Chapter 4
The Broken Side-view Mirror

There was a gecko. It shrank from the first light of the sunrise, clinging to the mesh on the shack’s screen door. In the blink of an eye, in that half-second before the boy could touch the screen, the gecko was gone. Quicker than turning on or off a light, the gecko’s disappearance often began Juan Diego’s dream—as the disappearing lizard had begun many of the boy’s mornings in Guerrero.

Rivera had built the shack for himself, but he’d remodeled the interior for the kids; though he was probably not Juan Diego’s father, and definitely not Lupe’s, el jefe had made a deal with their mother. Even at fourteen, Juan Diego knew there was not much of a deal between those two now. Esperanza, notwithstanding that she’d been named for hope, had never been a source of hope to her own children, nor did she ever encourage Rivera—as far as Juan Diego had seen. Not that a fourteen-year-old boy would necessarily notice such things, and, at thirteen, Lupe wasn’t a reliable witness to what might, or might not, have gone on between her mother and the dump boss.

As for ‘reliable,’ Rivera was the one person who could be counted on to look after these two dump kids—to the degree that anyone could protect los niños de la basura. Rivera had provided the only shelter for these two, and he’d sheltered Juan Diego and Lupe in other ways.

When el jefe went home at night—or wherever Rivera actually went—he left his truck and his dog with Juan Diego. The truck afforded the kids a second shelter, should they need it—unlike the shack, the cab of the truck could be locked—and no one but Juan Diego or Lupe would dare approach Rivera’s dog. Even the dump boss was wary of that dog: an underfed-looking male, he was a terrier-hound mix.

According to el jefe, the dog was part pit bull, part bloodhound—hence he was predisposed to fight, and to track down things by their smell.

‘Diablo is biologically inclined to be aggressive,’ Rivera had said.

‘I think you mean genetically inclined,’ Juan Diego had corrected him.

It’s hard to appreciate the degree that a dump kid could acquire such a sophisticated vocabulary; beyond the flattering attention paid to the unschooled boy by Brother Pepe at the Jesuit mission in Oaxaca, Juan Diego didn’t have an education—yet the boy had managed to do more than teach himself to read. He also spoke exceedingly well. The dump kid even spoke English, though his only exposure to the spoken language came from the U.S. tourists. In Oaxaca, at that time, the American expatriates amounted to an arts-and-crafts crowd and the usual potheads. Increasingly, as the Vietnam War dragged on—past 1968, when Nixon had been elected on the promise that he would end it—there were those lost souls (‘the young men searching for themselves,’ Brother Pepe called them), who in many cases comprised the draft dodgers.

Juan Diego and Lupe had little luck communicating with the potheads. The mushroom hippies were too busy expanding their consciousness by hallucinogenic means; they didn’t waste their time talking to children. The mescal hippies—if only when they were sober—enjoyed their conversations with the dump kids, and occasional readers could be found among them, although the mescal affected what these readers could remember. Quite a few of the draft dodgers were readers; they gave Juan Diego their paperback novels. These were mostly American novels, of course; they inspired Juan Diego to imagine living there.

And only seconds after the early-morning gecko had vanished, and the screen door of the shack slapped shut behind Juan Diego, a crow took flight from the hood of Rivera’s truck, and all the dogs in Guerrero began to bark. The boy watched the crow in flight—any excuse to imagine flying captivated him—while Diablo, rousing himself from the flatbed of Rivera’s pickup, commenced an ungodly baying that silenced all of the other dogs. Diablo’s baying was the bloodhound gene in Rivera’s scary dog; the pit-bull part, the fighter gene, was responsible for the missing lid of the dog’s bloodshot and permanently open left eye. The pinkish scar, where the eyelid had been, gave Diablo a baleful stare. (A dogfight, perhaps, or a person with a knife; the dump boss hadn’t witnessed the altercation, human or beast.)

As for the jagged-edged, triangular piece that had been less than surgically removed from one of the dog’s long ears—well, that one was anyone’s guess.

‘You did it, Lupe,’ Rivera once said, smiling at the girl. ‘Diablo would let you do anything to him—even eat his ear.’

Lupe had made a perfect triangle with her index fingers and her thumbs. What she said required Juan Diego’s translation, as always, or Rivera would not have understood her. ‘No animal or human has the teeth to bite like that,’ the girl incontrovertibly said.

