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.