by Héctor Tobar
“What are you? His relative? His daughter?”
“No. They are his, how do you say …?”
“He’s our grandfather,” Keenan offered.
“You know, there’s been a lot of people in and out of this place since I moved here.” James “Sweet Hands” Washington had arrived on Thirty-ninth Street as a single man in the middle of the last century, picking out these bungalows because they reminded him of the old shotgun houses in his native Louisiana. The spot at the end of the block occupied by the garment factory had been the site of a car-repair shop back then, and Sweet Hands had worked there for a number of years, dismantling carburetors with the hands dubbed “sweet” first for his exploits on the football field, and later for his exploits with the ladies. Sweet Hands examined the picture, the way the Mexican subject wore his khaki pants with a distinctive mid-1950s swagger, and then the bungalow in the background, and was momentarily transported to that time, when the Southern California sky was dirtier than it was today, and when Sweet Hands himself was a young man recently liberated from Southern strictures. This young man in the photograph looked like he had been liberated too: or maybe he was just feeling what Los Angeles was back then, in that era of hairspray and starched clothes, when the city had a proper stiffness to it, and also a certain glimmer, like the shine of those freshly waxed V8 cruisers that rolled along Central Avenue at a parade pace of fifteen miles per hour. Sweet Hands held the picture a long time, and finally let out a short grunt that was his bodily summation of all the emotions this unexpected encounter with the distant past had brought him. “Johnny. That’s his name. Johnny something.”
“Torres.”
“Oh, yeah. Johnny. Johnny Torres. I remember the Torres people.” They were one of the first Mexican families to move into these bungalows, way back when Mexico was a novelty Sweet Hands associated with sombreros, donkeys, and dark-eyed beauties with braids and long skirts that reached down to white socks and patent leather shoes. After the Torres people had left—four of them, he seemed to remember, including khaki-pants Johnny here—there hadn’t been many other Mexicans around until well after the Watts troubles. They started to show up in large numbers in the years before the Rodney King mess, in fact. It was quite a thing to be able to measure the passing of time by the conflagrations one had seen, by the looting crowds and the fire-makers. Bad times chased away his “people” in all the senses of the word: his relatives, his fellow Louisiana exiles, and most of the other sons of Africa who once lived here. His people had gone off to live in the desert, leaving the place to the Mexicans. Sweet Hands understood, from the way they carried themselves and from the singsong cadences he detected in their speech (without understanding precisely what it was that they were saying), that they came from a verdant place like his own Marion, a place of unrelenting greenness and tangled branches where the rain made songs on the tin roofs. The Mexicans brought with them that slow, boisterous, and tropical feel of rural Louisiana, and he liked having them around, especially since all his relatives had moved out to Lancaster. The few times his daughter and grandchildren came back in their clean and ironed clothes and told him “This place stinks” were enough for him to ask that they not come back—and to resist their entreaties that he move out to the desert. Here on Thirty-ninth Street, Sweet Hands could still take a couple of buses and find the last place in South Los Angeles that served Louisiana buffalo fish, and he might find two or three other old-timers there to talk about baseball and Duke Snider and Roy Campanella, and watching the Yankees play the Los Angeles Angels in 1961 at the old Wrigley Field, just a short walk away on Forty-second Place. There wasn’t any buffalo fish in Lancaster, it was dry as all hell out there, not a place for a man from Louisiana to live. Whereas on certain moist summer mornings the seagulls came to Thirty-ninth Street and circled over the trash cans behind the garment factory, where the taco trucks tossed the tortillas they didn’t sell. When Sweet Hands closed his eyes and listened to the caw-caw of the seagulls, he could see the ocean.
“Yeah, I remember this guy,” Sweet Hands said finally. “He used to live right there. Where Isabel and her kids live now. Moved out ages and ages ago. I think he moved to the desert. Or to Huntington Park. Used to be that Huntington Park was all the rage. A lot of people from here moved to HP, especially after they opened up that Ford plant …” With that he returned the photograph to Araceli, who looked crestfallen. “Sorry.” He gently closed the door and got back to his Dodgers, even as Brandon and Keenan stood up on their tiptoes to get a glimpse of the television inside.
