"I'll marry him only if he stops drinking," Lupe said to Juan Diego.
The good gringo's breath smelled worse than all the rest of him, and Juan Diego tried to distract himself from the bad smell by thinking about what present the friendly hippie might give the dump kids--last night, when he'd been more lucid, the young draft dodger had promised them a present.
Naturally, Lupe knew what her brother was thinking. "I don't believe the dear boy can afford to give us very extravagant presents," Lupe said. "One day, in about five to seven years, a simple gold wedding band might be nice, but I wouldn't count on anything special now--not when the hippie is spending his money on alcohol and prostitutes."
As if summoned by the prostitutes word, Esperanza came out of the bathroom; she was wearing her customary two towels (her hair bound in one, her body scarcely covered by the other) and carrying her Zaragoza Street clothes.
"Look at him, Mom!" Juan Diego cried; he began unbuttoning the good gringo's shirt, faster than Lupe had buttoned it up. "We found him on the street last night--he didn't have a mark on him. But this morning, look at him!" Juan Diego pulled open the hippie boy's shirt to reveal the Bleeding Jesus. "It's a miracle!" Juan Diego cried.
"It's el gringo bueno--he's no miracle," Esperanza said.
"Oh, let me die--she knows him! They've been naked together--she's done everything to him!" Lupe cried.
Esperanza rolled the gringo over on his stomach; she pulled down his underpants. "You call this a miracle?" she asked her children. On the dear boy's bare ass was a tattoo of the American flag, but the flag was purposely ripped in half; the crack of the hippie's ass divided the flag. It was pretty much the opposite of a patriotic picture.
"Whoa!" the unconscious gringo said in a strangled voice; he was lying facedown on the bed, where he appeared in danger of suffocating.
"He smells like upchuck," Esperanza said. "Help me get him into the bathtub--the water will bring him back to life."
"The gringo put his thing in her mouth," Lupe was babbling. "She put his thing in her--"
"Stop it, Lupe," Juan Diego said.
"Forget what I said about marrying him," Lupe said. "Not in five years or in seven--not ever!"
"You'll meet someone else," Juan Diego told his sister.
"Who has Lupe met? Who has upset her?" Esperanza asked. She held the naked hippie under his arms; Juan Diego took hold of the boy's ankles, and they carried him into the bathroom.
"You have upset her," Juan Diego told his mother. "Just the thought of you with the good gringo has upset her."
"Nonsense," Esperanza said. "Every girl loves the gringo kid, and he loves us. It would break your heart to be his mother, but the gringo kid makes all the other women in the world very happy."
"The gringo kid has broken my heart!" Lupe was wailing.
"What is the matter with her--did she get her period or something?" Esperanza asked Juan Diego. "I'd already had my first period by the time I was her age."
"No, I didn't get my period--I'm never getting my period!" Lupe screamed. "I'm retarded, remember? My period is retarded!"
Juan Diego and his mom hit the hippie's head on the hot-water faucet when they were sliding him into the bathtub, but the boy didn't flinch or open his eyes; his only response was to hold his penis.
"Isn't that sweet?" Esperanza asked Juan Diego. "He's a darling guy, isn't he?"
" 'I see, by your outfit, that you are a cowboy,' " the sleeping gringo sang.
Lupe wanted to be the one who turned the water on, but when she saw that el gringo bueno was holding his penis, she got upset all over again. "What is he doing to himself? He's thinking about sex--I know he is!" she said to Juan Diego.
"He's singing--he's not thinking about sex, Lupe," Juan Diego said.
"Sure he is--the gringo kid thinks about sex all the time. That's why he's so young-looking," Esperanza told them, turning on the tub; she opened both faucets all the way.
"Whoa!" cried the good gringo, opening his eyes. He saw the three of them peering down at him in the bathtub. He'd probably not seen Esperanza looking quite this way--in a tight white towel with her damp, tousled hair fallen forward, to either side of her pretty face. She had taken the second towel off her head; the towel for her hair was a little wet, but she wanted to leave it for the hippie boy to use. It would take her a while to get herself dressed, and to bring a couple of clean towels to the kids' bathroom.
"You drink too much, kid," Esperanza told the good gringo. "You don't have a big enough body to handle the alcohol."
