Avenue of Mysteries

13. Now and Forever

What happened to Juan Diego with the bomb-sniffing dogs at the Makati Shangri-La can be calmly and rationally explained, though what transpired developed quickly, and in the panic-stricken eyes of the hotel doorman and the Shangri-La security guards — the latter instantly lost control of the two dogs — there was nothing calm or rational attending the arrival of the Distinguished Guest. Such was the lofty-sounding designation attached to Juan Diego Guerrero’s name at the hotel registration desk: Distinguished Guest. Oh, that Clark French — Juan Diego’s former student had been busy, asserting himself.

There’d been an upgrade to the Mexican-American novelist’s room; special amenities, one of which was unusual, had been arranged. And the hotel management had been warned not to call Mr. Guerrero a Mexican American. Yet you wouldn’t have known that the natty hotel manager himself was hovering around the registration desk, waiting to confer celebrity status on the weary Juan Diego — that is, not if you witnessed the writer’s rude reception at the driveway entrance to the Shangri-La. Alas, Clark wasn’t on hand to welcome his former teacher.

As they pulled into the driveway, Bienvenido could see in the rearview mirror that his esteemed client was asleep; the driver tried to wave off the doorman, who was hurrying to open the rear door of the limo. Bienvenido saw that Juan Diego was slumped against this same rear door; the driver quickly opened his own door and stepped into the hotel entranceway, waving both arms.

Who knew that bomb-sniffing dogs were agitated by arm-waving? The two dogs lunged at Bienvenido, who raised both arms above his head, as if the security guards held him at gunpoint. And when the hotel doorman opened the limo’s rear door, Juan Diego, who appeared to be dead, began to fall out of the car. A falling dead man further excited the bomb-sniffing dogs; both of them bounded into the limo’s backseat, wresting the leather handles of their dog harnesses from the security guards’ hands.

The seat belt kept Juan Diego from falling entirely out of the car; he was suddenly jerked awake, his head lolling in and out of the limo. There was a dog in his lap, licking his face; it was a medium-size dog, a small male Labrador or a female Lab, actually a Lab mix, with a Lab’s soft, floppy ears and warm, wide-apart eyes.

“Beatrice!” Juan Diego cried. One can only imagine what he’d been dreaming about, but when Juan Diego cried out a woman’s name, a female name, the Lab mix, who was male, looked puzzled — his name was James. And Juan Diego’s crying out “Beatrice!” utterly unnerved the doorman, who’d presumed the arriving guest was dead. The doorman screamed.

Evidently, the bomb-sniffing dogs were predisposed to become aggressive when there was screaming. James (who was in Juan Diego’s lap) sought to protect Juan Diego by growling at the doorman, but Juan Diego had not noticed the other dog; he didn’t know there was a second dog seated next to him. This was one of those nervous-looking dogs with perky, stand-up ears and a shaggy, bristling coat; it was not a purebred German shepherd but a shepherd mix, and when this savagesounding dog began to bark (in Juan Diego’s ear), the writer must have imagined he was sitting beside a rooftop dog, and that Lupe might have been right: some rooftop dogs were ghosts. The shepherd mix had one wonky eye; it was a greenish yellow, and the wonky eye’s unsteady focus was not aligned with the dog’s good eye. The mismatched eye was further evidence to Juan Diego that the trembling dog next to him was a rooftop dog and a ghost; the crippled writer unbuckled his seat belt and tried to get out of the car — a difficult task with James (the Lab mix) in his lap.

And, just then, both dogs thrust their muzzles into the general vicinity of Juan Diego’s crotch; they pinned him to his seat — they were intently sniffing. Since the dogs were allegedly trained to sniff bombs, this got the attention of the security guards. “Hold it right there,” one of them said ambiguously — to either Juan Diego or the dogs.

“Dogs love me,” Juan Diego proudly announced. “I was a dump kid — un niño de la basura,” he tried to explain to the security guards; the two of them were fixated on the unsteady-looking man’s custom-made shoe. What the handicapped gentleman was saying made no sense to the guards. (“My sister and I tried to look after the dogs in the basurero. If the dogs died, we tried to burn them before the vultures got to them.”)

And here was the problem with the only two ways Juan Diego could limp: either he led with the lame foot at that crazy two-o’clock angle, in which case the jolt of his limp was the first thing you saw, or he started out on his good foot and dragged the bad one behind — in either case, the two-o’clock foot and that misshapen shoe drew your attention.

“Hold it right there!” the first security guard commanded again; both the way he raised his voice and how he pointed at Juan Diego made it clear he wasn’t speaking to the dogs. Juan Diego froze, mid-limp.

Who knew that bomb-sniffing dogs didn’t like it when people did that freezing thing and held themselves unnaturally still? The bomb-sniffers, both James and the shepherd mix, their noses now prodding Juan Diego in the area of his hip — more specifically, at the coat pocket of his sport jacket, where he’d put the paper napkin with the uneaten remains of his green-tea muffin — suddenly stiffened.

