Avenue of Mysteries (50 page)

People were always suggesting swimming lessons for Juan Diego, but he’d
had
swimming lessons; the dog paddle was his choice. (The way dogs swam was good enough for Juan Diego; novels progressed slowly, too.)

“Leave the kid alone,” Flor once told a lifeguard at the pool. “Have you seen this boy
walk
? His foot isn’t just
crippled
—it weighs a ton. Full of metal—you try doing more than a dog paddle with an anchor attached to one leg!”

“My foot isn’t full of metal,” Juan Diego told Flor, when they were on their way home from the Field House.

“It’s a good story, isn’t it?” was all Flor said. But she wouldn’t tell
her
story. The pony on that postcard was just a glimpse of Flor’s story, the only view of what happened to her in Houston that Edward Bonshaw would ever have.

“Hi, Mister!” Consuelo kept calling from the beach. Pedro had waded into the shallow water; the boy was being extra cautious. Pedro seemed to be pointing at potentially deadly things on the bottom of the sea.

“Here’s one!” Pedro shouted to Consuelo. “There’s a whole bunch!” The little girl in the pigtails wouldn’t venture into the water.

The Bohol Sea did not seem menacing to Juan Diego, who was slowly dog-paddling his way to shore. He wasn’t worried about the killer gherkins, or whatever Pedro was worried about. Juan Diego was tired
from treading water, which was the same as swimming to him, but he’d waited to come ashore until he could stop crying.

In truth, he hadn’t really stopped—he was just tired of how long he’d waited for the crying to end. In the shallow water, as soon as Juan Diego could touch the bottom, he decided to walk ashore the rest of the way—even though this meant he would resume limping.

“Be careful, Mister—they’re everywhere,” Pedro said, but Juan Diego didn’t see the first sea urchin he stepped on (or the next one, or the one after that). The hard-shelled, spine-covered spheres were no fun to step on, even if you didn’t limp.

“Too bad about the sea urchins, Mister,” Consuelo was saying, as Juan Diego came ashore on his hands and knees—both his feet were tingling from the painful spines.

Pedro had run off to fetch Dr. Quintana. “It’s okay to cry, Mister—the sea urchins really hurt,” Consuelo was saying; she sat beside him on the beach. His tears, maybe exacerbated by such a long time in the salt water, just kept coming. He could see Josefa and Pedro running toward him along the beach; Clark French lagged behind—he ran like a freight train, slow to start but steadily gaining speed.

Juan Diego’s shoulders were shaking—too much treading water, perhaps; the dog paddle is a lot of work for your arms and shoulders. The little girl in pigtails put her small, thin arms around him.

“It’s okay, Mister,” Consuelo tried to comfort him. “Here comes the doctor—you’re going to be okay.”

What is it with me and women doctors? Juan Diego was wondering. (He should have married one, he knew.)

“Mister has been stepping on sea urchins,” Consuelo explained to Dr. Quintana, who knelt in the sand beside Juan Diego. “Of course, he’s got other things to cry about,” the little girl in the pigtails said.

“He misses stuff—geckos, the dump,” Pedro began to enumerate to Josefa.

“Don’t forget his sister,” Consuelo said to Pedro. “A lion killed Mister’s sister,” Consuelo explained to Dr. Quintana, in case the doctor hadn’t heard the litany of woes Juan Diego was suffering—and now, on top of everything, he’d stepped on sea urchins!

Dr. Quintana was gently touching Juan Diego’s feet. “The trouble with sea urchins is their spines are movable—they don’t get you just once,” the doctor was saying.

“It’s not my feet—it’s not the sea urchins,” Juan Diego tried to tell her quietly.

“What?” Josefa asked; she bent her head closer, to hear him.

“I should have married a woman doctor,” he whispered to Josefa; Clark and the children couldn’t hear him.

“Why didn’t you?” Dr. Quintana asked, smiling at him.

“I didn’t ask her soon enough—she said yes to someone else,” Juan Diego said softly.

How could he have told Dr. Quintana more? It was impossible to tell Clark French’s wife why he’d never married—why a lifetime partner, a companion till the end, was a friend he’d never made. Not even if Clark and the children hadn’t been there on the beach could Juan Diego have told Josefa why he’d not dared to emulate the match Edward Bonshaw had made with Flor.