Los niños de la basura never knew when (or from where) Rivera arrived every morning at the basurero, or by what means el jefe had come down the hill from the dump to Guerrero. The dump boss was usually found napping in the cab of his truck; either the pistol-shot slap of the closing screen door or the barking dogs woke him. Or Diablo’s baying woke him, a half-second later—or earlier, that gecko, which almost no one saw.

‘Buenos días, jefe,’ Juan Diego usually said.

‘It’s a good day to do everything well, amigo,’ Rivera often answered the boy. The dump boss would add: ‘And where is the genius princess?’

‘I am where I always am,’ Lupe would answer him, the screen door slapping shut behind her. That second pistol shot reached as far as the hellfires in the basurero. More crows took flight. There was a disharmonious barking; the dump dogs and the dogs in Guerrero barked. Another menacing and all-silencing howl followed from Diablo, whose wet nose now touched the boy’s bare knee below his tattered shorts.

The dump fires had long been burning—the smoldering mounds of piled-high garbage and pawed-through trash. Rivera must have lit the fires at first light; then he took a nap in the cab of his truck.

The Oaxaca basurero was a wasteland of burning; whether you were standing there or as far away as Guerrero, the towers of smoke from the fires rose as high into the sky as you could see. Juan Diego’s eyes were already tearing when he came out that screen door. There was always a tear oozing from Diablo’s lidless eye, even when the dog slept—with his left eye open but not seeing.

That morning, Rivera had found another water pistol in the basurero; he’d tossed the squirt gun into the flatbed of the pickup, where Diablo had briefly licked it before leaving it alone.

‘I got one for you!’ Rivera called to Lupe, who was eating a cornmeal tortilla with jam on it; there was jam on her chin, and on one cheek, and Lupe had invited Diablo to lick her face. She let Diablo have the rest of her tortilla, too.

There were two vultures hunched over a dead dog in the road, and two more vultures floated overhead; they were making those descending spirals in the sky. In the basurero, there was usually at least one dead dog every morning; their carcasses did not remain intact for long. If the vultures failed to find a dead dog, or if the carrion eaters didn’t quickly dispose of it, someone would burn it. There was always a fire.

The dead dogs in Guerrero were treated differently. Those dogs probably had belonged to somebody; you didn’t burn someone else’s dog—besides, there were rules about starting fires in Guerrero. (There were concerns that the little neighborhood might burn down.) You let a dead dog lie around in Guerrero—it didn’t usually lie around for long. If the dead dog had an owner, the owner would get rid of it, or the carrion eaters would eventually do the job.

‘I didn’t know that dog—did you?’ Lupe was saying to Diablo, as she examined the water pistol el jefe had found. Lupe meant the dead dog being attended to by the two vultures in the road, but Diablo didn’t let on if he’d known the dog.

The dump kids could tell it was a copper day. El jefe had a load of copper in the flatbed of the pickup. There was a manufacturing plant that worked with copper near the airport; in the same area was another plant, which took aluminum.

‘At least it isn’t a glass day—I don’t like glass days,’ Lupe was saying to Diablo, or she was just talking to herself.

When Diablo was around, you never heard any growling from Dirty White—not even a whimper from the coward, Juan Diego was thinking. ‘He’s not a coward! He’s a puppy!’ Lupe shouted to her brother. Then she went on and on (to herself) about the brand of water pistol Rivera had retrieved from the basurero—something about the ‘feeble squirter mechanism.’

The dump boss and Juan Diego watched Lupe run into the shack; no doubt she was putting the newfound squirt gun with her collection.

El jefe had been checking the propane tank outside the kids’ shack; he was always checking it to be sure it wasn’t leaking, but this morning he was checking to see how full or near-empty the tank was. Rivera checked this by lifting the tank to see how heavy it was.

Juan Diego had often wondered on what basis the dump boss had decided that he was probably not Juan Diego’s father. It was true they looked nothing alike, but—as in Lupe’s case—Juan Diego looked so much like his mother that the boy doubted he could possibly resemble any father.

‘Just hope that you resemble Rivera in his kindness,’ Brother Pepe had told Juan Diego during the delivery of one bunch of books or another. (Juan Diego had been fishing for what Pepe might have known or heard about the boy’s most likely father.)

