The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,115

now they’re gone,” the mother cried. “They’re gone!” He had entered the Laguna Rancho Estates only once before, on a domestic violence call that was coincidentally in a home on this very same block, an old sailor beating up on his Vietnamese wife, who didn’t cry or scream about pressing charges, but just looked out the window at the ocean, dazed, most likely thinking about the continent on the other side of that curving blue hemisphere. Otherwise this part of his patrol area was a dead zone. He’d drive his Chevy Caprice past the front gate, wave at the guard, and accept a thumbs-up as the signal to execute an accelerating U-turn back down to the real city and the real work.

“We left them with their nanny. With our housekeeper,” the husband said, repeating the story the mother had told before she started weeping.

“Araceli is her name, right?” the deputy said, looking at his small notepad.

“Yeah.”

“And a last name.”

“Ramirez.”

“Age?”

“Late twenties. I think.”

“Where’s she from?”

“Mexico.”

“Immigration status?” Deputy Suarez knew he really wasn’t supposed to ask that question, but the word “immigration” was out there in the air, in the television news chorus, the talk radio banter: immigration, immigrant, illegal, illegals. You heard “Mexico” and you thought of one of those i-words, and you thought of a crime. And when you heard a Spanish surname that ended with a z, like his, you thought of Mexicans and the various federal codes they violated when they jumped over a steel fence into the United States. Other than that z, Deputy Suarez had no connection to Mexico himself, and saw no contradiction between his growing concern about Mexico and i-words and his Texas Gulf Coast family history.

“I have no idea whether she’s legal or not.”

“But you’re pretty sure she’s from over there? From Mexico.”

“Yes.”

Deputy Suarez bit his lip with concern. A few weeks back he had traveled down to the Border Patrol station in San Ysidro, to have lunch with an old sheriff’s deputy pal and to get a closer look at a potential career move into federal law enforcement. As a result of this conversation Deputy Suarez’s vision of Mexico had undergone a rapid devolution. Up to then, he’d thought of the Border Patrol gig as a chasing-chickens kind of job, a human roundup in the desert, and Mexico as a colorful haven of booze and cheap handicrafts. But to hear his old pal tell it, there was a terrorist army growing on the other side of that fence, flush with cash from cocaine and crystal meth. These lawbreakers lorded over Baja with their automatic weapons and their fleet of luxury SUVs stolen from law-abiding Californians, and they had weird nicknames like “Mister Three Letters” and “The Crutches.” They controlled the smuggling rings that brought people through the desert and sometimes right through the checkpoints because there were customs agents on the take: “You can smell it,” his friend said. It disturbed Deputy Suarez to think that there were places where the waters of corruption ran so deep and wide that even the well-paid agents of the U.S. government could be swept in. The drug gangs ran kidnapping rings that snared doctors and schoolteachers and the children of the Tijuana rich, and they tortured their enemies and tossed their bodies onto highways with notes attached and severed fingers stuffed into their mouths. “There’s some scary fucking shit going on down here, bro.” Deputy Suarez had gone to TJ as a child, and he remembered holding his mother’s hand as she weaved between the teeming market stalls, worrying that he might get lost. Now there were these new, real-life demons set loose in that city behind the fence.

“You think she might have taken them to Mexico?” the deputy asked Scott.

“No. No. I mean, no, I don’t think so. But I’m not sure. What? Do you think she might have taken them to Mexico? Does that happen?”

“Hey, it’s what doesn’t happen that surprises me.”

Scott led him to Araceli’s room, thinking the deputy’s professional eyes might see something there he could not. “This is some weird stuff,” the deputy said out loud. His eye was drawn to one of the cutout magazine pages stuck to the wall with tape: it showed an oil painting of a woman prone on a bed, her face shrouded by a white sheet, legs spread open. A baby with the face of an adult woman bearing a single eyebrow emerged from the woman’s vagina. Deputy Suarez said, “Jeez, that’s really sick,”