Avenue of Mysteries

21. Mister Goes Swimming

“Believing in ghosts isn’t the same thing as believing in God,” the former dump reader said aloud. Juan Diego spoke more confidently than Dr. Vargas ever had of his family ghosts. But Juan Diego had been dreaming that he was arguing with Clark French — though not about ghosts or believing in God. They were at each other’s throats, again, about that Polish pope. The way John Paul II had associated both abortion and birth control with moral decline made Juan Diego furious — that pope was on the everlasting warpath against contraception. In the early eighties, he’d called contraception and abortion “modern enemies of the family.”

“I’m sure there was a context you’re overlooking,” Clark French had said to his former teacher many times.

“A context, Clark?” Juan Diego had asked (he’d also asked this when he was dreaming).

In the late eighties, Pope John Paul II had called condom use — even to prevent AIDS—“morally illicit.”

“The context was the AIDS crisis, Clark!” Juan Diego had cried — not only that time but in his dream.

Yet Juan Diego woke up arguing that believing in ghosts was different from believing in God; it was disorienting, the way those transitions from dreaming to being awake can be. “Ghosts—” Juan Diego continued, sitting up in bed, but he suddenly stopped speaking.

He was alone in his bedroom at the Encantador; this time, Miriam had truly vanished — she was not in bed beside him while (somehow) managing not to breathe. “Miriam?” Juan Diego said, in case she was in the bathroom. But the door to the bathroom was open, and there was no answer — only the crowing of another rooster. (It had to be a different rooster; the first one had been killed mid-squawk, from the sound of it.) At least this rooster wasn’t crazy; the morning light flooded the bedroom — it was the New Year in Bohol.

Through the open windows, Juan Diego could hear the children in the swimming pool. When he went to the bathroom, he was surprised to see his prescriptions scattered on the countertop surrounding the sink. Had he gotten up in the night, and — half asleep, or in a sexually sated trance — scarfed down a bunch of pills? If so, how many had he taken — and which pills? (Both the Viagra and Lopressor containers were open; the tablets dotted the countertop — there were some on the bathroom floor.)

Was Miriam a prescription-pill addict? Juan Diego wondered. But not even an addict would find the beta-blockers stimulating, and what would a woman want with Viagra?

Juan Diego cleaned up the mess. He took an outdoor shower, enjoying the cats who skittishly appeared on the tile roof, yowling at him. Perhaps a cat, in the cover of darkness, had killed that misguided rooster mid-squawk. Cats were born killers, weren’t they?

Juan Diego was dressing when he heard the sirens, or what sounded like sirens. Maybe a body had washed ashore, he imagined — one of the perpetrators of the late-night karaoke music at the Panglao Island beach club, a night swimmer who’d danced all night and then drowned with cramps. Or the Nocturnal Monkeys had gone skinny-dipping, with disastrous results. Thus Juan Diego indulged his imagination with diabolical death scenes, the way writers will.

But when Juan Diego limped downstairs for breakfast, he saw the ambulance and the police car in the driveway of the Encantador. Clark French was officiously guarding the staircase to the second-floor library. “I’m just trying to keep the kids away,” Clark said to his former teacher.

“Away from what, Clark?” Juan Diego asked.

“Josefa is up there — with the medical examiner and the police. Auntie Carmen was in the room diagonally across the hall from your woman friend. I didn’t know she was leaving so soon!”

“Who, Clark? Who left?” Juan Diego asked him.

“Your woman friend! Who would come all this way for one night — even for New Year’s Eve?” Clark asked him.

Juan Diego hadn’t known Miriam was leaving; he must have looked surprised. “She didn’t tell you she was leaving?” Clark said. “I thought you knew her! The desk clerk said she had an early flight; a car picked her up before dawn. Someone said all the doors to the second-floor rooms were wide open after your woman friend had gone. That’s why they found Auntie Carmen!” Clark blathered.

“Found her — found her where, Clark?” Juan Diego asked him. The story was as chronologically challenging as one of Clark French’s novels! the former writing teacher was thinking.

“On the floor of her room, between her bed and the bathroom — Auntie Carmen is dead!” Clark cried.

“I’m sorry, Clark. Was she sick? Had she been—” Juan Diego was asking, when Clark French pointed to the registration desk in the lobby.

“She left a letter for you — the desk clerk has it,” Clark told his former teacher.

“Auntie Carmen wrote me—”

“Your woman friend left a letter for you—not Auntie Carmen!” Clark cried.

“Oh.”

“Hi, Mister,” Consuelo said; the little girl with the pigtails was standing beside him. Juan Diego saw that Pedro was with her.

“No going upstairs, children,” Clark French cautioned the kids, but Pedro and Consuelo chose to follow Juan Diego as he limped through the lobby to the registration desk.

“The aunt with all the fish has died, Mister,” Pedro began.

“Yes, I heard,” Juan Diego told the boy.

“She broke her neck,” Consuelo said.

“Her neck!” Juan Diego exclaimed.

“How do you break your neck getting out of bed, Mister?” Pedro asked.

“No idea,” Juan Diego said.

