Avenue of Mysteries

"The hotel has been bombed?" Juan Diego asked.

"Not that I know of," Bienvenido replied. "There are bomb-sniffing dogs at all the hotels. At the Shangri-La, people say the dogs don't know what they're sniffing for--they just like to sniff everything."

"That doesn't sound so bad," Juan Diego said. He liked dogs; he was always defending them. (Maybe the bomb-sniffing dogs at the Shangri-La were just being extra careful.)

"People say the dogs at the Shangri-La are untrained," Bienvenido was saying.

But Juan Diego couldn't focus on this conversation. Manila was reminding him of Mexico; he'd been unprepared for that, and now the talk had turned to dogs.

At Lost Children, he and Lupe had missed the dump dogs. When a litter of puppies was born in the basurero, the kids had tried to take care of the puppies; when a puppy died, Juan Diego and Lupe tried to find it before the vultures did. The dump kids had helped Rivera burn the dead dogs--burning them was a way to love the dogs, too.

At night, when they went looking for their mother on Zaragoza Street, Juan Diego and Lupe tried not to think about the rooftop dogs; those dogs were different--they were scary. They were mostly mongrels, as Brother Pepe had said, but Pepe was wrong to say that only some of the rooftop dogs were feral--most of them were. Dr. Gomez said she knew how the dogs ended up on the roofs, although Brother Pepe believed that no one knew how the dogs got there.

A lot of Dr. Gomez's patients had been bitten by the rooftop dogs; after all, she was an ear, nose, and throat specialist, and that's where the dogs tried to bite you. The dogs attacked your face, Dr. Gomez said. Years ago, in the top-floor apartments of those buildings south of the zocalo, people had let their pets run free on the roofs. But the pet dogs had run away, or they'd been scared away by wild dogs; many of those buildings were so close together that the dogs could run from roof to roof. People stopped letting their pet dogs up on the roofs; soon almost all the rooftop dogs were wild. But how had the first wild dogs ended up on the roofs?

At night, on Zaragoza Street, the headlights of passing cars were reflected in the eyes of the rooftop dogs. No wonder Lupe thought these dogs were ghosts. The dogs ran along the rooftops, as if they were hunting people in the street below. If you didn't talk, or you weren't listening to music, you could hear the dogs panting as they ran. Sometimes, when the dogs were jumping from roof to roof, a dog fell. The falling dogs were killed, of course, unless one landed on a person in the street below. The person passing by served to break the dog's fall. Those lucky dogs usually didn't die, but if they were injured from the fall, this made the dogs more likely to bite the people they'd fallen on.

"I guess you like dogs," Bienvenido was saying.

"I do--I do like dogs," Juan Diego said, but he was distracted by his thoughts of those ghost dogs in Oaxaca (if the rooftop dogs, or some of them, were truly ghosts).

"Those dogs aren't the only ghosts in town--Oaxaca is full of ghosts," Lupe had said, in her know-it-all way.

"I haven't seen them," was Juan Diego's first response.

"You will," was all Lupe would say.

Now, in Manila, Juan Diego was also distracted by an overloaded jeepney with one of the same religious slogans he'd already seen; evidently, it was a popular message: GOD'S CARE FOR YOU IS APPARENT. A contrasting sticker in the rear window of a taxi then caught Juan Diego's eye. CHILD-SEX TOURISTS, the taxi sticker said. DON'T TURN AWAY. TURN THEM IN.

Well, yes--turn the fuckers in! Juan Diego thought. But for those children who were recruited to have sex with tourists, Juan Diego believed, God's care for them wasn't all that apparent.

"I'll be interested to see what you think of the bomb-sniffers," Bienvenido was saying, but when he glanced in the rearview mirror, he saw that his client was asleep. Or dead, the driver might have thought, except that Juan Diego's lips were moving. Maybe the limo driver imagined that the not-so-famous novelist was composing dialogue in his sleep. The way Juan Diego's lips were moving, he appeared to be having a conversation with himself--the way writers do, Bienvenido supposed. The young Filipino driver couldn't have known the actual argument the older man was remembering, nor could Bienvenido have guessed where Juan Diego's dreams would transport him next.

* 12 *

Zaragoza Street

"Listen to me, Mr. Missionary--these two should stick together," Vargas was saying. "The circus will buy them clothes, the circus will pay for any medicine--plus three meals a day, plus a bed to sleep in, and there's a family to look after them."

"What family? It's a circus! They sleep in tents!" Edward Bonshaw cried.

"La Maravilla is a kind of family, Eduardo," Brother Pepe told the Iowan. "Circus children aren't in need," Pepe said, more doubtfully.

The name of Oaxaca's little circus, like Lost Children, had not escaped criticism. It could be confusing--Circo de La Maravilla. The L in La was uppercase because The Wonder herself was an actual person, a performer. (The act itself, the alleged marvel, was confusingly called la maravilla--a lowercase wonder or marvel.) And there were pe

ople in Oaxaca who thought Circus of The Wonder misleadingly advertised itself. The other acts were ordinary, not so marvelous; the animals weren't special. And there were rumors.

All anyone in town ever talked about was La Maravilla herself. (Like Lost Children, the circus's name was usually shortened; people said they were going to el circo or to La Maravilla.) The Wonder herself was always a young girl; there had been many. It was a breathtaking act, not always death-defying; several previous performers had been killed. And the survivors didn't continue to be The Wonder for very long. There was a lot of turnover among the performers; the stress probably got to these young girls. After all, they were risking their lives at that time when they were coming of age. Maybe the stress and their hormones got to them. Wasn't it truly wondrous that these young girls were doing something that could kill them while they were having their first periods and watching their breasts get bigger? Wasn't their coming of age the real danger, the actual marvel?

Some of the older dump kids who lived in Guerrero had sneaked into the circus; they'd told Lupe and Juan Diego about La Maravilla. But Rivera would never have tolerated such shenanigans. In those days when La Maravilla was in town, the circus set up shop in Cinco Senores; the circus grounds in Cinco Senores were closer to the zocalo and the center of Oaxaca than to Guerrero.

What drew the crowds to Circo de La Maravilla? Was it the prospect of seeing an innocent girl die? Yet Brother Pepe wasn't wrong to say that La Maravilla, or any circus, was a kind of family. (Of course, there are good and bad families.)

"But what can La Maravilla do with a cripple?" Esperanza asked.

"Please! Not when the boy is right here!" Senor Eduardo cried.

"It's okay. I am a cripple," Juan Diego had said.