Casual acquaintances, even colleagues and close friends—including those students he’d befriended, and had seen a bit of socially (not only in class or in teacher-writer conferences)—all
presumed
that Juan Diego’s adoptive parents had been a couple no one would have (or could have) sought to emulate. They’d been so
queer
—in every sense of the word! Surely, this was the commonplace version of why Juan Diego had never married anyone, why he’d not even made an effort to find that companion for life, the one so many people believed they wanted. (Surely, Juan Diego knew, this was the story Clark French would have imparted to his wife about his former teacher—an obdurate bachelor, in Clark’s eyes,
and
a godless secular humanist.)

Only Dr. Stein—dear Dr. Rosemary!—understood, Juan Diego believed. Dr. Rosemary Stein didn’t know everything about her friend and patient; she didn’t understand dump kids—she hadn’t been there when he’d been a child and a young adolescent. But Rosemary
did
know Juan Diego when he’d lost Señor Eduardo and Flor; Dr. Stein had been
their
doctor, too.

Dr. Rosemary, as Juan Diego thought of her—most fondly—knew why he’d never married. It wasn’t because Flor and Edward Bonshaw had been a
queer
couple; it was because those two had loved each other so much that Juan Diego couldn’t imagine ever finding a partnership as good as theirs—they’d been inimitable. And he’d loved them not only as parents, not to mention as “adoptive” parents. He’d loved them as the best (meaning, the most unattainable)
couple
he ever knew.

“He misses stuff,” Pedro had said, citing geckos and the dump.

“Don’t forget his sister,” Consuelo had said.

More than a lion had killed Lupe, Juan Diego knew, but he could no more say that—to any of them, there on the beach—than he could have become a skywalker. Juan Diego could no more have saved his sister than he could have become The Wonder.

And if he
had
asked Dr. Rosemary Stein to marry him—that is, before she’d said yes to someone else—who knows if she would have accepted the dump reader’s proposal?

“How was the swimming?” Clark French asked his former teacher. “I mean
before
the sea urchins,” Clark needlessly explained.

“Mister likes to bob around in one place,” Consuelo answered. “Don’t you, Mister?” the little girl in pigtails asked.

“Yes, I do, Consuelo,” Juan Diego told her.

“Treading water, a little dog-paddling—it’s a lot like writing a novel, Clark,” the dump reader told his former student. “It feels like you’re going a long way, because it’s a lot of work, but you’re basically covering old ground—you’re hanging out in familiar territory.”

“I see,” Clark said cautiously. He didn’t see, Juan Diego knew. Clark was a world-changer; he wrote with a mission, a positive agenda.

Clark French had no appreciation for dog-paddling or treading water; they were like living in the past, like going nowhere. Juan Diego lived there, in the past—reliving, in his imagination, the losses that had marked him.

•
22
•

Mañana

“If something in your life is wrong, or just unresolved, Mexico City is probably not the answer to your dreams,” Juan Diego had written in an early novel. “Unless you’re feeling in charge of your life, don’t go there.” The female character who says this isn’t Mexican, and we never learn what happens to her in Mexico City—Juan Diego’s novel didn’t go there.

The circus site, in northern Mexico City, was adjacent to a graveyard. The sparse grass in the stony field, where they exercised the horses and walked the elephants, was gray with soot. There was so much smog in the air, the lions’ eyes were watering when Lupe fed them.

Ignacio was making Lupe feed Hombre and the lionesses; the girl acrobats—the ones who were anticipating their periods—had revolted against the lion tamer’s tactics. Ignacio had convinced the girl acrobats that the lions knew when the girls got their periods, and the girls were afraid of bleeding near the big cats. (Of course, the girls were afraid of getting their periods in the first place.)

Lupe, who believed she would never get her period, was unafraid. And because she could read the lions’ minds, Lupe knew that Hombre and the lionesses never thought about the girls’ menstruating.

“Only Ignacio thinks about it,” Lupe had told Juan Diego. She liked feeding Hombre and the lionesses. “You wouldn’t believe how much they think about
meat,
” she’d explained to Edward Bonshaw. The Iowan wanted to watch Lupe feeding the lions—just to be sure the process was safe.

Lupe showed Señor Eduardo how the slot in the cage for the feeding tray could be locked and unlocked. The tray slid in and out, along the floor of the cage. Hombre would extend his paw through the slot, reaching
for the meat Lupe put on the tray; this was more a gesture of desire on the lion’s part than an actual attempt to grab the meat.

