"Not documented," the man of science slyly said.
Golfers had died hitting holes-in-one. An unusually high number of Germans suffered sudden cardiac deaths whenever the German soccer team was competing for the World Cup. Men, only a day or two after their wives have died; women who've lost their husbands, not only to death; parents who've lost children. They have all died of sadness, suddenly. These examples of emotional states leading to fatal heart rhythms were missing from Juan Diego's dream.
Yet the sound of Rivera's truck--that special whine the reverse gear made when Rivera was backing up--made its insidious way into Juan Diego's dream, no doubt at the moment the landing gear was dropping down from his plane, which was about to arrive in Bohol. Dreams do this: like the Roman Catholic Church, dreams co-opt things; dreams appropriate things that are not truly their own.
To a dream, it's all the same: the grinding sound of the landing gear for Philippine Airlines 177, the whine that Rivera's truck made in reverse. As for how the tainted smell of the Oaxaca morgue managed to infiltrate Juan Diego's dream on his short flight from Manila to Bohol--well, not everything can be explained.
Rivera knew where the loading platform was at the morgue; he knew the autopsy guy, too--the forensic surgeon who cut open the bodies in the anfiteatro de diseccion. As far as the dump kids were concerned, there'd never been any need to perform an autopsy on Esperanza. The Virgin Mary had scared her to death, and--what's more--the Mary Monster had meant to do it.
Rivera did his best to prepare Lupe for what Esperanza's cadaver would look like--the stitched autopsy scar (neck to groin), running straight down her sternum. But Lupe was unprepared for the pile of unclaimed corpses awaiting autopsies, or for the post-op body of el gringo bueno, whose outstretched white arms (as if he'd just been removed from the cross, where he'd been crucified) stood in stark relief against the more brown-skinned cadavers.
The good gringo's autopsy gash was fresh, newly stitched, and there'd been some cutting in the area of his head--more damage than a crown of thorns would have caused. The good gringo's war was over. It was a shock to Lupe and Juan Diego to see the hippie boy's cast-aside cadaver. El gringo bueno's Christlike face was at last at rest, though the Christ tattooed on the beautiful boy's pale body had also suffered from the forensic surgeon's dissection.
It was not lost on Lupe that her mother and the good gringo were the most beautiful bodies on display in the amphitheater of dissection, though they'd both looked a lot better when they were alive.
"We take el gringo bueno, too--you promised me we would burn him," Lupe said to Juan Diego. "We'll burn him with Mother."
Rivera had talked the autopsy guy into giving him and the dump kids Esperanza's body, but when Juan Diego translated Lupe's request--how she wanted the dead hippie, too--the forensic surgeon had a fit.
The American runaway was part of a crime investigation. Someone in the Hotel Somega told the police that the hippie had succumbed to alcohol poisoning--a prostitute claimed the kid had "just died" on top of her. But the autopsy guy had learned otherwise. El gringo bueno had been beaten to death; he'd been drunk, but the alcohol wasn't what killed him.
"His soul has to fly back home," Lupe kept saying. " 'As I walked out in the streets of Laredo,' " she suddenly sang. " 'As I walked out in Laredo one day--' "
"What language is that kid singing?" the forensic surgeon asked Rivera.
"The police aren't going to do anything," Rivera told him. "They're not even going to say the hippie was beaten to death. They'll say it was alcohol poisoning."
The forensic surgeon shrugged. "Yeah, that's what they're already saying," the surgeon said. "I told them the tattoo kid had been beaten, but the cops told me to keep it to myself."
"It's alcohol poisoning--that's how they're going to handle it," Rivera said.
"The only thing that matters now is the good gringo's soul," Lupe insisted. Juan Diego decided he should translate this.
"But what if his mother wants his body back?" Juan Diego added, after he told them what Lupe said about el gringo bueno's soul.
"The mom has asked for his ashes. That's not what we usually do, not even with foreigners," the surgeon replied. "We certainly don't burn the bodies at the basurero."
Rivera shrugged. "We'll get you some ashes," Rivera told him.
"There are two bodies, and we'll keep half the ashes for ourselves," Juan Diego said.
"We'll take the ashes to Mexico City--we'll scatter them at the Basilica de Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe, at the feet of our Virgin," Lupe said. "We're not bringing their ashes anywhere near Bad Mary without a nose!" Lupe cried.
