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"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.
ON 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."
