The Barbarian Nurseries

by Héctor Tobar

  The detective thought, That’s definitely not a perp laugh.

  The police officer lifted the Kevlar shell underneath his uniform and concluded, Naw, this lady ain’t a kidnapper. Too bad we gotta hand her over to the immigration people.

  The assistant district attorney had precisely the opposite reaction: All but an admission of guilt. With her aggressive laughter she mocks and challenges us.

  “I was taking them to their grandfather!” Araceli said suddenly at the top of her voice in English. “Because those people you put on the TV, that mother and father, los responsables, left me with Brandon y Keenan for four days! ¡Sola! Since Saturday morning! I had no more food to give them.”

  “They told us they were gone for two days,” the detective said.

  “¡Mentira!”

  “That means ‘lie,’ in Spanish,” said the police officer in the doorway, whose name tag identified him as CASTILLO.

  “By the grandfather, you mean who?”

  “El abuelo Torres.”

  “John Torres?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that who this is?” the police detective asked, producing the black-and-white photograph of el abuelo Torres that Araceli had left in her backpack.

  “Sí. I mean, yes. That is him.”

  In short order the police detective established Araceli’s story, which began with the fight between Maureen and Scott and the broken table, and led to her own, ill-advised journey to the center of Los Angeles, and finally to Huntington Park, and her flight after seeing herself on television. “I see the television say I am a kidnapper. What am I thinking?” she said. “That is why I run. As fast as I can, which is not very fast, I am sorry.” Goller remained silent, seemingly disoriented by the detective’s sudden burst of questions and Araceli’s unhesitating answers.

  “I did not wanna see Brandon and Keenan in Faster Care,” Araceli said.

  “What?” the detective said.

  “In Faster Care. Porque no estaban sus padres. Because they no had parents! I didn’t want them to go.”

  “To go where?”

  “To Faster Care.”

  “She means Foster Care,” Officer Castillo interjected from the doorway. “Not ‘Faster Care,’ “ he added with a roll of his eyes. “Foster Care.”

  Detective Blake studied the old photograph and the address scrawled on the back and slumped in his chair, feeling exasperated by the small comedy he had been drawn into. After a month in which he had crossed paths with a Taiwanese child-smuggling ring and a meth-addict grandmother whose idea of discipline was a lighted cigarette, and after three trips with preschoolers to emergency rooms for examinations and photograph sessions for that grim and perverse task known as evidence collection, he was more annoyed than relieved by the harmless stupidity of this case. There was no crime here to investigate, but there were others awaiting him. Serious shit follows bullshit—it always works that way. A few seconds later, he rose to his feet and left the interrogation room, with the assistant district attorney following behind him, and they began an argument that continued during the twenty minutes it took them to drive back to Paseo Linda Bonita.

  Deputy Castillo escorted Araceli to the holding cell, where she had three hours alone to study the art on the walls, which consisted of five representations of a unicorn with bulbous legs, three crucifixes tipped with arrowheads, and an exquisite rosebud, all drawn in pencil lines that had faded into ghost images in a fog of glossy, waterproof yellow paint. She thought she might ask one of the guards to lend her a writing instrument, because once they did set her free her time would be her own again, forever, and why not use this time to get started? Perhaps she would add a Picasso bull or an El Greco horse to the gallery.

  “Sir, a pencil, please, is it possible?” she asked Deputy Castillo when he returned. Unexpectedly, he unlocked the door and held it open.

  The news-aggregator website kept a flashing police-car light on its home page, along with a series of rapidly rewritten headlines, as the news of Brandon and Keenan’s alleged kidnapping and rescue unfolded, scoring three-point-four million “hits” over the course of the first three hours, with the traffic doubling for the next two hours, when the site linked to footage obtained by an ABC news affiliate: forty-five seconds of Araceli running and being tackled by a police officer, as captured by the film crew in Huntington Park, and sold by the director for one thousand dollars—worth two days of on-location catering, the director would later tell his friends. Soon the footage began circulating on national cable shows, and by midafternoon assignment editors and managing editors across Southern California were dispatching a battalion of wise-ass reporters to stake out the south county sheriff’s station and Paseo Linda Bonita.

  At the front gate of the Laguna Rancho Estates, the guards let through anyone carrying the Day-Glo-green rectangle of a laminated plastic press card issued by the sheriff’s department. Outside the Paseo Linda Bonita home the reporters pestered the sheriff’s department patrolmen and lower-l evel public information officials on the perimeter for details of the boys’ “drama,” and set up tripods and light reflectors on the lawn. A second media cluster laid siege to the Luján family home in Huntington Park, where the councilman had sealed all the doors and windows, leaving the reporters to hound the neighbors for some throw-away speculation about possible kidnappings and flights to the border.

