"Where does a dump kid learn English?" Dr. Vargas asked Brother Pepe in English. "Your English isn't this good, Pepe, but I presume you had a hand in teaching the boy."
"He taught himself, Vargas--he speaks, he understands, he reads," Pepe replied.
"This is a gift to be nurtured, Juan Diego," Edward Bonshaw told the boy. "I'm so sorry for your family tragedy, Dr. Vargas," Senor Eduardo added. "I know a little something about family adversities--"
"Who's the gringo?" Vargas rudely asked Juan Diego in Spanish.
"El hombre papagayo," Lupe said. ("The parrot man.")
Juan Diego deciphered this for Vargas.
"Edward is our new teacher," Brother Pepe told Dr. Vargas. "From Iowa," Pepe added.
"Eduardo," Edward Bonshaw said; the Iowan extended his hand before he regarded the rubber gloves Dr. Vargas was wearing--the gloves were spotted with blood from the boy's grotesquely flattened foot.
"You're sure he's not from Hawaii, Pepe?" Vargas asked. (It was impossible to overlook the clamorous parrots on the new missionary's Hawaiian shirt.)
"Like you, Dr. Vargas," Edward Bonshaw began, as he wisely changed his mind about shaking the young doctor's hand, "I have had my faith assailed by doubts."
"I never had any faith, hence no doubts," Vargas replied; his English was clipped but correct--there was nothing doubtful about it. "Here's what I like about X-rays, Juan Diego," Dr. Vargas continued in his no-nonsense English. "X-rays are not spiritual--in fact, they are wholly less ambiguous than a lot of elements I can think of at the moment. You come to me, injured, and with two Jesuits. You bring your visionary sister, who--as you say yourself--is more right about the past than she is about the future. Your esteemed jefe comes along--your dump boss, who looks after you and runs over you." (It was fortunate, for Rivera's sake, that Vargas's assessment was made in English, not Spanish, because Rivera was already feeling badly enough about the accident.) "And what the X-rays will show us are the limitations of what can be done for your foot. I'm speaking medically, Edward," Vargas interrupted himself, looking not only at Edward Bonshaw but also at Brother Pepe. "As for divine assistance--well, I leave that to you Jesuits."
"Eduardo," Edward Bonshaw corrected Dr. Vargas. Senor Eduardo's father, Graham (the dog-killer), had the middle name Edward; this was ample reason for Edward Bonshaw to prefer Eduardo, which Juan Diego had also taken a shine to.
Vargas delivered an impromptu outburst to Brother Pepe--this time in Spanish. "These dump kids live in Guerrero and their mother is cleaning the Templo de la Compania de Jesus--how Jesuitical! And I suppose she's cleaning Ninos Perdidos, too?"
"Si--the orphanage, too," Pepe replied.
Juan Diego was on the verge of telling Vargas that Esperanza, his mother, wasn't only a cleaning woman, but what else Esperanza did was ambiguous (at best), and the boy knew what a low opinion the young doctor had of ambiguity.
"Where is your mother now?" Dr. Vargas asked the boy. "She's not cleaning at this moment, surely."
"She's in the temple, praying for me," Juan Diego told him.
"Let's do the X-rays--let's move on," Dr. Vargas duly said; it was apparent that he'd had to restrain himself from making a disparaging comment on the powers of prayer.
"Thank you, Vargas," Brother Pepe said; he spoke with such uncharacteristic insincerity that everyone looked at him--even Edward Bonshaw, who'd met him only recently. "Thank you for making such an effort to spare us your constant atheism," Pepe said, more to the point.
"I am sparing you, Pepe," Vargas answered him.
"Surely your absence of belief is your own business, Dr. Vargas," Edward Bonshaw said. "But perhaps now is not the best time for it--for the boy's sake," the new missionary added, making absence of belief his business.
"It's okay, Senor Eduardo," Juan Diego told the Iowan in his near-perfect English. "I'm not much of a believer, either--I'm not much more of a believer than Dr. Vargas." But Juan Diego was more of a believer than he let on. He had his doubts about the Church--the local virgin politics, as he thought of them, included--yet the miracles intrigued him. He was open to miracles.
"Don't say that, Juan Diego--you're too young to cut yourself off from belief," Edward said.
"For the boy's sake," Vargas said in his abrupt-sounding English, "perhaps now is a better time for reality than for belief."
"Personally, I don't know what to believe," Lupe started in, heedless of who could (and couldn't) understand her. "I want to believe in Guadalupe, but look how she lets herself be used--look how the Virgin Mary manipulates her! How can you trust Guadalupe when she lets the Mary Monster be the boss?"
