Chapter 19
Boy Wonder

Across the top of the troupe tent for the young-women acrobats was a ladder bolted horizontally to two parallel two-by-fours. The rungs were loops of rope; eighteen loops ran the length of the ladder. This was where the skywalkers practiced, because the ceiling of the acrobats’ troupe tent was only twelve feet high. Even if you were hanging by your feet from the loops of rope, head down, you couldn’t kill yourself if you fell off the ladder in the troupe tent.

In the main tent, where the circus acts were performed—well, that was another matter. The exact same ladder with the eighteen rope rungs was bolted across the top of the main tent, but if you fell from that ladder, you would fall eighty feet—without a net, you would die. There was no net for the skywalk at Circo de La Maravilla.

Whether you called it Circus of The Wonder or just The Wonder, an important part of the marvel was the no-net part. Whether you meant the circus (the whole circus) when you said La Maravilla, or if you meant the actual performer when you said The Wonder—meaning La Maravilla herself—what made her so special had a lot to do with the no-net part.

This was on purpose, and entirely Ignacio’s doing. As a young man, the lion tamer had traveled to India and had first seen the skywalk at a circus there. That is where the lion tamer also got the idea of using children as acrobats. Ignacio acquired the no-net idea from a circus he saw in Junagadh, and from one he’d seen in Rajkot. No net, child performers, a high-risk act—the skywalk proved itself to be a real crowd-pleaser in Mexico, too. And because Juan Diego hated Ignacio, he had traveled to India—he wanted to see what the lion tamer had seen; he needed to know where Ignacio’s ideas came from.

The came-from part was a major aspect of Juan Diego’s life as a writer. A Story Set in Motion by the Virgin Mary, his India novel, had been about where everything ‘comes from’—in that novel, as in much of Juan Diego’s childhood and adolescence, a lot came from the Jesuits or the circus. Yet no novel by Juan Diego Guerrero was set in Mexico; there were no Mexican (or Mexican-American) characters in his fiction. ‘Real life is too sloppy a model for good fiction,’ Juan Diego had said. ‘The good characters in novels are more fully formed than most of the people we know in our lives,’ he would add. ‘Characters in novels are more understandable, more consistent, more predictable. No good novel is a mess; many so-called real lives are messy. In a good novel, everything important to the story comes from something or somewhere.’

Yes, his novels came from his childhood and adolescence—that was where his fears came from, and his imagination came from everything he feared. This didn’t mean he wrote about himself, or about what happened to him as a child and adolescent—he didn’t. As a writer, Juan Diego Guerrero had imagined what he feared. You could not ever know enough about where real people came from.

Take Ignacio, the lion tamer—his depravity, in particular. He could not be blamed on India. No doubt he’d acquired his lion-taming skills at the Indian circuses, but taming lions wasn’t an athletic ability—it definitely wasn’t acrobatic. (Lion-taming is a matter of domination; this appears to be true in the case of male and female lion tamers.) Ignacio had mastered how to look intimidating, or he had that quality before he ever went to India. With lions, of course, the intimidation part was an illusion. And whether or not the domination worked—well, that depended on the individual lion. Or the individual lionesses, in Ignacio’s case—the female factor.

The skywalk itself was mostly a matter of technique; for skywalkers, this entailed mastering a specific system. There was a way to do it. Ignacio had seen it, but the lion tamer wasn’t an acrobat—he’d only married one. Ignacio’s wife, Soledad, was the acrobat—or former acrobat. She’d been a trapeze artist, a flyer; physically, Soledad could do anything.

Ignacio had merely described how the skywalk looked; Soledad was the one who taught the young-women acrobats how to do it. Soledad had taught herself to skywalk on that safe ladder in the troupe tent; when she’d mastered it without falling, Soledad knew she could teach the girl acrobats how to do it.

