The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel

12




Brandon 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?”


Seat 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.


Scott’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 f*cking 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.


The 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.

As the boys projected hopeful eyes at the rusty sinews of the tracks that stretched away from the station, Araceli scanned the space that immediately surrounded them. Until she got them to their grandfather, these were her boys. It was one thing to be in charge of children inside the shelter of a home, protected by locked doors, or in the fenced boundaries of a park—it was quite another to be herding them about a city. She wanted to cover them with sheets of protective steel. The thought that an accident of man or machine might hurt them filtered into her consciousness and caused brief and irrational pangs of loss, followed by the manic darting of her eyes at each of their stops on the journey from the gate of the Laguna Rancho Estates to the empty platform and the stairways leading to the street and the bus stop and parking structures beyond.

“Hey, here it comes.”

A double-decked white commuter train with periwinkle stripes moved toward them as a snake would, the locomotive yawing back and forth on uneven tracks.

“Atrás,” Araceli commanded. “Back until the train stops.”

The boys opened their mouths as the cars rolled slowly before them, their massive weight causing the ground beneath them to shift and rise. “Tight!”

“Awesome!”

“¡Cuidado!”

The train stopped and two sliding doors opened before them, the boys entering ahead of Araceli, rolling their suitcases straight into the car, whose floor was conveniently level with the platform. With a quick turn of their heads the boys found the stairway leading to the upper deck and began to climb, Araceli scrambling after them, muttering “¡Esperen!“ at the backs of their feet. They found two pairs of empty seats arranged before a table.

“Hey, we’re moving.”

The train began its advance away from the station, and Brandon and Keenan were briefly mesmerized by the illusion of flight that came from looking through the railcar’s large windows and watching their enclosed space move against the low skyline of the transit center’s false downtown, a Potemkin village of parking garages masquerading as office buildings. As the train rolled away from the station, past gates with flashing red lights and waiting cars with daydreaming drivers, Araceli threw herself back into her seat and let out a sigh. Halfway there, more or less. The train itself was a clean comfort, with its white walls and stainless steel poles and vinyl seats with aerodynamic shaping and the plaque by the door that proclaimed its provenance: BOMBARDIER, MONTREAL. After dropping off the boys and the briefest of stays at the old man’s house, she would set off south again for Marisela’s and await news of Scott and Maureen. She imagined different outcomes for their family debacle, including a divorce that ended with an empty house and Araceli vacuuming after the movers had left, or a tearful family reunion and ample thanks from Scott and Maureen to Araceli for seeing their boys through the crisis.

Through the window, the boys saw a landscape of shrinking backyards shuffle past: the repetition of laundry lines and old furniture did not hold Brandon’s attention for long, and he finally looked across at Araceli and asked, “Can you draw me a picture? Here in my notebook? Like the dragon you drew for Keenan. That was cool.”

“Yeah, it was tight,” Keenan said.

“I didn’t know you could draw,” Brandon said.

“¿Qué quieres? What do you want I draw for you?”

“How about a soldier?”

“¿Un soldado? Fácil.”

She took his lined notebook and pencil and looked for a blank page, glancing quickly at his crude war scenes, little stick-figure Brueghels in which one army of stick men set off cannons and laid siege to rectangular forts and pummeled enemies who raised up stick hands and ran from scribbled explosions. This boy is very smart but he does not know art. Brandon watched, intently, as she traced some initial lines and a man in uniform with a weapon held across his chest took form on paper. It was a musket like the ones in his book American Revolution and Araceli drew it from memory, though she gave her soldier a modern uniform, with a row of medals and a steel helmet. Then she worked on the face, choosing features that were deeply familiar to her, and made it stare straight back at the viewer.

“Wow,” Brandon said when she finished. “That guy’s face—he looks really tough.”

“Really mean,” Keenan added.

The face belonged to Araceli’s mother.

Her art session was interrupted, suddenly, by the jolt of the train’s arrival in Fullerton, the last station before Los Angeles. Four people waiting on the platform quickly stepped on board and the train lurched forward anew. Soon the train was entering the industrial districts southeast of Los Angeles, one windowless warehouse followed by another as the train accelerated and began to vibrate slightly. The buildings began to age, the neutered, primary-colored plaster of the late twentieth century giving way to the earth-toned constructions of brick and cement of earlier eons. Suddenly the warehouses had windows, many dark and frosted over with dust and cobwebs so that they resembled thousands of cataract-infested eyes. The train went faster still and vibrated violently, causing Keenan to squeeze Araceli’s hand. Brandon held on to the armrest and felt his head strike the window, and wondered if the train might disintegrate, or if the forces of acceleration might transform this rolling steel box into a time machine that would transport them from the archaic era of brick now visible outside the window, to even simpler ages of wood, smoke, and stone.

The train slowed suddenly as it entered a switching yard with at least twenty parallel tracks. They rolled slowly past rusting hopper cars that had made hundreds of journeys from Kansas with wheat and corn, past tank cars oozing black tar, and container cars with German and Chinese names and bar codes stamped incongruously on their sides. The train made a long, sweeping turn under a freeway bridge and Araceli watched the haphazard cables and wires that followed the tracks moving like a black, horizontal rain. She noted too the random dispersal of trash on the embankment, the plastic bags and food containers sprinkled over the track gravel, the rusting iron overpasses, the graffiti-covered switching boxes, and a lone, stubby brick control tower with wooden doors chained shut. There was a spare beauty to all this decay, it was the empty and harsh landscape of an unsettling dream; these were spaces you were not meant to see, like the hidden air ducts and trash chutes of a glittering mansion, where cobwebs and dust and rat droppings collected freely and concerned no one. Her aesthetic lived in barren places like this, and she missed them. Here the wind, rain, and sun are free to shape and cook the steel and cement into sculptures that celebrate forgetfulness. She took a small notebook from her backpack and tried to quickly capture the manic, twisted essence of electrical lines, the bounce of the trash in the wind, the fluid shape of the rust patterns, until Keenan proclaimed, “Everything is really dirty here,” and her reverie and her concentration were broken.

