"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.
PERRO MESTIZO, A.K.A. MONGREL, 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.
Baby, the male dachshund, peed on the dirt floor of the tent every night. Pastora, the female sheepdog, whined ceaselessly. Estrella had to sleep in the dogs' troupe tent, or Pastora would never have been quiet--and Estrella snored. The sight of Estrella sleeping on her back, her face shadowed by the visor of her baseball cap, gave Lupe nightmares, but Estrella said she couldn't sleep bareheaded because the mosquitoes would bite her bald head; then her head would itch and she couldn't scratch it without removing her wig, which upset the dogs. During Perro Mestizo's quarantine, Alemania, the female German Shepherd, stood over Juan Diego's cot at night, panting in the boy's face. Lupe blamed Vargas for "demonizing" Mongrel; poor Perro Mestizo, "always the bad guy," was once more a victim in Lupe's eyes.
"The asshole dog bit Senor Eduardo," Juan Diego reminded his sister. The asshole-dog idea was Rivera's. Lupe didn't believe there were asshole dogs.
"Senor Eduardo was falling in love with Flor's penis!" Lupe cried--as if this new and disturbing development had caused Perro Mestizo to attack the Iowan. But this meant Perro Mestizo was homophobic, and didn't that make him an asshole dog?
Yet Juan Diego was able to persuade Lupe to stay at La Maravilla--at least until after the circus had traveled to Mexico City. The trip mattered more to Lupe than it did to Juan Diego; scattering their mother's ashes (and the good gringo's ashes, and Dirty White's, not to mention the remains of the Virgin Mary's enormous nose) meant a lot to Lupe. She believed Our Lady of Guadalupe had been marginalized in Oaxaca's churches; Guadalupe was a second fiddle in Oaxaca.
Esperanza, whatever her faults, had been "bumped off" by the Mary Monster, in Lupe's view. The clairvoyant child believed the wrongness of the religious world would right itself--if, and only if, her sinful mother's ashes were scattered at the Basilica de Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe in Mexico City. Only there did the dark-skinned virgin, la virgen morena, draw busloads of pilgrims to her shrine. Lupe longed to see the Chapel of the Well--where Guadalupe, encased in glass, lay on her deathbed.
Even with his limp, Juan Diego looked forward to the long climb--the endless stairs leading to El Cerrito de las Rosas, the temple where Guadalupe wasn't tucked away in a side altar. She was elevated at the front of the sacred El Cerrito, "The Little Hill." (Lupe, instead of saying "El Cerrito," liked to call the temple "Of the Roses"; she said this sounded more sacred than "The Little Hill.") Either there or at the dark-skinned virgin's deathbed in the Chapel of the Well, the dump kids would scatter the ashes, which they'd kept in a coffee can Rivera had found at the basurero.
The contents of the coffee can did not have Esperanza's smell. They had a nondescript odor. Flor had sniffed the ashes; she'd said it wasn't the good gringo's smell, either.
"It smells like coffee," Edward Bonshaw had said when he'd sniffed the coffee can.
Whatever the ashes smelled like, the dogs in the troupe tent weren't interested. Maybe there was a medicinal odor; Estrella said anything that smelled like medicine would put off the dogs. Perhaps the unidentifiable smell was the Virgin Mary's nose.
"It's definitely not Dirty White," was all Lupe would say about the smell; she sniffed the ashes in the coffee can every night before going to bed.
Juan Diego could never read her mind--he didn't even try. Possibly Lupe liked to sniff the contents of the coffee can because she knew they would be scattering the ashes soon, and she wanted to remember the smell after the ashes were gone.
Shortly before Circus of The Wonder would travel to Mexico City--a long trip, especially in a caravan of trucks and buses--Lupe brought the coffee can to a dinner party they were invited to, at Dr. Vargas's house in Oaxaca. Lupe told Juan Diego that she wanted a "scientific opinion" of the ashes' smell.
"But it's a dinner party, Lupe," Juan Diego said. It was the first dinner party the dump kids had been invited to; in all likelihood, they knew, the invitation wasn't Vargas's idea.