Juan Diego was trying to remember a recent terrorist incident — where was it, in Mindanao? Wasn’t that the southernmost island of the Philippines, the one nearest Indonesia? Wasn’t there a sizable Muslim population in Mindanao? Hadn’t there been a suicide bomber who’d strapped explosives to one of his legs? Before the explosion, all anyone had noticed was the bomber’s limp.

This doesn’t look good, Bienvenido was thinking. The driver left the orange albatross of a bag with the cowardly doorman, who was still recovering from the conviction that Juan Diego was a dead person come back to life with a zombie-like limp and calling out a woman’s name. The young limo driver went inside the hotel to the registration desk, where he told them they were about to shoot their Distinguished Guest.

“Call off the untrained dogs,” Bienvenido told the hotel manager. “Your security guards are poised to kill a crippled writer.”

The misunderstanding was soon sorted out; Clark French had even prepared the hotel for Juan Diego’s early arrival. Most important to Juan Diego was that the dogs be forgiven; the green-tea muffin had misled the bomb-sniffers. “Don’t blame the dogs,” was how Juan Diego put it to the hotel manager. “They are perfect dogs — promise me they won’t be mistreated.”

“Mistreated? No, sir — never mistreated!” the manager declared. It’s unlikely that a Distinguished Guest of the Makati Shangri-La had been such an advocate of the bomb-sniffing dogs before. The manager himself showed Juan Diego to his room. The amenities provided by the hotel included a fruit basket and the standard platter of crackers and cheese; the ice bucket with four bottles of beer (instead of the usual Champagne) had been the idea of Juan Diego’s devoted former student, who knew that his beloved teacher drank only beer.

Clark French was also one of Juan Diego’s doting readers, though Clark was surely better known in Manila as an American writer who’d married a Filipino woman. At a glance, Juan Diego knew, the giant aquarium had been Clark’s idea. Clark French loved to give his former teacher gifts that demonstrated the younger writer’s zeal for commemorating highlights from Juan Diego’s novels. In one of Juan Diego’s earliest efforts — a novel almost no one had read — the main character is a man with a defective urinary tract. His girlfriend has a huge fish tank in her bedroom; the sights and sounds of the exotic underwater life have an unsettling effect on the man, whose urethra is described as “a narrow, winding road.”

Juan Diego had an enduring fondness for Clark French, a diehard reader who retained the most specific details — details of the kind writers generally remembered only in their own work. Yet Clark didn’t always recall how these same details were intended to affect the reader. In Juan Diego’s urinary-tract novel, the main character is greatly disturbed by the underwater dramas forever unfolding in his girlfriend’s bedside aquarium; the fish keep him awake.

The hotel manager explained that the overnight loan of the lighted, gurgling fish tank was the gift of Clark French’s Filipino family; an aunt of Clark’s wife owned a store for exotic pets in Makati City. The aquarium had been too heavy for any table in the hotel room, so it stood immovably on the floor of the bedroom, beside the bed. The tank was half as tall as the bed, an imposing rectangle of sinister-looking activity. A welcoming note from Clark had accompanied the aquarium: Familiar details will help you sleep!

“They are all creatures from our own South China Sea,” the hotel manager remarked warily. “Don’t feed them. For one night, they can go without eating — so I’m told.”

“I see,” Juan Diego said. He didn’t see, at all, how Clark — or the Filipino aunt who owned the store for exotic pets — could have imagined anyone would find the aquarium restful. It held over sixty gallons of water, the aunt had said; after dark, the green underwater light would surely seem greener (not to mention, brighter). Small fish, too fast to describe, darted furtively in the upper reaches of the water. Something larger lurked in the darkest corner at the bottom of the tank: a pair of eyes glowed; there was a wavy undulation of gills.

“Is that an eel?” Juan Diego asked.

The hotel manager was a small, neatly dressed man with a painstakingly trimmed mustache. “Maybe a moray,” the manager said. “Better not stick your finger in the water.”

“No, of course not — that’s definitely an eel,” Juan Diego replied.

JUAN DIEGO HAD AT first regretted that he’d agreed to let Bienvenido drive him to a restaurant that evening. No tourists, mostly families—“a well-kept secret,” the driver had said to persuade him. Juan Diego had imagined he might be happier to have room service in his hotel room, and to go to bed early. Yet he now felt relieved that Bienvenido was taking him away from the Shangri-La; the unfamiliar fish and the evillooking eel would await his return. (He would rather have slept with the bomb-sniffing Lab mix James!)

The P.S. to Clark French’s welcoming note read as follows: You are in good hands with Bienvenido! Everyone excited to see you in Bohol! My whole family can’t wait to meet you! Auntie Carmen says the moray’s name is Morales — no touching!

