The Barbarian Nurseries (32 page)

Ian Goller was a native of the Orange County suburb of Fullerton who liked to tell people that his otherwise plain and unassuming hometown had once been home to the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. “You know,
Blade Runner?”
Fullerton had produced no other greatness, as far as he knew, other than a perennially excellent college baseball team, and Goller himself was a graduate of San Diego State University and the middle-of-the-pack Chapman University School of Law. At the DA’s office he put in long hours, unlike many of his colleagues, and quickly worked his way up from traffic court and DUIs, his rise aided by a few idiosyncrasies that identified him as an Orange County local, and thus made him a favorite of the OC-born DA. Goller still allowed his blond hair to reach his collar, wore a braided leather Hawaiian surf bracelet over the French cuffs of his dress shirts, and in his youth had flirted with a career as a professional surfer—which had led to a recent profile in
California Lawyer
as “the surfing prosecutor.”

Now, sitting with these two parents in their well-appointed living room in the Laguna Rancho Estates, he could see that he was in the presence of an Orange County mother who cared. He could feel it in the dust-free air, the good and life-giving scent of the nearby ocean, in the baby dictionaries and well-worn swing set, and see it in the way she stroked her baby girl’s back, as if to comfort the child when she was really comforting herself. As he contemplated the fate of the boys this OC mom had left in the care of a Mexican nanny, Goller saw everything that was at once satisfying and frustrating about being a prosecutor.

Protecting children and prosecuting abuse was the purest thing a
lawyer could do: the victims were sinless, and the defendants were invariably transparent scumbags, convicted by juries with great speed and relish. And in the suspect’s copper-tinged face and nationality, he saw the math of the multitudes that would one day drive him out of the profession altogether, because naïve Latin American immigrants like her were filling up his courtrooms. This was a painful realization for the son of an old-line Democratic family to make, and one he’d arrived at after years of observation, and despite his steadfastly liberal outlook on most other issues, from abortion rights to preserving the local wetlands. Ian Goller’s meta-knowledge of how foreign nationals clogged his superior court flowcharts, matrices, and spreadsheets, along with the victim-centered culture at the DA’s office, with its victim’s rights manifestos and procedures, tilted his view of the case decisively in favor of Maureen—despite her nervous and not-entirely-consistent recounting of events.

Ian Goller thought of this woman’s children, and about other children he had not been able to rescue, and he bowed his head in silent, private prayer.

Seeing the prosecutor lower his head and clasp his hands suddenly and without explanation only filled Maureen with more dread. She did not understand the source of the prosecutor’s intense stares, nor of the obvious irritation of the big woman who represented Child Protective Services.
These are the people who take children away from parents.
The arrival of the obese Mexican-American woman, especially, with her large nose and ruddy skin with a strange Indian-ebony mixing, and the plastic ID badge with the county seal, was nearly as frightening to her as the idea that Brandon and Keenan were wandering the city somewhere. Maureen entertained the prospect that the police might find her children, listen to Araceli’s true and entirely plausible story, and then decide to take her children away.
Maybe I should tell them now what really happened: that it’s been four days, not two, and that Araceli had no idea we were leaving.
How much trouble had she gotten her family into with that small lie? Maureen decided she would reveal the complexity of the situation, how she and Scott had played a part in its unfolding, and perhaps this small truth would bring her children to her quicker, and loosen the surly mask of the representative from Child Protective Services, the only other woman in the room besides Maureen, and the
only one of the strangers who seemed to sense the hidden and juvenile chain of events that had brought them all here.

Maureen was about to launch into her confession when the phone rang.

A
raceli walked through the neighborhood at a leisurely pace, past aging front-yard cacti and blooming rosebushes, and the unpainted gray skins of newly built cement homes with gabled roofs and dangling wires for light fixtures. She walked past pickup trucks with gold wings painted on their sides, three-t oned pickups with mismatching doors and hoods, and pickups with the color schemes of Mexican soccer teams, and then squeezed between two more pickups after jaywalking across California Street. Despite her deliberately unhurried pace, she decided it might be better not to walk in a straight line, but rather to make large zigzags through the grid of streets, especially now that a helicopter had appeared overhead.

