The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,154

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