The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,157

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.

21

First came the excitement of rushing through the jail, after being told she would face the judge, and then finding there was an anteroom before you got to the court. The guards guided Araceli into a cube-shaped room and directed her to wait alongside two other women on a bench bolted to the floor, one a Latina with eyebrows that looked like they were drawn with a 0.5-millimeter drafting pencil; the other an African-American woman with a head covered with parallel rows of hair and skin, as if plowed by a miniature farmer. The old cement walls of the cube-cell were freshly painted, and in their bone-colored blankness Araceli sensed hundreds of existential agonies, endured by people in much worse situations than hers. Araceli knew that her fate ended in Mexico, that at the end of her current visit to purgatory she would step into the disorderly but familiar sunshine of a Mexican border town, and that afterward she would walk to a bus station or a telephone booth and decide what to do next. It might happen in a year, or two, or maybe even in a few days, but eventually that would be her fate, and it calmed her to know this with certainty. The Latina woman to Araceli’s right apparently did not have such knowledge to settle her nerves, because she was repeatedly folding and unfolding a piece of paper. Finally she looked up at Araceli and showed her a row of crooked teeth, as if to say hello. She was gaunt and sallow-faced, with the nervous energy of a twenty-year-old, though she seemed a decade older than that, at least. She also seemed battered and confused, but not especially worried about being that way.

“I’m going to make a run for it,” the woman whispered into Araceli’s ear.