"Guadalupe lets Mary walk all over her, Lupe," Juan Diego said.
"Whoa! Stop! Don't say that!" Edward Bonshaw told the boy. "You're entirely too young to be cynical." (When the subject was religious, the new missionary's grasp of Spanish was better than you first thought.)
"Let's do the X-rays, Eduardo," Dr. Vargas said. "Let's move on. These kids live in Guerrero and work in the dump, while their mother cleans for you. Is that not cynical?"
"Let's move on, Vargas," Brother Pepe said. "Let's do the X-rays."
"It's a nice dump!" Lupe insisted. "Tell Vargas we love the dump, Juan Diego. Between Vargas and the parrot man, we'll end up living in Lost Children!" Lupe screamed, but Juan Diego translated nothing; he was silent.
"Let's do the X-rays," the boy said. He just wanted to know about his foot.
"Vargas is thinking there's no point in operating on your foot," Lupe told him. "Vargas believes that, if the blood supply is compromised, he'll have to amputate! He thinks you can't live in Guerrero with only one foot, or with a limp! In all likelihood, Vargas believes, your foot will heal by itself in a right-angle position--permanently. You'll walk again, but not for a couple of months. You'll never walk without a limp--that's what he's thinking. Vargas is wondering why the parrot man is here and not our mother. Tell him I know his thoughts!" Lupe screamed at her brother.
Juan Diego began: "I'll tell you what she says you're thinking." He told Vargas what Lupe had said, pausing dramatically to explain everything in English to Edward Bonshaw.
Vargas spoke to Brother Pepe as if the two men were alone: "Your dump kid is bilingual and his sister is a mind reader. They could do better for themselves in the circus, Pepe. They don't have to live in Guerrero and work in the basurero."
"Circus?" Edward Bonshaw said. "Did he say circus, Pepe? They're children! They're not animals! Surely Lost Children will care for them? A crippled boy! A girl who can't speak!"
"Lupe speaks a lot! She says too much," Juan Diego said.
"They're not animals!" Senor Eduardo repeated; perhaps it was the animals word (even in English) that made Lupe look more closely at the parrot man.
Uh-oh, Brother Pepe was thinking. God help us if the crazy girl reads his mind!
"The circus takes care of its kids, usually," Dr. Vargas said in English to the Iowan, giving a passing look at the guilt-stricken Rivera. "These kids could be a sideshow--"
"A sideshow!" Senor Eduardo cried, wringing his hands; maybe the way he was wringing his hands gave Lupe a vision of Edward Bonshaw as a seven-year-old boy. The girl began to cry.
"Oh, no!" Lupe blubbered; she covered her eyes with both hands.
"More mind reading?" Vargas asked, with seeming indifference.
"Is the girl really a mind reader, Pepe?" Edward asked.
Oh, I hope not now, Pepe was thinking, but all he said was: "The boy has taught himself to read in two languages. We can help the boy--think about him, Edward. We can't help the girl," Pepe added softly in English, though Lupe wouldn't have heard him if he'd said it en espanol. The girl was screaming again.
"Oh, no! They shot his dog! His father and his uncle--they killed the parrot man's poor dog!" Lupe wailed in her husky falsetto. Juan Diego knew how much his sister loved dogs; she either couldn't or wouldn't say more--she was sobbing inconsolably.
"What is it now?" the Iowan
asked Juan Diego.
"You had a dog?" the boy asked Senor Eduardo.
Edward Bonshaw fell to his knees. "Merciful Mary, Mother of Christ--thank you for bringing me where I belong!" the new missionary cried.
"I guess he did have a dog," Dr. Vargas said in Spanish to Juan Diego.
"The dog died--someone shot it," the boy told Vargas, as quietly as possible. The way Lupe was weeping, and with the Iowan's exclamatory praise of the Virgin Mary, it's unlikely that anyone heard this brief doctor-patient exchange--or what followed between them.
"Do you know someone in the circus?" Juan Diego asked Dr. Vargas.
"I know the person you should know, when the time comes," Vargas told the boy. "We'll need to get your mother involved--" Here Vargas saw Juan Diego instinctively shut his eyes. "Or Pepe, perhaps--we'll need Pepe's approval, in lieu of your mom's being sympathetic to the idea."
"El hombre papagayo--" Juan Diego started to say.
"I'm not the best choice for a constructive conversation with the parrot man," Dr. Vargas interrupted his patient.