“Now what do we do, Araceli?” Keenan asked as they walked back toward the street. The question echoed in Araceli’s mind in Spanish: ¿Y ahora qué hacemos? Araceli looked down Thirty-ninth Street and the end of the path she had followed to get to this place. It would be dark by the time they reached the bus stop and she sensed that walking through these neighborhoods at dusk could be worse than putting the boys into Foster Care, and that the best course of action might be to simply pick up the nearest pay phone and call 911. “Maybe we should go to this Huntington Park place,” Brandon offered. “That sounds like the kind of place my grandfather would live … by a park.” This absurd suggestion only made Araceli feel more trapped and desperate. I am the woman who cleans! She pulled down angrily at her blouse, which had been bunching up on her since they had left the house, then plopped herself down on the edge of the sidewalk. The boys followed, their Velcro-strapped tennis shoes next to her white, scuffed-up nurse’s shoes in the gutter.
The unwanted closeness caused the muscles of her legs and back to tense. Why are you so spoiled and helpless? Why can’t you have one nosy aunt or uncle or cousin nearby like all the other children on earth? She was going to have to make a decision about them. Was $250 stuffed in an envelope every week enough to justify this march across the city? Looking across the street and to her right, she saw a phone booth. If she just picked up the line and called, then maybe she could get the Foster Care people without summoning the police. And then I would be free. Down the block to Araceli’s left, a group of squat men and women with round faces gathered around a taco truck, in a chatty cluster before the swing shift began at what she guessed was a garment factory. Behind them she could see a loading dock with a large opening to a vast interior space with low ceilings and a bluish glow, engines groaning and puffing metallically. The boys from the Room of a Thousand Wonders did not know that there was a world of dangerous machines and a city of dark alleys all around them. Having been thrown together with these two boys, in the inescapably intimate situation of being their sole caretaker, Araceli suddenly felt the great distance that separated her life from theirs. I am a member of the tribe of chemical cleansers, of brooms, of machetes and shovels, and they are the people of pens and keyboards. We are people whose skin bakes in the sun, while they labor and live in fluorescent shadows, covering their skins with protective creams when they venture outside. Deeper and farther away to the south, beyond the mean city, there were rocky landscapes where men dug tunnels under steel fences, and deserts where children begged for water and asked their fathers if the next ridge was the last one, and cried when the answer was no. Brandon and Keenan did not know of such horrors, but Araceli did, and had survived them, and she wondered how many scars the boys might have after a night or two, or perhaps a week or a month, in Foster Care, which she imagined to be an anteroom to that dark and dangerous world. Maybe she couldn’t and shouldn’t protect them, maybe it was better for them to see and know. Maybe innocence is a skin you must shed to build layers more resistant to the caustic truths of the world. She wondered if she was living at the beginning of a new era, when the pale and protected began to live among the dark and the sorrowful, the angry multitudes of the south.
Behind them a door opened and Araceli and the boys turned around to see the woman from the first bungalow heading down the steps and walking toward them, with three giggling children trailing behind her.
13
Isabe
l Aguilar peeled back the curtain and spied on the lost strangers through the window of her small living room, which also doubled as the bedroom of her son and the Other Boy who lived with her. The three strangers sat on the curb, two white boys and a mexicana in a foul mood. Encounters with disoriented travelers were not unusual on Thirty-ninth Street, where Isabel’s rented bungalow stood at the edge of a district of hurricane fencing and barbed wire, of HELP WANTED signs in Korean, Spanish, and Cantonese, where cloth was transformed into boutique T-shirts and steel was cut and solvents were mixed. When lost pedestrians reached Isabel’s front step and contemplated the industrial horizon that began on her street, they realized they were in the wrong place and knocked on her door, twisting their faces into question marks: “¿Y la Main, dónde está?” “You know where my homie Ruben lives?” “Have any idea, honey, where I might find the United States Post Office?” Isabel answered the door for all of them, and sometimes opened the outer metal barrier, the better to hear their questions, even though she was a single mother living with her two children and the Other Boy who was not her son. She had been born in a town in the municipality of Sonsonate, El Salvador, a place of rusting railroad tracks where the green mushroom-cloud canopy of a single ceiba tree billowed over the central plaza and where neighbors knocked on your door expecting to be invited in.
