Avenue of Mysteries (32 page)

“That’s not the same as whether or not the book is
suitable,
” Edward Bonshaw would answer the fourteen-year-old. Or Señor Eduardo would pause in his reading aloud, tipping off Juan Diego that the missionary was attempting to skip over some sexual content.

“You’re censoring a sex scene,” the boy would say.

“I’m not sure this is
appropriate,
” the Iowan would reply.

The two of them had settled on Graham Greene; matters of faith and doubt were clearly at the forefront of Edward Bonshaw’s mind, if not the sole motivation for his whipping himself, and Juan Diego liked Greene’s sexual subjects, though the author tended to render the sex offstage or in an understated manner.

The way the studying worked was that Edward Bonshaw would begin a Greene novel by reading it aloud to Juan Diego; then Juan Diego would
read the rest of the novel to himself; last, the grown man and the boy would discuss the story. In the discussion part, Señor Eduardo was very keen about citing specific passages and asking Juan Diego what Graham Greene had
meant.

One sentence in
The Power and the Glory
had prompted a lengthy and ongoing discussion regarding its meaning. The student and the teacher had contrasting ideas about the sentence, which was: “There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.”

“What do you make of that, Juan Diego?” Edward Bonshaw had asked the boy. “Is Greene saying that our future
begins
in childhood, and we should pay attention to—”

“Well, of course the future
begins
in childhood—where
else
would it begin?” Juan Diego asked the Iowan. “But I think it’s bullshit to say there is
one
moment when
the
door to the future opens. Why can’t there be
many
moments? And is Greene saying there’s only
one
door? He says
the
door, like there’s only one.”

“Graham Greene isn’t
bullshit,
Juan Diego!” Señor Eduardo had cried; the zealot was clutching something small in one hand.

“I know about your mah-jongg tile—you don’t have to show it to me again,” Juan Diego told the scholastic. “I know, I know—you fell, the little piece of ivory and bamboo cut your face. You bled, Beatrice licked you—that’s how your dog died, shot and killed. I know, I know! But did that
one
moment make you want to be a priest? Did the door to no sex for the rest of your life open
only
because Beatrice got shot? There must have been
other
moments in your childhood; you could have opened
other
doors. You still could open a
different
door, right? That mah-jongg tile didn’t have to be your childhood
and
your future!”

Resignation: that was what Juan Diego had seen on Edward Bonshaw’s face. The missionary seemed
resigned
to his fate: celibacy, self-flagellation, the priesthood—all this was caused by a fall with a mah-jongg tile in his little hand? A life of beating himself and sexual denial because his beloved dog was cruelly shot and killed?

It was also resignation that Juan Diego saw on Rivera’s face now, as el jefe backed up the truck to the shack they had shared as a family in Guerrero. Juan Diego knew what it was like to have a not-a-conversation with Lupe—just to
listen
to her, whether you understood her or not.

Lupe always knew more than you did; Lupe, though incomprehensible much of the time, knew stuff no one else knew. Lupe was a child, but
she argued like a grown-up. She said things even she didn’t understand; she said the words “just came” to her, often before she had any awareness of their meaning.

Burn el gringo bueno with Mother; burn the Virgin Mary’s nose with them. Just do it. Scatter their ashes in Mexico City. Just do it.

And there had been the zealous Edward Bonshaw spouting Graham Greene (another Catholic, clearly tortured by faith
and
doubt), claiming there was only
one
moment when
the
door—a single fucking door!—opened and let the fucking future in.

“Jesus Christ,” Juan Diego was muttering when he climbed out of the flatbed of Rivera’s truck. (Neither Lupe nor the dump boss thought the boy was praying.)

“Just a minute,” Lupe told them. She walked purposefully away from them, disappearing behind the shack the dump kids had once called home. She has to take a leak, Juan Diego was thinking.

“No, I
don’t
have to take a leak!” Lupe called. “I’m looking for Dirty White!”

“Is she peeing, or do you need more water pistols?” Rivera asked. Juan Diego shrugged. “We should start burning the bodies—before the Jesuits get to the basurero,” el jefe said.

Lupe came back carrying a dead dog—it was a puppy, and Lupe was crying. “I always find them in the same place, or nearly the same place,” she was blubbering. The dead puppy was Dirty White.

