Avenue of Mysteries (23 page)

Along Zaragoza Street, there were always prostitutes, and the men cruising for prostitutes; in the courtyard of the Hotel Somega, Juan Diego and Lupe could watch the prostitutes and their customers come and go, but the kids never saw their mother on Zaragoza Street or in the hotel courtyard. There was no verification that Esperanza was working the street, and there may have been other guests at the Somega—people who were neither prostitutes nor their clients. Yet Rivera was not the only one the kids had heard call the Somega the “whore hotel,” and all the coming and going certainly made the hotel appear that way.

One night, when Juan Diego was wheelchair-bound, he and Lupe had followed a prostitute named Flor on Zaragoza Street; they knew the prostitute wasn’t their mother, but Flor looked a little like Esperanza from behind—Flor
walked
like Esperanza.

Lupe liked to make the wheelchair go fast; she would come up close to
people who had their backs turned to her—they never knew the wheelchair was there until it bumped them. Juan Diego was always afraid that these people would fall backward into his lap; he would lean forward and try to touch them with his hand before the speeding wheelchair made contact. That was how he first touched Flor; he’d meant to touch one of her hands, but Flor swung her arms back and forth when she walked, and Juan Diego unintentionally touched her swaying bottom.

“Jesus Mary Joseph!” Flor exclaimed, spinning around. She was very tall; she’d been prepared to throw a punch at head level, but she found herself looking down at the boy in a wheelchair.

“It’s just me and my sister,” Juan Diego said, cringing. “We’re looking for our mother.”

“Do I look like your mother?” Flor asked. She was a transvestite prostitute. There weren’t so many transvestite prostitutes in Oaxaca in those days; Flor really stood out, and not only because she was tall. She was almost beautiful; what was beautiful about her truly
wasn’t
affected by the softest-looking trace of a mustache on her upper lip, though Lupe noticed it.

“You look like our mom, a little,” Juan Diego answered Flor. “You’re both very pretty.”

“Flor’s a lot bigger, and there’s the you-know-what,” Lupe said, passing her finger over her upper lip. There was no need for Juan Diego to translate this.

“You kids shouldn’t be here,” Flor told them. “You should be in bed.”

“Our mother’s name is Esperanza,” Juan Diego said. “Maybe you’ve seen her here—maybe you
know
her.”

“I know Esperanza,” Flor told them. “But I don’t see her around here. I see
you
around here, all the time,” she told the kids.

“Maybe our mom is the most popular of all the prostitutes,” Lupe said. “Maybe she never leaves the Hotel Somega—the men just come to her.” But Juan Diego didn’t translate this.

“Whatever she’s babbling about, I can tell you one true thing,” Flor said. “Everybody who’s ever been here has been
seen
—I can promise you that. Maybe your mother hasn’t been here at all; maybe you kids should just go to
sleep.
”

“Flor knows a lot about the circus—it’s on her mind,” Lupe said. “Go on—ask her about it.”

“We have an offer from La Maravilla—just a sideshow act,” Juan
Diego said. “We would have our own tent, but we would share it with the dogs—they’re
trained
dogs, very smart. I don’t suppose you see any circus people, do you?” the boy asked.

“I don’t do dwarfs. You have to draw the line somewhere,” Flor told them. “The dwarfs have an unreasonable interest in me—they’re all over me,” she said.

“I won’t be able to sleep tonight,” Lupe told Juan Diego. “The thought of dwarfs all over Flor will keep me awake.”

“You told me to ask her. I won’t be able to sleep, either,” Juan Diego said to his sister.

“Ask Flor if she knows Soledad,” Lupe said.

“Maybe we don’t want to know,” Juan Diego said, but he asked Flor what she knew about the lion tamer’s wife.

“She’s a lonely, unhappy woman,” Flor answered. “Her husband is a pig. In his case, I’m on the lions’ side,” she said.

“I guess you don’t do lion tamers, either,” Juan Diego said.

“Not that one, chico,” Flor said. “Aren’t you Niños Perdidos kids? Doesn’t your mother work there? Why would you move into a tent with dogs if you don’t
have
to?”

Lupe began to recite a list of reasons. “One: love of dogs,” she started. “Two: to be stars—in a circus, we might be famous. Three: because the parrot man will come visit us, and our future—” She stopped for a second. “
His
future, anyway,” Lupe said, pointing to her brother. “His future is in the parrot man’s hands—I just know it is, circus or no circus.”

