Avenue of Mysteries (42 page)

“Señor Eduardo is still thinking about Flor having a penis,” Lupe said to Juan Diego. “He can’t stop thinking about her penis.”

“Jesus,” Juan Diego said. Too many things were happening too fast.

“The mind reader is talking about Jesus?” Dolores asked.

“She said you walk on the sky the way Jesus could walk on water,” Juan Diego lied to the stuck-up fourteen-year-old.

“What a liar!” Lupe exclaimed, with disgust.

“She wonders about how you support your weight, upside down, by the tops of your feet. It must take a while to develop the muscles that hold your feet in that right-angle position, so your feet don’t slip out of
the ropes. Tell me about that part,” Juan Diego said to the pretty skywalker. He finally got his breathing under control.

“Your sister is very observant,” Dolores said to the cripple. “That’s the hardest part.”

“It would be only half as hard for
me
to skywalk,” Juan Diego told Dolores. He kicked off his special shoe and showed her his twisted foot; yes, it was a little out of alignment with his shin—the foot pointed off in a two-o’clock direction—but the crushed foot was permanently frozen at a right angle. There was no muscle that needed to be developed in the crippled boy’s right foot. That foot wouldn’t bend; it
couldn’t
bend. His maimed right foot was locked in the perfect position for skywalking. “You see?” Juan Diego said to Dolores. “I would have to train only
one
foot—the left one. Wouldn’t that make skywalking easier for me?”

Soledad, who trained the skywalkers, knelt on the dirt floor of the troupe tent, feeling Juan Diego’s crippled foot. Juan Diego would always remember this moment: it was the first time anyone had handled that foot since it had healed, in its fashion—not to mention this being the first time anyone would touch that foot appreciatively.

“The boy’s right, Ignacio,” Soledad said to her husband. “The skywalk is half as hard for Juan Diego to learn. This foot is a hook—this foot already knows how to skywalk.”

“Only girls can be skywalkers,” the lion tamer said. “La Maravilla is always a girl.” (The man was a male machine, a penile robot.)

“The dirty pig isn’t interested in
your
puberty,” Lupe explained to Juan Diego, but she was angrier with Juan Diego than she was disgusted by Ignacio. “You can’t be The Wonder—you’ll
die
skywalking! You’re supposed to leave Mexico with Señor Eduardo,” Lupe said to her brother. “You don’t
stay
at the circus. La Maravilla isn’t permanent—not for
you
!” Lupe said to him. “You’re not an acrobat, you’re no athlete—you can’t even walk without a limp!” Lupe cried.

“No limp upside down—I can walk fine up there,” Juan Diego told her; he pointed to the horizontal ladder on the ceiling of the troupe tent.

“Maybe the cripple should have a look at the ladder in the
big
tent,” Dolores said, to no one in particular. “It takes balls to be The Wonder on
that
ladder,” the superior girl said to Juan Diego. “Anyone can be a skywalker in the
practice
tent.”

“I have balls,” the boy told her. The girl acrobats laughed at this, not only Dolores. Ignacio laughed, too, but not his wife.

Soledad had kept her hand on the cripple’s bad foot. “We’ll see if he
has the balls for it,” Soledad said. “This foot gives him an
advantage
—that’s all the boy and I are saying.”

“No boy can be La Maravilla,” Ignacio said; he was coiling and uncoiling his whip—more in a nervous than a threatening fashion.

“Why not?” his wife asked. “I’m the one who trains the skywalkers, aren’t I?” (Not all the lionesses were tamed, either.)

“I don’t like the sound of this,” Edward Bonshaw said to Flor. “They’re not serious about Juan Diego going anywhere near that ladder trick, are they? The
boy
isn’t serious, is he?” the Iowan asked Flor.

“The kid has balls, doesn’t he?” Flor asked the missionary.

“No, no—no skywalking!” Lupe cried. “You have
another
future!” the girl told her brother. “We should go back to Lost Children. No more circus!” Lupe cried. “Too much mind reading,” the girl said. She was suddenly looking at how the lion tamer was looking at
her
; Juan Diego saw Ignacio looking at Lupe, too.

“What?” Juan Diego asked his little sister. “What’s the pig thinking
now
?” he whispered to her.

Lupe couldn’t look at the lion tamer. “He’s thinking he would like to fuck me, when I’m
ready,
” Lupe told Juan Diego. “He’s wondering what it would be like to fuck a retarded girl—a girl who can be understood only by her crippled brother.”