“We’re going to burn Dirty White with your mother and the hippie?” Rivera asked.

“If you burned me, I would want to be burned with a puppy!” Lupe cried. Juan Diego thought this was worth translating, and he did. Rivera paid no attention to the dead puppy; el jefe had hated Dirty White. The dump boss was doubtless relieved that the disagreeable runt wasn’t rabid, and hadn’t bitten Lupe.

“I’m sorry the dog adoption didn’t work,” Rivera said to Lupe when the little girl had reseated herself in the cab of el jefe’s truck, the dead puppy lying stiffly in her lap.

When Juan Diego was once more with Diablo and the body bags in the flatbed of the pickup, Rivera drove to the basurero; once there, he backed up the truck to the fire that burned brightest among the smoldering piles.

Rivera was rushing a little when he took the two body bags out of the flatbed and doused them with gasoline.

“Dirty White looks soaking wet,” Juan Diego said to Lupe.

“He is,” she said, laying the puppy on the ground beside the body bags. Rivera respectfully poured some gasoline on the dead dog.

The dump kids turned away from the fire when el jefe threw the body bags on the coals, into the low flames; suddenly the flames shot higher. When the fire was a towering conflagration, but Lupe’s back was still turned to the blaze, Rivera tossed the little puppy into the inferno.

“I better move the truck,” the dump boss said. The kids had already noticed that the side-view mirror remained broken. Rivera claimed he would never repair it; he said he wanted to torture himself with the memory.

Like a good Catholic, Juan Diego thought, watching el jefe move the truck away from the sudden heat of the funeral pyre.

“
Who’s
a good Catholic?” Lupe asked her brother.

“Stop reading my mind!” Juan Diego snapped at her.

“I can’t help it,” she told him. When Rivera was still in the truck, Lupe said: “Now’s a good time to put the monster nose in the fire.”

“I don’t see the point of it,” Juan Diego said, but he threw the Virgin Mary’s broken nose into the conflagration.

“Here they come—right on time,” Rivera said, joining the kids where they stood at some distance from the fire; it was very hot. They could see Brother Pepe’s dusty red VW racing into the basurero.

Later, Juan Diego thought that the Jesuits tumbling out of the little VW Beetle resembled a clown act at the circus. Brother Pepe, the two outraged priests—Father Alfonso
and
Father Octavio—and, of course, the dumbstruck Edward Bonshaw.

The funeral pyre spoke for the dump kids, who said nothing, but Lupe decided that singing was okay. “ ‘Oh, beat the drum slowly and play the fife lowly,’ ” she sang. “ ‘Play the dead march as you carry me along—’ ”

“Esperanza wouldn’t have wanted a
fire
—” Father Alfonso started to say, but the dump boss interrupted him.

“It was what her children wanted, Father—that’s how it goes,” Rivera said.

“It’s what we do with what we love,” Juan Diego said.

Lupe was smiling serenely; she was watching the ascending columns of smoke drifting far away, and the ever-hovering vultures.

“ ‘Take me to the valley, and lay the sod o’er me,’ ” Lupe sang. “ ‘For I’m a young cowboy and I know I’ve done wrong.’ ”

“These children are orphans now,” Señor Eduardo was saying. “They are surely our responsibility, more than they ever were. Aren’t they?”

Brother Pepe didn’t immediately answer the Iowan, and the two old priests just looked at each other.

“What would Graham Greene say?” Juan Diego asked Edward Bonshaw.

“Graham Greene!” Father Alfonso exclaimed. “Don’t tell me, Edward, that this boy has been reading
Greene
—”

“How unsuitable!” Father Octavio said.

“Greene is hardly age-appropriate—” Father Alfonso began, but Señor Eduardo wouldn’t hear of it.

“Greene is a Catholic!” the Iowan cried.

“Not a good one, Edward,” Father Octavio said.

“Is this what Greene means by
one
moment?” Juan Diego asked Señor Eduardo. “Is this
the
door opening to the future—Lupe’s and mine?”

“This door opens to the circus,” Lupe said. “That’s what comes next—that’s where we’re going.”

Juan Diego translated this, of course, before he asked Edward Bonshaw: “Is this our
only
moment? Is this the
one
door to the future? Is this what Greene
meant
? Is this how childhood ends?” The Iowan was thinking hard—as hard as he ever had, and Edward Bonshaw was a deeply thoughtful man.

