Avenue of Mysteries (67 page)

That was the last place Vargas saw Pajama Man—at the old medical school. The contortionist’s cadaver was hoisted from the acid bath to a corrugated metal gurney; the fluid in Pajama Man’s cadaver drained into
a pail through a hole in the gurney, near the contortionist’s head. On the sloped steel autopsy slab—with a deep groove running down the middle to a draining hole, also at Pajama Man’s head—the cadaver was opened. Stretched out, forever uncontorted, Pajama Man was not recognizable to the medical students, but Vargas knew the onetime contortionist.

“There is no vacancy, no absence, like the expression on a cadaver’s face,” Vargas would write to Juan Diego after the boy had moved to Iowa. “The human dreams are gone,” Vargas wrote, “but not the pain. And traces of a living person’s vanity remain. You will remember Pajama Man’s attention to sculpting his beard and trimming his mustache, which betrays the time the contortionist spent looking into a mirror—either admiring or seeking to improve his looks.”

“Sic transit gloria mundi,” as Father Alfonso and Father Octavio were fond of intoning, with solemnity.

“Thus passes the glory of this world,” as Sister Gloria was
always
reminding the orphans at Lost Children.

The Argentinian flyers were too good at their job, and too happy with each other, not to find work at another circus. Fairly recently (anything after 2001, the new century, struck Juan Diego as
recently
), Brother Pepe had heard from someone who saw them; Pepe said the Argentinian flyers were flying for a little circus in the mountains, about an hour’s drive from Mexico City. They may have since retired.

After La Maravilla went out of business, Paco and Beer Belly went to Mexico City—it was where those two dwarf clowns were from, and (according to Pepe) Beer Belly had stayed there. Beer Belly went into a different business, though Juan Diego couldn’t remember what it was—Juan Diego didn’t know if Beer Belly was still alive—and Juan Diego had a hard time imagining Beer Belly
not
being a clown. (Of course, Beer Belly would always be a dwarf.)

Paco, Juan Diego knew, had died. Like Flor, Paco couldn’t stay away from Oaxaca. Like Flor, Paco loved to hang out at the old hanging-out places. Paco had always been a regular at La China, that gay bar on Bustamante, the place that would later become Chinampa. And Paco was also a regular at La Coronita—the cross-dressers’ party place that closed, for a while, in the 1990s (when La Coronita’s owner, who was gay, died). Like Edward Bonshaw and Flor, both La Coronita’s owner and Paco would die of AIDS.

Soledad, who’d once called Juan Diego “Boy Wonder,” would long outlive La Maravilla. She was still Vargas’s patient. There’d been stress
on her joints, no doubt—as Dr. Vargas had observed of the former trapeze artist—but these joint injuries notwithstanding, Soledad was still strong. Juan Diego would remember that she’d ended her career as a catcher, which was unusual for a woman. She’d had strong enough arms and a strong enough grip for catching men who were flying through the air.

Pepe would tell Juan Diego (around the time of the dissolution of the orphanage at Lost Children) how Vargas had been one of several people Soledad mentioned as a reference when she’d adopted two of Lost Children’s orphans, a boy and a girl.

Soledad had been a wonderful mother, Pepe reported. No one was surprised. Soledad was an impressive woman—well, she could be a little
cold,
Juan Diego remembered, but he’d always admired her.

There’d been a brief scandal, but this was after Soledad’s adopted kids had grown up and left home. Soledad had found herself with a bad boyfriend; neither Pepe nor Vargas would elaborate on the
bad
word, which they’d both used to describe Soledad’s boyfriend, but Juan Diego took the word to mean
abusive.

After Ignacio, Juan Diego was surprised to hear that Soledad would have had any patience for a bad boyfriend; she didn’t strike him as the type of woman who would tolerate abuse.

As it turned out, Soledad didn’t have to put up with the bad boyfriend for very long. She came home from shopping one morning, and there he was, dead, with his head on his arms, still sitting at the kitchen table. Soledad said he’d been sitting where he was when she’d left that morning.

“He must have had a heart attack, or something,” was all Brother Pepe ever said.

Naturally, Vargas was the examining physician. “It may have been an intruder,” Vargas said. “Someone who had an ax to grind—someone with strong hands,” Dr. Vargas surmised. The bad boyfriend had been strangled while sitting at the kitchen table.

The doctor said Soledad couldn’t possibly have strangled her boyfriend. “Her hands are a wreck,” Vargas had testified. “She couldn’t squeeze the juice out of a lemon!” was how Vargas had put it.

