The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel

20




A pretty and tiny Latina woman of about twenty-five arrived at the Covarrubias residence first, with a long, thin notebook in her hand. She had swept-back eyes with chestnut irises and strands of thin coal-black hair; a significantly older and taller man of rugged features who smelled of cigarettes accompanied her. They were an odd, English-speaking couple in a Spanish-speaking neighborhood, and a decidedly bad omen for a Mexican woman who expected to be arrested at any moment. Araceli might have taken the man for a retired cowboy, but for the camera in his hand and the nylon bag on his shoulder. These people have probably not come to arrest me, Araceli thought, and after they introduced themselves as journalists, she stepped outside onto the porch, and then onto the lawn, to see if there was a police cruiser lurking nearby. After a few moments of conversation on the grass it became clear that these two periodistas had not expected to find Araceli alone. “There’s no cops here,” the photographer said in a half question and half observation, after glancing inside the living room.

“¿Cómo que cops? ¿Entonces sí me vienen a arrestar?”

“Uh, I think that I, that we …” the reporter began, and she gave a guilty, girlish smile that was inappropriate to the moment. “Disculparme, por favor, no sabía,” the reporter began in Spanish, but stopped, because that language was obviously not her first, and was barely her second. She handed Araceli a business card, a stiff little rectangle with glossy letters that rose from the paper, inviting one’s fingers to linger over them, claiming the title Staff Writer for its owner, a Cynthia Villarreal.

“Well, this is awkward,” the photographer said, and he reached inside the pants of his jeans and grabbed a cigarette and put it in his mouth but did not light it. “The captain will not be pleased to see us, I think.”

“Well, they told me ten-fifteen.”

“It’s ten-oh-five, my dear.”

“Dang. I thought we were late. But we’re early.”

The photographer shook his head and, having determined that the young scribe with him was going to take a while to figure out what to do next, he began to shoot, capturing Araceli as she stood on the lawn, looking up at the sky. She searched for prowling helicopters, and then scanned the cars on the block and the distant intersections. The first frame the photographer shot, of Araceli’s worried squint searching the street for the authorities, would be on the web in an hour and on the front page of the newspaper the next day, a haunting and lonely close-up of a notorious woman in limbo, waiting for her abductors to arrive.

“Um, Kyle …,” the reporter said, but Kyle ignored her and held down his finger, the camera shutter opening and closing six times with the staccato beat of a flamenco song.

“¡No les tengo miedo!” Araceli shouted suddenly, turning to face the journalists. “I am not afraid! No. Why I be afraid? For nothing!” The photographer let off another burst of shutter openings as Araceli spoke, and those images too would appear on the web, in an essay of eleven images that his Los Angeles newspaper would headline “Arrest, Anger, and Drama in Santa Ana,” accompanied by the breathless audio narration of Cynthia Villarreal: “Araceli Ramirez knew that she would soon be taken into custody, but her response was a defiant one.” The second shot in that series featured Araceli looking directly into the camera, her mouth open and index finger pointing skyward at the moment she was repeating, “¡No les tengo miedo!,” an image with echoes of Latin American protest marches, as if Araceli were a market woman in a Mexican square, among tens of thousands of other women with open mouths joined in an outraged chorus over the price of onions, or the torture and murder of a comrade.

Now the rising pitch of accelerating engines announced the arrival of four sheriff’s cruisers: two parked in front of the Covarrubias home with red and blue lights flashing, the others taking position at either end of the block, sideways, as if to seal off the street. A burly but handsome sheriff’s captain emerged from the first cruiser. He was freshly shaved, with three bloody nicks on each cheek and an expression of wounded befuddlement that overcame him as it sank in that his “little reporter friend,” as she was known at the station, had tipped off the suspect to his arrival. He gave a plaintive opening of his arms and shouted at the reporter, “What’s going on?”

“I’m so sorry, Captain. Sorry!”

“Get that lens off me, jerko!”

“Negative, Captain,” the photographer said. “You’re on a public street.”

“Shit,” the captain said, and at that moment he decided that this was the last time he’d try to impress Ms. Villarreal, who was fifteen years younger and almost two feet shorter than him. He turned to Araceli, who now stood before him on the lawn, her arms folded across her chest. “You obviously know what I’m here for.”