At Circus of The Wonder, only young women—just the girl acrobats, of a certain age—were trained to be skywalkers (The Wonders themselves). This was also on purpose, and entirely Ignacio’s doing. The lion tamer liked young women; he thought that prepubescent girls were the best skywalkers. Ignacio believed that if you were in the audience, you wanted to be worried about the girls falling, not thinking about them sexually; once women were old enough for you to have sexual thoughts about them—well, at least in the lion tamer’s opinion, you weren’t so worried about them dying if you could imagine having sex with them.

Naturally, Lupe had known this about the lion tamer from the moment she’d met him—Lupe could read Ignacio’s mind. That first meeting, upon the dump kids’ arrival at La Maravilla, had been Lupe’s introduction to the lion tamer’s thoughts. Lupe had never read a mind as terrible as Ignacio’s mind before.

‘This is Lupe—the new fortune-teller,’ Soledad was saying, introducing Lupe to the young women in the troupe tent. Lupe knew she was in foreign territory.

‘Lupe prefers "mind reader" to "fortune-teller"—she usually knows what you’re thinking, not necessarily what happens next,’ Juan Diego explained. He felt insecure, adrift.

‘And this is Lupe’s brother, Juan Diego—he’s the only one who can understand what she says,’ Soledad continued.

Juan Diego was in a tent full of girls close to his age; a few were as young as (or younger than) Lupe, only ten or twelve, and there were a couple of fifteen- or sixteen-year-olds, but most of the girl acrobats were thirteen or fourteen. Juan Diego had never felt as self-conscious. He was not used to being around athletic girls.

A young woman hung upside down from the skywalking ladder at the apex of the troupe tent; the tops of her raw-looking bare feet, inserted in the first two rope rungs, were flexed at rigidly held right angles to her bare shins. She swung back and forth, her forward momentum never changing, as she stepped out of one rope rung, rhythmically moving ahead to the next—and, never losing her rhythm, to the next. There were sixteen steps in the skywalk, start to finish; at eighty feet, without a net, one of those sixteen steps could be your last. But the skywalker in the acrobats’ troupe tent seemed unconcerned; an insouciance attended her—she looked as relaxed as her untucked T-shirt, which she held to her chest (her wrists were crossed on her small breasts). ‘And this,’ Soledad was saying, as she pointed to the upside-down skywalker, ‘is Dolores.’ Juan Diego stared at her.

Dolores was La Maravilla of the moment; she was The Wonder in Circus of The Wonder, if only for a fleeting half-second—Dolores would not be prepubescent for long. Juan Diego held his breath.

The young woman, who was named for ‘pain’ and ‘suffering,’ just kept skywalking. Her loose gym shorts revealed her long legs; her bare belly was wet with sweat. Juan Diego adored her.

‘Dolores is fourteen,’ Soledad said. (Fourteen going on twenty-one, as Juan Diego would long remember her.) Dolores was beautiful but bored; she seemed indifferent to the risk she was taking, or to—more dangerously—any risk. Lupe already hated her.

But the lion tamer’s thoughts were what Lupe was reciting. ‘The pig thinks Dolores should be fucking, not skywalking,’ Lupe babbled.

‘Who should she be—’ Juan Diego started to ask, but Lupe wouldn’t stop babbling. She stared at Ignacio.

‘Him. The pig wants her to fuck him—he thinks she’s done with skywalking. There’s just no other girl who’s good enough to replace her—not yet,’ Lupe said. She went on to say that Ignacio believed it was a conflict if The Wonder gave him a hard-on; the lion tamer found it impossible to fear for a girl’s life if he also wanted to fuck her.

‘Ideally, as soon as a girl gets her period, she shouldn’t be a skywalker,’ Lupe elaborated. Ignacio had told all the girls that the lions knew when the girls got their periods. (Whether this was true or not, the girl acrobats believed it.) Ignacio knew when the girls had their periods because they became anxious around the lions or avoided the lions altogether.

