After La Maravilla went out of business, Paco and Beer Belly went to Mexico City — it was where those two dwarf clowns were from, and (according to Pepe) Beer Belly had stayed there. Beer Belly went into a different business, though Juan Diego couldn’t remember what it was — Juan Diego didn’t know if Beer Belly was still alive — and Juan Diego had a hard time imagining Beer Belly not being a clown. (Of course, Beer Belly would always be a dwarf.)
Paco, Juan Diego knew, had died. Like Flor, Paco couldn’t stay away from Oaxaca. Like Flor, Paco loved to hang out at the old hanging-out places. Paco had always been a regular at La China, that gay bar on Bustamante, the place that would later become Chinampa. And Paco was also a regular at La Coronita — the cross-dressers’ party place that closed, for a while, in the 1990s (when La Coronita’s owner, who was gay, died). Like Edward Bonshaw and Flor, both La Coronita’s owner and Paco would die of AIDS.
Soledad, who’d once called Juan Diego “Boy Wonder,” would long outlive La Maravilla. She was still Vargas’s patient. There’d been stress on her joints, no doubt — as Dr. Vargas had observed of the former trapeze artist — but these joint injuries notwithstanding, Soledad was still strong. Juan Diego would remember that she’d ended her career as a catcher, which was unusual for a woman. She’d had strong enough arms and a strong enough grip for catching men who were flying through the air.
Pepe would tell Juan Diego (around the time of the dissolution of the orphanage at Lost Children) how Vargas had been one of several people Soledad mentioned as a reference when she’d adopted two of Lost Children’s orphans, a boy and a girl.
Soledad had been a wonderful mother, Pepe reported. No one was surprised. Soledad was an impressive woman — well, she could be a little cold, Juan Diego remembered, but he’d always admired her.
There’d been a brief scandal, but this was after Soledad’s adopted kids had grown up and left home. Soledad had found herself with a bad boyfriend; neither Pepe nor Vargas would elaborate on the bad word, which they’d both used to describe Soledad’s boyfriend, but Juan Diego took the word to mean abusive.
After Ignacio, Juan Diego was surprised to hear that Soledad would have had any patience for a bad boyfriend; she didn’t strike him as the type of woman who would tolerate abuse.
As it turned out, Soledad didn’t have to put up with the bad boyfriend for very long. She came home from shopping one morning, and there he was, dead, with his head on his arms, still sitting at the kitchen table. Soledad said he’d been sitting where he was when she’d left that morning.
“He must have had a heart attack, or something,” was all Brother Pepe ever said.
Naturally, Vargas was the examining physician. “It may have been an intruder,” Vargas said. “Someone who had an ax to grind — someone with strong hands,” Dr. Vargas surmised. The bad boyfriend had been strangled while sitting at the kitchen table.
The doctor said Soledad couldn’t possibly have strangled her boyfriend. “Her hands are a wreck,” Vargas had testified. “She couldn’t squeeze the juice out of a lemon!” was how Vargas had put it.
Vargas offered the prescription painkillers Soledad was taking as evidence that the “damaged” woman couldn’t have strangled anyone. The medication was for joint pain — it was mostly for the pain in Soledad’s fingers and hands.
“Lots of damage — lots of pain,” the doctor had said.
Juan Diego didn’t doubt it — not the damage and pain part. But, looking back — remembering Soledad in the lion tamer’s tent, and the occasional glances Soledad sent in Ignacio’s direction — Juan Diego had seen something in the former trapeze artist’s eyes. There’d been nothing in Soledad’s dark eyes resembling the yellow in a lion’s eyes, but there’d definitely been something of a lioness’s unreadable intentions.
29. One Single Journey
“Cockfighting is legal here, and very popular,” Dorothy was saying. “The psycho roosters are up all night, crowing. The stupid gamecocks are psyching themselves up for their next fight.”
Well, Juan Diego thought, that might explain the psycho rooster who’d crowed before dawn that New Year’s Eve at the Encantador, but not the subsequent squawk of the rooster’s sudden and violent-sounding death — as if Miriam, by merely wishing the annoying rooster were dead, had made it happen.
At least he’d been forewarned, Juan Diego was thinking: there would be gamecocks crowing all night at the inn near Vigan. Juan Diego was interested to see what Dorothy would do about it.
“Someone should kill that rooster,” Miriam had said in her low, husky voice that night at the Encantador. Then, when the deranged rooster crowed a third time and his crowing was cut off mid-squawk, Miriam had said, “There, that does it. No more heralding of a false dawn, no more untruthful messengers.”
“And because the cocks crow all night, the dogs never stop barking,” Dorothy told him.
“It sounds very restful,” Juan Diego said. The inn was a compound of buildings, all old. The Spanish architecture was obvious; maybe the inn had once been a mission, Juan Diego was thinking — there was a church among the half-dozen guesthouses.
El Escondrijo, the inn was called—“The Hiding Place.” It was hard to discern what kind of place it was, arriving after ten o’clock at night, as they did. The other guests (if there were any) had gone to bed. The dining room was outdoors under a thatched roof, but it was open-sided, exposed to the elements, though Dorothy promised him there were no mosquitoes.
“What kills the mosquitoes?” Juan Diego asked her.
“Bats, maybe — or the ghosts,” Dorothy answered him indifferently. The bats, Juan Diego guessed, were also up all night — neither crowing nor barking, just silently killing things. Juan Diego was somewhat accustomed to ghosts, or so he thought.
The unlikely lovers were staying on the sea; there was a breeze. Juan Diego and Dorothy were not in Vigan, or in any other town, but the lights they could see were from Vigan, and there were two or three freighters anchored offshore. They could see the lights from the freighters, and when the wind was right, they could occasionally hear the ships’ radios.
“There’s a small swimming pool — a kids’ pool, I guess you would call it,” Dorothy was saying. “You have to be careful you don’t fall in the pool at night, because they don’t light it,” she warned.
There was no air-conditioning, but Dorothy said the nights were cool enough not to need it, and there was a ceiling fan in their room; the fan made a ticking sound, but given the crowing gamecocks and barking dogs, what did a ticking fan matter? The Hiding Place was not what you would call a resort.
“The local beach is adjacent to a fishing village and an elementary school, but you hear the children’s voices only from a distance — with kids, hearing them from a distance is okay,” Dorothy was saying, as they were going to bed. “The dogs in the fishing village are territorial about the beach, but you’re safe if you walk on the wet sand — just stay close to the water,” Dorothy advised him.
What sort of people stay at El Escondrijo? Juan Diego was wondering. The Hiding Place made him think of fugitives or revolutionaries, not a touristy place. But Juan Diego was falling asleep; he was half asleep when Dorothy’s cell phone (in the vibrate mode) made a humming sound on the night table.