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"Just remember this: I'm not your rescue project," Flor was telling the Iowan, who was dissolved in tears--tears of happiness, conflicted tears, or just plain tears. Inconsolable crying, in other words--sometimes lust has a way of doing that to you, too.
Their small entourage had stopped in front of the lion cages.
"Hola, Hombre," Lupe said to the lion. There was no question that the big male cat was looking at Lupe--only at Lupe, not at Ignacio.
Maybe Juan Diego was summoning the necessary courage to be a skywalker; perhaps this was the moment when he believed he had the balls for it. Actually being a Boy Wonder seemed possible.
"Any lingering thoughts on your mind about her being retarded?" the crippled boy asked the lion tamer. "You can see that Hombre knows she's a mind reader, can't you?" Juan Diego asked Ignacio. "A real one," the boy added. He wasn't half as confident as he sounded.
"Just don't try to fuck with me, ceiling-walker," Ignacio told Juan Diego. "Don't ever lie to me about what your sister says. I'll know if you're lying, practice-tent-walker. I can read what's on your mind--a little," the lion tamer said.
When Juan Diego looked at Lupe, she made no comment--she didn't even shrug. The girl was concentrating on the lion. To even the most casual passerby in the avenue of troupe tents, Lupe and Hombre were completely attuned to each other's thoughts. The old male lion and the girl weren't paying attention to anyone else.
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Casa Vargas
In Juan Diego's dream, it was impossible to tell where the music came from. It did not have the hard-sell sound of a mariachi band, working its way among the outdoor cafe tables at the Marques del Valle--one of those annoying bands that might have been playing anywhere in the zocalo. And although the circus band at La Maravilla had its own brass-and-drum version of "Streets of Laredo," this was not their moribund and dirgelike distortion of the cowboy's lament.
For one thing, Juan Diego heard a voice singing; in his dream, he heard the lyrics--if not as sweetly as the good gringo used to sing them. Oh, how el gringo bueno had loved "Streets of Laredo"--the dear boy could sing that ballad in his sleep! Even Lupe sang that song sweetly. Though her voice was strained and difficult to understand, Lupe did have a girl's voice--an innocent-sounding voice.
The amateur vocalizing from the beach club had ceased, so it couldn't have been the shopworn karaoke music that Juan Diego heard; the New Year's Eve celebrants at the Panglao Island beach club had gone to bed, or they'd drowned taking a night swim. And no one was still ringing in the New Year at the Encantador--even the Nocturnal Monkeys were mercifully silent.
It was pitch-dark in Juan Diego's hotel room; he held his breath because he could not hear Miriam breathing--only the mournful cowboy song in a voice Juan Diego didn't recognize. Or did he? It was strange to hear "Streets of Laredo" sung by an older woman; it didn't sound right. But wasn't the voice itself borderline recognizable? It was just the wrong voice for that song.
" 'I see, by your outfit, that you are a cowboy,' " the woman was singing in a low, husky voice. " 'These words he did say as I slowly walked by.' "
Was it Miriam's voice? Juan Diego wondered. How could she be singing when he couldn't hear her breathing? In the darkness, Juan Diego wasn't sure she was really there.
"Miriam?" he whispered. Then he said her name again, a little louder.
There was no singing now--"Streets of Laredo" had stopped. There was no detectable breathing, either; Juan Diego held his breath. He was listening for the slightest sound from Miriam; maybe she'd returned to her own room. He might have been snoring, or talking in his sleep--occasionally, Juan Diego talked when he dreamed.
I should touch her--just to feel if she's there or not, Juan Diego was thinking, but he was afraid to find out. He touched his penis; he smelled his fingers. The sex smell shouldn't have startled him--surely he remembered having sex with Miriam. But he didn't, not exactly. He had definitely said something--about the way she felt, how it felt to be inside her. He'd said "silky" or "silken"; this was all he could recall, only the language.
And Miriam had said: "You're funny--you need to have a word for everything."
Then a rooster crowed--in total darkness! Were roosters crazy in the Philippines? Was this stupid rooster disoriented by the karaoke music? Had the dumb bird mistaken the Nocturnal Monkeys for nocturnal hens?
"Someone should kill that rooster," Miriam said in her low, husky voice; he felt her bare breasts touch his chest and his upper arm--the fingers of her hand closed around his penis. Maybe Miriam could see in the dark. "There you are, darling," she told him, as if he'd needed assurance that he existed--that he was really there, with her--when all the while he'd been wondering if she were real, if she actually existed. (That was what he'd been afraid to find out.)
The crazy rooster crowed again in the darkness.
"I learned to swim in Iowa," he told Miriam in the dark--a funny thing to say to someone holding your penis, but this was how time happened to Juan Diego (not only in his dreams). Time jumped ahead or back; time seemed more associative than linear, but it wasn't exclusively associative, either.
"Iowa," Miriam murmured. "Not what comes to mind when I think of swimming."
"I don't limp in the water," Juan Diego told her. Miriam was making him hard again. When he wasn't in Iowa City, Juan Diego didn't meet many people who were interested in Iowa. "You've probably never been in the Midwest," Juan Diego said to Miriam.
"Oh, I've been everywhere," Miriam demurred, in that laconic way she had.
Everywhere? Juan Diego wondered. No one's been everywhere, he thought. But in regard to a sense of place, one's individual perspective matters, doesn't it? Not every fourteen-year-old, upon encountering Iowa City for the first time, would have found the move from Mexico exhilarating; for Juan Diego, Iowa was an adventure. He was a boy who'd never emulated the young people he saw around him; suddenly there were students everywhere. Iowa City was a college town, a Big Ten town--the campus was downtown, the city and the university were one and the same. Why wouldn't a dump reader find a college town fascinating?
Granted, it would soon strike any fourteen-year-old boy that the Iowa campus heroes were its sports stars. Yet this was consistent with what Juan Diego had imagined about the United States--from a Mexican kid's perspective, movie stars and sports heroes seemed to be the zenith of American culture. As Dr. Rosemary Stein had told Juan Diego, he was either a kid from Mexico or a grown-up from Iowa all the time.
For Flor, the transition to Iowa City from Oaxaca must have been more difficult--if not the magnitude of misadventure Houston had represented for her. In a Big Ten university town, what opportunities existed for a transvestite and former prostitute? She'd already made a mistake in Houston; Flor was disinclined to take any chances in Iowa City. Meekness, keeping a low profile--well, it wasn't in Flor's nature to be tentative. Flor had always asserted herself.
