Black columns of smoke stood high above the basurero, pillars of blackness reaching into the sky. Vultures circled overhead, but Pepe saw that there were carrion eaters above and below; dogs were everywhere in the basurero, skirting the hellfires and grudgingly giving ground to the men in trucks but to almost no one else. The dogs were uneasy company around the children, because both were scavenging — if not for the same stuff. (The dogs weren’t interested in glass or aluminum or copper.) The dump dogs were mostly strays, of course, and some were dying.
Pepe wouldn’t be in the basurero long enough to spot the dead dogs, or to see what became of them — they were burned, but not always before the vultures found them.
Pepe found more dogs down the hill, in Guerrero. These dogs had been adopted by the families who worked in the basurero and lived in the colony. Pepe thought the dogs in Guerrero looked better fed, and they behaved more territorially than the dogs in the dump. They were more like the dogs in any neighborhood; they were edgier and more aggressive than the dump dogs, who tended to slink in an abject or furtive manner, though the dump dogs had a sly way of holding their ground.
You wouldn’t want to be bitten by a dog in the basurero, or by one in Guerrero — Pepe was pretty sure about that. After all, most of the dogs in Guerrero originally came from the dump.
Brother Pepe took the sick kids from Lost Children to see Dr. Vargas at the Red Cross hospital on Armenta y López; Vargas made it his priority to treat the orphanage kids and the dump kids first. Dr. Vargas had told Pepe that those kids who were the scavengers in the basurero were in the greatest danger from the dogs and from the needles — there were lots of discarded syringes with used needles in the dump. Un niño de la basura could easily get pricked by an old needle.
“Hepatitis B or C, tetanus — not to mention any imaginable form of bacterial infection,” Dr. Vargas had told Pepe.
“And a dog at the basurero, or any dog in Guerrero, could have rabies, I suppose,” Brother Pepe had said.
“The dump kids simply must get the rabies shots, if one of those dogs bites them,” Vargas said. “But the dump kids are more than usually afraid of needles. They’re afraid of those old needles, which they should be afraid of, but this makes them afraid of getting shots! If dogs bite them, the dump kids are more afraid of the shots than they are of rabies, which is not good.” Vargas was a good man, in Pepe’s opinion, though Vargas was a man of science, not a believer. (Pepe knew that Vargas could be a strain, spiritually speaking.)
Pepe was thinking about the rabies danger when he got out of his VW Beetle and approached el jefe’s shack in Guerrero; Pepe’s arms were wrapped tightly around the good books he’d brought for the dump reader, and he was wary of all the barking and unfriendly-looking dogs. “¡Hola!” the plump Jesuit cried at the screen door to the shack. “I have books for Juan Diego, the reader—good books!” He stepped back from the screen door when he heard the fierce growling from inside el jefe’s shack.
That woman worker at the basurero had said something about the dump boss — el jefe himself. She’d called him by name. “You won’t have trouble recognizing Rivera,” the woman had told Pepe. “He’s the one with the scariest-looking dog.”
But Brother Pepe couldn’t see the dog who was growling so fiercely behind the shack’s screen door. He took a second step away from the door, which opened suddenly, revealing not Rivera or anyone resembling a dump boss; the small but scowling person in the doorway of el jefe’s shack wasn’t Juan Diego, either, but a dark-eyed, feral-looking girl — the dump reader’s younger sister, Lupe, who was thirteen. Lupe’s language was incomprehensible — what came out of her mouth didn’t even sound like Spanish. Only Juan Diego could understand her; he was his sister’s translator, her interpreter. And Lupe’s strange speech was not the most mysterious thing about her; the girl was a mind reader. Lupe knew what you were thinking — occasionally, she knew more about you than that.
“It’s a guy with a bunch of books!” Lupe shouted into the shack, inspiring a cacophony of barking from the disagreeable-sounding but unseen dog. “He’s a Jesuit, and a teacher — one of the do-gooders from Lost Children.” Lupe paused, reading Brother Pepe’s mind, which was in a state of mild confusion; Pepe hadn’t understood a word she’d said. “He thinks I’m retarded. He’s worried that the orphanage won’t accept me — the Jesuits would presume I’m uneducable!” Lupe called to Juan Diego.
“She’s not retarded!” the boy cried out from somewhere inside the shack. “She understands everything!”
“I guess I’m looking for your brother?” the Jesuit asked the girl. Pepe smiled at her, and she nodded; Lupe could see he was sweating in his herculean effort to hold all the books.
“The Jesuit is nice — he’s just a little overweight,” the girl called to Juan Diego. She stepped back inside the shack, holding the screen door open for Brother Pepe, who entered cautiously; he was looking everywhere for the growling but invisible dog.
The boy, the dump reader himself, was barely more visible. The bookshelves surrounding him were better built than most, as was the shack itself — el jefe’s work, Pepe guessed. The young reader didn’t appear to be a likely carpenter. Juan Diego was a dreamy-looking boy, as many youthful but serious readers are; the boy looked a lot like his sister, too, and both of them reminded Pepe of someone. At the moment, the sweating Jesuit couldn’t think who the someone was.
“We both look like our mother,” Lupe told him, because she knew the visitor’s thoughts. Juan Diego, who was lying on a deteriorated couch with an open book on his chest, did not translate for Lupe this time; the young reader chose to leave the Jesuit teacher in the dark about what his clairvoyant sister had said.
“What are you reading?” Brother Pepe asked the boy.
“Local history—Church history, you might call it,” Juan Diego said.
“It’s boring,” Lupe said.
“Lupe says it’s boring — I guess it’s a little boring,” the boy agreed.
“Lupe reads, too?” Brother Pepe asked. There was a piece of plywood perfectly supported by two orange crates — a makeshift table, but a pretty good one — next to the couch. Pepe put his heavy armload of books there.
“I read aloud to her — everything,” Juan Diego told the teacher. The boy held up the book he was reading. “It’s a book about how you came third — you Jesuits,” Juan Diego explained. “Both the Augustinians and the Dominicans came to Oaxaca before the Jesuits — you got to town third. Maybe that’s why the Jesuits aren’t such a big deal in Oaxaca,” the boy continued. (This sounded startlingly familiar to Brother Pepe.)
“And the Virgin Mary overshadows Our Lady of Guadalupe — Guadalupe gets shortchanged by Mary and by Our Lady of Solitude,” Lupe started babbling, incomprehensibly. “La Virgen de la Soledad is such a local hero in Oaxaca — the Solitude Virgin and her stupid burro story! Nuestra Señora de la Soledad shortchanges Guadalupe, too. I’m a Guadalupe girl!” Lupe said, pointing to herself; she appeared to be angry about it.
Brother Pepe looked at Juan Diego, who seemed fed up with the virgin wars, but the boy translated all this.
“I know that book!” Pepe cried.
“Well, I’m not surprised — it’s one of yours,” Juan Diego told him; he handed Pepe the book he’d been reading. The old book smelled strongly like the basurero, and some of the pages looked singed. It was one of those academic tomes — Catholic scholarship of the kind almost no one reads. The book had come from the Jesuits’ own library at the former convent, now the Hogar de los Niños Perdidos. Many of the old and unreadable books had been sent to the dump when the convent was remodeled to accommodate the orphans, and to make more shelf space for the Jesuit school.