Avenue of Mysteries

  Juan Diego must have looked to this mother and her daughter like a novice traveler, because he had to consult his written itinerary to learn the name of his Hong Kong hotel. While he was still fumbling in the pocket of his jacket for his reading glasses, the mother snatched the itinerary out of his hands. "Dear God--you don't want to be at the InterContinental Grand Stanford Hong Kong," Miriam told him. "It's an hour's drive from the airport."

  "It's actually in Kowloon," Dorothy said.

  "There's an adequate hotel at the airport," Miriam said. "You should stay there."

  "We always stay there," Dorothy said, sighing.

  Juan Diego started to say that he would need to cancel one reservation and make another--that was as far as he got.

  "Done," the daughter said; her fingers were flying over the keyboard of her laptop. It was a marvel to Juan Diego how young people always seemed to be using their laptops, which were never plugged in. Why don't their batteries run down? he was thinking. (And when they weren't glued to their laptops, they were madly texting on their cell phones, which never seemed to need recharging!)

  "I thought it was a long way to bring my laptop," Juan Diego said to the mother, who looked at him in a mostly pitying way. "I left mine at home," he said sheepishly to the hardworking daughter, who'd not once looked up from her constantly changing computer screen.

  "I'm canceling your harbor-view room--two nights at the InterContinental Grand Stanford, gone. I don't like that place, anyway," Dorothy said. "And I'm getting you a king suite at the Regal Airport Hotel at Hong Kong International. It's not as totally tasteless as its name--all the Christmas shit notwithstanding."

  "One night, Dorothy," her mother reminded the young woman.

  "Got it," Dorothy said. "There's one thing about the Regal: the way you turn the lights on and off is weird," she told Juan Diego.

  "We'll show him, Dorothy," the mother said. "I've read everything of yours--every word you've written," Miriam told him, putting her hand on his wrist.

  "I've read almost everything," Dorothy said.

  "There's two you haven't read, Dorothy," her mom said.

  "Two--big deal," Dorothy said. "That's almost everything, isn't it?" the girl asked Juan Diego.

  Of course he said, "Yes--almost." He couldn't tell if the young woman was flirting with him, or if her mother was; maybe neither of them was. The not-knowing part aged Juan Diego prematurely, too, but--to be fair--he'd been out of circulation for a while. It had been a long time since he'd dated anyone, not that he'd ever dated a lot, which two such worldly-looking travelers as this mother and daughter would have sized up about him.

  Meeting him, did women think he looked wounded? Was he one of those men who'd lost the love of his life? What was it about Juan Diego that made women think he would never get over someone?

  "I really like the sex in your novels," Dorothy told him. "I like how you do it."

  "I like it better," Miriam said to him, giving her daughter an all-knowing look. "I have the perspective to know what really bad sex is," Dorothy's mom told her.

  "Please, Mother--don't paint us a picture," Dorothy said.

  Miriam wasn't wearing a wedding ring, Juan Diego had noticed. She was a tall, trim woman, tense and impatient-looking, in a pearl-gray pantsuit, which she wore over a silvery T-shirt. Her beige-blond hair was certainly not its natural color, and she'd probably had a little work done on her face--either shortly after a divorce, or a somewhat longer time after she'd become a widow. (Juan Diego didn't intimately know about such things; he'd had no experience with women like Miriam, with the exception of his women readers or characters in novels.)

  Dorothy, the daughter, who'd said she first read one of Juan Diego's novels when it had been "assigned" to her--in college--looked as if she could still be of university age, or only a little older.

  These women weren't on their way to Manila--"not yet," they'd told him--but Juan Diego didn't remember where they were going after Hong Kong, if they'd said. Miriam hadn't told him her full name, but her accent was European-sounding--the foreign part was what registered with Juan Diego. He wasn't an expert on accents, of course--Miriam might have been an American.

  As for Dorothy, she would never be as beautiful as her mother, but the girl had a sullen, neglected prettiness--of the kind that a younger woman who's a little too heavy can get away with for a few more years. ("Voluptuous" wouldn't always be the word Dorothy brought to mind, Juan Diego knew--realizing, if only to himself, that he was writing about these efficient women, even as he allowed them to assist him.)