‘The pig can’t wait to fuck this girl—he thinks she’s ready,’ Lupe said, nodding to the serene, upside-down Dolores.

‘What does the skywalker think?’ Juan Diego whispered to Lupe.

‘I’m not reading her mind—La Maravilla has no thoughts right now,’ Lupe said dismissively. ‘But you’re wishing you could have sex with her, too—aren’t you?’ Lupe asked her brother. ‘Sick!’ she said, before Juan Diego could answer her.

‘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.’

‘Mostly terrible stuff,’ Lupe said.

‘She says the stuff that stands out is mostly terrible,’ Juan Diego told the lion tamer. Things were definitely going too fast.

‘She must be one of the real ones,’ Ignacio said; he looked at Lupe then—only at her, at no one else. ‘Have you ever read an animal’s mind?’ the lion tamer asked her. ‘I’m wondering if you could tell what a lion was thinking.’

‘It depends on the individual lion, or lioness,’ Lupe said. Juan Diego repeated this exactly as Lupe had said it. The way the girl acrobats retreated from Ignacio, upon hearing the lioness word, let the dump kids know that the lion tamer was sensitive about being thought of as a lioness tamer.

‘But you might be able to pick up the stuff that an individual lion, or lioness, was thinking?’ Ignacio asked; his eyes were unfocused again, darting about in the general area between the clairvoyant girl and her brother.

‘Mostly terrible stuff,’ Lupe repeated; this time, Juan Diego translated her literally.

‘Interesting,’ was all the lion tamer said, but everyone in the troupe tent could tell that he knew Lupe was one of the real ones, and that she’d read his mind accurately. ‘The cripple can try skywalking—we’ll see if he has the balls for it,’ Ignacio said, as he was leaving. He’d allowed his whip to completely uncoil, and he dragged it, at full length, behind him, as he left the troupe tent. The whip trailed after him as if it were a pet snake, following its master. The girl acrobats were all looking at Lupe; even Dolores, the superstar skywalker, was looking at Lupe.

‘They all want to know what Ignacio thinks about fucking them—if he thinks they’re ready,’ Lupe told Juan Diego. The lion tamer’s wife (and everyone else, even the missionary) had heard the Ignacio word.

‘What about Ignacio?’ Soledad asked; she didn’t bother to ask Lupe—she spoke directly to Juan Diego.

‘Yes, Ignacio thinks about fucking all of us—with every young woman, he thinks about doing it,’ Lupe said. ‘But you know that already—you don’t need me to tell you,’ Lupe said, straight to Soledad. ‘All of you know that already,’ Lupe told them; she looked at each of the girl acrobats when she said it—at Dolores the longest.

No one was surprised by Juan Diego’s verbatim translation of what his sister said. Flor looked the least surprised. Not even Edward Bonshaw was surprised, but of course he hadn’t understood most of the conversation—including Juan Diego’s translation.

‘There’s an evening performance,’ Soledad was explaining to the newcomers. ‘The girls have to put on their costumes.’

Soledad showed the dump kids to the troupe tent where they would be living. It was the dogs’ troupe tent, as promised; there were two collapsible cots for the kids, who also had their own wardrobe closet, and there was a tall standing mirror.

The dog beds and water bowls were arranged in an orderly fashion, and the coat rack for the dogs’ costumes was small and not in the way. The dog trainer was happy to meet the dump kids; she was an old woman who dressed as if she were still young, and still pretty. She was dressing the dogs for the evening performance when the dump kids got to the tent. Her name was Estrella, the word for ‘star.’ She told the niños she needed a break from sleeping with the dogs, though it was clear to the kids, as they watched Estrella dress the dogs, that the old woman genuinely loved the dogs, and that she took good care of them.