The aircraft was chop-chopping like a lawn mower in the airspace above the Luján home, and it did not take much imagination to conclude that the police were at that moment engaged in the “rescue” of Brandon and Keenan. Araceli marveled at the fact that in this country police could emerge from the empty sky in the time it took to walk five blocks. The police would now return Brandon and Keenan to the Room of a Thousand Wonders and the two-dimensional superheroes of their bedsheets. The helicopter was loud enough to bring a scattering of people to their front doors, to look up and wonder who or what the machine was looking for.

Now the helicopter began to move, making circles concentric to the point where it had started, banking and turning in ever larger circles until its spinning blades and green body dipped over Araceli’s head, a giant mechanical dragonfly whose beating squeal announced crisis and urgency. Araceli began to walk faster as more people came out of their homes and stood on their lawns, craning their necks upward. An accelerating automobile drew their eyes back to the ground, a Huntington Park police patrol car zooming past with exaggerated masculine purpose. Araceli halted her sidewalk march and watched the flashing lights of the patrol car reach the end of the block, cross the intersection, and
then accelerate into the next block with another throttle burst and thought,
They’re trying to scare me out into the open. They think that if they zoom through here I will begin to run, and give myself away.

She began walking again, but was aware that by stopping and starting with the passing of the patrol car she had drawn attention to herself.

“Hey, that’s her!” shouted the voice of an adolescent boy standing behind her on the sidewalk. She continued walking without looking back. “That’s the lady! From the TV!”

Araceli took a few more steps until a second voice shouted from one of the doorways,
“¡La secuestradora!
“ She turned and saw a woman with dimpled cheeks pointing at her from a cement porch, with the glee of a person who has scratched the skin of a lottery card and discovered a twenty-dollar prize. Araceli stumbled away, walking faster, frightened as much by the voyeurism of the people around her as by the idea that they might hand her over to the police.
“¡Es ella! La vi en el canal 52.
¿A
dónde vas?
“ She began a light jog, thinking that she might be safe as soon as she turned the corner and escaped this block and its Greek chorus of television watchers, people who believed she was the
secuestradora
in the news montages, a villainous taker of children.

“¡Córrele!”
a man shouted with a gusto usually reserved for horse races and cattle roundups.

“¿Y los niños?”
a woman’s voice pleaded as she turned the corner, and Araceli was tempted to turn and say,
I don’t have them, I never took them.
She reached a block where narrow bungalows were lined like railroad boxcars in parallel rows, their square lawns transformed by drought into flat and featureless dust squares. Plastic curls of Christmas lights hung from the eaves, and all the residents were inside, glued to their televisions, she guessed, looking at Araceli’s fuzzy picture on their screens. A block later she found herself standing underneath the enormous zinc torso of a power transmission tower, eight lines attached to four arms that stretched out like a woman having herself measured for a dress. The lines loomed above a corridor of vacant land that ran several straight miles through residential neighborhoods, one tower following another until they gradually disappeared into the midday ozone bake of dirty-blue haze and nothingness. Araceli took a second or two to contemplate the hugeness of the tower above her, and the oddity of the notch that
had been cut into the grid of homes. She jumped over the short fence that proclaimed
NO TRESPASSING
and began to walk under the trunk lines, thinking there would be no nosy television watchers to bother her as she walked here, and that she might be able to follow the lines northward to the peopleless heart of the metropolis, and the safety of factory buildings and warehouses. Her legs labored against the uneven, weed-covered ground, because she was entering a kind of urban wilderness, a nursery of odd flora sprouting up through the mustard grass. A cypress tree, its canopy shaped like a large wing. Sickly rosebushes without buds. Strawberry plants clinging to a patch of loam. Bamboo grasses and a stunted palm with thin leaves that sprouted, fountainlike, from its trunk, and the wide, tall bouquet of a nopal cactus. She had stumbled into the back closet of California gardens, the place where seedlings of plants discarded and abandoned came to scratch their roots into the dry native soil. If she hadn’t been on the run, she might have stopped to admire this freakish landscape, and she might have noticed too the cluster of cameras and lights in the distance.