  Whoever they were, and wherever they were going, this mother and daughter were veterans of traveling first class on Cathay Pacific. When Flight 841 to Hong Kong finally boarded, Miriam and Dorothy wouldn't let the doll-faced flight attendant show Juan Diego how to put on Cathay Pacific's one-piece pajamas or operate the cocoon-like sleeping capsule. Miriam marched him through the routine of how to put on the childish pajamas, and Dorothy--the technological wizard in the two-woman family--demonstrated the mechanics of the most comfortable bed Juan Diego had ever encountered on an airplane. The two women virtually tucked him in.

  I think they were both flirting with me, Juan Diego mused as he was falling asleep--certainly the daughter was. Of course Dorothy reminded Juan Diego of students he'd known over the years; many of them, he knew, had only appeared to be flirting with him. There were young women that age--some solitary, tomboyish writers among them--who'd struck the older writer as knowing only two kinds of social behavior: they knew how to flirt, and they knew how to show irreversible contempt.

  Juan Diego was almost asleep when he remembered that he was taking an unplanned break from the beta-blockers; he was already beginning to dream when a mildly troubling thought occurred to him, albeit briefly, before it drifted away. The thought was: I don't really understand what happens when you stop and restart the beta-blockers. But the dream (or memory) was overtaking him, and he let it come.

  * 4 *

  The Broken Side-view Mirror

  There was a gecko. It shrank from the first light of the sunrise, clinging to the mesh on the shack's screen door. In the blink of an eye, in that half-second before the boy could touch the screen, the gecko was gone. Quicker than turning on or off a light, the gecko's disappearance often began Juan Diego's dream--as the disappearing lizard had begun many of the boy's mornings in Guerrero.

  Rivera had built the shack for himself, but he'd remodeled the interior for the kids; though he was probably not Juan Diego's father, and definitely not Lupe's, el jefe had made a deal with their mother. Even at fourteen, Juan Diego knew there was not much of a deal between those two now. Esperanza, notwithstanding that she'd been named for hope, had never been a source of hope to her own children, nor did she ever encourage Rivera--as far as Juan Diego had seen. Not that a fourteen-year-old boy would necessarily notice such things, and, at thirteen, Lupe wasn't a reliable witness to what might, or might not, have gone on between her mother and the dump boss.

  As for "reliable," Rivera was the one person who could be counted on to look after these two dump kids--to the degree that anyone could protect los ninos de la basura. Rivera had provided the only shelter for these two, and he'd sheltered Juan Diego and Lupe in other ways.

  When el jefe went home at night--or wherever Rivera actually went--he left his truck and his dog with Juan Diego. The truck afforded the kids a second shelter, should they need it--unlike the shack, the cab of the truck could be locked--and no one but Juan Diego or Lupe would dare approach Rivera's dog. Even the dump boss was wary of that dog: an underfed-looking male, he was a terrier-hound mix.

  According to el jefe, the dog was part pit bull, part bloodhound--hence he was predisposed to fight, and to track down things by their smell.

  "Diablo is biologically inclined to be aggressive," Rivera had said.

  "I think you mean genetically inclined," Juan Diego had corrected him.

  It's hard to appreciate the degree that a dump
kid could acquire such a sophisticated vocabulary; beyond the flattering attention paid to the unschooled boy by Brother Pepe at the Jesuit mission in Oaxaca, Juan Diego didn't have an education--yet the boy had managed to do more than teach himself to read. He also spoke exceedingly well. The dump kid even spoke English, though his only exposure to the spoken language came from the U.S. tourists. In Oaxaca, at that time, the American expatriates amounted to an arts-and-crafts crowd and the usual potheads. Increasingly, as the Vietnam War dragged on--past 1968, when Nixon had been elected on the promise that he would end it--there were those lost souls ("the young men searching for themselves," Brother Pepe called them), who in many cases comprised the draft dodgers.

  Juan Diego and Lupe had little luck communicating with the potheads. The mushroom hippies were too busy expanding their consciousness by hallucinogenic means; they didn't waste their time talking to children. The mescal hippies--if only when they were sober--enjoyed their conversations with the dump kids, and occasional readers could be found among them, although the mescal affected what these readers could remember. Quite a few of the draft dodgers were readers; they gave Juan Diego their paperback novels. These were mostly American novels, of course; they inspired Juan Diego to imagine living there.

