Avenue of Mysteries (51 page)

They tried Pastora, the sheepdog, first; everyone thought that a dachshund’s legs were too short to climb the steps on a stepladder—surely Baby couldn’t reach the steps.

Pastora could climb the ladder—those border-collie types are very agile and aggressive—but when she got to the top, she lay down on the diving platform with her nose between her forepaws. The dwarf clowns danced under the stepladder, holding out the open blanket to the sheepdog, but Pastora wouldn’t even stand on the diving platform. When Paco or Beer Belly called her name, the sheepdog just wagged her tail while she was lying down.

“She’s no jumper,” was all Estrella said.

“Baby has balls,” Juan Diego said. Dachshunds
do
have balls—for their size, they seem especially ferocious—and Baby was willing to try climbing the stepladder. But the short-legged dachshund needed a boost.

This would be funny—the audience will laugh, Paco and Beer Belly decided. And the sight of the two dwarf clowns pushing Baby up the stepladder was funny. As always, Paco was dressed (badly) as a woman; while Paco pushed Baby’s ass, to help the dachshund up the stepladder, Beer Belly stood behind Paco—pushing
her
ass up the ladder.

“So far, so good,” Estrella said. But Baby, balls and all, was afraid of heights. When the dachshund got to the top of the stepladder, he froze on the diving platform; he was even afraid to lie down. The little dachshund stood so rigidly still that he began to tremble; soon the stepladder started to shake. Paco and Beer Belly pleaded with Baby as they held out the open blanket. Eventually, Baby peed on the diving platform; he was too afraid to lift his leg, the way male dogs are supposed to do.

“Baby is humiliated—he can’t pee like himself,” Estrella said.

But the act was
funny,
the dwarf clowns insisted. It didn’t matter that Baby wasn’t a jumper, Paco and Beer Belly said.

Estrella wouldn’t let Baby do it in front of an audience. She said the act was psychologically cruel. This was not what Juan Diego had intended. But that night in the darkness of the dogs’ troupe tent, all Juan Diego said to Lupe was: “The new dog act isn’t
stupid.
All we need is a new dog—we need a jumper,” Juan Diego said.

It would take him years to realize how he’d been manipulated into saying this. It was so long before Lupe said something—in the snoring, farting troupe tent for the dogs—Juan Diego was almost asleep when she spoke, and Lupe sounded as if she were half asleep herself.

“The poor horse,” was all Lupe said.

“
What
horse?” Juan Diego asked in the darkness.

“The one in the graveyard,” Lupe answered him.

In the morning, the dump kids woke up to a pistol shot. One of the circus horses had bolted from the sooty field and jumped the fence into the graveyard, where it broke its leg against a gravestone. Ignacio had shot the horse; the lion tamer kept a .45-caliber revolver, in case there was any lion trouble.

“
That
poor horse,” was all Lupe said, at the sound of the shot.

La Maravilla had arrived in Mexico City on Thursday. The roustabouts had set up the troupe tents the day they’d arrived; all day Friday, the roustabouts were raising the main tent and securing the animal barriers around the ring. The animals’ concentration was affected by traveling, and they needed most of Friday to recover.

The horse had been named Mañana; he was a gelding, and a slow learner. The trainer was always saying that the horse might master a trick they’d been practicing for weeks “tomorrow”—hence Mañana. But the trick of jumping the fence into the graveyard, and breaking his leg, was a new one for Mañana.

Ignacio put the poor horse out of his misery on Friday. Mañana had jumped a fence to get into the graveyard, but the gate to the graveyard was locked; disposing of the dead horse shouldn’t have become a matter of such insurmountable difficulty. However, the gunshot had been reported; the police came to the circus site, and they were more of a hindrance than a help.

Why did the lion tamer have a big-caliber gun? the police asked. (Well, he was a
lion
tamer.) Why had Ignacio shot the horse? (Mañana’s leg was broken!) And so on.

There was no permit to dispose of the dead horse in Mexico City—not on a weekend, not in the case of a horse that hadn’t “come from” Mexico City. Getting Mañana out of the locked graveyard was just the start of the difficulties.

There were performances throughout the weekend, starting with Friday night. The last was early Sunday afternoon, and the roustabouts would collapse the main tent and dismantle the ring barriers before nightfall that day. La Maravilla would be on the road again, heading back to Oaxaca, by the middle of the day on Monday. The dump kids and Edward Bonshaw planned to go to the Guadalupe shrine on Saturday morning.