As a graduate student, Clark French had needed defending, and Juan Diego had defended him. The young writer was unfashionably ebullient, an ever-optimistic presence; it wasn’t only his writing that suffered from an overuse of exclamation points.

“That’s definitely a moray,” Juan Diego told the hotel manager. “Name of Morales.”

“Ironic name for a biting eel—‘Morals,’ the moray,” the manager said. “The pet store sent a team to assemble the aquarium: two luggage carts to carry the jugs of seawater; the underwater thermometer is most delicate; the system that circulates the water had a water-bubble problem; the rubber bags with the individual creatures had to be carried by hand — an impressive production for a one-night visit. Maybe the moray was sedated for such a stressful trip.”

“I see,” Juan Diego repeated. Señor Morales did not appear to be under the influence of sedation at the moment; the eel was menacingly coiled in the farthest corner of the tank, calmly breathing, the yellowish eyes unblinking.

As a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop — and later, as a published novelist — Clark French eschewed an ironic touch. Clark was unstintingly earnest and sincere; naming a moray eel Morales was not his style. The irony must have been entirely Auntie Carmen’s, from the Filipino side of Clark’s family. It made Juan Diego anxious that all of them were waiting to meet him in Bohol; yet he was happy for Clark French — the seemingly friendless young writer had found a family. Clark French’s fellow students (would-be writers, all) had found him hopelessly naïve. What young writer is attracted to a sunny disposition? Clark was improbably positive; he had an actor’s handsome face, an athletic body, and he was as badly but conservatively dressed as a door-to-door Jehovah’s Witness.

Clark’s actual religious convictions (Clark was very Catholic) must have reminded Juan Diego of a young Edward Bonshaw. In fact, Clark French had met his Filipino wife — and her “whole family,” as he’d enthusiastically described them — during a Catholic do-gooder mission in the Philippines. Juan Diego couldn’t remember the exact circumstances. A Catholic charity, of one kind or another? Orphaned children and unwed mothers might have been involved.

Even Clark French’s novels exerted a tenacious and combative goodwill: his main characters, lost souls and serial sinners, always found redemption; the act of redeeming usually followed a moral low point; the novels predictably ended in a crescendo of benevolence. Quite understandably, these novels were critically attacked. Clark had a tendency to preach; he evangelized. Juan Diego thought it was sad that Clark French’s novels were scorned — in the same manner poor Clark himself had been mocked by his fellow students. Juan Diego truly liked Clark French’s writing; Clark was a craftsman. But it was Clark’s curse to be annoyingly nice. Juan Diego knew Clark meant it — the young optimist was genuine. But Clark was also a proselytizer — he couldn’t help it.

Crescendos of benevolence following moral low points — formulaic, but does this work with religious readers? Was Clark to be scorned for having readers? Could Clark help it that he was uplifting? (“Terminally uplifting,” a fellow grad student at Iowa had said.)

Yet the aquarium for one night was too much; this was more Clark than Clark — this was going too far. Or am I just too tired from all the traveling to appreciate the gesture? Juan Diego wondered. He hated to blame Clark for being Clark — or for having an eternal goodness. Juan Diego was sincerely fond of Clark French; yet his fondness for the young writer tormented him. Clark was obdurately Catholic.

A wild thrashing sent a sudden spray of warm seawater from the aquarium, startling Juan Diego and the hotel manager. Had an unlucky fish been eaten or killed? The strikingly clear, green-lit water revealed no traces of blood or body parts; the ever-watchful eel gave no outward indication of wrongdoing. “It’s a violent world,” the hotel manager remarked; it was a sentence, eschewing irony, one would find at a moral low point in a Clark French novel.

“Yes,” was all Juan Diego said. He’d been born a guttersnipe; he hated himself when he looked down on other people, especially when they were good people, like Clark, and Juan Diego was looking down on him the way every superior and condescending person in the literary world looked down on Clark French — for being uplifting.

After the manager left him alone, Juan Diego wished he’d asked about the air-conditioning; it was too cold in the room, and the thermostat on the wall presented the tired traveler with a labyrinthine choice of arrows and numbers — what Juan Diego imagined he might encounter in the cockpit of a fighter plane. Why was he so tired? Juan Diego wondered. Why is it that all I want to do is sleep and dream, or see Miriam and Dorothy again?

He had another impromptu nap; he sat at the desk and fell asleep in the chair. He woke up shivering.

There was no point in unpacking his huge orange bag for a one-night stay. Juan Diego displayed his beta-blockers on the bathroom sink, to remind himself to take the usual dose — the right dose, not a double one. He put the clothes he’d been wearing on the bed; he showered and shaved. His traveling life without Miriam and Dorothy was very much like his normal life; yet it suddenly seemed empty and purposeless without them. And why was that? he wondered, along with wondering about his tiredness.