When Lupe slid the tray full of meat back inside the lion’s cage, Hombre always withdrew his extended paw. The lion waited for the meat in a sitting position; like a broom, his tail swished from side to side across the floor of his cage.

The lionesses never reached through the slot for the meat Lupe was putting on the feeding tray; they sat waiting, with their tails swishing the whole time.

For cleaning, the feeding tray could be entirely removed from the slot at the floor of the cage. Even when the tray was taken out of the cage, the slot wasn’t big enough for Hombre or the lionesses to escape through the opening; the slot was too small for Hombre’s big head to fit through it. Not even one of the lionesses could have stuck her head through the open feeding slot.

“It’s safe,” Edward Bonshaw had said to Juan Diego. “I just wanted to be sure about the size of the opening.”

Over the long weekend when La Maravilla was performing in Mexico City, Señor Eduardo slept with the dump kids in the dogs’ troupe tent. The first night—when the dump kids knew the Iowan was asleep, because he was snoring—Lupe said to her brother: “I can fit through the slot where the feeding tray slides in and out. It’s not too small an opening for
me
to fit through.”

In the darkness of the tent, Juan Diego considered what Lupe meant; what Lupe said and what she meant weren’t always the same thing.

“You mean, you could climb into Hombre’s cage—or the lionesses’ cage—through the feeding slot?” the boy asked her.

“If the feeding tray was removed from the slot—yes, I could,” Lupe told him.

“You sound like you’ve
tried
it,” Juan Diego said.

“Why would I try it?” Lupe asked him.

“I don’t know—why
would
you?” Juan Diego asked her.

She didn’t answer him, but even in the dark he sensed her shrug, her sheer indifference to answering him. (As if Lupe couldn’t be bothered to explain everything she knew, or how she knew it.)

Someone farted—one of the dogs, perhaps. “Was that the biter?” Juan Diego asked. Perro Mestizo, a.k.a. Mongrel, slept with Lupe on her cot. Pastora slept with Juan Diego; he knew the sheepdog hadn’t farted.

“It was the parrot man,” Lupe answered. The dump kids laughed. A
dog’s tail wagged—there was the accompanying thump-thump. One of the dogs had liked the laughter.

“Alemania,” Lupe said. It was the female German shepherd who had wagged her big tail. She slept on the dirt floor of the tent, by the tent flap, as if she were guarding (in police-dog fashion) the way in or out.

“I wonder if lions can catch rabies,” Lupe said, as if she were falling asleep, and she wouldn’t remember this idea in the morning.

“Why?” Juan Diego asked her.

“Just wondering,” Lupe said, sighing. After a pause, she asked: “Don’t you think the new dog act is stupid?”

Juan Diego knew when Lupe was deliberately changing the subject, and of course Lupe knew he’d been thinking about the new dog act. It was Juan Diego’s idea, but the dogs hadn’t been very cooperative, and the dwarf clowns had taken over the idea; it had become Paco and Beer Belly’s new act, in Lupe’s opinion. (As if those two clowns needed another stupid act.)

Ah, the passage of time—one day when he’d been dog-paddling in the pool at the old Iowa Field House, Juan Diego realized that the new dog act had amounted to his first novel-in-progress, but it was a story he’d been unable to finish. (And the idea that lions could catch rabies? Didn’t this amount to a story that Lupe had been unable to bring to a close?)

Like Juan Diego’s actual novels, the dog act began as a
what-if
proposition. What if one of the dogs could be trained to climb to the top of a stepladder? It was that type of stepladder with a shelf at the top; the shelf was for holding a can of paint, or a workman’s tools, but Juan Diego had imagined the shelf as a diving platform for a dog. What if one of the dogs climbed the stepladder and sailed into the air, off the diving platform, into an open blanket the dwarf clowns were holding out?

“The audience would love it,” Juan Diego told Estrella.

“Not Alemania—she won’t do it,” Estrella had said.

“Yes—I guess a German shepherd is too big to climb a stepladder,” Juan Diego had replied.

“Alemania is too smart to do it,” was all Estrella said.

“Perro Mestizo, the biter, is a chickenshit,” Juan Diego said.

“You hate little dogs—you hated Dirty White,” Lupe had told him.

“I don’t hate little dogs—Perro Mestizo isn’t that little. I hate
cowardly
dogs, and dogs who bite,” Juan Diego had told his sister.

“Not Perro Mestizo—he won’t do it,” was all Estrella said.