The Barbarian Nurseries

by Héctor Tobar

  Some nights, sitting on these steps, Tomás continued, he would see a man walking down South Broadway and imagined he might be his father, especially if the man advanced with the uneven, slumped-over walk of people whose heads were swimming with what Isabel called estu-pefecantes. Tomás wasn’t especially eager to see his father, and the sight of these drugged and drunk men often caused him to retreat back into the bungalow, lest the old man come and claim him and renew their hotel-hopping adventures. But Tomás quickly realized it was silly to think this, because his father and mother were almost certainly dead: if they were alive they would have come looking for him long ago, because they needed him to help feed them, and to call the ambulance when they lost consciousness, even if they said they didn’t want to be rescued.

  “Maybe our parents are dead too,” Brandon said absentmindedly. “Maybe that’s why they left us alone with Araceli.”

  “No, they’re not,” Keenan said. “I talked to them.”

  Before Keenan could explain further, Araceli was hovering over them, telling them it was time to go to bed. They changed into their pajamas and giggled a bit with Tomás and Héctor in the darkness, until Araceli stretched out on the floor alongside Brandon and Keenan and told them all to be quiet. The weariness of a day spent walking and traveling soon caught up with the boys, and they slipped effortlessly into a sleep that was black and complete, devoid of dreams, fantasies, and illusions.

  “Nah, I wouldn’t recommend setting out on those freeways, I really wouldn’t at this particular moment.” The hotel clerk was a smart, cosmopolitan-l ooking young Iranian-American man of about twenty-five, and he offered his advice with a relaxed confidence that made it just a bit harder on Maureen to leave and rush home to her children, so that she could solve the mystery of the unanswered fifty rings of the telephone at her home. She was several hours past checkout time, apparently; there was no way around that, which was unfortunate, because after the fight over the new garden Maureen had a newfound appreciation of the buying power of the money she would be throwing down the drain by leaving. But more serious than wasted cash was this new fact about the traffic. “Look, I just came in off the Ten, and it isn’t pretty in either direction. It could take you five hours to get into the city. It’s the Fourth of July tomorrow.” Maureen contemplated five bumper-to-bumper hours with a volatile, well-rested baby girl in the backseat. “But if you leave first thing in the morning, it’ll be free and clear. And you can have the breakfast buffet you already paid for. We’ll have fresh croissants!”

  When she balanced the traffic and the croissants against the unanswered phone, the idea that her boys were probably out with their father on some “boys-only” adventure seemed more plausible. They were out, running away from the shut-in fever that gripped the residents of 107 Paseo Linda Bonita on long weekends. She imagined them camping in a forest, the boys snuggled next to their father after sunset, asleep in their underused nylon sleeping bags on a bed of pine needles, underneath the darkening summer sky.

  Araceli awoke to the feel of the stiff floor beneath rising and falling with a wavelike motion, and opened her eyes to see the unilluminated, bare lightbulb above her in a pendulum swing. ¿Un temblor? Unmistakably, yes. And then it was over. Now she took note of the white summer-morning light streaming through the gaps in the thick rubber skin of the curtains, dust dancing in the shafts. She propped herself up from her position on the floor in the center of the living room, and saw Keenan asleep on Tomás’s bed, and Brandon on the floor between her and Tomás, resting upon billowing rafts of polyester comforters imprinted with parrots, Japanese action figures, and the logo of a Mexican soccer team. Brandon lay with an open mouth and craned neck that suggested to Araceli a tortured, uneven sleep, and Keenan with a wet hitchhiker’s thumb before his mouth. They had slept through the morning street cacophony that seeped past the iron bars and through the curtains: a motorcycle sans muffler, a truck whose passing weight caused the wooden floor to shift, a wino’s squealing call to prayer: “Wooooo ooohhh! Mother-fuuuuuuuckers! Earthquake! Come an’ get it! Come on!” Araceli considered the pathos of the well-fed and long-haired Torres-Thompson boys amid the exterior noises of poverty and addiction, asleep inside the cramped nest of the bungalow living room, with its particle-board dressers and walls whose gray paint seemed to perspiring. The boys’ thin hair was moist with sweat and they gave boy-sized puffs of breath that floated upward toward the bare glass bulb, now still again. What would Maureen say and do if she were to suddenly appear and see her two princes sleeping in a room with a Salvadoran and a Mexican boy? Her jefa would lower her thin, lightly sculpted eyebrows into an aggressive prow of disapproval, she would make assorted English half-word noises of outrage. Humph! You brought my children here? To this disgusting little bungalow tenement? To sleep next to an orphan boy?