Juan Diego watched the news on TV in his hotel bathrobe; the chill of cold air was no less cold, but he’d fiddled with the thermostat and had managed to reduce the speed of the fan. The air-conditioning was no warmer — it just blasted less. (Weren’t those poor fish used to warm seas, the moray included?)

On the TV, there was an unclear video, captured on a surveillance camera, of the suicide bomber in Mindanao. The terrorist was not recognizable, but his limp bore a disquieting resemblance to Juan Diego’s. Juan Diego had been scrutinizing the slight differences — it was the same leg that was affected, the right one — when the explosion obliterated everything. There was a click, and the TV screen showed a scratchy-sounding blackness. The video clip left Juan Diego with the upsetting feeling that he’d seen his own suicide.

He noted that there was enough ice in the bucket to keep the beer cold long after his dinner — not that the frigid air-conditioning wouldn’t suffice. Juan Diego dressed himself in the greenish glow cast from the aquarium. “Lo siento, Señor Morales,” he said, as he was leaving the hotel room. “I’m sorry if it’s not warm enough for you and your friends.” The moray appeared to be watching him as the writer stood uncertainly in the doorway; the eel’s stare was so steadfast that Juan Diego waved to the unresponsive creature before he closed the hotel room door.

At the family restaurant Bienvenido drove him to—“a well-kept secret” to some, perhaps — there was a screaming child at every table, and the families all seemed to know one another; they shouted from table to table, passing platters of food back and forth.

The decor defied Juan Diego’s understanding: a dragon, with an elephant’s trunk, was trampling soldiers; a Virgin Mary, with an angry-looking Christ Child in her arms, guarded the restaurant’s entrance. She was a menacing Mary — a Mary with a bouncer’s attitude, Juan Diego decided. (Leave it to Juan Diego to find fault with the Virgin Mary’s attitude. Didn’t that dragon with the elephant’s trunk, the one trampling the soldiers, have an attitude problem, too?)

“Isn’t San Miguel a Spanish beer?” Juan Diego asked Bienvenido in the limo; they were driving back to the hotel. Juan Diego must have had a few beers.

“Well, it’s a Spanish brewery,” Bienvenido said, “but their parent company is in the Philippines.”

Any version of colonialism — Spanish colonialism, in particular — was certain to set off Juan Diego. And then there was Catholic colonialism, as Juan Diego thought of it. “Colonialism, I suppose,” was all the writer said; in the rearview mirror, he could see the limo driver thinking this over. Poor Bienvenido: he’d imagined they were talking about beer.

“I suppose,” was all Bienvenido said.

IT MUST HAVE BEEN a saint’s day — which one, Juan Diego didn’t remember. The responsive prayer, beginning in the chapel, didn’t exist only in Juan Diego’s dream; the prayer had drifted upstairs on the morning the dump kids woke up with el gringo bueno in their room at Niños Perdidos.

“¡Madre!” one of the nuns called; it sounded like Sister Gloria’s voice. “Ahora y siempre, serás mi guía.”

“Mother!” the orphans in the kindergarten responded. “Now and forever, you will be my guide.”

The kindergartners were in the chapel, one floor below Juan Diego and Lupe’s bedroom. On saints’ days, the responsive prayers drifted upstairs before the kindergartners began their morning march. Lupe, either awake or half asleep, would murmur her own prayer in response to the kindergartners’ ode to the Virgin Mary.

“Dulce madre mía de Guadalupe, por tu justicia, presente en nuestros corazones, reine la paz en el mundo,” Lupe prayed — somewhat sarcastically. “My sweet mother Guadalupe, in your righteousness, present in our hearts, let peace reign in the world.”

But this morning, when Juan Diego was barely awake, with his eyes still closed, Lupe said, “There’s a miracle for you: our mother has managed to pass through our room — she’s taking a bath — without ever seeing the good gringo.”

Juan Diego opened his eyes. Either el gringo bueno had died in his sleep or he’d not moved; yet the bedsheet no longer covered him. The hippie and his Crucified Christ lay still and exposed — a tableau of an untimely death, of youth struck down — while the dump kids could hear Esperanza singing some secular ditty in the bathtub. “He’s a beautiful boy, isn’t he?” Lupe asked her brother.

“He smells like beer piss,” Juan Diego noted, bending over the young American to be sure he was breathing.

“We should get him out on the street — at least get him dressed,” Lupe said. Esperanza had already pulled the plug; the niños could hear the sound the tub made when it was draining. Esperanza’s singing was muffled — she was probably towel-drying her hair.

In the chapel, one floor below them, or perhaps in the poetic license taken in Juan Diego’s dream, the nun who sounded like Sister Gloria once more exhorted the children to repeat after her: “¡Madre! Ahora y siempre—”

“ ‘I want my arms and legs around you!’ ” Esperanza sang. “ ‘I want my tongue touching your tongue, too!’ ”

“ ‘I spied a young cowboy, all wrapped in white linen,’ ” the dead-asleep gringo was singing. “ ‘Wrapped up in white linen and cold as the clay.’ ”

“Whatever this mess is, it isn’t a miracle,” Lupe said; she got out of bed to help Juan Diego dress the helpless gringo.