Brother Pepe had discussed with Vargas what Pepe called Edward Bonshaw's "test of the soul." Dr. Vargas didn't think Flor had presented the Iowan with a spiritual crisis. In fact, Vargas had offended Flor by suggesting to Senor Eduardo that the only reason to worry about his relationship with a transvestite prostitute might be a medical matter.
Dr. Vargas meant sexually transmitted diseases; he meant how many partners a prostitute had, and what Flor might have picked up from one of them. It didn't matter to Vargas that Flor had a penis--or that Edward Bonshaw had one, too, and that the Iowan would have to give up his hope of becoming a priest because of it.
That Edward Bonshaw had broken his vow of celibacy didn't matter to Dr. Vargas, either. "I just don't want your dick to fall off--or turn green, or something," Vargas had said to the Iowan. That was what offended Flor, and why she wouldn't come to the dinner party at Casa Vargas.
In Oaxaca, anyone who had an ax to grind with Vargas called his house "Casa Vargas." This included people who disliked him for his family wealth, or thought it was insensitive of him to have moved into his parents' mansion after they'd been killed in a plane crash. (By now, everyone in Oaxaca knew the story of how Vargas was supposed to have been on that plane.) And among the people who played the "Casa Vargas" card were those who'd been offended by how brusque Vargas could be. He used science like a bludgeon; he was inclined to club you with a strictly medical detail--the way he'd relegated Flor to a potential sexually transmitted disease.
Well, that was Vargas--that was who he was. Brother Pepe knew him well. Pepe thought he could count on Vargas to be cynical about everything. Pepe believed the dump kids and Edward Bonshaw could benefit from some of Vargas's cynicism. This was why Pepe had prevailed upon Vargas to invite the Iowan and the dump kids to the dinner party.
Pepe knew other scholastics who'd failed their vows. There could be doubts and detours on the road to the priesthood. When the most zealous students abandoned their studies, the emotional and psychological aspects of "reorientation," as Pepe thought of it, could be brutal.
No doubt Edward Bonshaw had questioned whether or not he was gay, or if he was in love with this particular person who just happened to have breasts and a penis. No doubt Senor Eduardo had asked himself: Aren't a lot of gay men not attracted to transvestites? Yet Edward Bonshaw knew that some gay men were attracted to trannies.
But did that make him, Senor Eduardo must have wondered, a sexual minority within a minority?
Brother Pepe didn't care about those distinctions within distinctions. Pepe had a lot of love in him. Pepe knew that the matter of the Iowan's sexual orientation was strictly Edward Bonshaw's business.
Brother Pepe didn't have a problem with Senor Eduardo's belatedly discovering his homosexual self (if that's what was going on), or his abandoning the quest to become a priest; it was okay with Pepe that Edward Bonshaw was smitten by a cross-dresser with a penis. And Pepe didn't dislike Flor, but Pepe had a problem with the prostitute part--not necessarily for Vargas's sexually transmitted reasons. Pepe knew that Flor had always been in trouble; she'd lived surrounded by trouble (not everything could be blamed on Houston), while Edward Bonshaw had scarcely lived at all. What would two people like that do together in Iowa? For Senor Eduardo, in Pepe's opinion, Flor was a step too far--Flor's world was without boundaries.
As for Flor--who knew what she was thinking? "I think you're a very nice parrot man," Flor had said to the Iowan. "I should have met you when I was a kid," she'd told him. "We might have helped each other get through some shit."
Well, yes--Brother Pepe would have agreed to that. But wasn't now too late for the two of them? As for Dr. Vargas--specifically, his "offending" Flor--Pepe might have put Vargas up to it. Yet no litany of sexually transmitted diseases was likely to scare Edward Bonshaw away; sexual attraction isn't strictly scientific.
Brother Pepe had higher hopes of Vargas's skepticism succeeding with Juan Diego and Lupe. The dump kids were disillusioned with La Maravilla--at least Lupe was. Dr. Vargas took a dim view of reading lions' minds, as did Brother Pepe. Vargas had examined a few of the young-women acrobats; they'd been his patients, both before and after Ignacio got his hands on them. As a performer, being The Wonder--La Maravilla herself--could kill you. (No one had survived the fall from eighty feet without a net.) Dr. Vargas knew that the girl acrobats who'd had sex with Ignacio wished they were dead.