Whenever Juan Diego had asked el jefe why he’d put himself in the probably-not category, the dump boss always smiled and said he was ‘probably not smart enough’ to be the dump reader’s dad.

Juan Diego, who’d been watching Rivera lift the propane tank (a full tank was very heavy), suddenly said: ‘One day, jefe, I’ll be strong enough to lift the propane tank—even a full one.’ (This was about as close as the dump reader could come to telling Rivera that he wished and hoped the dump boss was his father.)

‘We should go,’ was all Rivera said, climbing into the cab of his truck.

‘You still haven’t fixed your side-view mirror,’ Juan Diego told el jefe.

Lupe was babbling about something as she ran to the truck, the shack’s screen door slapping shut behind her. The pistol-shot sound of that closing screen door had no effect on the vultures hunched over the dead dog in the road; there were four vultures at work now, and not one of them flinched.

Rivera had learned not to tease Lupe by making vulgar jokes about the water pistols. One time, Rivera had said: ‘You kids are so crazy about those squirt guns—people will think you’re practicing artificial insemination.’

The phrase had long been used in medical circles, but the dump kids had first heard of it from a science fiction novel saved from burning. Lupe had been disgusted. When she heard el jefe mention artificial insemination, Lupe had erupted in a fury of preteen indignation; she was eleven or twelve at the time.

‘Lupe says she knows what artificial insemination is—she thinks it’s gross,’ Juan Diego had translated for his sister.

‘Lupe doesn’t know what artificial insemination is,’ the dump boss had insisted, but he looked anxiously at the indignant girl. Who knew what the dump reader might have read to her? el jefe thought. Even as a little girl, Lupe had been strongly opposed but attentive to everything indecent or obscene.

There was more moral outrage (of an unintelligible kind) expressed by Lupe. All Juan Diego said was: ‘Yes, she does. Would you like her to describe artificial insemination to you?’

‘No, no!’ Rivera had cried. ‘I was just kidding! Okay, the water pistols are nothing but squirt guns. Let’s leave it at that.’

But Lupe wouldn’t stop babbling. ‘She says you’re always thinking about sex,’ Juan Diego had interpreted for Rivera.

‘Not always!’ Rivera had exclaimed. ‘I try not to think about sex around you two.’

Lupe went on and on. She’d been stamping her feet—her boots were too big; she’d found them in the dump. Her stomping had turned into an impromptu dance—including a pirouette—as she berated Rivera.

‘She says it’s pathetic to disapprove of prostitutes while you still hang out with prostitutes,’ Juan Diego was explaining.

‘Okay, okay!’ Rivera had shouted, throwing up his muscular arms. ‘The water pistols, the squirt guns, are just toys—nobody’s getting pregnant with them! Whatever you say.’

Lupe had stopped dancing; she kept pointing to her upper lip while she pouted at Rivera.

‘What now? What is this—sign language?’ Rivera had asked Juan Diego.

‘Lupe says you’ll never get a girlfriend who isn’t a prostitute—not with that stupid-looking mustache,’ the boy had told him.

‘Lupe says, Lupe says,’ Rivera had muttered, but the dark-eyed girl continued to stare at him—all the while tracing the contours of a nonexistent mustache on her smooth upper lip.

Another time, Lupe had told Juan Diego: ‘Rivera is too ugly to be your father.’

‘El jefe isn’t ugly inside,’ the boy had answered her.

‘He has mostly good thoughts, except about women,’ Lupe said.

‘Rivera loves us,’ Juan Diego told his sister.

‘Yes, el jefe loves us—both of us,’ Lupe admitted. ‘Even though I’m not his—and you’re probably not his, either.’

‘Rivera gave us his name—both of us,’ the boy reminded her.

‘I think it’s more like a loan,’ Lupe said.

‘How can our names be a loan?’ the boy had asked her; his sister shrugged their mother’s shrug—a hard one to read. (A little bit always the same, a little bit different every time.)

‘Maybe I’m Lupe Rivera, and always will be,’ the girl had said, somewhat evasively. ‘But you’re someone else. You’re not always going to be Juan Diego Rivera—that’s not who you are,’ was all Lupe would say about it.

___________

On that morning when Juan Diego’s life was about to change, Rivera made no vulgar squirt-gun jokes. El jefe sat distractedly at the wheel of his truck; the dump boss was ready to make his rounds, starting with the load of copper—a heavy load.

