brought him. “Johnny. That’s his name. Johnny something.”
“Torres.”
“Oh, yeah. Johnny. Johnny Torres. I remember the Torres people.” They were one of the first Mexican families to move into these bungalows, way back when Mexico was a novelty Sweet Hands associated with sombreros, donkeys, and dark-eyed beauties with braids and long skirts that reached down to white socks and patent leather shoes. After the Torres people had left—four of them, he seemed to remember, including khaki-pants Johnny here—there hadn’t been many other Mexicans around until well after the Watts troubles. They started to show up in large numbers in the years before the Rodney King mess, in fact. It was quite a thing to be able to measure the passing of time by the conflagrations one had seen, by the looting crowds and the fire-makers. Bad times chased away his “people” in all the senses of the word: his relatives, his fellow Louisiana exiles, and most of the other sons of Africa who once lived here. His people had gone off to live in the desert, leaving the place to the Mexicans. Sweet Hands understood, from the way they carried themselves and from the singsong cadences he detected in their speech (without understanding precisely what it was that they were saying), that they came from a verdant place like his own Marion, a place of unrelenting greenness and tangled branches where the rain made songs on the tin roofs. The Mexicans brought with them that slow, boisterous, and tropical feel of rural Louisiana, and he liked having them around, especially since all his relatives had moved out to Lancaster. The few times his daughter and grandchildren came back in their clean and ironed clothes and told him “This place stinks” were enough for him to ask that they not come back—and to resist their entreaties that he move out to the desert. Here on Thirty-ninth Street, Sweet Hands could still take a couple of buses and find the last place in South Los Angeles that served Louisiana buffalo fish, and he might find two or three other old-timers there to talk about baseball and Duke Snider and Roy Campanella, and watching the Yankees play the Los Angeles Angels in 1961 at the old Wrigley Field, just a short walk away on Forty-second Place. There wasn’t any buffalo fish in Lancaster, it was dry as all hell out there, not a place for a man from Louisiana to live. Whereas on certain moist summer mornings the seagulls came to Thirty-ninth Street and circled over the trash cans behind the garment factory, where the taco trucks tossed the tortillas they didn’t sell. When Sweet Hands closed his eyes and listened to the caw-caw of the seagulls, he could see the ocean.
“Yeah, I remember this guy,” Sweet Hands said finally. “He used to live right there. Where Isabel and her kids live now. Moved out ages and ages ago. I think he moved to the desert. Or to Huntington Park. Used to be that Huntington Park was all the rage. A lot of people from here moved to HP, especially after they opened up that Ford plant …” With that he returned the photograph to Araceli, who looked crestfallen. “Sorry.” He gently closed the door and got back to his Dodgers, even as Brandon and Keenan stood up on their tiptoes to get a glimpse of the television inside.
“Now what do we do, Araceli?” Keenan asked as they walked back toward the street. The question echoed in Araceli’s mind in Spanish: ¿Y ahora qué hacemos? Araceli looked down Thirty-ninth Street and the end of the path she had followed to get to this place. It would be dark by the time they reached the bus stop and she sensed that walking through these neighborhoods at dusk could be worse than putting the boys into Foster Care, and that the best course of action might be to simply pick up the nearest pay phone and call 911. “Maybe we should go to this Huntington Park place,” Brandon offered. “That sounds like the kind of place my grandfather would live … by a park.” This absurd suggestion only made Araceli feel more trapped and desperate. I am the woman who cleans! She pulled down angrily at her blouse, which had been bunching up on her since they had left the house, then plopped herself down on the edge of the sidewalk. The boys followed, their Velcro-strapped tennis shoes next to her white, scuffed-up nurse’s shoes in