“The lady who just appears has disappeared, Mister,” Consuelo told him.

“Yes, I heard,” Juan Diego said to the little girl with the pigtails.

The desk clerk saw Juan Diego coming; an eager-looking but anxious young man, he was already holding out the letter. “Mrs. Miriam left this for you, sir — she had to catch an early flight.”

“Mrs. Miriam,” Juan Diego repeated. Did no one know Miriam’s last name?

Clark French had followed him and the children to the registration desk. “Is Mrs. Miriam a frequent guest at the Encantador? Is there a Mr. Miriam?” Clark asked the desk clerk. (Juan Diego knew well the tone of moral disapproval in his former student’s voice; it was also a presence, a glowing heat, in Clark’s writing voice.)

“She has stayed with us before, but not frequently. There is a daughter, sir,” the desk clerk told Clark.

“Dorothy?” Juan Diego asked.

“Yes, that’s the daughter’s name, sir — Dorothy,” the desk clerk said; he handed Juan Diego the letter.

“You know the mother and the daughter?” Clark French asked his former teacher. (Clark’s tone of voice was now in moral high-alert mode.)

“I was closer to the daughter first, Clark, but I only just met both of them — on my flight from New York to Hong Kong,” Juan Diego explained. “They’re world travelers — that’s all I know about them. They—”

“They sound worldly, all right — at least Miriam seemed very worldly,” Clark abruptly said. (Juan Diego knew that worldly wasn’t such a good thing — not if you were, like Clark, a serious Catholic.)

“Aren’t you going to read the letter from the lady, Mister?” Consuelo asked. Remembering the contents of Dorothy’s “letter” had made Juan Diego pause before opening Miriam’s message in front of the children, but how could he not open it now? They were all waiting.

“Your woman friend may have noticed something — I mean about Auntie Carmen,” Clark French said. Clark managed to make a woman friend sound like a demon in female form. Wasn’t there a word for a female demon? (It sounded like something Sister Gloria would say.) A succubus—that was the word! Surely Clark French was familiar with the term. Succubi were female evil spirits, said to have sex with men who were asleep. It must come from Latin, Juan Diego was thinking, but his thoughts were interrupted by Pedro pulling on his arm.

“I’ve never seen anyone faster, Mister,” Pedro told Juan Diego. “I mean your lady friend.”

“At either appearing or disappearing, Mister,” Consuelo said, pulling on her pigtails.

Since they were so interested in Miriam, Juan Diego opened her letter. Until Manila, Miriam had written on the envelope. See fax from D., she’d also scrawled there — either hastily or impatiently, or both. Clark took the envelope from Juan Diego, reading aloud the “Until Manila” part.

“Sounds like a title,” Clark French said. “You’re seeing Miriam in Manila?” he asked Juan Diego.

“I guess so,” Juan Diego told him; he’d mastered Lupe’s shrug, which had been their mother’s insouciant shrug. It made Juan Diego a little proud to believe that Clark French thought his former teacher was worldly, to imagine that Clark might think Juan Diego was consorting with succubi!

“I suppose D. is the daughter. It looks like a long fax,” Clark carried on.

“D. is for Dorothy, Clark — yes, she’s the daughter,” Juan Diego said.

It was a long fax, and a little hard to follow. There was a water buffalo in the story, and stinging things; a series of mishaps had happened to children Dorothy had encountered in her travels, or so it seemed. Dorothy was inviting Juan Diego to join her at a resort called El Nido on Lagen Island — it was in another part of the Philippines, a place called Palawan. There were plane tickets in the envelope. Naturally, Clark had noticed the plane tickets. And Clark clearly knew and disapproved of El Nido. (A nido could be a nest, a den, a hole, a haunt.) Clark no doubt disapproved of D., too.

There was a sound of small wheels rolling across the lobby of the Encantador; the sound made the hair on the back of Juan Diego’s neck stand up — before he looked and saw the gurney, he had known (somehow) that it was the stretcher from the ambulance. They were wheeling it to the service elevator. Pedro and Consuelo ran after the gurney. Clark and Juan Diego saw Clark’s wife, Dr. Josefa Quintana; she was coming down the stairs from the second-floor library and was with the medical examiner.

“As I told you, Clark, Auntie Carmen must have fallen awkwardly — her neck was broken,” Dr. Quintana told him.

“Maybe someone snapped her neck,” Clark French said; he looked at Juan Diego, as if seeking confirmation.

“They’re both novelists,” Josefa said to the medical examiner. “Big imaginations.”

“Your aunt fell hard, the floor is stone — her neck must have crumpled under her, when she fell,” the medical examiner explained to Clark.

“She also banged the top of her head,” Dr. Quintana told him.

“Or someone banged her, Josefa!” Clark French said.

“This hotel is—” Josefa started to say to Juan Diego. She stopped herself to watch the solemn children, Pedro and Consuelo, accompanying the gurney carrying Auntie Carmen’s body. One of the EMTs was wheeling the gurney through the lobby of the Encantador.

“This hotel is what?” Juan Diego asked Clark’s wife.