“Yes, you’re right! That’s exactly right!” Lupe suddenly said to the Iowan; the little girl touched Señor Eduardo’s hand.

“She says you’re right—whatever you’re thinking,” Juan Diego said to Edward Bonshaw, who kept staring into the raging flames.

“He’s thinking that the poor draft dodger’s ashes will be returned to his homeland, and to his grieving mother, with the ashes of a prostitute,” Lupe said. Juan Diego translated this, too.

Suddenly there was a harsh spitting sound from the funeral pyre, and a thin blue flame shot up among the vivid oranges and yellows, as if something chemical had caught fire, or perhaps a puddle of gasoline had ignited.

“Maybe it’s the puppy—it was so wet,” Rivera said, as they all stared at the intense blue flame.

“The puppy!” Edward Bonshaw cried. “You burned a dog with your mother and that dear hippie child? You burned another dog in their fire!”

“Everyone should be so lucky as to be burned with a puppy,” Juan Diego told the Iowan.

The hissing blue flame had everyone’s attention, but Lupe reached up her arms and pulled her brother’s face down to her lips. Juan Diego thought she was going to kiss him, but Lupe wanted to whisper in his ear, although no one else could have understood her, not even if they’d heard.

“It’s definitely the wet puppy,” Rivera was saying.

“La nariz,” Lupe whispered in her brother’s ear, touching his nose. The second she spoke, the hissing sound stopped—the blue flame disappeared. The flaming blue hiss was the nose, all right, Juan Diego was thinking.

The jolt of Philippine Airlines 177 landing in Bohol didn’t even wake him up, as if there were nothing that could wake Juan Diego from the dream of when his future started.

•
16
•

King of Beasts

Several passengers paused at the cockpit exit for Philippine Airlines 177, telling the flight attendant of their concerns about the older-looking, brown-skinned gentleman who was slumped over in a window seat. “He’s either dead to the world or just dead,” one of the passengers told the flight attendant, in a confounding combination of the vernacular and the laconic.

Juan Diego definitely looked dead, but his thoughts were far away, on high, in the spires of smoke funneling above the Oaxaca basurero; if only in his mind, he had a vulture’s view of the city limits—of Cinco Señores, where the circus grounds were, and the distant but brightly colored tents of Circo de La Maravilla.

The paramedics were notified from the cockpit; before all the passengers had left the plane, the rescuers rushed on. Various lifesaving methods were seconds away from being performed when one of the lifesavers realized that Juan Diego was very much alive, but by then the supposedly stricken passenger’s carry-on had been searched. The prescription drugs drew the most immediate attention. The beta-blockers signified there was a heart problem; the Viagra, with the printed warning not to take the stuff with nitrates, prompted one of the paramedics to ask Juan Diego, with no little urgency, if he’d been taking nitrates.

Juan Diego not only didn’t know what nitrates were; his mind was in Oaxaca, forty years ago, and Lupe was whispering in his ear.

“La nariz,” Juan Diego whispered to the anxious paramedic; she was a young woman, and she understood a little Spanish.

“Your nose?” the young paramedic asked; to make herself clear, she touched her own nose when she spoke.

“You can’t breathe? You’re having trouble breathing?” another of the paramedics asked; he also touched his nose, doubtless to signify breathing.

“Viagra can make you stuffy,” a third paramedic said.

“No, not
my
nose,” Juan Diego said, laughing. “I was dreaming about the Virgin Mary’s nose,” he told the team of paramedics.

This was not helpful; the insanity of mentioning the Virgin Mary’s nose distracted the medical personnel from the line of questioning they should have pursued—namely, if Juan Diego had been manipulating the dosage of his Lopressor prescription. Yet, to the team of paramedics, the passenger’s life signs were okay; that he’d managed to sleep through a turbulent landing (crying children, screaming women) was not a medical matter.

“He looked dead,” the flight attendant kept saying to anyone who would listen to her. But Juan Diego had been oblivious to the rocky landing, the sobbing children, the wails of the women who’d been certain they were going to die. The miracle (or not) of the Virgin Mary’s nose had completely captured Juan Diego’s attention, as it had so many years ago; all he’d heard was the hissing blue flame, which had disappeared as suddenly as it first appeared.