Avenue of Mysteries (8 page)

“Rivera loves us,” Juan Diego told his sister.

“Yes, el jefe loves us—
both
of us,” Lupe admitted. “Even though I’m not his—and you’re probably not his, either.”

“Rivera gave us his name
—both
of us,” the boy reminded her.

“I think it’s more like a loan,” Lupe said.

“How can our names be a loan?” the boy had asked her; his sister
shrugged their mother’s shrug—a hard one to read. (A little bit always the same, a little bit different every time.)

“Maybe I’m Lupe Rivera, and always will be,” the girl had said, somewhat evasively. “But you’re someone else. You’re not always going to be Juan Diego Rivera—that’s not who you are,” was all Lupe would say about it.

O
N THAT MORNING WHEN
Juan Diego’s life was about to change, Rivera made no vulgar squirt-gun jokes. El jefe sat distractedly at the wheel of his truck; the dump boss was ready to make his rounds, starting with the load of copper—a heavy load.

The distant airplane was slowing down; it must be landing, Juan Diego guessed to himself. He was still watching the sky for flying things. There was an airport (at the time, not much more than a landing strip) outside Oaxaca, and the boy loved watching the planes that flew over the basurero; he’d never flown.

In the dream, of course, was the devastating foreknowledge of who was on that airplane on that morning—thus, immediately upon the appearance of the plane in the sky, there came the simultaneous understanding of Juan Diego’s future. In reality, on that morning, something fairly ordinary had diverted Juan Diego’s attention from the far-off but descending plane. The boy had spotted what he thought was a feather—not from a crow or a vulture. A different-looking feather (but not
that
different-looking) was pinned under the left-rear wheel of the truck.

Lupe had already slipped into the cab beside Rivera.

Diablo, despite his lean appearance, was a well-fed dog—he was quite superior to the scavenging dump dogs, not only in this respect. Diablo was an aloof, macho-looking dog. (In Guerrero, they called him the “male animal.”)

With his forepaws on Rivera’s toolbox, Diablo could extend his head and neck over the passenger side of the pickup; if he put his forepaws on el jefe’s spare tire, Diablo’s head would obstruct Rivera’s vision of his side-view mirror—the broken one, on the driver’s side. When the dump boss glanced in that broken mirror, he had a multifaceted view: a spiderweb of shards of glass reflected Diablo’s four-eyed face. The dog suddenly had two mouths, two tongues.

“Where is your brother?” Rivera asked the girl.

“I’m not the only one who’s crazy,” Lupe said, but the dump boss didn’t understand her at all.

When el jefe had a nap in the cab of his truck, he often put the stick shift, which was on the floor of the cab, in reverse. If the gear shift was set in first gear, the knob could poke him in his ribs while he was trying to sleep.

Diablo’s “normal” face now appeared in the passenger-side mirror—the unbroken one—but when Rivera looked in the driver’s-side mirror, in the spiderweb of broken glass, he never saw Juan Diego trying to retrieve the slightly unusual-looking, reddish-brown feather that was trapped under the left-rear wheel of the truck. The truck lurched backward in reverse, rolling over the boy’s right foot. It’s just a chicken feather, Juan Diego realized. In the same half-second, he acquired his lifelong limp—for a feather as common as dirt in Guerrero. On the outskirts of Oaxaca, lots of families kept chickens.

The small bump under the left-rear tire caused the Guadalupe doll on the dashboard to wobble her hips. “Be careful you don’t get yourself pregnant,” Lupe told the doll, but Rivera had no comprehension of what she’d said; el jefe could hear Juan Diego screaming. “You’ve lost your touch for miracles—you’ve sold out,” Lupe was saying to the Guadalupe doll. Rivera had braked the truck; he climbed out of the cab, running to the injured boy. Diablo was barking crazily—he sounded like a different dog. All the dogs in Guerrero began to bark. “
Now
see what you’ve done,” Lupe admonished the doll on the dashboard, but the girl quickly climbed out of the cab and ran to her brother.

The boy’s right foot had been crushed; flattened and bleeding, the maimed foot pointed away from his right ankle and shin in a two-o’clock position. His foot looked smaller, somehow. Rivera carried Juan Diego to the cab; the boy would have continued to scream, but the pain made him hold his breath, then gasp for air, then hold his breath again. His boot slipped off.

“Try to breathe normally, or you’ll faint,” Rivera told him.

“Maybe now you’ll fix that stupid mirror!” Lupe was screaming at the dump boss.

“What is she saying?” Rivera asked the boy. “I hope it’s not about my side-view mirror.”

