Avenue of Mysteries (62 page)

Rivera must have left Guerrero with some sense of urgency—who knows how Pepe might have announced the scattering to him?—because the dump boss was still wearing his woodworking apron.

The apron had many pockets and was as long as an unflattering, matronly-looking skirt. One pocket was for chisels, of varying sizes; another was for different patches of sandpaper, coarse and fine; a third pocket was for the glue tube and the rag Rivera used to wipe the residue of glue from the nozzle of the tube. There was no telling what was in the
other pockets—the pockets were what Rivera said he liked about his woodworking apron. The old leather apron held many secrets—or so Juan Diego, as a child, had once believed.

“I don’t know what we’re waiting for—for
you,
maybe,” Juan Diego said to el jefe. “I think the giantess is unlikely to
do
anything,” the boy added, nodding to the Mary Monster.

The temple was filling up, though there was still time before the Mass, at the moment when Brother Pepe and Rivera arrived. Juan Diego would remember, later, that Lupe paid more attention to the dump boss than she usually did; as for el jefe, he was even warier around Lupe than he usually was.

Rivera had his left hand thrust deep inside a mystery pocket of his woodworking apron; with the fingertips of his right hand, the dump boss touched the film of ash on the Communion railing.

“The ashes smell a little funny—not an overpowering smell,” Father Alfonso said to el jefe.

“There’s something sticky in these ashes—a foreign substance,” Father Octavio said.

Rivera sniffed his fingertips, then wiped them on his leather apron.

“You’ve got a lot of stuff in your pockets, jefe,” Lupe said to the dump boss, but Juan Diego didn’t translate this; the dump reader was miffed that Rivera hadn’t responded to the giantess joke—namely, Juan Diego’s prediction that the Virgin Mary was unlikely to
do
anything.

“You should snuff the candles, Pepe,” the dump boss said; pointing to his beloved Virgin Mary, Rivera then spoke to the two old priests. “She’s highly flammable,” el jefe said.

“Flammable!” Father Alfonso cried.

Rivera recited the same litany of the coffee can’s contents that the dump kids had heard from Dr. Vargas—a scientific, strictly
chemical
analysis. “Paint, turpentine—or some kind of paint thinner. Gasoline, definitely,” Rivera told the two old priests. “And probably stuff for staining wood.”

“The Holy Mother won’t be
stained,
will she?” Father Octavio asked the dump boss.

“You better let me clean her up,” the dump boss said. “If I could have a little time alone with her—I mean before the first morning Mass tomorrow. The best would be after the evening Mass tonight. You don’t want to mix water with some of these
foreign substances,
” Rivera said, as
if he were an alchemist who couldn’t be refuted—not your usual dump boss, in any case.

Brother Pepe, on tiptoe, was at work extinguishing the candles with the long gold candle snuffer; naturally, the falling ashes had already snuffed out those candles nearest to the Virgin Mary.

“Does your hand hurt, jefe—where you cut yourself?” Lupe asked Rivera. He was a hard one to read, even for a mind reader.

Juan Diego would later speculate that Lupe may have read
everything
on Rivera’s mind—not only el jefe’s thoughts about his cutting himself, and how much he was bleeding. Lupe might have known all about whatever “small project” Pepe had interrupted Rivera in the middle of, including what Rivera had called “the fine-tuning part”—namely, what exactly the dump boss was working on when he slashed the thumb and index finger of his left hand. But Lupe never said what she knew, or
if
she knew, and Rivera—like the pockets of his woodworking apron—held many secrets.

“Lupe wants to know if your hand hurts, jefe—where you cut yourself,” Juan Diego said.

“I just need a couple of stitches,” Rivera said; he kept his left hand hidden in the pocket of the leather apron.

Brother Pepe had thought Rivera shouldn’t drive; they’d taken Pepe’s VW from the shack in Guerrero. Pepe wanted to drive the dump boss to Dr. Vargas right away for the stitches, but Rivera had wanted to see the results of the scattering first.

“The
results
!” Father Alfonso repeated, after Pepe’s account.

“The results amount to a species of vandalism,” Father Octavio said, looking at Juan Diego and Lupe when he spoke.

“I need to see Vargas, too—let’s go,” Lupe said to her brother. The dump kids weren’t even looking at the Mary Monster; they weren’t expecting much in the area of
results
from her. But Rivera looked up at the Virgin Mary’s noseless face—as if, her darkened visage notwithstanding, the dump boss expected to see a sign, something bordering on instructions.