"What are you doing here?" the dear boy asked her; he had a wonderful smile, the Dying Christ on his scrawny chest notwithstanding.
"She's our mother! You're fucking our mother!" Lupe yelled.
"Yikes, little sister--" the gringo started to say. Naturally, he hadn't understood her.
"This is our mother," Juan Diego told the hippie, as the tub was filling.
"Oh, wow. We're all friends, right? Amigos, aren't we?" the boy asked, but Lupe turned away from the bathtub; she went back into the bedroom.
They could all hear Sister Gloria and the kindergartners coming up the stairs from the chapel, because Esperanza had left the door to the hall open, and Lupe had left the bathroom door open. Sister Gloria called the enforced march for the kindergartners their "constitutional"; the children tramped upstairs, chanting the responsive "!Madre!" prayer. They marched around the hall, praying--they did this daily, not only on saints' days. Sister Gloria said she made the children march for the "additional benefit" of the good effect this had on Brother Pepe and Edward Bonshaw, who loved to see and hear the kindergartners repeating the "now and forever" business.
But Sister Gloria had a punitive streak in her. Sister Gloria probably wanted to punish Esperanza, catching her--as it usually happened--in the two towels, fresh from her bath. Sister Gloria must have imagined that the endearing holiness of the chanting kindergartners burned in Esperanza's sinning heart like a heated sword. Possibly, Sister Gloria deluded herself even further: she might have thought that the "you will be my guide" kindergartners had a cleansing effect on the prostitute's wayward brats, those dump kids who'd been given special privileges at Lost Children. A room of their own and their own bathroom, too!--this was not how Sister Gloria would have treated los ninos de la basura. This was no way to run an orphanage--not in Sister Gloria's opinion. You didn't give special privileges to smoke-smelling scavengers from the basurero!
But on the morning when Lupe learned that her mother and the good gringo had been lovers, Lupe was not in the mood to hear Sister Gloria and the kindergartners reciting the "!Madre!" prayer.
"Mother!" Sister Gloria arduously repeated; she had paused at the open door to the dump kids' bedroom, where the nun could see Lupe sitting on one of the unmade beds. The kindergartners stopped marching ahead in the hall; they stood, shuffling in place, staring into the bedroom. Lupe was sobbing, which was not entirely new.
"Now and forever, you will be my guide," the children were repeating--for what must have seemed, at least to Lupe, the hundredth (or the thousandth) time.
"Mother Mary is a fake!" Lupe screamed at them. "Let the Virgin Mary show me a miracle--just the tiniest miracle, please!--and I might believe, for a minute, that your Mother Mary has actually done something, except steal Mexico from our Guadalupe. What did the Virgin Mary ever actually do? She didn't even get herself pregnant!"
But Sister Gloria and the chanting kindergartners were used to incomprehensible outbursts from the presumed-to-be-retarded vagabond. ("La vagabunda," Sister Gloria called Lupe.)
"!Madre!" Sister Gloria simply said, again, and the children once more repeated the incessant prayer.
Esperanza's emergence from the bathroom came as a ghostly apparition to the kindergartners--they halted their responsive praying in midsentence. "Ahora y siempre--" the children were saying when they suddenly stopped, the "now and forever" incantation just ending. Esperanza was wearing only one towel, the one that scan
tily covered her body. Her wild, freshly shampooed hair momentarily made the kindergartners think she was not the orphanage's fallen cleaning woman; Esperanza now appeared to the children as a different, more confident being.
"Oh, get over it, Lupe!" Esperanza said. "He's not the last naked boy who will break your heart!" (This was sufficient to make Sister Gloria stop praying, too.)
"Yes he is--the first and last naked boy!" Lupe cried. (Of course the kindergartners and Sister Gloria didn't get this last bit.)
"Pay no attention to Lupe, children," Esperanza told the kindergartners, as she walked barefoot into the hall. "A vision of the Crucified Christ has disturbed her. She thought the Dying Jesus was in her bathtub--the crown of thorns, the excessive bleeding, the whole nailed-to-the-cross thing! Who wouldn't get upset to wake up to that?" Esperanza asked Sister Gloria, who was speechless. "Good morning to you, too, Sister," Esperanza said, sashaying her way down the hall--such as it was possible to sashay in a skimpy, tight towel. In fact, the tightness of the towel caused Esperanza to stride ahead with small, mincing steps--yet she managed to walk fairly fast.
