The Barbarian Nurseries (18 page)

West 39th Street, L.A., Julio 1954.

O
n Monday morning, Araceli approached the preparation of the oatmeal with a sense of finality. After breakfast was cooked and served she would be free, because
el señor
Scott was sure to be at his office, the desk altar where he never missed a weekday prayer. When they finished eating, the boys went directly to the game room and within a minute or so the sound effects of steel striking steel were wafting toward the kitchen, where Araceli stood before the refrigerator, a tremor of anticipation in her hands as she picked up the telephone and began to punch in the number.

“You’ve reached Scott Torres, vice president of programming at Elysian Systems. I’m currently on the phone or away from my desk. Please leave a message or press zero to talk to the operator.”

Startled to hear another recorded voice, she pressed zero. After a single ring, an actual human voice answered, a woman.

“Elysian Systems.”

“Con
Scott Torres, please. Mr. Scott Torres.”

“I’m sorry, he called in sick today.”
“¿Qué?”

“Excuse me?”

“He called sick?”

“Yes,” the operator said, speaking slower now, because the person on the other end of this call was obviously English-challenged. “He called
in
sick.”

“¿Cómo que sick?”

Now the operator was amused by the incongruity of a woman with a thick accent and poor telephone skills calling a cutting-edge, if somewhat small, software company, and asking for a midrange executive in the same tone of voice these people probably used to order their spicy food.

“Sick, yes. Ill. Unwell. Would you like me to transfer you to his voice mail so you can leave him a message?”

“A message? Yes. Please.”

Araceli thought quickly about what she should say while Scott’s message unfurled again over the phone, her pulse racing anew.

“Señor Scott. Estoy sola con los niños.
I am alone with the boys.” She stopped and seconds passed as she thought how she should elaborate on that central fact.
“¡Sola! Por tres días ya. Se nos está acabando la comida.
The food is gone almost.
No sé qué hacer. La señora Maureen se fue.
I don’t know where she is …”

A loud tone sounded on the receiver and the call went dead.

S
cott Torres was not at his desk because he was recovering Monday morning in a hotel room, alone, having fled Charlotte Harris-Hayasaki’s apartment after two nights, his marital fidelity more or less unblemished. Thanks to the hotel minibar, he was hung over and had awakened at 8:45 in a bright, sun-drenched room with open curtains, stumbling over to the phone to report in sick to the office switchboard some ten minutes later, having forgotten, in his unsettled state, that he’d given the entire programming department, including himself, the day off for a four-day weekend. He showered, dressed, and paid the hotel bill in cash. It was time to go home and face Maureen.

A
fter hanging up the phone, Araceli lingered by it for several minutes, because it seemed within the realm of possibility that Scott could receive her message immediately and call her back. She had already
decided that she would not spend another night sleeping on the floor of El Cuarto de las Mil Maravillas. Before the day was out either she would have reached one of her
patrones
with the message of her plight, or she would head out for the Los Angeles address of the Torres family patriarch, the clapboard building depicted in the glossy photograph. During her first few weeks in California, Araceli had lived at a similar address, a 107 East Twenty-third Street, and she believed that if the address corresponded to the logical system one expected from an American city, a 232 West Thirty-ninth Street must not be far away. It was not within Araceli’s experience, or that of most people who had been born and raised into adulthood in Mexico, that families picked up and moved themselves and abandoned their old properties every few years, in the same way one might discard a dress that had been worn once or twice too often. Property in Mexico stood as a constant. Once in possession of a deed, and sometimes without a deed at all, a family would plant itself on a patch of topsoil and allow themselves to become as rooted as noble old oak trees, their branches of children and grandchildren a canopy blossoming over the land. Either old man Torres himself or someone related to him would certainly be living at this West Thirty-ninth Street address, just as one could find twenty to thirty people connected by blood, marriage, and poor judgment to Araceli at Monte Líbano 210 in Nezahualcóyotl and the adjoining houses.

This escape plan liberated Araceli’s mind of the mocking ticks of the clock, of her dependence on absent bosses. She had taken control of the situation.

At 10:45 a.m. she entered the gaming room and found the two boys sitting on the couch amid the ambient noise of a cheering crowd. There was a football game taking place on the flat screen in front of them, only the players were frozen in their positions, several stopped in midstride, an image that seemed unnatural precisely because the players looked so lifelike. The virtual football teams were waiting for one or both of the boys to set them in motion with controllers that had been tossed on the rug and forgotten. Having grown bored, finally, with the pleasures of computer-generated fantasy, the boys were both reading, Brandon immersed in a Bible-sized tome, Keenan with a book of brightly colored cartoons depicting the adventures of a journalist mouse, the text rendered in a crazy pasticcio of changing fonts.

“When are Mom and Dad coming home?” Brandon asked.