"His dog! They shot his dog! Poor Beatrice!" Lupe was blubbering.
Notwithstanding the strained and unintelligible way Lupe spoke, Edward Bonshaw could make out the Beatrice word.
"Clairvoyance is a gift from God, Pepe," Edward said to his colleague. "Is the girl truly prescient? You said that word."
"Forget about the girl, Senor Eduardo," Brother Pepe quietly said--again, in English. "Think about the boy--we can save him, or help him to save himself. The boy is salvageable."
"But the girl knows things--" the Iowan started to say.
"Not things that will help her," Pepe quickly said.
"The orphanage will take these kids, won't they?" Senor Eduardo asked Brother Pepe.
Pepe was worried about the nuns at Lost Children; it was not necessarily the dump kids the nuns didn't like--the preexisting problem was Esperanza, their cleaning-lady-with-a-night-job mother. But all Pepe said to the Iowan was: "Si--Ninos Perdidos will take the kids." And here Pepe paused; he was wondering what to say next, and if he should say it--he had doubts.
None of them had noticed when Lupe stopped crying. "El circo," the clairvoyant girl said, pointing at Brother Pepe. "The circus."
"What about the circus?" Juan Diego asked his sister.
"Brother Pepe thinks it's a good idea," Lupe told him.
"Pepe thinks the circus is a good idea," Juan Diego told them all, in English and in Spanish. But Pepe didn't look so sure.
That ended their conversation for a while. The X-rays took a lot of time, mostly the part when they were waiting for the radiologist's opinion; as it turned out, the waiting went on so long that there was little doubt among them concerning what they would hear. (Vargas had already thought it, and Lupe had already told them his thoughts.)
While they were waiting to hear from the radiologist, Juan Diego decided that he actually liked Dr. Vargas. Lupe had come to a slightly different conclusion: the girl adored Senor Eduardo--chiefly, but not only, because of what had happened to the seven-year-old's dog. The girl had fallen asleep with her head in Edward Bonshaw's lap. That the all-seeing child had bonded with him gave the new teacher added zeal; the Iowan kept looking at Brother Pepe, as if to say: And you believe we can't save her? Of course we can!
Oh, Lord, Pepe prayed--what a perilous road lies ahead of us, in both lunatic and unknown hands! Please guide us!
It was then that Dr. Vargas sat beside Edward Bonshaw and Brother Pepe. Vargas lightly touched the sleeping girl's head. "I want a look at her throat," the young doctor reminded them. He told them he'd asked his nurse to contact a colleague whose office was also in the Cruz Roja hospital. Dr. Gomez was an ear, nose, and throat specialist--it would be ideal if she were available to have a look at Lupe's larynx. But if Dr. Gomez couldn't have a look for herself, Vargas knew she would at least lend him the necessary instruments. There was a special light, and a little mirror that you held at the back of the throat.
"Nuestra madre," Lupe said in her sleep. "Our mother. Let them look in her throat."
"She's not awake--Lupe always talks in her sleep," Rivera said.
"What is she saying, Juan Diego?" Brother Pepe asked the boy.
"It's about our mother," Juan Diego said. "Lupe can read your mind while she's asleep," the boy warned Vargas.
"Tell me more about Lupe's mother, Pepe," Vargas said.
"Her mother sounds the same but different--no one can understand her when she gets excited, or when she's praying. But Esperanza is older, of course," Pepe tried to explain--without really saying what he meant. He was struggling to express himself, both in English and in Spanish. "Esperanza can make herself comprehensible--she's not always impossible to understand. Esperanza is, from time to time, a prostitute!" Pepe blurted out, after checking to be sure that Lupe was still asleep. "Whereas this child, this innocent girl--well, she can't manage to communicate what she means, except to her brother."
Dr. Vargas looked at Juan Diego, who simply nodded; Rivera was nodding, too--the dump boss was both nodding and crying. Vargas asked Rivera: "When she was an infant, and when she was a small child, did Lupe have any respiratory distress--anything you can recall?"
"She had croup--she coughed and coughed," Rivera said, sobbing.
When Brother Pepe explained Lupe's history of croup to Edward Bonshaw, the Iowan asked: "Don't lots of kids get croup?"
"It's her hoarseness that is distinctive--the audible evidence of vocal strain," Dr. Vargas said slowly. "I still want to have a look at Lupe's throat, her larynx, her vocal cords."