  “Police sources say that Councilman Sal Luján is not a suspect in the case,” went the report on KFWB all-news radio, delivered by a baritone-voiced veteran of riots, celebrity trials, and airplane crashes, big and small, a macho reporter-gumshoe who was on a first-name basis with mid- and high-ranking police officials in most of the dozens of jurisdictions in Los Angeles and Orange counties. “Seems he’s just a Good Samaritan who got caught up in the drama of the two boys. But authorities say they’re still trying to figure out what this lady Araceli No-eh-my Ramirez was up to. But, once again, the children she absconded with are said to be safe … Reporting from Huntington Park, this is Pete …”

  The case was a “troubling mystery,” said the NBC television affiliate reporter, a portrait of gray-haired youthfulness well known to Southern Californians for the calm urgency of his reporting on the edge of brush fires, mudslides, and assorted gangland crime scenes. “We really don’t know what shape those boys are in or what they went through. We don’t know if this Mexican nanny will be charged with anything. We don’t know what, exactly, her intentions were,” the reporter said, summarizing all he didn’t know when his affiliate patched him into the network’s national cable feed. For several hours the repeated transmissions of Araceli’s blurred backyard photograph were juxtaposed with the footage of the searches and lines at the border, and of Araceli being tackled, and of the gleaming white home in a neighborhood most often described with the adjectives “exclusive,” “hillside,” and “gated.” As interest in the story deepened in the early Eastern Daylight Time evening on national cable news, the class of professional tragedy-pundits chimed in. They were former prosecutors and defense attorneys who specialized in taking small bites of nebulous information and chewing them until they became opinions and insights based on “what my gut tells me” and “what we know and what we don’t know.” Some opined, why not, on what they believed they knew about Mexican women and the well-off families that could afford to place their children in the care of foreigners. These comments intermingled with those of faceless callers to nationwide toll-free lines, for whom Araceli grew into a figure of menace and dread, while Maureen and Scott became objects of pity splashed with a touch of envy and populist scorn. “There’s a good reason to stay at home and be a mom, and not leave your kids with a Mexican girl, even if you can get one for ten bucks a day,” a caller opined in Gaith-ersburg, Maryland, speaking to the woman of the flaring nostrils, who nodded gravely.

  In those American homes where Mexican, Guatemalan, and Peruvian women actually worked, mothers and fathers digested the news, and looked across their freshly du
sted living rooms and tautly made beds and gave their hired help a closer look. They asked themselves questions that they usually suppressed, because the answers were, in practice, unknowable. Where is this woman from, and how much do I really know about her? Many of them were familiar with the superficial details of their employees’ lives. The most empathetic among them had studied the photographs that arrived in the mail from places south, little faraway images with KODAK imprinted anachronistically on the back, of wrinkled parents in village gardens of prickly pear cacti and drought-bleached corn, of children in used American clothing celebrating exotic holidays involving the burning of incense and parades with religious icons. The knowledge of that distant poverty provoked feelings of admiration, guilt, and mild revulsion in varying degrees, and also a sense of confusion. How can we live in such a big world, where hooded sweatshirts and baby ballerina dresses circulate from north to south, from new to old, from those who pay retail to those who pay for their clothes by the pound? Now toss into this mystery a villain, and the possibility of hidden peccadilloes and secret motives of revenge, and the result was a slight but noticeable uptick in the volume of phone calls in the greater Southern California region, as mothers in cubicles, mothers leaving yoga sessions, mothers leaving staff meetings, mothers at the Getty and the Huntington, at the Beverly Center and the Sherman Oaks Galleria, looked away from their monitors and turned off their car radios, and picked up office phones and cell phones and called home, just to check, just to listen to the accented voices of their hired help, to see if they might hear an intonation suggesting deception, the verbal slip of the schemer. “Everything okay? ¿Todo bien? Sí? Yes? Okay, then.” When they returned home they counted the items in their jewelry boxes and some examined the arms and necks of their children for bruises, and a very few even asked their toddlers, for the first time in weeks, if Lupe and María and Soledad were really “nice” or if they were ever “mean,” to which the most common responses were, “What?” and “¿Qué, Mommy?”

  17

  Brandon sat with his legs crossed on the floor of the living room, telling the story of the journey he and his brother had taken to a distant land called Los Angeles. For the first time in his young life he had an audience of strangers listening to him with the same expression of urgent concentration that adults put on their faces when they talked and argued among themselves. The grown-ups sat on the edge of the couch and the love seat, and on a chair from the dining room, four adult men and two women in various states of formal dress, and with assorted metal and plastic badges and communication devices attached to their garments, accessories that, in Brandon’s eyes, established their membership in officialdom. None of this made Brandon nervous. Rather, he saw in the presence of people introduced to him as “the officers” and “the social workers” a confirmation of the fact that he had survived an adventure tinged with danger. He had gone to a place far from the warm security and predictability of his home, and had returned to tell the tale.

