John Irving - Avenue of Mysteries

“What does the lion tamer’s wife—” Juan Diego whispered.

“Soledad knows the pig fucks the girl acrobats, when they’re ‘old enough’—she’s just sad about it,” Lupe told him.

When Dolores got to the end of the skywalk, she reached up for the ladder with both hands and allowed her long legs to hang down; her scarred bare feet were not many inches above the ground when she let go of the ladder and dropped to the dirt floor of the tent.

“Remind me,” Dolores said to Soledad. “What does the cripple do? Something not with his feet, probably,” the superior young woman said — a goddess of bitchery, Juan Diego thought.

“Mouse tits, spoiled cunt — let the lion tamer knock her up! That’s her only future!” Lupe said. Vulgarity to this extreme was uncharacteristic of Lupe, but she was reading the minds of the other girl acrobats; Lupe’s language would coarsen at the circus. (Juan Diego didn’t translate this outburst, of course — he was smitten by Dolores.)

“Juan Diego is a translator — the brother is his sister’s interpreter,” Soledad told the proud girl. Dolores shrugged.

“Die in childbirth, monkey twat!” Lupe said to Dolores. (More mind reading — the other girl acrobats hated Dolores.)

“What did she say?” Dolores asked Juan Diego.

“Lupe was wondering if the rope rungs hurt the tops of your feet,” Juan Diego said haltingly to the skywalker. (The raw-looking scars on the tops of Dolores’s feet were obvious to anyone.)

“At first,” Dolores answered, “but you get used to it.”

“It’s good that they’re talking to each other, isn’t it?” Edward Bonshaw asked Flor. No one in the troupe tent wanted to stand next to Flor. Ignacio stood as far away from Flor as he could get — the transvestite was a lot taller and broader in the shoulders than the lion tamer.

“I guess so,” Flor said to the missionary. No one wanted to stand next to Señor Eduardo, either, but that was only because of the elephant shit on his sandals.

Flor said something to the lion tamer, and received the shortest possible reply; this brief exchange happened so quickly that Edward Bonshaw didn’t understand.

“What?” the Iowan asked Flor.

“I was asking where we might find a hose,” Flor told him.

“Señor Eduardo is still thinking about Flor having a penis,” Lupe said to Juan Diego. “He can’t stop thinking about her penis.”

“Jesus,” Juan Diego said. Too many things were happening too fast.

“The mind reader is talking about Jesus?” Dolores asked.

“She said you walk on the sky the way Jesus could walk on water,” Juan Diego lied to the stuck-up fourteen-year-old.

“What a liar!” Lupe exclaimed, with disgust.

“She wonders about how you support your weight, upside down, by the tops of your feet. It must take a while to develop the muscles that hold your feet in that right-angle position, so your feet don’t slip out of the ropes. Tell me about that part,” Juan Diego said to the pretty skywalker. He finally got his breathing under control.

“Your sister is very observant,” Dolores said to the cripple. “That’s the hardest part.”

“It would be only half as hard for me to skywalk,” Juan Diego told Dolores. He kicked off his special shoe and showed her his twisted foot; yes, it was a little out of alignment with his shin — the foot pointed off in a two-o’clock direction — but the crushed foot was permanently frozen at a right angle. There was no muscle that needed to be developed in the crippled boy’s right foot. That foot wouldn’t bend; it couldn’t bend. His maimed right foot was locked in the perfect position for skywalking. “You see?” Juan Diego said to Dolores. “I would have to train only one foot — the left one. Wouldn’t that make skywalking easier for me?”

Soledad, who trained the skywalkers, knelt on the dirt floor of the troupe tent, feeling Juan Diego’s crippled foot. Juan Diego would always remember this moment: it was the first time anyone had handled that foot since it had healed, in its fashion — not to mention this being the first time anyone would touch that foot appreciatively.

“The boy’s right, Ignacio,” Soledad said to her husband. “The skywalk is half as hard for Juan Diego to learn. This foot is a hook — this foot already knows how to skywalk.”

“Only girls can be skywalkers,” the lion tamer said. “La Maravilla is always a girl.” (The man was a male machine, a penile robot.)

“The dirty pig isn’t interested in your puberty,” Lupe explained to Juan Diego, but she was angrier with Juan Diego than she was disgusted by Ignacio. “You can’t be The Wonder — you’ll die skywalking! You’re supposed to leave Mexico with Señor Eduardo,” Lupe said to her brother. “You don’t stay at the circus. La Maravilla isn’t permanent — not for you !” Lupe said to him. “You’re not an acrobat, you’re no athlete — you can’t even walk without a limp!” Lupe cried.

“No limp upside down — I can walk fine up there,” Juan Diego told her; he pointed to the horizontal ladder on the ceiling of the troupe tent.

“Maybe the cripple should have a look at the ladder in the big tent,” Dolores said, to no one in particular. “It takes balls to be The Wonder on that ladder,” the superior girl said to Juan Diego. “Anyone can be a skywalker in the practice tent.”

“I have balls,” the boy told her. The girl acrobats laughed at this, not only Dolores. Ignacio laughed, too, but not his wife.

Soledad had kept her hand on the cripple’s bad foot. “We’ll see if he has the balls for it,” Soledad said. “This foot gives him an advantage —that’s all the boy and I are saying.”

“No boy can be La Maravilla,” Ignacio said; he was coiling and uncoiling his whip — more in a nervous than a threatening fashion.

“Why not?” his wife asked. “I’m the one who trains the skywalkers, aren’t I?” (Not all the lionesses were tamed, either.)

“I don’t like the sound of this,” Edward Bonshaw said to Flor. “They’re not serious about Juan Diego going anywhere near that ladder trick, are they? The boy isn’t serious, is he?” the Iowan asked Flor.

“The kid has balls, doesn’t he?” Flor asked the missionary.

“No, no — no skywalking!” Lupe cried. “You have another future!” the girl told her brother. “We should go back to Lost Children. No more circus!” Lupe cried. “Too much mind reading,” the girl said. She was suddenly looking at how the lion tamer was looking at her ; Juan Diego saw Ignacio looking at Lupe, too.

“What?” Juan Diego asked his little sister. “What’s the pig thinking now ?” he whispered to her.

Lupe couldn’t look at the lion tamer. “He’s thinking he would like to fuck me, when I’m ready, ” Lupe told Juan Diego. “He’s wondering what it would be like to fuck a retarded girl — a girl who can be understood only by her crippled brother.”

“You know what I’ve been thinking?” Ignacio suddenly said. The lion tamer was looking at an undesignated location, perfectly between Lupe and Juan Diego, and Juan Diego wondered if this was a tactic Ignacio used with the lions — namely, not to make eye contact with an individual lion but to make the lions think he was looking at all of them. Definitely, too many things were happening at once.

“Lupe knows what you’ve been thinking,” Juan Diego told the lion tamer. “She’s not retarded.”

“What I was going to say,” Ignacio said, still looking at neither Juan Diego nor Lupe, but at a spot somewhere between them, “is that most mind readers or fortune-tellers, or whatever they call themselves, are fakes. The ones who can do it on demand are definitely fakes. The real ones can read some people’s minds, but not everyone’s. The real ones find most people’s minds uninteresting. The real ones pick up from people’s minds only the stuff that stands out.”