Avenue of Mysteries (66 page)

“It’ll be all right,” Lupe had repeated to Hombre, from the beginning. “Nothing’s your fault,” she’d told the lion.

That was not how the lion looked, when Juan Diego saw him sitting in a corner at the back of his cage. Hombre looked guilty. Hombre was sitting at the farthest possible distance from where Lupe lay curled in a ball—in the diagonally opposite corner of the lion’s cage. Lupe was curled up in the corner nearest the open slot for the feeding tray; her face was turned away from Juan Diego. At the time, he was grateful he’d been spared seeing Lupe’s expression. Later, Juan Diego would wish he’d seen her face—it might have spared him from imagining her expression for the rest of his life.

Hombre had killed Lupe with one bite—“a crushing bite to the back of the neck,” as Dr. Vargas would describe it after examining her body. There were no other wounds on Lupe’s body—not even a claw mark. There were scant traces of blood in the area of the bite marks on Lupe’s neck, and not a drop of Lupe’s blood anywhere in the lion’s cage. (Ignacio later said that Hombre would have licked up any blood—the lion had finished eating all the meat, too.)

After Ignacio shot Hombre—twice, in his big head—there was quite a lot of the lion’s blood in that corner of his cage, where Hombre had banished himself. Looking remorseful wouldn’t save the confused and sorrowful lion. Ignacio had taken a quick look at the placement of Lupe’s body near the open slot for the feeding tray, and at the diagonally opposite (almost submissive) position Hombre had chosen in the farthest corner of the lion’s cage. And when Juan Diego had come limping, on the run, to the lion tamer’s tent, Ignacio had brought his gun with him to the scene of the crime.

Ignacio shot Mañana because the horse had a broken leg. In Juan Diego’s opinion, Ignacio wasn’t justified in shooting Hombre. Lupe had been right: what happened wasn’t the lion’s fault. What motivated Ignacio to shoot Hombre was twofold. The lion tamer was a coward; he didn’t dare go inside Hombre’s cage after the lion had killed Lupe—not when Hombre was alive. (The tension in the lion’s cage, after Lupe was killed, was unknown territory.) And Ignacio was assuredly motivated by some macho bullshit of the “man-eater” mentality—namely, the lion tamer needed to believe that instances of humans falling victim to lions were
always
the lions’ fault.

And
of course, however misguided Lupe’s thinking was, she’d been right about everything that
would
happen if Hombre killed her. Lupe knew Ignacio would shoot Hombre—she must have known what would happen as a result of that, too.

As it turned out, Juan Diego wouldn’t fully appreciate Lupe’s foresight (her superhuman, if not divine, omniscience) until the following morning.

The day Lupe was killed, Circo de La Maravilla was overrun by those types Ignacio thought of as the “authorities.” Because the lion tamer had always seen himself as
the
authority, Ignacio did not function very well in the presence of
other
authorities—the police, and people with similarly official roles to play.

The lion tamer was curt with Juan Diego when the boy told him that Lupe had fed the lionesses before she fed Hombre. Juan Diego knew this, because he figured that Lupe would have thought
no one
would feed the lionesses that day if she didn’t.

Juan Diego also knew this because he’d gone to have a look at the lionesses after Lupe and Hombre were killed. The night before, Lupe had unlocked the slot for the feeding tray in the cage for the lionesses, too. She must have fed the lionesses the usual way; then she’d pulled the feeding tray entirely out, leaving it leaning against the outside of the lionesses’ cage, exactly the way she’d left the feeding tray to Hombre’s cage.

Besides, the lionesses
looked
as if they’d been fed; “las señoritas,” as Ignacio called them, were just lying around at the back of their cage and had simply stared at Juan Diego in their unreadable way.

Ignacio’s response to Juan Diego made the boy feel it didn’t matter to the lion tamer whether Lupe had fed the lionesses before she died, or not, but it
did
matter, as things would turn out. It mattered a lot. It meant that no one else had to feed the lionesses on the day Lupe and Hombre were killed.

Juan Diego even tried to give Ignacio the two keys to the slots in the lion cages for the feeding trays, but Ignacio didn’t want the keys. “Keep them—I got my own keys,” the lion tamer told him.

