Avenue of Mysteries (60 page)

“It’s just the salt water, and because you’ve been having a lot of sex,” Dorothy told him. She seemed to know more about his penis than Juan Diego did. And the stinging soon stopped. (It was more like
tingling
than stinging, truthfully.) Juan Diego wasn’t under attack from those stinging
things—the plankton that looked like condoms for three-year-olds. There were no upright-swimming index fingers—those stinging pink things, swimming vertically, like sea horses, the jellyfish he’d heard about only from Dorothy and Clark.

As for Clark, Juan Diego started getting inquiring text messages from his former student before he and Dorothy left El Nido and Lagen Island.

“D. is STILL with you, isn’t she?” the first such text message from Clark inquired.

“What should I tell him?” Juan Diego asked Dorothy.

“Oh, Leslie is texting Clark, too—is she?” Dorothy had asked. “I’m just not answering her. You would think Leslie and I had been going steady, or something.”

But Clark French kept texting his former teacher. “As far as poor Leslie knows, D. has just DISAPPEARED. Leslie was expecting D. to meet her in Manila. But poor Leslie is suspicious—she knows you know D. What do I tell her?”

“Tell Clark we’re leaving for Laoag. Leslie will know where that is. Everyone knows where Laoag is. Don’t get more specific,” Dorothy told Juan Diego.

But when Juan Diego did exactly that—when he sent Clark a text that he was “off to Laoag with D.”—he heard back from his former student almost immediately.

“D. is fucking you, isn’t she? You understand: I’m not the one who wants to know!” Clark texted him. “Poor Leslie is asking ME. What do I tell her?”

Dorothy saw his consternation as he stared at his cell phone. “Leslie is a very possessive person,” Dorothy said to Juan Diego, without needing to ask him if the text was from Clark. “We have to let Leslie know she doesn’t
own
us. This is all because your former student is too uptight to fuck her, and Leslie knows her tits won’t stay perky forever, or something.”

“You want me to blow off your bossy girlfriend?” Juan Diego asked Dorothy.

“I guess you’ve never had to blow off a bossy girlfriend,” Dorothy said; without waiting for Juan Diego to admit that he hadn’t
had
a bossy girlfriend—or many other kinds of girlfriends—Dorothy told him how he should handle the situation.

“We have to show Leslie that she doesn’t have an emotional ball-and-chain effect on us,” Dorothy began. “Here’s what you say to Clark—
he’ll tell Leslie everything. One: Why shouldn’t D. and I do it? Two: Leslie and D. did it, didn’t they? Three: How are those boys doing—that one kid’s poor penis, especially? Four: Want us to say hi to the water buffalo for the whole family?”

“That’s what I should say?” Juan Diego asked Dorothy. She really
did
know a lot, he was thinking.

“Just send it,” Dorothy told him. “Leslie needs to be blown off—she’s begging for it.
Now
you can say you’ve had a bossy girlfriend. Fun, huh?” Dorothy asked him.

He sent the text, per Dorothy’s instructions. Juan Diego was aware he was blowing off Clark, too. He was having fun, all right; in fact, he couldn’t remember when he’d had this much fun—the quickly passing stinging sensation in his penis notwithstanding.

“How is
this guy
doing?” Dorothy then asked him, touching his penis. “Still stinging? Still
tingling
a tiny bit, maybe? Want to make this guy tingle some more?” Dorothy asked him.

He could barely manage to nod his head, he was so tired. Juan Diego was still staring at his cell phone, thinking about the uncharacteristic text message he’d sent to Clark.

“Don’t worry,” Dorothy was whispering to him; she kept touching his penis. “You look a little tired, but not
this guy,
” she whispered. “
He
doesn’t get tired.”

Dorothy now took his phone away from him. “Don’t worry, darling,” she said to him in a more commanding fashion than before—the
darling
word impossibly sounding the way it had when Miriam had said it. “Leslie won’t bother us again. Trust me: she’ll get the message. Your friend Clark French does everything she wants—except fuck her.”

Juan Diego wanted to ask Dorothy about their trip to Laoag and Vigan, but he couldn’t form the words. He couldn’t possibly have expressed to Dorothy his doubts about going there. Dorothy had decided
—because
Juan Diego was an American, and one of the Vietnam generation—that he should at least
see
where those young Americans, those frightened nineteen-year-olds who were so afraid of being
tortured,
went to get away from the war (when, or if, they could manage to get away from it).