“Enchanted,” Dr. Quintana told him.

“She means haunted,” Clark French said.

“Casa Vargas,” was all Juan Diego said; that he’d just been dreaming about ghosts was not even a surprise. “Ni siquiera una sorpresa,” he said in Spanish. (“Not even a surprise.”)

“Juan Diego knew the daughter of his woman friend first — he only met them on the plane,” Clark was explaining to his wife. (The medical examiner had left them, following the gurney.) “I guess you don’t know them well,” Clark said to his former teacher.

“Not at all well,” Juan Diego admitted. “I’ve slept with them both, but they’re mysteries to me,” he told Clark and Dr. Quintana.

“You’ve slept with a mother and her daughter,” Clark said, as if making sure. “Do you know what succubi are?” he then asked, but before Juan Diego could answer, Clark continued. “Succuba means ‘paramour’; a succubus is a demon in female form—”

“Said to have sex with men in their sleep!” Juan Diego hurried to interject.

“From the Latin succubare, ‘to lie beneath,’ ” Clark carried on.

“Miriam and Dorothy are just mysteries to me,” Juan Diego told Clark and Dr. Quintana again.

“Mysteries,” Clark repeated; he kept saying it.

“Speaking of mysteries,” Juan Diego said, “did you hear that rooster crowing in the middle of the night — in total darkness?”

Dr. Quintana stopped her husband from repeating the mysteries word. No, they’d not heard the crazy rooster, whose crowing had been cut short — perhaps forever.

“Hi, Mister,” Consuelo said; she was back beside Juan Diego. “What are you going to do today?” she whispered to him. Before Juan Diego could answer her, Consuelo took his hand; he felt Pedro take hold of his other hand.

“I’m going to swim,” Juan Diego whispered to the kids. They looked surprised — all the water, which was everywhere around them, notwithstanding. The kids glanced worriedly at each other.

“What about your foot, Mister?” Consuelo whispered. Pedro was nodding gravely; both children were staring at the two-o’clock angle of Juan Diego’s crooked right foot.

“I don’t limp in the water,” Juan Diego whispered. “I’m not crippled when I’m swimming.” The whispering was fun.

Why did Juan Diego feel so exhilarated at the prospect of the day ahead of him? More than the swimming beckoned him; it pleased him that the children enjoyed whispering with him. Consuelo and Pedro liked making a game of his going swimming — Juan Diego liked the kids’ company.

Why was it that Juan Diego felt no urgency to pursue the usual arguing with Clark French about Clark’s beloved Catholic Church? Juan Diego didn’t even mind that Miriam hadn’t told him she was leaving; actually, he was a little relieved she was gone.

Had he felt afraid of Miriam, in some unclear way? Was it merely the simultaneity of his dreaming about ghosts or spirits on a New Year’s Eve and Miriam having spooked him? To be honest, Juan Diego was happy to be alone. No Miriam. (“Until Manila.”)

But what about Dorothy? The sex with Dorothy, and with Miriam, had been sublime. If so, why were the details so difficult to remember? Miriam and Dorothy were so entwined with his dreams that Juan Diego was wondering if the two women existed only in his dreams. Except that they definitely existed—other people had seen them! That young Chinese couple in the Kowloon train station: the boyfriend had taken Juan Diego’s picture with Miriam and Dorothy. (“I can get one of all of you,” the boy had said.) And there was no question that everyone had seen Miriam at the New Year’s Eve dinner; quite possibly, only the unfortunate little gecko, skewered by the salad fork, had failed to see Miriam — until it was too late.

Yet Juan Diego wondered if he would even recognize Dorothy; in his mind’s eye, he had trouble visualizing the young woman — admittedly, Miriam was the more striking of the two. (And, sexually speaking, Miriam was more recent.)

“Shall we all have breakfast?” Clark French was saying, though both Clark and his wife were distracted. Were they peeved at the whispering, or that Juan Diego seemed inseparable from Consuelo and Pedro?

“Consuelo, haven’t you already had breakfast?” Dr. Quintana asked the little girl. Consuelo had not let go of Juan Diego’s hand.

“Yes, but I didn’t eat anything — I was waiting for Mister,” Consuelo answered.

“Mr. Guerrero,” Clark corrected the little girl.

“Actually, Clark, I prefer just Mister—all by itself,” Juan Diego said.

“It’s a two-gecko morning, Mister — so far,” Pedro told Juan Diego; the boy had been looking behind all the paintings. Juan Diego had seen Pedro lifting the corners of rugs and peering at the insides of lampshades. “Not a sign of the big one — it’s gone,” the boy said.

The gone word was a hard one for Juan Diego. The people he’d loved were gone — all the dear ones, the ones who’d marked him.

“I know we’ll see you again in Manila,” Clark was saying to him, though Juan Diego would be in Bohol for two more days. “I know you’re seeing D., and where you’re going next. We can discuss the daughter another time,” Clark French said to his former teacher — as if what there was to say about Dorothy (or what Clark felt compelled to say about her) wasn’t possible to say in the company of children. Consuelo tightly held Juan Diego’s hand; Pedro had lost interest in the hand-holding, but the boy wasn’t going away.