Estrella’s refusal to dress or behave her age made her more of a child than the dump kids; both Lupe and Juan Diego liked her, as did the dogs. Lupe had always disapproved of her mother’s sluttish appearance, but the low-cut blouses Estrella wore were more comical than tawdry; her withered breasts often slipped into view, but they were small and shrunken—there was nothing of a come-on in Estrella’s revealing them. And her once-tight skirts were clownish now; Estrella was a scarecrow—her clothes didn’t cling to her, not the way they once had (or as she may have imagined they still did).

Estrella was bald; she hadn’t liked the way her hair had thinned, or how it had lost its crow-black luster. She shaved her head—or she persuaded someone else to shave it for her, because she was prone to cutting herself—and she wore wigs (she had more wigs than dogs). The wigs were way too young for her.

At night, Estrella slept in a baseball cap; she complained that the visor forced her to sleep on her back. It was not her fault that she snored—she blamed the baseball cap. And the headband of the cap left a permanent indentation on her forehead, below where she wore her wigs.

When Estrella was tired, there would be days when she failed to exchange the baseball cap for one wig or another. If La Maravilla wasn’t performing, Estrella dressed like a bald stick figure of a prostitute in a baseball cap.

She was a generous person; Estrella was not possessive about her wigs. She would let Lupe try them on, and both Estrella and Lupe liked trying one wig or another on the dogs. Today Estrella wasn’t having one of her baseball-cap days; she wore the ‘flaming-redhead’ wig, which arguably would have looked better on one of the dogs—it definitely would have looked better on Lupe.

Anyone could see why the dump kids and the dogs adored Estrella. But her generosity notwithstanding, she was not as welcoming to Flor and Señor Eduardo as she was to the niños de la basura. Estrella wasn’t a sexual bigot; she was not hostile to having a transvestite prostitute in the dogs’ troupe tent. But the dog trainer had made a point of scolding the dogs if they ever crapped in the troupe tent. Estrella didn’t want the beshitted Iowan to give the dogs any bad ideas, so she wasn’t welcoming to the Jesuit.

Near the outdoor showers, which were behind the men’s latrine tent, there was a faucet with a long hose; now Flor took Edward Bonshaw there to do something about the elephant shit that had hardened on the missionary’s sandals—and, more uncomfortably, between the toes of his bare feet.

Because Estrella was telling Lupe the names of the dogs and how much to feed each one, Soledad seized this moment of privacy; in a life lived in troupe tents, Juan Diego would soon realize, there were not many private moments—not unlike life at the orphanage.

‘Your sister is very special,’ Soledad began quietly. ‘But why doesn’t she want you to try to become The Wonder? The skywalkers are the stars of this circus.’ The concept of being a star stunned him.

‘Lupe believes I have a different future—not skywalking,’ Juan Diego said. He felt caught off-guard.

‘Lupe knows the future, too?’ Soledad asked the crippled boy.

‘Only some of it,’ Juan Diego answered her; in truth, he didn’t know how much (or how little) Lupe knew. ‘Because Lupe doesn’t see skywalking in my future, she thinks I’ll die trying it—if I try it.’

‘And what do you think, Juan Diego?’ the lion tamer’s wife asked him. She was an unfamiliar kind of adult to a dump kid.

‘I just know I wouldn’t limp if I were skywalking,’ the boy told her. He saw the decision, looming ahead of him.

‘The dachshund is a male called Baby,’ he heard Lupe repeating to herself; Juan Diego knew this was the way she memorized things. He could see the dachshund: the little dog was wearing a baby bonnet tied under his chin and was sitting up straight in a child’s stroller.

‘Ignacio wanted a mind reader for the lions,’ Soledad said suddenly to Juan Diego. ‘What kind of sideshow is a mind reader at a circus? You said yourself that your sister isn’t a fortune-teller,’ Soledad continued softly. This wasn’t going as expected.

‘The sheepdog is a female called Pastora,’ Juan Diego heard Lupe saying. (The noun pastora means ‘shepherdess.’) Pastora was a sheepdog of the border-collie type; she was wearing a girl’s dress. When the dog walked on all fours, she tripped on the dress, but when she stood on her hind legs, pushing the child’s stroller with Baby (the dachshund) in it, the dress fit her correctly.