Juan Diego had meant to ask Dorothy, too, where exactly the doctrinaire certainty of her opinions came from—you know how Juan Diego was always wondering where everything
came from
—but he’d been unable to summon the strength to question the autocratic young woman.

Dorothy disapproved of the Japanese tourists at El Nido; she disliked how the resort catered to the Japanese, pointing out that there was Japanese food on the menu.

“But we’re very near to Japan,” Juan Diego reminded her. “And other people like Japanese food—”

“After what Japan
did
to the Philippines?” Dorothy asked him.

“Well, the war—” Juan Diego had started to say.

“Wait till you see the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial—if you actually end up seeing it,” Dorothy said dismissively. “The Japanese shouldn’t come to the Philippines.”

And Dorothy pointed out that the Australians outnumbered all the other white people in the dining hall at El Nido. “Wherever they go, they go as a group—they’re a gang,” she said.

“You don’t like Australians?” Juan Diego asked her. “They’re so friendly—they’re just naturally gregarious.” This was greeted by Dorothy’s Lupe-like shrug.

Dorothy might as well have said: If you don’t
understand,
I couldn’t possibly have any success in
explaining
it to you.

There were two Russian families at El Nido, and some Germans, too. “There are Germans
everywhere,
” was all Dorothy said.

“They’re big travelers, aren’t they?” Juan Diego had asked her.

“They’re big
conquerors,
” Dorothy had said, rolling her dark eyes.

“But you like the food here—at El Nido. You said the food is good,” Juan Diego reminded her.

“Rice is rice,” was all Dorothy would say—as if she’d never said the food was good. Yet, when Dorothy was in a
this-guy
mood, her focus was impressive.

Their last night at El Nido, Juan Diego woke with the moonlight reflecting off the lagoon; their earlier, intense attention to “this guy” must have distracted them from closing the curtains. The way the silvery light fell across the bed and illuminated Dorothy’s face was a little eerie. Asleep, there was something as lifeless as a statue about her—as if Dorothy were a mannequin who, only occasionally, sprang to life.

Juan Diego leaned over her in the moonlight, putting his ear close to her lips. He could not feel the breath escaping her mouth and nose, nor did her breasts—lightly covered by the sheets—appear to rise and fall.

For a moment, Juan Diego imagined he could hear Sister Gloria saying, as she once had: “I don’t want to hear another word about Our Lady of Guadalupe
lying down.
” For a moment, it was as if Juan Diego were
lying next to the sex-doll likeness of Our Lady of Guadalupe—the gift the good gringo had given him, from that virgin shop in Oaxaca—and Juan Diego had finally managed to saw the pedestal off the mannequin’s imprisoned feet.

“Is there something you’re expecting me to say?” Dorothy whispered in his ear, startling him. “Or maybe you were thinking of going down on me, and waking me up that way,” the young woman indifferently said.

“Who are you?” Juan Diego asked her. But he could see in the silvery moonlight that Dorothy had fallen back to sleep, or she was pretending to be asleep—or else he’d only imagined her speaking to him,
and
what he’d asked her.

T
HE SUN WAS SETTING
; it lingered long enough to cast a coppery glow over the South China Sea. Their little plane from Palawan flew on, toward Manila. Juan Diego was remembering the goodbye look Dorothy gave to that tourist-weary water buffalo at the airport, as they were leaving.

“That’s a water buffalo on beta-blockers,” Juan Diego had remarked. “The poor thing.”

“Yeah, well—you should see him when there’s a caterpillar up his nose,” Dorothy had said, once more giving the water buffalo the evil eye.

The sun was gone. The sky was the color of a bruise. By the far-apart, twinkling lights onshore, Juan Diego could tell they were flying over ground—the sea was now behind them. Juan Diego was staring out the plane’s little window when he felt Dorothy’s heavy head make contact with his shoulder and the side of his neck; her head felt as solid as a cannonball.

“What you will see, in about fifteen minutes, are the city lights,” Dorothy told him. “What comes first is an unlit darkness.”

“An unlit darkness?” Juan Diego asked her; his voice sounded alarmed.

“Except for the occasional ship,” she answered him. “The darkness is Manila Bay,” Dorothy explained. “First the bay, then the lights.”