“Get ready,” Araceli announced, ignoring the question. “After lunch, we go to your grandfather’s house.”

“To Grandpa John’s?” Brandon asked.

“Yes.”

“Excellent!” Keenan said. They had not seen their paternal grandfather in two years, a time at the very limit of young Keenan’s pool of memories, though the old man had left a lasting impression on both of them because he was a bit of a libertine, a dispenser of large quantities of hard candy who didn’t care if a movie was rated PG-13, and who often handed over meaningful sums of cash that raised the eyebrows of their parents. The boys associated him, most strongly, with visits to a soda fountain in his neighborhood, a place where a certain dish of chocolate in excess was served. They remembered their grandfather sitting in a booth across from them, wringing his hands in delight as they devoured their dessert and turning down their offers of, “Wanna try some, Grandpa?” Brandon and Keenan packed their rolling suitcases and backpacks with extra speed, anticipating another visit to that temple of sugar, and the condominium with the expansive recreation facilities where the elder Torres lived alone in a long-dashed hope that his grandchildren might visit him and use the kidney-shaped swimming pool. They packed their bathing suits and Game Boys too, until Araceli told them to leave all toys behind and to bring more underwear instead.

B
randon and Keenan led the way, rolling small suitcases that click-clacked along the cement walkway, backpacks filled with books and a few small toys hanging from their shoulders. Araceli locked the door behind them and crossed herself, against her secular inclinations: she would be traveling with two children and one never knew what one might encounter on the road. At the corner and the first turn that led away from the Paseo Linda Bonita cul-de-sac, Brandon stopped to look back at Araceli, his eleven-year-old eyes finding reassurance in the plump image of improvised motherhood she presented. She wore jeans and a billowing cotton blouse, and over her shoulder she carried one of his mother’s old backpacks (used, in its day, to transport Keenan’s diapers and bottles) and a floppy khaki safari hat Maureen liked to wear on all-day summer excursions to theme parks. Minutes earlier, she’d packed the very minimum for herself—two changes of clothes, the unspent and unbanked cash she had on hand, tucking away her savings passbook in a drawer. In the backpack’s front pocket she placed the photograph of their destination, along with a package of the moist wipes Maureen used to clean the baby’s bottom, and the only piece of identification in her possession: a Mexican voter registration card. Then she’d announced to
the boys the route they would be taking, speaking with a voice of confident authority and in clipped clauses that wedded English nouns with Spanish verbs.
“Primero bajamos al
front gate,
y luego al
bus stop,
y después
al train station
que nos lleva
a downtown Los Angeles,
y finalmente tomamos
the bus
a la
house
de tu
grandfather.” The boys were eager to leave, imagining their grandfather’s conspiratorial whispers, his aftershave aroma, and his swimming pool at the end of their journey. But before taking his next step forward, Brandon waited until Araceli’s eyes caught his one more time, because after less than a minute walking under the July sun, he was struck by the strangeness of what he was doing: undertaking an expedition through streets he knew only from the windows of his parents’ automobiles. From the edge of the sidewalk he looked up at Araceli and then once again at the street: heat waves shimmered up from the asphalt in imitation of a lake, as if they were standing at the edge of a pier, in a skiff about to push off into roiling waters.

“Vámonos,”
Araceli said, and Brandon resumed the march, Keenan and Araceli behind him in single file. Brandon listened to the barking of unseen dogs that marked their advance down the hill, the animals communicating through what Brandon concluded must be a language:
Humans! Alert! Unknown humans! Alert!
Until they reached the front gate the only people they encountered were two Spanish-speaking gardeners trimming the edges of a freshly cut fescue lawn who were too engaged in their work to take notice of a countrywoman leading two North American children down the street on foot. When Araceli and her charges reached the gate of the Estates, they failed to capture the attention of the pregnant young woman on duty at the guard kiosk that morning: she was on the phone and was simultaneously inspecting the credentials of a battered moving van and its Mexican driver. They walked another block down the sidewalk-free public access road, Araceli leading them now, trying to get the boys to walk on the grass shoulder, which required them to grab their suitcases by the handles and carry them. Then, for the first time in their young lives, Brandon and Keenan waited for a city bus. “What color is the bus?” Brandon asked. “Will it have seat belts?”

