The Barbarian Nurseries (27 page)

“Lucía and I are going to go there,” Griselda said.
“Un día. Tal vez.”

Araceli wanted to suggest some museums Griselda might not have heard of, but before she could the small man with the smoking Jesus asked her if she’d been to Huntington Park before.

“No,” Araceli said. She twisted her mouth into English so Smoking-Jesus Boy would understand her. “But this is a place you can forget easily. So maybe I was here before and I just don’t remember.” Hearing this, the two homeboys among Lucía’s friends stuck their hands deeper in their pockets and squinted approvingly at Araceli through dilated pupils and gave weak and wicked cannabis grins and wondered briefly if this lady had ever been in The Life, over there in Mexico, because she looked like a girl who could handle herself in a fight. A moment later they forgot about her, and looked up at the sickle moon and the first stars of dusk and listened intently to the pulsating bass of the music and how deeply it inhabited infinite space, and then they smelled the fat-laden air coming from the barbecue pit and their stomachs suddenly ached with hollowness, and they decided it was time to get something to eat again.

Araceli was the deepest mystery to all the parents and older relatives present, some of whom were a bit put off when she entered their circle—they were all standing by the tables and their pyramids of pork and side dishes. She was about to plunge her fork into a serving of
carnitas
when she noticed she had inadvertently brought the conversation between the compadres to a sudden halt.
“Buenas tardes,”
she said, eliciting a round of not-especially-friendly
“Buenas tardes”
in return. These mothers and fathers were put off too by Araceli’s failure to pay much attention to the boys she was apparently assigned to look after, even
when the older of the two approached and said with a stricken plea, “I think someone should tell all these kids to stop playing with firecrackers because it’s so dangerous.”

“¿Qué quieres que haga?”
Araceli asked rhetorically, because there was nothing she could do, and the boy snuck away, leaving all those who observed the exchange to wonder what exactly was going on here with this child-unfriendly woman and those American boys.

“It’s true what
el niño
says,” one of the moms said in Spanish. “Those things are too dangerous. Someone is going to get burned.”

“They see more dangerous things at school, believe me,” said another mom dismissively, and with this all the mothers and fathers in the circle nodded. “The other day, I go to pick up my son and the entire school is surrounded by police cars and police officers, and there is what they call a ‘lockdown.’ My son is in the sixth grade, believe it or not, and one of the kids is running down the hallway with a knife. I think he stabbed a teacher in the leg with it.”

“Qué barbaridad.”

“The things that go on in those schools.”

“My son is in sixth grade too, and he doesn’t know his times tables past three,” one of the fathers said. “ ‘What’s six times eight?’ I ask him, and he looks at me all confused. So I tell him, ‘What are they teaching you there?’ and he says, ‘I don’t know.’ In my pueblo, they taught us that in the second year.”

“What are we supposed to do?” one of the mothers said.

“You’re supposed to go to the teacher and complain,” Lucía Luján interjected in English, having just entered the circle on the hunt for her own plate of food. “You’re supposed to get in the face of that teacher and say,
‘What’s up with the times tables?’
“

“¿Podemos hacer eso?”

“Of course you can. That’s how this country works. Get a classroom full of white kids, and that’s what their parents do all the time. They treat every teacher like a worker.”

“Tiene razón,” Araceli said. “La señora Maureen, mi jefa, siempre está peleando con los maestros.”

“But if we go, they don’t take us seriously,” one of the mothers said, speaking directly to Lucía. “You go to the office and they tell us, ‘What are you doing here? Go away. We’re busy.’ “

They all paused, middle-aged and young, Mexican-born and U.S.-born, and considered the betrayal of the schools, and the steel mesh that covered every window, the security cameras in the hallways, the posted warnings aimed at student and adult alike, and a few of them very self-consciously allowed their eyes to drift over to those young girls and boys who were their blood and their responsibility, running and bouncing in the backyard, each child gleaming and full of promise, and each poor and stripped of it. Boy and girl screams filled the silence that followed, which was heavy with hurt and powerlessness and a certain unfocused sense of workingman’s defiance that found no words in which it could be expressed.

