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"You better not become anything, Juan Diego," Flor had told the fourteen-year-old, while Pepe was weeping inconsolably. "Trust us, Pepe--Edward and I won't let the kid amount to beans," Flor said. "We'll be sure he becomes one of those Mexican nobodies."
Edward Bonshaw, overhearing all this, had only understood his name.
"Eduardo," Edward Bonshaw had said, correcting Flor, who'd just smiled at him understandingly.
"They were my parents, or they tried to be!" Juan Diego attempted to say out loud, but the words wouldn't come in the darkness. "Oh," was all he managed to say--again. The way Miriam was moving on top of him, he couldn't have said more than that.
PERRO MESTIZO, A.K.A. MONGREL, was quarantined and observed for ten days--if you're looking for rabies, this is a common procedure for biting animals that don't look sick. (Mongrel was not rabid, but Dr. Vargas, consistent with his giving Edward Bonshaw rabies shots, had wanted to be sure.) For ten days, the dog act wasn't performed at Circo de La Maravilla; the baby-stealer's quarantine was a disruption to the routine of the other dogs in the dump kids' troupe tent.
Baby, the male dachshund, peed on the dirt floor of the tent every night. Pastora, the female sheepdog, whined ceaselessly. Estrella had to sleep in the dogs' troupe tent, or Pastora would never have been quiet--and Estrella snored. The sight of Estrella sleeping on her back, her face shadowed by the visor of her baseball cap, gave Lupe nightmares, but Estrella said she couldn't sleep bareheaded because the mosquitoes would bite her bald head; then her head would itch and she couldn't scratch it without removing her wig, which upset the dogs. During Perro Mestizo's quarantine, Alemania, the female German Shepherd, stood over Juan Diego's cot at night, panting in the boy's face. Lupe blamed Vargas for "demonizing" Mongrel; poor Perro Mestizo, "always the bad guy," was once more a victim in Lupe's eyes.
"The asshole dog bit Senor Eduardo," Juan Diego reminded his sister. The asshole-dog idea was Rivera's. Lupe didn't believe there were asshole dogs.
"Senor Eduardo was falling in love with Flor's penis!" Lupe cried--as if this new and disturbing development had caused Perro Mestizo to attack the Iowan. But this meant Perro Mestizo was homophobic, and didn't that make him an asshole dog?
Yet Juan Diego was able to persuade Lupe to stay at La Maravilla--at least until after the circus had traveled to Mexico City. The trip mattered more to Lupe than it did to Juan Diego; scattering their mother's ashes (and the good gringo's ashes, and Dirty White's, not to mention the remains of the Virgin Mary's enormous nose) meant a lot to Lupe. She believed Our Lady of Guadalupe had been marginalized in Oaxaca's churches; Guadalupe was a second fiddle in Oaxaca.
Esperanza, whatever her faults, had been "bumped off" by the Mary Monster, in Lupe's view. The clairvoyant child believed the wrongness of the religious world would right itself--if, and only if, her sinful mother's ashes were scattered at the Basilica de Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe in Mexico City. Only there did the dark-skinned virgin, la virgen morena, draw busloads of pilgrims to her shrine. Lupe longed to see the Chapel of the Well--where Guadalupe, encased in glass, lay on her deathbed.
Even with his limp, Juan Diego looked forward to the long climb--the endless stairs leading to El Cerrito de las Rosas, the temple where Guadalupe wasn't tucked away in a side altar. She was elevated at the front of the sacred El Cerrito, "The Little Hill." (Lupe, instead of saying "El Cerrito," liked to call the temple "Of the Roses"; she said this sounded more sacred than "The Little Hill.") Either there or at the dark-skinned virgin's deathbed in the Chapel of the Well, the dump kids would scatter the ashes, which they'd kept in a coffee can Rivera had found at the basurero.
The contents of the coffee can did not have Esperanza's smell. They had a nondescript odor. Flor had sniffed the ashes; she'd said it wasn't the good gringo's smell, either.
"It smells like coffee," Edward Bonshaw had said when he'd sniffed the coffee can.
Whatever the ashes smelled like, the dogs in the troupe tent weren't interested. Maybe there was a medicinal odor; Estrella said anything that smelled like medicine would put off the dogs. Perhaps the unidentifiable smell was the Virgin Mary's nose.
"It's definitely not Dirty White," was all Lupe would say about the smell; she sniffed the ashes in the coffee can every night before going to bed.
