Avenue of Mysteries (40 page)

Juan Diego had been staring at his lap—at Miriam’s hand, which was pressing the Viagra tablet against his right thigh—but when he looked up at the dinner table (at all the dinner tables), he realized he’d missed the moment when everyone had put on a party hat. He saw that even Miriam wore a paper party hat, like a king’s or a queen’s crown—hers was pink, however. The party hats were all pastel colors. Juan Diego touched the top of his head and felt the party hat—a paper crown, ringing his hair.

“Mine is—” he started to say.

“Powder blue,” Miriam told him, and when he patted his right-front pants pocket, he felt the mah-jongg tile but not the Viagra tablet. He also felt Miriam’s hand cover his.

“You took it,” she whispered.

“I did?”

The dinner dishes had been cleared, though Juan Diego couldn’t remember eating—not even the ceviche.

“You look tired,” Miriam was telling him.

If he’d had more experience with women, wouldn’t Juan Diego have known that there was something strange, or a little “off,” about Miriam? What Juan Diego knew of women mostly came from fiction, from reading novels and writing them. The women in fiction were often alluring and mysterious; in Juan Diego’s novels, the women were intimidating, too. And wasn’t it normal—or not unusual, surely—for women in fiction to be a little bit dangerous?

If the women in Juan Diego’s real life lagged behind those women he’d met only in his imagination—well, that might explain why women like Miriam and Dorothy, who were far beyond Juan Diego’s experience with
actual
women, seemed so attractive and familiar to him. (Maybe he’d met them in his imagination many times. Was that where he’d seen them before?)

If the paper party hats had suddenly materialized on the heads of the New Year’s Eve revelers at the Encantador, there was a similar lack of explanation for the equally spontaneous appearance of the band, beginning with three scruffy-looking young men with intermittent facial hair and starvation-symptom physiques. The lead guitarist had a neck tattoo that resembled a scalding injury, a burn-scar facsimile. The harmonica player and the drummer liked the tank-top look, which revealed their tattooed arms; the drummer fancied an insect theme, whereas the harmonica player preferred reptiles—nothing but scaly vertebrates, snakes and lizards, could crawl on his bare arms.

Miriam’s comment on the young men was withering: “Lots of testosterone but few prospects.” Juan Diego could tell that Clark French heard this, but Clark had his back turned to the boys in the band—Clark’s slightly startled expression revealed that he thought Miriam had meant
him.

“Those boys, behind you—the
band,
Clark,” Dr. Quintana told her husband.

They were called (everyone knew) the Nocturnal Monkeys. The
group’s reputation, which was strictly local, rested on the bony bare shoulders of the lead singer—a skeletal waif in a strapless dress. Her breasts were not substantial enough to keep her dress from slipping down, and her lank black hair, savagely chopped at earlobe level, stood in stark contrast to her cadaverous pallor. There was an unnatural whiteness to her skin—not very Filipino, Juan Diego was thinking. That the lead singer looked like a freshly unearthed corpse made Juan Diego wonder if a tattoo or two might have helped—even an insect or a reptile, if not the grotesque damage done to the lead guitarist’s neck.

As for the band’s name, the Nocturnal Monkeys, naturally Clark had an explanation. The nearby Chocolate Hills were a local landmark. There were monkeys in the Chocolate Hills.

“No doubt the monkeys are nocturnal,” Miriam said.

“Exactly,” Clark answered her uncertainly. “If you’re interested, and if it’s not raining, a day trip to the Chocolate Hills can be arranged—a group of us go every year,” Clark said.

“But we wouldn’t see the monkeys in the daytime—not if they’re nocturnal,” Miriam pointed out.

“That’s true—we never see the monkeys,” Clark mumbled. He had trouble looking at Miriam, Juan Diego noticed.

“I guess
these
monkeys are the best we can do,” Miriam said; she languidly waved her bare arm in the general direction of the hapless-looking band. They looked like Nocturnal Monkeys, all right.

“One night, every year, a group of us go on a riverboat cruise,” Clark ventured, more cautiously than before. Miriam made him nervous; she just waited for him to continue. “We take a bus to the river. There are docks by the river, places to eat,” Clark rambled on. “After dinner, we take a sightseeing boat up the river.”

“In the dark,” Miriam said flatly. “What’s there to see in the dark?” she asked Clark.