The train slowed to a walking pace and a valley of smooth concrete walls suddenly opened alongside the tracks, stretching more than a mile in the distance, with several bridges vaulting over it. “What’s that?” Keenan asked.

“It’s the river,” Araceli said.

“That’s a river?” Brandon said, perplexed, until he noticed the bottom of the chasm held a narrow channel of flowing water with perfectly straight edges. “What’s it called? Why is it made out of cement? It hasn’t rained, so where does the water come from?”

“Too many questions,” Araceli said.

“Too many?” No one had ever told Brandon such a thing.

“Yes.”

Brandon looked at the river and saw that a giant with a paint can had covered the top of the valley with a mosaic of sparkling elephant-sized letters, spelling words in mongrel greens and tainted yellows that pulsated inside a pool of gray-blue swirls. Or at least it seemed a giant had painted them. He wondered if he should ask Araceli, then decided against it. Probably it was a giant.

“Hey, look, there’s people down there,” Keenan shouted, loud enough to get the attention of the four or five other adults in the car, who looked up from their newspapers and laptops just long enough to glance at and quickly forget the familiar sight of the soiled caste who lived by this stretch of track.

“Los homeless,” Araceli said.

Brandon pressed his nose against the glass and looked downward, spotting a line of shelters between the train tracks and the river, teetering house-t ents of oil-stained plywood, sun-bleached blue tarpaulin, frayed nylon rope, and aluminum foil. They looked like ground-hugging tree houses, improvised assemblages built by children and taken over by tubercular adults. A few humans sat on chairs in between their creations in this village as it followed the curve in the tracks, their roofs a quilt of tarpaulin and wood forming a long crescent dotted with the occasional column of smoke. Brandon searched for the sources of these fires, and spotted a gangly man in aviator glasses tending to a kettle on a grill. The train rolled slowly toward the man, and for a few seconds Brandon was directly above him. He bore a long scar on his cheek oozing red and black liquids. A battle wound? Brandon wondered. A cut inflicted by a knife or a sword? A month earlier Brandon had finished the last volume in a four-book series of novels, The Saga of the Fire-Swallowers, and as he sat in the train with his nose pressed to the glass, the violent and disturbing denouement of that epic narrative seemed the only plausible explanation for the existence of this village of suffering passing below him. These people are refugees; they are the defeated soldiers and the displaced citizens of the City of Vardur. The novels were a fantasy tale for young-adult readers set in a world of preindustrial stone villages. His father had bought the entire set and read them some years earlier, leaving them forgotten on a shelf for his oldest son to discover, Brandon’s fascination growing with each chapter he spent in the company of its villains, a cult of rugged men and boys who engaged in the ritual eating of flames before and after battle. There was something about this homeless camp that seemed to belong to the ancient times described in those books, a way of life untroubled by electricity, or modernity in general. In truth, Brandon never should have been allowed to read the Fire-Swallower books, given their graphic descriptions of scorched-earth warfare, including the slaughter of entire villages and their children with blades forged from various metals, real and fanciful, and the antagonists who filled their speeches with fascistic rationalizations about “the weak,” “the strong,” and “the pure.” It was all meant to be an allegory about the cruelty and demagoguery of the modern age, and its imagery drew heavily from the outrages of the twentieth century, so much so, and so realistically, that the sharp-eyed Brandon had long ago concluded that the story was not entirely the product of a writer’s imagination. Long before this train journey Brandon had begun to warm to the idea that the Fire-Swallower saga was, in fact, a thinly veiled, detailed account of a real but primitive corner of the actual world. Entire cities emptied of good people, civilians tortured, their homes and their books set to the torch. How could such injustice exist, how could humanity live with it? He knew he should speak of what he read to his mother, who obviously had no idea about the taboos being broken in the works of literature he carried about the house: “You’re such a good little reader,” was all she said. It was stunning to be confronted with such adult naïveté, though it was undeniably cool to possess knowledge forbidden to eleven-year-olds who were not as precocious readers as he. Still, the stories told in the saga caused him to lose sleep some nights, until he finally convinced himself that what he was reading was indeed fantasy. And now this, a wounded man, an actual victim of the Fire-Swallowers’ wrath, driven to seek shelter by the concrete river with his fellow Vardurians.

“Those flame-swallowing bastards!” Brandon cried out, in imitation of the hero of the saga, the noble Prince Goo-han.

“¿Qué dices?” Araceli said. “¿Bastardos?” Suddenly the eleven-year-old was saying swear words. He’s only been out of the house and into the world a few hours and already he’s being corrupted.

“It’s the Fire-Swallowers,” Brandon said in a tone of patient explanation, having realized quickly that Araceli had never read those books: they were in English, after all. “The Fire-Swallowers made these people refugees. They destroyed their towns and houses. They fled and they’ve come to live here by the river. I read about it in Revenge of the Riverwalkers. The Fire-Swallowers burned down their village, Vardur, because they wouldn’t swear loyalty to the evil king. So they had to seek shelter on the riverbanks, but I never thought …”

“Estás loco,” Araceli said. “You read too much.”