Instead, the film crew saw her first, when, about eight hundred yards to the north, an Estonian cinematographer peered into the viewfinder of his camera. Araceli was under the second tower in the distance, a woman stumbling forward in the dancing waves of rising heat, lifting her legs over the weedy land like a woman wading through snowdrifts. “Someone is in my shot,” the cinematographer said, his neck bent and face attached to the eyepiece. “They are coming into the shot.”

“Again?” the director called out. “Where?”

A dozen or so members of the small film crew began squinting at the horizon. They were shooting the coda of an indie feature with a modest $3.1 million budget, and they had already been bedeviled by the appearance of the helicopters, which were driving the sound guy loopy. At the director’s behest the cinematographer had filmed the circling craft for two minutes and forty-five seconds, capturing their lead actor looking up at the machines circling over the wires, the expression of foreboding and curiosity on his tanned face completely in line with the themes of the screenplay. Electrical towers appeared at the end of each of the film’s three acts, and the cinematographer had shot other towers and wires in the San Bernardino Mountains, and in the plain of tumbleweeds outside Henderson, Nevada, and the Cimarron Grasslands
of southwestern Kansas. The Huntington Park shoot was intended for the epilogue, the towers and the barren channel of weeds at the actor’s feet symbols of the protagonist’s failed search for self in Las Vegas casinos and a Kansas beef-processing town.

“I told you these Eastside locations were a bitch,” the key grip said. “I told you.” Most of the local residents had behaved themselves: they were used to being put out by film crews drawn to the grim and epic backdrop, and only the appearance of an A-list actor or Mexican television star really got them very excited. Every few minutes, however, there was the straggling homeless person, or a gangbanger on his bicycle, people who hadn’t read the letter:
Sorry for the inconvenience: We’re bringing a little bit of Hollywood to your neighborhood!

“Now I see him,” the director said.

“Her. It’s a she.”

At that instant a helicopter swooped in close to the trunk line and a police car emerged with a squeaky skid on one of the streets that cut through the corridor. Two officers jumped out of the car and the figure of the woman began to run toward the crew.

“Whoa, they’re chasing her.”

“They’ve got their sticks out.”

“Is this real?”

“Batons. You call them batons, not sticks.”

“Are you getting this?” the director yelled to the cinematographer. He called out the name of the lead actor, a bright young prospect whose presence in the film had assured its funding—he was a twenty-four-year-old Australian with a sparse chestnut beard that matched his eyes, and a Gary Cooper everyman quality that screamed out he was destined for big-budget greatness. “In character,” the director said. “Stay in character.” The actor took a breath and a moment to remember his drama-school improvisation training and stretched his arms down at his sides. He relaxed his facial muscles into a look of genuine puzzlement and muted pleading captured in profile as he watched the foot chase that was now headed in his direction, a Mexican woman towing a cloud of dust and two running men in black, a spectacle now about one hundred yards distant.

“They’re going to beat her,” a crew member said breathlessly. “They’re going to beat her to a pulp.”

“Take a step toward them. Just one step.”

The actor moved hesitatingly toward the running woman, as if he wanted to help her but was not sure he could.

“Good. Now one more. Just one. Are we still getting this?”

“Yes, I’m on a tiny f-stop,” the cinematographer said. “The depth of field is magnificent.”

“Beautiful.”

Weeks later in the editing room, the director and his editor would incorporate about seventy-five seconds of this footage into the final version of the film. Araceli never saw the camera, or the actor, or the film crew. She was focused on the men trailing behind her and the idea that she might elude them. They had come to grab her and bind her hands in plastic strings, but she still found herself suppressing a laugh as she ran, even with brambles scratching at her ankles, because there was the quality of a schoolyard game to being chased around like this.
There are other, easier ways of returning to Mexico. They will grab me and drag me across the dirt like a calf in the rodeo, and then cage me. We must endure these rituals of humiliation: this is our Mexican glory, to be pursued and apprehended in public places for bystanders to see.