The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,84
and the American boys in the back of his memory, alongside the other unusual event of the afternoon: the sentencing of a onetime sitcom actor whose career had been so brief and distant in time, only the judge recalled it. It had depressed the judge to think that, at forty-four, he was older than his bailiff, his clerk, and his stenographer, older also than the defense attorney and the representative from the city attorney’s office. Only the accused surpassed him in age, and when Judge Adalian finally realized that no one in the court was aware of the defendant’s contribution to television history, the fifty-two-year-old drunk driving defendant had looked at the judge and raised his eyebrows in an expression of shared generational weariness. “Time passes,” the defendant said, and this too struck a chord in the judge’s memory, because it wasn’t often that the alcoholics who passed through his court imparted any wisdom. The light turned green and the judge glided northward, unaware that in a few weeks’ time his memory of crossing paths with the faded actor and the Mexican woman with the two “white” boys on the same ordinary day would win him an appearance on cable television.
Araceli reached the curb on the other side of Broadway and turned right, Brandon now bringing up the rear, because he felt the need to protect his younger brother by walking behind him, lest some monster or Fire-Swallower emerge from one of the shuttered storefronts.
“Don’t look at anyone in the eye, Keenan,” Brandon said.
“What?”
“This is a dangerous place.”
“You can’t tell me what to do.”
“There might be bad guys inside these buildings,” Brandon insisted. “Look at the markings. That’s a bad number. Thirteen.”
“Really?” Keenan said, and for a moment he saw the world as his brother did, thinking that xiii had to be some warrior code.
Logic told Araceli she was just two blocks away from the address on the back of the old photograph, but now she too was beginning to have serious doubts, given the ominous, spray-painted repetitions of the number 13 on the walls and the sidewalk. She sensed, for the first time, that her naïveté about the city might be leading them to the place where graffiti scribblers and gang members were nurtured under the opaque roof of the smoggy sky, a kind of greenhouse nursery of mannish dysfunction. Now they walked past a large vacant lot, a rectangle filled with knee-high milkweed and trash, which in the glory days of el abuelo Torres had been the Lido Broadway movie theater. As a young man el abuelo Torres had seen High School Confidential screened here, lusted after the curvy starlet Cleo Moore, and been pummeled by a couple of African-American guys who didn’t appreciate his comments during a midweek matinee of Blackboard Jungle. Juan Torres and his parents were still in the city-to-farm circuit then, forced with a number of other Mexican-American families to live among blacks. Juan fought the black guys over girls too. Living here and tasting blood in his mouth had shaped his sense of racial hierarchy, and his ideas about where he fit in the pigmented pyramid of privilege that he understood the United States to be. As dark as we are, we ain’t at the bottom. When he had a glass of sangria or a shot of whiskey too many, the brawling, proud, and prejudiced Johnny Torres of Thirty-ninth Street and the Lido Broadway was resurrected: as during Keenan’s sixth birthday party, when he remarked very loudly on how fair-skinned and “good looking” his younger grandson was—“a real white boy, that one”—a remark that led his progressive daughter-in-law to banish him from her home.
If Araceli had not been trailing two children, if she had not been anxious to reach the place that would liberate her from her unwanted role as caretaker of two boys, she might have stopped and taken the time to study the rubble of the Lido Broadway, a half dozen pipes rising from a cracking cement floor like raised hands in a classroom. Time worked more aggressively in the heart of an American city than in a Mexican city, where colonial structures breezed through the centuries without much difficulty. Here, cement, steel, and brick began to surrender after just a decade or two of abandonment. The people who lived and worked here ran away. But from what? It was best to keep moving, quickly. She spotted a woman pushing a stroller on the next block and a young child walking