S
eat belts on a bus would be a good idea, Araceli thought as the grinding bus climbed and coasted toward the Metro Center transportation hub. The boys sat next to each other in the row in front of Araceli, grabbing on to the rubber safety bar attached to the seat in front of them, leaning forward with the wide eyes of boys taking a ride at the amusement park, and for a moment Araceli was struck by their smallness and fragility, and worried about the bruises and broken bones an accident could bring. These boys never traveled without the protection of seat belts and the crash-tested engineering of American family vehicles. A bus crash could send bodies flying against metal and glass. Araceli had learned this in Mexico City; she knew the dangers firsthand. True, this American bus driver did not bob and weave through traffic like his Mexico City counterparts, who plied their routes with homicidal aggressiveness in rattling and rusty vehicles. Once she had stumbled upon the scene of a bus accident, during her final visit to the art fair in Coyoacán, moments after purchasing a small oil painting rendered on a piece of wood that depicted a suited and masked
lucha libre
wrestler standing stiffly with his bride. The tableau of stupidity and suffering she encountered that day finally convinced her it was time to leave Mexico. The bus passengers had suffered no visible injuries, though a few were sitting on the edge of the sidewalk theatrically rubbing their necks while a taxi driver remonstrated with them. A few paces away a skinny teenager with chocolate skin and oily hair was gasping for breath as he lay on his back in the gutter, his eyes blazing open to the dirty blue sky as two dozen of his fellow citizens gathered around him, studying him with the distant, emotionless stare
chilangos
are famous for.
Look.
A
young man is dying right here in front of us. This is something we don’t normally see. It’s all so more real than what’s on television, isn’t it? This isn’t an actor. He is a poor man like us, just trying to make a few more pesos like the ones he is still clutching in his hand. We can’t help him
;
we can only look and thank the Virgin that it isn’t us down there.

“Is he dying, Mommy?” a child’s voice asked.

“¿Y la pinche ambulancia?”
shouted an irritated voice from the back of the cluster.

The young crash victim was a street vendor: a few paces away his bicycle lay bent, while a passerby gathered his scattered load of loofah sponges and stacked them in a small pyramid next to the bicycle.
Yes,
the boy is dying, but they might need his loofahs in heaven.
Araceli was standing at the edge of Coyoacán’s seventeenth-century plaza, in sight of the domed church and the gazebo, next to a line of trees whose trunks were painted white to discourage drivers from crashing into them. She felt bile rising in her throat as the other bystanders pushed their elbows against hers. A red trickle flowed from the young victim’s nostrils, and when he stopped blinking the crowd started to thin, people walking away in a silence as yet unbroken by the wailing of an ambulance. At that moment Araceli fully and finally comprehended the cruelty of her native city, the precariousness of life in the presence of so much unregulated traffic and unfulfilled need, a city where people born farmers and fishermen sprinted before cars faster than any horse or sailing ship. The crash cured her of any lingering procrastinator’s malaise and set in motion her oft-delayed plans to leave for the United States. That night she made a fateful phone call to a friend in downtown Los Angeles, and believed she heard in her friend’s upbeat voice a place where cars, bicycles, and pedestrians each occupied their own byways, sensibly and safely moving through the city.

S
cott’s route from the Irvine Hampton Inn to his hillside home took him along the five northbound lanes of Interstate 5, a highway that was considerably thinner and less traveled in Scott’s youth, when it had been known as the Golden State Freeway. The highway was an immense channel of metal and heated air, and at forty miles an hour or seventy-five, its straightness and width exercised a hypnotic power over drivers. As he navigated through the thinly populated fringes of Orange County, at a late-morning post-commute hour with only moderate traffic, Scott found his thoughts about the coming reencounter with Maureen intermingling with the running dots and dashes of the white lines that demarcated the lanes. The lines were a siren speaking in murmurs of rushing air that bade him to
follow-me, follow-me, follow-me,
to mountain passes, meadows, and interchanges as yet unknown, to places where no one would know he had pushed his wife into a table. When this trance of happy forgetfulness ended, Scott found himself just one hundred yards from his turnoff, but still in the number-one lane, too late to cross the three lanes of traffic to reach the exit for the freeway
that led to the coast and the Laguna Rancho Estates. Damn! Scott gritted his teeth and gave a second half curse as his usual exit and overpass grew smaller in the rearview mirror. He was speeding toward the metropolitan center of Orange County and the course correction back home required shifting lanes and taking the next exit, but Scott’s hands resisted moving: instead, they allowed the car’s momentum to continue carrying him forward and away from Maureen.
Maybe I’m not ready to go home yet.
The car stream was like a data stream and maybe he needed to see where the information took him, so to speak. He passed Disneyland, left Orange County and entered Los Angeles County at La Habra, and a short while later approached the Telegraph Road exit to his old South Whittier neighborhood. Now, at last, he exited, and headed for the inelegant, weed-happy patch of suburban sprawl where Scott the adolescent and teenager had been introduced to the joys of FORTRAN and masturbation.