“Whoa!” the hippie boy moaned; he was still asleep, or he’d completely passed out. “We’re all friends, right?” he kept asking. “You smell great, and you’re so beautiful!” he told Lupe, as she was trying to button his dirty shirt. But the good gringo’s eyes never opened; he couldn’t see Lupe. He was too hung over to wake up.

“I’ll marry him only if he stops drinking,” Lupe said to Juan Diego.

The good gringo’s breath smelled worse than all the rest of him, and Juan Diego tried to distract himself from the bad smell by thinking about what present the friendly hippie might give the dump kids — last night, when he’d been more lucid, the young draft dodger had promised them a present.

Naturally, Lupe knew what her brother was thinking. “I don’t believe the dear boy can afford to give us very extravagant presents,” Lupe said. “One day, in about five to seven years, a simple gold wedding band might be nice, but I wouldn’t count on anything special now — not when the hippie is spending his money on alcohol and prostitutes.”

As if summoned by the prostitutes word, Esperanza came out of the bathroom; she was wearing her customary two towels (her hair bound in one, her body scarcely covered by the other) and carrying her Zaragoza Street clothes.

“Look at him, Mom!” Juan Diego cried; he began unbuttoning the good gringo’s shirt, faster than Lupe had buttoned it up. “We found him on the street last night — he didn’t have a mark on him. But this morning, look at him!” Juan Diego pulled open the hippie boy’s shirt to reveal the Bleeding Jesus. “It’s a miracle!” Juan Diego cried.

“It’s el gringo bueno — he’s no miracle,” Esperanza said.

“Oh, let me die — she knows him! They’ve been naked together — she’s done everything to him!” Lupe cried.

Esperanza rolled the gringo over on his stomach; she pulled down his underpants. “You call this a miracle?” she asked her children. On the dear boy’s bare ass was a tattoo of the American flag, but the flag was purposely ripped in half; the crack of the hippie’s ass divided the flag. It was pretty much the opposite of a patriotic picture.

“Whoa!” the unconscious gringo said in a strangled voice; he was lying facedown on the bed, where he appeared in danger of suffocating.

“He smells like upchuck,” Esperanza said. “Help me get him into the bathtub — the water will bring him back to life.”

“The gringo put his thing in her mouth,” Lupe was babbling. “She put his thing in her—”

“Stop it, Lupe,” Juan Diego said.

“Forget what I said about marrying him,” Lupe said. “Not in five years or in seven — not ever!”

“You’ll meet someone else,” Juan Diego told his sister.

“Who has Lupe met? Who has upset her?” Esperanza asked. She held the naked hippie under his arms; Juan Diego took hold of the boy’s ankles, and they carried him into the bathroom.

“You have upset her,” Juan Diego told his mother. “Just the thought of you with the good gringo has upset her.”

“Nonsense,” Esperanza said. “Every girl loves the gringo kid, and he loves us. It would break your heart to be his mother, but the gringo kid makes all the other women in the world very happy.”

“The gringo kid has broken my heart!” Lupe was wailing.

“What is the matter with her — did she get her period or something?” Esperanza asked Juan Diego. “I’d already had my first period by the time I was her age.”

“No, I didn’t get my period — I’m never getting my period!” Lupe screamed. “I’m retarded, remember? My period is retarded!”

Juan Diego and his mom hit the hippie’s head on the hot-water faucet when they were sliding him into the bathtub, but the boy didn’t flinch or open his eyes; his only response was to hold his penis.

“Isn’t that sweet?” Esperanza asked Juan Diego. “He’s a darling guy, isn’t he?”

“ ‘I see, by your outfit, that you are a cowboy,’ ” the sleeping gringo sang.

Lupe wanted to be the one who turned the water on, but when she saw that el gringo bueno was holding his penis, she got upset all over again. “What is he doing to himself? He’s thinking about sex — I know he is!” she said to Juan Diego.

“He’s singing — he’s not thinking about sex, Lupe,” Juan Diego said.

“Sure he is — the gringo kid thinks about sex all the time. That’s why he’s so young-looking,” Esperanza told them, turning on the tub; she opened both faucets all the way.

“Whoa!” cried the good gringo, opening his eyes. He saw the three of them peering down at him in the bathtub. He’d probably not seen Esperanza looking quite this way — in a tight white towel with her damp, tousled hair fallen forward, to either side of her pretty face. She had taken the second towel off her head; the towel for her hair was a little wet, but she wanted to leave it for the hippie boy to use. It would take her a while to get herself dressed, and to bring a couple of clean towels to the kids’ bathroom.

“You drink too much, kid,” Esperanza told the good gringo. “You don’t have a big enough body to handle the alcohol.”