“Come on, jefe—you’re hurting, you’re still bleeding,” Lupe said, taking Rivera’s good right hand. The dump boss was unused to such affection from the ever-critical girl. El jefe gave Lupe his hand and let her lead him up the center aisle.

“We’ll see that you have the temple to yourself, before closing time tonight!” Father Alfonso called after the dump boss.

“Pepe—you’ll lock up after him, I presume,” Father Octavio said to Brother Pepe, who’d returned the candle snuffer to its sacred place; Pepe was hurrying after Rivera and the niños de la basura.

“¡Sí, sí!” Pepe called to the two old priests.

Edward Bonshaw was left holding the empty coffee can. Now was not the time for Señor Eduardo to say what he knew he needed to say to Father Alfonso or Father Octavio; now was not the time to confess—there was a Mass upcoming, and the lid to the coffee can was missing. It had simply (or not so simply) disappeared; it might as well have gone up in smoke, like the Virgin Mary’s nose, Señor Eduardo was thinking. But the lid to that secular coffee can—last touched by Lupe—had vanished without a flaming blue hiss.

The dump kids and the dump boss had left the temple with Brother Pepe, leaving Edward Bonshaw and the two old priests to face the noseless Virgin Mary and their uncertain future. Perhaps Pepe understood this best: Pepe knew that the process of reorientation was never easy.

•
27
•

A Nose for a Nose

The nighttime flight from Manila to Laoag was packed with crying children. They weren’t in the air for more than an hour and a quarter, but the wailing kids made the flying time seem longer.

“Is it a weekend?” Juan Diego asked Dorothy, but she told him it was a Thursday night. “A school night!” Juan Diego declared; he was dumbfounded. “Don’t these kids go to school?” (He knew, before she did it, that Dorothy was going to shrug.)

Even the nonchalance of Dorothy’s shrug—it was such a slight gesture—was sufficient to dislocate Juan Diego from the present time. Not even the crying children could keep him in the moment. Why was he so easily (and repeatedly) carried back to the past? Juan Diego wondered.

Was it all to do with the beta-blocker business, or was his footing in the Philippines of an insubstantial or transient nature?

Dorothy was saying something about her inclination to talk more when there were children around—“I would rather listen to myself than the kids, you know?”—but Juan Diego found it difficult to listen to Dorothy. Though it had happened forty years ago, the conversation with Dr. Vargas at Cruz Roja—on the occasion of Vargas’s stitching the thumb and index finger of Rivera’s left hand—was more
present
in Juan Diego’s mind than Dorothy’s monologue en route to Laoag.

“You don’t like children?” was all Juan Diego had asked her. After that, he didn’t say a word for the rest of the flight. He’d
listened
to more of what Vargas and Rivera and Lupe were saying—over the stitches, that long-ago morning at the Red Cross hospital—than he actually heard (or would remember) of Dorothy’s discursive soliloquy.

“I’m okay if people have children—I mean
other
people. If other
adults want kids, that’s fine with me,” Dorothy stated. Not quite in chronological order, she began her lecture on local history; Dorothy must have wanted Juan Diego to know at least a little about where they were going. But Juan Diego missed most of what Dorothy would tell him; he was paying closer attention to a conversation at Cruz Roja, one he should have listened to more closely forty years ago.

“Jesus, jefe—were you in a sword fight?” Vargas was asking the dump boss.

“It was just a chisel,” Rivera told Vargas. “I tried the bevel chisel first—it has a cutting edge that makes an oblique angle—but it wasn’t working.”

“So you changed chisels,” Lupe prompted el jefe. Juan Diego translated this.

“Yeah, I changed chisels,” Rivera said. “The problem was the object I was working on—it doesn’t lie flat. It’s hard to hold at the base—the object doesn’t really
have
a base.”

“It’s hard to stabilize the object with one hand while you cut, or chip away, with the chisel in your other hand,” Lupe explained. Juan Diego translated this clarifying point, too.

“Yeah—the object is hard to stabilize, all right,” the dump boss agreed.

“What kind of object is it, jefe?” Juan Diego asked.

“Think of a doorknob—or the latch to a door, or to a window,” the dump boss answered him. “Kind of like that.”

“Tricky business,” Lupe said. Juan Diego also translated this.