"That girl doesn't sound like anyone else," the forensic surgeon said, but Juan Diego didn't translate Lupe's craziness about scattering the good gringo's and Esperanza's ashes at the feet of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City.
Rivera, probably because there was a young girl present, insisted that Esperanza and el gringo bueno be put in separate body bags; Juan Diego and Rivera helped the forensic surgeon do that. During this funereal moment, Lupe looked at the other cadavers, both the dissected ones and the ones waiting for dissection--the corpses that didn't matter to her, in other words. Juan Diego could hear Diablo barking and howling from the back of Rivera's truck; the dog could tell that the air around the morgue was tainted. There was a cold-meat smell in the anfiteatro de diseccion.
"How could his mother not want to see his body first? How could any mom want the dear boy's ashes instead?" Lupe was saying. She wasn't expecting an answer--after all, she believed in burning.
Esperanza may not have wanted to be cremated, but the dump kids were doing it anyway. Considering her Catholic zeal (Esperanza had loved confession), she might not have chosen a funeral pyre at the dump, but if the deceased doesn't leave prior instructions (Esperanza didn't), the disposal of the dead is for the children to decide.
"The Catholics are crazy not to believe in cremation," Lupe was babbling. "There's no better place to burn things than at the dump--the black smoke rising as far as you can see, the vultures drifting across the landscape." Lupe had closed her eyes in the amphitheater of dissection, clutching the hideous Coatlicue earth goddess to her not-yet-noticeably-emerging breasts. "You have the nose, don't you?" Lupe asked her brother, opening her eyes.
"Yes, of course I have it," Juan Diego said; his pocket bulged.
"The nose goes in the fire, too--just to be sure," Lupe said.
"Sure of what?" Juan Diego asked. "Why burn the nose?"
"Just in case the imposter Mary has any power--just to be safe," Lupe said.
"La nariz?" Rivera asked; he had a body bag slung over each big shoulder. "What nose?"
"Say nothing about Mary's nose. Rivera is too superstitious. Let him figure it out. He'll see the noseless monster Virgin the next time he goes to Mass, or to confess his sins. I keep telling him, but he doesn't listen--his mustache is a sin," Lupe babbled. She saw that Rivera was listening to her closely; la nariz had gotten el jefe's attention--he was trying to figure out what the dump kids had been saying about a nose.
" 'Get six jolly cowboys to carry my coffin,' " Lupe started singing. " 'Get six pretty maidens to bear up my pall.' " It was the right moment for the cowboy dirge--Rivera was toting two bodies to his truck. " 'Put bunches of roses all over my coffin,' " Lupe kept singing. " 'Roses to deaden the clods as they fall.' "
"The girl is a marvel," the forensic surgeon said to the dump boss. "She could be a rock star."
"How could she be a rock star?" Rivera asked him. "No one but her brother can understand her!"
"Nobody knows what rock stars are singing. Who can understand the lyrics?" the surgeon asked.
"There's a reason the idiot autopsy guy spends his whole life with dead people," Lupe was babbling. But the rock-star business made Rivera forget about the nose. El jefe carried the body bags outside to the loading platform, and then put them gently on the flatbed of his truck, where Diablo immediately sniffed the bodies.
/> "Don't let Diablo roll on the bodies," Rivera told Juan Diego; the dump kids and Rivera knew how much the dog liked rolling on dead things. Juan Diego would ride to the basurero in the flatbed of the truck with Esperanza and el gringo bueno and, of course, Diablo.
Lupe rode in the cab of the truck with Rivera.
"The Jesuits will come here, you know," the forensic surgeon was saying to the dump boss. "They come to collect their flock--they'll be here for Esperanza."
"The children are in charge of their mother--tell the Jesuits that the dump kids are Esperanza's flock," Rivera told the autopsy guy.
"That little girl could be in the circus, you know," the forensic surgeon said, pointing to Lupe in the cab.
"Doing what?" Rivera asked him.
"People would pay just to hear her talk!" the autopsy guy said. "She wouldn't even have to sing."
It would haunt Juan Diego, later, how this surgeon with his rubber gloves, tainted with death and dissection, had brought the circus into the conversation at the Oaxaca morgue.