“What are you doing here?” the dear boy asked her; he had a wonderful smile, the Dying Christ on his scrawny chest notwithstanding.

“She’s our mother! You’re fucking our mother!” Lupe yelled.

“Yikes, little sister—” the gringo started to say. Naturally, he hadn’t understood her.

“This is our mother,” Juan Diego told the hippie, as the tub was filling.

“Oh, wow. We’re all friends, right? Amigos, aren’t we?” the boy asked, but Lupe turned away from the bathtub; she went back into the bedroom.

They could all hear Sister Gloria and the kindergartners coming up the stairs from the chapel, because Esperanza had left the door to the hall open, and Lupe had left the bathroom door open. Sister Gloria called the enforced march for the kindergartners their “constitutional”; the children tramped upstairs, chanting the responsive “¡Madre!” prayer. They marched around the hall, praying — they did this daily, not only on saints’ days. Sister Gloria said she made the children march for the “additional benefit” of the good effect this had on Brother Pepe and Edward Bonshaw, who loved to see and hear the kindergartners repeating the “now and forever” business.

But Sister Gloria had a punitive streak in her. Sister Gloria probably wanted to punish Esperanza, catching her — as it usually happened — in the two towels, fresh from her bath. Sister Gloria must have imagined that the endearing holiness of the chanting kindergartners burned in Esperanza’s sinning heart like a heated sword. Possibly, Sister Gloria deluded herself even further: she might have thought that the “you will be my guide” kindergartners had a cleansing effect on the prostitute’s wayward brats, those dump kids who’d been given special privileges at Lost Children. A room of their own and their own bathroom, too! — this was not how Sister Gloria would have treated los niños de la basura. This was no way to run an orphanage — not in Sister Gloria’s opinion. You didn’t give special privileges to smoke-smelling scavengers from the basurero!

But on the morning when Lupe learned that her mother and the good gringo had been lovers, Lupe was not in the mood to hear Sister Gloria and the kindergartners reciting the “¡Madre!” prayer.

“Mother!” Sister Gloria arduously repeated; she had paused at the open door to the dump kids’ bedroom, where the nun could see Lupe sitting on one of the unmade beds. The kindergartners stopped marching ahead in the hall; they stood, shuffling in place, staring into the bedroom. Lupe was sobbing, which was not entirely new.

“Now and forever, you will be my guide,” the children were repeating — for what must have seemed, at least to Lupe, the hundredth (or the thousandth) time.

“Mother Mary is a fake!” Lupe screamed at them. “Let the Virgin Mary show me a miracle — just the tiniest miracle, please! — and I might believe, for a minute, that your Mother Mary has actually done something, except steal Mexico from our Guadalupe. What did the Virgin Mary ever actually do? She didn’t even get herself pregnant!”

But Sister Gloria and the chanting kindergartners were used to incomprehensible outbursts from the presumed-to-be-retarded vagabond. (“La vagabunda,” Sister Gloria called Lupe.)

“¡Madre!” Sister Gloria simply said, again, and the children once more repeated the incessant prayer.

Esperanza’s emergence from the bathroom came as a ghostly apparition to the kindergartners — they halted their responsive praying in midsentence. “Ahora y siempre—” the children were saying when they suddenly stopped, the “now and forever” incantation just ending. Esperanza was wearing only one towel, the one that scantily covered her body. Her wild, freshly shampooed hair momentarily made the kindergartners think she was not the orphanage’s fallen cleaning woman; Esperanza now appeared to the children as a different, more confident being.

“Oh, get over it, Lupe!” Esperanza said. “He’s not the last naked boy who will break your heart!” (This was sufficient to make Sister Gloria stop praying, too.)

“Yes he is — the first and last naked boy!” Lupe cried. (Of course the kindergartners and Sister Gloria didn’t get this last bit.)

“Pay no attention to Lupe, children,” Esperanza told the kindergartners, as she walked barefoot into the hall. “A vision of the Crucified Christ has disturbed her. She thought the Dying Jesus was in her bathtub — the crown of thorns, the excessive bleeding, the whole nailed-to-the-cross thing! Who wouldn’t get upset to wake up to that?” Esperanza asked Sister Gloria, who was speechless. “Good morning to you, too, Sister,” Esperanza said, sashaying her way down the hall — such as it was possible to sashay in a skimpy, tight towel. In fact, the tightness of the towel caused Esperanza to stride ahead with small, mincing steps — yet she managed to walk fairly fast.

“What naked boy?” Sister Gloria asked Lupe. The little vagabond sat stone-faced on the bed; Lupe pointed to the open bathroom door.