“I don’t know the parrot man—I’ve never met him,” Flor told the kids, after Juan Diego had struggled to translate Lupe’s list.

“The parrot man doesn’t want a woman,” Lupe reported, which Juan Diego also translated. (Lupe had heard Señor Eduardo say this.)

“I know
lots
of parrot men!” the transvestite prostitute said.

“Lupe means that the parrot man has taken a vow of celibacy,” Juan Diego tried to explain to Flor, but she wouldn’t let him finish what he was going to say.

“Oh, no—I don’t know
any
men like that,” Flor said. “Does the parrot man have a sideshow act at La Maravilla?”

“He’s the new missionary at the Templo de la Compañía de Jesús—he’s a Jesuit from Iowa,” Juan Diego told her.

“Jesus Mary Joseph!” Flor exclaimed again. “
That
kind of parrot man.”

“His dog was killed—it probably changed his life,” Lupe said, but Juan Diego left this untranslated.

Their attention was then diverted by a fight in front of the Hotel Somega; the altercation must have started in the hotel, but it had progressed from the courtyard into Zaragoza Street.

“Shit, it’s the good gringo—that kid is a liability to himself,” Flor said. “He might have been safer in Vietnam.”

There were more and more of the American hippie boys in Oaxaca; some of them came with girlfriends, but the girlfriends never stayed long. Most of the draft-age boys were alone, or they ended up alone. They were running away from the war in Vietnam, or from what their country had become, Edward Bonshaw said. The Iowan reached out to them—he tried to help them—but most of the hippie boys weren’t religious types. Like the rooftop dogs, they were lost souls—they were running wild, or they drifted around town like ghosts.

Flor had reached out to the young American draft dodgers, too; all the lost boys knew her. Maybe they liked her because she was a transvestite—like them, she was still a boy—but the lost Americans also liked Flor because her English was excellent. Flor had lived in Texas, but she’d come back to Mexico. Flor never changed the way she told that story. “Let’s just say my only way out of Oaxaca took me to Houston,” she would always begin. “Have you ever been to Houston? Let’s just say I had to get out of Houston.”

Lupe and Juan Diego had seen the good gringo around Zaragoza Street before. One morning Brother Pepe had found him sleeping in a pew of the Jesuit temple. El gringo bueno was singing “Streets of Laredo,” the cowboy song, in his sleep—just the first verse, over and over again, Pepe had said.

As I walked out in the streets of Laredo

As I walked out in Laredo one day,

I spied a young cowboy, all wrapped in white linen,

Wrapped up in white linen and cold as the clay.

The hippie boy was always friendly to the dump kids. As for the fracas that had started in the Hotel Somega, it appeared that el gringo bueno hadn’t been given time to get dressed. He lay curled on the sidewalk in a fetal position, to protect himself from being kicked; he wore just a pair of jeans. He was carrying his sandals and a dirty long-sleeved shirt, the only shirt the dump kids had seen him wear. But Lupe and Juan Diego had not seen the boy’s big tattoo before. It was a Christ on the
Cross: the bleeding face of Jesus, crowned with thorns, filled the slender hippie’s bare chest. Christ’s torso, including the pierced part, covered the hippie’s bare belly. Christ’s outstretched arms (Jesus’s sorely abused wrists and hands) were tattooed over the hippie boy’s upper arms and forearms. It was as if the upper body of Christ had been violently affixed to the upper body of the good gringo. Both the crucified Christ and the hippie boy needed to shave, and their long hair was similarly matted.

There were two thugs standing over the boy on Zaragoza Street. The dump kids knew Garza—the tall, bearded one. Either he let you in the lobby of the Somega or he didn’t; he was usually the one who told the kids to get lost. Garza had a territorial attitude concerning the hotel courtyard. The other thug—the young, fat one—was Garza’s slave boy, César. (Garza fucked everything.)

“Is this how you get your rocks off?” Flor asked the two thugs.

There was another prostitute on the sidewalk of Zaragoza Street, one of the younger ones; she had badly pockmarked skin, and she wasn’t wearing much more than the good gringo was. Her name was Alba, which means “dawn,” and Juan Diego thought she looked like a girl you might meet for a moment as short-lived as a sunrise.

“He didn’t pay me enough,” Alba told Flor.

“It was more than she told me it was going to be,” el gringo bueno said. “I paid her what she first told me.”

“Take the gringo with you,” Flor said to Juan Diego. “If you can sneak out of Lost Children, you can sneak in—right?”

