The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,86

to keep out predators: she wouldn’t live there now without bars on the windows. She returned the photograph and gave Araceli and the boys the same dismissive look she gave the impossibly earnest young men with narrow ties who visited her earlier in the day searching for the family of Salvadoran Mormons that had once occupied this same bungalow. “Ni idea,” the woman said.

Araceli stomped on the wooden porch in frustration. A day on foot, in trains, and buses, from station to station, neighborhood to neighborhood: for this? In the time they had walked from the bus stop the sun had dipped below the buildings on the horizon, the western sky had begun its transformation into the colors of a smoldering hearth. She looked down at the boys and wondered if they would be able to make it all the way back to Paseo Linda Bonita and how much trouble they would become once she told them they would have to start walking again.

The woman at the door sensed Araceli’s predicament, which was centered on the presence of the two boys behind her, both of whom seemed to be English speakers. “I think someone I know can help you,” she said, switching languages for the benefit of the boys. “El negro. He lives right here behind me. Apartment B. I think he’s the oldest person who lives here. They say he’s been here forever.”

A minute or so later Araceli was knocking on the steel door with the B next to it.

“Who the hell is it? What are ya knockin’ so loud for, goddamnit!” Behind the perforated steel sheet, an inner door of wood opened, and Araceli saw the silhouette of a large man with thick arms and a slightly curvy posture. “Oh, shit. Didn’t know you had the kids with you,” the voice said. “What? What you need?”

“I am looking for this person,” Araceli said.

“Huh?”

“I am looking for the man in this picture. His name is Torres.”

The man opened the door, slowly, and stretched out a weatherworn hand to take the picture, examining it behind his screen. “Whoa! This takes me back!” the man shouted. Now the door opened fully and the man looked down the three steps of his porch to examine the woman who had given him this artifact. He was a bald black man, inexplicably wearing a sweater on this late afternoon in July, and when he fully opened his door the sound of a television baseball announcer filtered out, causing Brandon to stand up on his tiptoes and try to look inside. The man from Apartment B was easily in his seventies, and still tall despite the stoop in his back. The spaces under his eyes were covered with small polyps, and his cheeks with white stubble.

“What are you? His relative? His daughter?”

“No. They are his, how do you say …?”

“He’s our grandfather,” Keenan offered.

“You know, there’s been a lot of people in and out of this place since I moved here.” James “Sweet Hands” Washington had arrived on Thirty-ninth Street as a single man in the middle of the last century, picking out these bungalows because they reminded him of the old shotgun houses in his native Louisiana. The spot at the end of the block occupied by the garment factory had been the site of a car-repair shop back then, and Sweet Hands had worked there for a number of years, dismantling carburetors with the hands dubbed “sweet” first for his exploits on the football field, and later for his exploits with the ladies. Sweet Hands examined the picture, the way the Mexican subject wore his khaki pants with a distinctive mid-1950s swagger, and then the bungalow in the background, and was momentarily transported to that time, when the Southern California sky was dirtier than it was today, and when Sweet Hands himself was a young man recently liberated from Southern strictures. This young man in the photograph looked like he had been liberated too: or maybe he was just feeling what Los Angeles was back then, in that era of hairspray and starched clothes, when the city had a proper stiffness to it, and also a certain glimmer, like the shine of those freshly waxed V8 cruisers that rolled along Central Avenue at a parade pace of fifteen miles per hour. Sweet Hands held the picture a long time, and finally let out a short grunt that was his bodily summation of all the emotions this unexpected encounter with the distant past had

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