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In his mescal stupor, el gringo bueno could manage no more than the first two lines of the first verse of "Streets of Laredo"; the way the song just petered out almost made the dump kids wish the good gringo would keep singing.
As I walked out in the streets of Laredo
As I walked out in Laredo one day--
"You're thirteen, Lupe," Juan Diego repeated, more insistently.
"I mean later, when I'm older--if I get older," Lupe said. "I am beginning to have breasts, but they're very small. I know they're supposed to get bigger."
"What do you mean, if you get older?" Juan Diego asked his sister. They lay in the dark with their backs turned to each other, but Juan Diego could feel Lupe shrug beside him.
"I don't think the good gringo and I get much older," she told him.
"You don't know that, Lupe," Juan Diego said.
"I know my breasts don't get any bigger," Lupe told him.
Juan Diego would be awake a little longer, just thinking about this. He knew Lupe was usually right about the past; he fell asleep with the half-comforting knowledge that his sister didn't do the future as accurately.
* 13 *
Now and Forever
What happened to Juan Diego with the bomb-sniffing dogs at th
e Makati Shangri-La can be calmly and rationally explained, though what transpired developed quickly, and in the panic-stricken eyes of the hotel doorman and the Shangri-La security guards--the latter instantly lost control of the two dogs--there was nothing calm or rational attending the arrival of the Distinguished Guest. Such was the lofty-sounding designation attached to Juan Diego Guerrero's name at the hotel registration desk: Distinguished Guest. Oh, that Clark French--Juan Diego's former student had been busy, asserting himself.
There'd been an upgrade to the Mexican-American novelist's room; special amenities, one of which was unusual, had been arranged. And the hotel management had been warned not to call Mr. Guerrero a Mexican American. Yet you wouldn't have known that the natty hotel manager himself was hovering around the registration desk, waiting to confer celebrity status on the weary Juan Diego--that is, not if you witnessed the writer's rude reception at the driveway entrance to the Shangri-La. Alas, Clark wasn't on hand to welcome his former teacher.
As they pulled into the driveway, Bienvenido could see in the rearview mirror that his esteemed client was asleep; the driver tried to wave off the doorman, who was hurrying to open the rear door of the limo. Bienvenido saw that Juan Diego was slumped against this same rear door; the driver quickly opened his own door and stepped into the hotel entranceway, waving both arms.
Who knew that bomb-sniffing dogs were agitated by arm-waving? The two dogs lunged at Bienvenido, who raised both arms above his head, as if the security guards held him at gunpoint. And when the hotel doorman opened the limo's rear door, Juan Diego, who appeared to be dead, began to fall out of the car. A falling dead man further excited the bomb-sniffing dogs; both of them bounded into the limo's backseat, wresting the leather handles of their dog harnesses from the security guards' hands.
The seat belt kept Juan Diego from falling entirely out of the car; he was suddenly jerked awake, his head lolling in and out of the limo. There was a dog in his lap, licking his face; it was a medium-size dog, a small male Labrador or a female Lab, actually a Lab mix, with a Lab's soft, floppy ears and warm, wide-apart eyes.
"Beatrice!" Juan Diego cried. One can only imagine what he'd been dreaming about, but when Juan Diego cried out a woman's name, a female name, the Lab mix, who was male, looked puzzled--his name was James. And Juan Diego's crying out "Beatrice!" utterly unnerved the doorman, who'd presumed the arriving guest was dead. The doorman screamed.
Evidently, the bomb-sniffing dogs were predisposed to become aggressive when there was screaming. James (who was in Juan Diego's lap) sought to protect Juan Diego by growling at the doorman, but Juan Diego had not noticed the other dog; he didn't know there was a second dog seated next to him. This was one of those nervous-looking dogs with perky, stand-up ears and a shaggy, bristling coat; it was not a purebred German shepherd but a shepherd mix, and when this savagesounding dog began to bark (in Juan Diego's ear), the writer must have imagined he was sitting beside a rooftop dog, and that Lupe might have been right: some rooftop dogs were ghosts. The shepherd mix had one wonky eye; it was a greenish yellow, and the wonky eye's unsteady focus was not aligned with the dog's good eye. The mismatched eye was further evidence to Juan Diego that the trembling dog next to him was a rooftop dog and a ghost; the crippled writer unbuckled his seat belt and tried to get out of the car--a difficult task with James (the Lab mix) in his lap.
And, just then, both dogs thrust their muzzles into the general vicinity of Juan Diego's crotch; they pinned him to his seat--they were intently sniffing. Since the dogs were allegedly trained to sniff bombs, this got the attention of the security guards. "Hold it right there," one of them said ambiguously--to either Juan Diego or the dogs.
"Dogs love me," Juan Diego proudly announced. "I was a dump kid--un nino de la basura," he tried to explain to the security guards; the two of them were fixated on the unsteady-looking man's custom-made shoe. What the handicapped gentleman was saying made no sense to the guards. ("My sister and I tried to look after the dogs in the basurero. If the dogs died, we tried to burn them before the vultures got to them.")
And here was the problem with the only two ways Juan Diego could limp: either he led with the lame foot at that crazy two-o'clock angle, in which case the jolt of his limp was the first thing you saw, or he started out on his good foot and dragged the bad one behind--in either case, the two-o'clock foot and that misshapen shoe drew your attention.
"Hold it right there!" the first security guard commanded again; both the way he raised his voice and how he pointed at Juan Diego made it clear he wasn't speaking to the dogs. Juan Diego froze, mid-limp.
Who knew that bomb-sniffing dogs didn't like it when people did that freezing thing and held themselves unnaturally still? The bomb-sniffers, both James and the shepherd mix, their noses now prodding Juan Diego in the area of his hip--more specifically, at the coat pocket of his sport jacket, where he'd put the paper napkin with the uneaten remains of his green-tea muffin--suddenly stiffened.
Juan Diego was trying to remember a recent terrorist incident--where was it, in Mindanao? Wasn't that the southernmost island of the Philippines, the one nearest Indonesia? Wasn't there a sizable Muslim population in Mindanao? Hadn't there been a suicide bomber who'd strapped explosives to one of his legs? Before the explosion, all anyone had noticed was the bomber's limp.
This doesn't look good, Bienvenido was thinking. The driver left the orange albatross of a bag with the cowardly doorman, who was still recovering from the conviction that Juan Diego was a dead person come back to life with a zombie-like limp and calling out a woman's name. The young limo driver went inside the hotel to the registration desk, where he told them they were about to shoot their Distinguished Guest.
"Call off the untrained dogs," Bienvenido told the hotel manager. "Your security guards are poised to kill a crippled writer."
The misunderstanding was soon sorted out; Clark French had even prepared the hotel for Juan Diego's early arrival. Most important to Juan Diego was that the dogs be forgiven; the green-tea muffin had misled the bomb-sniffers. "Don't blame the dogs," was how Juan Diego put it to the hotel manager. "They are perfect dogs--promise me they won't be mistreated."
"Mistreated? No, sir--never mistreated!" the manager declared. It's unlikely that a Distinguished Guest of the Makati Shangri-La had been such an advocate of the bomb-sniffing dogs before. The manager himself showed Juan Diego to his room. The amenities provided by the hotel included a fruit basket and the standard platter of crackers and cheese; the ice bucket with four bottles of beer (instead of the usual Champagne) had been the idea of Juan Diego's devoted former student, who knew that his beloved teacher drank only beer.
