John Irving - Avenue of Mysteries

“What is this place? A vision of Hades, with a matching odor! What terrible rite of passage do these poor children undertake here?” the dramatic young Bonshaw asked.

How will we endure this lovable lunatic? Brother Pepe asked himself; that the zealot was well-meaning would not impress Oaxaca. But all Pepe said was: “It’s just the city dump. The smell comes from burning the dead dogs, among other things. Our mission has reached out to two children here — dos pepenadores, two scavengers.”

“Scavengers!” Edward Bonshaw cried.

“Los niños de la basura,” Pepe said softly, hoping to create some separation between the scavenging children and the scavenging dogs.

Just then, a begrimed boy of indeterminable age — definitely a dump kid; you could tell by his too-big boots — thrust a small, shivering dog in the passenger-side window of Brother Pepe’s VW Beetle.

“No, thank you,” Edward Bonshaw politely said — more to the foul-smelling little dog than to the dump kid, who bluntly stated that the starving creature was free. (Dump kids weren’t beggars.)

“You shouldn’t touch that dog!” Pepe shouted at the dump kid in Spanish. “You could be bitten!” Pepe told the urchin.

“I know about rabies!” the dirty kid cried; he withdrew the cringing dog from the window. “I know about the shots!” the little scavenger yelled at Brother Pepe.

“What a beautiful language!” Edward Bonshaw remarked.

Dearest Lord — the scholastic doesn’t understand Spanish at all! Pepe surmised. A film of ash had coated the windshield of the VW Beetle, and Pepe discovered that the wipers only served to smear the ashes — further obscuring his view of the road out of the basurero. It was because he had to get out of his car to clean the windshield with an old cloth that Brother Pepe told the new missionary about Juan Diego, the dump reader; perhaps Pepe should have said a little more about the boy’s younger sister — specifically, Lupe’s apparent mind-reading ability and the girl’s unintelligible speech. But, given the optimist and the enthusiast that he was, Brother Pepe tended to focus his attention on the positive and the uncomplicated.

The girl, Lupe, was somewhat disturbing, whereas the boy —well, Juan Diego was simply wonderful. There was nothing contradictory about a fourteen-year-old, born and raised in the basurero, who’d taught himself to read in two languages!

“Thank you, Jesus,” Edward Bonshaw said, when the two Jesuits were under way again — headed in the right direction, back to Oaxaca.

Thanks for what ? Pepe was wondering, when the young American continued his oh-so-earnest prayer. “Thank you for my total immersion in where I am most needed,” the scholastic said.

“It’s just the city dump,” Brother Pepe said, again. “Dump kids are pretty well looked after. Trust me, Edward — you are not needed in the basurero.”

“Eduardo,” the young American corrected him.

“Sí, Eduardo,” was all Pepe managed to say. For years, he’d stood alone against Father Alfonso and Father Octavio; those priests were older and more theologically informed than Brother Pepe. Father Alfonso and Father Octavio could make Pepe feel as if he were a betrayer of the Catholic faith — as if he were a raving secular humanist, or worse. (Could there be anyone worse, from a Jesuitical perspective?) Father Alfonso and Father Octavio knew their Catholic dogma by rote; while the two priests talked circles around Brother Pepe, and they made Pepe feel inadequate in his belief, they were irreparably doctrinaire.

In Edward Bonshaw, perhaps Pepe had found a worthy opponent for those two old Jesuit priests — a crazy but daring combatant, one who might challenge the very nature of the mission at Niños Perdidos.

Had the young scholastic actually thanked the dear Lord for what he called his “total immersion” in the need to save two dump kids? Did the American really believe the dump kids were candidates for salvation?

“I’m sorry for not properly welcoming you, Señor Eduardo,” Brother Pepe now said. “Lo siento — bienvenido,” Pepe added admiringly.

“¡Gracias!” the zealot cried. Through the ash-bleared windshield, they could both discern a small obstacle in the rotary ahead; the traffic was veering away from something. “Road kill?” Edward Bonshaw asked.

A quarrelsome contingent of dogs and crows competed over the unseen dead; as the red VW Beetle came closer, Brother Pepe blew his horn. The crows took flight; the dogs scattered. All that remained in the road was a smear of blood. The road kill, if that’s what had spilled the blood, was gone.

“The dogs and the crows ate it,” Edward Bonshaw said. More exclamations about the obvious, Brother Pepe was thinking, but that was when Juan Diego spoke — instantly waking himself from his long sleep, his dream, which wasn’t strictly a dream. (It was more like dreams manipulated by memories, or the other way around; it was what he’d been missing since the beta-blockers had stolen his childhood and his all-important early adolescence.)

“No — it’s not road kill,” Juan Diego said. “It’s my blood. It dripped from Rivera’s truck — Diablo didn’t lick up every drop.”

“Were you writing ?” Miriam, the imperious mother, asked Juan Diego.

“It sounds like a gruesome story,” the daughter, Dorothy, said.

Their two less-than-angelic faces peered down at him; he was aware that they’d both been to the lavatory and had brushed their teeth — their breath, but not his, was very fresh. The flight attendants were fussing about the first-class cabin.

Cathay Pacific 841 was descending to Hong Kong; a foreign but welcome smell was in the air, definitely not the Oaxaca basurero.

“We were about to wake you, when you woke up,” Miriam told him.

“You don’t want to miss the green-tea muffins — they’re almost as good as sex,” Dorothy said.

“Sex, sex, sex — enough sex, Dorothy,” her mother said.

Juan Diego, aware of how bad his breath must be, gave the two women a tight-lipped smile. He was slowly realizing where he was, and who these two attractive women were. Oh, yes — I skipped the beta-blockers, he was remembering. I was briefly back where I belong ! he was thinking; how his heart ached to be back there.

And what was this ? He had an erection in his comical Cathay Pacific sleeping suit, his clownish trans-Pacific pajamas. And he hadn’t taken even half of one Viagra — his gray-blue Viagra tablets, together with the beta-blockers, were in his checked bag.

Juan Diego had slept for more than fifteen hours of what was a flight lasting sixteen hours and ten minutes. He limped off to the lavatory with noticeably quicker, lighter steps. His self-appointed angels (if not quite in the guardian category) watched him go; both mother and daughter seemed to regard him fondly.

“He’s darling, isn’t he?” Miriam asked her daughter.

“He’s cute, all right,” Dorothy said.

“Thank goodness we found him — he would be utterly lost without us!” the mother remarked.

“Thank goodness,” Dorothy repeated; the goodness word escaped somewhat unnaturally from the young woman’s overripe lips.

“He was writing, I think — imagine writing in your sleep !” Miriam exclaimed.

“About blood dripping from a truck!” Dorothy said. “Doesn’t diablo mean ‘the devil’?” she asked her mom, who just shrugged.

“Honestly, Dorothy — you do go on and on about green-tea muffins. It’s just a muffin, for Christ’s sake,” Miriam told her daughter. “Eating a muffin isn’t remotely the same as having sex!”