“You know what I’ve been thinking?” Ignacio suddenly said. The lion tamer was looking at an undesignated location, perfectly between Lupe and Juan Diego, and Juan Diego wondered if this was a tactic Ignacio used with the lions—namely, not to make eye contact with an individual lion but to make the lions think he was looking at all of them. Definitely, too many things were happening at once.

“Lupe knows what you’ve been thinking,” Juan Diego told the lion tamer. “She’s
not
retarded.”

“What I was
going to
say,” Ignacio said, still looking at neither Juan Diego nor Lupe, but at a spot somewhere between them, “is that most mind readers or fortune-tellers, or whatever they call themselves, are fakes. The ones who can do it on demand are definitely fakes. The real ones can read
some
people’s minds, but not everyone’s. The real ones find most people’s minds uninteresting. The real ones pick up from people’s minds only the stuff that stands out.”

“Mostly terrible stuff,” Lupe said.

“She says the stuff that stands out is mostly terrible,” Juan Diego told the lion tamer. Things were definitely going too fast.

“She must be one of the real ones,” Ignacio said; he looked at Lupe then—only at her, at no one else. “Have you ever read an animal’s mind?” the lion tamer asked her. “I’m wondering if you could tell what a
lion
was thinking.”

“It depends on the individual lion, or
lioness,
” Lupe said. Juan Diego repeated this exactly as Lupe had said it. The way the girl acrobats retreated from Ignacio, upon hearing the
lioness
word, let the dump kids know that the lion tamer was sensitive about being thought of as a
lioness
tamer.

“But you might be able to pick up the stuff that an
individual
lion, or lioness, was thinking?” Ignacio asked; his eyes were unfocused again, darting about in the general area between the clairvoyant girl and her brother.

“Mostly terrible stuff,” Lupe repeated; this time, Juan Diego translated her literally.

“Interesting,” was all the lion tamer said, but everyone in the troupe tent could tell that he knew Lupe was one of the real ones, and that she’d read his mind accurately. “The cripple can try skywalking—we’ll see if he has the balls for it,” Ignacio said, as he was leaving. He’d allowed his whip to completely uncoil, and he dragged it, at full length, behind him, as he left the troupe tent. The whip trailed after him as if it were a pet snake, following its master. The girl acrobats were all looking at Lupe; even Dolores, the superstar skywalker, was looking at Lupe.

“They all want to know what Ignacio thinks about fucking them—if he thinks they’re
ready,
” Lupe told Juan Diego. The lion tamer’s wife (and everyone else, even the missionary) had heard the
Ignacio
word.

“What about Ignacio?” Soledad asked; she didn’t bother to ask Lupe—she spoke directly to Juan Diego.

“Yes, Ignacio thinks about fucking all of us—with every young woman, he thinks about doing it,” Lupe said. “But you know that already—you don’t need
me
to tell you,” Lupe said, straight to Soledad. “
All
of you know that already,” Lupe told them; she looked at each of the girl acrobats when she said it—at Dolores the longest.

No one was surprised by Juan Diego’s verbatim translation of what his sister said. Flor looked the least surprised. Not even Edward Bonshaw was surprised, but of course he hadn’t understood most of the conversation—including Juan Diego’s translation.

“There’s an evening performance,” Soledad was explaining to the newcomers. “The girls have to put on their costumes.”

Soledad showed the dump kids to the troupe tent where they would be living. It was the dogs’ troupe tent, as promised; there were two collapsible cots for the kids, who also had their own wardrobe closet, and there was a tall standing mirror.

The dog beds and water bowls were arranged in an orderly fashion, and the coat rack for the dogs’ costumes was small and not in the way. The dog trainer was happy to meet the dump kids; she was an old woman who dressed as if she were still young, and still pretty. She was dressing the dogs for the evening performance when the dump kids got to the tent. Her name was Estrella, the word for “star.” She told the niños she needed a break from sleeping with the dogs, though it was clear to the kids, as they watched Estrella dress the dogs, that the old woman genuinely loved the dogs, and that she took good care of them.

Estrella’s refusal to dress or behave her age made her more of a child than the dump kids; both Lupe and Juan Diego liked her, as did the dogs. Lupe had always disapproved of her mother’s sluttish appearance, but the low-cut blouses Estrella wore were more comical than tawdry; her withered breasts often slipped into view, but they were small and shrunken—there was nothing of a come-on in Estrella’s revealing them. And her once-tight skirts were clownish now; Estrella was a scarecrow—her clothes didn’t cling to her, not the way they once had (or as she may have imagined they still did).