“What about Dorothy?” Juan Diego asked Clark; it was hardly an innocent question. (Juan Diego knew that Clark was hot and bothered by the mother-daughter business.) “And where is it I’m seeing her — on another island?” Before Clark could answer him, Juan Diego turned to Josefa. “When you don’t make your own plans, you never remember where you’re going,” he said to the doctor.

“Those meds you’re taking,” Dr. Quintana began. “You’re still taking the beta-blockers, aren’t you — you haven’t stopped taking them, have you?”

That was when Juan Diego realized that he must have stopped taking his Lopressor prescription — all those pills strewn about his bathroom had fooled him. He felt too good this morning; if he’d taken the beta-blockers, he wouldn’t be feeling this good.

He lied to Dr. Quintana. “I’m definitely taking them — you’re not supposed to stop unless you do it gradually, or something.”

“You talk to your doctor before you even think about not taking them,” Dr. Quintana told him.

“Yes, I know,” Juan Diego said to her.

“You’re going from here to Lagen Island — Palawan,” Clark French told his old teacher. “The resort is called El Nido — it’s not at all like here. It’s very fancy there — you’ll see how different it is,” Clark told him disapprovingly.

“Are there geckos on Lagen Island?” Pedro asked Clark French. “What are the lizards like there?” the boy asked him.

“They have monitor lizards — they’re carnivorous, as big as dogs,” Clark told the boy.

“Do they run or swim?” Consuelo asked Clark.

“They do both — fast,” Clark French said to the little girl with the pigtails.

“Don’t give the children nightmares, Clark,” Josefa said to her husband.

“The idea of that mother and her daughter gives me nightmares,” Clark French began.

“Maybe not around the children, Clark,” his wife told him.

Juan Diego just shrugged. He didn’t know about the monitor lizards, but seeing Dorothy on the fancy island would indeed be different. Juan Diego felt a little guilty — how he enjoyed his former student’s disapproval, how Clark’s moral condemnation was somehow gratifying.

Yet Clark and Miriam and Dorothy were, in their different ways, manipulative, Juan Diego thought; maybe he enjoyed manipulating the three of them a little.

Suddenly, Juan Diego was aware of Clark’s wife, Josefa, holding his other hand — the one Consuelo wasn’t attached to. “You’re limping less today, I think,” the doctor told him. “You seem to have caught up on your sleep.”

Juan Diego knew he would have to be careful around Dr. Quintana; he would have to watch how he fooled around with his Lopressor prescription. When he was around the doctor, he might need to appear more diminished than he was — she was very observant.

“Oh, I feel pretty good today — pretty good for me, I mean,” Juan Diego told her. “Not quite so tired, not quite so diminished,” was how Juan Diego put it to Dr. Quintana.

“Yes, I can tell,” Josefa told him, giving his hand a squeeze.

“You’re going to hate El Nido — it’s full of tourists, foreign tourists,” Clark French was saying.

“You know what I’m going to do today? It’s something I love,” Juan Diego said to Josefa. But before he could tell Clark’s wife his plans, the little girl with the pigtails was faster.

“Mister is going swimming!” Consuelo cried.

You could see what an effort Clark French was making — what a struggle it was for him to suppress his disapproval of swimming.

EDWARD BONSHAW AND THE dump kids rode in the bus with the dog lady Estrella and the dogs. The dwarf clowns, Beer Belly and his not very female-looking counterpart — Paco, the cross-dresser — were on the same bus. As soon as Señor Eduardo had fallen asleep, Paco dotted the Iowan’s face (and the faces of the dump kids) with “elephant measles.” Paco used rouge to create the measles; he dotted his own face and Beer Belly’s face, too.

The Argentinian aerialists fell asleep fondling each other, but the dwarfs did not dot the lovers’ faces with the rouge. (The Argentinians might have imagined the elephant measles were sexually transmitted.) The girl acrobats, who never stopped talking in the back of the bus, acted too superior to be interested in the elephant-measles prank, which Juan Diego had the feeling the dwarf clowns always played on unsuspecting souls on La Maravilla’s road trips.

All the way to Mexico City, Pajama Man, the contortionist, slept stretched out on the floor of the bus, in the aisle between the seats. The dump kids had not seen the contortionist fully extended before; they were surprised to see that he was actually quite tall. The contortionist was also undisturbed by the dogs, who restlessly paced in the aisle, stepping on and sniffing him.

Dolores — The Wonder herself — sat apart from the less-accomplished girl acrobats. She stared out the window of the bus, or she slept with her forehead pressed against the window glass, verifying for Lupe the skywalker’s status as a “spoiled cunt”—this appellation in tandem with the “mouse-tits” slur. Even Dolores’s ankle chimes had earned her Lupe’s condemnation as a “noise-making, attention-seeking slut,” though Dolores’s aloofness — from everyone, at least on the bus — made the skywalker strike Juan Diego as the opposite of “attention-seeking.”

