Read Online Avenue of Mysteries by John Irving - Free Book Online Page B

foreknowledge of who was on that airplane on that morning—thus, immediately upon the appearance of the plane in the sky, there came the simultaneous understanding of Juan Diego’s future. In reality, on that morning, something fairly ordinary had diverted Juan Diego’s attention from the far-off but descending plane. The boy had spotted what he thought was a feather—not from a crow or a vulture. A different-looking feather (but not that different-looking) was pinned under the left-rear wheel of the truck.
    Lupe had already slipped into the cab beside Rivera.
    Diablo, despite his lean appearance, was a well-fed dog—he was quite superior to the scavenging dump dogs, not only in this respect. Diablo was an aloof, macho-looking dog. (In Guerrero, they called him the “male animal.”)
    With his forepaws on Rivera’s toolbox, Diablo could extend his head and neck over the passenger side of the pickup; if he put his forepaws on el jefe’s spare tire, Diablo’s head would obstruct Rivera’s vision of his side-view mirror—the broken one, on the driver’s side. When the dump boss glanced in that broken mirror, he had a multifaceted view: a spiderweb of shards of glass reflected Diablo’s four-eyed face. The dog suddenly had two mouths, two tongues.
    “Where is your brother?” Rivera asked the girl.
    “I’m not the only one who’s crazy,” Lupe said, but the dump boss didn’t understand her at all.
    When el jefe had a nap in the cab of his truck, he often put the stick shift, which was on the floor of the cab, in reverse. If the gear shift was set in first gear, the knob could poke him in his ribs while he was trying to sleep.
    Diablo’s “normal” face now appeared in the passenger-side mirror—the unbroken one—but when Rivera looked in the driver’s-side mirror, in the spiderweb of broken glass, he never saw Juan Diego trying to retrieve the slightly unusual-looking, reddish-brown feather that was trapped under the left-rear wheel of the truck. The truck lurched backward in reverse, rolling over the boy’s right foot. It’s just a chicken feather, Juan Diego realized. In the same half-second, he acquired his lifelong limp—for a feather as common as dirt in Guerrero. On the outskirts of Oaxaca, lots of families kept chickens.
    The small bump under the left-rear tire caused the Guadalupe doll on the dashboard to wobble her hips. “Be careful you don’t get yourself pregnant,” Lupe told the doll, but Rivera had no comprehension of what she’d said; el jefe could hear Juan Diego screaming. “You’ve lost your touch for miracles—you’ve sold out,” Lupe was saying to the Guadalupe doll. Rivera had braked the truck; he climbed out of the cab, running to the injured boy. Diablo was barking crazily—he sounded like a different dog. All the dogs in Guerrero began to bark. “ Now see what you’ve done,” Lupe admonished the doll on the dashboard, but the girl quickly climbed out of the cab and ran to her brother.
    The boy’s right foot had been crushed; flattened and bleeding, the maimed foot pointed away from his right ankle and shin in a two-o’clock position. His foot looked smaller, somehow. Rivera carried Juan Diego to the cab; the boy would have continued to scream, but the pain made him hold his breath, then gasp for air, then hold his breath again. His boot slipped off.
    “Try to breathe normally, or you’ll faint,” Rivera told him.
    “Maybe now you’ll fix that stupid mirror!” Lupe was screaming at the dump boss.
    “What is she saying?” Rivera asked the boy. “I hope it’s not about my side-view mirror.”
    “I’m trying to breathe normally,” Juan Diego told him.
    Lupe got in the truck’s cab first, so that her brother could put his head in her lap and stick his bad foot out the passenger-side window. “Take him to Dr. Vargas!” the girl was screaming at Rivera, who understood the Vargas word.
    “We’ll try for a miracle first—then Vargas,” Rivera