Estrella was bald; she hadn’t liked the way her hair had thinned, or how it had lost its crow-black luster. She shaved her head—or she persuaded someone else to shave it for her, because she was prone to cutting herself—and she wore wigs (she had more wigs than dogs). The wigs were way too young for her.

At night, Estrella slept in a baseball cap; she complained that the visor forced her to sleep on her back. It was not her fault that she snored—she blamed the baseball cap. And the headband of the cap left a permanent indentation on her forehead, below where she wore her wigs.

When Estrella was tired, there would be days when she failed to exchange the baseball cap for one wig or another. If La Maravilla wasn’t performing, Estrella dressed like a bald stick figure of a prostitute in a baseball cap.

She was a generous person; Estrella was not possessive about her wigs. She would let Lupe try them on, and both Estrella and Lupe liked trying one wig or another on the dogs. Today Estrella wasn’t having one of her baseball-cap days; she wore the “flaming-redhead” wig, which arguably
would have looked better on one of the dogs—it definitely would have looked better on Lupe.

Anyone could see why the dump kids and the dogs adored Estrella. But her generosity notwithstanding, she was not as welcoming to Flor and Señor Eduardo as she was to the niños de la basura. Estrella wasn’t a sexual bigot; she was not hostile to having a transvestite prostitute in the dogs’ troupe tent. But the dog trainer had made a point of scolding the dogs if they ever crapped in the troupe tent. Estrella didn’t want the beshitted Iowan to give the dogs any bad ideas, so she wasn’t welcoming to the Jesuit.

Near the outdoor showers, which were behind the men’s latrine tent, there was a faucet with a long hose; now Flor took Edward Bonshaw there to do something about the elephant shit that had hardened on the missionary’s sandals—and, more uncomfortably, between the toes of his bare feet.

Because Estrella was telling Lupe the names of the dogs and how much to feed each one, Soledad seized this moment of privacy; in a life lived in troupe tents, Juan Diego would soon realize, there were not many private moments—not unlike life at the orphanage.

“Your sister is very special,” Soledad began quietly. “But why doesn’t she want you to try to become The Wonder? The skywalkers are the stars of this circus.” The concept of being a star stunned him.

“Lupe believes I have a different future—not skywalking,” Juan Diego said. He felt caught off-guard.

“Lupe knows the future, too?” Soledad asked the crippled boy.

“Only some of it,” Juan Diego answered her; in truth, he didn’t know how much (or how little) Lupe knew. “Because Lupe doesn’t see skywalking in my future, she thinks I’ll die trying it
—if
I try it.”

“And what do
you
think, Juan Diego?” the lion tamer’s wife asked him. She was an unfamiliar kind of adult to a dump kid.

“I just know I wouldn’t limp if I were skywalking,” the boy told her. He saw the decision, looming ahead of him.

“The dachshund is a male called Baby,” he heard Lupe repeating to herself; Juan Diego knew this was the way she memorized things. He could see the dachshund: the little dog was wearing a baby bonnet tied under his chin and was sitting up straight in a child’s stroller.

“Ignacio wanted a mind reader for the
lions,
” Soledad said suddenly to Juan Diego. “What kind of sideshow is a mind reader at a circus? You
said yourself that your sister isn’t a fortune-teller,” Soledad continued softly. This wasn’t going as expected.

“The sheepdog is a female called Pastora,” Juan Diego heard Lupe saying. (The noun
pastora
means “shepherdess.”) Pastora was a sheepdog of the border-collie type; she was wearing a girl’s dress. When the dog walked on all fours, she tripped on the dress, but when she stood on her hind legs, pushing the child’s stroller with Baby (the dachshund) in it, the dress fit her correctly.

“What would Lupe tell people in a sideshow? What woman wants to hear someone say what her husband is thinking? What guy is going to be happy hearing what’s on his wife’s mind?” Soledad was asking Juan Diego. “Won’t kids be embarrassed if their friends know what they’re thinking? Just think about it,” Soledad said. “All Ignacio cares about is what that old lion and those lionesses are thinking. If your sister can’t read the lions’ minds, she’s of no use to Ignacio. And once she
has
read what’s on the lions’ minds—then she’s no longer of use, is she? Or do lions change their minds?” Soledad asked Juan Diego.