Naturally, Brother Pepe and Edward Bonshaw hadn’t allowed Juan Diego to spend another night in the dogs’ troupe tent. Pepe and Señor Eduardo had helped Juan Diego pack his things, together with Lupe’s few things—namely, her clothes. (Lupe had no keepsakes; she didn’t miss her Coatlicue figurine, not since Mary’s new nose.)

In the hasty move from La Maravilla to Lost Children, Juan Diego would lose the lid to the coffee can that had held the nose-inspiring ashes, but that night he slept in his old room at Lost Children, and he went to bed with Lupe’s lanyard around his neck. He could feel the two keys to the lion cages; in the dark, he squeezed the keys between his thumb and index finger before he fell asleep. Next to him, in the small bed Lupe used to sleep in, the parrot man watched over him—that is, when the Iowan wasn’t snoring.

Boys dream of being heroes; after Juan Diego lost Lupe, he wouldn’t have those dreams. He knew his sister had sought to save him; he knew he’d failed to save her. An aura of fate had marked him—even at fourteen, Juan Diego knew this, too.

The morning after he lost Lupe, Juan Diego woke to the sound of children chanting—the kindergartners were repeating Sister Gloria’s responsive prayer. “Ahora y siempre,” the kindergartners recited. “Now and forever”—not this, not for the rest of my life, Juan Diego was thinking; he was awake, but he kept his eyes closed. Juan Diego didn’t want to see his old room at Lost Children; he didn’t want to see Lupe’s small bed, with no one (or perhaps the parrot man) in it.

That next morning, Lupe’s body would have been with Dr. Vargas. Father Alfonso and Father Octavio had already asked Vargas for a viewing of the child’s body; the two old priests wanted to bring one of the nuns from Lost Children with them to Cruz Roja. There were questions about how Lupe’s body should be dressed, and—given the lion bite—whether or not an open casket was advisable. (Brother Pepe had said he couldn’t do it—that is,
view
Lupe’s body. That was why the two old priests asked Vargas for a viewing.)

That morning, as far as anyone at La Maravilla knew—except for Ignacio, who knew differently—Dolores had simply run away. It was the talk of the circus, how The Wonder herself had just disappeared; it seemed so unlikely that no one had seen her in Oaxaca. A pretty girl like that, with long legs like hers, couldn’t just vanish from sight, could she?

Maybe only Ignacio knew that Dolores was in Guadalajara; maybe the amateur abortion had already occurred, and the peritoneal infection was just developing. Perhaps Dolores believed she would recover soon, and she’d started her return trip to Oaxaca.

That morning, at Lost Children, Edward Bonshaw must have had a lot on his mind. He had a huge confession to make to Father Alfonso and Father Octavio—not the kind of confession the two old priests were
used to. And Señor Eduardo knew he needed the Church’s help. The scholastic had not only forsaken his vows; the Iowan was a gay man in love with a transvestite.

How could two such people hope to adopt an orphan? Why would anyone allow Edward Bonshaw and Flor to be legal guardians of Juan Diego? (Señor Eduardo didn’t just need the Church’s
help
; he needed the Church to bend the rules, more than a little.)

That morning, at La Maravilla, Ignacio knew he had to feed the lionesses himself. Who could the lion tamer have persuaded to do it for him? Soledad wasn’t speaking to him, and Ignacio had managed to make the girl acrobats afraid of the lions; his bullshit about the lions
sensing
when the girls got their periods had scared the young acrobats away. Even before Hombre killed Lupe, the girls were frightened—even of the lionesses.

“It’s the lionesses the lion tamer should be afraid of,” Lupe had predicted.

That morning, the day after Ignacio shot and killed Hombre, the lion tamer must have made a mistake when he was feeding the lionesses. “They can’t fool me—I know what they’re thinking,” Ignacio had bragged about the lionesses. “The young ladies are obvious,” the lion tamer had told Lupe. “I don’t need a mind reader for las señoritas.”

Ignacio had told Lupe he could read the lionesses’ minds by the body parts they were named for.

That morning, the lionesses must not have been as easy to read as the lion tamer once thought. According to studies of lions in the Serengeti, as Vargas would later impart to Juan Diego, lionesses are responsible for the majority of the kills. Lionesses know how to hunt as a team; when stalking a herd of wildebeest or zebra, they encircle the herd, cutting off any escape routes, before they attack.

When the dump kids had just met Hombre for the first time, Flor whispered to Edward Bonshaw: “If you think you just saw the king of beasts, think again. You’re about to meet him now. Ignacio is the king of beasts.”