‘What would Lupe tell people in a sideshow? What woman wants to hear someone say what her husband is thinking? What guy is going to be happy hearing what’s on his wife’s mind?’ Soledad was asking Juan Diego. ‘Won’t kids be embarrassed if their friends know what they’re thinking? Just think about it,’ Soledad said. ‘All Ignacio cares about is what that old lion and those lionesses are thinking. If your sister can’t read the lions’ minds, she’s of no use to Ignacio. And once she has read what’s on the lions’ minds—then she’s no longer of use, is she? Or do lions change their minds?’ Soledad asked Juan Diego.

‘I don’t know,’ the boy admitted. He felt frightened.

‘I don’t know, either,’ Soledad told him. ‘I just know you’ve got better odds of staying at the circus if you’re a skywalker—especially if you’re a boy skywalker. You understand what I’m saying, Boy Wonder?’ Soledad asked him. It all felt too abrupt.

‘Yes, I do,’ he told her, but the abruptness scared him. It was hard for him to imagine that she’d ever been pretty, but Juan Diego knew Soledad was a clear thinker; she understood her husband, perhaps well enough to survive him. Soledad understood that the lion tamer was a man who made mostly selfish decisions—his interest in Lupe as a mind reader was a matter of self-preservation. One thing was obvious about Soledad: she was a strong woman.

There’d been stress on her joints, no doubt, as Dr. Vargas had observed of the former trapeze artist. Damage to her fingers, her wrists, her elbows—these joint injuries notwithstanding, Soledad was still strong. As a flyer, she’d ended her career as a catcher. In trapeze work, men are usually the catchers, but Soledad had strong enough arms, and a strong enough grip, to be a catcher.

‘The mongrel is male. I don’t think it’s fair that he’s called Perro Mestizo—‘Mongrel’ shouldn’t be the poor dog’s name!’ Lupe was saying. The mongrel, poor Perro Mestizo, wasn’t wearing a costume. In the act for the dogs, Mongrel was a baby-stealer. Perro Mestizo tries to run off with the stroller with Baby in it—with the dachshund in the baby bonnet barking like a lunatic, of course. ‘Perro Mestizo is always the bad guy,’ Lupe was saying. ‘That’s not fair, either!’ (Juan Diego knew what Lupe was going to say next because it was an oft-repeated theme with his sister.) ‘Perro Mestizo didn’t ask to be born a mongrel,’ Lupe said. (Naturally, Estrella, the dog trainer, hadn’t the slightest idea what Lupe was saying.)

‘I guess Ignacio is a little afraid of the lions,’ Juan Diego said cautiously to Soledad. It wasn’t a question; he was stalling.

‘Ignacio should be afraid of the lions—he should be a lot afraid,’ the lion tamer’s wife said.

‘The German shepherd, who is female, is called Alemania,’ Lupe was babbling. Juan Diego thought it was a cop-out to name a German shepherd ‘Germany’; it was also a stereotype to dress a German shepherd in a police uniform. But Alemania was supposed to be a policía—a policewoman. Naturally, Lupe was babbling about how ‘humiliating’ it was for Perro Mestizo, who was male, to be apprehended by a female German shepherd. In the circus act, Perro Mestizo is caught stealing the baby in the stroller; the undressed mongrel is dragged out of the ring by the scruff of his neck by Alemania in her police uniform. Baby (the dachshund) and his mother (Pastora, the sheepdog) are reunited.

It was at this moment of realization—the dump kids’ slim chances of success at Circo de La Maravilla, the fate of a crippled skywalker juxtaposed with the unlikelihood of Lupe becoming a mind reader of lions—when the barefoot Edward Bonshaw hobbled into the dogs’ troupe tent. The tender-footed way the Iowan was walking must have set off the dogs, or perhaps it was the sheer ungainliness of the smaller Señor Eduardo clinging to the bigger transvestite for support.