To Juan Diego, Dolores looked sad, even doomed; the boy didn’t imagine it was falling from the skywalk that threatened her. It was Ignacio, the lion tamer, who clouded Dolores’s future, as Lupe had forewarned—“let the lion tamer knock her up!” Lupe had cried. “Die in childbirth, monkey twat!” It may have been something Lupe had said in passing anger, but — in Juan Diego’s mind — this amounted to an unbreakable curse.

The boy not only desired Dolores; he admired her courage as a skywalker — he’d practiced the skywalk enough to know that the prospect of trying it at eighty feet was truly terrifying.

Ignacio wasn’t on the bus with the dump kids; he was in the truck transporting the big cats. (Soledad said Ignacio always traveled with his lions.) Hombre, whom Lupe had called “the last dog, the last one,” had his own cage. Las señoritas — the young ladies, named for their most expressive body parts — were caged together. (As Flor had observed, the lionesses got along with one another.)

The circus site, in northern Mexico City — not far from Cerro Tepeyac, the hill where Juan Diego’s Aztec namesake had reported seeing la virgen morena in 1531—was some distance from downtown Mexico City, but near to the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. Yet the bus carrying the dump kids and Edward Bonshaw broke free from the circus caravan of vehicles, and took an impromptu detour into downtown Mexico City, inspired by the two dwarf clowns.

Paco and Beer Belly wanted their fellow performers in La Maravilla to see the dwarfs’ old neighborhood — the two clowns were from Mexico City. When the bus was slowed in city traffic, near the busy intersection of the Calle Anillo de Circunvalación and the Calle San Pablo, Señor Eduardo woke up.

Perro Mestizo, a.k.a. Mongrel, the baby-stealer—“the biter,” Juan Diego now called him — had been sleeping in Lupe’s lap, but the little dog had managed to pee on Señor Eduardo’s thigh. This made the Iowan imagine he’d peed in his own pants.

This time, Lupe had managed to read Edward Bonshaw’s mind — hence she understood his confusion upon waking up.

“Tell the parrot man Perro Mestizo peed on him,” Lupe told Juan Diego, but by that point the Iowan had seen the elephant measles on the dump kids’ faces.

“You’ve broken out — you’ve caught something dreadful!” Señor Eduardo cried.

Beer Belly and Paco were trying to organize a walking tour of the Calle San Pablo — the bus was now stopped — but Edward Bonshaw saw more elephant measles on the faces of the dwarf clowns. “It’s an epidemic!” the Iowan cried. (Lupe later said he was imagining that incontinence was an early symptom of the disease.)

Paco handed the soon-to-be-former scholastic a small mirror (on the inside lid of his rouge compact), which the cross-dresser carried in his purse. “You have it, too — it’s elephant measles. There are outbreaks in every circus — it’s not usually fatal,” the transvestite said.

“Elephant measles!” Señor Eduardo cried. “Not usually fatal—” he was saying, when Juan Diego whispered in his ear.

“They’re clowns — it’s a trick. It’s some kind of makeup,” the dump reader told the distraught missionary.

“It’s my burgundy rouge, Eduardo,” Paco said, pointing to the makeup in the little compact with the mirror.

“It made me piss my pants!” Edward Bonshaw indignantly told the transvestite dwarf, but Juan Diego was the only one who understood the Iowan’s excited English.

“The mongrel pissed on your pants — the same dumb dog who bit you,” Juan Diego said to Señor Eduardo.

“This doesn’t look like a circus site,” Edward Bonshaw was saying, as he and the dump kids followed the performers who were getting off the bus. Not everyone was interested in the walking tour of Paco and Beer Belly’s old neighborhood, but it was the one look Juan Diego and Lupe would get of downtown Mexico City — the dump kids wanted to see the throngs of people.

“Vendors, protestors, whores, revolutionaries, tourists, thieves, bicycle salesmen—” Beer Belly was reciting as he led the way. Indeed, there was a bicycle shop near the corner of the Calle San Pablo and the Calle Roldán. There were prostitutes on the sidewalk in front of the bikes for sale, and more prostitutes in the courtyard of a whore hotel on the Calle Topacio, where the girls loitering in the courtyard looked only a little older than Lupe.

“I want to go back to the bus,” Lupe said. “I want to go back to Lost Children, even if we—” The way she stopped herself from saying more made Juan Diego wonder if Lupe had changed her mind — or if she’d suddenly seen something in the future, something that made it unlikely (at least in Lupe’s mind) that the dump kids would go back to Lost Children.

Whether Edward Bonshaw understood her, before Juan Diego could translate his sister’s request — or if Lupe, who suddenly seized the Iowan’s hand, made it sufficiently clear to Señor Eduardo what she wanted, without words — the girl and the Jesuit went back to the bus. (The moment had not been sufficiently clear to Juan Diego.)

“Is there something hereditary — something in their blood — that makes them prostitutes?” Juan Diego asked Beer Belly. (The boy must have been thinking of his late mother, Esperanza.)

“You don’t want to think about what’s in their blood,” Beer Belly told the boy.

“Whose blood? What about blood?” Paco asked them; her wig was askew, and the stubble on her face contrasted strangely with the mauve lipstick and matching eye shadow — not to mention the elephant measles.

