Page 26 of Avenue of Mysteries


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"Is he--that is, dying?" Father Alfonso asked Brother Pepe.

"Not that I know of," Pepe replied, trying to repress his impish smile a little. "In fact, Edward seems very healthy--and most eager to be of use."

"Of use," Father Octavio repeated, as if this were a death sentence. "How utilitarian."

"Mercy," Father Alfonso said.

"I'm following them," Brother Pepe told the priests; he was waddling hurriedly to his dusty red VW Beetle. "In case anything happens."

"Mercy," Father Octavio echoed.

"Leave it to the Americans, to make themselves of use," Father Alfonso said.

Rivera's truck was pulling away from the curb, and Brother Pepe followed it into the traffic. Ahead of him, he could see Juan Diego's little face, held protectively in his strange sister's small hands. Diablo had once again put his forepaws on the pickup's toolbox; the wind blew the dog's unmatched ears away from his face--both the normal one and the ear that was missing a jagged-edged, triangular piece. But it was Edward Bonshaw who captured and held Brother Pepe's attention.

"Look at him," Lupe had said to Juan Diego. "At him, at the gringo--the parrot man!"

What Brother Pepe saw in Edward Bonshaw was a man who looked like he belonged--like a man who had never felt at home, but who'd suddenly found his place in the scheme of things.

Brother Pepe didn't know if he was excited or afraid, or both; he saw now that Senor Eduardo was truly a man with a purpose.

It was the way Juan Diego felt in his dream--the way you feel when you know everything has changed, and that this moment heralds the rest of your life.

"Hello?" a young woman's voice was saying on the phone, which Juan Diego only now realized he held in his hand.

"Hello," the writer, who'd been fast asleep, said; only now was he aware of his throbbing erection.

"Hi, it's me--it's Dorothy," the young woman said. "You're alone, aren't you? My mother isn't with you, is she?"

* 8 *

Two Condoms

What can you believe about a fiction writer's dreams? In his dreams, obviously, Juan Diego felt free to imagine what Brother Pepe was thinking and feeling. But in whose point of view were Juan Diego's dreams? (Not in Pepe's.)

Juan Diego would have been happy to talk about this, and about other aspects of his resurgent dream life, though it seemed to him that now was not the time. Dorothy was playing with his penis; as the novelist had observed, the young woman brought to this postcoital play the same unwavering scrutiny she tended to bring to her cell phone and laptop. And Juan Diego wasn't much inclined to male fantasies, not even as a fiction writer.

"I think you can do it again," the naked girl was saying. "Okay--maybe not immediately, but pretty soon. Just look at this guy!" she exclaimed. She'd not been shy the first time, either.

At his age, Juan Diego didn't do a lot of looking at his penis, but Dorothy had--from the start.

What happened to foreplay? Juan Diego had wondered. (Not that he'd had much experience with foreplay or afterplay.) He'd been trying to explain to Dorothy the Mexican glorification of Our Lady of Guadalupe. They'd been cuddled together in Juan Diego's dimly lit bed, where they were barely able to hear the muted radio--as if from a faraway planet--when the brazen girl had pulled back the covers and taken a look at his adrenaline-charged, Viagra-enhanced erection.

"The problem began with Cortes, who conquered the Aztec Empire in 1521--Cortes was very Catholic," Juan Diego was saying to the young woman. Dorothy lay with her warm face against his stomach, staring at his penis. "Cortes came from Extremadura; the Extremadura Guadalupe, I mean a statue of the virgin, was supposedly carved by Saint Luke, the evangelist. It was discovered in the fourteenth century," Juan Diego continued, "when the virgin pulled one of her tricky apparitions--you know, an appearance before a humble-shepherd type. She commanded him to dig at the site of her apparition; the shepherd found the icon on the spot."

"This is not an old man's penis--this is one alert-looking guy you have here," Dorothy said, not remotely apropos of the Guadalupe subject. Thus she'd begun; Dorothy didn't waste time.

Juan Diego did his best to ignore her. "The Guadalupe of Extremadura was dark-skinned, not unlike most Mexicans," Juan Diego pointed out to Dorothy, although it disconcerted him to be speaking to the back of the dark-haired young woman's head. "Thus the Extremadura Guadalupe was the perfect proselytizing tool for those missionaries who followed Cortes to Mexico; Guadalupe became the ideal icon to convert the natives to Christianity."

"Uh-huh," Dorothy replied, slipping Juan Diego's penis into her mouth.

Juan Diego was not, and had never been, a sexually confident man; lately, discounting his solo experiments with Viagra, he'd had no sexual relationships at all. Yet Juan Diego managed a cavalier response to Dorothy's going down on him--he kept talking. It must have been the novelist in him: he could concentrate on the long haul; he'd never been much of a short-story writer.

"It was ten years after the Spanish conquest, on a hill outside Mexico City--" Juan Diego said to the young woman sucking his penis.

"Tepeyac," Dorothy briefly interrupted herself; she pronounced the word perfectly before she slipped his cock back in her mouth. Juan Diego was nonplussed that such an unscholarly-looking girl knew the name of the place, but he tried to be as nonchalant about that as he was pretending to be about the blow job.

"It was an early morning in December 1531--" Juan Diego began again.

Source: www.allfreenovel.com
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