The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,75
meadows, and interchanges as yet unknown, to places where no one would know he had pushed his wife into a table. When this trance of happy forgetfulness ended, Scott found himself just one hundred yards from his turnoff, but still in the number-one lane, too late to cross the three lanes of traffic to reach the exit for the freeway that led to the coast and the Laguna Rancho Estates. Damn! Scott gritted his teeth and gave a second half curse as his usual exit and overpass grew smaller in the rearview mirror. He was speeding toward the metropolitan center of Orange County and the course correction back home required shifting lanes and taking the next exit, but Scott’s hands resisted moving: instead, they allowed the car’s momentum to continue carrying him forward and away from Maureen. Maybe I’m not ready to go home yet. The car stream was like a data stream and maybe he needed to see where the information took him, so to speak. He passed Disneyland, left Orange County and entered Los Angeles County at La Habra, and a short while later approached the Telegraph Road exit to his old South Whittier neighborhood. Now, at last, he exited, and headed for the inelegant, weed-happy patch of suburban sprawl where Scott the adolescent and teenager had been introduced to the joys of FORTRAN and masturbation.
He entered the late twentieth century industrial parks of an old oil patch called Santa Fe Springs, onto surface streets plied, at this hour, by fleets of tractor-trailers, then past a baseball field and a high school with soccer goalposts, where a single, middle-aged Latino man was sprinting with a ball at his feet. Scott followed the splintering posts that carried telephone voices, antiquated analog signals pushed through copper, toward the horizon and the Whittier hills beyond. He reached the first neighborhoods, where the homes boasted miniature gabled roofs, and jumbo vans and pickup trucks in the driveways of mini—Spanish cottages and mini-ranches, their humble size a kind of camouflage. South Whittier does not want you to remember it; it wants to pass unnoticed.
When he reached the intersection of Carmelita Road and Painter Avenue, the vista changed abruptly, shifting Scott’s mood along with it, because everything at that familiar crossroads was laden with painful memories from the predigital, pre-Internet era. The homes here were taller, and yet flimsier than those he had just passed, and were more uniform, each having been built by the same developer from the same “Ponderosa ranchette” kit. He hadn’t been to his old neighborhood since his mother’s death, and for a moment the weathered, fairy-tale pastels of the two-story homes glimmered as strangely as they had on the August day of her funeral. He slowed the car to the speed of a brisk walk as he turned the final corner and saw the old Torres family homestead and its watered-down mustard stucco with a flavoring of avocado trim, hiding behind an overgrown olive tree. He had expected to feel a superior satisfaction returning to this place, because he had become bigger and more worldly in the decades since, conquering the nodes and networks that united the world. Instead, he felt smaller. We were still fucking poor and I didn’t even realize it. He looked for a place to park his car on the dead-end street, but found all the available spaces taken up with sedans of dated styling, pickup trucks abused by their loads, and a station wagon. Did they even make station wagons anymore? There were never this many cars when he played baseball here.
Scott parked a half block away and stepped out of his car, surveying the workday quiet as he walked toward his old home, but he stopped when something in the backyard of the next-door property caught his eye. The Newberrys had once lived here, with their Ozark cheeks and corduroy jeans. Peering down the end of the driveway, he noticed something that was foreign to his memory: a large glass and metal box with a pitched roof and a small crucifix on top, plastic party streamers flowing out from the roof to the adjacent garage. Stepping closer, he saw a statue of a suntanned Virgin Mary inside the box, her clasped hands and powder-blue mantle rendered in painted plaster, a garland of fresh white roses draped around her neck, votive candles aflame at her feet. This is so strange, so Mexican. These people had taken his old neighborhood, once connected to the rest