“I’m
trying
to breathe normally,” Juan Diego told him.

Lupe got in the truck’s cab first, so that her brother could put his head in her lap and stick his bad foot out the passenger-side window. “Take him to Dr. Vargas!” the girl was screaming at Rivera, who understood the
Vargas
word.

“We’ll try for a miracle first—then Vargas,” Rivera said.

“Expect no miracles,” Lupe said; she punched the Guadalupe doll on the dashboard, and the doll’s hips started shaking again.

“Don’t let the Jesuits have me,” Juan Diego said. “Brother Pepe is the only one I like.”

“Perhaps I should be the one to explain this to your mother,” Rivera was saying to the kids; he drove slowly ahead, not wanting to kill any dogs in Guerrero, but once the truck was out on the highway, el jefe sped up.

The jostling in the cab made Juan Diego moan; his crushed foot, bleeding out the open window, had streaked the passenger side of the cab with blood. In the undamaged side-view mirror, Diablo’s blood-flecked face appeared. In the rushing wind, a stream of the injured boy’s blood ran to the rear of the cab, where Diablo was licking it up.

“Cannibalism!” Rivera shouted. “You disloyal dog!”

“Cannibalism is not the right word,” Lupe declared, with her usual moral indignation. “Dogs like blood—Diablo is a good dog.”

With his teeth clenched in pain, the effort to translate his sister’s defense of the blood-licking dog was beyond Juan Diego, who thrashed his head from side to side in Lupe’s lap.

When he could manage to hold his head still, Juan Diego believed he saw some menacing eye contact between the Guadalupe doll on Rivera’s dashboard and his fervent sister. Lupe had been named after the Virgin of Guadalupe. Juan Diego was named for the Indian who’d encountered the dark-skinned virgin in 1531. Los niños de la basura were born to Indians in the New World, but they also had Spanish blood; this made them (in their eyes) the conquistadors’ bastard children. Juan Diego and Lupe didn’t feel that the Virgin of Guadalupe was necessarily looking out for them.

“You should pray to her, you ungrateful heathen—not punch her!” Rivera now said to the girl. “Pray for your brother—ask for Guadalupe’s help!”

Juan Diego had translated Lupe’s invective on this religious subject too many times; he clenched his teeth, his lips tightly closed, not uttering a word.

“Guadalupe has been corrupted by the Catholics,” Lupe began. “She was
our
Virgin, but the Catholics stole her; they made her the Virgin Mary’s dark-skinned servant. They might as well have called her Mary’s slave—maybe Mary’s
cleaning woman
!”

“Blasphemy! Sacrilege! Unbeliever!” Rivera shouted. The dump boss didn’t need Juan Diego to translate Lupe’s diatribe—he’d heard Lupe sound off about the Guadalupe business before. It was no secret to Rivera that Lupe had a love-hate thing going with Our Lady of Guadalupe. El jefe also knew Lupe disliked Mother Mary. The Virgin Mary was an imposter, in the crazy child’s opinion; the Virgin of Guadalupe had been the real deal, but those crafty Jesuits had stolen her for their Catholic agenda. In Lupe’s opinion, the dark-skinned virgin had been compromised—hence “corrupted.” The child believed that Our Lady of Guadalupe had once been miraculous but wasn’t anymore.

This time, Lupe’s left foot delivered a near-lethal kick to the Guadalupe doll, but the suction-cup base held fast to the dashboard while the doll shimmied and shook herself in a frankly less-than-virginal way.

In order to kick the dashboard doll, Lupe had done little more than arch her lap upward, toward the windshield, but even this much movement caused Juan Diego to scream.

“You
see
? Now you’ve hurt your brother!” Rivera cried, but Lupe bent over Juan Diego; she kissed his forehead, her smoke-smelling hair falling to either side of the injured boy’s face.

“Remember this,” Lupe whispered to Juan Diego. “
We
are the miracle—you and me. Not them. Just us. We’re the miraculous ones,” she said.

With his eyes tightly closed, Juan Diego heard the plane roar over them. At the time, he knew only that they were near the airport; he knew nothing about who was on that plane and coming closer. In the dream, of course, he knew everything—the future, too. (Some of it.)

“We’re the miraculous ones,” Juan Diego whispered. He was asleep—he was still dreaming—though his lips were moving. No one heard him; no one hears a writer who’s writing in his sleep.

Besides, Cathay Pacific 841 was still hurtling toward Hong Kong—on one side of the plane, the Taiwan Strait, on the other, the South China Sea. But in Juan Diego’s dream, he was only fourteen—a passenger, in pain, in Rivera’s truck—and all the boy could do was repeat after his clairvoyant sister: “We’re the miraculous ones.”

