The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,140

the descendants of escaped pets and, in a landscape that was the natural home of gray-brown house sparrows and black crows, they were disturbing for the ostentatious display of their exotic colors. Five years earlier she had written to the SPCA, the Sierra Club, and the Audubon Club about how disturbing it was, what a violation of natural rhythms and habitats, to have these tropical birds gathering on the telephone wires and bathing in the creek. Only the Audubon people had written back, with a polite and oft-circulated letter decrying the “invasive species” but lamenting the expense and impracticality of rounding up all the birds, which were in fact six different species of the genus Amazona.

The Mexicans came after the parrots. There had always been a few, but they were English-speaking and generally decent folk back in the day when Janet Bryson was a newlywed and lived in this same home with her former husband. She could talk to those Mexicans because they were Americans, and she could even see a bit of herself in the family comings and goings she witnessed on their driveways and in their garages, the household routines shaped around automobiles, football, and the holidays. Their cousins and grandparents concentrated for Thanksgiving and their lights went up every Christmas. But then came the slow drip of Spanish speakers, the inexorable filling of her block with actual nationals of that other country. She’d knocked on the door of one of the first of these Spanish-speaking families when they moved in next door, offering a plate of brownies because it was the neighborly thing to do. A man of about thirty with a head of black Brillo-pad hair had greeted her, seemingly perplexed by the gesture and also delighted by the appearance of a still-hot white woman on his doorstep. Moments later, this man’s wife had joined him at the door and had given Janet Bryson a reluctant “thank you”—or, rather, “tank you”—and then a dismissive up-and-down, as if to say, No, my husband won’t go after this one. And they still hadn’t returned her plate several years later! Janet Bryson didn’t forget a slight, which was why she hadn’t spoken to her ex-husband for several years, not since an incident at a Super Bowl party involving one of his girlfriends. She remembered the missing plate as more Mexicans arrived, with one family on her block raising a Mexican flag on an actual flagpole they planted on their front lawn, in violation of a building code no one bothered to enforce.

The parrots squawked and waddled in the wash, and thrived and multiplied on a diet of oranges and lemons, and their sudden bursts of noise, their early morning squawk-chorus, often startled Mrs. Bryson awake, as did the Mexicans who revved up their old cars at six or seven to get them going. The parrots flew in groups of about twenty, in large, diamond-shaped formations, and the Mexicans moved in clusters, pairs of men standing over engines, groups of women and girls carrying pots. The Mexicans always seemed to be plotting, with the men putting arms around one another, speaking in lowered voices. Most ominously, she heard, several times a week, one of them make a seven-tone whistle. It was a kind of signal, a summoning, the last note trailing off in plaintive demand. What was the meaning?

Janet Bryson had begun to study the Mexicans in the same way she had studied the parrots, by plugging keywords into Internet search engines, and then by writing letters and emails in which her sense of dislocation found voice. She had come to see herself as part of an under-the-radar network of concerned citizens, isolated voices scattered about suburbs like El Monte and Lancaster, fighting the evils of bilingual education and the bad habits of these people, such as using their front lawns to park their cars and dry their laundry. From her Internet friends, she learned about the conspiracies hatched at the highest levels of government and finance to join together the United States, Canada, and Mexico into a single country, with a single currency called the Amero. She had seen schematic drawings that were said to represent the superhighway that would link the interior of Mexico to Kansas City, and thus accelerate the country’s plunge into foreignness. Watching the Mexicans on Calmada Avenue plot, and reading about the much larger scheme to transform her country, was like living in a dream: the events were strange, menacing, and out of her