Araceli broke the wordlessness suddenly, to say that the kids she cared for seemed to be getting an excellent education.

“Where are they from?”

“Los Laguna Rancho Estates. Por la playa. En los cerros.”

“The public schools are good down there, I bet,” Lucía Luján said.

“No van a la escuela pública,”
Araceli said. “Private school.
Todo pagado. Y muy caro.
Very expensive. I see the bills.”

“How much?” Lucía Luján asked quickly.

Araceli spoke the figure in slow and deliberate Spanish, allowing its mathematical obscenity, its thousands and thousands, to hover over the assembled hardworking, cash-strapped, taxpaying adults and scholarship-funded college students like a blinding glow of fake sunshine. There were one or two gasps, though Lucía Luján’s eyebrows rose with only moderate surprise—the tuition for those two boys, together, was a bit more than her tuition at Princeton, before all the financial aid kicked in.

“Imposible,”
one of the parents said.

“Estás loca,”
said another.

“No sea chismosa. Por favor.”

It was preposterous, and suddenly everyone in the circle except Lucía was angry at Araceli for revealing a figure that, were they to accept it as truth, would temporarily strip them of some of their own moderately elevated sense of accomplishment, by revealing just how small their achievements were relative to true American success and affluence. The compadres with kids in parochial school imagined they were paying top dollar, but in fact it was a small fraction of the sum Araceli had just divulged, even though those gringo boys didn’t look so
much different than theirs, not especially special, and certainly not that rich.

“Es lo que cuesta,”
Araceli insisted. She explained that she knew this startling fact not because she’d made any effort to find out, but rather because her employers were exceedingly casual with their paperwork and left letters and bills lying around. And with a dollar figure that big screaming from the kitchen countertop, even a normally circumspect housekeeper like Araceli had to take a look.

“You’re pretty sure about that number?” Lucía asked.

“Claro que sí
,” Araceli said.

“No,”
one of the compadres insisted.
“Estás confundida.”

I might be just a housekeeper and a
chilanga, Araceli wanted to say,
but I know basic English and math and the meaning of commas and decimal points and dollar signs.
But instead she gave a long glance at her disbelieving audience, then shook her head with a dismissive chuckle that was instantly recognizable to Lucía for its thick layering of intellectual condescension. With that all the compadres and Lucía drifted away, leaving Araceli amused and finally able to take a first real bite of the
carnitas,
which were quite juicy. She searched for the boys and spotted them, and then decided she could forget about them again, because here in this big backyard they would be safe.

Brandon and Keenan were running about the backyard with the children of the extended Luján clan. Having watched the men with the shovels remove their dirt and then the foil-wrapped meat, and a few hot rocks, Brandon had persuaded himself that he was no longer in danger from the fires in the earth, though now there were various firecrackers and flames and explosions going off in the air around him. Salomón’s brother Pedro had brought three large boxes’ worth of assorted handheld pyrotechnics from Tijuana, and the children were playing with them, the most popular being small silver balls that burst into sparks when the children flung them against the patio’s concrete floor.

“I got you! I got you!” a girl yelled as one of her “fire rocks” exploded at Keenan’s feet, and Keenan replied by throwing one back at her, and laughing as she squealed.

“Be careful!” Brandon shouted at his brother and anyone else in earshot, though no one listened. A boy was lighting firecrackers and throwing them into the now-empty pig pit and there were no adults
stopping him. Gunpowder tickled Brandon’s nose, and bits of paper and cardboard from the firecrackers were littering the patio floor and the lawn, and there were other kids igniting sticks that spit fire and whistled, holding them too close to their eyes, and they wouldn’t stop even when Brandon shouted out
“¡Cuidado!
“ in Spanish. He looked for Araceli, but she had drifted away into the crowd of people tearing at meat from the buried pig with their teeth, and for the first time since leaving his home on Paseo Linda Bonita, Brandon felt truly alone and afraid. The firecracker explosions pinched his eardrums and the neighborhood dogs were suffering too, filling the air with their wailing and barking on this block and all the others surrounding it, begging the humans to cease fire. It was one thing to play war when all the sounds came from your mouth or your imagination, and quite another to be standing in a cloud of gunpowder. Now he heard a powerful explosion, felt the thumping vibration in his chest, and then the echo of the boom. “An M-80!” a boy shouted, and Brandon wondered why no one in the backyard was ducking for cover when there were bombs exploding out on the street.

