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"Your family books the whole place every year!" Clark cried. "This person knew it was a private party. She booked a room anyway, and the Encantador took her reservation--even knowing all the rooms were fully booked! What kind of person wants to crash a private party? She knew she would be entirely isolated! She knew she would be absolutely alone!"
"She," was all Juan Diego said, once again feeling his heart race. Outside, in the darkness, there were no eyes now. The road had narrowed, and turned to gravel, then to dirt. Perhaps the Encantador was a secluded place, but she would not be entirely isolated there. She, Juan Diego hoped, would be with him. If Miriam was the uninvited guest, she absolutely wouldn't be alone for long.
That was when the boy driver must have noticed something odd in the rearview mirror. He spoke quickly in Tagalog to Dr. Quintana. Clark French only partially understood the driver, but there was an element of alarm in the boy's tone; Clark turned and peered into the rear seat, where he could see that his wife had unbuckled her seat belt and was looking closely at Juan Diego.
"Is something wrong, Josefa?" Clark asked his wife.
"Give me a second, Clark--I think he's just asleep," Dr. Quintana told her husband.
"Stop the car--stop it!" Clark told the boy driver, but Josefa spoke sharply in Tagalog to the boy, and the kid kept driving.
"We're almost there, Clark--it's not necessary to stop here," Josefa said. "I'm sure your old friend is sleeping--dreaming, if I had to guess, but I'm sure he's just asleep."
*
FLOR DROVE THE DUMP kids to Circo de La Maravilla, because Brother Pepe was already beginning to blame himself for los ninos taking such a risk; Pepe was too upset to go with them, although el circo had been his idea--his and Vargas's. Flor drove Pepe's VW Beetle, with Edward Bonshaw in the passenger seat and the kids in the back.
Lupe had delivered a tearful challenge to the noseless statue of the Virgin Mary; this was seconds before they'd driven away from the Templo de la Compania de Jesus. "Show me a real miracle--anyone can scare a superstitious cleaning woman to death!" Lupe had shouted at the towering Virgin. "Do something to make me believe in you--I think you're just a big bully! Look at you! All you do is stand there! You don't even have a nose!"
"You're not going to offer some prayers, too?" Senor Eduardo asked Juan Diego, who was disinclined to translate his sister's outburst for the Iowan--nor did the limping boy dare to tell the missionary his most dire fears. If anything happened to Juan Diego at La Maravilla--or if, for any reason, he and Lupe were ever separated--there would be no future for Lupe, because no one but her brother could understand her. Not even the Jesuits would keep her and care for her; Lupe would be put in the institution for retarded children, where she would be forgotten. Even the name of the place for retarded children was unknown or had been forgotten, and no one seemed to know where it was--or no one would say exactly where it was, nothing more than "out of town" or "up in the mountains."
At that time, when Lost Children was relatively new in town, there was only one other orphanage in Oaxaca, and it was a little bit "out of town" and "up in the mountains." It was in Viguera, and everyone knew its name--Ciudad de los Ninos, "City of Children."
"City of Boys" was what Lupe called it; they didn't take girls. Most of the boys were ages six to ten; twelve was the cut-off, so they wouldn't have taken Juan Diego.
City of Children had opened in 1958; it had been around longer than Ninos Perdidos, and the all-boys' orphanage would outlast Lost Children, too.
Brother Pepe would not speak ill of Ciudad de los Ninos; perhaps Pepe believed all orphanages were a godsend. Father Alfonso and Father Octavio said only that education was not a priority at City of Children. (The dump kids had mer
ely observed that the boys were bused to school--their school was near the Solitude Virgin's basilica--and Lupe had said, with her characteristic shrug, that the buses themselves were as beat to shit as you would expect for buses accustomed to transporting boys.)
One of the orphans at Lost Children had been at Ciudad de los Ninos as a younger boy. He didn't bad-mouth the all-boys' orphanage; he never said he was mistreated there. Juan Diego would remember that this boy said there were shoe boxes stacked in the dining hall (this was said without any explanation), and that all the boys--twenty or so--slept in one room. The mattresses were unsheeted, and the blankets and stuffed animals had earlier belonged to other boys. There were stones in the soccer field, this boy said--you didn't want to fall down--and the meat was cooked on an outdoor wood fire.
These observations were not offered as criticisms; they simply contributed to Juan Diego and Lupe's impression that City of Boys would not have been an option for them--even if Lupe had been the right sex for that place, and even if both kids hadn't been too old.
If the dump kids went crazy at Lost Children, they would go back to the basurero before they would submit to the institution for the retarded, where Lupe had heard the children were "head-bangers," and some of the head-bangers had their hands tied behind their backs. This prevented them from gouging out the eyes of other kids, or their own eyes. Lupe would not tell Juan Diego her source.
There's no explaining why the dump kids thought it was perfectly logical that Circo de La Maravilla was a fortunate option, and the only acceptable alternative to their returning to Guerrero. Rivera would have welcomed the Guerrero choice, but he was notably absent when Flor drove the dump kids and Senor Eduardo to La Maravilla. And it would have been a tight fit for the dump boss, had he tried to squeeze into Brother Pepe's VW Beetle. To the dump kids, it also seemed perfectly logical that they were driven to the circus by a transvestite prostitute.
Flor was smoking as she drove, holding her cigarette out the driver's-side window, and Edward Bonshaw, who was nervous--he knew Flor was a prostitute; he didn't know she was a transvestite--said, as casually as he could, "I used to smoke. I kicked the habit."
"You think celibacy isn't a habit?" Flor asked him. Senor Eduardo was surprised that Flor's English was so good. He knew nothing of the unmentionable Houston experience in her life, and no one had told him that Flor had been born a boy (or that she still had a penis).
Flor navigated her way through a wedding party that had exited a church into the street: the bride and groom, the guests, a nonstop mariachi band--"the usual imbeciles," Flor called them.
"I'm worried about los ninos at the circus," Edward Bonshaw confided to the transvestite, choosing not to engage the celibacy subject, or tactfully allowing it to wait.
"Los ninos de la basura are almost old enough to be getting married," Flor said, as she made threatening gestures out the driver's-side window to anyone (even children) in the wedding party, the cigarette now dangling from her lips. "If these kids were getting married, I would be worried about them," Flor carried on. "At the circus, the worst that can go wrong is a lion kills you. There's a lot more that can go wrong with a marriage."
"Well, if that's how you feel about marriage, I suppose celibacy isn't such a bad idea," Edward Bonshaw said, in his Jesuitical way.
"There's only one actual lion at the circus," Juan Diego interposed from the backseat. "All the rest are lionesses."
"So that asshole Ignacio is a lioness tamer--is that what you're saying?" Flor asked the boy.
She'd just managed to get around, or through, the wedding party, when Flor and the VW Beetle encountered a tilted burro cart. The cart was overloaded with melons, but all the melons had rolled to the rear end of the cart, hoisting the burro by its harness into the air; the melons outweighed the little donkey, whose hooves were flailing. The front end of the burro cart was also suspended in the air.
"Another dangling donkey," Flor said. With surprising delicacy, she gave the finger to the burro-cart driver--using the same long-fingered hand that once again held her cigarette (between her thumb and index finger). About a dozen melons had rolled into the street, and the burro-cart driver had abandoned the dangling donkey because some street kids were stealing his melons.