The distant airplane was slowing down; it must be landing, Juan Diego guessed to himself. He was still watching the sky for flying things. There was an airport (at the time, not much more than a landing strip) outside Oaxaca, and the boy loved watching the planes that flew over the basurero; he’d never flown.

In the dream, of course, was the devastating foreknowledge of who was on that airplane on that morning—thus, immediately upon the appearance of the plane in the sky, there came the simultaneous understanding of Juan Diego’s future. In reality, on that morning, something fairly ordinary had diverted Juan Diego’s attention from the far-off but descending plane. The boy had spotted what he thought was a feather—not from a crow or a vulture. A different-looking feather (but not that different-looking) was pinned under the left-rear wheel of the truck.

Lupe had already slipped into the cab beside Rivera.

Diablo, despite his lean appearance, was a well-fed dog—he was quite superior to the scavenging dump dogs, not only in this respect. Diablo was an aloof, macho-looking dog. (In Guerrero, they called him the ‘male animal.’)

With his forepaws on Rivera’s toolbox, Diablo could extend his head and neck over the passenger side of the pickup; if he put his forepaws on el jefe’s spare tire, Diablo’s head would obstruct Rivera’s vision of his side-view mirror—the broken one, on the driver’s side. When the dump boss glanced in that broken mirror, he had a multifaceted view: a spiderweb of shards of glass reflected Diablo’s four-eyed face. The dog suddenly had two mouths, two tongues.

‘Where is your brother?’ Rivera asked the girl.

‘I’m not the only one who’s crazy,’ Lupe said, but the dump boss didn’t understand her at all.

When el jefe had a nap in the cab of his truck, he often put the stick shift, which was on the floor of the cab, in reverse. If the gear shift was set in first gear, the knob could poke him in his ribs while he was trying to sleep.

Diablo’s ‘normal’ face now appeared in the passenger-side mirror—the unbroken one—but when Rivera looked in the driver’s-side mirror, in the spiderweb of broken glass, he never saw Juan Diego trying to retrieve the slightly unusual-looking, reddish-brown feather that was trapped under the left-rear wheel of the truck. The truck lurched backward in reverse, rolling over the boy’s right foot. It’s just a chicken feather, Juan Diego realized. In the same half-second, he acquired his lifelong limp—for a feather as common as dirt in Guerrero. On the outskirts of Oaxaca, lots of families kept chickens.

The small bump under the left-rear tire caused the Guadalupe doll on the dashboard to wobble her hips. ‘Be careful you don’t get yourself pregnant,’ Lupe told the doll, but Rivera had no comprehension of what she’d said; el jefe could hear Juan Diego screaming. ‘You’ve lost your touch for miracles—you’ve sold out,’ Lupe was saying to the Guadalupe doll. Rivera had braked the truck; he climbed out of the cab, running to the injured boy. Diablo was barking crazily—he sounded like a different dog. All the dogs in Guerrero began to bark. ‘Now see what you’ve done,’ Lupe admonished the doll on the dashboard, but the girl quickly climbed out of the cab and ran to her brother.

The boy’s right foot had been crushed; flattened and bleeding, the maimed foot pointed away from his right ankle and shin in a two-o’clock position. His foot looked smaller, somehow. Rivera carried Juan Diego to the cab; the boy would have continued to scream, but the pain made him hold his breath, then gasp for air, then hold his breath again. His boot slipped off.

‘Try to breathe normally, or you’ll faint,’ Rivera told him.

‘Maybe now you’ll fix that stupid mirror!’ Lupe was screaming at the dump boss.

‘What is she saying?’ Rivera asked the boy. ‘I hope it’s not about my side-view mirror.’

‘I’m trying to breathe normally,’ Juan Diego told him.

Lupe got in the truck’s cab first, so that her brother could put his head in her lap and stick his bad foot out the passenger-side window. ‘Take him to Dr. Vargas!’ the girl was screaming at Rivera, who understood the Vargas word.

‘We’ll try for a miracle first—then Vargas,’ Rivera said.

‘Expect no miracles,’ Lupe said; she punched the Guadalupe doll on the dashboard, and the doll’s hips started shaking again.

‘Don’t let the Jesuits have me,’ Juan Diego said. ‘Brother Pepe is the only one I like.’