The big Mexican woman sitting on the curb stood out among the parade of the lost on Thirty-ninth Street first for the startling photograph she presented as a calling card, an image of Isabel’s bungalow before the floors sagged and the doors and windows were encased in steel, and second because the children she had with her were obviously not hers. Isabel detected a faint coloring of Oaxaca or Guatemala in their skin—perhaps she was their aunt or cousin. But there was something decidedly non—Latin American in the air of pampered curiosity with which they sized up Isabel and the bungalow. They reminded Isabel of the children she had cared for in Pasadena when she worked there one summer, boys who knew the abundance of expansive homes with unlocked doors and clutter-free stretches of hardwood floor that were swept and polished by women like her. Why was the Mexican woman dragging them around these parts, where the only white people she saw regularly were the policemen and the old man who collected the rent?
“What are you looking at?” asked the Other Boy behind her. “Why are you on my bed?” His name was Tomás, he was eleven, and he had lived with Isabel and her son and daughter for two years. The Other Boy was an orphan, and under strict orders to be quiet and grateful, and to bother her as little as possible, though he was constantly forgetting that last commandment. Isabel turned and gave him a scowl that involved a slight baring of her pewter-lined teeth.
“¡Gallate!” she snapped.
Tomás raised his eyebrows, smiled, and turned away, unfazed, returning to the movie he was watching with Héctor, Isabel’s son and Tomás’s best friend on earth, and with María Antonieta, Isabel’s daughter.
Isabel found her natural provincial generosity once again pulling her toward the front door and down the stairs. These small-town instincts had gotten her into trouble before—the Other Boy being the principal reminder of this. But she sensed that outside on the curb there was a woman in a situation much like her own: alone with two children and the Other Boy and only the twice-monthly visits of the father of her children, Wandering-Eye Man, and his cash stipend to make the situation livable. Her ex had visited the previous weekend, which was why Isabel had had her nails and hair done, but all she had accomplished with that was to make his eyes fix on her for a heartbeat or two longer than usual.
When Isabel opened the door, Héctor, María Antonieta, and the Other Boy paused the movie they had been watching on their DVD player and the three of them followed her out the door and down the stairs.
Isabel leaned down and asked a question softly of Araceli. “¿Tienen hambre? Tenemos hot dogs.”
“Hot dogs?” Keenan shouted. Before Araceli could answer, her charges were rising to their feet and following the three children into the bungalow. Araceli mumbled a “Gracias” as she scrambled after the children and up the three stairs through a doorway whose wood moldings had been painted and repainted so many times over the course of eight decades they seemed to be made of clay. They entered a room where the floor nearly disappeared in the impossible clutter of furniture: a secondhand sofa of coarse fabric, a dresser, two beds, a television, and assorted shelves squeezed between walls of much-abused plaster that held the memories of the dozens of families that had lived there, including a clan of worn-out farmworkers named Torres.
When Keenan and Brandon stepped into this space, their eyes were drawn to the alabaster face of a motionless woman on the television screen. She was holding a large white scepter and wearing a crown of crystals, while riding a chariot pulled by a panther. “Hey, this is a cool movie,” Brandon said as he and his brother dropped themselves to the carpet, to watch the image atop the dresser spring into movement, while the three children in Isabel’s care positioned themselves around their guests, all five children craning their necks upward to watch an elaborately staged battle unfold between the stacks of folded clothes and towels that framed the television on either side. Brandon’s eyes were momentarily drawn to the tall votive candle burning on one edge of the dresser: the flicking flame illuminated Saint James the vanquisher of the Moors, a sword-wielding man on horseback trampling people underfoot, an image that suggested that the memory of warfare and conquest was alive among the inhabitants of this home.