“The king of
pigs,
” Lupe had suddenly said.

As for those statistics from the Serengeti, or other studies of lions, the only part the king of
pigs
might have understood was what took place in the wild after the lionesses had killed their prey. That was when the male lions asserted their dominance—they ate their fill before the lionesses
were allowed to eat their share. Juan Diego was sure the king of
pigs
would have been okay with that.

That morning, no one saw what happened to Ignacio when he was feeding the lionesses, but lionesses know how to be patient; lionesses have learned to wait their turn. Las señoritas—Ignacio’s young ladies—would have their turn. That morning, the beginning of the end of La Maravilla would be complete.

Paco and Beer Belly were the first to find the lion tamer’s body; the dwarf clowns were waddling along the avenue of troupe tents, on their way to the outdoor showers. They must have wondered how it was possible that the lionesses could have killed Ignacio when his mangled body was outside their cage. But anyone familiar with how lionesses work could figure it out, and Dr. Vargas (naturally, Vargas was the one who examined Ignacio’s body) had little difficulty reconstructing a likely sequence of events.

As a novelist, when Juan Diego talked about plot—specifically, how he approached plotting a novel—he liked to talk about the “teamwork of lionesses” as “an early model.” In interviews, Juan Diego would begin by saying that no one saw what happened to the lion tamer; he would then say that he never tired of reconstructing a likely sequence of events, which was at least partially responsible for his becoming a novelist. And if you add together what happened to Ignacio with what Lupe might have been thinking—well, you can see what could have fueled the dump reader’s imagination, can’t you?

Ignacio put the meat for the lionesses on the feeding tray, as usual. He slid the feeding tray into the open slot in the cage, as usual. Then something unusual must have happened.

Vargas couldn’t restrain himself from describing the extraordinary number of claw wounds on Ignacio’s arms, his shoulders, the back of his neck; one of the lionesses had grabbed him first—then other paws, with claws, took hold of him. The lionesses must have hugged him close to the bars of their cage.

Vargas said the lion tamer’s nose was gone, as were his ears, both cheeks, his chin; Vargas said the fingers of both hands were gone—the lionesses had overlooked one thumb. What killed Ignacio, Vargas said, was a suffocating throat bite—what the doctor described as a “messy one.”

“This was no clean kill,” as Vargas would put it. He explained that a lioness could kill a wildebeest or a zebra with a single suffocating throat
bite, but the bars of the cage were too close together; the lioness who eventually killed Ignacio with a suffocating throat bite couldn’t fit her head between the bars—she didn’t get to open her jaws as widely as she wanted to before she got a good grip on the lion tamer’s throat. (This was why Vargas used the
messy
word to describe the lethal bite.)

After the fact, the “authorities” (as Ignacio thought of them) would investigate the wrongdoings at La Maravilla. That was what always happened after a fatal accident at a circus—the experts arrived and told you what you were doing wrong. (The experts said the amount of meat that Ignacio was feeding the lions was wrong; the number of times the lions were fed was also wrong.)

Who cares? Juan Diego would think; he couldn’t remember what the experts said would have been the
correct
number of times or the
right
amount. What was wrong with La Maravilla had been what was wrong with Ignacio himself. The
lion tamer
had been wrong! In the end, no one at La Maravilla needed experts to tell them that.

In the end, Juan Diego would think, what Ignacio saw were those gathering yellow eyes—the final looks, less than fond, from his señoritas—the unforgiving eyes of the lion tamer’s last young ladies.

T
HERE
’
S A POSTSCRIPT TO
every circus that goes under. Where do the performers go when a circus goes out of business? The Wonder herself, we know, went out of business fairly soon. But we also know, don’t we, that the other performers at La Maravilla couldn’t do what Dolores did? As Juan Diego had discovered, not everyone could be a skywalker.

Estrella would find homes for the dogs. Well, no one wanted the mongrel; Estrella had to take him. As Lupe had said, Perro Mestizo was always the bad guy.

And no other circus had wanted Pajama Man; his vanity preceded him. For a while, on the weekends, the contortionist could be seen contorting himself for the tourists in the zócalo.

Dr. Vargas would later say he was sorry the medical school had moved. The new medical school, which is opposite a public hospital, away from the center of town, is nowhere near the morgue and the Red Cross hospital, Vargas’s old stomping grounds—where the old medical school was, when Vargas still taught there.