‘Perhaps I should be the one to explain this to your mother,’ Rivera was saying to the kids; he drove slowly ahead, not wanting to kill any dogs in Guerrero, but once the truck was out on the highway, el jefe sped up.

The jostling in the cab made Juan Diego moan; his crushed foot, bleeding out the open window, had streaked the passenger side of the cab with blood. In the undamaged side-view mirror, Diablo’s blood-flecked face appeared. In the rushing wind, a stream of the injured boy’s blood ran to the rear of the cab, where Diablo was licking it up.

‘Cannibalism!’ Rivera shouted. ‘You disloyal dog!’

‘Cannibalism is not the right word,’ Lupe declared, with her usual moral indignation. ‘Dogs like blood—Diablo is a good dog.’

With his teeth clenched in pain, the effort to translate his sister’s defense of the blood-licking dog was beyond Juan Diego, who thrashed his head from side to side in Lupe’s lap.

When he could manage to hold his head still, Juan Diego believed he saw some menacing eye contact between the Guadalupe doll on Rivera’s dashboard and his fervent sister. Lupe had been named after the Virgin of Guadalupe. Juan Diego was named for the Indian who’d encountered the dark-skinned virgin in 1531. Los niños de la basura were born to Indians in the New World, but they also had Spanish blood; this made them (in their eyes) the conquistadors’ bastard children. Juan Diego and Lupe didn’t feel that the Virgin of Guadalupe was necessarily looking out for them.

‘You should pray to her, you ungrateful heathen—not punch her!’ Rivera now said to the girl. ‘Pray for your brother—ask for Guadalupe’s help!’

Juan Diego had translated Lupe’s invective on this religious subject too many times; he clenched his teeth, his lips tightly closed, not uttering a word.

‘Guadalupe has been corrupted by the Catholics,’ Lupe began. ‘She was our Virgin, but the Catholics stole her; they made her the Virgin Mary’s dark-skinned servant. They might as well have called her Mary’s slave—maybe Mary’s cleaning woman!’

‘Blasphemy! Sacrilege! Unbeliever!’ Rivera shouted. The dump boss didn’t need Juan Diego to translate Lupe’s diatribe—he’d heard Lupe sound off about the Guadalupe business before. It was no secret to Rivera that Lupe had a love-hate thing going with Our Lady of Guadalupe. El jefe also knew Lupe disliked Mother Mary. The Virgin Mary was an imposter, in the crazy child’s opinion; the Virgin of Guadalupe had been the real deal, but those crafty Jesuits had stolen her for their Catholic agenda. In Lupe’s opinion, the dark-skinned virgin had been compromised—hence ‘corrupted.’ The child believed that Our Lady of Guadalupe had once been miraculous but wasn’t anymore.

This time, Lupe’s left foot delivered a near-lethal kick to the Guadalupe doll, but the suction-cup base held fast to the dashboard while the doll shimmied and shook herself in a frankly less-than-virginal way.

In order to kick the dashboard doll, Lupe had done little more than arch her lap upward, toward the windshield, but even this much movement caused Juan Diego to scream.

‘You see? Now you’ve hurt your brother!’ Rivera cried, but Lupe bent over Juan Diego; she kissed his forehead, her smoke-smelling hair falling to either side of the injured boy’s face.

‘Remember this,’ Lupe whispered to Juan Diego. ‘We are the miracle—you and me. Not them. Just us. We’re the miraculous ones,’ she said.

With his eyes tightly closed, Juan Diego heard the plane roar over them. At the time, he knew only that they were near the airport; he knew nothing about who was on that plane and coming closer. In the dream, of course, he knew everything—the future, too. (Some of it.)

‘We’re the miraculous ones,’ Juan Diego whispered. He was asleep—he was still dreaming—though his lips were moving. No one heard him; no one hears a writer who’s writing in his sleep.

Besides, Cathay Pacific 841 was still hurtling toward Hong Kong—on one side of the plane, the Taiwan Strait, on the other, the South China Sea. But in Juan Diego’s dream, he was only fourteen—a passenger, in pain, in Rivera’s truck—and all the boy could do was repeat after his clairvoyant sister: ‘We’re the miraculous ones.’

Perhaps all the passengers on the plane were asleep, for not even the scarily sophisticated mother and her slightly-less-dangerous-looking daughter had heard him.