The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,81

Italians, Poles. He had seen more L.A. history than any other employee or volunteer at this transit hub, and when he looked at Araceli and her charges he understood, immediately, that this was a servant woman from Mexico hired to care for the two children that accompanied her.

“Well, where are you headed, exactly, ma’am?”

As the woman fumbled in her backpack for an address, Gus Dimitri took time to think that California had really pushed this immigrant-servant fad to the extreme. Is it really wise, he’d like to ask the parents of these boys, to have a Mexican woman guiding your precious children across the metropolis like this? To have them in the care of a woman lost at Union Station? At about the time Gus Dimitri had retired from the workforce, California had gone mad with immigrant-hiring—from front yards to fast-food joints, these people did everything now. They were good workers, yes, real old-fashioned nose-to-the-grindstone types. But jeez: Didn’t Americans want to do anything for themselves anymore? When he was about the age of this older boy here, he’d sold newspapers on the street himself, making a killing hawking extras on Crenshaw Boulevard for the Max Schmeling—Joe Louis fights. But did American kids even have paper routes anymore? His own paper was delivered via pickup truck by a Mexican guy (he assumed) named Roberto Lizardi, according to the Christmas card that arrived with his paper once a year.

“To Thirty-ninth Street,” Araceli said. “In Los Angeles.”

“That’s back, the other way,” he said. “Patsaouras Plaza.”

“Thank you.”

Araceli quickly circled back into the long, low-ceilinged passageway.

“Where are we going?” Keenan asked. “Why are we going underground again?”

“We are going to take the bus,” Araceli explained. “Tenemos que ir a la otra estación. Another station, not this one.” They reached a wide cement staircase and climbed into a sunlit atrium with several exits. This was the transit center where the buses departed, but Araceli could not remember which gate led to the buses serving the neighborhood in Los Angeles where el viejo Torres lived. She approached another information booth and the boys’ attention was drawn upward again, this time to the mural on the wall behind the desk: an old steam engine rushed toward a village set amid verdant fields, advancing through a series of orchards, leaving a column of black smoke in its wake. To the left, there was a second mural in which the steam engine ran alongside a blue ribbon of river, which itself snaked past a city thick with squat buildings; in a third panel to the right the same city gleamed with skyscrapers and the river had morphed into a concrete channel.

“Is that what was here before?” Brandon asked, before Araceli could get her own question in.

“Yeah,” said the man behind the counter, an MTA employee. “And let me tell you something else—this’ll really blow your mind. Where we’re standing, right now—it used to be Chinatown. There’s all sorts of archaeological stuff they found buried underneath here. Chinese stuff.”

“So what happened to the Chinese?”

“Ah, they knocked all that down ages ago. Flattened it.”

“Well, that’s disturbing,” Brandon said, parroting a phrase his mother used quite often.

Brandon pondered the revelation about Chinatown as the man explained to Araceli where she could catch the bus they needed to take. The ground he and his brother were standing on was older than the oldest person he knew, and probably older than the oldest Vardurian, which was a horizon-opening realization for an eleven-year-old boy. Probably if you dug down deep you could find not just Chinatown, but also the ruins of many other cities and villages of the past, just like in that picture book on his shelf where you see the Stone Age, the Roman Age, the Middle Ages, and the Modern Age all inhabit the same stretch of earth beside a river, with battles fought and buildings burned and people buried and cities rebuilt and torn down and rebuilt again as you turn from one page to the next.

“Ya, vámonos,” Araceli called out. “Es por aquí.”

The boys followed her to one of several parallel sidewalks and within seconds an empty bus had pulled up and Araceli and the boys climbed in. This bus, Brandon noted immediately, was a battle-worn version of the first bus they had taken in the Laguna Rancho Estates earlier in the day. It appeared to have traveled through a few hailstorms, given the scratches on the plastic windows, and as it headed out of the shady transit center and