  “And then we got on this train that had two levels, and we left for another place. In Los Angeles,” he said, his younger brother nodding alongside him. “This other place was made of bricks, mostly.”

  “And wood,” Keenan added.

  “Yeah, and wood, I think. And we went by a river,” Brandon continued. “Or was it a canyon?”

  “Yeah, a really big canyon,” Keenan said.

  “With bridges over it. And there were these people living there. Refugees from the Fire-Swallowers.”

  “The Fire-Swallowers?” Olivia Garza asked.

  “Yeah, those are the people who came and destroyed the village of Vardur at the end of Revenge of the Riverwalkers.”

  “It’s one of his books that he reads,” Keenan said. Seeing the adults confused, he felt compelled to inject some explanation. “When Mom and Dad left, and Araceli said she would take care of us, she really didn’t take care of us—I mean, she didn’t tell us what to do like Mom does. So Brandon started reading more than he usually does. And when he reads—”

  “Yeah, but these people I saw were real people,” Brandon interrupted. “They had scars on their faces, from their battles with the Fire-Swallowers. Then we went to a big train station. And then we got into a bus, and we were looking for Grandpa’s house, because Araceli said we should look for him. But we found this other place instead, where there are houses that are like jails, I guess. And then we found other houses that had half doors and quarter doors, and three-quarter doors, and other things I thought only existed in books. But they were real. And then we found a shack, which was in this place that’s kind of like an oasis in the desert, where people come from all over to meet and sell things. We met this boy, who’s a slave. I have a book about slavery, and he didn’t look like any of the slaves in that book, but he was still a slave. We stayed with him in his shack. And he told us about the warriors who used to live across the street, and the battles they had, which always lasted thirteen seconds. The lady who lived there, she was really mean to this boy, and she made him work.”

  “That’s true,” Keenan said. “He really was a slave.”

  “Right. He was like my age, but he was a slave. So we slept there one night, until we woke up in the morning and heard some guy screaming outside.”

  “I didn’t hear anybody screaming,” Keenan said.

  “You were still asleep, but I heard it. It was right after the earthquake.”

  “There was an earthquake?” Keenan said.

  “Yeah. So this guy, he was like in pain, or something. He was yelling like he was hurting in his guts. And then everybody got up and we went to another place, which is called a park even though there isn’t any park there. We went there because we thought Grandpa lived there, I guess, but he didn’t live there either. At this park place they had a fire burning in the ground, to take a pig and turn him into bones. And the fire was burning hot, even though it was buried, because later we touched the rocks that were under the ground and they were still hot. But before that, everything started exploding around us. A bomb exploded in the street. And Keenan was holding some fire in his hand, and I told him to drop it, but he wouldn’t listen to me.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Yes, you did. Don’t lie. I saw you. You were holding fire, it was sparking from your palm, and then the bomb went off in the street. That’s when I wanted to cry. After that a lynch mob came to the front porch, and they started yelling at us, because they were against the guy who lived there, and we started yelling back the name of Ray Forma, who is against them. Ray Forma is like some sort of hero that protects people against lynch mobs. These people yelling at us, they didn’t have torches, but it was a lynch mob, I’m pretty sure, and they were really angry at the guy who lived there, because he’s a president. But then the police came and chased away the lynch mob and we went to sleep and when we woke up the next morning we were on television so I got on the phone and called Dad.”

  The assembled audience of adults stared at Brandon with perplexed mouths agape and brows wrinkled, each mystified by the nonsensical details of Brandon’s story and his straightforward and sincere way of recounting them, and the way Keenan sometimes nodded in confirmation of what his brother said. Adults and children had been momentarily transported into a shared state of mystery and innocence, a kind of mental blankness where anything was possible, and the adults allowed themselves to entertain, for the briefest instant of grown-up time, the possibility that these two well-spoken boys had actually returned from a magical land. Even Olivia Garza, who believed she had heard every kind of story a child could tell, did not know precisely what she should make of Brandon’s monologue, so she simply looked at her digital recorder and turned it off.

  Detective Blake and Assistant District Attorney Goller rose to their feet simultaneously, while a second detective named Harkness patted both Brandon and Keenan on the head and said, “Thanks guys.” Detective Blake called back the parents from their temporary exile in the kitchen and left the boys w
ith them, and the committee retired to the backyard for a tête-à-tête. For a few moments, they stood in a circle and looked at one another with now-what expressions.

  “I don’t know what to make of that,” Detective Blake said finally. “That kid’s got quite an imagination.”

  “This is what happens when you leave them alone too much, in my opinion,” Olivia Garza said. “Whether it’s TV, or books, or computer games. There are drawbacks. They slip into their own world.”

  “God knows what really happened to them,” Assistant District Attorney Goller said. “I’m not a psychologist, but maybe this is some sort of emotional fantasy response to severe trauma.”