No one had ever told Brandon such a thing: in the Torres-Thompson home reading was a sacred act; it was the one activity the children were allowed without time limits or parental supervision. Books were powerful and good, they told truths, and Brandon decided he should ignore his temporary caretaker’s remarks and study the Vardurian camp and see what secrets it might reveal. Brandon’s memory stretched back only a few years beyond the time they moved into the Laguna Rancho Estates, and his idea of what homes looked like was deeply influenced by the repetitive conformity of his neighborhood, with its association-approved paint schemes and standard-sized driveways. Below him, now, was a place where every shelter was entirely different from its neighbor, many with tiny yards fenced in with loops of electrical wire and plastic bags tied together to form a kind of rope. Before the train made one final turn and headed into the station he spotted one last Vardurian: a woman with a fountain of silvery hair who was sweeping out her shelter with a broom.


Maureen stood over the portable crib in her hotel room and studied her daughter as she took an afternoon nap. Samantha slept on her back, clutching the yellow blanket that accompanied her day and night, her closed eyes peaceful hemispheres, with her rusty eyelashes as delicate equators. With her eyes closed Samantha’s oval face was nearly identical to her oldest brother when he was the same age, the boy’s sleeping face recorded in a photograph framed in mahogany in their living room gallery: Maureen’s separation from Brandon for more than seventy-two hours only heightened the sense that she was looking down at her son and not her daughter, and she began to feel the deepening absence of her boys from her life. When you see your children sleeping you understand the full glory and beauty of being a mother; you stand tall and awake before their silent need, before their purity and vulnerability. She looked up at where she was, in a hotel room of slightly overdone southwestern décor, with a Navajo rug nailed to the wall opposite the bed and an authentic, desert-baked ram’s skull hanging on the door, and could hear the startled voice of her conscience screaming out, What have I done? My son! My sons! She picked up the phone and called home.


At that moment, Maureen’s boys were walking dutifully behind their Mexican caretaker, taking their first steps off the train at Union Station. They walked along one of several parallel platforms between locomotive behemoths, one of which was ringing a bell as it rolled away, roughly at the pace of a walking man, into open tracks toward the city beyond. Brandon and Keenan saw porters wearing stiff caps, and seniors defeated by the stacks of luggage on steel carts, and heard a speaker pronounce, “Last call for the Sunset Limited … all aboard!” and thought that at last they’d arrived at a real train station. The boys wanted to linger out on the open-air platform, in the meaningful presence of all that rolling stock and those travelers, but Araceli was telling them to follow her, with an impatient “Órale, por aquí,” and they descended down a long, sloping ramp, going underground.

They entered a long and wide hallway with low ceilings that reminded Keenan of airports he had visited. Araceli had passed through here during her first days in Los Angeles, and the sight of the crowds of people with huge duffel bags and boxes tucked under their arms reminded her of that other, more innocent Araceli. Sola. With a hard-shell suitcase the smuggler had mocked for its patent impracticality, dazzled by the city’s alien and sleek feel, suffering a kind of weird agoraphobia because she was in a vast plain of unknown things. The reencounter with her recent past only made Araceli more uncomfortable, more anxious to reach her destination. She looked left and then right and decided to go right, beginning to walk very quickly, navigating smartly between the crosscurrents of passengers, like a chilanga again, almost losing Brandon and Keenan because she was in such a hurry.

“Hey, Araceli, wait up,” Brandon shouted, and Araceli turned back and gave him a mildly exasperated look identical to the one she showed him two or three times a day in his own living room, bedroom, and kitchen.

Walking side by side now, they passed an electronic sign announcing destinations and departure times, LAS VEGAS BUS, TEXAS EAGLE, SURFLINER NORTH, and then suddenly entered a room where the low ceilings disappeared and the space above them opened up, causing Brandon and Keenan to crane their necks skyward. They marveled at the vaulted ceiling, which was covered with tiles of vaguely Mediterranean or Arabic styling, exuding both warmth and largeness. Chandeliers resembling baroque spacecraft hung from the rafters and both boys silently mouthed the word Whoa as they walked underneath them. There were rows of high-backed, upholstered benches where boys in baseball uniforms and weary, sunburned Dutch and Italian travelers sat with clusters of nylon backpacks at their feet. A crew that was in the second day of a music-video shoot was packing up in the unused and locked wing of the station where tickets had once been sold, where the oak-paneled ticket windows served as permanent and oft-used sets.

“I’ve seen this place in the movies,” Keenan said. “I thought it was pretend.”

They passed through an arch high enough for the tallest troll or giant to fit through, and then walked out the main door of the station, where they were confronted by the summer sunlight, and cars and pedestrians all moving purposefully northward and southward on streets and walkways. Behind this shifting tableau stood the imposing backdrop of the downtown Los Angeles skyline, the glass skyscrapers of the Financial District, and the stubby stone tower of City Hall, which had a ziggurat pyramid on top, so that it resembled a Mesopotamian rocket ready for launch.

“No, por aquí no es,” Araceli said, and she circled back into the waiting room again, the boys scrambling behind her.

She walked up to the information booth and the tall, lean, sclerotic man standing there, the name tag on his jacket announcing him to be GUS DIMITRI, VOLUNTEER.

“We are looking for the buses,” Araceli said.

Gus Dimitri was a spry octogenarian and a native of South Los Angeles, old enough to remember when that black and brown ghetto of today was a whites-only haven for Greeks, Jews, Italians, Poles. He had seen more L.A. history than any other employee or volunteer at this transit hub, and when he looked at Araceli and her charges he understood, immediately, that this was a servant woman from Mexico hired to care for the two children that accompanied her.