Juan Diego wanted to go back to the bus, too; going back to Lost Children was surely also on the boy’s mind. “Trouble isn’t geographical, honey,” he’d heard Flor say to Señor Eduardo — apropos of what, Juan Diego wasn’t sure. (Hadn’t Flor’s trouble in Houston been geographical?)

Maybe it was the comfort of the coffee can, and its mixed contents, that Juan Diego wanted; he and Lupe had left the coffee can on the bus. As for going back to Lost Children, did Juan Diego feel this would be a defeat? (At the very least, it must have felt to him like a form of retreat.)

“I look at you with envy,” Juan Diego had heard Edward Bonshaw say to Dr. Vargas. “Your ability to heal, to change lives—” Señor Eduardo was saying, when Vargas cut him off.

“An envious Jesuit sounds like a Jesuit in trouble. Don’t tell me you have doubts, parrot man,” Vargas had said.

“Doubt is part of faith, Vargas — certainty is for you scientists who have closed the other door,” Edward Bonshaw told him.

“The other door!” Vargas had cried.

Back on the bus, Juan Diego saw who’d skipped the walking tour. Not only the sullen Dolores — The Wonder herself had not left her window seat — but the other girl acrobats as well. What was the matter with Mexico City, or this part of downtown, was at least a little bit troubling to them — namely, the prostitutes. Maybe the circus had saved the girl acrobats from difficult choices; La Maravilla might have thrust Ignacio into their future decision-making moments, but the life of those girls selling themselves on San Pablo and Topacio was not the life of the girl acrobats at Circus of The Wonder — not yet.

The Argentinian aerialists had not left the bus, either; they were cuddled together, as if frozen in the act of fondling — their overt sex life seemed to protect them from falling, as surely as the guy wires they scrupulously attached to each other’s safety harnesses. The contortionist, Pajama Man, was stretching in the aisle between the seats — his flexibility was nothing he wanted to expose to laughter out in public. (No one laughed at him in the circus.) And Estrella, of course, had stayed on the bus with her dear dogs.

Lupe was asleep in two seats, her head in Edward Bonshaw’s lap. Lupe didn’t mind that Perro Mestizo had peed on the Iowan’s thigh. “I think Lupe is frightened. I think you should both be back at Lost Children—” Señor Eduardo started to say, when he saw Juan Diego.

“But you’re leaving, aren’t you?” the fourteen-year-old asked him.

“Yes — with Flor,” the Iowan said softly.

“I heard your conversation with Vargas — the one about the pony on the postcard,” Juan Diego said to Edward Bonshaw.

“You shouldn’t have heard that conversation, Juan Diego — I sometimes forget how good your English is,” Señor Eduardo said.

“I know what pornography is,” Juan Diego told him. “It was a pornographic photograph, right? A postcard with a picture of a pony — a young woman has the pony’s penis in her mouth. Right?” the fourteen-year-old asked the missionary. Edward Bonshaw guiltily nodded.

“I was your age when I saw it,” the Iowan said.

“I understand why it upset you,” the boy said. “I’m sure it would upset me, too. But why does it still upset you?” Juan Diego asked Señor Eduardo. “Don’t grown-ups ever get over things?”

Edward Bonshaw had been at a county fair. “County fairs weren’t so appropriate, in those days,” Juan Diego had heard the Iowan say to Dr. Vargas.

“Yeah, yeah — horses with five legs, a cow with an extra head. Freak animals—mutants, right?” Vargas had asked him.

“And girlie shows, girls stripping in tents—peep shows, they were called,” Señor Eduardo had continued.

“In Iowa!” Vargas had exclaimed, laughing.

“Someone in a girlie tent sold me a pornographic postcard — it cost a dollar,” Edward Bonshaw confessed.

“The girl sucking off the pony?” Vargas had asked the Iowan.

Señor Eduardo looked shocked. “You know that postcard?” the missionary asked.

“Everyone saw that postcard. It was made in Texas, wasn’t it?” Vargas asked. “Everyone here knew it because the girl looked Mexican—”

But Edward Bonshaw had interrupted the doctor. “There was a man in the foreground of the postcard — you couldn’t see his face, but he wore cowboy boots and he had a whip. It looked as if he had forced the girl—”

It was Vargas’s turn to interrupt. “Of course someone forced her. You didn’t think it was the girl’s idea, did you? Or the pony’s,” Vargas added.

“That postcard haunted me. I couldn’t stop looking at it — I loved that poor girl!” the Iowan said.

“Isn’t that what pornography does?” Vargas asked Edward Bonshaw. “You’re not supposed to be able to stop looking at it!”

“The whip bothered me, especially,” Señor Eduardo said.

“Pepe has told me you have a thing for whips—” Vargas started to say.

“One day I took the postcard to confession,” Edward Bonshaw continued. “I confessed my addiction to it — to the priest. He told me: ‘Leave the picture with me.’ Naturally, I thought he wanted it for the same reasons I’d wanted it, but the priest said: ‘I can destroy this, if you’re strong enough to let it go. It’s time that poor girl was left in peace,’ the priest said.”