"What naked boy?" Sister Gloria asked Lupe. The little vagabond sat stone-faced on the bed; Lupe pointed to the open bathroom door.
" 'Come sit down beside me and hear my sad story,' " someone was singing. " 'Got shot in the breast, and I know I must die.' "
Sister Gloria hesitated; upon the cessation of the "!Madre!" prayer and Esperanza's scantily covered exit, the hatchet-faced nun could hear what she thought were voices coming from the dump kids' bathroom. At first, Sister Gloria might have imagined she'd heard Juan Diego talking (or singing) to himself. But now, rising above the splashing sounds and the running water, the nun knew she'd been listening to two voices: that chatterbox of a boy from the Oaxaca basurero, Juan Diego (Brother Pepe's prize pupil), and what struck Sister Gloria as the voice of a much older boy or young man. What Esperanza had called a naked boy sounded very much to Sister Gloria like a grown man--that was why the nun had hesitated.
The kindergartners, however, had been indoctrinated; the kindergartners were trained to march, and march they did. The kindergartners tramped forward, through the dump kids' bedroom and into the bathroom.
What else could Sister Gloria do? If there were a young man who, in any fashion, resembled the Crucified Christ--a Dying Jesus in the dump kids' bathtub, as Esperanza had described him--wasn't it Sister Gloria's duty to protect the orphans from what Lupe had misinterpreted as a vision (one that had, apparently, upset her so)?
As for Lupe herself, she didn't wait around; she headed for the hallway. "!Madre!" Sister Gloria exclaimed, hurrying into the bathroom after the kindergartners.
"Now and forever, you will be our guide," the kindergartners were chanting in the bathroom--before all the screaming started. Lupe just kept walking down the hall.
The conversation Juan Diego had been having with the good gringo was very interesting, but--given what happened when the kindergartners marched into the bathroom--it's understandable why Juan Diego (especially, in his later years) had trouble keeping the details straight.
"I don't know why your mom keeps callin' me 'kid'--I'm not as young as I look," el gringo bueno had begun. (Of course he didn't look like a kid to Juan Diego, who was only fourteen--Juan Diego was a kid--but Juan Diego just nodded.) "My dad died in the Philippines, in the war--lots of Americans died there, but not when my dad did," the draft dodger continued. "My dad was really unlucky. That kind of luck can run in the family, you know. That was part of the reason I didn't think I should go to Vietnam--the bad luck runnin' in the family part--but also I always wanted to go to the Philippines, to see where my dad is buried and to pay my respects, just to say how sorry I was that I never got to meet him, you know."
Of course Juan Diego just nodded; he was beginning to notice that the tub kept filling, but the water level never changed. Juan Diego realized that the tub was draining and filling in equal amounts; the hippie had probably knocked out the plug--he kept slipping and sliding around on his tattooed bare ass. He also kept putting more and more shampoo in his hair, until the shampoo was all gone, and the suds from the shampoo rose all around the slippery gringo; the Crucified Christ had completely disappeared.
"Corregidor, May 1942--that was the culmination of a battle in the Philippines," the hippie was saying. "The Americans got wiped out. A month before had been the Bataan Death March--sixty-five fuckin' miles after the U.S. surrender. A lot of American prisoners didn't make it. This is why there's such a big American cemetery and memorial in the Philippines--it's in Manila. That's where I gotta go and tell my dad I love him. I can't go to Vietnam, and die there, before I can visit my dad," the young American said.
"I see," was all Juan Diego said.
"I thought I could convince them I was a pacifist," the good gringo went on; he was completely covered in shampoo, the spade-shaped patch of beard under his lower lip excepted. This tuft of dark hair seemed to be the only place where the boy's beard grew; he looked too young to need to shave the rest of his face, but he'd been running away from the draft for three years. He told Juan Diego he was twenty-six; they'd tried to draft him after he finished college, when he'd been twenty-three. That was when he got the Agonizing Christ tattoo: to convince the U.S. Army that he was a pacifist. Naturally, the religious tattoo didn't work.
In an expression of anti-patriotic hostility, the good gringo then got his ass tattooed--the American flag, apparently ripped in two by the crack in his ass--and fled to Mexico.