“Well, where are you headed, exactly, ma’am?”

As the woman fumbled in her backpack for an address, Gus Dimitri took time to think that California had really pushed this immigrant-servant fad to the extreme. Is it really wise, he’d like to ask the parents of these boys, to have a Mexican woman guiding your precious children across the metropolis like this? To have them in the care of a woman lost at Union Station? At about the time Gus Dimitri had retired from the workforce, California had gone mad with immigrant-hiring—from front yards to fast-food joints, these people did everything now. They were good workers, yes, real old-fashioned nose-to-the-grindstone types. But jeez: Didn’t Americans want to do anything for themselves anymore? When he was about the age of this older boy here, he’d sold newspapers on the street himself, making a killing hawking extras on Crenshaw Boulevard for the Max Schmeling—Joe Louis fights. But did American kids even have paper routes anymore? His own paper was delivered via pickup truck by a Mexican guy (he assumed) named Roberto Lizardi, according to the Christmas card that arrived with his paper once a year.

“To Thirty-ninth Street,” Araceli said. “In Los Angeles.”

“That’s back, the other way,” he said. “Patsaouras Plaza.”

“Thank you.”

Araceli quickly circled back into the long, low-ceilinged passageway.

“Where are we going?” Keenan asked. “Why are we going underground again?”

“We are going to take the bus,” Araceli explained. “Tenemos que ir a la otra estación. Another station, not this one.” They reached a wide cement staircase and climbed into a sunlit atrium with several exits. This was the transit center where the buses departed, but Araceli could not remember which gate led to the buses serving the neighborhood in Los Angeles where el viejo Torres lived. She approached another information booth and the boys’ attention was drawn upward again, this time to the mural on the wall behind the desk: an old steam engine rushed toward a village set amid verdant fields, advancing through a series of orchards, leaving a column of black smoke in its wake. To the left, there was a second mural in which the steam engine ran alongside a blue ribbon of river, which itself snaked past a city thick with squat buildings; in a third panel to the right the same city gleamed with skyscrapers and the river had morphed into a concrete channel.

“Is that what was here before?” Brandon asked, before Araceli could get her own question in.

“Yeah,” said the man behind the counter, an MTA employee. “And let me tell you something else—this’ll really blow your mind. Where we’re standing, right now—it used to be Chinatown. There’s all sorts of archaeological stuff they found buried underneath here. Chinese stuff.”

“So what happened to the Chinese?”

“Ah, they knocked all that down ages ago. Flattened it.”

“Well, that’s disturbing,” Brandon said, parroting a phrase his mother used quite often.

Brandon pondered the revelation about Chinatown as the man explained to Araceli where she could catch the bus they needed to take. The ground he and his brother were standing on was older than the oldest person he knew, and probably older than the oldest Vardurian, which was a horizon-opening realization for an eleven-year-old boy. Probably if you dug down deep you could find not just Chinatown, but also the ruins of many other cities and villages of the past, just like in that picture book on his shelf where you see the Stone Age, the Roman Age, the Middle Ages, and the Modern Age all inhabit the same stretch of earth beside a river, with battles fought and buildings burned and people buried and cities rebuilt and torn down and rebuilt again as you turn from one page to the next.

“Ya, vámonos,” Araceli called out. “Es por aquí.”

The boys followed her to one of several parallel sidewalks and within seconds an empty bus had pulled up and Araceli and the boys climbed in. This bus, Brandon noted immediately, was a battle-worn version of the first bus they had taken in the Laguna Rancho Estates earlier in the day. It appeared to have traveled through a few hailstorms, given the scratches on the plastic windows, and as it headed out of the shady transit center and into the sun of the Los Angeles streets and the light shone inside, Brandon noted the worn seats and the assorted scribbling in the interior. “It stinks in here,” Keenan declared. A sweaty, vaguely fecal aroma seeped out of the seats, and the sour sweetness of spilled sugar beverages attached itself to the humid air molecules in the aisles, the smells riding the bus up and down and across the city all day for free.

They rolled slowly away from the transit center, to streets that brought them closer to the glass towers of the Financial District. Brandon and Keenan had seen this stretch of the city many times before, in the company of their parents, from the high perch of a car speeding along elevated freeways. That was the Los Angeles they had always known, the city center that was home to the Dodgers and the Lakers. On those trips they had glided over the heart of Los Angeles, traveling near the tops of its palm trees, driving to museums and parks that were somewhere on the other side of a vast grid of stucco buildings and asphalt strips that stretched as far as one could see into the haze. Studying this landscape from the ground level for the first time, Brandon noticed how every object appeared to be built from bare metal, brick, and concrete, arranged into simple geometric forms: the right angles formed by the traffic lights welded to poles, the open rectangular mouths of the storm drains, the strange tower on the roof of one building assembled entirely from triangles. It was all more linear and rough-edged and interesting, to his young eyes, than the curvy contours of Paseo Linda Bonita.