“I doubt that poor girl ever knew peace,” Vargas had said.

“That’s when I first wanted to be a priest,” Edward Bonshaw said. “I wanted to do for other people what that priest did for me — he rescued me. Who knows?” Señor Eduardo said. “Maybe that postcard destroyed that priest.”

“I presume the experience was worse for the girl,” was all Vargas said. Edward Bonshaw had stopped talking. But what Juan Diego didn’t understand was why the postcard still bothered Señor Eduardo.

“Don’t you think Dr. Vargas was right?” Juan Diego asked the Iowan on the circus bus. “Don’t you think that pornographic photo was worse for the poor girl?”

“That poor girl wasn’t a girl,” Señor Eduardo said; he’d glanced once at Lupe, asleep in his lap, just to be sure she was still sleeping. “That poor girl was Flor,” the Iowan said; he was whispering now. “That’s what happened to Flor in Houston. The poor girl met a pony.”

HE’D CRIED FOR FLOR and Señor Eduardo before; Juan Diego could not stop crying for them. But Juan Diego was some distance from shore — no one could see he was crying. And didn’t the salt water bring tears to everyone’s eyes? You could float forever in salt water, Juan Diego was thinking; it was so easy to tread water in the calm and tepid sea.

“Hi, Mister!” Consuelo was calling. From the beach, Juan Diego could see the little girl in pigtails — she was waving to him, and he waved back.

It took almost no effort to stay afloat; he seemed to be barely moving. Juan Diego cried as effortlessly as he swam. The tears just came.

“You see, I always loved her — even before I knew her!” Edward Bonshaw had told Juan Diego. The Iowan hadn’t recognized Flor as the girl with the pony — not at first. And when Señor Eduardo did recognize Flor — when he realized she was the girl in the pony postcard, but Flor was all grown-up now — he’d been unable to tell her that he knew the pony part of her sad Texas story.

“You should tell her,” Juan Diego had told the Iowan; even at fourteen, the dump reader knew that much.

“When Flor wants to tell me about Houston, she will — it’s her story, the poor girl,” Edward Bonshaw would say to Juan Diego for years.

“Tell her!” Juan Diego kept saying to Señor Eduardo, as their time together marched on. Flor’s Houston story would remain hers to tell.

“Tell her!” Juan Diego cried in the warm Bohol Sea. He was looking offshore; he was facing the endless horizon — wasn’t Mindanao somewhere out there? (Not a soul onshore could have heard him crying.)

“Hi, Mister!” Pedro was calling to him. “Watch out for the—” (This was followed by, “Don’t step on the—”; the unheard word sounded like gherkins.) But Juan Diego was in deep water; he couldn’t touch the bottom — he was in no danger of stepping on pickles or sea cucumbers, or whatever weird thing Pedro was warning him about.

Juan Diego could tread water a long time, but he wasn’t a good swimmer. He liked to dog-paddle — that was his preferred stroke, a slow dog paddle (not that anyone could dog-paddle fast).

The dog paddle had posed a problem for the serious swimmers in the indoor pool at the old Iowa Field House. Juan Diego swam laps very slowly; he was known as the dog-paddler in the slow lane.

People were always suggesting swimming lessons for Juan Diego, but he’d had swimming lessons; the dog paddle was his choice. (The way dogs swam was good enough for Juan Diego; novels progressed slowly, too.)

“Leave the kid alone,” Flor once told a lifeguard at the pool. “Have you seen this boy walk? His foot isn’t just crippled—it weighs a ton. Full of metal — you try doing more than a dog paddle with an anchor attached to one leg!”

“My foot isn’t full of metal,” Juan Diego told Flor, when they were on their way home from the Field House.

“It’s a good story, isn’t it?” was all Flor said. But she wouldn’t tell her story. The pony on that postcard was just a glimpse of Flor’s story, the only view of what happened to her in Houston that Edward Bonshaw would ever have.

“Hi, Mister!” Consuelo kept calling from the beach. Pedro had waded into the shallow water; the boy was being extra cautious. Pedro seemed to be pointing at potentially deadly things on the bottom of the sea.

“Here’s one!” Pedro shouted to Consuelo. “There’s a whole bunch!” The little girl in the pigtails wouldn’t venture into the water.

The Bohol Sea did not seem menacing to Juan Diego, who was slowly dog-paddling his way to shore. He wasn’t worried about the killer gherkins, or whatever Pedro was worried about. Juan Diego was tired from treading water, which was the same as swimming to him, but he’d waited to come ashore until he could stop crying.

In truth, he hadn’t really stopped — he was just tired of how long he’d waited for the crying to end. In the shallow water, as soon as Juan Diego could touch the bottom, he decided to walk ashore the rest of the way — even though this meant he would resume limping.

“Be careful, Mister — they’re everywhere,” Pedro said, but Juan Diego didn’t see the first sea urchin he stepped on (or the next one, or the one after that). The hard-shelled, spine-covered spheres were no fun to step on, even if you didn’t limp.

