Avenue of Mysteries (44 page)

“Just remember this: I’m not your rescue project,” Flor was telling the Iowan, who was dissolved in tears—tears of happiness, conflicted tears, or just plain tears. Inconsolable crying, in other words—sometimes lust has a way of doing that to you, too.

Their small entourage had stopped in front of the lion cages.

“Hola, Hombre,” Lupe said to the lion. There was no question that the big male cat was looking at Lupe
—only
at Lupe, not at Ignacio.

Maybe Juan Diego was summoning the necessary courage to be a skywalker; perhaps this was the moment when he believed he had the
balls
for it. Actually
being
a Boy Wonder seemed possible.

“Any lingering thoughts on your mind about her being
retarded
?” the crippled boy asked the lion tamer. “You can see that Hombre knows she’s a mind reader, can’t you?” Juan Diego asked Ignacio. “A
real
one,” the boy added. He wasn’t half as confident as he sounded.

“Just don’t try to fuck with me, ceiling-walker,” Ignacio told Juan Diego. “Don’t ever lie to me about what your sister says. I’ll know if you’re lying,
practice
-tent-walker. I can read what’s on your mind—a little,” the lion tamer said.

When Juan Diego looked at Lupe, she made no comment—she didn’t even shrug. The girl was concentrating on the lion. To even the most casual passerby in the avenue of troupe tents, Lupe and Hombre were completely attuned to each other’s thoughts. The old male lion and the girl weren’t paying attention to anyone else.

•
20
•

Casa Vargas

In Juan Diego’s dream, it was impossible to tell where the music came from. It did not have the hard-sell sound of a mariachi band, working its way among the outdoor café tables at the Marqués del Valle—one of those annoying bands that might have been playing anywhere in the zócalo. And although the circus band at La Maravilla had its own brass-and-drum version of “Streets of Laredo,” this was not their moribund and dirgelike distortion of the cowboy’s lament.

For one thing, Juan Diego heard a voice singing; in his dream, he heard the lyrics—if not as sweetly as the good gringo used to sing them. Oh, how el gringo bueno had loved “Streets of Laredo”—the dear boy could sing that ballad in his sleep! Even Lupe sang that song sweetly. Though her voice was strained and difficult to understand, Lupe did have a girl’s voice—an innocent-sounding voice.

The amateur vocalizing from the beach club had ceased, so it couldn’t have been the shopworn karaoke music that Juan Diego heard; the New Year’s Eve celebrants at the Panglao Island beach club had gone to bed, or they’d drowned taking a night swim. And no one was still ringing in the New Year at the Encantador—even the Nocturnal Monkeys were mercifully silent.

It was pitch-dark in Juan Diego’s hotel room; he held his breath because he could not hear Miriam breathing—only the mournful cowboy song in a voice Juan Diego didn’t recognize. Or did he? It was strange to hear “Streets of Laredo” sung by an older woman; it didn’t sound right. But wasn’t the voice itself borderline recognizable? It was just the wrong voice for that song.

“ ‘I see, by your outfit, that you are a cowboy,’ ” the woman was singing in a low, husky voice. “ ‘These words he did say as I slowly walked by.’ ”

Was it Miriam’s voice? Juan Diego wondered. How could she be singing when he couldn’t hear her breathing? In the darkness, Juan Diego wasn’t sure she was really there.

“Miriam?” he whispered. Then he said her name again, a little louder.

There was no singing now—“Streets of Laredo” had stopped. There was no detectable breathing, either; Juan Diego held his breath. He was listening for the slightest sound from Miriam; maybe she’d returned to her own room. He might have been snoring, or talking in his sleep—occasionally, Juan Diego talked when he dreamed.

I should touch her—just to feel if she’s there or not, Juan Diego was thinking, but he was afraid to find out. He touched his penis; he smelled his fingers. The sex smell shouldn’t have startled him—surely he remembered having sex with Miriam. But he didn’t, not exactly. He had definitely said something—about the way she felt, how it felt to be inside her. He’d said “silky” or “silken”; this was all he could recall, only the language.

And Miriam had said: “You’re funny—you need to have a word for everything.”

Then a rooster crowed—in total darkness! Were roosters crazy in the Philippines? Was this stupid rooster disoriented by the karaoke music? Had the dumb bird mistaken the Nocturnal Monkeys for nocturnal
hens
?

