” of the ashes’ smell.

“But it’s a dinner party, Lupe,” Juan Diego said. It was the first dinner party the dump kids had been invited to; in all likelihood, they knew, the invitation wasn’t Vargas’s idea.

Brother Pepe had discussed with Vargas what Pepe called Edward Bonshaw’s “test of the soul.” Dr. Vargas didn’t think Flor had presented the Iowan with a
spiritual
crisis. In fact, Vargas had offended Flor by suggesting to Señor Eduardo that the only reason to worry about his relationship with a transvestite prostitute might be a medical matter.

Dr. Vargas meant sexually transmitted diseases; he meant how many partners a prostitute had, and what Flor might have picked up from one of them. It didn’t matter to Vargas that Flor had a penis—or that Edward Bonshaw had one, too, and that the Iowan would have to give up his hope of becoming a priest because of it.

That Edward Bonshaw had broken his vow of celibacy didn’t matter to Dr. Vargas, either. “I just don’t want your dick to fall off—or turn green, or something,” Vargas had said to the Iowan.
That
was what offended Flor, and why she wouldn’t come to the dinner party at Casa Vargas.

In Oaxaca, anyone who had an ax to grind with Vargas called his house “Casa Vargas.” This included people who disliked him for his family wealth, or thought it was insensitive of him to have moved into his parents’ mansion after they’d been killed in a plane crash. (By now, everyone in Oaxaca knew the story of how Vargas was
supposed to
have been on that plane.) And among the people who played the “Casa Vargas” card were those who’d been offended by how
brusque
Vargas could be. He used science like a bludgeon; he was inclined to club you with a strictly medical detail—the way he’d relegated Flor to a potential sexually transmitted disease.

Well, that was Vargas—that was who he was. Brother Pepe knew him well. Pepe thought he could count on Vargas to be cynical about everything. Pepe believed the dump kids and Edward Bonshaw could benefit from some of Vargas’s cynicism. This was why Pepe had prevailed upon Vargas to invite the Iowan and the dump kids to the dinner party.

Pepe knew other scholastics who’d failed their vows. There could be doubts and detours on the road to the priesthood. When the most zealous students abandoned their studies, the emotional and psychological aspects of “reorientation,” as Pepe thought of it, could be brutal.

No doubt Edward Bonshaw had questioned whether or not he was gay, or if he was in love with this particular person who
just happened
to have breasts and a penis. No doubt Señor Eduardo had asked himself: Aren’t a lot of gay men
not
attracted to transvestites? Yet Edward Bonshaw knew that some gay men
were
attracted to trannies. But did that make him, Señor Eduardo must have wondered, a sexual minority within a minority?

Brother Pepe didn’t care about those distinctions within distinctions. Pepe had a lot of love in him. Pepe knew that the matter of the Iowan’s sexual orientation was strictly Edward Bonshaw’s business.

Brother Pepe didn’t have a problem with Señor Eduardo’s belatedly discovering his homosexual self (if that’s what was going on), or his abandoning the quest to become a priest; it was okay with Pepe that Edward Bonshaw was smitten by a cross-dresser with a penis. And Pepe didn’t dislike Flor, but Pepe had a problem with the prostitute part—not necessarily for Vargas’s sexually transmitted reasons. Pepe knew that Flor had always been in trouble; she’d lived surrounded by trouble (not everything could be blamed on Houston), while Edward Bonshaw had scarcely lived at all. What would two people like that
do
together in Iowa? For Señor Eduardo, in Pepe’s opinion, Flor was a step too far—Flor’s world was without boundaries.

As for Flor—who knew what she was thinking? “I think you’re a very nice parrot man,” Flor had said to the Iowan. “I should have met you when I was a kid,” she’d told him. “We might have helped each other get through some shit.”

Well, yes—Brother Pepe would have agreed to that. But wasn’t
now
too late for the two of them? As for Dr. Vargas—specifically, his “offending” Flor—Pepe might have put Vargas up to it. Yet no litany of sexually transmitted diseases was likely to scare Edward Bonshaw away; sexual attraction isn’t strictly scientific.

Brother Pepe had higher hopes of Vargas’s skepticism succeeding with Juan Diego and Lupe. The dump kids were disillusioned with La Maravilla—at least Lupe was. Dr. Vargas took a dim view of reading lions’ minds, as did Brother Pepe. Vargas had examined a few of the young-women acrobats; they’d been his patients, both before and after
Ignacio got his hands on them. As a performer, being The Wonder—La Maravilla herself—could kill you. (No one had survived the fall from eighty feet without a net.) Dr. Vargas knew that the girl acrobats who’d had sex with Ignacio wished they were dead.

And Vargas had admitted to Pepe, somewhat defensively, that he’d first thought the circus would be a good prospect for the dump kids because he’d envisioned that Lupe, who was a mind reader, would have no contact with Ignacio. (Lupe wouldn’t be one of Ignacio’s girl acrobats.) Now Vargas had changed his mind; what Vargas didn’t like about Lupe’s reading the lions’ minds was that this put the thirteen-year-old in contact with Ignacio.