And Vargas had admitted to Pepe, somewhat defensively, that he'd first thought the circus would be a good prospect for the dump kids because he'd envisioned that Lupe, who was a mind reader, would have no contact with Ignacio. (Lupe wouldn't be one of Ignacio's girl acrobats.) Now Vargas had changed his mind; what Vargas didn't like about Lupe's reading the lions' minds was that this put the thirteen-year-old in contact with Ignacio.
Pepe had come full circle about the dump kids' prospects at the circus. Brother Pepe wanted them back at Lost Children, where they would at least be safe. Pepe had Vargas's support about Juan Diego's prospects as a skywalker, too. So what if the crippled foot was permanently locked in the perfect position for skywalking? Juan Diego wasn't an athlete; the boy's good foot was a liability.
He'd been practicing in the acrobats' troupe tent. The good foot had slipped out of the loops of rope in that ladder--he'd fallen a few times. And this was only the practice tent.
Lastly, there were the dump kids' expectations about Mexico City. Juan Diego and Lupe's pilgrimage to the basilica there was troubling to Pepe, who was from Mexico City. Pepe knew what a shock it could be to see Guadalupe's shrine for the first time, and he knew the dump kids could be finicky--they were hard kids to please when it came to public expressions of religious faith. Pepe thought the dump kids had their own religion, and it struck Pepe as unfathomably personal.
Ninos Perdidos would not let Edward Bonshaw and Brother Pepe accompany the dump kids on their trip to Mexico City; they couldn't give their two best teachers time off together. And Senor Eduardo wanted to see the shrine to Guadalupe almost as much as the dump kids did--in Pepe's opinion, the Iowan was as likely to be overwhelmed and disgusted by the excesses of the Basilica de Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe as the dump kids were. (The throngs who flocked to the Guadalupe shrine on a Saturday morning could conceivably run roughshod over anyone's personal beliefs.)
Vargas knew the scene--the mindless, run-amok worshipers were the epitome of everything he hated. But Pepe was wrong to imagine that Dr. Vargas (or anyone else) could prepare the dump kids and Edward Bonshaw for the hordes of pilgrims approaching the Basilica de Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe on the Avenue of Mysteries--"the Avenue of Miseries," Pepe had heard Vargas call it, in the doctor's blunt English. The spectacle was one los ninos de la basura and the missionary had to experience themselves.
Speaking of spectacles: a dinner party at Casa Vargas was a spectacle. The life-size statues of the Spanish conquistadors, at the top and bottom of the grand staircase (and in the hall), were more intimidating than the religious sex dolls and other statuary for sale at the virgin shop on Independencia.
The menacing Spanish soldiers were very realistic; they stood guard on two floors of Vargas's house like a conquering army. Vargas had touched nothing in his parents' mansion. He'd lived his youth at war with his parents' religion and politics, but he'd left their paintings and statues and family photos intact.
Vargas was a socialist and an atheist; he virtually gave away his medical services to the neediest. But the house he lived in was a reminder of his spurned parents' rejected values. Casa Vargas did not revere Vargas's dead parents as much as it appeared to mock them; their culture, which Vargas had rebuked, was on display, but more for the effect of ridicule than honor--or so it seemed to Pepe.
"Vargas might as well have stuffed his dead parents and let them stand guard in the family house!" Brother Pepe had forewarned Edward Bonshaw, but the Iowan was unhinged before he even arrived at the dinner party.
Senor Eduardo had not confessed his transgression with Flor to Father Alfonso or Father Octavio. The zealot persisted in seeing the people he loved as projects; they were to be reclaimed or rescued--they were never to be abandoned. Flor and Juan Diego and Lupe were the Iowan's projects; Edward Bonshaw saw them through the eyes of a born reformer, but he did not love them less for looking upon them in this fashion. (In Pepe's opinion, this was a complication in Senor Eduardo's process of "reorientation.")