Araceli followed Isabel to the kitchen, which occupied the transitional space between the room where the children were watching television and a third room in the back where there were two more beds and a dresser covered with cold creams, rouges, eyeliner, and perfume bottles and makeup containers that filled the air with a bouquet of ethanol and coconut oil. From this spot, Araceli could keep an eye on the children, and also watch as Isabel drew water from the tap and filled a pot to boil the hot dogs. La señora Maureen would be scandalized: she insisted that all cooking in her home be done with bottled water.
“And the kids?” Isabel asked Araceli in a conspiratorial Spanish half whisper. “What’s going on with them?”
“They belong to the family I work for,” Araceli said in a matter-of-fact voice. “Their parents disappeared on me. And I came looking for their grandfather. I thought he lived here.”
“Maybe he lived here once. But I’ve been here two years and haven’t seen any other viejos other than Mr. Washington.” Isabel opened a cabinet and removed a small, flat package from a space where boxes, loaves of bread, cans, and plastic bags were packed in as tight as passengers on a Mexico City subway, then threw the package into a microwave, and the room was soon filled with the sound of corn popping. Araceli looked over and saw that Brandon was talking to the children who lived here, their heads leaning forward, Isabel’s boy nodding, his eyes narrowed in an expression of serious contemplation. She wondered in which language they were conversing.
When the movie ended, Brandon and the Other Boy renewed their discussion of the plot and characters, talking in a bilingual mix of English and Spanish that leaned heavily toward the former. “I think the bruja blanca has to come back in the next movie,” the Other Boy, Tomás, was saying. “There’s lots of movies where people come back from the dead.”
“Who are they going to do battle with if not the witch?” Héctor offered, and then he and Tomás looked at Brandon, because in the twenty minutes they had been watching the movie together Brandon had, with a few comments and observations, already established himself as an authority on the subject.
Brandon moved his head back and forth in a gesture that meant Yes and no. The movie was based on another series of books Brandon had read and finished, over the course of Thanksgiving and Christmas vacations and many school nights in between during his fourth-grade year. More than a year had passed since he had completed the seventh volume in the series, but he remembered all the books in great detail. “The witc
h is really dead and she’s not coming back. But she’s in another book that comes before this one.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
Brandon began a patient, detailed recitation of the long, winding series of adventures of the characters portrayed in the movie, an epic narrative that involved an apple core, the tree that blossomed from it, a piece of furniture built from the tree, and various magicians, professors, and animals with visionary powers, all unfolding in the City of London and other places in the real world, and in a magical, parallel realm. Brandon had also read about the historical war that took place in the background of the seven-volume fantasy saga, in a big picture book called Eyewitness: World War II, and he wove a few events from that conflict into the story that he told Tomás and Héctor, who were shocked to hear that German planes had bombed British cities and transformed entire neighborhoods into flaming rubble. “How could they do that to the kids down there?” Tomás asked, and Brandon replied, “Don’t know. That’s just the way war is, I guess.”
“It happened to my grandpa in the war, in Chalatenango,” Héctor interjected, causing the other boys to stop and look at him and await more details, though he had none. Héctor was a shy boy and not a natural storyteller, and El Salvador was a place that might as well have been a place from a fantasy novel, because he had never been there and he knew the country only from the stories his father told him during his twice-monthly visits.
Returning to the fantasy saga depicted in the movie, Brandon told them how, over the course of seven books, it had become clear that the magical and the real inhabited the same physical space—“not like in the movie, where they have to go into that closet to get to the other world.” Brandon shared this revelation with Tomás and Héctor with special relish, because it matched his growing sense of the weird urban districts in which he and his brother were traveling. The train had brought them to this place called Los Angeles, where the magical and the real, the world of fantasy books and history, seemed to coexist on the same extended stage of streets, rivers, and railroad tracks. “Did you know that there are Vardurians living close by?” he told his new friends. “The Fire-Swallowers chased them to the railroad tracks and the river. Did you know that?” Tomás and Héctor looked perplexed: They haven’t read those books either, Brandon realized.
