The Barbarian Nurseries (49 page)
A hot wind blew in through the window, the heat of the desert and the black highway rising into the pickup truck, making Felipe sweat, the perspiration dripping down his neck and covering his T-shirt. She reached down between her feet and pulled up another bottle of water and opened it, handing it to him, and you would have thought she’d given him a bouquet of roses.
Even the smallest kindness from me makes him happy—he must be in love. But when will he kiss me?
“How far is Carolina?” she asked.
“Very far. Maybe four or five days.”
“Would you drive five days with me?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Aren’t you worried?”
“About what?”
“Getting caught. By the immigration.”
“No. I’m a citizen.”
“Of the United States?”
“Yes. I got my papers last year. Through my uncle. It took ten years.”
“But I don’t have papers, and you could get in trouble for helping me. You’re breaking the law.”
“So?”
“And you still want to drive with me. And help me escape?”
“Yeah.”
It took a moment for this small miracle to sink in and feel true. Yes, it was there to see in his serene and satisfied study of the road ahead of them. It was the look of a housepainter after a day of flawless work. He was a big man with big sexy hair, and he was hers. He would even break the law for her.
“¡Qué romántico!”
she shouted, and laughed, and he laughed too, in a muted and nervous way.
“After we get to Phoenix, we have to decide,” he said. “There’s two ways we can go. We can keep going east, and go to Texas or Carolina. Or we can go south, to Sonora and to Nogales and Imuris—to my
tierra.
If we go south, we can’t come back north, because there are checkpoints with
la migra.”
He turned to look at her and asked, “Where do you want to go?”
“A mí me da igual,”
she said, because she could see herself following either path.
Soon the last human settlement was behind them and they sped across a vast, open plain of sand the color and texture of flour, covered with skeletal shrubs, maroon mountains rising in the distance, rocky and lifeless. “We reached the desert,” Araceli shouted. The road had become a straight line, dipping over the horizon in a watery mirage.
“It’s the Mojave,” Felipe shouted back.
They were in an eastward flow with sports cars in bright primary colors that zipped past their truck like low-slung missiles, and big sedans with people inside reading books and looking at tiny screens, passengers and drivers cool and comfortable behind shields of tinted glass. They were people of all the American colors, and carried an air of affluent confidence and anticipation:
The road belongs to them and they know it,
Araceli thought,
and they even appreciate it.
There were great big vehicles the size of small homes too, with license plates of many different colors that announced their owners resided in the
LAND OF ENCHANTMENT
and
VACATIONLAND,
or that they were headed to a
SPORTSMAN’S PARADISE.
The plain of shrubs and sand undulated as if it were a vast pool of liquid, or an ocean, with mountain ranges standing like islands in the distance. An hour went by wordlessly as they crossed this sea, and Araceli would think later the time swam by, it slid along so smooth and quiet and lovely. She imagined gliding across this desert ocean, with Felipe at her side, until they reached Carolina del Norte, or maybe even Veracruz, and the real sea at the end of their journey, to begin life anew.
Now several tall plants were growing alongside the highway, the long succulent fingers of the ocotillo, their barbed, candy-cane digits reaching for the white sun. Suddenly there were dozens of them, and now hundreds, covering a mountain slope. Araceli was going to comment on the beauty of the ocotillos when another pickup truck identical to theirs began to roll alongside them, the two vehicles cruising together long enough for Araceli to stare through the open windows and examine the face of the driver. He was a
mexicano,
like her, though perhaps ten years older, with a freeway of worry lines carved into his forehead, and a muddy
complexion that suggested Michoacán or Guerrero, or some other corner of her country where the people raised corn. He was looking at the straight highway with faraway eyes, as if remembering other journeys on other highways like this one, and suddenly she realized this man was the person she might become if she stayed in the United States. She imagined a biography for him, a story of crossings, arrivals, money, and disappointments.
There are so many of us on these roads. So many of us from adobe villages and cinder-block
colonias.
We are scattered on this highway between the motor homes and the sports cars, we scrubbers and builders, we planters and cooks, searching for the next place, the next hope.
“A lot of people are going to Arizona,” Felipe said. “I have a cousin who lives there. He says no matter where you go, you can find a job in a day. We’ll be there in an hour. The border is the Colorado River. When we go over the river, we’re in Arizona.”
Araceli had never been in another state besides California.
It’s called the United States because there are many, fifty altogether.
She wondered if there would be authorities at the border, an official checkpoint where they would demand to see her documents. If so, they would discover she lacked the necessary stamps of U.S. eagles—she had a passport now, but a passport without a visa was just another reminder of her Mexicanness. The anxiety about crossing the river and the coming frontier distracted her until they reached a place called Blythe and the signs said Arizona was just five miles away.
“What happens when we cross the border?” she finally blurted out.
“What?”
“In Arizona. Do they ask for my papers?”
“No. You just cross.”