“Someone should kill that rooster,” Miriam said in her low, husky voice; he felt her bare breasts touch his chest and his upper arm—the fingers of her hand closed around his penis. Maybe Miriam could see in the dark. “There you are, darling,” she told him, as if he’d needed assurance that
he
existed—that he was really there, with her—when all the while he’d been wondering if
she
were real, if she actually
existed.
(That was what he’d been afraid to find out.)

The crazy rooster crowed again in the darkness.

“I learned to swim in Iowa,” he told Miriam in the dark—a funny thing to say to someone holding your penis, but this was how time happened to Juan Diego (not only in his dreams). Time jumped ahead or back; time seemed more associative than linear, but it wasn’t exclusively associative, either.

“Iowa,” Miriam murmured. “Not what comes to mind when I think of swimming.”

“I don’t limp in the water,” Juan Diego told her. Miriam was making him hard again. When he wasn’t in Iowa City, Juan Diego didn’t meet
many people who were interested in Iowa. “You’ve probably never been in the Midwest,” Juan Diego said to Miriam.

“Oh, I’ve been everywhere,” Miriam demurred, in that laconic way she had.

Everywhere? Juan Diego wondered. No one’s been everywhere, he thought. But in regard to a sense of place, one’s individual perspective matters, doesn’t it? Not every fourteen-year-old, upon encountering Iowa City for the first time, would have found the move from Mexico exhilarating; for Juan Diego, Iowa was an adventure. He was a boy who’d never emulated the young people he saw around him; suddenly there were students everywhere. Iowa City was a college town, a Big Ten town—the campus was downtown, the city and the university were one and the same. Why wouldn’t a dump reader find a college town fascinating?

Granted, it would soon strike any fourteen-year-old boy that the Iowa campus heroes were its sports stars. Yet this was consistent with what Juan Diego had imagined about the United States—from a Mexican kid’s perspective, movie stars and sports heroes seemed to be the zenith of American culture. As Dr. Rosemary Stein had told Juan Diego, he was either a kid from Mexico or a grown-up from Iowa all the time.

For Flor, the transition to Iowa City from Oaxaca must have been more difficult—if not the magnitude of misadventure Houston had represented for her. In a Big Ten university town, what opportunities existed for a transvestite and former prostitute? She’d already made a mistake in Houston; Flor was disinclined to take any chances in Iowa City. Meekness, keeping a low profile—well, it wasn’t in Flor’s nature to be tentative. Flor had always asserted herself.

When the deranged rooster crowed a third time, his crowing was cut off mid-squawk. “There, that does it,” Miriam said. “No more heralding of a false dawn, no more untruthful messengers.”

While Juan Diego tried to comprehend exactly what Miriam had meant—she sounded so authoritative—one dog began to bark; soon other dogs were barking. “Don’t hurt the dogs—nothing is their fault,” Juan Diego told Miriam. It was what he imagined Lupe would have said. (Here was another New Year, and Juan Diego was still missing his dear sister.)

“No harm will come to the dogs, darling,” Miriam murmured.

Now a breeze could be felt through the open seaward windows; Juan Diego thought he could smell the salt water, but he couldn’t hear the waves—if there were waves. He only then realized that he could
swim
in Bohol; there was a beach and a pool at the Encantador. (The good gringo, the inspiration for Juan Diego’s trip to the Philippines, had not inspired thoughts of swimming.)

“Tell me how you learned to swim in
Iowa,
” Miriam whispered in his ear; she was straddling him, and he felt himself enter her again. A feeling of such smoothness surrounded him—it was almost like swimming, he thought, before it crossed his mind that Miriam had known what he was thinking.

Yes, it had been a long time ago, but, because of Lupe, Juan Diego knew what it was like to be around a mind reader.

“I swam in an indoor pool, at the University of Iowa,” Juan Diego began, a little breathlessly.

“I meant
who,
darling—I meant who taught you, who took you to the swimming pool,” Miriam said softly.

“Oh.”

Juan Diego couldn’t say their names, not even in the dark.

Señor Eduardo had taught him to swim—this was in the swimming pool in the old Iowa Field House, next to the university hospitals and clinics. Edward Bonshaw, who had left academia to pursue the priesthood, was welcomed back to the English Department at the University of Iowa—“from whence he’d come,” Flor was fond of saying, exaggerating her Mexican accent with the
whence
word.

