Avenue of Mysteries (24 page)

Through his snores, the gutteral-sounding verse of “Streets of Laredo” seemed to emanate from el gringo bueno—like his smell.

“Oh, beat the drum slowly and play the fife lowly,

Play the dead march as you carry me along;

Take me to the valley, and lay the sod o’er me,

For I’m a young cowboy and I know I’ve done wrong.”

Lupe wet a washcloth and wiped the salty crust off the hippie boy’s lips and face. She meant to cover him with his shirt; she didn’t want to see his Bleeding Jesus in the middle of the night. But when Lupe smelled the gringo’s shirt, she said it smelled like mescal or beer puke, or like the dead worm—she just pulled the sheet up to the young American’s chin and made some effort to tuck him in.

The hippie boy was tall and thin, and his long arms—with Christ’s mangled wrists and hands imprinted on them—lay at his sides, outside the bedsheet. “What if he dies in the room with us?” Lupe asked Juan Diego. “What happens to your soul if you die in someone else’s room in a foreign country? How can the gringo’s soul get back home?”

“Jesus,” Juan Diego said.

“Leave Jesus out of it. We’re the ones who are responsible for him. What do we do if the hippie boy dies?” Lupe asked.

“Burn him at the basurero. Rivera will help us,” Juan Diego said. He didn’t really mean it—he was just trying to get Lupe to go to bed. “The good gringo’s soul will escape with the smoke.”

“Okay, we have a plan,” Lupe said. When she got into Juan Diego’s bed, she was wearing more clothes than she usually slept in. Lupe said she wanted to be “modestly dressed” with the hippie boy in their bedroom. She wanted Juan Diego to sleep on the side of the bed nearest the gringo; Lupe didn’t want the sight of the Agonizing Christ to startle her in the night. “I hope you’re working on the miracle story,” she said to her brother, turning her back to him in the narrow bed. “Nobody’s going to believe that tattoo is a milagro.”

Juan Diego would be awake half the night, rehearsing how he would present the lost American’s Bleeding Christ tattoo as an overnight miracle. Just before he finally fell sleep, Juan Diego realized that Lupe was still awake, too. “I would marry this hippie boy, if he smelled better and stopped singing that cowboy song,” Lupe said.

“You’re thirteen,” Juan Diego reminded his little sister.

In his mescal stupor, el gringo bueno could manage no more than the first two lines of the first verse of “Streets of Laredo”; the way the song just petered out almost made the dump kids wish the good gringo would keep singing.

As I walked out in the streets of Laredo

As I walked out in Laredo one day—

“You’re
thirteen,
Lupe,” Juan Diego repeated, more insistently.

“I mean later, when I’m older
—if
I get older,” Lupe said. “I am beginning to have breasts, but they’re very small. I know they’re supposed to get bigger.”

“What do you mean,
if
you get older?” Juan Diego asked his sister. They lay in the dark with their backs turned to each other, but Juan Diego could feel Lupe shrug beside him.

“I don’t think the good gringo and I get much older,” she told him.

“You don’t
know
that, Lupe,” Juan Diego said.

“I know my breasts don’t get any bigger,” Lupe told him.

Juan Diego would be awake a little longer, just thinking about this. He knew Lupe was usually right about the past; he fell asleep with the half-comforting knowledge that his sister didn’t do the future as accurately.

•
13
•

Now and Forever

What happened to Juan Diego with the bomb-sniffing dogs at the Makati Shangri-La can be calmly and rationally explained, though what transpired developed quickly, and in the panic-stricken eyes of the hotel doorman and the Shangri-La security guards—the latter instantly lost control of the two dogs—there was nothing calm or rational attending the arrival of the Distinguished Guest. Such was the lofty-sounding designation attached to Juan Diego Guerrero’s name at the hotel registration desk:
Distinguished Guest.
Oh, that Clark French—Juan Diego’s former student had been busy, asserting himself.

There’d been an upgrade to the Mexican-American novelist’s room; special amenities, one of which was unusual, had been arranged. And the hotel management had been warned not to call Mr. Guerrero a Mexican American. Yet you wouldn’t have known that the natty hotel manager himself was hovering around the registration desk, waiting to confer celebrity status on the weary Juan Diego—that is, not if you witnessed the writer’s rude reception at the driveway entrance to the Shangri-La. Alas, Clark wasn’t on hand to welcome his former teacher.