Araceli said nothing and in the few heartbeats of silent standoff that followed, shouts could be heard coming from the homes and backyards around them. “¡La migra!“ An invisible but audible panic was unfolding around them, with the percussion of slamming doors and windows opening so that people could stare down at the police cruisers from second-floor windows, followed by more, indecipherable yelling from the next block, and the scratchy and hurried tennis-shoe strides on the cement sidewalk of a young man in a CLUB AMERICA fútbol jersey. The soccer fan walked with his hands in his pockets across the street, and then glanced once over his shoulder at the officers, and finally broke into a trot as he reached the corner. Get away, get away. The residents of Maple Street had been sitting snugly in their homes for two days, watching Araceli’s short sprint and capture looping on their televisions, listening to secondhand reports in Spanish detailing the English chorus of los medios norteamericanos for her rearrest. Word had spread that the subject of this broadcast frenzy was living among them, but now the arrival of the deputies’ brass badges and their dangling batons and the flashing lights of their cruisers transformed this novelty into a threat, and brought to life the goblins that haunted their daily consciousness. The paisana from the television has brought las autoridades to our neighborhood, and now they will take us all away before we can finish our breakfasts and wash the dishes. Córrele, córrele.

“For some reason, these people think we’ve come to enforce the immigration laws,” the captain said. “It’s because of you, little lady,” he said to Araceli. He cupped his hands and gave a halfhearted megaphone shout: “Attention, neighbors! I am not the migra. I am not here for any of you.”

In a building down at the end of the block, a woman from rural Guanajuato grabbed her infant son and executed a panicked climb into the attic of her two-story duplex, then crawled into a nook of stacked boxes and took her cell phone to call el licenciado Octavio Covarrubias. The self-educated, self-appointed conscience of Maple Street often gave out his number to the new arrivals, presenting himself as a levelheaded, semiretired family man who might be able to help people in trouble. The ring tone on his phone sounded as he stood on the porch, and its burst of trumpets and accordions from a song by Los Temerarios broke the trance of the standoff on the front lawn, where the sheriff’s captain was trying to think of a way to persuade the woman named in the arrest warrant to get into his patrol car quickly, the better to calm everyone around them.

“Sí, quédate allí escondida,” Octavio said into the phone, which caught the attention of all the Spanish-speakers around them, including one of the deputies.

“Hey, Captain,” the deputy said. “There’s people hiding in these houses.”

“Probably in the closets and the attics again,” said another deputy.

“God, I hate that.”

The captain ignored his underlings and turned to Araceli. “The quicker you come with us, young lady, the sooner the good people of this neighborhood will be able to come out of their closets.” Araceli was standing ten feet away from him on the lawn, but he didn’t want to step toward her and simply grab her, because if she tried to run away she might spread the panic to other blocks, and if she resisted and his deputies had to restrain her, they could have a minor disturbance on their hands, in full view of the press.

“¿Y para qué me vienes a piscar?” she asked.

“For child abuse,” said the captain, whose encounters with Orange County suspects had familiarized him with some of the basic Spanish idioms used in such cases, though he had no idea of the full range of uses of the verb “piscar,” a California-Spanish mongrel of the English “pick” that had managed to sneak into Araceli’s speech through the daily drip of Los Angeles television and radio. He looked down at the warrant and repeated three words he saw there: “Felony child abuse. Child endangerment, to be precise.”

“I don’t understand,” Araceli said.

“It means you put the children in danger. Peligro, los niños.”

Araceli shook her head and gave the captain a murderous look. He was trying to be gracious, but he was an extension of the eyebrows on the television, and now it was clear that the eyebrows and the other faces on the news had persuaded the authorities to invent any reason to detain her. What’s more, the norteamericanos were at war with themselves over whether they should throw her in jail or allow her to live free, with the sheriff’s captain standing before her obviously in the latter camp, even as duty forced him to arrest her.

This is like living with el señor Scott and la señora Maureen: they cannot decide what they want for dinner, or if they want dessert, so they have me going two ways at once.

“That’s a good girl,” the captain said, and did not notice as Araceli gave him another penetrating stare for that unnecessary bit of condescension.