Brother Pepe still shared a bathroom with the zealot. Pepe knew that Edward Bonshaw had stopped whipping himself, but Pepe could hear the Iowan crying in the bathroom, where he whipped the toilet and the sink and the bathtub instead. Senor Eduardo cried and cried, because he didn't know how he could quit his job at Lost Children until he'd arranged to take care of his beloved projects.
As for Lupe, she was in no mood for a dinner party at Casa Vargas. She'd been spending all her time with Hombre and the lionesses--las senoritas, "the young ladies," Ignacio called the three lionesses. He'd named them, each one for a body part. Cara, "face" (of a person); Garra, "paw" (with claws); Oreja, "ear" (external, the outer ear). Ignacio told Lupe he could read the lionesses' minds by these body parts. Cara scrunched up her face when she was agitated or angry; Garra looked like she was kneading bread with her paws, her claws digging into the ground; Oreja cocked one ear askew, or she flattened both her ears.
"They can't fool me--I know what they're thinking. The young ladies are obvious," the lion tamer said to Lupe. "I don't need a mind reader for las senoritas--it's Hombre whose thoughts are a mystery."
Maybe not to Lupe--that's what Juan Diego was thinking. Juan Diego was in no mood for a dinner party, either; he doubted that Lupe had been entirely forthcoming to him.
"What is on Hombre's mind?" he'd asked her.
"Not much--typical guy," Lupe had told her brother. "Hombre thinks about doing it to the lionesses. To Cara, usually. Sometimes to Garra. To Oreja, hardly at all--except when he thinks of her suddenly, and then he wants to do it to her right away. Hombre thinks about sex or he doesn't think at all," Lupe said. "Except about eating."
"But is Hombre dangerous?" Juan Diego asked her. (He thought it was odd that Hombre thought about sex. Juan Diego was pretty sure that Hombre didn't actually have sex, at all.)
"If you bother Hombre when he's eating--if you touch him when he's thinking about doing it to one of the lionesses. Hombre wants everything to be
the same--he doesn't like change," Lupe said. "I don't know if the lions actually do it," she admitted.
"But what does Hombre think about Ignacio? That's all Ignacio cares about!" Juan Diego cried.
Lupe shrugged their late mother's shrug. "Hombre loves Ignacio, except when he hates him. It confuses Hombre when he hates Ignacio. Hombre knows he's not supposed to hate Ignacio," Lupe answered.
"There's something you're not telling me," Juan Diego said to her.
"Oh--now you read minds, do you?" Lupe asked him.
"What is it?" Juan Diego asked her.
"Ignacio thinks the lionesses are dumb twats--he's not interested in what the lionesses are thinking," Lupe answered.
"That's it?" Juan Diego asked. Between what Ignacio thought and the vocabulary of the girl acrobats, Lupe's language was growing filthier on a daily basis.
"Ignacio is obsessed with what Hombre thinks--it's a guy-to-guy thing." But the next thing she said in a funny way, Juan Diego thought. "The tamer of the lionesses doesn't care what the lionesses are thinking," Lupe said. She hadn't said el domador de leones--that's what you called the lion tamer. Instead Lupe had said el domador de leonas.
"So what are the lionesses thinking, Lupe?" Juan Diego had asked her. (Not about sex, apparently.)
"The lionesses hate Ignacio--all the time," Lupe answered. "The lionesses are dumb twats--they're jealous of Ignacio because they think Hombre loves Ignacio more than the asshole lion loves them! Yet if Ignacio ever hurts Hombre, the lionesses will kill Ignacio. The lionesses are all dumber than monkey twats!" Lupe shouted. "They love Hombre, even though the asshole lion never thinks about them--unless he remembers that he wants to do it, and then Hombre has trouble remembering which one he wants to do it to more!"
"The lionesses want to kill Ignacio?" Juan Diego asked Lupe.
"They will kill him," she said. "Ignacio has nothing to fear from Hombre--it's the lionesses the lion tamer should be afraid of."
"The problem is what you tell Ignacio, or what you don't tell him," Juan Diego told his little sister.
"That's your problem," Lupe had said. "I'm just the mind reader. You're the one the lion tamer listens to, ceiling-walker," she said.