Juan Diego watched Lupe feeding the lions. A mourning dove was
having a dust bath in the dirt near Hombre’s cage; the lion hated birds, and maybe Hombre thought the dove was after his meat. For some reason, Hombre was more aggressive in the way he extended his paw through the slot for the feeding tray, and one of his claws nicked the back of Lupe’s hand. There was only a little blood; Lupe put her hand to her mouth, and Hombre withdrew his paw—the guilty-looking lion retreated into his cage.

“Not your fault,” Lupe said to the big cat. There was a change in the lion’s dark-yellow eyes—a more intense focus, but on the mourning dove or on Lupe’s blood? The bird must have sensed the intensity of Hombre’s calculating stare and took flight.

Hombre’s eyes were instantly normal again—even bored. The two dwarf clowns were waddling past the lions’ cages, on their way to the outdoor showers. They wore towels around their waists and their sandals were flapping. The lion looked at them with an utter lack of interest.

“¡Hola, Hombre!” Beer Belly called.

“¡Hola, Lupe! ¡Hola, Lupe’s brother!” Paco said; the cross-dresser’s breasts were so small (almost nonexistent) that Paco didn’t bother to cover them when she walked to and from the outdoor showers, and her beard was at its most stubbly in the mornings. (Whatever Paco was taking for hormones, she wasn’t getting her estrogens from the same source Flor got hers; Flor got her estrogens from Dr. Vargas.)

But, as Flor had said, Paco was a clown; it wasn’t Paco’s aim in life to make herself passable as a woman. Paco was a gay dwarf who, in real life, spent most of her time as a man.

It was as a
he
that Paco went to La China, the gay bar on Bustamante. And when Paco went to La Coronita, where the transvestites liked to dress up, Paco also went as a
he
—Paco was just another guy among the gay clientele.

Flor said that Paco picked up a lot of first-timers, those men who were having their first experiences at being with another man. (Maybe the first-timers looked at a gay dwarf as a cautious way to start?)

But when Paco was with her circus family at La Maravilla, the dwarf clown felt safe to be a
she.
She could be comfortable as a cross-dresser around Beer Belly. In the clown acts, they always acted as if they were a couple, but in real life Beer Belly was straight. He was married, and his wife wasn’t a dwarf.

Beer Belly’s wife was afraid of getting pregnant; she didn’t want to have a dwarf for a child. She made Beer Belly wear two condoms. Everyone
in La Maravilla had heard Beer Belly’s stories about the perils of wearing an extra condom.

“Nobody does that—no one wears two condoms, you know,” Paco was always telling him, but Beer Belly kept using double condoms, because it was what his wife wanted.

The outdoor showers were made of flimsy, prefabricated plywood—they could be assembled and taken apart fairly fast. They sometimes fell down; they had even collapsed on the person taking a shower. There were as many bad stories about the outdoor showers La Maravilla used as there were about Beer Belly’s extra condoms. (Lots of embarrassing accidents, in other words.)

The girl acrobats complained to Soledad about Ignacio looking at them in the outdoor showers, but Soledad couldn’t stop her husband from being a lecherous pig. The morning Mañana was shot in the graveyard, Dolores was taking an outdoor shower; Paco and Beer Belly had timed their arrival at the showers—they were hoping to get a look at Dolores naked.

The two dwarf clowns were not lecherous—not in the case of the beautiful but unapproachable skywalker, The Wonder herself. Paco was a gay guy—what did Paco care about getting a look at Dolores? And Beer Belly had all he could possibly handle with his two-condom wife; Beer Belly wasn’t personally interested in seeing Dolores naked, either.

But the two dwarfs had a bet between them. Paco had said: “My tits are bigger than Dolores’s.” Beer Belly bet that Dolores’s were bigger. This was why the two clowns were always trying to get a look at Dolores in the outdoor shower. Dolores had heard about the bet; she wasn’t happy about it. Juan Diego had imagined the shower falling down—Dolores exposed, the dwarf clowns arguing about breast size. (Lupe, who’d used the
mouse-tits
definition for Dolores’s breasts, was on Paco’s side; Lupe believed Paco’s tits were bigger.)

That was why Juan Diego followed Paco and Beer Belly to the outdoor showers; the fourteen-year-old hoped something might happen, and he would get to see Dolores naked. (Juan Diego didn’t care that her breasts were small; he believed she was beautiful, even if her tits were tiny.)

