The lionesses never reached through the slot for the meat Lupe was putting on the feeding tray; they sat waiting, with their tails swishing the whole time.
For cleaning, the feeding tray could be entirely removed from the slot at the floor of the cage. Even when the tray was taken out of the cage, the slot wasn't big enough for Hombre or the lionesses to escape through the opening; the slot was too small for Hombre's big head to fit through it. Not even one of the lionesses could have stuck her head through the open feeding slot.
"It's safe," Edward Bonshaw had said to Juan Diego. "I just wanted to be sure about the size of the opening."
Over the long weekend when La Maravilla was performing in Mexico City, Senor Eduardo slept with the dump kids in the dogs' troupe tent. The first night--when the dump kids knew the Iowan was asleep, because he was snoring--Lupe said to her brother: "I can fit through the slot where the feeding tray slides in and out. It's not too small an opening for me to fit through."
In the darkness of the tent, Juan Diego considered what Lupe meant; what Lupe said and what she meant weren't always the same thing.
"You mean, you could climb into Hombre's cage--or the lionesses' cage--through the feeding slot?" the boy asked her.
"If the feeding tray was removed from the slot--yes, I could," Lupe told him.
"You sound like you've tried it," Juan Diego said.
"Why would I try it?" Lupe asked him.
"I don't know--why would you?" Juan Diego asked her.
She didn't answer him, but even in the dark he sensed her shrug, her sheer indifference to answering him. (As if Lupe couldn't be bothered to explain everything she knew, or how she knew it.)
Someone farted--one of the dogs, perhaps. "Was that the biter?" Juan Diego asked. Perro Mestizo, a.k.a. Mongrel, slept with Lupe on her cot. Pastora slept with Juan Diego; he knew the sheepdog hadn't farted.
"It was the parrot man," Lupe answered. The dump kids laughed. A dog's tail wagged--there was the accompanying thump-thump. One of the dogs had liked the laughter.
"Alemania," Lupe said. It was the female German shepherd who had wagged her big tail. She slept on the dirt floor of the tent, by the tent flap, as if she were guarding (in police-dog fashion) the way in or out.
"I wonder if lions can catch rabies," Lupe said, as if she were falling asleep, and she wouldn't remember this idea in the morning.
"Why?" Juan Diego asked her.
"Just wondering," Lupe said, sighing. After a pause, she asked: "Don't you think the new dog act is stupid?"
Juan Diego knew when Lupe was deliberately changing the subject, and of course Lupe knew he'd been thinking about the new dog act. It was Juan Diego's idea, but the dogs hadn't been very cooperative, and the dwarf clowns had taken over the idea; it had become Paco and Beer Belly's new act, in Lupe's opinion. (As if those two clowns needed another stupid act.)
Ah, the passage of time--one day when he'd been dog-paddling in the pool at the old Iowa Field House, Juan Diego realized that the new dog act had amounted to his first novel-in-progress, but it was a story he'd been unable to finish. (And the idea that lions could catch rabies? Didn't this amount to a story that Lupe had been unable to bring to a close?)
Like Juan Diego's actual novels, the dog act began as a what-if proposition. What if one of the dogs could be trained to climb to the top of a stepladder? It was that type of stepladder with a shelf at the top; the shelf was for holding a can of paint, or a workman's tools, but Juan Diego had imagined the shelf as a diving platform for a dog. What if one of the dogs climbed the stepladder and sailed into the air, off the diving platform, into an open blanket the dwarf clowns were holding out?
"The audience would love it," Juan Diego told Estrella.
"Not Alemania--s
he won't do it," Estrella had said.
"Yes--I guess a German shepherd is too big to climb a stepladder," Juan Diego had replied.
"Alemania is too smart to do it," was all Estrella said.
"Perro Mestizo, the biter, is a chickenshit," Juan Diego said.
"You hate little dogs--you hated Dirty White," Lupe had told him.
"I don't hate little dogs--Perro Mestizo isn't that little. I hate cowardly dogs, and dogs who bite," Juan Diego had told his sister.
"Not Perro Mestizo--he won't do it," was all Estrella said.
They tried Pastora, the sheepdog, first; everyone thought that a dachshund's legs were too short to climb the steps on a stepladder--surely Baby couldn't reach the steps.