Janet Bryson’s contribution to the campaign to return Araceli Ramirez to jail, and eventually back to Mexico, began at the southernmost point on her big fold-out map of Orange County, in the community formerly known as Leisure World. She was out collecting handwritten and signed letters, having been rallied to do so by the One California activist organization, and her first stop placed her underneath the hanging ferns inside a Leisure World veranda of breeze blocks, where a woman held a dog in her purse, and stroked its long hair and compliant head. “God bless you for doing this,” the woman told Janet, recounting how her Shih Tzu had been frightened by the firecrackers on the Fourth of July, set off a mile away in the uncontrolled neighborhoods where “those people” lived. “It was so unfair, because Ginger had just had surgery, the poor thing.” They were united, Janet Bryson and the woman with the dog, by their sympathy for Maureen Thompson and their contempt for illegal immigrants and lawbreakers of all stripes, but when she drove away Janet Bryson could only think about how lonely the woman seemed, and how unnatural it was to carry a dog that way. Next she drove her son’s Toyota C elica northward into the suburbs of central Orange County—her own Chevy Caprice having again failed to start this morning—and wondered about the meaning of the pink dice hanging from the rearview mirror. Was that a gang thing? This worrying possibility stayed with her as she advanced along Main Streets and First Streets lined with the rusting steel and broken glass tubes of the neon signs of their heyday. Once people drove their rumbling Ramblers and El Caminos down and across these overlapping grids, along Beach Boulevard and Katella Avenue, the thoroughfares that carried people of her father’s generation past malt shops and burger joints, to the tower marquees announcing double features at drive-in theaters. The drive-ins were all Swap Meets now frequented by the illegals and the Vietnamese. She remembered sitting in the backseat of her father’s Ford Falcon, unbuckled and unworried, behind his parted and moist hair, and feeling her bare legs sticking to the vinyl seats. Janet Bryson knew she could never make those old days come back. Instead, in this work of letter-gathering, this volunteer activism, she felt like a woman weather-stripping her windows and basement in September: it was something she did not so much with the hope of making things better, as much as to keep them from getting worse.

The letters Janet Bryson carried were filled with warnings of the impending criminal and budgetary doom wrought by the legions of illegal crossers; she was retrieving these missives personally for afternoon delivery to the Orange County Board of Supervisors. The One California group had emailed and faxed its members talking points to be included in the letters, and a separate list of individual crimes and crime-types attributable to illegals, including: the “epidemic” of identity theft; the murder of a sixteen-year-old boy outside a beach park the previous August by members of a Los Angeles street gang; a sudden spike in DUIs in Anaheim; and the rape and murder of a twelve-year-old girl in Fullerton. Each writer chose from this felonious buffet and plopped phrases into one of five different form letters written by One California. They wrote in the creaky cursive of a septuagenarian, or squeezed five hundred words of all capitals onto a single page of notebook paper, or typed on old IBMs and Olivettis. The writers had been encouraged to fill their letters with their own observations about the larger problems of illegal immigration, and at red lights Janet stopped to peruse these sections.


Araceli N. Ramirez should be arrested and deported no matter what the outcome of the criminal proceedings the County undertakes against her. Illegal Mexican labor lowers wages while demanding entitlements. Examples: Title One schools, WIC, Medical Care, Bilingual education. Not to mention they breed like there’s no tomorrow, regardless of whether they can support their children because they know the state will subsidize them.


The Latino movement backing this woman is AGGRESSIVE. The pressure and the outright numbers of people moving into this country, the outright force of the Spanish language is a clear statement of revolution. I am shocked by this Latino movement which is now supporting this woman despite her obvious crimes against two innocent American children.


To those who want to point out how much these illegal immigrants like Araceli N. Ramirez contribute to their society because they like their housekeeper and their gardener, and because they like paying less for tomatoes, spend some time looking at the real California around us. Look at our full prisons, our higher insurance rates, our lowering education standards, the new diseases spreading in our cities. For me, I’ll pay more for my tomatoes.


Janet Bryson’s journey took her next to a Garden Grove apartment block the color of overripe avocado flesh, where a too-thin woman of about forty with bony, sunburned shoulders handed her a letter through a security gate and said, “Don’t go yet, hon. Want some iced tea?” Janet climbed up briefly to the woman’s apartment and living room and sipped and listened to the woman describe “the unraveling of my life.” Her husband had succumbed to liver problems three years earlier, “and my mom died a year ago this week in Kenosha.” She too complained about the Fourth of July noise and smoke, but also about the disability bureaucrats and her glaucoma, and the neighbors who stole her newspaper, and how she heard her dead husband speaking in the hallways on certain warm summer nights, until Janet finally said, “I’m so, so sorry. But I really have to go.” It pained Janet Bryson that she could not listen more. She picked up the last letter at 3:45 p.m. on Citrus Avenue in Yorba Linda, four blocks from the Richard Nixon Library and Museum, and made her away southward on the State Highway 57 freeway to Santa Ana. By 4:55 p.m., she had managed to deliver one copy of each letter by hand to the five offices of the members of the Orange County Board of Supervisors.