Vargas offered the prescription painkillers Soledad was taking as evidence that the “damaged” woman couldn’t have strangled anyone. The medication was for joint pain—it was mostly for the pain in Soledad’s fingers and hands.

“Lots of damage—lots of pain,” the doctor had said.

Juan Diego didn’t doubt it—not the damage and pain part. But, looking back—remembering Soledad in the lion tamer’s tent, and the occasional glances Soledad sent in Ignacio’s direction—Juan Diego had seen something in the former trapeze artist’s eyes. There’d been nothing in Soledad’s dark eyes resembling the yellow in a lion’s eyes, but there’d definitely been something of a lioness’s unreadable intentions.

•
29
•

One Single Journey

“Cockfighting is legal here, and very popular,” Dorothy was saying. “The psycho roosters are up all night, crowing. The stupid gamecocks are psyching themselves up for their next fight.”

Well, Juan Diego thought, that might explain the psycho rooster who’d crowed before dawn that New Year’s Eve at the Encantador, but not the subsequent squawk of the rooster’s sudden and violent-sounding death—as if Miriam, by merely wishing the annoying rooster were dead, had made it happen.

At least he’d been forewarned, Juan Diego was thinking: there would be gamecocks crowing all night at the inn near Vigan. Juan Diego was interested to see what Dorothy would do about it.

“Someone should kill that rooster,” Miriam had said in her low, husky voice that night at the Encantador. Then, when the deranged rooster crowed a third time and his crowing was cut off mid-squawk, Miriam had said, “There, that does it. No more heralding of a false dawn, no more untruthful messengers.”

“And because the cocks crow all night, the dogs never stop barking,” Dorothy told him.

“It sounds very restful,” Juan Diego said. The inn was a compound of buildings, all old. The Spanish architecture was obvious; maybe the inn had once been a mission, Juan Diego was thinking—there was a church among the half-dozen guesthouses.

El Escondrijo, the inn was called—“The Hiding Place.” It was hard to discern what kind of place it was, arriving after ten o’clock at night, as they did. The other guests (if there were any) had gone to bed. The dining room was outdoors under a thatched roof, but it was open-sided,
exposed to the elements, though Dorothy promised him there were no mosquitoes.

“What kills the mosquitoes?” Juan Diego asked her.

“Bats, maybe—or the ghosts,” Dorothy answered him indifferently. The bats, Juan Diego guessed, were also up all night—neither crowing nor barking, just silently killing things. Juan Diego was somewhat accustomed to ghosts, or so he thought.

The unlikely lovers were staying on the sea; there was a breeze. Juan Diego and Dorothy were not in Vigan, or in any other town, but the lights they could see were from Vigan, and there were two or three freighters anchored offshore. They could see the lights from the freighters, and when the wind was right, they could occasionally hear the ships’ radios.

“There’s a small swimming pool—a kids’ pool, I guess you would call it,” Dorothy was saying. “You have to be careful you don’t fall in the pool at night, because they don’t light it,” she warned.

There was no air-conditioning, but Dorothy said the nights were cool enough not to need it, and there was a ceiling fan in their room; the fan made a ticking sound, but given the crowing gamecocks and barking dogs, what did a ticking fan matter? The Hiding Place was not what you would call a resort.

“The local beach is adjacent to a fishing village and an elementary school, but you hear the children’s voices only from a distance—with kids, hearing them from a distance is okay,” Dorothy was saying, as they were going to bed. “The dogs in the fishing village are territorial about the beach, but you’re safe if you walk on the wet sand—just stay close to the water,” Dorothy advised him.

What sort of people stay at El Escondrijo? Juan Diego was wondering. The Hiding Place made him think of fugitives or revolutionaries, not a touristy place. But Juan Diego was falling asleep; he was half asleep when Dorothy’s cell phone (in the vibrate mode) made a humming sound on the night table.

“What a surprise, Mother,” he heard Dorothy say sarcastically in the dark. There was a long pause, while cocks crowed and dogs barked, before Dorothy said, “Uh-huh,” a couple of times; she said, “Okay,” once or twice, too, before Juan Diego heard her say, “You’re kidding, right?” And these familiar
Dorothyisms
were followed by the way the less-than-dutiful-sounding daughter ended the call. Juan Diego heard Dorothy
tell Miriam: “You don’t want to hear what I dream about—believe me, Mother.”