"This is what pretendin' to be a pacifist will get you--three years on the lam," the gringo was saying. "But just look what happened to my poor dad: he was younger than I am when they sent him to the Philippines. The war was almost over, but he was among the amphibious troops who recaptured Corregidor--February 1945. You can die when you're winnin' a war, you know--same as you can die when you're losin'. But is that bad luck, or what?"
"It's bad luck," Juan Diego agreed.
"I'll say it is--I was born in '44, just a few months before my dad was killed. He never saw me," the good gringo said. "My mom doesn't even know if he saw my baby pictures."
"I'm sorry," Juan Diego said. He was kneeling on the bathroom floor, beside the bathtub. Juan Diego was as impressionable as most fourteen-year-olds; he thought the American hippie was the most fascinating young man he'd ever met.
"Man on wheels," the gringo said, touching Juan Diego's hand with his shampoo-covered fingers. "Promise me somethin', man on wheels."
"Sure," Juan Diego said; after all, he'd just made a couple of absurd promises to Lupe.
"If anythin' happens to me, you gotta go to the Philippines for me--you gotta tell my dad I'm sorry," el gringo bueno said.
"Sure--yes, I will," Juan Diego said.
For the first time, the hippie looked surprised. "You will?" he asked Juan Diego.
"Yes, I will," the dump reader repeated.
"Whoa! Man on wheels! I guess I need more friends like you," the gringo told him. At that point, he slid entirely under the water and the shampoo suds; the hippie and his Bleeding Jesus had completely disappeared when the kindergartners, followed by the outraged Sister Gloria, marched into the bathroom, to the relentless chanting of "!Madre!" and "Now and forever--" not to mention the "you will be my guide" inanity.
"Well, where is he?" Sister Gloria asked Juan Diego. "There's no naked boy here. What naked boy?" the nun repeated; she didn't notice the bubbles under the bathwater (not with all the shampoo suds), but one of the kindergartners pointed to the bubbles, and Sister Gloria suddenly looked where the alert child was pointing.
That was when the sea monster rose from the frothy water. One can only guess that this is what the tattooed hippie and the Crucified Christ (or a shampoo-covered convergence of the two) looked like to the indoctrinated kindergartners: a religious sea monster. And, in all probability, the good gringo thought that his emergence from the bathwater should be of some entertainment value; after he'd just to
ld Juan Diego such a heavy-hearted story, maybe the draft dodger sought to change the mood of the moment. We'll never know what the crazy hippie had intended by flinging himself upward from the bottom of the bathtub, spouting water like a whale and extending his arms to either side of the tub--as if he were as nailed-to-the-cross, and dying, as the Bleeding Jesus tattooed on the naked boy's heaving chest. And what possessed the tall boy--what made him decide to stand up in the bathtub, so that he towered over everyone and made his nakedness all the more apparent? Well, we'll never know what el gringo bueno was thinking, or even if he was thinking. (The young American runaway was not known on Zaragoza Street for rational behavior.)
To be fair: the hippie had submerged himself when he and Juan Diego were alone in the bathroom; the good gringo had no idea, when he rose out of the water, that he was emerging to a multitude--not to mention that most of them were five-year-olds who believed in Jesus. The fact that the little children were there was not this Jesus's fault.
"Whoa!" cried the Crucified Christ--he looked more like the Drowned Christ at the moment, and the whoa word was a foreign-sounding one to the Spanish-speaking kindergartners.
Four or five of the terrified children instantly wet their pants; one little girl shrieked so loudly that several girls and boys bit their tongues. Those kindergartners nearest the door to the bedroom bolted through the bedroom, screaming, and raced into the hall. Those children who must have believed there was no escape from the gringo Christ fell to their knees, peeing and crying, and covered their heads with their hands; one little boy hugged a little girl so hard that she bit him in the face.
Sister Gloria had swooned, catching her balance by putting one hand on the bathtub, but the hippie Jesus, who feared that the nun was falling, wrapped his wet arms around her. "Whoa, Sister--" was all the young man managed to say, before Sister Gloria beat against the naked boy's chest with both her fists. She landed several blows on the Heaven-beseeching and tortured face of the Jesus tattoo, but when she saw (with horror) what she was doing, Sister Gloria threw up her arms and lifted her eyes in her own most Heaven-beseeching manner.