Sitting next to his brother, in an aisle seat, Keenan was closer to the clusters of passengers who began to fill the aisle after a few stops, grabbing the bar above them. Keenan didn’t know it was possible to stand up in a moving bus. An older woman towered above him, carrying a plastic bag filled with documents and envelopes, the heavy contents swaying about as the bus lurched forward. Directly across from Keenan, a seated middle-aged man with green eyes held another plastic bag, his weathered hands covered with small cuts, and through the bag’s translucent skin Keenan could make out folded clothes, two thick books, and a pair of pliers. The man held the bag close to his body, inside the vessel formed by his legs and the metal back of the seat in front of him, and Keenan sensed that whatever was inside was very important to him. These people are carrying the things they own inside the plastic bags my mother and Araceli use to bring things from the market. Keenan was eight years old, but the poignancy of poor people clutching their valuables in plastic bags close to their weary bodies was not lost on him and for the first time in his young life he felt an abstract sense of compassion for the strangers in his midst. “There are a lot of needy, hungry people in this world,” his mother would say, usually when he wouldn’t finish his dinner, but it was like hearing about Santa Claus, because one saw them only fleetingly. He believed “the poor” and “the hungry” were gnomelike creatures who lived on the fringes of mini-malls and other public places, sorting through the trash. Now he understood what his mother meant, and thought that next time he was presented with a plate of fish sticks, he would eat every last one. Two passengers in front of him were speaking Spanish, and this drew his attention because he thought he might make out what they were saying, since he understood nearly all of what Araceli said to him in that language. But their speech was an indefinable jumble of new nouns, oddly conjugated verbs, and figurative expressions, and he only understood the odd word or phrase: “es muy grande,” “domingo,” “fútbol,” and “el cuatro de julio.”

“Nos bajamos en la próxima,” Araceli said as she rose to her feet. “Next stop. We get off.”

They stepped from the bus to the sidewalk and the door closed behind them with a clank and a hydraulic sigh. Araceli took in the yellow-gray heat and the low sun screaming through the soiled screen of the center-city atmosphere. Goodbye blue skies and sea breezes of Laguna Rancho, Araceli thought. This was more like the bowl of machine-baked air of her hometown: she had forgotten the feeling of standing in the still and ugly oxygen of a real city. “We walk. That way,” Araceli said, pointing south down a long thoroughfare that ran perpendicular to the street the bus had left them on, the four lanes running straight toward a line of distant palm trees that grew shorter until they were toothpicks swallowed up by the haze.

“This doesn’t look like the place my grandfather lives,” Brandon said.

“Is it close?” Keenan asked.

“Sí. Just a few blocks.”

They stood alone, housekeeper and young charges, on a block where only the bus bench and shelter interrupted the empty sweep of the sidewalk. So strange, Araceli observed, a block without people, just as on Paseo Linda Bonita, but this time in the middle of an aging city with buildings from the previous century. All the storefronts were shuttered and locks as big as oranges dangled from their steel doors, while swarthy men struck poses for the passing motorists from rooftop billboards, their fingers enviously wrapped around light-skinned women and bottles of beer and hard liquor. For a moment Araceli thought that Brandon might be right, that el viejo Torres could not live near here. Then again, you never knew in Los Angeles what you might find around the next corner. You could be in the quiet, sunny, and gritty desolation of a block like this at one moment, and find yourself on a tree-l ined, shady, and glimmering block of apartments the next. Mexico City was like that too.

Once again, the wheels of the boys’ suitcases clack-clacked on the sidewalk as they marched southward. “This doesn’t look like where he lives,” Brandon repeated, annoying Araceli. “In fact, I’m pretty sure this isn’t the place.”

“It’s just a few blocks,” she insisted. In a few minutes she would be free of the care of these two boys and the pressure would be lifted from her temples. Their grandfather would emerge from his door, she would tell him the story of the table and the empty house, and he would make them an early dinner and she would be free of them. They advanced southward, witnessed only by the passing motorists, who were all accelerating on this stretch of relatively open roadway, going too fast to take much note of the caravan of pedestrians headed southward in single file, a boy with rock-star-long hair leading the way, his brow wrinkled skeptically, a smaller child behind him, and a big-boned Mexican woman bringing up the rear and studying the street signs. These were the final minutes before the clock struck five, and the drivers were eager to cover as much ground as possible before the skyline to the north began to empty of clerks, analysts, corporate vice presidents, cafeteria workers, public relations specialists, sales wizards, and assorted other salaried slaves. On this midsummer day, most of these automobiles proceeded with windows sealed and artificial alpine breezes blowing inside, but the air-conditioning was not working inside the Toyota Cressida of Judge Robert Adalian, a jurist at the nearby concrete bunker known as Los Angeles Municipal Traffic Court—Central District. Judge Adalian was driving with the windows open when Araceli, Brandon, and Keenan passed before him at the crosswalk on Thirty-seventh Street and South Broadway, thanks to the rare red light on his drive northward along Broadway, his daily detour of choice to avoid the Harbor Freeway. These pedestrians pushed the button to cross and broke the sequence of the lights, the judge thought as he took in the odd spectacle of a woman who was clearly Mexican with two boys who were clearly not. It’s not their skin tone that gives the boys away, it’s their hair and the way they’re walking and studying everything around them like tourists. Those boys don’t belong here. Through his open window he caught a snippet of their talk.

“I think we’re lost,” the taller boy said.