Baby barked first; the little dachshund in the baby bonnet leapt out of the stroller. This was so off-script, so not the circus act, that poor Perro Mestizo became agitated and bit one of Edward Bonshaw’s bare feet. Baby quickly lifted one leg, as most male dogs do, and peed on Señor Eduardo’s other bare foot—the unbitten one. Flor kicked the dachshund and the mongrel.

Alemania, the police dog, disapproved of kicking; there was a tense standoff between the German shepherd and the transvestite—growls from the big dog, a no-retreat policy from Flor, who would never back down from a fight. Estrella, her flaming-redhead wig askew, tried to calm the dogs down.

Lupe was so upset to read (in an instant) what was on Juan Diego’s mind that she paid no attention to the dogs. ‘I’m a mind reader for lions? That’s it?’ the girl asked her brother.

‘I trust Soledad—don’t you?’ was all Juan Diego said.

‘We’re indispensable if you’re a skywalker—otherwise, we’re dispensable. That’s it?’ Lupe asked Juan Diego again. ‘Oh, I get it—you like the sound of being a Boy Wonder, don’t you?’

‘Soledad and I don’t know if lions change their minds—assuming you can read what the lions are thinking,’ Juan Diego said; he was trying to be dignified, but the Boy Wonder idea had tempted him.

‘I know what’s on Hombre’s mind,’ was all Lupe would tell him.

‘I say we just try it,’ Juan Diego said. ‘We give it a week, just see how it goes—’

‘A week!’ Lupe cried. ‘You’re no Boy Wonder—believe me.’

‘Okay, okay—we’ll give it just a couple of days,’ Juan Diego pleaded. ‘Let’s just try it, Lupe—you don’t know everything,’ he added. What cripple doesn’t dream of walking without a limp? And what if a cripple could walk spectacularly? Skywalkers were applauded, admired, even adored—just for walking, only sixteen steps.

‘It’s a leave-or-die-here situation,’ Lupe said. ‘A couple of days or a week won’t matter.’ It all felt too abrupt—to Lupe, too.

‘You’re so dramatic!’ Juan Diego told her.

‘Who wants to be The Wonder? Who’s being dramatic?’ Lupe asked him. ‘Boy Wonder.’

Where were the responsible adults?

It was hard to imagine anything more happening to Edward Bonshaw’s feet, but the barefoot Iowan was thinking about something else; the dogs had failed to distract him from his thoughts, and Señor Eduardo could not have been expected to understand the dump kids’ plight. Not even Flor, in her continuing flirtation with the Iowan, should be blamed for missing the leave-or-die-here decision the dump kids faced. The available adults were thinking about themselves.

‘Do you really have breasts and a penis?’ Edward Bonshaw blurted out in English to Flor, whose unspoken Houston experience had given her a good grasp of the language. Señor Eduardo had counted on Flor’s understanding him, of course; he just hadn’t realized that Juan Diego and Lupe, who’d been arguing with each other, would hear and understand him. And no one in the dogs’ troupe tent could have guessed that Estrella, the old dog trainer—not to mention Soledad, the lion tamer’s wife—also understood English.

Naturally, when Señor Eduardo asked Flor if she had breasts and a penis, the crazy dogs had stopped barking. Truly everyone in the dogs’ troupe tent heard and appeared to understand the question. The dump kids were not the subject of this question.

‘Jesus,’ Juan Diego said. The kids were on their own.

Lupe had clutched her Coatlicue totem to her too-small-to-notice breasts. The terrifying goddess with the rattlesnake rattles for nipples seemed to understand the breasts-and-penis question.

‘Well, I’m not showing you the penis—not here,’ Flor said to the Iowan. She was unbuttoning her blouse and untucking it from her skirt. Children on their own make abrupt decisions.