"Drive on!" Juan Diego cried to Rivera; the boy pounded on the truck's cab, and Rivera drove away from the loading platform. It was a cloudless day with a perfect bright-blue sky. "Don't roll on them--no rolling!" Juan Diego shouted at Diablo, but the dog just sat in the flatbed, watching the live boy, not even sniffing the bodies.
Soon the wind dried the tears on Juan Diego's face, but the wind did not permit him to hear what Lupe was saying inside the truck's cab to Rivera. Juan Diego could hear only his sister's prophesying voice, not her words; she was going on and on about something. Juan Diego thought she was babbling about Dirty White. Rivera had given the runt to a family in Guerrero, but the rodent-size dog kept returning to el jefe's shack--no doubt looking for Lupe.
Now Dirty White was missing; naturally, Lupe had harangued Rivera without mercy. She said she knew where Dirty White would go--she meant where the little dog would go to die. ("The puppy place," she'd called it.)
From the flatbed of the pickup, Juan Diego could hear only bits and pieces of what the dump boss was saying. "If you say so," el jefe would interject from time to time, or: "I couldn't have said it better myself, Lupe"--all the way to Guerrero, from where Juan Diego could see the isolated plumes of smoke; there were already a few fires burning in the not-too-distant dump.
Overhearing, inexactly, Lupe's not-a-conversation with Rivera reminded Juan Diego of studying literature with Edward Bonshaw in one of the soundproof reading rooms in the library of Ninos Perdidos. What Senor Eduardo meant by studying literature was a reading-aloud process: the Iowan would begin by reading what he called a "grown-up novel" to Juan Diego; in this way, they could determine together whether or not the book was age-appropriate for the boy. Naturally, there would be differences of opinion between them regarding the aforementioned appropriateness or lack thereof.
"What if I'm really liking it? What if I know that, if I were allowed to read this book, I would never stop reading it?" Juan Diego asked.
"That's not the same as whether or not the book is suitable," Edward Bonshaw would answer the fourteen-year-old. Or Senor Eduardo would pause in his reading aloud, tipping off Juan Diego that the missionary was attempting to skip over some sexual content.
"You're censoring a sex scene," the boy would say.
"I'm not sure this is appropriate," the Iowan would reply.
The two of them had settled on Graham Greene; matters of faith and doubt were clearly at the forefront of Edward Bonshaw's mind, if not the sole motivation for his whipping himself, and Juan Diego liked Greene's sexual subjects, though the author tended to render the sex offstage or in an understated manner.
The way the studying worked was that Edward Bonshaw would begin a Greene novel by reading it aloud to Juan Diego; then Juan Diego would read the rest of the novel to himself; last, the grown man and the boy would discuss the story. In the discussion part, Senor Eduardo was very keen about citing specific passages and asking Juan Diego what Graham Greene had meant.
One sentence in The Power and the Glory had prompted a lengthy and ongoing discussion regarding its meaning. The student and the teacher had contrasting ideas about the sentence, which was: "There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in."
"What do you make of that, Juan Diego?" Edward Bonshaw had asked the boy. "Is Greene saying that our future begins in childhood, and we should pay attention to--"
"Well, of course the future begins in childhood--where else would it begin?" Juan Diego asked the Iowan. "But I think it's bullshit to say there is one moment when the door to the future opens. Why can't there be many moments? And is Greene saying there's only one door? He says the door, like there's only one."
"Graham Greene isn't bullshit, Juan Diego!" Senor Eduardo had cried; the zealot was clutching something small in one hand.
"I know about your mah-jongg tile--you don't have to show it to me again," Juan Diego told the scholastic. "I know, I know--you fell, the little piece of ivory and bamboo cut your face. You bled, Beatrice licked you--that's how your dog died, shot and killed. I know, I know! But did that one moment make you want to be a priest? Did the door to no sex for the rest of your life open only because Beatrice got shot? There must have been other moments in your childhood; you could have opened other doors. You still could open a different door, right? That mah-jongg tile didn't have to be your childhood and your future!"
Resignation: that was what Juan Diego had seen on Edward Bonshaw's face. The missionary seemed resigned to his fate: celibacy, self-flagellation, the priesthood--all this was caused by a fall with a mah-jongg tile in his little hand? A life of beating himself and sexual denial because his beloved dog was cruelly shot and killed?