  And only seconds after the early-morning gecko had vanished, and the screen door of the shack slapped shut behind Juan Diego, a crow took flight from the hood of Rivera's truck, and all the dogs in Guerrero began to bark. The boy watched the crow in flight--any excuse to imagine flying captivated him--while Diablo, rousing himself from the flatbed of Rivera's pickup, commenced an ungodly baying that silenced all of the other dogs. Diablo's baying was the bloodhound gene in Rivera's scary dog; the pit-bull part, the fighter gene, was responsible for the missing lid of the dog's bloodshot and permanently open left eye. The pinkish scar, where the eyelid had been, gave Diablo a baleful stare. (A dogfight, perhaps, or a person with a knife; the dump boss hadn't witnessed the altercation, human or beast.)

  As for the jagged-edged, triangular piece that had been less than surgically removed from one of the dog's long ears--well, that one was anyone's guess.

  "You did it, Lupe," Rivera once said, smiling at the girl. "Diablo would let you do anything to him--even eat his ear."

  Lupe had made a perfect triangle with her index fingers and her thumbs. What she said required Juan Diego's translation, as always, or Rivera would not have understood her. "No animal or human has the teeth to bite like that," the girl incontrovertibly said.

  Los ninos de la basura never knew when (or from where) Rivera arrived every morning at the basurero, or by what means el jefe had come down the hill from the dump to Guerrero. The dump boss was usually found napping in the cab of his truck; either the pistol-shot slap of the closing screen door or the barking dogs woke him. Or Diablo's baying woke him, a half-second later--or earlier, that gecko, which almost no one saw.

  "Buenos dias, jefe," Juan Diego usually said.

  "It's a good day to do everything well, amigo," Rivera often answered the boy. The dump boss would add: "And where is the genius princess?"

  "I am where I always am," Lupe would answer him, the screen door slapping shut behind her. That second pistol shot reached as far as the hellfires in the basurero. More crows took flight. There was a disharmonious barking; the dump dogs and the dogs in Guerrero barked. Another menacing and all-silencing howl followed from Diablo, whose wet nose now touched the boy's bare knee below his tattered shorts.

  The dump fires had long been burning--the smoldering mounds of piled-high garbage and pawed-through trash. Rivera must have lit the fires at first light; then he took a nap in the cab of his truck.

  The Oaxaca basurero was a wasteland of burning; whether you were standing there or as far away as Guerrero, the towers of smoke from the fires rose as high into the sky as you could see. Juan Diego's eyes were already tearing when he came out that screen door. There was always a tear oozing from Diablo's lidless eye, even when the dog slept--with his left eye open but not seeing.

  That morning, Rivera had found another water pistol in the basurero; he'd tossed the squirt gun into the flatbed of the pickup, where Diablo had briefly licked it before leaving it alone.

  "I got one for you!" Rivera called to Lupe, who was eating a cornmeal tortilla with jam on it; there was jam on her chin, and on one cheek, and Lupe had invited Diablo to lick her face. She let Diablo have the rest of her tortilla, too.

  There were two vultures hunched over a dead dog in the road, and two more vultures floated overhead; they were making those descending spirals in the sky. In the basurero, there was usually at least one dead dog every morning; their carcasses did not remain intact for long. If the vultures failed to find a dead dog, or if the carrion eaters didn't quickly dispose of it, someone would burn it. There was always a fire.

  The dead dogs in Guerrero were treated differently. Those dogs probably had belonged to somebody; you didn't burn someone else's dog--besides, there were rules about starting fires in Guerrero. (There were concerns that the little neighborhood might burn down.) You let a dead dog lie around in Guerrero--it didn't usually lie around for long. If the dead dog had an owner, the owner would get rid of it, or the carrion eaters would eventually do the job.

  "I didn't know that dog--did you?" Lupe was saying to Diablo, as she examined the water pistol el jefe had found. Lupe meant the dead dog being attended to by the two vultures in the road, but Diablo didn't let on if he'd known the dog.

  The dump kids could tell it was a copper day. El jefe had a load of copper in the flatbed of the pickup. There was a manufacturing plant that worked with copper near the airport; in the same area was another plant, which took aluminum.

