Avenue of Mysteries (26 page)

“What is the matter with her—did she get her period or something?” Esperanza asked Juan Diego. “I’d already had my first period by the time I was her age.”

“No, I didn’t get my period—I’m
never
getting my period!” Lupe screamed. “I’m
retarded,
remember? My period is retarded!”

Juan Diego and his mom hit the hippie’s head on the hot-water faucet when they were sliding him into the bathtub, but the boy didn’t flinch or open his eyes; his only response was to hold his penis.

“Isn’t that sweet?” Esperanza asked Juan Diego. “He’s a darling guy, isn’t he?”

“ ‘I see, by your outfit, that you are a cowboy,’ ” the sleeping gringo sang.

Lupe wanted to be the one who turned the water on, but when she saw that el gringo bueno was holding his penis, she got upset all over again. “What is he doing to himself? He’s thinking about sex—I know he is!” she said to Juan Diego.

“He’s singing—he’s
not
thinking about sex, Lupe,” Juan Diego said.

“Sure he is—the gringo kid thinks about sex all the time. That’s why he’s so young-looking,” Esperanza told them, turning on the tub; she opened both faucets all the way.

“Whoa!” cried the good gringo, opening his eyes. He saw the three of them peering down at him in the bathtub. He’d probably not seen Esperanza looking quite this way—in a tight white towel with her damp, tousled hair fallen forward, to either side of her pretty face. She had taken the second towel off her head; the towel for her hair was a little wet, but she wanted to leave it for the hippie boy to use. It would take
her a while to get herself dressed, and to bring a couple of clean towels to the kids’ bathroom.

“You drink too much, kid,” Esperanza told the good gringo. “You don’t have a big enough body to handle the alcohol.”

“What are
you
doing here?” the dear boy asked her; he had a wonderful smile, the Dying Christ on his scrawny chest notwithstanding.

“She’s our
mother
! You’re fucking our
mother
!” Lupe yelled.

“Yikes, little sister—” the gringo started to say. Naturally, he hadn’t understood her.

“This is our mother,” Juan Diego told the hippie, as the tub was filling.

“Oh, wow. We’re all friends,
right
? Amigos, aren’t we?” the boy asked, but Lupe turned away from the bathtub; she went back into the bedroom.

They could all hear Sister Gloria and the kindergartners coming up the stairs from the chapel, because Esperanza had left the door to the hall open, and Lupe had left the bathroom door open. Sister Gloria called the enforced march for the kindergartners their “constitutional”; the children tramped upstairs, chanting the responsive “¡Madre!” prayer. They marched around the hall, praying—they did this daily, not only on saints’ days. Sister Gloria said she made the children march for the “additional benefit” of the good effect this had on Brother Pepe and Edward Bonshaw, who loved to see and hear the kindergartners repeating the “now and forever” business.

But Sister Gloria had a punitive streak in her. Sister Gloria probably wanted to punish Esperanza, catching her—as it usually happened—in the two towels, fresh from her bath. Sister Gloria must have imagined that the endearing holiness of the chanting kindergartners burned in Esperanza’s sinning heart like a heated sword. Possibly, Sister Gloria deluded herself even further: she might have thought that the “you will be my guide” kindergartners had a cleansing effect on the prostitute’s wayward brats, those dump kids who’d been given special privileges at Lost Children. A room of their own and their own bathroom, too!—this was
not
how Sister Gloria would have treated los niños de la basura. This was no way to run an orphanage—not in Sister Gloria’s opinion. You didn’t give special privileges to smoke-smelling scavengers from the basurero!

But on the morning when Lupe learned that her mother and the good gringo had been lovers, Lupe was not in the mood to hear Sister Gloria and the kindergartners reciting the “¡Madre!” prayer.

“Mother!” Sister Gloria arduously repeated; she had paused at the open door to the dump kids’ bedroom, where the nun could see Lupe sitting on one of the unmade beds. The kindergartners stopped marching ahead in the hall; they stood, shuffling in place, staring into the bedroom. Lupe was sobbing, which was not entirely new.

“Now and forever, you will be my guide,” the children were repeating—for what must have seemed, at least to Lupe, the hundredth (or the thousandth) time.

“Mother Mary is a
fake
!” Lupe screamed at them. “Let the Virgin Mary show me a miracle—just the tiniest miracle,
please
!—and I might believe, for a minute, that your Mother Mary has actually
done
something, except steal Mexico from our Guadalupe. What did the Virgin Mary ever actually
do
? She didn’t even get herself
pregnant
!”

