“I see,” Brother Pepe said. But he was only beginning to see what the brother and sister’s situation was: indeed, it was better than the situation for many children who separated the stuff they picked through and sorted in the basurero. And it was worse for them, too — because Lupe and Juan Diego were resented by the scavengers and their families in Guerrero. These two dump kids may have had Rivera’s protection (for which they were resented), but el jefe was not exactly their father. And their mother, who worked nights on Zaragoza Street, was a prostitute who didn’t actually live in Guerrero.
There is a pecking order everywhere, Brother Pepe thought sadly to himself.
“What’s a pecking order?” Lupe asked her brother. (Pepe was now beginning to understand that the girl knew what he was thinking.)
“A pecking order is how the other niños de la basura feel superior to us,” Juan Diego said to Lupe.
“Precisely,” Pepe said, a little uneasily. Here he’d come to meet the dump reader, the fabled boy from Guerrero, bringing him good books, as a good teacher would — only to discover that he, Pepe, the Jesuit himself, was the one with a lot to learn.
That was when the constantly complaining but unseen dog showed itself, if it was actually a dog. The weaselly little creature crawled out from under the couch — more rodential than canine, Pepe thought.
“His name is Dirty White — he’s a dog, not a rat!” Lupe said indignantly to Brother Pepe.
Juan Diego explained this, but the boy added: “Dirty White is a dirty little coward — an ungrateful one.”
“I saved him from death!” Lupe cried. Even as the skinny, hunched dog sidled toward the girl’s outstretched arms, his lips involuntarily curled, baring his pointed teeth.
“He should be called Saved from Death, not Dirty White,” Juan Diego said, laughing. “She found him with his head caught in a milk carton.”
“He’s a puppy. He was starving,” Lupe protested.
“Dirty White is still starving for something,” Juan Diego said.
“Stop,” his sister told him; the puppy shivered in her arms.
Pepe tried to repress his thoughts, but this was harder than he’d imagined it would be; he decided it would be best to leave, even abruptly, rather than allow the clairvoyant girl to read his mind. Pepe didn’t want the thirteen-year-old innocent to know what he was thinking.
He started his VW Beetle; there was no sign of Rivera, or el jefe’s “scariest-looking” dog, as the Jesuit teacher drove away from Guerrero. The spires of black smoke from the basurero were rising all around him, as were the good-hearted Jesuit’s blackest thoughts.
Father Alfonso and Father Octavio looked upon Juan Diego and Lupe’s mother — Esperanza, the prostitute — as the “fallen.” In the minds of the two old priests, there were no fallen souls who had fallen further than prostitutes; there were no miserable creatures of the human kind as lost as these unfortunate women were. Esperanza was hired as a cleaning woman for the Jesuits in an allegedly holy effort to save her.
But don’t these dump kids need saving, too? Pepe wondered. Aren’t los niños de la basura among the “fallen,” or aren’t they in danger of future falling? Or of falling further?
When that boy from Guerrero was a grown-up, complaining to his doctor about the beta-blockers, he should have had Brother Pepe standing beside him; Pepe would have given testimony to Juan Diego’s childhood memories and his fiercest dreams. Even this dump reader’s nightmares were worth preserving, Brother Pepe knew.
WHEN THESE DUMP KIDS were in their early teens, Juan Diego’s most recurrent dream wasn’t a nightmare. The boy often dreamed of flying — well, not exactly. It was an awkward-looking and peculiar kind of airborne activity, which bore little resemblance to “flying.” The dream was always the same: people in a crowd looked up; they saw that Juan Diego was walking on the sky. From below — that is, from ground level — the boy appeared to be very carefully walking upside down in the heavens. (It also seemed that he was counting to himself.)
There was nothing spontaneous about Juan Diego’s movement across the sky — he was not flying freely, as a bird flies; he lacked the powerful, straightforward thrust of an airplane. Yet, in that oft-repeated dream, Juan Diego knew he was where he belonged. From his upside-down perspective in the sky, he could see the anxious, upturned faces in the crowd.
When he described the dream to Lupe, the boy would also say to his strange sister: “There comes a moment in every life when you must let go with your hands — with both hands.” Naturally, this made no sense to a thirteen-year-old — even to a normal thirteen-year-old. Lupe’s reply was unintelligible, even to Juan Diego.
One time when he asked her what she thought of his dream about walking upside down in the heavens, Lupe was typically mysterious, though Juan Diego could at least comprehend her exact words.
“It’s a dream about the future,” the girl said.
“Whose future?” Juan Diego asked.
“Not yours, I hope,” his sister replied, more mysteriously.
“But I love this dream!” the boy had said.
“It’s a death dream,” was all Lupe would say further.
But now, as an older man, since he’d been taking the beta-blockers, his childhood dream of walking on the sky was lost to him, and Juan Diego didn’t get to relive the nightmare of that long-ago morning he was crippled in Guerrero. The dump reader missed that nightmare.
He’d complained to his doctor. “The beta-blockers are blocking my memories!” Juan Diego cried. “They are stealing my childhood—they are robbing my dreams!” To his doctor, all this hysteria meant was that Juan Diego missed the kick his adrenaline gave him. (Beta-blockers really do a number on your adrenaline.)
His doctor, a no-nonsense woman named Rosemary Stein, had been a close friend of Juan Diego’s for twenty years; she was familiar with what she thought of as his hysterical overstatements.
Dr. Stein knew very well why she had prescribed the beta-blockers for Juan Diego; her dear friend was at risk of having a heart attack. He not only had very high blood pressure (170 over 100), but he was pretty sure his mother and one of his possible fathers had died of a heart attack — his mother, definitely, at a young age. Juan Diego had no shortage of adrenaline — the fight-or-flight hormone, which is released during moments of stress, fear, calamity, and performance anxiety, and during a heart attack. Adrenaline also shunts blood away from the gut and viscera — the blood goes to your muscles, so that you can run. (Maybe a dump reader has more need of adrenaline than most people.)
Beta-blockers do not prevent heart attacks, Dr. Stein had explained to Juan Diego, but these medications block the adrenaline receptors in the body and thus shield the heart from the potentially devastating effect of the adrenaline released during a heart attack.
“Where are my damn adrenaline receptors?” Juan Diego had asked Dr. Stein. (“Dr. Rosemary,” he called her — just to tease her.)
“In the lungs, blood vessels, heart — almost everywhere,” she’d answered him. “Adrenaline makes your heart beat faster. You breathe harder, the hair on your arms stands up, your pupils dilate, your blood vessels constrict — not good, if you’re having a heart attack.”