At 5:30 p.m. she was back on Interstate 5, heading north toward South Whittier in heavy traffic, but feeling light and free of the congestion of red lights braking and cars inching forward. She touched the passenger seat, where the letters had lain, and gave a sigh of satisfaction, thinking how she would type Mission Accomplished in the subject line of the email she would send to the One California office when she got home. And then she remembered the woman with the dog, and the woman who heard ghosts, and thought she had helped them that day simply by listening. Owe no man anything, but to love one another, for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law. She felt attached to something larger than herself. Not just the story of the wronged American family, but also to other homes and automobiles where women looked out their windows and into the city and tried to make sense of what they saw. She turned on the radio and found it tuned, by her son, to some Spanish hip-hop monstrosity: so she changed the station, finding some rock-and-roll songs from her father’s era. Those joyous anthems with their ascendant guitars and big soul choruses matched the way she felt. Her reverie lasted through forty more minutes of bumper-to-bumper, until she reached her exit at Carmenita Road and she turned northward home.


John Torres was well inside the house on Paseo Linda Bonita before Maureen became aware of his presence. He had talked his way past the useless guards at the front gate easily enough: they were quickly persuaded that a seventy-year-old man was harmless, and Maureen was sweeping in the kitchen when he opened and stepped through the unlocked front door. He quickly found his grandsons in their bedroom—“You guys are reading? In the middle of a summer day?”—and was hugging them and bribing them with twenty-dollar bills by the time Maureen could rush into their room. She glared at the old man with a how dare you! affixed to her lips that died, undelivered, when she saw Brandon and Keenan waving greenbacks ecstatically before her.

“Look! Grandpa gave us money!”

“Hello, daughter,” John Torres said with a stiff cheerfulness, and Maureen wondered if he knew how much she hated hearing him call her that. He was dressed like an angry workingman forced to play a round of golf against his will, copper jowls resting over the collar of his polo shirt, khaki pants affixed to his bony frame by a belt that was about six inches too long. Now he grabbed at its flapping leather tongue as he waited for her to reply, because he sensed that she was studying it and judging him and his simplicity. She was, in fact, looking at his fingers and hands, and thought that the contrast of the wounded digits at the end of arms stuffed into a teal shirt summed up all his contradictions, and for that reason she resisted the temptation to say, Hello, Juan, which was his birth name, after all. Scott had discovered this a few years back, when helping the old man with some Social Security paperwork, and Maureen had rather spitefully called him that on that last time he had come to this home, two years ago. It was during Keenan’s sixth birthday, in a moment of high dudgeon following his outrageous, bigoted, and incorrect observation that Keenan was “the white boy” and Brandon was “the Mexican.” It was the sort of thing he said when he had too much alcohol, which was nearly every time he arrived for a family gathering, and she had resolved at that moment to banish him from Paseo Linda Bonita for at least a dozen birthdays.

“Hello, Grandfather Torres. To what do we owe the pleasure?”

He seemed a bit taken aback by the polite greeting, having failed to notice the sarcasm in it. “Well, I have a television,” he began. “And I’ve been watching my grandsons on it for a couple of days now, and the one time I called here I got some stranger who hung up on me when he heard me say, ‘What’s going on over there?’ So I figured I’d have to come over here and see for myself.”

“As you can see, everything is under control.”

“Is it?” He looked around the room, at his grandsons, who were now busy putting away the two twenties he had given each of them in little plastic safes with numbered combinations. “The newspaper said they were going to investigate you.”

“No, Scott just …” Maureen stopped and gestured with her palms in the direction of the boys. “Should we be having this discussion here?” But John Torres was looking straight into her eyes, demanding an answer to soothe a kind of skeptical parental concern she recognized. “Scott just called,” she lied. “He went to talk to those people at the county. And they dropped it.”

“Because they arrested that Mexican girl you had here. Right?”

“What, they arrested Araceli?” Brandon shouted. “They’re going to put her in jail?”

“No, no, they’re just asking her questions,” Maureen said, and would think later that it had been a long time since she had deceived her children.

“Someone needs to cut the grass,” the elder Torres said abruptly.

“Scott will do it.”

“No. I will.” The old man touched each of his grandsons on the head, and left the room with the air of a man eager to get started on a new job. Ten minutes later she heard a grinding roar from the front yard, and she looked out to see a septuagenarian in a polo shirt digging his leather Top-Sider shoes into the overgrown, spongy grass. The old man pushed the machine over the sloped lawn with surprising efficiency, though after less than thirty seconds he was already covered with beads of sweat, and she wondered if he might have a stroke. He tackles this physical task with the same gusto Scott attacks a programming problem. After an hour of grinding, whizzing, and sweeping with various implements, motorized and muscle-driven, he was done. When Samantha woke up from her nap Maureen wandered out with her daughter to inspect his work. He had cut the lawn with a perfection that made the living thing look plastic, or painted, an evenness that was unnatural but also pleasing to the eye.

“Your grandfather knows how to cut a lawn,” Maureen said.