“No seas ridículo, no estamos lost,” the Mexican woman answered, irritated, and the judge chuckled, because he’d grown up in Hollywood with some Guatemalans and Salvadorans, and the Mexican woman’s brief use of Spanglish transported him to that time and place, twenty years ago, when Spanish could still be heard in his old neighborhood, before that final exodus from the old Soviet Union had filled up the neighborhood with so many refugees from the old country (including his future wife) that the city had put up signs around it announcing LITTLE ARMENIA. The light turned green and the judge quickly filed away the Mexican woman and the American boys in the back of his memory, alongside the other unusual event of the afternoon: the sentencing of a onetime sitcom actor whose career had been so brief and distant in time, only the judge recalled it. It had depressed the judge to think that, at forty-four, he was older than his bailiff, his clerk, and his stenographer, older also than the defense attorney and the representative from the city attorney’s office. Only the accused surpassed him in age, and when Judge Adalian finally realized that no one in the court was aware of the defendant’s contribution to television history, the fifty-two-year-old drunk driving defendant had looked at the judge and raised his eyebrows in an expression of shared generational weariness. “Time passes,” the defendant said, and this too struck a chord in the judge’s memory, because it wasn’t often that the alcoholics who passed through his court imparted any wisdom. The light turned green and the judge glided northward, unaware that in a few weeks’ time his memory of crossing paths with the faded actor and the Mexican woman with the two “white” boys on the same ordinary day would win him an appearance on cable television.

Araceli reached the curb on the other side of Broadway and turned right, Brandon now bringing up the rear, because he felt the need to protect his younger brother by walking behind him, lest some monster or Fire-Swallower emerge from one of the shuttered storefronts.

“Don’t look at anyone in the eye, Keenan,” Brandon said.

“What?”

“This is a dangerous place.”

“You can’t tell me what to do.”

“There might be bad guys inside these buildings,” Brandon insisted. “Look at the markings. That’s a bad number. Thirteen.”

“Really?” Keenan said, and for a moment he saw the world as his brother did, thinking that xiii had to be some warrior code.

Logic told Araceli she was just two blocks away from the address on the back of the old photograph, but now she too was beginning to have serious doubts, given the ominous, spray-painted repetitions of the number 13 on the walls and the sidewalk. She sensed, for the first time, that her naïveté about the city might be leading them to the place where graffiti scribblers and gang members were nurtured under the opaque roof of the smoggy sky, a kind of greenhouse nursery of mannish dysfunction. Now they walked past a large vacant lot, a rectangle filled with knee-high milkweed and trash, which in the glory days of el abuelo Torres had been the Lido Broadway movie theater. As a young man el abuelo Torres had seen High School Confidential screened here, lusted after the curvy starlet Cleo Moore, and been pummeled by a couple of African-American guys who didn’t appreciate his comments during a midweek matinee of Blackboard Jungle. Juan Torres and his parents were still in the city-to-farm circuit then, forced with a number of other Mexican-American families to live among blacks. Juan fought the black guys over girls too. Living here and tasting blood in his mouth had shaped his sense of racial hierarchy, and his ideas about where he fit in the pigmented pyramid of privilege that he understood the United States to be. As dark as we are, we ain’t at the bottom. When he had a glass of sangria or a shot of whiskey too many, the brawling, proud, and prejudiced Johnny Torres of Thirty-ninth Street and the Lido Broadway was resurrected: as during Keenan’s sixth birthday party, when he remarked very loudly on how fair-skinned and “good looking” his younger grandson was—“a real white boy, that one”—a remark that led his progressive daughter-in-law to banish him from her home.

If Araceli had not been trailing two children, if she had not been anxious to reach the place that would liberate her from her unwanted role as caretaker of two boys, she might have stopped and taken the time to study the rubble of the Lido Broadway, a half dozen pipes rising from a cracking cement floor like raised hands in a classroom. Time worked more aggressively in the heart of an American city than in a Mexican city, where colonial structures breezed through the centuries without much difficulty. Here, cement, steel, and brick began to surrender after just a decade or two of abandonment. The people who lived and worked here ran away. But from what? It was best to keep moving, quickly. She spotted a woman pushing a stroller on the next block and a young child walking beside her, two hundred yards away, next to a liquor store with a painted mural of the Virgin of Guadalupe on its side.

Araceli walked toward the store and the Virgin, and soon she and the boys were entering a neighborhood with houses and apartment buildings that were occupied, clapboard structures, mostly, some with iron fences enclosing rosebushes. They saw a woman flinging a carpet against the stairs of a porch that led to a two-story building with four doors. Brandon noted the strange numbers above each entrance—3754¼, 3754½, 3764¾—and was reminded of the fanciful numbered railroad platform from a famous children’s book; he wondered if these doors too might be a portal to a secret world. They passed a two-story clapboard bungalow with the rusted steel bars of a prison, and both boys wondered if some bad guy was being held inside, but a few doors down, they saw an identical structure, with no bars and freshly painted coral-colored walls, an organ pipe cactus rising ten feet high in the garden, alongside a small terra-cotta fountain with running water and a cherub on top. “That’s a nice house,” Keenan said. “Muy bonito,” he added, and Araceli thought, yes, they must be on the right track, because the houses were suddenly getting prettier. But half a block farther along they encountered a square-shaped rooming house whose doors and windows had been boarded up, the plywood rectangles forming the eyes and mouth of a blindfolded and muzzled creature. “I really don’t think my grandfather lives around here,” Brandon said again, and this time Araceli didn’t bother answering him.

Two blocks later they arrived at a street sign announcing Thirty-ninth Street and the final confirmation of Araceli’s folly: on this block, where the photograph and the street name on the back had led her, there was a collection of powder-blue duplex bungalows, apartments in a two-story clapboard building surrounded by snowflakes of white paint, and two windowless stucco industrial cubes. The address corresponded to one of the bungalows, which faced the street, with side doors opening to a narrow courtyard. Araceli reached into Maureen’s backpack, retrieved the old photograph, and matched the bungalow behind the young abuelo Torres to the structure before her: the windows were covered with steel bars now and the old screen door had given way to a fortress shield of perforated steel, but it was the same building. Together, the two images, past and present, were a commentary on the cruelty of time and its passage, and of Araceli’s chronological illiteracy, her ignorance of the forces of local history. After a day of walking and bus and train rides she had arrived at her destination, and it was clear that el abuelo Torres did not live here, and could not live here, because everything about the place screamed poverty and Latin America, from the wheeled office chair someone had left in the middle of the courtyard amid a pool of cigarette butts, to the strains of reggae-ton music pulsating from inside one of the bungalows.