Juan Diego could never read her mind--he didn't even try. Possibly Lupe liked to sniff the contents of the coffee can because she knew they would be scattering the ashes soon, and she wanted to remember the smell after the ashes were gone.
Shortly before Circus of The Wonder would travel to Mexico City--a long trip, especially in a caravan of trucks and buses--Lupe brought the coffee can to a dinner party they were invited to, at Dr. Vargas's house in Oaxaca. Lupe told Juan Diego that she wanted a "scientific opinion" of the ashes' smell.
"But it's a dinner party, Lupe," Juan Diego said. It was the first dinner party the dump kids had been invited to; in all likelihood, they knew, the invitation wasn't Vargas's idea.
Brother Pepe had discussed with Vargas what Pepe called Edward Bonshaw's "test of the soul." Dr. Vargas didn't think Flor had presented the Iowan with a spiritual crisis. In fact, Vargas had offended Flor by suggesting to Senor Eduardo that the only reason to worry about his relationship with a transvestite prostitute might be a medical matter.
Dr. Vargas meant sexually transmitted diseases; he meant how many partners a prostitute had, and what Flor might have picked up from one of them. It didn't matter to Vargas that Flor had a penis--or that Edward Bonshaw had one, too, and that the Iowan would have to give up his hope of becoming a priest because of it.
That Edward Bonshaw had broken his vow of celibacy didn't matter to Dr. Vargas, either. "I just don't want your dick to fall off--or turn green, or something," Vargas had said to the Iowan. That was what offended Flor, and why she wouldn't come to the dinner party at Casa Vargas.
In Oaxaca, anyone who had an ax to grind with Vargas called his house "Casa Vargas." This included people who disliked him for his family wealth, or thought it was insensitive of him to have moved into his parents' mansion after they'd been killed in a plane crash. (By now, everyone in Oaxaca knew the story of how Vargas was supposed to have been on that plane.) And among the people who played the "Casa Vargas" card were those who'd been offended by how brusque Vargas could be. He used science like a bludgeon; he was inclined to club you with a strictly medical detail--the way he'd relegated Flor to a potential sexually transmitted disease.
Well, that was Vargas--that was who he was. Brother Pepe knew him well. Pepe thought he could count on Vargas to be cynical about everything. Pepe believed the dump kids and Edward Bonshaw could benefit from some of Vargas's cynicism. This was why Pepe had prevailed upon Vargas to invite the Iowan and the dump kids to the dinner party.
Pepe knew other scholastics who'd failed their vows. There could be doubts and detours on the road to the priesthood. When the most zealous students abandoned their studies, the emotional and psychological aspects of "reorientation," as Pepe thought of it, could be brutal.
No doubt Edward Bonshaw had questioned whether or not he was gay, or if he was in love with this particular person who just happened to have breasts and a penis. No doubt Senor Eduardo had asked himself: Aren't a lot of gay men not attracted to transvestites? Yet Edward Bonshaw knew that some gay men were attracted to trannies.
But did that make him, Senor Eduardo must have wondered, a sexual minority within a minority?
Brother Pepe didn't care about those distinctions within distinctions. Pepe had a lot of love in him. Pepe knew that the matter of the Iowan's sexual orientation was strictly Edward Bonshaw's business.
Brother Pepe didn't have a problem with Senor Eduardo's belatedly discovering his homosexual self (if that's what was going on), or his abandoning the quest to become a priest; it was okay with Pepe that Edward Bonshaw was smitten by a cross-dresser with a penis. And Pepe didn't dislike Flor, but Pepe had a problem with the prostitute part--not necessarily for Vargas's sexually transmitted reasons. Pepe knew that Flor had always been in trouble; she'd lived surrounded by trouble (not everything could be blamed on Houston), while Edward Bonshaw had scarcely lived at all. What would two people like that do together in Iowa? For Senor Eduardo, in Pepe's opinion, Flor was a step too far--Flor's world was without boundaries.
As for Flor--who knew what she was thinking? "I think you're a very nice parrot man," Flor had said to the Iowan. "I should have met you when I was a kid," she'd told him. "We might have helped each other get through some shit."
Well, yes--Brother Pepe would have agreed to that. But wasn't now too late for the two of them? As for Dr. Vargas--specifically, his "offending" Flor--Pepe might have put Vargas up to it. Yet no litany of sexually transmitted diseases was likely to scare Edward Bonshaw away; sexual attraction isn't strictly scientific.