  Yes, señora, Araceli would say. You were gone. And that would be the end of the argument.

  Araceli stepped carefully over the boys on the floor, opened the front door, and walked out into the street, toward the liquor-grocery and its public telephone.

  14

  Their bus headed eastward, deeper into the modern industrial heart of the metropolis, over the north-south thoroughfares and railroad tracks that carried cargo and commerce, into districts of barbed wire and sidewalks blooming with fist-sized weeds, past stainless-steel saltwater tanks excreting briny crystals, past industrial parking lots with shrubbery baked amber by drought and neglect, past storage lots filled with stacked PVC pipes, past stunted tree saplings and buildings marked CHOY’S IMPORT and VERNON GRAPHIC SERVICES and COMAK TRADING, and through one intersection where a single tractor-trailer loomed and groaned and waited. The setting triggered no new reveries in Brandon’s overactive imagination, because he was too sleepy to think, having stayed up late into the night thinking about Tomás and his stories about the crossroads on Thirty-ninth Street, and then being forced to get up early by Araceli for the departure to their next destination. They were headed for a park where it was said his grandfather might live.

  “I don’t know where,” Araceli said. “But I know who to ask.” She told them about her friend Marisela, and the uncle of hers by marriage who lived in Huntington Park, su tío político, a man said to occupy an orderly American suburban house in a neighborhood that was also the one el abuelo had moved to, according to Mr. Washington back on Thirty-ninth Street.

  “This uncle of my friend can help us,” she said.

  “You have a friend?” Keenan asked, and wasn’t surprised when Araceli didn’t answer.

  Already, it seemed to Araceli, things were going more smoothly than she expected, the bus was advancing quickly through streets with little resistance from the usual weekday morning traffic. For a moment Araceli was struck by the emptiness, and the sense that she might be missing a key piece of information that explained this strangely quiet Tuesday.

  They switched lines on California Street and headed southward, now inside a bus in which they were the only passengers, alone with the driver’s unauthorized personal radio. “That was a four-point-eight, centered in Barstow,” the radio declared. “L.A. County Fire Chief Bill Abrams asks that we all use fireworks safely … There’s a red-flag warning in the canyons of Los Angeles and Orange counties, which means acute fire danger … It’s clear sailing on the freeways for all you holiday travelers …” The bus entered a neighborhood of cream-colored mini Mission cottages with arched doorways, and unadorned apartment buildings that resembled Monopoly hotels, the skyline behind them dominated by the steel monsters of twin power trunk lines, and a half-dozen parallel strings that drew the boys’ gazes upward to watch their arcs descend and rise from one tower to the next.

  “We’re following the electricity,” Keenan said.

  “Yeah,” Brandon said. “We’re like electrons or something.”

  They reached their final stop and moved to the door at the front of the bus, Araceli taking a moment to ask the mustachioed driver, who looked Mexican, “�
�Qué se hizo toda la gente?”

  “Es el Fourth of July. ¿No sabías?” the driver said, the English coming out as harsh as a native’s, the Spanish flat and unused. “Wake up, girl. Haven’t you been listening? It’s a holiday!”

  Maureen rolled her car out of the spa at the early but sane hour of eight-fifteen in the morning. She arrived at Paseo Linda Bonita without stopping three hours and twenty-six minutes later, according to the onboard computer in her automobile. By then, the sun was noon-high and July-strong, and for some reason her husband’s automobile was baking in the driveway instead of the garage, an incongruity that nevertheless lifted the anxiety that had overtaken Maureen the night before. Scott is here. She opened the garage door, parked her car, and took pleasure in the feeling of having returned to take charge of the home she had built. With her daughter on her arm, Maureen walked purposefully to the door that led from the garage to the kitchen, stepping inside with a shout of “I’m home!” Her eyes settled on the familiar and spotless kitchen, each square of clean tile, each gleaming plane of marble a musical note of order. “I’m home!” Maureen shouted again, putting a little rasp into it this time. The sound echoed through the home without an answer, and for a second or two Maureen concluded this must be a silence of resentment, and that her sons and husband would soon emerge from one of the rooms glowering at her because she had left them for four days.