A flash of light on the horizon caught his eye, and he turned to see three fire bursts growing in the shape of dandelions against the dark gray sky, followed by the muffled sound a few seconds later of distant cannons.

“¡Son los
fireworks
de la ciudad!”
someone shouted, just as more burning dandelions emerged, their light shining on the distant transmission lines and the towers. “The city fireworks show!” someone else said, and now everyone was turning and watching as more bursts followed, some in the shape of flying saucers, in green and crimson and yellow, some drooping like jellyfish, others slithering through the sky like serpents, and finally one forming a large orb that loomed over the towers and the neighborhood like a small planet, causing many oohs and ahhs from the people gathered in the Luján backyard.

The planet fell from the sky and the explosions stopped, suddenly. For ten, twenty, thirty seconds the adults and children looked up at the blank sky and waited for the next burst of light. They saw only a large cloud of smoke, drifting slowly eastward like a white Rorschach test across the dark sky. From beginning to end the sixty-third annual Huntington Park Fireworks Extravaganza was the shortest in city history,
having lasted just four minutes and thirty-five seconds, the city having failed to take note of the nationwide fireworks shortage caused by a warehouse explosion in China’s Guangdong Province some months earlier.

“That’s it?” someone said in English.

“¿Se acabó?”

“What a rip-off!”

Standing by the table where the
carnitas
were being carved, City Councilman Salomón Luján stood with a large serving fork, took in the empty horizon, and uttered a useful English exclamation that had been one of the first to drift into his vocabulary:

“Oh, shit.”

A
fter a harried exchange of shouted questions and answers during their five-minute drive up the hill to Paseo Linda Bonita, Maureen and Scott realized that Brandon and Keenan had been alone with Araceli since Friday morning, and that neither had talked to the boys since calling home on Friday evening. The length of their absence stretched out to unseemly numbers: four days, more than ninety-six hours of blank and unknown chapters in their sons’ lives, ninety-six hours in which they had abdicated their parental responsibilities.
When they are small, you are vigilant at the playground, you never allow your eye to stray from them for more than a few seconds,
Maureen thought.
And if you lose sight of them, for twenty seconds, for a minute, you are transported suddenly into an abyss of guilt and panic, and you scan the surroundings against the idea that your loss will endure forever, until you spot them and your heart returns to that calm place where parents most seek to live.
Maureen drove past the guard shack without bothering to acknowledge the pregnant woman on duty, and violated the 25
MPH
speed limit signs, flying over speed bumps and making several squealing turns up the sinuous streets of the Laguna Rancho Estates. She pulled into the garage and ran into the house, leaving Samantha still strapped in the car with her father.

Although Maureen had been in the house thirty minutes earlier, and recognized the improbability that her sons might have returned in that short time, she called out their names again: “Brandon! Keenan!
Mommy and Daddy are home! Brandon! Keenan!” This maternal reflex became more of a plea and lament with each repetition, until Scott said, “They’re not here,” which caused Maureen to turn and snap at him, “I can see that!”

Scott began looking for a note from Araceli, and for clues about her departure and destination. There was nothing in the kitchen, the place where one might have expected her to leave a message. In the living room he was distracted by the great open space where the shattered coffee table had once been, and thus failed to notice that one of the picture frames on the bookshelves was empty. He moved back to the kitchen, where he informed Maureen of the undeniable conclusion that their children had not been home for a while. “If you look closely you can tell the bathrooms haven’t been used for at least twenty-four hours, if not longer,” he said. “And no one used the kitchen until you got here and made that meal for Samantha. Right?” Before Maureen could answer, Scott headed toward the door that led from the kitchen to the backyard and the guesthouse, and stepped across the open space to Araceli’s door again, and tried turning the handle.