“La fregué,” Araceli muttered to herself, which caused both boys to look up at her in confusion.

“Is this it?” Brandon said. “Is this the address?”

“Sí. Y aquí no vive tu abuelo.”

“No, he doesn’t,” Brandon said. “His house is in a big apartment complex, with a big lawn in front. It’s yellow. And there aren’t any ugly buildings like those over there.”

“Now what?” asked Keenan.

Behind the security door of the bungalow directly before them, Araceli could hear a second, inner door opening. “¿Se le ofrece algo?” a female voice asked through the perforated steel shield.

Araceli walked to the door and held up the photograph. “Estoy buscando a este hombre,” she said. “Vivía aquí.”

Seeing no danger in a mexicana with two young boys, the woman opened the steel door and reached out to take the picture, revealing herself to Araceli as a world-weary woman of about thirty whose smooth skin and long, swept-back eyes appeared to have been carved from soapstone. Her nails were painted pumpkin and her hair seemed oddly stiff and perky, given the circles under her eyes, but those same eyes quickly brightened as she took in the photograph.

“¡Pero esta foto tiene años y años!” the woman declared, and chuckled after recognizing the black-and-white porch and arriving at the realization that the little shotgun house with the sagging floors and peeling faux linoleum in which she lived had been standing so long, and that once it had been possible to live there without metal barriers to keep out predators: she wouldn’t live there now without bars on the windows. She returned the photograph and gave Araceli and the boys the same dismissive look she gave the impossibly earnest young men with narrow ties who visited her earlier in the day searching for the family of Salvadoran Mormons that had once occupied this same bungalow. “Ni idea,” the woman said.

Araceli stomped on the wooden porch in frustration. A day on foot, in trains, and buses, from station to station, neighborhood to neighborhood: for this? In the time they had walked from the bus stop the sun had dipped below the buildings on the horizon, the western sky had begun its transformation into the colors of a smoldering hearth. She looked down at the boys and wondered if they would be able to make it all the way back to Paseo Linda Bonita and how much trouble they would become once she told them they would have to start walking again.

The woman at the door sensed Araceli’s predicament, which was centered on the presence of the two boys behind her, both of whom seemed to be English speakers. “I think someone I know can help you,” she said, switching languages for the benefit of the boys. “El negro. He lives right here behind me. Apartment B. I think he’s the oldest person who lives here. They say he’s been here forever.”

A minute or so later Araceli was knocking on the steel door with the B next to it.

“Who the hell is it? What are ya knockin’ so loud for, goddamnit!” Behind the perforated steel sheet, an inner door of wood opened, and Araceli saw the silhouette of a large man with thick arms and a slightly curvy posture. “Oh, shit. Didn’t know you had the kids with you,” the voice said. “What? What you need?”

“I am looking for this person,” Araceli said.

“Huh?”

“I am looking for the man in this picture. His name is Torres.”

The man opened the door, slowly, and stretched out a weatherworn hand to take the picture, examining it behind his screen. “Whoa! This takes me back!” the man shouted. Now the door opened fully and the man looked down the three steps of his porch to examine the woman who had given him this artifact. He was a bald black man, inexplicably wearing a sweater on this late afternoon in July, and when he fully opened his door the sound of a television baseball announcer filtered out, causing Brandon to stand up on his tiptoes and try to look inside. The man from Apartment B was easily in his seventies, and still tall despite the stoop in his back. The spaces under his eyes were covered with small polyps, and his cheeks with white stubble.

“What are you? His relative? His daughter?”

“No. They are his, how do you say …?”

“He’s our grandfather,” Keenan offered.

“You know, there’s been a lot of people in and out of this place since I moved here.” James “Sweet Hands” Washington had arrived on Thirty-ninth Street as a single man in the middle of the last century, picking out these bungalows because they reminded him of the old shotgun houses in his native Louisiana. The spot at the end of the block occupied by the garment factory had been the site of a car-repair shop back then, and Sweet Hands had worked there for a number of years, dismantling carburetors with the hands dubbed “sweet” first for his exploits on the football field, and later for his exploits with the ladies. Sweet Hands examined the picture, the way the Mexican subject wore his khaki pants with a distinctive mid-1950s swagger, and then the bungalow in the background, and was momentarily transported to that time, when the Southern California sky was dirtier than it was today, and when Sweet Hands himself was a young man recently liberated from Southern strictures. This young man in the photograph looked like he had been liberated too: or maybe he was just feeling what Los Angeles was back then, in that era of hairspray and starched clothes, when the city had a proper stiffness to it, and also a certain glimmer, like the shine of those freshly waxed V8 cruisers that rolled along Central Avenue at a parade pace of fifteen miles per hour. Sweet Hands held the picture a long time, and finally let out a short grunt that was his bodily summation of all the emotions this unexpected encounter with the distant past had brought him. “Johnny. That’s his name. Johnny something.”

“Torres.”