It was also resignation that Juan Diego saw on Rivera's face now, as el jefe backed up the truck to the shack they had shared as a family in Guerrero. Juan Diego knew what it was like to have a not-a-conversation with Lupe--just to listen to her, whether you understood her or not.
Lupe always knew more than you did; Lupe, though incomprehensible much of the time, knew stuff no one else knew. Lupe was a child, but she argued like a grown-up. She said things even she didn't understand; she said the words "just came" to her, often before she had any awareness of their meaning.
Burn el gringo bueno with Mother; burn the Virgin Mary's nose with them. Just do it. Scatter their ashes in Mexico City. Just do it.
And there had been the zealous Edward Bonshaw spouting Graham Greene (another Catholic, clearly tortured by faith and doubt), claiming there was only one moment when the door--a single fucking door!--opened and let the fucking future in.
"Jesus Christ," Juan Diego was muttering when he climbed out of the flatbed of Rivera's truck. (Neither Lupe nor the dump boss thought the boy was praying.)
"Just a minute," Lupe told them. She walked purposefully away from them, disappearing behind the shack the dump kids had once called home. She has to take a leak, Juan Diego was thinking.
"No, I don't have to take a leak!" Lupe called. "I'm looking for Dirty White!"
"Is she peeing, or do you need more water pistols?" Rivera asked. Juan Diego shrugged. "We should start burning the bodies--before the Jesuits get to the basurero," el jefe said.
Lupe came back carrying a dead dog--it was a puppy, and Lupe was crying. "I always find them in the same place, or nearly the same place," she was blubbering. The dead puppy was Dirty White.
"We're going to burn Dirty White with your mother and the hippie?" Rivera asked.
"If you burned me, I would want to be burned with a puppy!" Lupe cried. Juan Diego thought this was worth translating, and he did. Rivera paid no attention to the dead puppy; el jefe had hated Dirty White. The dump boss was doubtless relieved that the disagreeable runt wasn't rabid, and hadn't bitten Lupe.
"I'm sorry the dog adoption didn't work," Rivera said to Lupe when the little girl had reseated herself in the cab of el jefe's truck, the dead puppy lying stiffly in her lap.
/> When Juan Diego was once more with Diablo and the body bags in the flatbed of the pickup, Rivera drove to the basurero; once there, he backed up the truck to the fire that burned brightest among the smoldering piles.
Rivera was rushing a little when he took the two body bags out of the flatbed and doused them with gasoline.
"Dirty White looks soaking wet," Juan Diego said to Lupe.
"He is," she said, laying the puppy on the ground beside the body bags. Rivera respectfully poured some gasoline on the dead dog.
The dump kids turned away from the fire when el jefe threw the body bags on the coals, into the low flames; suddenly the flames shot higher. When the fire was a towering conflagration, but Lupe's back was still turned to the blaze, Rivera tossed the little puppy into the inferno.
"I better move the truck," the dump boss said. The kids had already noticed that the side-view mirror remained broken. Rivera claimed he would never repair it; he said he wanted to torture himself with the memory.
Like a good Catholic, Juan Diego thought, watching el jefe move the truck away from the sudden heat of the funeral pyre.
"Who's a good Catholic?" Lupe asked her brother.
"Stop reading my mind!" Juan Diego snapped at her.
"I can't help it," she told him. When Rivera was still in the truck, Lupe said: "Now's a good time to put the monster nose in the fire."
"I don't see the point of it," Juan Diego said, but he threw the Virgin Mary's broken nose into the conflagration.
"Here they come--right on time," Rivera said, joining the kids where they stood at some distance from the fire; it was very hot. They could see Brother Pepe's dusty red VW racing into the basurero.
Later, Juan Diego thought that the Jesuits tumbling out of the little VW Beetle resembled a clown act at the circus. Brother Pepe, the two outraged priests--Father Alfonso and Father Octavio--and, of course, the dumbstruck Edward Bonshaw.
The funeral pyre spoke for the dump kids, who said nothing, but Lupe decided that singing was okay. " 'Oh, beat the drum slowly and play the fife lowly,' " she sang. " 'Play the dead march as you carry me along--' "
"Esperanza wouldn't have wanted a fire--" Father Alfonso started to say, but the dump boss interrupted him.