The dwarf clowns and Juan Diego could see Dolores’s head and bare shoulders above the prefabricated barrier of the outdoor shower. That was when one of the elephants appeared in the avenue of troupe tents; the elephant was dragging the dead horse, who had been chained around
the neck. The police followed after Mañana’s body; there were ten policemen for one dead horse. Ignacio and the policemen were arguing.

Dolores’s head was thickly lathered with shampoo—her eyes were closed. You could see her ankles and her bare feet below the flimsy plywood barrier; the shampoo suds covered her feet. Juan Diego was thinking that maybe the shampoo stung the open wounds on the tops of her feet.

The lion tamer stopped talking when he saw that Dolores was in one of the outdoor showers. The policemen all looked in The Wonder’s direction, too.

“Maybe now isn’t such a good time,” Beer Belly said to his dwarf buddy, Paco.

“I say now’s the perfect time,” Paco said, waddling faster. The dwarf clowns ran to Dolores’s outdoor shower. They couldn’t have seen over the prefabricated barrier without (impossibly) standing on each other’s shoulders, so they looked under the plywood at the bottom of the shower—staring upward, into the falling water and shampoo. They were looking for only a second or two; their heads were wet with water (and frothy with shampoo) when they straightened up and turned away from Dolores’s shower. Dolores was still washing her hair; she’d never noticed the dwarfs stealing a look at her. But then Juan Diego tried to peer over the top of the prefabricated barrier; he had to pull himself up, off his feet, with both his hands gripping the flimsy plywood.

Later, Beer Belly said that it would have been a funny clown act; the unlikeliest cast of characters were assembled on a small stage in the avenue of troupe tents. The dwarf clowns, already dappled with Dolores’s shampoo, were just bystanders. (Clowns can be at their funniest when they’re just standing around, doing nothing.)

Later, the elephant trainer said that what happens in the periphery of an elephant’s vision can be more startling to the elephant than something the beast is looking at directly. When Dolores’s outdoor shower collapsed, she screamed; she couldn’t see (she was blinded by shampoo), but she surely sensed that the walls surrounding her had vanished.

Later, Juan Diego said that although he was pinned under one of the prefabricated walls of the shower, he could feel the ground shake when the elephant broke into a run mode, or a gallop mode (or whatever mode elephants break into when they panic and bolt).

The elephant trainer ran after his elephant; the chain, still attached
to the neck of the dead horse, had snapped—but not before Mañana was jerked forward into a kneeling (or praying) position.

Dolores had dropped to all fours on the raised wooden platform that served as a makeshift floor to the shower; she was keeping her head under the stream of water, so she could rinse the shampoo out of her hair—she wanted to
see
again, of course. Juan Diego had crawled out from under the collapsed plywood barrier. He was trying to give Dolores her towel.

“It was me—I did it. I’m sorry,” he said to her; she took the towel from him, but Dolores seemed in no hurry to cover herself. She used the towel to dry her hair first; it was only when she saw Ignacio, and the ten policemen, that The Wonder covered herself with the towel.

“You got more balls than I thought
—some
balls, anyway,” was all Dolores said to Juan Diego.

No one realized that she’d not noticed the dead horse. All the while, the dwarf clowns just stood watching in the avenue of troupe tents—the towels around their waists. Paco’s breasts were so small that not one of the ten policemen looked at her twice; the policemen definitely thought Paco was a guy.

“I told you Dolores’s are bigger,” Beer Belly said to his fellow dwarf clown.

“Are you kidding?” Paco asked him. “
Mine
are bigger!”

“Yours are smaller,” Beer Belly told her.

“Bigger!” Paco said. “What do
you
say, Lupe’s brother?” the cross-dresser asked Juan Diego. “Are Dolores’s bigger or smaller?”

“They’re prettier,” the fourteen-year-old said. “Dolores’s are more beautiful,” Juan Diego said.

“You got some balls, all right,” Dolores told him; she stepped off the shower platform into the avenue of troupe tents, where she fell over the dead horse. The bullet hole was still bleeding. The wound was on the side of Mañana’s face, between the ear and one of the horse’s wide-open eyes.

Later, Paco would say that she disagreed with Beer Belly—not only about the relative size of Dolores’s breasts, but also about the suitability of the shower episode as a clown act. “Not the dead-horse part—that wasn’t funny,” was all Paco would say about it.