“Oh, yeah. Johnny. Johnny Torres. I remember the Torres people.” They were one of the first Mexican families to move into these bungalows, way back when Mexico was a novelty Sweet Hands associated with sombreros, donkeys, and dark-eyed beauties with braids and long skirts that reached down to white socks and patent leather shoes. After the Torres people had left—four of them, he seemed to remember, including khaki-pants Johnny here—there hadn’t been many other Mexicans around until well after the Watts troubles. They started to show up in large numbers in the years before the Rodney King mess, in fact. It was quite a thing to be able to measure the passing of time by the conflagrations one had seen, by the looting crowds and the fire-makers. Bad times chased away his “people” in all the senses of the word: his relatives, his fellow Louisiana exiles, and most of the other sons of Africa who once lived here. His people had gone off to live in the desert, leaving the place to the Mexicans. Sweet Hands understood, from the way they carried themselves and from the singsong cadences he detected in their speech (without understanding precisely what it was that they were saying), that they came from a verdant place like his own Marion, a place of unrelenting greenness and tangled branches where the rain made songs on the tin roofs. The Mexicans brought with them that slow, boisterous, and tropical feel of rural Louisiana, and he liked having them around, especially since all his relatives had moved out to Lancaster. The few times his daughter and grandchildren came back in their clean and ironed clothes and told him “This place stinks” were enough for him to ask that they not come back—and to resist their entreaties that he move out to the desert. Here on Thirty-ninth Street, Sweet Hands could still take a couple of buses and find the last place in South Los Angeles that served Louisiana buffalo fish, and he might find two or three other old-timers there to talk about baseball and Duke Snider and Roy Campanella, and watching the Yankees play the Los Angeles Angels in 1961 at the old Wrigley Field, just a short walk away on Forty-second Place. There wasn’t any buffalo fish in Lancaster, it was dry as all hell out there, not a place for a man from Louisiana to live. Whereas on certain moist summer mornings the seagulls came to Thirty-ninth Street and circled over the trash cans behind the garment factory, where the taco trucks tossed the tortillas they didn’t sell. When Sweet Hands closed his eyes and listened to the caw-caw of the seagulls, he could see the ocean.

“Yeah, I remember this guy,” Sweet Hands said finally. “He used to live right there. Where Isabel and her kids live now. Moved out ages and ages ago. I think he moved to the desert. Or to Huntington Park. Used to be that Huntington Park was all the rage. A lot of people from here moved to HP, especially after they opened up that Ford plant …” With that he returned the photograph to Araceli, who looked crestfallen. “Sorry.” He gently closed the door and got back to his Dodgers, even as Brandon and Keenan stood up on their tiptoes to get a glimpse of the television inside.

“Now what do we do, Araceli?” Keenan asked as they walked back toward the street. The question echoed in Araceli’s mind in Spanish: ¿Y ahora qué hacemos? Araceli looked down Thirty-ninth Street and the end of the path she had followed to get to this place. It would be dark by the time they reached the bus stop and she sensed that walking through these neighborhoods at dusk could be worse than putting the boys into Foster Care, and that the best course of action might be to simply pick up the nearest pay phone and call 911. “Maybe we should go to this Huntington Park place,” Brandon offered. “That sounds like the kind of place my grandfather would live … by a park.” This absurd suggestion only made Araceli feel more trapped and desperate. I am the woman who cleans! She pulled down angrily at her blouse, which had been bunching up on her since they had left the house, then plopped herself down on the edge of the sidewalk. The boys followed, their Velcro-strapped tennis shoes next to her white, scuffed-up nurse’s shoes in the gutter.

The unwanted closeness caused the muscles of her legs and back to tense. Why are you so spoiled and helpless? Why can’t you have one nosy aunt or uncle or cousin nearby like all the other children on earth? She was going to have to make a decision about them. Was $250 stuffed in an envelope every week enough to justify this march across the city? Looking across the street and to her right, she saw a phone booth. If she just picked up the line and called, then maybe she could get the Foster Care people without summoning the police. And then I would be free. Down the block to Araceli’s left, a group of squat men and women with round faces gathered around a taco truck, in a chatty cluster before the swing shift began at what she guessed was a garment factory. Behind them she could see a loading dock with a large opening to a vast interior space with low ceilings and a bluish glow, engines groaning and puffing metallically. The boys from the Room of a Thousand Wonders did not know that there was a world of dangerous machines and a city of dark alleys all around them. Having been thrown together with these two boys, in the inescapably intimate situation of being their sole caretaker, Araceli suddenly felt the great distance that separated her life from theirs. I am a member of the tribe of chemical cleansers, of brooms, of machetes and shovels, and they are the people of pens and keyboards. We are people whose skin bakes in the sun, while they labor and live in fluorescent shadows, covering their skins with protective creams when they venture outside. Deeper and farther away to the south, beyond the mean city, there were rocky landscapes where men dug tunnels under steel fences, and deserts where children begged for water and asked their fathers if the next ridge was the last one, and cried when the answer was no. Brandon and Keenan did not know of such horrors, but Araceli did, and had survived them, and she wondered how many scars the boys might have after a night or two, or perhaps a week or a month, in Foster Care, which she imagined to be an anteroom to that dark and dangerous world. Maybe she couldn’t and shouldn’t protect them, maybe it was better for them to see and know. Maybe innocence is a skin you must shed to build layers more resistant to the caustic truths of the world. She wondered if she was living at the beginning of a new era, when the pale and protected began to live among the dark and the sorrowful, the angry multitudes of the south.

Behind them a door opened and Araceli and the boys turned around to see the woman from the first bungalow heading down the steps and walking toward them, with three giggling children trailing behind her.