Avenue of Mysteries

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 scan

tily 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.