John Irving - Avenue of Mysteries

The two dwarf clowns were not lecherous — not in the case of the beautiful but unapproachable skywalker, The Wonder herself. Paco was a gay guy — what did Paco care about getting a look at Dolores? And Beer Belly had all he could possibly handle with his two-condom wife; Beer Belly wasn’t personally interested in seeing Dolores naked, either.

But the two dwarfs had a bet between them. Paco had said: “My tits are bigger than Dolores’s.” Beer Belly bet that Dolores’s were bigger. This was why the two clowns were always trying to get a look at Dolores in the outdoor shower. Dolores had heard about the bet; she wasn’t happy about it. Juan Diego had imagined the shower falling down — Dolores exposed, the dwarf clowns arguing about breast size. (Lupe, who’d used the mouse-tits definition for Dolores’s breasts, was on Paco’s side; Lupe believed Paco’s tits were bigger.)

That was why Juan Diego followed Paco and Beer Belly to the outdoor showers; the fourteen-year-old hoped something might happen, and he would get to see Dolores naked. (Juan Diego didn’t care that her breasts were small; he believed she was beautiful, even if her tits were tiny.)

The dwarf clowns and Juan Diego could see Dolores’s head and bare shoulders above the prefabricated barrier of the outdoor shower. That was when one of the elephants appeared in the avenue of troupe tents; the elephant was dragging the dead horse, who had been chained around the neck. The police followed after Mañana’s body; there were ten policemen for one dead horse. Ignacio and the policemen were arguing.

Dolores’s head was thickly lathered with shampoo — her eyes were closed. You could see her ankles and her bare feet below the flimsy plywood barrier; the shampoo suds covered her feet. Juan Diego was thinking that maybe the shampoo stung the open wounds on the tops of her feet.

The lion tamer stopped talking when he saw that Dolores was in one of the outdoor showers. The policemen all looked in The Wonder’s direction, too.

“Maybe now isn’t such a good time,” Beer Belly said to his dwarf buddy, Paco.

“I say now’s the perfect time,” Paco said, waddling faster. The dwarf clowns ran to Dolores’s outdoor shower. They couldn’t have seen over the prefabricated barrier without (impossibly) standing on each other’s shoulders, so they looked under the plywood at the bottom of the shower — staring upward, into the falling water and shampoo. They were looking for only a second or two; their heads were wet with water (and frothy with shampoo) when they straightened up and turned away from Dolores’s shower. Dolores was still washing her hair; she’d never noticed the dwarfs stealing a look at her. But then Juan Diego tried to peer over the top of the prefabricated barrier; he had to pull himself up, off his feet, with both his hands gripping the flimsy plywood.

Later, Beer Belly said that it would have been a funny clown act; the unlikeliest cast of characters were assembled on a small stage in the avenue of troupe tents. The dwarf clowns, already dappled with Dolores’s shampoo, were just bystanders. (Clowns can be at their funniest when they’re just standing around, doing nothing.)

Later, the elephant trainer said that what happens in the periphery of an elephant’s vision can be more startling to the elephant than something the beast is looking at directly. When Dolores’s outdoor shower collapsed, she screamed; she couldn’t see (she was blinded by shampoo), but she surely sensed that the walls surrounding her had vanished.

Later, Juan Diego said that although he was pinned under one of the prefabricated walls of the shower, he could feel the ground shake when the elephant broke into a run mode, or a gallop mode (or whatever mode elephants break into when they panic and bolt).

The elephant trainer ran after his elephant; the chain, still attached to the neck of the dead horse, had snapped — but not before Mañana was jerked forward into a kneeling (or praying) position.

Dolores had dropped to all fours on the raised wooden platform that served as a makeshift floor to the shower; she was keeping her head under the stream of water, so she could rinse the shampoo out of her hair — she wanted to see again, of course. Juan Diego had crawled out from under the collapsed plywood barrier. He was trying to give Dolores her towel.

“It was me — I did it. I’m sorry,” he said to her; she took the towel from him, but Dolores seemed in no hurry to cover herself. She used the towel to dry her hair first; it was only when she saw Ignacio, and the ten policemen, that The Wonder covered herself with the towel.

“You got more balls than I thought —some balls, anyway,” was all Dolores said to Juan Diego.

No one realized that she’d not noticed the dead horse. All the while, the dwarf clowns just stood watching in the avenue of troupe tents — the towels around their waists. Paco’s breasts were so small that not one of the ten policemen looked at her twice; the policemen definitely thought Paco was a guy.

“I told you Dolores’s are bigger,” Beer Belly said to his fellow dwarf clown.

“Are you kidding?” Paco asked him. “ Mine are bigger!”

“Yours are smaller,” Beer Belly told her.

“Bigger!” Paco said. “What do you say, Lupe’s brother?” the cross-dresser asked Juan Diego. “Are Dolores’s bigger or smaller?”

“They’re prettier,” the fourteen-year-old said. “Dolores’s are more beautiful,” Juan Diego said.

“You got some balls, all right,” Dolores told him; she stepped off the shower platform into the avenue of troupe tents, where she fell over the dead horse. The bullet hole was still bleeding. The wound was on the side of Mañana’s face, between the ear and one of the horse’s wide-open eyes.

Later, Paco would say that she disagreed with Beer Belly — not only about the relative size of Dolores’s breasts, but also about the suitability of the shower episode as a clown act. “Not the dead-horse part — that wasn’t funny,” was all Paco would say about it.

Dolores, lying on the dead horse in the avenue of troupe tents, kicked her bare legs, thrashed her bare arms, and screamed. Ignacio, uncharacteristically, ignored her. He walked on with the ten policemen, but before the lion tamer continued his argument with the law-enforcement officers, he said quite a mouthful to Juan Diego.

“If you have ‘some balls,’ ceiling- walker, what are you waiting for?” Ignacio asked the boy. “When are you going to try skywalking at eighty feet? I think Some Balls should be your name. Or how about Mañana? It’s a free name now,” the lion tamer said, pointing to the dead horse. “It’s yours, if you want it — if you’re always going to put off becoming the first male skywalker until ‘tomorrow.’ If you’re going to keep putting it off — till the next mañana!”

Dolores had gotten to her feet; her towel was stained with the horse’s blood. Before she walked off in the direction of the girl acrobats’ troupe tent, she gave both Beer Belly and Paco a whack on the tops of their heads. “You disgusting little creeps,” she told them.

“Bigger than yours,” was all Beer Belly said to Paco, after Dolores had left them standing there.

“Smaller than mine,” Paco told him quietly.

Ignacio and the ten policemen had walked on; they were still arguing, although the lion tamer was doing all the talking.

“If I need a permit to dispose of a dead horse, I suppose I don’t need a permit to butcher the animal and feed the meat to my lions — do I?” the lion tamer was saying, but he wasn’t waiting for an answer from the ten policemen. “I don’t suppose you expect me to drive a dead horse back to Oaxaca, do you?” Ignacio asked them. “I could have left the horse to die in the graveyard. You wouldn’t have liked that very much, would you?” the lion tamer went on, unanswered.