“Fireflies—there must be thousands. The fireflies are spectacular,” Clark said.

“What do the fireflies do—besides blink?” Miriam asked.

“The fireflies blink
spectacularly,
” Clark insisted.

Miriam shrugged. “Blinking is what those beetles do for courtship,” Miriam said. “Imagine if the only way we could come on to one another was to
blink
!” Whereupon she started blinking at Juan Diego, who blinked back at her; they both began to laugh.

Dr. Josefa Quintana also laughed; she blinked across the dinner table
at her husband, but Clark French was not in a blinking mood. “The fireflies are spectacular,” he repeated, in the manner of a schoolteacher who has lost control of the class.

The way Miriam was blinking her eyes at Juan Diego gave him a hard-on. He remembered (thanks to Miriam) that he’d taken the Viagra, and Miriam’s hand on his thigh, under the table, might have contributed. Juan Diego found it disconcerting that he had the distinct impression someone was breathing on his knee—very near to where Miriam’s hand rested on his thigh—and when he looked under the table, there was the little girl in pigtails, Consuelo, staring up at him. “Good night, Mister—I’m supposed to go to bed,” Consuelo said.

“Good night, Consuelo,” Juan Diego said. Both Josefa and Miriam looked under the table at the little girl. “My mother usually unbraids my pigtails before I go to bed,” the child explained. “But tonight a
teenager
is putting me to bed—I have to sleep in my pigtails.”

“Your hair will not die overnight, Consuelo,” Dr. Quintana told the little girl. “Your pigtails can survive one night.”

“My hair will be all
twisted,
” Consuelo complained.

“Come here,” Miriam told her. “I know how to unbraid pigtails.”

Consuelo was reluctant to go to Miriam, but Miriam smiled and held out her arms to the little girl, who climbed into Miriam’s lap. She sat there with her back very straight and her hands clasped tightly together. “You’re supposed to brush it, too, but you don’t have a brush,” Consuelo was saying nervously.

“I know what to do with pigtails with my fingers,” Miriam told the little girl. “I can brush your hair with my fingers.”

“Please don’t make me fall asleep, like Pedro,” Consuelo said.

“I’ll try not to,” Miriam said in her deadpan, no-promises fashion.

When Miriam was unbraiding Consuelo’s pigtails, Juan Diego looked under the table for Pedro, but the boy had slipped unseen into Dr. Quintana’s chair. (Juan Diego also hadn’t noticed when Dr. Quintana had left her seat, but he saw now that the doctor was standing next to Clark, diagonally across the table.) Many of the adults had left their chairs at the tables in the center of the dining room; those tables were being carried away—the center of the dining-room area would become the dance floor. Juan Diego didn’t like to watch people dance; dancing doesn’t work for cripples, not even vicariously.

The little children were being taken to bed; the older children, the teenagers, had also left the tables at the perimeter of the dance floor.
Some adults had already seated themselves at those perimeter tables. When the music started, no doubt the teenagers would be back, Juan Diego was thinking, but they had disappeared for the moment—doing whatever teenagers do.

“What do you suppose has happened to the big gecko behind that painting, Mister?” Pedro quietly asked Juan Diego.

“Well—” Juan Diego began.

“It’s gone. I looked. Nothing there,” Pedro whispered.

“The big gecko must be off on a hunting expedition,” Juan Diego suggested.

“It’s gone,” Pedro repeated. “Maybe the lady stabbed the big gecko, too,” Pedro whispered.

“No—I don’t think so, Pedro,” Juan Diego said, but the boy looked convinced that the big gecko was gone for good.

Miriam had unbraided Consuelo’s pigtails and was expertly running her fingers through the little girl’s thick black hair. “You have beautiful hair, Consuelo,” Miriam told the girl, who was sitting only slightly less rigidly in Miriam’s lap than before. Consuelo was fighting off sleep, suppressing a yawn.

“Yes, I
do
have nice hair,” Consuelo said. “If I were ever kidnapped, the kidnappers would cut off my hair and sell it.”

“Don’t think about that—it isn’t going to happen,” Miriam told her.

“Do you know everything that’s going to happen?” Consuelo asked Miriam.

For some reason, Juan Diego held his breath; he was waiting intently for Miriam’s answer—he didn’t want to miss a word.