Pepe had come full circle about the dump kids’ prospects at the circus. Brother Pepe wanted them back at Lost Children, where they would at least be
safe.
Pepe had Vargas’s support about Juan Diego’s prospects as a skywalker, too. So what if the crippled foot was permanently locked in the perfect position for skywalking? Juan Diego wasn’t an athlete; the boy’s good foot was a liability.

He’d been practicing in the acrobats’ troupe tent. The good foot had slipped out of the loops of rope in that ladder—he’d fallen a few times. And this was only the practice tent.

Lastly, there were the dump kids’ expectations about Mexico City. Juan Diego and Lupe’s pilgrimage to the basilica there was troubling to Pepe, who was
from
Mexico City. Pepe knew what a shock it could be to see Guadalupe’s shrine for the first time, and he knew the dump kids could be finicky—they were hard kids to please when it came to public expressions of religious faith. Pepe thought the dump kids had their own religion, and it struck Pepe as unfathomably personal.

Niños Perdidos would not let Edward Bonshaw
and
Brother Pepe accompany the dump kids on their trip to Mexico City; they couldn’t give their two best teachers time off together. And Señor Eduardo wanted to see the shrine to Guadalupe almost as much as the dump kids did—in Pepe’s opinion, the Iowan was as likely to be overwhelmed and disgusted by the excesses of the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe as the dump kids were. (The throngs who flocked to the Guadalupe shrine on a Saturday morning could conceivably run roughshod over anyone’s personal beliefs.)

Vargas knew the scene—the mindless, run-amok worshipers were the epitome of everything he hated. But Pepe was wrong to imagine that Dr. Vargas (or anyone else) could prepare the dump kids and Edward
Bonshaw for the hordes of pilgrims approaching the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe on the Avenue of Mysteries—“the Avenue of
Miseries,
” Pepe had heard Vargas call it, in the doctor’s blunt English. The spectacle was one los niños de la basura and the missionary had to experience themselves.

Speaking of spectacles: a dinner party at Casa Vargas was a spectacle. The life-size statues of the Spanish conquistadors, at the top and bottom of the grand staircase (and in the hall), were more intimidating than the religious sex dolls and other statuary for sale at the virgin shop on Independencia.

The menacing Spanish soldiers were very realistic; they stood guard on two floors of Vargas’s house like a conquering army. Vargas had touched nothing in his parents’ mansion. He’d lived his youth at war with his parents’ religion and politics, but he’d left their paintings and statues and family photos intact.

Vargas was a socialist and an atheist; he virtually gave away his medical services to the neediest. But the house he lived in was a reminder of his spurned parents’ rejected values. Casa Vargas did not revere Vargas’s dead parents as much as it appeared to mock them; their culture, which Vargas had rebuked, was on display, but more for the effect of ridicule than honor—or so it seemed to Pepe.

“Vargas might as well have
stuffed
his dead parents and let
them
stand guard in the family house!” Brother Pepe had forewarned Edward Bonshaw, but the Iowan was unhinged before he even arrived at the dinner party.

Señor Eduardo had not confessed his transgression with Flor to Father Alfonso or Father Octavio. The zealot persisted in seeing the people he loved as projects; they were to be reclaimed or rescued—they were never to be abandoned. Flor and Juan Diego and Lupe were the Iowan’s projects; Edward Bonshaw saw them through the eyes of a born reformer, but he did not love them less for looking upon them in this fashion. (In Pepe’s opinion, this was a complication in Señor Eduardo’s process of “reorientation.”)

Brother Pepe still shared a bathroom with the zealot. Pepe knew that Edward Bonshaw had stopped whipping himself, but Pepe could hear the Iowan crying in the bathroom, where he whipped the toilet and the sink and the bathtub instead. Señor Eduardo cried and cried, because he didn’t know how he could quit his job at Lost Children until he’d arranged to
take care of
his beloved projects.

As for Lupe, she was in no mood for a dinner party at Casa Vargas. She’d been spending all her time with Hombre and the lionesses—las señoritas, “the young ladies,” Ignacio called the three lionesses. He’d named them, each one for a body part. Cara, “face” (of a person); Garra, “paw” (with claws); Oreja, “ear” (external, the outer ear). Ignacio told Lupe he could read the lionesses’ minds by these body parts. Cara scrunched up her face when she was agitated or angry; Garra looked like she was kneading bread with her paws, her claws digging into the ground; Oreja cocked one ear askew, or she flattened both her ears.

“They can’t fool me—I know what they’re thinking. The young ladies are obvious,” the lion tamer said to Lupe. “I don’t need a mind reader for las señoritas—it’s Hombre whose thoughts are a mystery.”