  They debarked from the bus onto a wide avenue that seemed very new to Brandon and very old at the same time. A line of storefronts rose over the street, each edifice a bold, rectangular robot emblazoned with the names of commercial concerns: SOMBREROS EL CHARRO, KID’S LOVE, SPRINT MOBILE. The multitudes that filled this shopping district on most days were absent, and in the soft light of that holiday morning there was only an eight-foot-tall teenage girl with braces and a billowing white dress to greet Araceli and her charges. She was frozen giddily in two dimensions behind a curtain of black steel bars, and when Brandon peeked into her darkened storefront prison at the merchandise that surrounded her, he saw glittering, child-sized crowns and pictures of chariot limousines. This was a place, he concluded, where girls came to be transformed, by dollar and by ritual, into princesses. But Brandon didn’t like princess stories and his attention quickly returned to the street and to his brother and Araceli, who were both turning their heads north and south and back again.

  “Which way do we go?” Keenan said.

  “Tengo que preguntar,” Araceli said, but there was no one around to ask, and they began to walk down the sidewalk, past parking meters and empty diagonal parking spaces, underneath the fluted tower of a shuttered Deco movie palace, Keenan craning his head to admire the melting green skin of a nonfunctioning bronze clock affixed to the top. After half a block, they found one store with an open door and lights on behind the display windows.

  “Not open,” said the Korean woman inside. She was kneeling on the floor with a clipboard, surrounded by boxes and racks of rayon blouses. “Cerrado.”

  “I am not looking for clothes,” Araceli said. “I am looking for a street.” She showed the woman a slip of paper with the address Marisela had given her.

  Myung Lee rose to her feet, took the address, and then sized up the child-accompanied woman who had given it to her. In the four months since opening her business, every day seemed to bring another oddity, another riddle, like this Mexican woman and her handsome children. Myung Lee was a native of Seoul, single, thirty-eight years old, and fluent in the language of local fashions: rayon with tropical flowers and leopard prints and bold décolletages, free-flowing polyesters to drape over bodies of any shape or size. “Maybe I know this street,” she said. Geography was easy: what she didn’t understand was the stealthy methodology of the shoplifters, or the pricing logic of the wholesalers in the garment-factory district, or why her uncle would lend her $40,000 to open a business, while expecting her to fail. This Fourth of July morning brought more lonely hours of inventory, and more obsessive daydreaming about her uncle and his haughty California millionaire confidence and his thin teenage daughter with her size-two dresses and their mansion in that Asian Beverly Hills called Bradbury. The longer Myung remembered her debt to her skeptical samchon, the more she hated rayon and tropical flowers and leopard patterns. Oddly, however, she still liked being in the presence of American women, or Mexican women, or whatever most of her clients were, and as she moved to the door to show Araceli which way to go, she felt the irritation on her face slipping into the pleasantness that was always good retail practice.

  “This is over there,” Myung Lee said, pointing to the east. “Not far. Two blocks.” She placed a hand on Keenan’s shoulder and said, “Your boys are very nice,” leaving Araceli too stunned to offer any clarification. Their father must be very fair, Myung Lee thought, and she imagined this missing white partner as the strangers walked away down Pacific Boulevard. I am a single woman, yes, but I haven’t allowed a man to leave me with two boys to feed and clothe. No.

  “She thought you were our mother,” Keenan said. “That was weird.”

  “Estaba muy confundida,” Araceli said, and they headed away from empty Pacific Boulevard into a neighborhood of houses with sandpaper skins painted blue-violet and carnation-pink, with little patches of stiff crabgrass enclosed behind painted brick pillars and iron bars welded in feather and fan patterns. A canopy of intersecting utility wires drew Brandon’s eye upward again, while Keenan looked across the street and saw a man leaning against a fence with his hips thrust out in the style of Latin American campesinos, a pose that reminded Keenan of the handful of childhood photographs he’d seen of his grandfather. “Maybe this is where Grandpa John lives,” Keenan said.

  “I guess,” Brandon said. “It’s not as poor as Los Angeles.”