“They don’t check anything?”
“No. Just the trucks carrying fruits and vegetables.”
They rattled down the highway, toward an oasis of tree canopies and green bushes. Soon they were on a wide bridge, rolling across to the other side.
LEAVING CALIFORNIA
said the sign as they passed over a muddy river.
“¡Adiós, California!”
she yelled with her arms raised in the air, as if on the last drop of a roller coaster.
“ ‘Bye!” Felipe shouted in English, and they laughed and shouted together.
On the other side they were greeted by a sign that said
WELCOME TO ARIZONA,
decorated with what she assumed was the flag of that state, red and yellow rays rising from a patch of blue, a copper star in the middle. Araceli admired its simple abstract expressiveness and thought,
That’s what a flag should look like.
They drove past the checkpoint for trucks Felipe had mentioned, and started to climb away from the river and into a rocky landscape.
This is Arizona, these red stones, already the landscape looks different. I have seen these fire-colored rocks in the movies and thought it was in California, but I was wrong.
She had arrived in a new place, and suddenly days and weeks of worry and fear lifted, and she lay her head against the door, feeling she would fall asleep any minute in this peaceful, rust-colored place, where a dozen tall saguaros had raised their arms to greet her.
Araceli fell into a soothing darkness and dreamed, for the first time, of Brandon and Keenan, that she was guiding them by the hand along the red Arizona rocks, away from a pool of water. Then the sun caught her full in the face and her dreams turned yellow and while these golden dreams lived they wiped out the memories of many years, of all her highway travels, her border crossings, her goodbyes and hellos.
She awoke to the taste of humid air and looked around to see that they were still in the desert. The forest of saguaros had grown thicker and a bank of percolating thunderclouds with bright white roofs and dark gray bellies was looming over the horizon with cathedral-like majesty. For a moment, Araceli wondered if the clouds were an apparition, or an extension of her dream, because the sky had been empty and blue when they crossed the river.
“Look at those clouds,” she said.
“Es un
monsoon,” Felipe said. “You see them in the desert in the summer. Looks like we’re driving right into it.”
The air cooled and thickened and soon the sun disappeared behind the storm, shooting out rays in the patches of blue between the clouds, lines that spread out like a fan, the image in the Arizona flag she’d seen when they crossed the border, yellow streaks radiating from the star. She tasted the humid air again and understood that this storm came from the south, from somewhere deep in the tropical heart of the earth, from Mexico or some other wet and needy land.
Soon they were underneath the cloud bank and it began to rain.
First a few drops, each one large and heavy on the windshield, then thick sheets that covered the road with swirling streams, so that Felipe had to pull over to the shoulder and wait for the storm to pass. Araceli opened the window and let the warm water fall on her face, a rain stronger than any she could remember, a downpour that washed away all the dust of the desert and turned it to mud.
She turned and saw Felipe’s face was wet too, and at that moment she leaned across the cab to kiss him. Their lips met in a moist caress. And then another one. And one more, until they stopped and looked at each other and Araceli suddenly felt lighter and younger, and she kissed him again and their arms and hands reached for one another too, until she gently pushed him back and said, “Slow.”
The rain stopped and the sound of cars splashing by on the wet road brought them back to where they were—on the shoulder of a highway in Arizona, in flight.
“We have to keep going,” she said.
They rejoined the road and in a few minutes they were entering a metropolis, Phoenix, with its low-slung warehouses, and neighborhoods with homes of rocky front yards and cactus landscaping. The sun returned, the clouds retreated, and the highway grew wider, spreading out from two eastbound lanes to three, until they reached the city center and the glass towers pulsated in the returning heat. The highway sank below the level of the street and spread out into four and then five lanes. Several green and white rectangles loomed on the overpasses above them, with odd-numbered highways and new destinations. 17.
FLAGSTAFF.
225.
TUCSON.
“So we have to decide,” Felipe said. “Which way are we going? To Flagstaff if we stay in the United States. To Tucson if we go to Mexico.”
Araceli looked up at the signs and thought,
Yes, it’s my choice.
She raised her hand, stretched it out until it almost touched the windshield, and pointed with her index finger.
“Para allá,”
she shouted above the roar of wind and engines, and then she said it in English too, just because she could.
“That way.”
HÉCTOR TOBAR
, now a weekly columnist for the
Los Angeles Times
, is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and a novelist. He is the author of
Translation Nation
and
The Tattooed Soldier
. The son of Guatemalan immigrants, he is a native of the city of Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife and three children.
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The Barbarian Nurseries
Copyright © 2011 by Héctor Tobar.
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EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2011 ISBN: 978-1-443-40711-3
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FIRST CANADIAN EDITION
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Tobar, Héctor, 1963–
The barbarian nurseries / Héctor Tobar.
ISBN 978-1-44340-709-0
I. Title.
PS3570.O22B37 2011 813’.54 C2011-903663-0
RRD 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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