Edward Bonshaw, with the clairvoyant girl asleep on his lap, sat as if frozen. The enormity of his vows seemed to assail him and give him strength in the same riotous millisecond: his devotion to Saint Ignatius Loyola, for the insane reason of the saint's announcement that he would sacrifice his life if he could prevent the sins of a single prostitute on a single night; the two gifted dump kids on the threshold of either danger or salvation--perhaps both; and now the atheistic young man of science Dr. Vargas, who could think only of examining the child psychic's throat, her larynx, her vocal cords--oh, what an opportunity, and what a collision course, this was!
That was when Lupe woke up, or--if she'd been awake for a while--when she opened her eyes.
"What is my larynx?" the little girl asked her brother. "I don't want Vargas looking at it."
"She wants to know what her larynx is," Juan Diego translated for Dr. Vargas.
"It's the upper part of her trachea--where her vocal cords are," Vargas explained.
"Nobody's getting near my trachea. What is it?" Lupe asked.
"Now she's concerned about her trachea," Juan Diego reported.
"Her trachea is the main trunk of a system of tubes; air passes through these tubes, to and from Lupe's lungs," Dr. Vargas told Juan Diego.
"There are tubes in my throat?" Lupe asked.
"There are tubes in all our throats, Lupe," Juan Diego said.
"Whoever Dr. Gomez is, Vargas wants to have sex with her," Lupe told her brother. "Dr. Gomez is married, she has children, she's a lot older than he is, but Vargas still wants to have sex with her."
"Dr. Gomez is an ear, nose, and throat specialist, Lupe," Juan Diego said to his unusual sister.
"Dr. Gomez can look at my larynx, but Vargas can't--he's disgusting!" Lupe said. "I don't like the idea of a mirror at the back of my throat--this hasn't been a good day for mirrors!"
"Lupe's a little worried about the mirror," was all Juan Diego said to Dr. Vargas.
"Tell her the mirror doesn't hurt," Vargas said.
"Ask him if what he wants to do to Dr. Gomez hurts!" Lupe cried.
"Either Dr. Gomez or I will hold Lupe's tongue with a gauze pad--just to keep her tongue away from the back of her throat--" Vargas was explaining, but Lupe wouldn't let him continue.
"The Gomez woman can hold my tongue--not Vargas," Lupe said.
"Lupe is looking forward to meeti
ng Dr. Gomez," was all Juan Diego said.
"Dr. Vargas," Edward Bonshaw said, after he'd drawn a deep breath, "at a mutually convenient time--I mean some other time, of course--I think you and I should talk about our beliefs."
With the hand that had so gently touched the sleeping girl, Dr. Vargas--with a more forceful grip--closed his fingers tightly around the new missionary's wrist. "Here's what I think, Edward--or Eduardo, or whatever your name is," Vargas said. "I think the girl has got something going on in her throat; perhaps the problem is her larynx, affecting her vocal cords. And this boy is going to limp for the rest of his life, whether he keeps that foot or loses it. That's what we have to deal with--I mean here, on this earth," Dr. Vargas said.
When Edward Bonshaw smiled, his fair skin seemed to shine; the idea that an inner light had been suddenly switched on was eerily plausible. When Senor Eduardo smiled, a wrinkle as precise and striking as a lightning bolt crossed the bright-white tissue of that perfect check mark on the zealot's forehead--smack between his blond eyebrows. "In case you were wondering about my scar," Edward Bonshaw began, as he always began, his story.
* 10 *
No Middle Ground
"We'll see you sooner than you think," Dorothy had told Juan Diego.
"We end up in Manila," the young woman had said enigmatically.
In a moment of hysteria, Lupe had told Juan Diego that they would end up living in Lost Children--a half-truth, as it turned out. The dump kids--like everyone else, the nuns called them "los ninos de la basura"--moved their things from Guerrero to the Jesuit orphanage. Life at the orphanage was different from life at the dump, where only Rivera and Diablo had protected them. The nuns at Ninos Perdidos--together with Brother Pepe and Senor Eduardo--would look after Lupe and Juan Diego more closely.
It was heartbreaking to Rivera that he'd been replaced, but he was on Esperanza's shit list for running over her only son, and Lupe was unforgiving on the subject of the unrepaired side-view mirror. Lupe said it was only Diablo and Dirty White she would miss, but she would miss the other dogs in Guerrero and the dump dogs--even the dead ones. With Rivera's help or Juan Diego's, Lupe had been in the habit of burning the dead dogs at the basurero. (And of course Rivera would be missed--both Juan Diego and Lupe would miss el jefe, despite what Lupe had said.)