But Sister Gloria and the chanting kindergartners were used to incomprehensible outbursts from the presumed-to-be-retarded vagabond. (“La vagabunda,” Sister Gloria called Lupe.)

“¡Madre!” Sister Gloria simply said, again, and the children once more repeated the incessant prayer.

Esperanza’s emergence from the bathroom came as a ghostly apparition to the kindergartners—they halted their responsive praying in midsentence. “Ahora y siempre—” the children were saying when they suddenly stopped, the “now and forever” incantation just ending. Esperanza was wearing only one towel, the one that scantily covered her body. Her wild, freshly shampooed hair momentarily made the kindergartners think she was not the orphanage’s fallen cleaning woman; Esperanza now appeared to the children as a different, more confident being.

“Oh, get over it, Lupe!” Esperanza said. “He’s not the last naked boy who will break your heart!” (This was sufficient to make Sister Gloria stop praying, too.)

“Yes he is—the first and last naked boy!” Lupe cried. (Of course the kindergartners and Sister Gloria didn’t get this last bit.)

“Pay no attention to Lupe, children,” Esperanza told the kindergartners, as she walked barefoot into the hall. “A vision of the Crucified Christ has disturbed her. She thought the Dying Jesus was in her bathtub—the crown of thorns, the excessive bleeding, the whole nailed-to-the-cross thing! Who wouldn’t get upset to wake up to
that
?” Esperanza asked Sister Gloria, who was speechless. “Good morning to you, too, Sister,” Esperanza said, sashaying her way down the hall—such as it
was possible to
sashay
in a skimpy, tight towel. In fact, the tightness of the towel caused Esperanza to stride ahead with small, mincing steps—yet she managed to walk fairly fast.

“
What
naked boy?” Sister Gloria asked Lupe. The little vagabond sat stone-faced on the bed; Lupe pointed to the open bathroom door.

“ ‘Come sit down beside me and hear my sad story,’ ” someone was singing. “ ‘Got shot in the breast, and I know I must die.’ ”

Sister Gloria hesitated; upon the cessation of the “¡Madre!” prayer and Esperanza’s scantily covered exit, the hatchet-faced nun could hear what she thought were voices coming from the dump kids’ bathroom. At first, Sister Gloria might have imagined she’d heard Juan Diego talking (or singing) to himself. But now, rising above the splashing sounds and the running water, the nun knew she’d been listening to
two
voices: that chatterbox of a boy from the Oaxaca basurero, Juan Diego (Brother Pepe’s prize pupil), and what struck Sister Gloria as the voice of a much older boy or young
man
. What Esperanza had called a naked
boy
sounded very much to Sister Gloria like a grown
man
—that was why the nun had hesitated.

The kindergartners, however, had been indoctrinated; the kindergartners were trained to
march,
and march they did. The kindergartners tramped forward, through the dump kids’ bedroom and into the bathroom.

What else could Sister Gloria
do
? If there were a young man who, in any fashion, resembled the Crucified Christ—a Dying Jesus in the dump kids’ bathtub, as Esperanza had described him—wasn’t it Sister Gloria’s duty to protect the orphans from what Lupe had misinterpreted as a
vision
(one that had, apparently, upset her so)?

As for Lupe herself, she didn’t wait around; she headed for the hallway. “¡Madre!” Sister Gloria exclaimed, hurrying into the bathroom after the kindergartners.

“Now and forever, you will be our guide,” the kindergartners were chanting in the bathroom—before all the screaming started. Lupe just kept walking down the hall.

The conversation Juan Diego had been having with the good gringo was very interesting, but—given what happened when the kindergartners marched into the bathroom—it’s understandable why Juan Diego (especially, in his later years) had trouble keeping the details straight.

“I don’t know why your mom keeps callin’ me ‘kid’—I’m not as young as I look,” el gringo bueno had begun. (Of course he didn’t look like a
kid
to Juan Diego, who was only fourteen—Juan Diego
was
a kid—but Juan Diego just nodded.) “My dad died in the Philippines, in the war
—lots
of Americans died there, but not when my dad did,” the draft dodger continued. “My dad was
really
unlucky. That kind of luck can run in the family, you know. That was
part
of the reason I didn’t think I should go to Vietnam—the bad luck runnin’ in the family part—but also I always wanted to go to the Philippines, to see where my dad is buried and to pay my respects, just to say how sorry I was that I never got to meet him, you know.”

