"It's all the rage in Iowa City," Edward Bonshaw said; maybe this was a joke.
"A possible monkey wrench in the ointment for Father Alfonso," Pepe cautioned the scholastic. That didn't sound right; he'd meant a possible fly in the ointment, of course--or perhaps he should have said, "Those shirts will look like monkey business to Father Alfonso." Yet Edward Bonshaw had understood him.
"Father Alfonso is a little conservative, is he?" the young American asked.
"An underdescription," Brother Pepe said.
"An understatement," Edward Bonshaw corrected him.
"My English has rusted a small size," Pepe admitted.
"I'll spare you my Spanish, for the moment," Edward said.
Pepe was shown how the customs officer had found the first whip, then the second. "Instruments of torture?" the officer had asked young Bonshaw--first in Spanish, then in English.
"Instruments of devotion," Edward (or Eduardo) had answered. Brother Pepe was thinking, Oh, my merciful Lord--we have a poor soul who flagellates himself when what we wanted was an English teacher!
The second suitcase in upheaval was full of books. "More instruments of torture," the customs officer had continued, in Spanish and English.
"Of further devotion," Edward Bonshaw had corrected the officer. (At least the flagellant reads, Pepe was thinking.)
"The sisters at the orphanage--among them, a few of your fellow teachers--were quite taken with your photograph," Brother Pepe told the scholastic, who was struggling to repack his violated bags.
"Aha! But I've lost a lot of weight since then," the young missionary said.
"Apparently--you've not been ill, I hope," Pepe ventured.
"Denial, denial--denial is good," Edward Bonshaw explained. "I stopped smoking, I stopped drinking--I think the zero-alcohol factor has curtailed my appetite. I'm just not as hungry as I used to be," the zealot said.
"Aha!" Brother Pepe said. (Now he has me saying it! Pepe marveled to himself.) He'd never had any alcohol--not a drop. The "zero-alcohol factor" had not once curtailed Brother Pepe's appetite.
"Clothes, whips, reading material," the customs officer had summarized, in Spanish and English, to the young American.
"Just the bare essentials!" Edward Bonshaw had declared.
Merciful Lord, spare his soul! Pepe was thinking, as if the scholastic's remaining days on this mortal earth were already numbered.
The customs officer in Mexico City had also questioned the American's visa, which had a temporary delimitation.
"You're intending to stay for how long?" the officer had asked.
"If everything goes well, three years," the young Iowan had replied.
The prospects of the pioneer before him struck Brother Pepe as poor. Edward Bonshaw seemed an unlikely survivor of a mere six months of the missionary life. The Iowan would need more clothes--ones that fit him. He would run out of books to read, and the two whips wouldn't suffice--not for the number of times the doomed zealot would feel inclined to flagellate himself.
"Brother Pepe, you drive a VW Beetle!" Edward Bonshaw exclaimed, as the two Jesuits made their way to the dusty red car in the parking lot.
"Just Pepe, please--the Brother part is not necessary," Pepe said. He was wondering if all Americans made exclamations about the obvious, but he quite liked the young scholastic's enthusiasm for everything.
Who else would those smart Jesuits have chosen to run their school, if not a man like Pepe, who both embodied and admired enthusiasm? Who else would the Jesuits have put in charge of Ninos Perdidos? You don't add an orphanage to a successful school, and call it "Lost Children," without a good-hearted worrier like Brother Pepe to oversee everything.
But worriers, including the good-hearted ones, can be distracted drivers. Perhaps Pepe was thinking about the dump reader; maybe Pepe was imagining that he was bringing more books to Guerrero. For whatever reason, Pepe turned the wrong way when he left the airport--instead of turning toward Oaxaca, and back to town, he headed to the basurero. By the time Brother Pepe realized his mistake, he was already in Guerrero.
Pepe wasn't all that familiar with the area. In looking for a safe place to turn around, he chose the dirt road to the dump. It was a wide road, and only those smelly trucks--moving slowly to or from the basurero--usually traveled there.
Naturally, once Pepe had stopped the little VW and managed to turn it around, the two Jesuits were enveloped in the black plumes of smoke from the dump; the mountains of smoldering garbage and trash towered above the road. Scavenging children could be seen; they scrambled up and down the reeking mounds. A driver had to be wary of the scavengers--both the ragamuffin children and the dump dogs. The smell, borne by the smoke, made the young American missionary gag.
"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 ninos 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.
"Si, 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 ta
lked 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 Ninos 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, Senor 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!"
Dorothy rolled her eyes and sighed; her body had a permanent aspect of slouching about it, whether she sat or stood. (One could best imagine her lying down.)
Juan Diego emerged from the lavatory, smiling to the oh-so-engaging mother and daughter. He'd managed to extricate himself from the crazy Cathay Pacific pajamas, which he handed to one of the flight attendants; he was looking forward to having a green-tea muffin, if not quite as much as Dorothy apparently did.
Juan Diego's erection had only slightly subsided, and he was very aware of it; after all, he'd missed having erections. Normally, he needed to take half a Viagra to have one--until now.