“Too bad about the sea urchins, Mister,” Consuelo was saying, as Juan Diego came ashore on his hands and knees — both his feet were tingling from the painful spines.

Pedro had run off to fetch Dr. Quintana. “It’s okay to cry, Mister — the sea urchins really hurt,” Consuelo was saying; she sat beside him on the beach. His tears, maybe exacerbated by such a long time in the salt water, just kept coming. He could see Josefa and Pedro running toward him along the beach; Clark French lagged behind — he ran like a freight train, slow to start but steadily gaining speed.

Juan Diego’s shoulders were shaking — too much treading water, perhaps; the dog paddle is a lot of work for your arms and shoulders. The little girl in pigtails put her small, thin arms around him.

“It’s okay, Mister,” Consuelo tried to comfort him. “Here comes the doctor — you’re going to be okay.”

What is it with me and women doctors? Juan Diego was wondering. (He should have married one, he knew.)

“Mister has been stepping on sea urchins,” Consuelo explained to Dr. Quintana, who knelt in the sand beside Juan Diego. “Of course, he’s got other things to cry about,” the little girl in the pigtails said.

“He misses stuff — geckos, the dump,” Pedro began to enumerate to Josefa.

“Don’t forget his sister,” Consuelo said to Pedro. “A lion killed Mister’s sister,” Consuelo explained to Dr. Quintana, in case the doctor hadn’t heard the litany of woes Juan Diego was suffering — and now, on top of everything, he’d stepped on sea urchins!

Dr. Quintana was gently touching Juan Diego’s feet. “The trouble with sea urchins is their spines are movable — they don’t get you just once,” the doctor was saying.

“It’s not my feet — it’s not the sea urchins,” Juan Diego tried to tell her quietly.

“What?” Josefa asked; she bent her head closer, to hear him.

“I should have married a woman doctor,” he whispered to Josefa; Clark and the children couldn’t hear him.

“Why didn’t you?” Dr. Quintana asked, smiling at him.

“I didn’t ask her soon enough — she said yes to someone else,” Juan Diego said softly.

How could he have told Dr. Quintana more? It was impossible to tell Clark French’s wife why he’d never married — why a lifetime partner, a companion till the end, was a friend he’d never made. Not even if Clark and the children hadn’t been there on the beach could Juan Diego have told Josefa why he’d not dared to emulate the match Edward Bonshaw had made with Flor.

Casual acquaintances, even colleagues and close friends — including those students he’d befriended, and had seen a bit of socially (not only in class or in teacher-writer conferences) — all presumed that Juan Diego’s adoptive parents had been a couple no one would have (or could have) sought to emulate. They’d been so queer—in every sense of the word! Surely, this was the commonplace version of why Juan Diego had never married anyone, why he’d not even made an effort to find that companion for life, the one so many people believed they wanted. (Surely, Juan Diego knew, this was the story Clark French would have imparted to his wife about his former teacher — an obdurate bachelor, in Clark’s eyes, and a godless secular humanist.)

Only Dr. Stein — dear Dr. Rosemary! — understood, Juan Diego believed. Dr. Rosemary Stein didn’t know everything about her friend and patient; she didn’t understand dump kids — she hadn’t been there when he’d been a child and a young adolescent. But Rosemary did know Juan Diego when he’d lost Señor Eduardo and Flor; Dr. Stein had been their doctor, too.

Dr. Rosemary, as Juan Diego thought of her — most fondly — knew why he’d never married. It wasn’t because Flor and Edward Bonshaw had been a queer couple; it was because those two had loved each other so much that Juan Diego couldn’t imagine ever finding a partnership as good as theirs — they’d been inimitable. And he’d loved them not only as parents, not to mention as “adoptive” parents. He’d loved them as the best (meaning, the most unattainable) couple he ever knew.

“He misses stuff,” Pedro had said, citing geckos and the dump.

“Don’t forget his sister,” Consuelo had said.

More than a lion had killed Lupe, Juan Diego knew, but he could no more say that — to any of them, there on the beach — than he could have become a skywalker. Juan Diego could no more have saved his sister than he could have become The Wonder.

And if he had asked Dr. Rosemary Stein to marry him — that is, before she’d said yes to someone else — who knows if she would have accepted the dump reader’s proposal?

“How was the swimming?” Clark French asked his former teacher. “I mean before the sea urchins,” Clark needlessly explained.

“Mister likes to bob around in one place,” Consuelo answered. “Don’t you, Mister?” the little girl in pigtails asked.

“Yes, I do, Consuelo,” Juan Diego told her.

“Treading water, a little dog-paddling — it’s a lot like writing a novel, Clark,” the dump reader told his former student. “It feels like you’re going a long way, because it’s a lot of work, but you’re basically covering old ground — you’re hanging out in familiar territory.”

“I see,” Clark said cautiously. He didn’t see, Juan Diego knew. Clark was a world-changer; he wrote with a mission, a positive agenda.

Clark French had no appreciation for dog-paddling or treading water; they were like living in the past, like going nowhere. Juan Diego lived there, in the past — reliving, in his imagination, the losses that had marked him.