Of course Juan Diego just nodded; he was beginning to notice that the tub kept filling, but the water level never changed. Juan Diego realized that the tub was draining and filling in equal amounts; the hippie had probably knocked out the plug—he kept slipping and sliding around on his tattooed bare ass. He also kept putting more and more shampoo in his hair, until the shampoo was all gone, and the suds from the shampoo rose all around the slippery gringo; the Crucified Christ had completely disappeared.

“Corregidor, May 1942—that was the culmination of a battle in the Philippines,” the hippie was saying. “The Americans got wiped out. A month before had been the Bataan Death March—sixty-five fuckin’ miles after the U.S. surrender. A lot of American prisoners didn’t make it. This is why there’s such a big American cemetery and memorial in the Philippines—it’s in Manila. That’s where I gotta go and tell my dad I love him. I can’t go to Vietnam, and die there, before I can visit my dad,” the young American said.

“I see,” was all Juan Diego said.

“I thought I could convince them I was a pacifist,” the good gringo went on; he was completely covered in shampoo, the spade-shaped patch of beard under his lower lip excepted. This tuft of dark hair seemed to be the only place where the boy’s beard grew; he looked too young to need to shave the rest of his face, but he’d been running away from the draft for three years. He told Juan Diego he was twenty-six; they’d tried to draft him after he finished college, when he’d been twenty-three. That was when he got the Agonizing Christ tattoo: to convince the U.S. Army that he was a pacifist. Naturally, the religious tattoo didn’t work.

In an expression of anti-patriotic hostility, the good gringo then got his ass tattooed—the American flag, apparently ripped in two by the crack in his ass—and fled to Mexico.

“This is what pretendin’ to be a pacifist will get you—three years on
the lam,” the gringo was saying. “But just look what happened to my poor dad: he was younger than I am when they sent him to the Philippines. The war was almost
over,
but he was among the amphibious troops who recaptured Corregidor—February 1945. You can die when you’re
winnin’
a war, you know—same as you can die when you’re losin’. But is that bad luck, or what?”

“It’s bad luck,” Juan Diego agreed.

“I’ll say it is—I was born in ’44, just a few months before my dad was killed. He never saw me,” the good gringo said. “My mom doesn’t even know if he saw my baby pictures.”

“I’m sorry,” Juan Diego said. He was kneeling on the bathroom floor, beside the bathtub. Juan Diego was as impressionable as most fourteen-year-olds; he thought the American hippie was the most fascinating young man he’d ever met.

“Man on wheels,” the gringo said, touching Juan Diego’s hand with his shampoo-covered fingers. “Promise me somethin’, man on wheels.”

“Sure,” Juan Diego said; after all, he’d just made a couple of absurd promises to Lupe.

“If anythin’ happens to me, you gotta go to the Philippines for me—you gotta tell my dad I’m sorry,” el gringo bueno said.

“Sure—yes, I will,” Juan Diego said.

For the first time, the hippie looked surprised. “You
will
?” he asked Juan Diego.

“Yes, I will,” the dump reader repeated.

“Whoa! Man on wheels! I guess I need more friends like you,” the gringo told him. At that point, he slid entirely under the water and the shampoo suds; the hippie and his Bleeding Jesus had completely disappeared when the kindergartners, followed by the outraged Sister Gloria, marched into the bathroom, to the relentless chanting of “¡Madre!” and “Now and forever—” not to mention the “you will be my guide” inanity.

“Well, where
is
he?” Sister Gloria asked Juan Diego. “There’s no naked boy here.
What
naked boy?” the nun repeated; she didn’t notice the bubbles under the bathwater (not with all the shampoo suds), but one of the kindergartners pointed to the bubbles, and Sister Gloria suddenly looked where the alert child was pointing.

That was when the sea monster rose from the frothy water. One can only guess that this is what the tattooed hippie and the Crucified Christ (or a shampoo-covered convergence of the two) looked like to the indoctrinated kindergartners: a
religious
sea monster. And, in all probability,
the good gringo thought that his emergence from the bathwater should be of some entertainment value; after he’d just told Juan Diego such a heavy-hearted story, maybe the draft dodger sought to change the mood of the moment. We’ll never know what the crazy hippie had intended by
flinging
himself upward from the bottom of the bathtub, spouting water like a whale and extending his arms to either side of the tub—as if
he
were as nailed-to-the-cross, and dying, as the Bleeding Jesus tattooed on the naked boy’s heaving chest. And what possessed the tall boy—what made him decide to stand up in the bathtub, so that he towered over everyone and made his nakedness all the more apparent? Well, we’ll never know what el gringo bueno was thinking, or even
if
he was thinking. (The young American runaway was not known on Zaragoza Street for
rational
behavior.)