His maimed foot always throbbed a little after he'd been asleep and had just woken up, but the foot was throbbing in a new and different way--or so Juan Diego imagined. In his mind, he was fourteen again, and Rivera's truck had just flattened his right foot. He could feel the warmth of Lupe's lap against his neck and the back of his head. The Guadalupe doll, on Rivera's dashboard, jiggled this way and that--the way women often seemed to be promising something unspoken and unacknowledged, which was the way Miriam and her daughter, Dorothy, presented themselves to Juan Diego right now. (Not that their hips jiggled!)
But the writer could not speak; Juan Diego's teeth were clenched, his lips tightly sealed, as if he were still making an effort not to scream in pain and thrash his head from side to side in his long-departed sister's lap.
* 6 *
Sex and Faith
The elongated passageway to the Regal Airport Hotel at Hong Kong International was bedecked with an incomplete assortment of Christmas memorabilia--happy-faced reindeer and Santa's elf-laborer types, but no sleigh, no gifts, no Santa himself.
"Santa's getting laid--he probably called an escort service," Dorothy explained to Juan Diego.
"Enough sex, Dorothy," her mother cautioned the wayward-looking girl.
From the testiness that infiltrated their seemingly more than mother-daughter banter, Juan Diego would have guessed this mother and daughter had been traveling together for years--improbably, for centuries.
"Santa is definitely staying here," Dorothy said to Juan Diego. "The Christmas shit is year-round."
"Dorothy, you're not here year-round," Miriam said. "You wouldn't know."
"We're here enough," the daughter sullenly said. "It feels like we're here year-round," she told Juan Diego.
They were on an ascending escalator, passing a creche. To Juan Diego, it seemed strange that they'd not once been outdoors--not since he'd arrived at JFK in all the snow. The creche was surrounded by the usual cast of characters, humans and barn animals--only one exotic creature among the animals. And the miraculous Virgin Mary could not have been entirely human, Juan Diego had always believed; here in Hong Kong she smiled shyly, averting her eyes from her admirers. At the creche moment, wasn't all the attention supposed to be paid to her precious son? Apparently not--the Virgin Mary was a scene-stealer. (Not only in Hong Kong, Juan Diego had always believed.)
There was Joseph--the poor fool, as Juan Diego thought of him. But if Mary truly was a virgin, Joseph appeared to be handling the childbirth episode as well as could be expected--no fiery glances or suspicious looks at the inquisitive kings and wise men and shepherds, or at the manger's other gawkers and hangers-on: a cow, a donkey, a rooster, a camel. (The camel, of course, was the one exotic creature.)
"I'll bet the father was one of the wise guys," Dorothy offered.
"Enough sex, Dorothy," her mother said.
Juan Diego wrongly surmised he was alone in noticing that the Christ Child was missing from the creche--or buried, perhaps smothered, in the hay. "The Baby Jesus--" he started to say.
"Someone kidnapped the Holy Infant years ago," Dorothy explained. "I don't think the Hong Kong Chinese care."
"Maybe the Christ Child is getting a face-lift," Miriam offered.
"Not everyone gets a face-lift, Mother," Dorothy said.
"That Holy Infant is no kid, Dorothy," her mother remarked. "Believe me--Jesus has ha
d a face-lift."
"The Catholic Church has done more to cosmetically enhance itself than a face-lift," Juan Diego said sharply--as if Christmas, and all the creche promotion, were strictly a Roman Catholic affair. Both mother and daughter looked inquiringly at him, as if puzzled by his angry tone. But surely Miriam and Dorothy couldn't have been surprised by the sting in Juan Diego's voice--not if they'd read his novels, which they had. He had an ax to grind--not with people of faith, or believers of any kind, but with certain social and political policies of the Catholic Church.
Yet the occasional sharpness when he spoke surprised everyone about Juan Diego; he looked so mild-mannered, and--because of the maimed right foot--he moved so slowly. Juan Diego didn't resemble a risk-taker, except when it came to his imagination.
At the top of the escalator, the three travelers arrived at a baffling intersection of underground passages--signs pointing to Kowloon and Hong Kong Island, and to somewhere called the Sai Kung Peninsula.
"We're taking a train?" Juan Diego asked his lady admirers.
"Not now," Miriam told him, seizing his arm. They were connected to a train station, Juan Diego guessed, but there were confusing advertisements for tailor shops and restaurants and jewelry stores; for jewels, they were offering "endless opals."
"Why endless? What's so special about opals?" Juan Diego asked, but the women seemed strangely selective about listening.
"We'll check into the hotel first, just to freshen up," Dorothy was telling him; she'd grabbed his other arm.
Juan Diego limped forward; he imagined he wasn't limping as much as he usually did. But why? Dorothy was rolling Juan Diego's checked bag and her own--effortlessly, the two bags with one hand. How can she manage to do that? Juan Diego was wondering when they came upon a large floor-length mirror; it was near the registration desk for their hotel. But when Juan Diego quickly assessed himself in the mirror, his two companions weren't visible alongside him; curiously, he did not see these two efficient women reflected in the mirror. Maybe he'd given the mirror too quick a look.
"We'll take the train to Kowloon--we'll see the skyscrapers on Hong Kong Island, their lights reflected in the water of the harbor. It's better to see it after dark," Miriam was murmuring in Juan Diego's ear.