  "At least it isn't a glass day--I don't like glass days," Lupe was saying to Diablo, or she was just talking to herself.

  When Diablo was around, you never heard any growling from Dirty White--not even a whimper from the coward, Juan Diego was thinking. "He's not a coward! He's a puppy!" Lupe shouted to her brother. Then she went on and on (to herself) about the brand of water pistol Rivera had retrieved from the basurero--something about the "feeble squirter mechanism."

  The dump boss and Juan Diego watched Lupe run into the shack; no doubt she was putting the newfound squirt gun with her collection.

  El jefe had been checking the propane tank outside the kids' shack; he was always checking it to be sure it wasn't leaking, but this morning he was checking to see how full or near-empty the tank was. Rivera checked this by lifting the tank to see how heavy it was.

  Juan Diego had often wondered on what basis the dump boss had decided that he was probably not Juan Diego's father. It was true they looked nothing alike, but--as in Lupe's case--Juan Diego looked so much like his mother that the boy doubted he could possibly resemble any father.

  "Just hope that you resemble Rivera in his kindness," Brother Pepe had told Juan Diego during the delivery of one bunch of books or another. (Juan Diego had been fishing for what Pepe might have known or heard about the boy's most likely father.)

  Whenever Juan Diego had asked el jefe why he'd put himself in the probably-not category, the dump boss always smiled and said he was "probably not smart enough" to be the dump reader's dad.

  Juan Diego, who'd been watching Rivera lift the propane tank (a full tank was very heavy), suddenly said: "One day, jefe, I'll be strong enough to lift the propane tank--even a full one." (This was about as close as the dump reader could come to telling Rivera that he wished and hoped the dump boss was his father.)

  "We should go," was all Rivera said, climbing into the cab of his truck.

  "You still haven't fixed your side-view mirror," Juan Diego told el jefe.

  Lupe was babbling about something as she ran to the truck, the shack's screen door slapping shut behind her. The pistol-shot sound of that closing screen door had no effect on the vultures hunched over the dead dog in the road; there were four vultures at work now, and not one of them flinched.

&
nbsp; Rivera had learned not to tease Lupe by making vulgar jokes about the water pistols. One time, Rivera had said: "You kids are so crazy about those squirt guns--people will think you're practicing artificial insemination."

  The phrase had long been used in medical circles, but the dump kids had first heard of it from a science fiction novel saved from burning. Lupe had been disgusted. When she heard el jefe mention artificial insemination, Lupe had erupted in a fury of preteen indignation; she was eleven or twelve at the time.

  "Lupe says she knows what artificial insemination is--she thinks it's gross," Juan Diego had translated for his sister.

  "Lupe doesn't know what artificial insemination is," the dump boss had insisted, but he looked anxiously at the indignant girl. Who knew what the dump reader might have read to her? el jefe thought. Even as a little girl, Lupe had been strongly opposed but attentive to everything indecent or obscene.

  There was more moral outrage (of an unintelligible kind) expressed by Lupe. All Juan Diego said was: "Yes, she does. Would you like her to describe artificial insemination to you?"

  "No, no!" Rivera had cried. "I was just kidding! Okay, the water pistols are nothing but squirt guns. Let's leave it at that."

  But Lupe wouldn't stop babbling. "She says you're always thinking about sex," Juan Diego had interpreted for Rivera.

  "Not always!" Rivera had exclaimed. "I try not to think about sex around you two."

  Lupe went on and on. She'd been stamping her feet--her boots were too big; she'd found them in the dump. Her stomping had turned into an impromptu dance--including a pirouette--as she berated Rivera.

  "She says it's pathetic to disapprove of prostitutes while you still hang out with prostitutes," Juan Diego was explaining.

  "Okay, okay!" Rivera had shouted, throwing up his muscular arms. "The water pistols, the squirt guns, are just toys--nobody's getting pregnant with them! Whatever you say."

  Lupe had stopped dancing; she kept pointing to her upper lip while she pouted at Rivera.

  "What now? What is this--sign language?" Rivera had asked Juan Diego.

  "Lupe says you'll never get a girlfriend who isn't a prostitute--not with that stupid-looking mustache," the boy had told him.