As they pulled into the driveway, Bienvenido could see in the rearview mirror that his esteemed client was asleep; the driver tried to wave off the doorman, who was hurrying to open the rear door of the limo. Bienvenido saw that Juan Diego was slumped against this same rear door; the driver quickly opened his own door and stepped into the hotel entranceway, waving both arms.

Who knew that bomb-sniffing dogs were agitated by arm-waving? The two dogs lunged at Bienvenido, who raised both arms above his head, as if the security guards held him at gunpoint. And when the hotel doorman opened the limo’s rear door, Juan Diego, who appeared to be
dead, began to fall out of the car. A falling dead man further excited the bomb-sniffing dogs; both of them bounded into the limo’s backseat, wresting the leather handles of their dog harnesses from the security guards’ hands.

The seat belt kept Juan Diego from falling entirely out of the car; he was suddenly jerked awake, his head lolling in and out of the limo. There was a dog in his lap, licking his face; it was a medium-size dog, a small male Labrador or a female Lab, actually a Lab mix, with a Lab’s soft, floppy ears and warm, wide-apart eyes.

“Beatrice!” Juan Diego cried. One can only imagine what he’d been dreaming about, but when Juan Diego cried out a woman’s name, a
female
name, the Lab mix, who was male, looked puzzled—his name was James. And Juan Diego’s crying out “Beatrice!” utterly unnerved the doorman, who’d presumed the arriving guest was dead. The doorman screamed.

Evidently, the bomb-sniffing dogs were predisposed to become aggressive when there was screaming. James (who was in Juan Diego’s lap) sought to protect Juan Diego by growling at the doorman, but Juan Diego had not noticed the
other
dog; he didn’t know there was a second dog seated next to him. This was one of those nervous-looking dogs with perky, stand-up ears and a shaggy, bristling coat; it was not a purebred German shepherd but a shepherd mix, and when this savagesounding dog began to bark (in Juan Diego’s ear), the writer must have imagined he was sitting beside a
rooftop
dog, and that Lupe might have been right: some rooftop dogs were ghosts. The shepherd mix had one wonky eye; it was a greenish yellow, and the wonky eye’s unsteady focus was not aligned with the dog’s good eye. The mismatched eye was further evidence to Juan Diego that the trembling dog next to him was a rooftop dog
and
a ghost; the crippled writer unbuckled his seat belt and tried to get out of the car—a difficult task with James (the Lab mix) in his lap.

And, just then, both dogs thrust their muzzles into the general vicinity of Juan Diego’s crotch; they pinned him to his seat—they were intently
sniffing.
Since the dogs were allegedly trained to sniff
bombs,
this got the attention of the security guards. “Hold it right there,” one of them said ambiguously—to either Juan Diego or the dogs.

“Dogs love me,” Juan Diego proudly announced. “I was a dump kid—un niño de la basura,” he tried to explain to the security guards; the two of them were fixated on the unsteady-looking man’s custom-made shoe. What the handicapped gentleman was saying made no sense to the
guards. (“My sister and I tried to look after the dogs in the basurero. If the dogs died, we tried to burn them before the vultures got to them.”)

And here was the problem with the only two ways Juan Diego could limp: either he led with the lame foot at that crazy two-o’clock angle, in which case the jolt of his limp was the first thing you saw, or he started out on his good foot and dragged the bad one behind—in either case, the two-o’clock foot and that misshapen shoe drew your attention.

“Hold it right there!” the first security guard commanded again; both the way he raised his voice and how he pointed at Juan Diego made it clear he wasn’t speaking to the dogs. Juan Diego froze, mid-limp.

Who knew that bomb-sniffing dogs didn’t like it when people did that freezing thing and held themselves unnaturally still? The bomb-sniffers, both James and the shepherd mix, their noses now prodding Juan Diego in the area of his hip—more specifically, at the coat pocket of his sport jacket, where he’d put the paper napkin with the uneaten remains of his green-tea muffin—suddenly stiffened.

Juan Diego was trying to remember a recent terrorist incident—where was it, in Mindanao? Wasn’t that the southernmost island of the Philippines, the one nearest Indonesia? Wasn’t there a sizable Muslim population in Mindanao? Hadn’t there been a suicide bomber who’d strapped explosives to one of his legs? Before the explosion, all anyone had noticed was the bomber’s limp.

