John Irving - Avenue of Mysteries

He’d sat up but had felt too dizzy to stand. Blood streamed down between his eyes and dripped from the end of his nose. The dog, now awake, had wagged her tail and licked the bleeding boy’s face.

Edward found the dog’s affectionate attention soothing. The boy was seven; his father had labeled him a “mama’s boy,” for no better reason than that Edward had expressed his dislike of hunting.

“Why shoot things that are alive?” he’d asked his father.

The dog didn’t like hunting, either. A Labrador retriever, she’d blundered into a neighbor’s swimming pool when she was still a puppy, and had almost drowned; thereafter, she was afraid of water — not normal for a Lab. Also “not normal,” in the unwavering opinion of Edward’s dictatorial father, was the dog’s disposition not to retrieve. (Neither a ball nor a stick — certainly not a dead bird.)

“What happened to the retriever part? Isn’t she supposed to be a Labrador retriever ?” Edward’s cruel uncle Ian always said.

But Edward loved the nonretrieving, never-swimming Lab, and the sweet dog doted on the boy; they were both “cowardly,” in the harsh judgment of Edward’s father, Graham. To young Edward, his father’s brother — the bullying uncle Ian — was an unkind dolt.

This is all the background necessary to understand what happened next. Edward’s father and Uncle Ian were hunting pheasants; they returned with a couple of the murdered birds, barging into the kitchen by the door to the garage.

This was the house in Coralville — at the time, a distant-seeming suburb of Iowa City — and Edward, bloody-faced, was sitting on the kitchen floor, where the nonretrieving, never-swimming Lab appeared to be eating the boy head-first. The men burst into the kitchen with Uncle Ian’s Chesapeake Bay retriever, a thoughtless male gundog of Ian’s own aggressive disposition and lack of discernible character.

“Fucking Beatrice !” Edward’s father shouted.

Graham Bonshaw had named the Lab Beatrice, the most derisively female name he could imagine; it was a name suitable for a dog that Uncle Ian said should be spayed—“so she won’t reproduce herself and further dilute a noble breed.”

The two hunters left Edward sitting on the kitchen floor while they took Beatrice outside and shot her in the driveway.

This was not quite the story you were expecting when Edward Bonshaw, in his later life, pointed to the L-shaped scar on his forehead and began, with disarming indifference, “In case you were wondering about my scar—” thereby leading you to the brutal killing of Beatrice, a dog young Edward had adored, a dog with the sweetest disposition imaginable.

And for all those years, Juan Diego remembered, Señor Eduardo had kept that pretty little mah-jongg tile — the block that had permanently checkmarked his fair forehead.

Was it the inconsequential cut from the towel rod on Juan Diego’s forehead, which had finally stopped bleeding, that triggered this nightmarish memory of Edward Bonshaw, who’d been so dearly beloved in Juan Diego’s life? Was it too short a flight, from Hong Kong to Manila, for Juan Diego to sleep soundly? It was not as short a flight as he’d imagined, but he was restless and half awake the entire two hours, and his dreams were disjointed; Juan Diego’s fitful sleep and the narrative disorder of his dreams were further evidence to him that he’d taken a double dose of beta-blockers.

He would dream intermittently all the way to Manila — foremost, the horrible history of Edward Bonshaw’s scar. That is exactly what taking two Lopressor pills will get you! Yet, tired though he was, Juan Diego was grateful to have dreamed at all, even disjointedly. The past was where he lived most confidently, and with the surest sense of knowing who he was — not only as a novelist.

• • •

THERE IS OFTEN TOO much dialogue in disjointed dreams, and things happen violently and without warning. The doctors’ offices in Cruz Roja, the Red Cross hospital in Oaxaca, were confusingly close to the emergency entrance — either a bad idea or by design, or both. A girl who’d been bitten by one of Oaxaca’s rooftop dogs was brought to the orthopedic office of Dr. Vargas instead of the ER; though her hands and forearms had been mangled while she was trying to protect her face, the girl did not present any obvious orthopedic problems. Dr. Vargas was an orthopedist — though he did treat circus people (mainly child performers), dump kids, and the orphans at Lost Children, not just for orthopedics.

Vargas was irked that the dog-bite victim had been brought to him. “You’re going to be fine, ” he kept telling the crying girl. “She should be in the ER — not with me,” Vargas repeatedly said to the girl’s hysterical mother. Everyone in the waiting room was upset to see the mauled girl — including Edward Bonshaw, who had only recently arrived in town.

“What is a rooftop dog?” Señor Eduardo asked Brother Pepe. “Not a breed of dog, I trust!” They were following Dr. Vargas to the examining room. Juan Diego was being wheeled on a gurney.

Lupe babbled something, which her injured brother was disinclined to translate. Lupe said some of the rooftop dogs were spirits — actual ghosts of dogs who’d been willfully tortured and killed. The ghost dogs haunted the rooftops of the city, attacking innocent people — because the dogs (in their innocence) had been attacked, and they were seeking revenge. The dogs lived on rooftops because they could fly; because they were ghost dogs, no one could harm them — not anymore.

“ That’s a long answer!” Edward Bonshaw confided to Juan Diego. “What did she say?”

“You’re right, not a breed,” was all Juan Diego told the new missionary.

“They’re mostly mongrels. There are many stray dogs in Oaxaca; some are feral. They just hang out on the rooftops — no one knows how the dogs get there,” Brother Pepe explained.

“They don’t fly,” Juan Diego added, but Lupe went on babbling. They were now in the examining room with Dr. Vargas.

“And what has happened to you ?” Dr. Vargas asked the incomprehensible girl. “Just calm down and tell me slowly, so I can understand you.”

“ I’m the patient — she’s just my sister,” Juan Diego said to the young doctor. Maybe Vargas hadn’t noticed the gurney.

Brother Pepe had already explained to Dr. Vargas that he’d examined these dump kids before, but Vargas saw too many patients — he had trouble keeping the kids straight. And Juan Diego’s pain had quieted down; for the moment, he’d stopped screaming.

Dr. Vargas was young and handsome; an aura of intemperate nobility, which can occasionally come from success, emanated from him. He was used to being right. Vargas was easily perturbed by the incompetence of others, though the impressive young man was too quickly inclined to judge people he was meeting for the first time. Everyone knew that Dr. Vargas was the foremost orthopedic surgeon in Oaxaca; crippled children were his specialty — and who didn’t care about crippled children? Yet Vargas rubbed everyone the wrong way. Children resented him because Vargas couldn’t remember them; adults thought he was arrogant.

“So you’re the patient,” Dr. Vargas said to Juan Diego. “Tell me about yourself. Not the dump-kid part. I can smell you; I know about the basurero. I mean your foot — just tell me about that part.”

“The part about my foot is a dump-kid part,” Juan Diego told the doctor. “A truck in Guerrero backed over my foot, with a load of copper from the basurero — a heavy load.”

Sometimes Lupe spoke in lists; this was one of those times. “One: this doctor is a sad jerk,” the all-seeing girl began. “Two: he is ashamed to be alive. Three: he thinks he should have died. Four: he’s going to say you need X-rays, but he’s just stalling — he already knows he can’t fix your foot.”