“ ‘Come sit down beside me and hear my sad story,’ ” someone was singing. “ ‘Got shot in the breast, and I know I must die.’ ”

Sister Gloria hesitated; upon the cessation of the “¡Madre!” prayer and Esperanza’s scantily covered exit, the hatchet-faced nun could hear what she thought were voices coming from the dump kids’ bathroom. At first, Sister Gloria might have imagined she’d heard Juan Diego talking (or singing) to himself. But now, rising above the splashing sounds and the running water, the nun knew she’d been listening to two voices: that chatterbox of a boy from the Oaxaca basurero, Juan Diego (Brother Pepe’s prize pupil), and what struck Sister Gloria as the voice of a much older boy or young man. What Esperanza had called a naked boy sounded very much to Sister Gloria like a grown man—that was why the nun had hesitated.

The kindergartners, however, had been indoctrinated; the kindergartners were trained to march, and march they did. The kindergartners tramped forward, through the dump kids’ bedroom and into the bathroom.

What else could Sister Gloria do? If there were a young man who, in any fashion, resembled the Crucified Christ — a Dying Jesus in the dump kids’ bathtub, as Esperanza had described him — wasn’t it Sister Gloria’s duty to protect the orphans from what Lupe had misinterpreted as a vision (one that had, apparently, upset her so)?

As for Lupe herself, she didn’t wait around; she headed for the hallway. “¡Madre!” Sister Gloria exclaimed, hurrying into the bathroom after the kindergartners.

“Now and forever, you will be our guide,” the kindergartners were chanting in the bathroom — before all the screaming started. Lupe just kept walking down the hall.

The conversation Juan Diego had been having with the good gringo was very interesting, but — given what happened when the kindergartners marched into the bathroom — it’s understandable why Juan Diego (especially, in his later years) had trouble keeping the details straight.

“I don’t know why your mom keeps callin’ me ‘kid’—I’m not as young as I look,” el gringo bueno had begun. (Of course he didn’t look like a kid to Juan Diego, who was only fourteen — Juan Diego was a kid — but Juan Diego just nodded.) “My dad died in the Philippines, in the war—lots of Americans died there, but not when my dad did,” the draft dodger continued. “My dad was really unlucky. That kind of luck can run in the family, you know. That was part of the reason I didn’t think I should go to Vietnam — the bad luck runnin’ in the family part — but also I always wanted to go to the Philippines, to see where my dad is buried and to pay my respects, just to say how sorry I was that I never got to meet him, you know.”

Of course Juan Diego just nodded; he was beginning to notice that the tub kept filling, but the water level never changed. Juan Diego realized that the tub was draining and filling in equal amounts; the hippie had probably knocked out the plug — he kept slipping and sliding around on his tattooed bare ass. He also kept putting more and more shampoo in his hair, until the shampoo was all gone, and the suds from the shampoo rose all around the slippery gringo; the Crucified Christ had completely disappeared.

“Corregidor, May 1942—that was the culmination of a battle in the Philippines,” the hippie was saying. “The Americans got wiped out. A month before had been the Bataan Death March — sixty-five fuckin’ miles after the U.S. surrender. A lot of American prisoners didn’t make it. This is why there’s such a big American cemetery and memorial in the Philippines — it’s in Manila. That’s where I gotta go and tell my dad I love him. I can’t go to Vietnam, and die there, before I can visit my dad,” the young American said.

“I see,” was all Juan Diego said.

“I thought I could convince them I was a pacifist,” the good gringo went on; he was completely covered in shampoo, the spade-shaped patch of beard under his lower lip excepted. This tuft of dark hair seemed to be the only place where the boy’s beard grew; he looked too young to need to shave the rest of his face, but he’d been running away from the draft for three years. He told Juan Diego he was twenty-six; they’d tried to draft him after he finished college, when he’d been twenty-three. That was when he got the Agonizing Christ tattoo: to convince the U.S. Army that he was a pacifist. Naturally, the religious tattoo didn’t work.

In an expression of anti-patriotic hostility, the good gringo then got his ass tattooed — the American flag, apparently ripped in two by the crack in his ass — and fled to Mexico.

“This is what pretendin’ to be a pacifist will get you — three years on the lam,” the gringo was saying. “But just look what happened to my poor dad: he was younger than I am when they sent him to the Philippines. The war was almost over, but he was among the amphibious troops who recaptured Corregidor — February 1945. You can die when you’re winnin’ a war, you know — same as you can die when you’re losin’. But is that bad luck, or what?”

“It’s bad luck,” Juan Diego agreed.

“I’ll say it is — I was born in ’44, just a few months before my dad was killed. He never saw me,” the good gringo said. “My mom doesn’t even know if he saw my baby pictures.”

“I’m sorry,” Juan Diego said. He was kneeling on the bathroom floor, beside the bathtub. Juan Diego was as impressionable as most fourteen-year-olds; he thought the American hippie was the most fascinating young man he’d ever met.

“Man on wheels,” the gringo said, touching Juan Diego’s hand with his shampoo-covered fingers. “Promise me somethin’, man on wheels.”