“Yeah,” was all Rivera said.

“You cut the shit out of yourself, jefe,” Vargas told the dump boss. “Maybe you should stick to the basurero business.”

At the time, everyone had laughed—Juan Diego could still hear their laughter, as Dorothy rambled on and on. She was saying something about the northwestern coast of Luzon. Laoag was a trading port and a fishing site in the tenth and eleventh centuries—“one sees the Chinese influence,” Dorothy was saying. “Then Spain invaded, with their Mary-Jesus business—your old friends,” Dorothy said to Juan Diego. (The Spanish came in the 1500s; they were in the Philippines for more than three hundred years.)

But Juan Diego wasn’t listening. There was other dialogue that weighed on him, a moment when he might have (could have, should
have) seen something coming—a moment when he might have diverted the course of things to come.

Lupe stood near enough to touch the stitches, watching Vargas close the wounds in Rivera’s thumb and index finger; Vargas told Lupe he was in danger of attaching her inquisitive little face to el jefe’s hand. That was when Lupe asked Vargas what he knew about lions and rabies. “Can lions get rabies? Let’s start with that,” Lupe began. Juan Diego translated, but Vargas was the kind of guy who wouldn’t readily admit there was something he didn’t know.

“An infected dog can transmit rabies when the virus reaches the dog’s salivary glands, which is about a week—or less—before the dog dies from rabies,” Vargas replied.

“Lupe wants to know about a
lion,
” Juan Diego told him.

“The incubation period in an infected human is usually about three to seven weeks, but I’ve had patients who developed the disease in ten days,” Vargas was saying, when Lupe interrupted him.

“Let’s say a rabid dog bites a lion—you know, like a rooftop dog, or like one of those perros del basurero. Does the lion get sick? What happens to the
lion
?” Lupe asked Vargas.

“I’m sure there have been studies—I’ll have to look at what research has been done on rabies in lions,” Dr. Vargas said, sighing. “Most people who get bitten by lions probably aren’t worried about rabies. That wouldn’t be the first worry you would have, in the case of a lion bite,” he told Lupe.

Juan Diego knew there was no translation for Lupe’s shrug.

Dr. Vargas was bandaging the thumb and index finger of Rivera’s left hand. “You have to keep this clean and dry, jefe,” Vargas was telling the dump boss. But Rivera was looking at Lupe, who looked away from him; el jefe knew when Lupe was keeping something to herself.

And Juan Diego was anxious to get back to Cinco Señores, where La Maravilla would be setting up the tents and quieting down the animals. At the time, Juan Diego believed he had more important business to attend to than what was on Lupe’s mind. As a fourteen-year-old boy will, Juan Diego was dreaming about himself as a hero—he had
skywalking
aspirations on his mind. (And of course Lupe knew what her brother was thinking; she could read his thoughts.)

The four of them fit into Pepe’s VW Beetle; Pepe drove the dump kids to Cinco Señores before he took Rivera back to the shack in Guerrero.
(El jefe had said he wanted to take a nap before the local anesthetic wore off.)

In the car, Pepe told the dump kids they were welcome to come back to Lost Children. “Your old room is ready for you, anytime,” was the way Pepe put it. But Sister Gloria had returned Juan Diego’s life-size sex doll of the Guadalupe virgin to the Christmas-parties place—Lost Children would never be the same, Juan Diego was thinking. And why would you leave an orphanage, and then go back? If you leave, you leave, Juan Diego thought—you move
on,
not back.

When they got to the circus, Rivera was crying; the dump kids knew the local anesthetic had not worn off, but the dump boss was too upset to speak.

“We
know
we would be welcome to come back to Guerrero, jefe,” Lupe said. “Tell Rivera we know the shack is
our
shack, if we ever need to go home,” Lupe told Juan Diego. “Tell him we miss him, too,” Lupe said. Juan Diego said all that, while Rivera kept crying—his big shoulders were shaking in the passenger seat.

It is simply amazing, at that age, when you’re thirteen or fourteen, how you can take being loved for granted, how (even when you are
wanted
) you can feel utterly alone. The dump kids were
not
abandoned at Circo de La Maravilla; yet they’d stopped confiding in each other, and they were confiding in no one else.

“Good luck with that object you’re working on,” Juan Diego told Rivera, when the dump boss was leaving Cinco Señores to go back to Guerrero.