Was it Dorothy’s voice or the weight of her head that was putting him to sleep? Or did Juan Diego feel the unlit darkness beckoning?

The head that rested on him was Lupe’s, not Dorothy’s; he was on a bus, not a plane; the mountain road that snaked by in the darkness was somewhere in the Sierra Madre—the circus was returning to Oaxaca from Mexico City. Lupe slept as heavily against him as an undreaming
dog; her little fingers had loosened their grip on the two religious totems she’d been playing with, before she fell asleep.

Juan Diego was holding the coffee can with the ashes—he didn’t let Lupe pinch it between her knees when she was sleeping. With her hideous Coatlicue statuette and the Guadalupe figurine—the one Juan Diego had found on the stairs, descending from El Cerrito—Lupe had been waging a war between superheroes. Lupe made the two action figures knock heads, exchange kicks, have sex; the serene-looking Guadalupe seemed an unlikely winner, and one look at Coatlicue’s rattlesnake-rattle nipples (or her skirt of serpents) left little doubt that, between the two combatants, she was the representative from the Underworld.

Juan Diego had let his sister act out the religious war within her in this childish superhero battle. The saintly-looking Guadalupe figurine at first appeared overmatched; she held her hands in a prayerful position, above the small but discernible swell of her belly. Guadalupe didn’t have a fighter’s stance, whereas Coatlicue looked as poised to strike as one of her writhing snakes, and Coatlicue’s flaccid breasts were scary. (Even a starving infant would have been turned off by those rattlesnake-rattle nipples!)

Yet Lupe engaged the two action figures in a variety of emotionally charged activities: the fighting and fucking were equally intermixed, and there were moments of apparent tenderness between the two warriors—even kissing.

When Juan Diego observed Guadalupe and Coatlicue
kissing,
he asked Lupe if this represented a kind of truce between the fighters—a putting aside of their religious differences. After all, couldn’t kissing mean making up?

“They’re just taking a break,” was all Lupe said, recommencing the more violent, nonstop action between the two totems—more fighting and fucking—until Lupe was exhausted and fell asleep.

As far as Juan Diego could tell, looking at Guadalupe and Coatlicue in the loosening fingers of Lupe’s small hands, nothing had been settled between the two bitches. How could a violent mother-earth goddess coexist with one of those know-it-all, do-nothing virgins? Juan Diego was thinking. He didn’t know that, across the aisle of the darkened bus, Edward Bonshaw was watching him when he gently took the two religious figurines from his sleeping sister’s hands.

Someone on the bus had been farting—one of the dogs, maybe; the
parrot man, perhaps; Paco and Beer Belly, definitely. (The two dwarf clowns drank a lot of beer.) Juan Diego had already opened the bus window beside him, just a crack. The gap was sufficient for him to slip the two superheroes through the opening. Somewhere, one everlasting night—on a winding road through the Sierra Madre—two formidable religious figures were left to fend for themselves in the unlit darkness.

What now—what
next
? Juan Diego was thinking, when Señor Eduardo spoke to him from across the aisle.

“You are not alone, Juan Diego,” the Iowan said. “If you reject one belief and then another, still you aren’t alone—the universe isn’t a godless place.”

“What now—what
next
?” Juan Diego asked him.

A dog with an inquiring look walked between them in the aisle of the circus bus; it was Pastora, the sheepdog—she wagged her tail, as if Juan Diego had spoken to her, and walked on.

Edward Bonshaw began babbling about the Temple of the Society of Jesus—he meant the one in Oaxaca. Señor Eduardo wanted Juan Diego to consider scattering Esperanza’s ashes at the feet of the giant Virgin Mary there.

“The Mary Monster—” Juan Diego started to say.

“Okay—maybe not
all
the ashes, and only at her
feet
!” the Iowan quickly said. “I know you and Lupe have
issues
with the Virgin Mary, but your mother
adored
her.”

“The Mary Monster
killed
our mother,” Juan Diego reminded Señor Eduardo.

“I think you’re interpreting an accident in a dogmatic fashion,” Edward Bonshaw cautioned him. “Perhaps Lupe is more open to revisiting the Virgin Mary—the Mary Monster, as you call her.”

Pastora, pacing, passed between them in the aisle again. The restless dog reminded Juan Diego of himself, and of the way Lupe had been behaving lately—uncharacteristically unsure of herself, perhaps, but also secretive.