John Irving - Avenue of Mysteries

As for Dorothy, she would never be as beautiful as her mother, but the girl had a sullen, neglected prettiness — of the kind that a younger woman who’s a little too heavy can get away with for a few more years. (“Voluptuous” wouldn’t always be the word Dorothy brought to mind, Juan Diego knew — realizing, if only to himself, that he was writing about these efficient women, even as he allowed them to assist him.)

Whoever they were, and wherever they were going, this mother and daughter were veterans of traveling first class on Cathay Pacific. When Flight 841 to Hong Kong finally boarded, Miriam and Dorothy wouldn’t let the doll-faced flight attendant show Juan Diego how to put on Cathay Pacific’s one-piece pajamas or operate the cocoon-like sleeping capsule. Miriam marched him through the routine of how to put on the childish pajamas, and Dorothy — the technological wizard in the two-woman family — demonstrated the mechanics of the most comfortable bed Juan Diego had ever encountered on an airplane. The two women virtually tucked him in.

I think they were both flirting with me, Juan Diego mused as he was falling asleep — certainly the daughter was. Of course Dorothy reminded Juan Diego of students he’d known over the years; many of them, he knew, had only appeared to be flirting with him. There were young women that age — some solitary, tomboyish writers among them — who’d struck the older writer as knowing only two kinds of social behavior: they knew how to flirt, and they knew how to show irreversible contempt.

Juan Diego was almost asleep when he remembered that he was taking an unplanned break from the beta-blockers; he was already beginning to dream when a mildly troubling thought occurred to him, albeit briefly, before it drifted away. The thought was: I don’t really understand what happens when you stop and restart the beta-blockers. But the dream (or memory) was overtaking him, and he let it come.

There was a gecko. It shrank from the first light of the sunrise, clinging to the mesh on the shack’s screen door. In the blink of an eye, in that half-second before the boy could touch the screen, the gecko was gone. Quicker than turning on or off a light, the gecko’s disappearance often began Juan Diego’s dream — as the disappearing lizard had begun many of the boy’s mornings in Guerrero.

Rivera had built the shack for himself, but he’d remodeled the interior for the kids; though he was probably not Juan Diego’s father, and definitely not Lupe’s, el jefe had made a deal with their mother. Even at fourteen, Juan Diego knew there was not much of a deal between those two now. Esperanza, notwithstanding that she’d been named for hope, had never been a source of hope to her own children, nor did she ever encourage Rivera — as far as Juan Diego had seen. Not that a fourteen-year-old boy would necessarily notice such things, and, at thirteen, Lupe wasn’t a reliable witness to what might, or might not, have gone on between her mother and the dump boss.

As for “reliable,” Rivera was the one person who could be counted on to look after these two dump kids — to the degree that anyone could protect los niños de la basura. Rivera had provided the only shelter for these two, and he’d sheltered Juan Diego and Lupe in other ways.

When el jefe went home at night — or wherever Rivera actually went — he left his truck and his dog with Juan Diego. The truck afforded the kids a second shelter, should they need it — unlike the shack, the cab of the truck could be locked — and no one but Juan Diego or Lupe would dare approach Rivera’s dog. Even the dump boss was wary of that dog: an underfed-looking male, he was a terrier-hound mix.

According to el jefe, the dog was part pit bull, part bloodhound — hence he was predisposed to fight, and to track down things by their smell.

“Diablo is biologically inclined to be aggressive,” Rivera had said.

“I think you mean genetically inclined,” Juan Diego had corrected him.

It’s hard to appreciate the degree that a dump kid could acquire such a sophisticated vocabulary; beyond the flattering attention paid to the unschooled boy by Brother Pepe at the Jesuit mission in Oaxaca, Juan Diego didn’t have an education — yet the boy had managed to do more than teach himself to read. He also spoke exceedingly well. The dump kid even spoke English, though his only exposure to the spoken language came from the U.S. tourists. In Oaxaca, at that time, the American expatriates amounted to an arts-and-crafts crowd and the usual potheads. Increasingly, as the Vietnam War dragged on — past 1968, when Nixon had been elected on the promise that he would end it — there were those lost souls (“the young men searching for themselves,” Brother Pepe called them), who in many cases comprised the draft dodgers.

Juan Diego and Lupe had little luck communicating with the potheads. The mushroom hippies were too busy expanding their consciousness by hallucinogenic means; they didn’t waste their time talking to children. The mescal hippies — if only when they were sober — enjoyed their conversations with the dump kids, and occasional readers could be found among them, although the mescal affected what these readers could remember. Quite a few of the draft dodgers were readers; they gave Juan Diego their paperback novels. These were mostly American novels, of course; they inspired Juan Diego to imagine living there.

And only seconds after the early-morning gecko had vanished, and the screen door of the shack slapped shut behind Juan Diego, a crow took flight from the hood of Rivera’s truck, and all the dogs in Guerrero began to bark. The boy watched the crow in flight — any excuse to imagine flying captivated him — while Diablo, rousing himself from the flatbed of Rivera’s pickup, commenced an ungodly baying that silenced all of the other dogs. Diablo’s baying was the bloodhound gene in Rivera’s scary dog; the pit-bull part, the fighter gene, was responsible for the missing lid of the dog’s bloodshot and permanently open left eye. The pinkish scar, where the eyelid had been, gave Diablo a baleful stare. (A dogfight, perhaps, or a person with a knife; the dump boss hadn’t witnessed the altercation, human or beast.)

As for the jagged-edged, triangular piece that had been less than surgically removed from one of the dog’s long ears — well, that one was anyone’s guess.

“ You did it, Lupe,” Rivera once said, smiling at the girl. “Diablo would let you do anything to him — even eat his ear.”

Lupe had made a perfect triangle with her index fingers and her thumbs. What she said required Juan Diego’s translation, as always, or Rivera would not have understood her. “No animal or human has the teeth to bite like that,” the girl incontrovertibly said.

Los niños de la basura never knew when (or from where) Rivera arrived every morning at the basurero, or by what means el jefe had come down the hill from the dump to Guerrero. The dump boss was usually found napping in the cab of his truck; either the pistol-shot slap of the closing screen door or the barking dogs woke him. Or Diablo’s baying woke him, a half-second later — or earlier, that gecko, which almost no one saw.

“Buenos días, jefe,” Juan Diego usually said.

“It’s a good day to do everything well, amigo,” Rivera often answered the boy. The dump boss would add: “And where is the genius princess?”

“I am where I always am,” Lupe would answer him, the screen door slapping shut behind her. That second pistol shot reached as far as the hellfires in the basurero. More crows took flight. There was a disharmonious barking; the dump dogs and the dogs in Guerrero barked. Another menacing and all-silencing howl followed from Diablo, whose wet nose now touched the boy’s bare knee below his tattered shorts.