“Sure,” Juan Diego said; after all, he’d just made a couple of absurd promises to Lupe.

“If anythin’ happens to me, you gotta go to the Philippines for me — you gotta tell my dad I’m sorry,” el gringo bueno said.

“Sure — yes, I will,” Juan Diego said.

For the first time, the hippie looked surprised. “You will?” he asked Juan Diego.

“Yes, I will,” the dump reader repeated.

“Whoa! Man on wheels! I guess I need more friends like you,” the gringo told him. At that point, he slid entirely under the water and the shampoo suds; the hippie and his Bleeding Jesus had completely disappeared when the kindergartners, followed by the outraged Sister Gloria, marched into the bathroom, to the relentless chanting of “¡Madre!” and “Now and forever—” not to mention the “you will be my guide” inanity.

“Well, where is he?” Sister Gloria asked Juan Diego. “There’s no naked boy here. What naked boy?” the nun repeated; she didn’t notice the bubbles under the bathwater (not with all the shampoo suds), but one of the kindergartners pointed to the bubbles, and Sister Gloria suddenly looked where the alert child was pointing.

That was when the sea monster rose from the frothy water. One can only guess that this is what the tattooed hippie and the Crucified Christ (or a shampoo-covered convergence of the two) looked like to the indoctrinated kindergartners: a religious sea monster. And, in all probability, the good gringo thought that his emergence from the bathwater should be of some entertainment value; after he’d just told Juan Diego such a heavy-hearted story, maybe the draft dodger sought to change the mood of the moment. We’ll never know what the crazy hippie had intended by flinging himself upward from the bottom of the bathtub, spouting water like a whale and extending his arms to either side of the tub — as if he were as nailed-to-the-cross, and dying, as the Bleeding Jesus tattooed on the naked boy’s heaving chest. And what possessed the tall boy — what made him decide to stand up in the bathtub, so that he towered over everyone and made his nakedness all the more apparent? Well, we’ll never know what el gringo bueno was thinking, or even if he was thinking. (The young American runaway was not known on Zaragoza Street for rational behavior.)

To be fair: the hippie had submerged himself when he and Juan Diego were alone in the bathroom; the good gringo had no idea, when he rose out of the water, that he was emerging to a multitude — not to mention that most of them were five-year-olds who believed in Jesus. The fact that the little children were there was not this Jesus’s fault.

“Whoa!” cried the Crucified Christ — he looked more like the Drowned Christ at the moment, and the whoa word was a foreign-sounding one to the Spanish-speaking kindergartners.

Four or five of the terrified children instantly wet their pants; one little girl shrieked so loudly that several girls and boys bit their tongues. Those kindergartners nearest the door to the bedroom bolted through the bedroom, screaming, and raced into the hall. Those children who must have believed there was no escape from the gringo Christ fell to their knees, peeing and crying, and covered their heads with their hands; one little boy hugged a little girl so hard that she bit him in the face.

Sister Gloria had swooned, catching her balance by putting one hand on the bathtub, but the hippie Jesus, who feared that the nun was falling, wrapped his wet arms around her. “Whoa, Sister—” was all the young man managed to say, before Sister Gloria beat against the naked boy’s chest with both her fists. She landed several blows on the Heaven-beseeching and tortured face of the Jesus tattoo, but when she saw (with horror) what she was doing, Sister Gloria threw up her arms and lifted her eyes in her own most Heaven-beseeching manner.

“¡Madre!” Sister Gloria once more cried, as if Mother Mary were the nun’s single savior and confidante — truly, as the nun’s responsive prayer maintained, her one and only guide.

That was when el gringo bueno slipped and fell forward into the bathtub; the soapy water sloshed over the sides of the tub, drenching the bathroom floor. The hippie, now on his hands and knees, had enough presence of mind to turn off the running water. The tub, at last, could drain, but as the water quickly receded, those kindergartners still in the bathroom — for the most part, they’d been too afraid to run away — saw the emerging American flag (torn in two) on the gringo Christ’s bare ass.

Sister Gloria saw the flag, too — a tattoo of such secular certainty that it clashed with the tattoo of the Agonizing Jesus. To the instinctively disapproving nun, a satanic discord seemed to emanate from the naked boy in the emptying tub.

Juan Diego had not moved. He knelt on the bathroom floor, the spilled bathwater touching his thighs. Around him, the cringing kindergartners lay curled in wet balls. It must have been the future writer developing in him, but Juan Diego thought of the amphibious troops killed in recapturing Corregidor, some of them not much older than children. He thought of the wild promise he’d made to the good gringo, and he was thrilled — the way, at fourteen, you can be thrilled by an utterly unrealistic vision of the future.

“Ahora y siempre — now and forever,” one of the soaking-wet kindergartners was whimpering.

“Now and forever,” Juan Diego said, more confidently. He knew this was a promise to himself — to seize every opportunity that looked like the future, from this moment forward.