  They advanced two blocks more and the street name still did not materialize on any of the signs, and Araceli stopped again, and the rolling wheels of the suitcases ceased their noise, and for a moment she and her charges stood in an unexpectedly deep silence. The thoroughfares and the freeways that surrounded the neighborhood were empty in those first hours of a holiday morning, no trucks or forklifts were at work in the nearby industrial districts, and in the absence of the usual noise there was a natural stillness that seemed somehow unnatural. Every Huntington Park resident who was up and about that morning noticed the quiet too; it hit them first through the windows left open on a summer night, and later when they stepped outside. They heard the calls of the birds for the first time in months, the keek-keek of highflying, black-necked stilts heading for the nearby Los Angeles River, the three-note carols of American robins, and the Morse-code tapping of woodpeckers hunting for acorns stored inside the utility poles. As their ears adjusted to the quiet, they heard fainter sounds still: the whistling of air through the wings of the mourning doves, and the creak and rustle of tree branches moved by the weak flow of the July wind. They were small-t own sounds, country sounds, and they had the effect of making those who heard them more aware of the charms of their time and place, and of all that was comforting and homey in the cluttered workingman’s paradise that Huntington Park wanted to be.

  The quiet caused Victorino Alamillo, the only man awake and outdoors on his block, to pause in the unfurling of his American flag, contemplating for a moment his 1972 Chevy truck and camper shell in repose in the driveway, until his eye was drawn skyward by the sight of a crow bullet-gliding one hundred feet in the air. After climbing to the top of his ladder, he stopped again, flag in hand, because from that perch the spread of the quiet across the neighborhood was all the more apparent. He could scan the roofs of his neighbors’ houses, see their satellite dishes and kitchen vents and the nearby district of salvage shops, and hear a few distant but sharp sounds: the fee-bee? fee-bee? question posed by a black phoebe, and then, most improbably, the braying of an invisible goat. ¿Un chivo?

  Suddenly, the spell was broken by a clack-clack coming from the sidewalk.

  “Excuse me,” Araceli said. “Excuse
! Me!”

  Araceli and her charges had stopped at their first encounter with a person who seemed capable of helping them—a man whose flag seemed to imbue him with authority. They had been watching him for several seconds, beginning with his climb up the ladder, flag in hand, looking to Brandon and Keenan like a man claiming a piece of real estate for his country at the end of a battle.

  Victorino Alamillo looked down at Araceli, and hearing her marked accent answered, “Espérate allí un momentito.” Seeing this lost trio, obviously in flight from some familial mash-up, brought him fully back to the real Huntington Park, reminding him of the transient, unsettled place this really was. Suddenly, the flag and the hammer he was holding both fell from his hand.

  “I think the star means he has a kid who’s in the war,” Brandon said, pointing to a rectangle with a single blue star that was affixed mysteriously to the inside of the home’s living room window.

  “Correct,” Victorino said, as he descended to retrieve the flag. “My son in is Kandahar. En Afghani stan. He is a medic.” He pronounced this last word in a way that conveyed pacifist fatherly pride.

  “That’s cool,” Keenan said.

  “Estamos buscando esta calle,” Araceli said. “La calle Rugby.”

  “Está del otro lado de Pacific,” Victorino said, pointing westward. “Regrésate por allá”

  “¿Está seguro?” Araceli asked, rather impertinently. “Porque una coreana nos dijo que era por aquí.”

  “Sí, señorita,” Victorino said. Switching to the authoritative sound of English, he added, “I’ve lived here fifteen years. It’s that way.”

  Araceli grave a curt “Gracias” and without further ceremony headed west, with Brandon and Keenan trailing after. They had entered a landscape of very old American dreams. Huntington Park was a collection of truck farms subdivided a century ago into a grid of homes, and inhabited ever since by men and women lured in by affordable mortgages, by a shared belief in the value of square footage in a U.S. city, the nearby factories, warehouses, and freight trains be damned. For the first third of its history Huntington Park had been homesteaded by English-speakers with Oklahoma and Iowa and other flat American places in their pasts, and for the next third of its history those proud but paranoid people had fought to keep various dark-skinned others out, until finally evacuating in favor of those who dominated Huntington Park in the most recent third of its history: transplants from South Texas, Jalisco, Zacatecas, and East Los Angeles, and other places filled with Spanish-surnamed people. All these home owners, in all these epochs, came and found comfort in the perpendicular streets, in the surveyor’s patient construction of uniformity and efficient use of space, in the stop signals, and in the city workers who cleaned the parks. A red-and-white-striped flag and its blue field with white stars had long been a symbol of that nurturing and protective order, and it remained so for many in Huntington Park, even those who still preferred the colors of other flags and the other kinds of order those banners represented.