Avenue of Mysteries

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 senoritas--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 Basilica de Nuestra Senora 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 Circunvalacion and the Calle San Pablo, Senor 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 Senor 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!" Senor 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!" Senor 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 Senor 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 Roldan. 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 Senor 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 Senor 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--" Senor 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.