Lupe had said some terrible things about Dolores--"let the lion tamer knock her up!" Lupe had said. (In fact, Ignacio had knocked Dolores up.) "That's her only future!" Lupe had said, but now she was sorry she'd said those things. Dolores had gotten her first period a while ago; maybe the lions didn't know when Dolores started bleeding, but Ignacio did.
Dolores had been running to lose the baby--she wasn't having her period anymore--but she couldn't run hard enough to make herself miscarry. It was morning sickness that made Dolores throw up.
When Lupe told all this to Juan Diego, he asked Lupe if Dolores had talked about it, but Dolores hadn't told Lupe about her condition. Lupe had just read what was on Dolores's mind.
Dolores did say one thing to Lupe that morning when The Wonder left the main tent--once Dolores knew Juan Diego was coming down the climbing rope. "I'll tell you what I don't have the balls for--because you're such a little know-it-all, you probably know already," Dolores said to Lupe. "I don't have the balls for the next part of my life," the skywalker said. Then Dolores left the main tent--she wouldn't be back. La Maravilla wouldn't have a skywalker.
The last person to see Dolores in Oaxaca was Dr. Vargas, in the ER at Cruz Roja. Vargas said Dolores died of a peritoneal infection--from a botched abortion in Guadalajara. Vargas said: "The asshole lion tamer knows some amateur he sends his pregnant skywalkers to see." By the time Dolores got to Cruz Roja, the infection was too advanced for Vargas to save her.
"Die in childbirth, monkey twat!" Lupe had once said to The Wonder. In a way, Dolores would; like Juan Diego, she was only fourteen. Circo de La Maravilla lost La Maravilla.
The chain of events, the links in our lives--what leads us where we're going, the courses we follow to our ends, what we don't see coming, and what we do--all this can be mysterious, or simply unseen, or even obvious.
Vargas was a good doctor, and a smart man. One look at Dolores, and Vargas had known everything: the abortion in Guadalajara (Vargas had seen the results before); the amateur who'd botched the job (Vargas knew the butcher was Ignacio's pal); the fourteen-year-old who'd gotten her first period fairly recently (Vargas was aware of the weird connection between skywalking and menstruating, though he'd not known the lion tamer had told the girls that the lions knew when the girls were bleeding).
But not even Vargas knew everything. For the rest of his life, Dr. Vargas would be interested in lions and rabies; he would continue to send Juan Diego details of the existent research. Yet when Lupe had asked the question--when Lupe was looking for answers--Vargas never followed up with any lion information.
True to his nature, Vargas had a scientific mind--he couldn't stop speculating. He wasn't really interested in lions and rabies, but long after Lupe's death, Varga
s would wonder why Lupe had wanted to know.
Senor Eduardo and Flor had died of AIDS and Lupe was long gone when Vargas wrote to Juan Diego about some incomprehensible "studies" in Tanzania. Research on rabies in lions in the Serengeti raised these "significant" points, which Vargas had highlighted.
Rabies in lions originated in domestic dogs; it was thought to spread from dogs to hyenas, and from hyenas to lions. Rabies in lions could cause disease, but it could also be "silent." (There had been epidemics of rabies in lions in 1976 and 1981, but no disease occurred--they were called silent epidemics.) Presence of a certain parasite, which had been likened to malaria, was thought to determine whether the disease from rabies did or didn't occur--in other words, a lion could spread rabies while not being sick, and never getting sick; whereas a lion could get the same rabies virus and die, depending on coinfection with the parasite.
"This has to do with the effects on the immune system caused by the parasite," Vargas had written to Juan Diego. There had been "killer" epidemics of rabies in lions in the Serengeti--these occurred in periods of drought, which killed off the Cape buffalo. (The buffalo carcasses were infested with ticks, which carried the parasite.)
It wasn't that Vargas thought these Tanzanian "studies" would ever have helped Lupe. She'd been interested in whether or not Hombre could get rabies, and if the rabies would make Hombre sick. But why? That's what Vargas wished he knew. (What was the point of knowing it now? Juan Diego thought. It was too late to know what Lupe had been thinking.)
For a lion to get sick with rabies was a long shot, even in the Serengeti, but what crazy idea had Lupe considered, before she changed her mind and thought of her next crazy idea?
Why would Hombre's getting sick with rabies have mattered? That must have been where the rooftop-dog idea came from, before Lupe abandoned it. A rabid dog bites Hombre, or Hombre kills and eats a rabid dog, but then what? So Hombre gets sick--then Hombre bites Ignacio, but what happens next?
"It was all about what the lionesses thought," Juan Diego had explained to Vargas a hundred times. "Lupe could read the lions' minds--she knew that Hombre would never harm Ignacio. And the girls at La Maravilla would never be safe--not as long as the lion tamer lived. Lupe knew that, too, because she could read Ignacio's mind."
Naturally, this fanciful logic was not in the language of the scientific studies Dr. Vargas found convincing.
"You're saying Lupe somehow knew that the lionesses would kill Ignacio, but only if the lion tamer killed Hombre?" Vargas (always incredulous) asked Juan Diego.
"I heard her say it," Juan Diego had told Vargas repeatedly. "Lupe didn't say the lionesses 'would' kill Ignacio--she said they 'will' kill him. Lupe said the lionesses hated Ignacio. She said the lionesses were all dumber than monkey twats--because the lionesses were jealous of Ignacio, and thought Hombre loved the lion tamer more than the lion loved them! Ignacio had nothing to fear from Hombre--it was the lionesses the lion tamer should have been afraid of, Lupe always said."
"Lupe knew all that? How did she know all that?" Dr. Vargas always asked Juan Diego. The doctor's studies of rabies in lions would continue. (It was not a very popular field of study.)
THE SAME DAY THAT Juan Diego chickened out of skywalking would be known (for a while) in Oaxaca as "The Day of the Nose." It would never be called "El Dia de la Nariz" on a church calendar; it wouldn't become a national holiday, or even a local saint's day. The Day of the Nose would soon pass from memory--even from local lore--but, for a while, it would amount to a small big deal.
In the avenue of troupe tents, Lupe and Juan Diego were alone; it was still early in the morning, before the first morning Mass, and Circo de La Maravilla was still sleeping in.
There was some commotion coming from the dogs' troupe tent--clearly Estrella and the dogs weren't sleeping in--and the dump kids hurried to see what the cause of the commotion was. It was unusual to see Brother Pepe's VW Beetle in the avenue of troupe tents--the little car was empty, but Pepe had left the engine running--and the kids could hear Perro Mestizo, the mongrel, barking his brains out. At the open flaps of the dogs' troupe tent, Alemania, the female German shepherd, was growling--she was holding Edward Bonshaw at bay.
"There they are!" Pepe cried, when he saw the dump kids.
"Uh-oh," Lupe said. (Obviously, she knew what was on the Jesuits' minds.)
"Have you seen Rivera?" Brother Pepe asked Juan Diego.
"Not since you saw him," Juan Diego answered.
"The dump boss was thinking about going to the first morning Mass," Lupe said; she waited for her brother to translate this, before she told Juan Diego the rest. Since Lupe knew everything Pepe and Senor Eduardo were thinking, she didn't wait for them to tell Juan Diego what was going on. "The Mary Monster has grown a new nose," Lupe said. "Or the Virgin Mary has sprouted someone else's nose. As you might expect, there's a debate."