This doesn’t look good, Bienvenido was thinking. The driver left the orange albatross of a bag with the cowardly doorman, who was still recovering from the conviction that Juan Diego was a dead person come back to life with a zombie-like limp and calling out a woman’s name. The young limo driver went inside the hotel to the registration desk, where he told them they were about to shoot their Distinguished Guest.

“Call off the untrained dogs,” Bienvenido told the hotel manager. “Your security guards are poised to kill a crippled writer.”

The misunderstanding was soon sorted out; Clark French had even prepared the hotel for Juan Diego’s early arrival. Most important to Juan Diego was that the dogs be forgiven; the green-tea muffin had misled the bomb-sniffers. “Don’t blame the dogs,” was how Juan Diego put it to the hotel manager. “They are perfect dogs—promise me they won’t be mistreated.”

“Mistreated? No, sir—never mistreated!” the manager declared. It’s unlikely that a Distinguished Guest of the Makati Shangri-La had been such an advocate of the bomb-sniffing dogs before. The manager himself
showed Juan Diego to his room. The amenities provided by the hotel included a fruit basket and the standard platter of crackers and cheese; the ice bucket with four bottles of beer (instead of the usual Champagne) had been the idea of Juan Diego’s devoted former student, who knew that his beloved teacher drank only beer.

Clark French was also one of Juan Diego’s doting readers, though Clark was surely better known in Manila as an American writer who’d married a Filipino woman. At a glance, Juan Diego knew, the giant aquarium had been Clark’s idea. Clark French loved to give his former teacher gifts that demonstrated the younger writer’s zeal for commemorating highlights from Juan Diego’s novels. In one of Juan Diego’s earliest efforts—a novel almost no one had read—the main character is a man with a defective urinary tract. His girlfriend has a huge fish tank in her bedroom; the sights and sounds of the exotic underwater life have an unsettling effect on the man, whose urethra is described as “a narrow, winding road.”

Juan Diego had an enduring fondness for Clark French, a diehard reader who retained the most specific details—details of the kind writers generally remembered only in their own work. Yet Clark didn’t always recall how these same details were intended to affect the reader. In Juan Diego’s urinary-tract novel, the main character is greatly disturbed by the underwater dramas forever unfolding in his girlfriend’s bedside aquarium; the fish keep him awake.

The hotel manager explained that the overnight loan of the lighted, gurgling fish tank was the gift of Clark French’s Filipino family; an aunt of Clark’s wife owned a store for exotic pets in Makati City. The aquarium had been too heavy for any table in the hotel room, so it stood immovably on the floor of the bedroom, beside the bed. The tank was half as tall as the bed, an imposing rectangle of sinister-looking activity. A welcoming note from Clark had accompanied the aquarium:
Familiar details will help you sleep!

“They are all creatures from our own South China Sea,” the hotel manager remarked warily. “Don’t feed them. For one night, they can go without eating—so I’m told.”

“I see,” Juan Diego said. He didn’t see, at all, how Clark—or the Filipino aunt who owned the store for exotic pets—could have imagined anyone would find the aquarium
restful.
It held over sixty gallons of water, the aunt had said; after dark, the green underwater light would surely seem greener (not to mention, brighter). Small fish, too fast to
describe, darted furtively in the upper reaches of the water. Something larger lurked in the darkest corner at the bottom of the tank: a pair of eyes glowed; there was a wavy undulation of gills.

“Is that an eel?” Juan Diego asked.

The hotel manager was a small, neatly dressed man with a painstakingly trimmed mustache. “Maybe a moray,” the manager said. “Better not stick your finger in the water.”

“No, of course not—that’s definitely an eel,” Juan Diego replied.

J
UAN
D
IEGO HAD AT
first regretted that he’d agreed to let Bienvenido drive him to a restaurant that evening. No tourists, mostly families—“a well-kept secret,” the driver had said to persuade him. Juan Diego had imagined he might be happier to have room service in his hotel room, and to go to bed early. Yet he now felt relieved that Bienvenido was taking him away from the Shangri-La; the unfamiliar fish and the evillooking eel would await his return. (He would rather have slept with the bomb-sniffing Lab mix James!)

The P.S. to Clark French’s welcoming note read as follows:
You are in good hands with Bienvenido! Everyone excited to see you in Bohol! My whole family can’t wait to meet you! Auntie Carmen says the moray’s name is Morales—no touching!