“I think the lady
does
know everything,” Pedro whispered to Juan Diego, who shared the fearful-looking boy’s premonition about Miriam. Juan Diego had stopped breathing because he believed that Miriam
did
know the future, though Juan Diego doubted Pedro’s conviction that Miriam had done away with the big gecko. (She would have needed a more formidable murder weapon than a salad fork.)

And the whole time, while Juan Diego wasn’t breathing, both he and Pedro were watching Miriam massage Consuelo’s scalp. Not a single kink remained in the little girl’s luxuriant hair, and Consuelo herself was slumped against Miriam in a succumbed state; the drowsy-looking little girl had half-closed her eyes—she seemed to have forgotten that she’d ever asked Miriam an unanswered question.

Pedro hadn’t forgotten. “Go on, Mister—you better ask her,” the boy
whispered. “She’s putting Consuelo to sleep—maybe
that’s
what she did to the big gecko,” Pedro suggested.

“
Do
you—” Juan Diego started to say, but his tongue felt funny in his mouth and his speech was slurred.
Do
you know everything that’s going to happen? he’d meant to ask Miriam, but Miriam held a finger to her lips and silenced him.

“
Shhh
—the poor child should be in bed,” Miriam whispered.

“But
you
—” Pedro began. That was as far as he got.

Juan Diego saw the gecko fall or drop from the ceiling; it was another small one. This one landed on Pedro’s head, in his hair. The startled-looking gecko had landed perfectly on top of the boy’s head, inside the open crown of the paper party hat, which in Pedro’s case was a sea-green color—not that different from the little lizard’s coloring. When Pedro felt the gecko in his hair, the boy began to scream; this retrieved Consuelo from her trance—the little girl started screaming, too.

Juan Diego would realize only later why two Filipino kids would scream about a gecko. It wasn’t the gecko that made Pedro and Consuelo scream. They were screaming because they must have imagined that Miriam was going to stab the gecko, pinning the little lizard to the top of Pedro’s head.

Juan Diego was reaching for the gecko in Pedro’s hair when the panic-stricken boy swatted the little lizard into the area of the dance floor, where his party hat also ended up. It was the drummer (the guy with the insect tattoos on his bare arms) who stomped on the gecko; he spattered some of the lizard’s innards on his tight jeans.

“Oh, man—that’s harsh,” the harmonica player said; he was the one in the other tank top, the musician with the snakes and lizards tattooed on his arms.

The lead guitarist with the burn-scar tattoo on his neck didn’t notice the spattered gecko; he was diddling with the amplifier and the speaker boxes, tweaking the sound.

But Consuelo and Pedro had seen what happened to the little gecko; their screams had turned to wails of protestation, not relieved by the teenagers who were taking them off to bed. (Screaming and wailing had brought the teenagers back to the dining room, where they’d perhaps mistaken the cries of the children for the band’s first number.)

More philosophical than some lead singers, the waif of a corpse-colored girl stared at the ceiling above the dance floor—as if she were expecting more falling geckos. “I hate those fuckin’ things,” she said to
no one in particular. She also saw that the drummer was trying to wipe the lizard’s spattered innards off his jeans.
“Gross,”
the lead singer said matter-of-factly; the way she said it made “Gross” sound like the title of her best-known song.

“I’m betting my bedroom is closer to the dance floor than yours,” Miriam was saying to Juan Diego, as the freaked-out children were being carried away. “What I mean, darling, is that the choice of where we sleep might best be guided by how much of
these
Nocturnal Monkeys we want to hear.”

“Yes,” was all Juan Diego could manage to say. He saw that Auntie Carmen was no longer among the remaining adults in the vicinity of the newly emerging dance floor; either she’d been carried away with the dinner tables or she’d slipped off to bed before the little children.
These
Nocturnal Monkeys must not have won over Auntie Carmen with their charms. As for the
actual
nocturnal monkeys, the ones in the Chocolate Hills, Juan Diego imagined that Auntie Carmen might have liked them—if only to feed one to her pet moray.

“Yes,” Juan Diego repeated. It was definitely time to slip away. He stood up from the table as if he didn’t limp—as if he’d never limped—and because Miriam took immediate hold of his arm, Juan Diego almost didn’t limp as he began to walk with her.

“Not staying to welcome in the New Year?” Clark French called to his former teacher.

“Oh, we’re going to welcome it in, all right,” Miriam called to him, once more with a languid wave of one bare arm.

“Leave them alone, Clark—let them go,” Josefa said.