Avenue of Mysteries

Had the young scholastic actually thanked the dear Lord for what he called his "total immersion" in the need to save two dump kids? Did the American really believe the dump kids were candidates for salvation?

"I'm sorry for not properly welcoming you, Senor Eduardo," Brother Pepe now said. "Lo siento--bienvenido," Pepe added admiringly.

"!Gracias!" the zealot cried. Through the ash-bleared windshield, they could both discern a small obstacle in the rotary ahead; the traffic was veering away from something. "Road kill?" Edward Bonshaw asked.

A quarrelsome contingent of dogs and crows competed over the unseen dead; as the red VW Beetle came closer, Brother Pepe blew his horn. The crows took flight; the dogs scattered. All that remained in the road was a smear of blood. The road kill, if that's what had spilled the blood, was gone.

"The dogs and the crows ate it," Edward Bonshaw said. More exclamations about the obvious, Brother Pepe was thinking, but that was when Juan Diego spoke--instantly waking himself from his long sleep, his dream, which wasn't strictly a dream. (It was more like dreams manipulated by memories, or the other way around; it was what he'd been missing since the beta-blockers had stolen his childhood and his all-important early adolescence.)

"No--it's not road kill," Juan Diego said. "It's my blood. It dripped from Rivera's truck--Diablo didn't lick up every drop."

"Were you writing?" Miriam, the imperious mother, asked Juan Diego.

"It sounds like a gruesome story," the daughter, Dorothy, said.

Their two less-than-angelic faces peered down at him; he was aware that they'd both been to the lavatory and had brushed their teeth--their breath, but not his, was very fresh. The flight attendants were fussing about the first-class cabin.

Cathay Pacific 841 was descending to Hong Kong; a foreign but welcome smell was in the air, definitely not the Oaxaca basurero.

"We were about to wake you, when you woke up," Miriam told him.

"You don't want to miss the green-tea muffins--they're almost as good as sex," Dorothy said.

"Sex, sex, sex--enough sex, Dorothy," her mother said.

Juan Diego, aware of how bad his breath must be, gave the two women a tight-lipped smile. He was slowly realizing where he was, and who these two attractive women were. Oh, yes--I skipped the beta-blockers, he was remembering. I was briefly back where I belong! he was thinking; how his heart ached to be back there.

And what was this? He had an erection in his comical Cathay Pacific sleeping suit, his clownish trans-Pacific pajamas. And he hadn't taken even half of one Viagra--his gray-blue Viagra tablets, together with the beta-blockers, were in his checked bag.

Juan Diego had slept for more than fifteen hours of what was a flight lasting sixteen hours and ten minutes. He limped off to the lavatory with noticeably quicker, lighter steps. His self-appointed angels (if not quite in the guardian category) watched him go; both mother and daughter seemed to regard him fondly.

"He's darling, isn't he?" Miriam asked her daughter.

"He's cute, all right," Dorothy said.

"Thank goodness we found him--he would be utterly lost without us!" the mother remarked.

"Thank goodness," Dorothy repeated; the goodness word escaped somewhat unnaturally from the young woman's overripe lips.

"He was writing, I think--imagine writing in your sleep!" Miriam exclaimed.

"About blood dripping from a truck!" Dorothy said. "Doesn't diablo mean 'the devil'?" she asked her mom, who just shrugged.

"Honestly, Dorothy--you do go on and on about green-tea muffins. It's just a muffin, for Christ's sake," Miriam told her daughter. "Eating a muffin isn't remotely the same as having sex!"

Dorothy rolled her eyes and sighed; her body had a permanent aspect of slouching about it, whether she sat or stood. (One could best imagine her lying down.)

Juan Diego emerged from the lavatory, smiling to the oh-so-engaging mother and daughter. He'd managed to extricate himself from the crazy Cathay Pacific pajamas, which he handed to one of the flight attendants; he was looking forward to having a green-tea muffin, if not quite as much as Dorothy apparently did.

Juan Diego's erection had only slightly subsided, and he was very aware of it; after all, he'd missed having erections. Normally, he needed to take half a Viagra to have one--until now.

His maimed foot always throbbed a little after he'd been asleep and had just woken up, but the foot was throbbing in a new and different way--or so Juan Diego imagined. In his mind, he was fourteen again, and Rivera's truck had just flattened his right foot. He could feel the warmth of Lupe's lap against his neck and the back of his head. The Guadalupe doll, on Rivera's dashboard, jiggled this way and that--the way women often seemed to be promising something unspoken and unacknowledged, which was the way Miriam and her daughter, Dorothy, presented themselves to Juan Diego right now. (Not that their hips jiggled!)

But the writer could not speak; Juan Diego's teeth were clenched, his lips tightly sealed, as if he were still making an effort not to scream in pain and thrash his head from side to side in his long-departed sister's lap.

* 6 *

Sex and Faith