He entered the late twentieth century industrial parks of an old oil patch called Santa Fe Springs, onto surface streets plied, at this hour, by fleets of tractor-trailers, then past a baseball field and a high school with soccer goalposts, where a single, middle-aged Latino man was sprinting with a ball at his feet. Scott followed the splintering posts that carried telephone voices, antiquated analog signals pushed through copper, toward the horizon and the Whittier hills beyond. He reached the first neighborhoods, where the homes boasted miniature gabled roofs, and jumbo vans and pickup trucks in the driveways of mini—Spanish cottages and mini-ranches, their humble size a kind of camouflage.
South Whittier does not want you to remember it; it wants to pass unnoticed.

When he reached the intersection of Carmelita Road and Painter Avenue, the vista changed abruptly, shifting Scott’s mood along with it, because everything at that familiar crossroads was laden with painful memories from the predigital, pre-Internet era. The homes here were taller, and yet flimsier than those he had just passed, and were more uniform, each having been built by the same developer from the same “Ponderosa ranchette” kit. He hadn’t been to his old neighborhood since his mother’s death, and for a moment the weathered, fairy-tale pastels of the two-story homes glimmered as strangely as they had on the August day of her funeral. He slowed the car to the speed of a brisk walk as he
turned the final corner and saw the old Torres family homestead and its watered-down mustard stucco with a flavoring of avocado trim, hiding behind an overgrown olive tree. He had expected to feel a superior satisfaction returning to this place, because he had become bigger and more worldly in the decades since, conquering the nodes and networks that united the world. Instead, he felt smaller.
We were still fucking poor and I didn’t even realize it.
He looked for a place to park his car on the dead-end street, but found all the available spaces taken up with sedans of dated styling, pickup trucks abused by their loads, and a station wagon. Did they even make station wagons anymore? There were never this many cars when he played baseball here.

Scott parked a half block away and stepped out of his car, surveying the workday quiet as he walked toward his old home, but he stopped when something in the backyard of the next-door property caught his eye. The Newberrys had once lived here, with their Ozark cheeks and corduroy jeans. Peering down the end of the driveway, he noticed something that was foreign to his memory: a large glass and metal box with a pitched roof and a small crucifix on top, plastic party streamers flowing out from the roof to the adjacent garage. Stepping closer, he saw a statue of a suntanned Virgin Mary inside the box, her clasped hands and powder-blue mantle rendered in painted plaster, a garland of fresh white roses draped around her neck, votive candles aflame at her feet.
This is so strange, so Mexican.
These people had taken his old neighborhood, once connected to the rest of modern America by AM radio and VHF television signals broadcast from zinc towers, back into history, to a rural age, a time of angels and miracles.

“Buenas tardes,” a woman’s voice called, startling him. “¿Le puedo ayudar en algo?”

Scott looked to his right and saw a woman of about fifty in sweatpants: she held a broom, and judging from her otherworldly smile she believed he was in need of spiritual direction.

“No, nothing, nada,” he sputtered. “I used to live in the house next door. I came to see, sorry …”

“Isn’t she beautiful?” the woman said in accented English, and Scott sensed a religious speech about to begin and backed away.
“No tengas miedo,”
the woman said, trancelike, as Scott scurried away. He
was
afraid: of her statue, her Spanish, her weird religiosity, and the power of
all those things to chase away his old neighbors. What had they done to the Newberrys? The Newberrys weren’t rich. They were from Little Rock. “She wants to help you,” the woman continued in English, and Scott wondered how many years ago the Newberrys had left and if they knew there was a Mexican lady praying to a statue in their old backyard.

T
he Laguna Niguel train station was a typical example of the soulless functionality of late twentieth century American public architecture, and as such it deeply disappointed Brandon, who expected the “station” to be an actual building, with schedules posted on the wall and long wooden benches inside a high-walled waiting room. When Araceli had told them they would take a train, it had conjured images in Brandon’s head of locomotives spitting steam, and passengers and baggage handlers scrambling on covered platforms underneath vaulted glass ceilings. Instead the station consisted of two bare concrete runways, a short metal awning where six or seven people might squeeze together to find shelter from the rain, and four refrigerator-sized ticket machines. Brandon thought of train stations as theatrical stages where people acted out momentous shifts in their lives, an idea shaped by a trilogy of novels he had read in the fifth grade, a series in which each book’s final scene unfolded inside the Gare du Nord in Paris. His only previous train ride had come some years back on the Travel Town kiddie train at Griffith Park, and there too the station consisted of a kid-sized replica of an actual building, complete with a ticket booth and a swinging Los
ANGELES
sign. The small steel rectangle that announced
LAGUNA
NIGUEL in the spare, sans-serif font of the Metrolink commuter rail network didn’t rise to the occasion, and Brandon frowned at the recognition that actual life did not always match the drama and sweep of literature or film. Nor were there the large crowds of people one associated with trains in the movies. In fact, Brandon, his brother, and Araceli were the only people on either side of the platform.