‘Don’t you see?’ Lupe said to Juan Diego. ‘She’s the one—the one for him! Flor and Señor Eduardo—they’re the ones who adopt you. They can take you away with them only if they’re together!’

Flor had taken her blouse completely off. It was not necessary for her to remove her bra. She had small breasts—what she would later describe as ‘the best the hormones could do’; Flor said she was ‘not a surgery person.’ But, just to be sure, Flor took off her bra, too; small as they were, she wanted Edward Bonshaw to have no doubt that she indeed had breasts.

‘Not rattlesnake rattles, are they?’ Flor asked Lupe, when everyone in the dogs’ troupe tent could see her breasts and the nipples.

‘It’s a leave-or-die-here situation,’ Lupe repeated. ‘Señor Eduardo and Flor are your ride out,’ the little girl told Juan Diego.

‘For now, you’ll just have to believe me about the penis,’ Flor was saying to the Iowan; she’d put her bra back on and was buttoning her blouse when Ignacio walked in. Tent or no tent, the dump kids got the feeling that the lion tamer would never knock before entering.

‘Come meet the lions,’ Ignacio said to Lupe. ‘I guess you have to come, too,’ the lion tamer said to the cripple—to the would-be Boy Wonder.

There was no question that the dump kids understood the terms: the mind-reading job was all about the lions. And whether the lions changed their minds or not, it would also be Lupe’s job to make the lion tamer believe the lions might change their minds.

But what must the barefoot, bitten, and pissed-on missionary have been thinking? Edward Bonshaw’s vows were unhinged; Flor’s breasts-and-penis combination had made him reconsider celibacy in ways no amount of whipping would dispel.

‘One of Christ’s soldiers,’ Señor Eduardo had called himself and his Jesuit brethren, but his certainty was shaken. And the two old priests clearly didn’t want the dump kids to stay at Lost Children; their halfhearted questioning about the safety of the circus had been more a matter of priestly protocol than of genuine concern or conviction.

‘Those children are so wild—I suppose they could be eaten by wild animals!’ Father Alfonso had said, throwing up his hands—as if such a fate would be fitting for dump kids.

‘They do lack restraint—they could fall off those swinging things!’ Father Octavio had chimed in.

‘Trapezes,’ Pepe had said helpfully.

‘Yes! Trapezes!’ Father Octavio had cried, almost as if the idea appealed to him.

‘The boy won’t be swinging from anything,’ Edward Bonshaw had assured the priests. ‘He’ll be a translator—at least he won’t be a dump-scrounger!’

‘And the girl will be reading minds, telling fortunes—no swinging from anything for her. At least she won’t end up a prostitute,’ Brother Pepe had told the two priests; Pepe knew the priests so well—the prostitute word was the clincher.

‘Better to be eaten by wild animals,’ Father Alfonso had said.

‘Better to fall off the trapezes,’ Father Octavio had of course concurred.

‘I knew you would understand,’ Señor Eduardo had told the two old priests. Yet, even then, the Iowan looked uncertain about which side he should be on. He looked like he wondered what he’d been arguing for. Why was the circus ever such a good idea?

And now—once more navigating the avenue of troupe tents, on the lookout for elephant shit—Edward Bonshaw hobbled uncertainly on his tender bare feet. The Iowan was slumped against Flor, clinging to the bigger, stronger transvestite for support; the short distance to the lions’ cages, only two minutes away, must have seemed an eternity for Edward Bonshaw—meeting Flor, and merely thinking about her breasts and her penis, had altered the trajectory of his life.

That walk to the lions’ cages was a skywalk for Señor Eduardo; to the missionary, this short distance amounted to his walk at eighty feet without a net—however much the Iowan hobbled, these were his life-changing steps.