“The nuns will find him in the morning—or Brother Pepe or Señor Eduardo or our mother will find him,” Lupe said.

Juan Diego tried to explain this to Flor. He and Lupe shared a bedroom and a bathroom; their mother, unannounced, came to use the bathroom, and so on. But Flor wanted the dump niños to get the good gringo off the street. Niños Perdidos was
safe
; the kids should take the hippie boy with them—no one at the orphanage would beat him. “Tell the nuns you found him on the sidewalk, and you were just doing the
charitable
thing,” Flor said to Juan Diego. “Tell them the boy didn’t have a tattoo, but when you woke up in the morning, the Crucified Christ was all over the good gringo’s body.”

“And we heard him singing in his sleep—that cowboy song—for
hours,
but we couldn’t see in the dark,” Lupe improvised. “El gringo bueno must have been getting that tattoo in the dark all night!”

As if on cue, the half-naked hippie boy had begun to sing; he was not
asleep now. He must have been singing “Streets of Laredo” to taunt the two thugs who’d been harassing him—just the second verse, this time.

“I see, by your outfit, that you are a cowboy.”

These words he did say as I slowly walked by.

“Come sit down beside me and hear my sad story,

Got shot in the breast, and I know I must die.”

“Jesus Mary Joseph,” was all Juan Diego said softly.

“Hey, how’s it going, man on wheels?” the good gringo asked Juan Diego, as if he’d just noticed the boy in his wheelchair. “Hey, fast-drivin’ little sister! You got any speedin’ tickets yet?” (Lupe had bumped the good gringo with the wheelchair before.)

Flor was helping the hippie boy into his clothes. “If you touch him again, Garza,” Flor was saying, “I’ll cut your cock and balls off while you’re asleep.”

“You got the same junk between your legs,” Garza told the transvestite prostitute.

“No, my junk is a lot bigger than yours,” Flor told him.

César, Garza’s slave boy, started to laugh, but the way both Garza and Flor looked at him made him stop.

“You ought to say what you’re worth the first time, Alba,” Flor said to the young prostitute with the bad skin. “You shouldn’t change your mind about what you’re worth.”

“You can’t tell me what to do, Flor,” Alba said, but the girl had waited until she’d slunk back inside the courtyard of the Hotel Somega before she said it.

Flor walked with the dump kids and the good gringo as far as the zócalo. “I owe you!” the young American called to her, after she left them. “I owe you niños, too,” the hippie boy told the dump kids. “I’m going to get you a present for this,” he told them.

“How are we supposed to keep him hidden?” Lupe asked her brother. “We can sneak him into Lost Children tonight—no problem—but we can’t sneak him out in the morning.”

“I’m working on the story that his Bleeding Christ tattoo is a miracle,” Juan Diego told her. (This was definitely an idea that would appeal to a dump reader.)

“It
is
a miracle, kind of,” el gringo bueno started to tell them. “I got the idea for this tattoo—”

Lupe wouldn’t let the lost young man tell his story, not then. “Promise me something,” she said to Juan Diego.

“Another promise—”

“Just promise me!” Lupe cried. “If I end up on Zaragoza Street, kill me—just kill me. Let me hear you say it.”

“Jesus Mary Joseph!” Juan Diego said; he was trying to
exclaim
this the way Flor had done it.

The hippie had forgotten what he was saying; he struggled with a verse of “Streets of Laredo,” as if he were writing the inspired lyrics for the first time.

“Get six jolly cowboys to carry my coffin,

Get six pretty maidens to bear up my pall.

Put bunches of roses all over my coffin,

Roses to deaden the clods as they fall.”

“Say it!” Lupe yelled at the dump reader.

“Okay, I’ll kill you. There, I said it,” Juan Diego told her.

“Whoa! Man on wheels, little sister—nobody’s
killin’
anyone, right?” the good gringo asked them. “We’re all friends,
right
?”

The good gringo had mescal breath, which Lupe called “worm breath” because of the dead worm in the bottom of the mescal bottle. Rivera called mescal the poor man’s tequila; the dump boss said you drank mescal and tequila the same way, with a lick of salt and a little lime juice. The good gringo smelled like lime juice and beer; the night the dump kids sneaked him into Lost Children, the young American’s lips were crusty with salt, and there was more salt in the V-shaped patch of beard the boy had left unshaven beneath his lower lip. The niños let the good gringo sleep in Lupe’s bed; they had to help him undress, and he was already asleep—on his back, and snoring—before Lupe and Juan Diego could get themselves ready for bed.