Juan Diego lay awake in the darkness, thinking about this mother and her daughter; he was retracing how he’d met them—he was considering how dependent on them he’d become.

“Go to sleep, darling,” Juan Diego heard Dorothy say; it was almost exactly the way Miriam would have said the
darling
word. And the young woman’s hand, unerringly, reached for and found his penis, which she gave an ambivalent squeeze.

“Okay,” Juan Diego was trying to say, but the word wouldn’t come. Sleep overcame him, as if on Dorothy’s command.

“When I die,
don’t
burn me. Give me the whole hocus-pocus,” Lupe had said, looking straight at Father Alfonso and Father Octavio. That was what Juan Diego heard in his sleep—Lupe’s voice, instructing them.

Juan Diego didn’t hear the crowing cocks and the barking dogs; he didn’t hear the two cats fighting or fucking (or both) on the thatched roof of the outdoor shower. Juan Diego didn’t hear Dorothy get up in the night, not to pee but to open the door to the outdoor shower, where she snapped on the shower light.

“Fuck off or die,” Dorothy said sharply to the cats—they stopped yowling. She spoke more softly to the ghost she saw standing in the outdoor shower, as if the water were running—it wasn’t—and as if he were naked, though he was wearing clothes.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean
you
—I was speaking to those cats,” Dorothy told him, but the young ghost had vanished.

Juan Diego hadn’t heard Dorothy’s apology to the quickly disappearing prisoner of war—he was one of the ghost guests. The emaciated young man was gray-skinned and dressed in prison-gray garb—one of the tortured captives of the North Vietnamese. And by his haunted, guilty-looking expression—as Dorothy would later explain to Juan Diego—she’d surmised he was one of the ones who’d broken down under torture. Maybe the young P.O.W. had capitulated under pain. Perhaps he’d signed letters that said he did things he never did. Some of the young Americans had made broadcasts, reciting Communist propaganda.

It wasn’t their fault; they shouldn’t blame themselves, Dorothy always tried to tell the ghost guests at El Escondrijo, but the ghosts had a way of vanishing before you could tell them anything.

“I just want them to know they’re forgiven for whatever they did, or were forced to do,” was how Dorothy would put it to Juan Diego. “But
these young ghosts keep their own hours. They don’t listen to us—they don’t interact with us at all.”

Dorothy would also tell Juan Diego that the captured Americans who’d died in North Vietnam didn’t always dress in their gray prison garb; some of the younger ones wore their fatigues. “I don’t know if they have a choice regarding what they wear—I’ve seen them in sportswear, Hawaiian shirts and shit like that,” was the way Dorothy would put it to Juan Diego. “Nobody knows the rules for ghosts.”

Juan Diego hoped he would be spared seeing the tortured P.O.W. ghosts in their Hawaiian shirts, but his first night at the old inn on the outskirts of Vigan, the ghostly appearances of the long-dead R&R clientele at El Escondrijo were as yet unseen by Juan Diego; he slept in the contentious company of his own ghosts. Juan Diego was dreaming—in this case, it was a loud dream. (It’s no wonder Juan Diego didn’t hear Dorothy speaking to those cats or apologizing to that ghost.)

Lupe had asked for the “whole hocus-pocus,” and the Temple of the Society of Jesus had not held back. Brother Pepe did his best; he tried to persuade the two old priests to keep the service simple, but Pepe should have known there would be no restraining them. This was the Church’s bread and butter, the death of innocents—the death of children didn’t call for restraint. Lupe would get a no-holds-barred service—nothing simple about it.

Father Alfonso and Father Octavio had insisted on the open casket. Lupe was in a white dress, with a white scarf snug around her neck—hence no bite marks, no swelling, showed. (You were forced to imagine what the back of her neck must have looked like.) And there was so much incense-swinging, the unfamiliar-looking face of the broken-nosed Virgin Mary was obscured in a pungent haze. Rivera was worried about the smoke—as if Lupe were being consumed by the hellfires of the basurero, as she once would have wanted.

“Don’t worry—we’ll burn something later, like she said,” Juan Diego whispered to el jefe.

“I’ve got my eye out for a dead puppy—I’ll find one,” the dump boss answered him.

They were both disconcerted by the Hijas del Calvario—the “Daughters of Calvary,” the wailing nuns for hire.

“The professional weepers,” as Pepe called them, seemed excessive. It was enough to have Sister Gloria leading the orphaned kindergartners in their oft-rehearsed responsive prayer.