Flor wasn’t a swimmer, but after Juan Diego had learned to swim, she occasionally took him to the pool—it was used by the university faculty and staff, and by their children, and also popular with townies. Señor Eduardo and Juan Diego had loved the old Field House—in the early seventies, before the Carver-Hawkeye Arena was built, most of Iowa’s indoor sports took place in the Field House. In addition to swimming there, Edward Bonshaw and Juan Diego went to see the basketball games and the wrestling matches.

Flor had liked the pool but not the old Field House; there were too many jocks running around, she said. Women took their kids to the pool—women were uneasy around Flor, but they didn’t stare at her. Young men couldn’t help themselves, Flor always said—young men just stared. Flor was tall and broad-shouldered—six-two and 170 pounds—and although she was small-breasted, she was both very attractive (in a womanly way) and very masculine-looking.

At the pool, Flor wore a one-piece bathing suit, but she was only viewable above her waist. She always wrapped a big towel around her
hips; the bottom of her bathing suit was not in view, and Flor never went in the water.

Juan Diego didn’t know how Flor managed the dressing and undressing part—this would have happened in the women’s locker room. Maybe she never took off the bathing suit? (It never got wet.)

“Don’t worry about it,” Flor had told the boy. “I’m not showing my junk to anyone but Señor Eduardo.”

Not in Iowa City, anyway—as Juan Diego would one day understand. It would one day also be understandable why Flor needed to get away from Iowa—not a lot, just occasionally.

If Brother Pepe had happened to see Flor in Oaxaca, he would write to Juan Diego. “I suppose you and Edward know she’s here—‘just visiting,’ she says. I see her in the usual places—well, I don’t mean
all
the ‘usual’ places!” was how Pepe would put it.

Pepe meant he’d seen Flor at La China, that gay bar on Bustamante—the one that would become Chinampa. Pepe also saw La Loca at La Coronita, where the clientele was mostly gay and the transvestites were dressed to kill.

Pepe
didn’t
mean that Flor showed up at the whore hotel; it wasn’t the Hotel Somega, or being a prostitute, that Flor missed. But where was a person like Flor supposed to go in Iowa City? Flor was a party person—at least occasionally. There was no La China—not to mention no La Coronita—in Iowa City in the seventies and eighties. What was the harm in Flor going back to Oaxaca from time to time?

Brother Pepe wasn’t judging her, and apparently, Señor Eduardo had been understanding.

When Juan Diego was leaving Oaxaca, Brother Pepe had blurted out to him: “Don’t become one of those Mexicans who—”

Pepe had stopped himself.

“Who
what
?” Flor had asked Pepe.

“One of those Mexicans who hate Mexico,” Pepe managed to say.

“You mean one of those
Americans,
” Flor said.

“Dear boy!” Brother Pepe had exclaimed, hugging Juan Diego to him. “You don’t want to become one of those Mexicans who are always coming back, either—the ones who can’t stay away,” Pepe added.

Flor just stared at Brother Pepe. “What else
shouldn’t
he become?” she asked Pepe. “What
other
kind of Mexican is forbidden?”

But Pepe had ignored Flor; he’d whispered in Juan Diego’s ear. “Dear boy, become who you want to be—just stay in touch!” Pepe pleaded.

“You better not become
anything,
Juan Diego,” Flor had told the fourteen-year-old, while Pepe was weeping inconsolably. “Trust us, Pepe—Edward and I won’t let the kid amount to beans,” Flor said. “We’ll be sure he becomes one of those Mexican
nobodies.
”

Edward Bonshaw, overhearing all this, had only understood his name.

“Eduardo,” Edward Bonshaw had said, correcting Flor, who’d just smiled at him understandingly.

“They were my
parents,
or they tried to be!” Juan Diego attempted to say out loud, but the words wouldn’t come in the darkness. “Oh,” was all he managed to say—again. The way Miriam was moving on top of him, he couldn’t have said more than that.

P
ERRO
M
ESTIZO
,
A
.
K
.
A
. M
ONGREL
, was quarantined and observed for ten days—if you’re looking for rabies, this is a common procedure for biting animals that don’t look sick. (Mongrel was not rabid, but Dr. Vargas, consistent with his giving Edward Bonshaw rabies shots, had wanted to be sure.) For ten days, the dog act wasn’t performed at Circo de La Maravilla; the baby-stealer’s quarantine was a disruption to the routine of the other dogs in the dump kids’ troupe tent.