Señor Eduardo slipped his small hand into Flor’s much bigger palm; the missionary almost fell when she squeezed his hand in hers. ‘The truth is,’ the Iowan struggled to say, ‘I am falling for you.’ Tears were streaming down his face; the life he had long sought, the one he’d flagellated himself for, was over.

‘You don’t sound too happy about it,’ Flor pointed out to him.

‘No, no—I am, I’m truly very happy!’ Edward Bonshaw told her; he began telling Flor how Saint Ignatius Loyola had founded an asylum for fallen women. ‘It was in Rome, where the saint announced he would sacrifice his life if he could prevent the sins of a single prostitute on a single night,’ Señor Eduardo was blubbering.

‘I don’t want you to sacrifice your life, you idiot,’ the transvestite prostitute told him. ‘I don’t want you to save me,’ she said. ‘I think you should start by fucking me,’ Flor told the Iowan. ‘Let’s just start with that, and see what happens,’ Flor told him.

‘Okay,’ Edward Bonshaw said, almost falling again; he was staggering, but lust has a way.

The girl acrobats ran by them in the avenue of troupe tents; the green and blue spangles on their singlets glimmered in the lantern lights. Also passing them, but not running, was Dolores; she was walking fast, but she saved her running for the training beneficial to a superstar skywalker. The spangles on her singlet were silver and gold, and her anklets had silver chimes; as Dolores walked past them, her anklets were chiming. ‘Noise-making, attention-seeking slut!’ Lupe called after the pretty skywalker. ‘Not your future—forget about it,’ was all Lupe said to Juan Diego.

Ahead of them were the lion cages. The lions were awake now—all four of them. The eyes of the three lionesses were alertly following the pedestrian traffic in the avenue of troupe tents. The sullen male, Hombre, had his narrowed eyes fixed on the approaching lion tamer.

To the passersby in the busy avenue, it might have seemed that the crippled boy stumbled, and that his little sister caught hold of his arm before he could fall; someone watching the dump kids more closely might have imagined that the limping boy simply bent over to kiss his sister in the area of one of her temples.

What actually happened was that Juan Diego whispered in Lupe’s ear. ‘If you really can tell what the lions are thinking, Lupe—’ Juan Diego started to say.

‘I can tell what you’re thinking,’ Lupe interrupted him.

‘For Christ’s sake, just be careful what you say the lions are thinking!’ Juan Diego whispered to her harshly.

‘You’re the one who has to be careful,’ Lupe told him. ‘Nobody knows what I’m saying unless you tell them,’ she reminded him.

‘Just remember this: I’m not your rescue project,’ Flor was telling the Iowan, who was dissolved in tears—tears of happiness, conflicted tears, or just plain tears. Inconsolable crying, in other words—sometimes lust has a way of doing that to you, too.

Their small entourage had stopped in front of the lion cages.

‘Hola, Hombre,’ Lupe said to the lion. There was no question that the big male cat was looking at Lupe—only at Lupe, not at Ignacio.

Maybe Juan Diego was summoning the necessary courage to be a skywalker; perhaps this was the moment when he believed he had the balls for it. Actually being a Boy Wonder seemed possible.

‘Any lingering thoughts on your mind about her being retarded?’ the crippled boy asked the lion tamer. ‘You can see that Hombre knows she’s a mind reader, can’t you?’ Juan Diego asked Ignacio. ‘A real one,’ the boy added. He wasn’t half as confident as he sounded.

‘Just don’t try to fuck with me, ceiling-walker,’ Ignacio told Juan Diego. ‘Don’t ever lie to me about what your sister says. I’ll know if you’re lying, practice-tent-walker. I can read what’s on your mind—a little,’ the lion tamer said.

When Juan Diego looked at Lupe, she made no comment—she didn’t even shrug. The girl was concentrating on the lion. To even the most casual passerby in the avenue of troupe tents, Lupe and Hombre were completely attuned to each other’s thoughts. The old male lion and the girl weren’t paying attention to anyone else.