Perhaps all the passengers on the plane were asleep, for not even the scarily sophisticated mother and her slightly-less-dangerous-looking daughter had heard him.

•
5
•

Yielding Under No Winds

The American who landed in Oaxaca that morning—to Juan Diego’s future, he was the most important passenger on that incoming plane—was a scholastic in training to be a priest. He’d been hired to teach at the Jesuit school and orphanage; Brother Pepe had picked him out of a list of applicants. Father Alfonso and Father Octavio, the two old priests at the Templo de la Compañía de Jesús, had expressed their doubts regarding the young American’s command of Spanish. Pepe’s point was that the scholastic was overqualified; he’d been a whale of a student—surely his Spanish would catch up.

Everyone at the Hogar de los Niños Perdidos was expecting him. Except for Sister Gloria, the nuns who watched over the orphans at Lost Children had confided to Pepe that they liked the young teacher’s photograph. Pepe didn’t tell anyone, but he’d found the picture appealing, too. (If it was possible, in a photo, for someone to
look
zealous—well, this guy did.)

Father Alfonso and Father Octavio had sent Brother Pepe to meet the new missionary’s plane. From the photograph on the American teacher’s dossier, Brother Pepe had been anticipating a bigger, more mature-looking man. It was not only that Edward Bonshaw had recently lost a lot of weight; the young American, who was not yet thirty, hadn’t bought any new clothes since his weight loss. His clothes were huge on him, even clownish, which gave the deeply serious-looking scholastic an aura of childish haphazardness. Edward Bonshaw resembled the youngest kid in a big family—the one who wore the hand-me-downs discarded or outgrown by his older, larger siblings and cousins. The short sleeves of his Hawaiian shirt hung below his elbows; the untucked shirt (a parrots-in-palm-trees
theme) drooped to his knees. Upon exiting the plane, young Bonshaw tripped on the cuffs of his sagging trousers.

As usual, the plane, upon landing, had struck one or more of the chickens that chaotically overran the runway. The reddish-brown feathers flew upward in the seemingly random funnels of wind; where the two chains of the Sierra Madre converge, it can be windy. But Edward Bonshaw did not notice that a chicken (or chickens) had been killed; he reacted to the feathers and the wind as if they were a warm greeting, expressly for him.

“Edward?” Brother Pepe started to say, but a chicken feather stuck to his lower lip and made him spit. He simultaneously thought that the young American looked insubstantial, out of place, and unprepared, but Pepe remembered his own insecurity at that age, and his heart went out to young Bonshaw—as if the new missionary were one of the orphans at Lost Children.

The three-year service in preparation for the priesthood was called regency; thereafter, Edward Bonshaw would pursue theological studies for another three years. Ordination followed theology, Pepe was reminding himself as he assessed the young scholastic, who was attempting to wave the chicken feathers away. And after his ordination, Edward Bonshaw then faced a fourth year of theological study—not to mention that the poor guy had already completed a Ph.D. in English literature! (No wonder he’s lost some weight, Brother Pepe considered.)

But Pepe had underestimated the zealous young man, who seemed to be making an unnatural effort to look like a conquering hero in a spiral cloud of chicken feathers. Indeed, Brother Pepe didn’t know that Edward Bonshaw’s ancestors had been a formidable bunch, even by Jesuitical standards.

The Bonshaws had come from the Dumfries area of Scotland, near the English border. Edward’s great-grandfather Andrew had immigrated to the Canadian Maritimes. Edward’s grandfather Duncan had immigrated to the United States—albeit cautiously. (As Duncan Bonshaw had been fond of saying, “Only to Maine, not to the
rest
of the United States.”) Edward’s father, Graham, had moved farther west—no farther west than Iowa, in fact. Edward Bonshaw was born in Iowa City; until he came to Mexico, he’d never left the Midwest.

As for how the Bonshaws became Catholics, only God and the great-grandfather knew. Like many Scots, Andrew Bonshaw had a Protestant upbringing; he’d sailed from Glasgow a Protestant, but when he
disembarked in Halifax, Andrew Bonshaw was closely tied to Rome—he came ashore a Catholic.

A conversion, if not a miracle of a near-death kind, must have occurred onboard that ship; something miraculous had to have happened during the transatlantic crossing, but—even as an old man—Andrew never spoke of it. He took the miracle to his grave. All Andrew ever said about the voyage was that a nun had taught him how to play mah-jongg.
Something
must have happened during one of their games.