The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,92
on the bed and watched through the window as Tomás walked away. He’s going down the street by himself! Without any grown-up! And now he’s jaywalking across the highway! Nearby South Broadway resembled a highway to Brandon, and seeing Tomás sprint across its four lanes of asphalt was like watching a diver jump off a rocky cliff into a narrow pool of water. Tomás slipped into a gray stucco prison labeled LIQUOR MARKET and emerged a few minutes later carrying one white plastic bag in his right hand and two in his left. Now he executed a return sprint across South Broadway, running with a scurrying gait thanks to the weight of the bag, and in less than a minute he was climbing up the stairs to the bungalow.
“Esta vez no aplastaste el pan,” Isabel said at the top of the stairs in Spanish that was too fast for Brandon to understand, though he judged from the harsh tone that Isabel had given him a reprimand, or perhaps another command. Sure enough, a moment later Tomás was in the kitchen, slipping the jugs of milk into the refrigerator. Isabel snapped at him again in Spanish and the boy climbed up on the counter in the kitchen to retrieve a box from a cabinet near the ceiling. From these interactions Brandon was able to intuit that Tomás was not Isabel’s son, and that, in fact, he was a slave.
Slavery was another of those vicious human institutions depicted again and again in the various fantasy and history books Brandon pored through. In the prologue to Eyewitness: Civil War there were photographs of chains that wrapped around the necks and ankles of slaves, and etchings that showed slaves being whipped, and these images gave greater weight to the tales of slavery in Revenge of the Riverwalkers and other works of fiction he’d read. Clearly, Tomás wasn’t that kind of slave, since there were no chains to be seen in the house, but he wasn’t a free boy either, free to play and shout and read. Rather, Tomás was at the mercy of the pretty but angry woman who ran this household. Now she was making Tomás do something Brandon would never have imagined another boy their age doing: he was serving everyone dinner.
What was left of Scott’s anger melted away in the early afternoon drive back from South Whittier to the coast, and when he made the final turn onto Paseo Linda Bonita, he realized Maureen had every right to hate him. He had behaved poorly the night of their argument, and aggravated his sins to higher orders of shame by leaving his home and his post as patriarch for seventy-two hours. The absence of his family’s voices and faces from his direct orbit had brought him a sense of clarity about his own failings, if not necessarily the courage to face the consequences of his actions. He parked the car in the driveway, not wanting to open the garage and set off the grinding motor and door slam that would announce his arrival to the interior of the house. Instead, he performed a quiet sidle into the living room through the front door, sensing that the element of surprise would work in his favor during the reencounter with his wife. He listened for the sounds that would give away the location of his children and Maureen, but heard nothing.
He peeked into the kitchen and found the basins and marble counters in silent repose: the stainless steel sink was bone-dry, and the science geek in him kicked in and deduced it had not been used for several hours, at least. Now he noticed the stuffy air: the air-conditioning was off. This realization led him to begin moving through the house more aggressively and purposefully. When he opened the door to the garage, he was not surprised to find Maureen’s car missing, final confirmation that none of his family members were here, because his children would have to be with their mother. Unless …
“Araceli!” he called out from the kitchen. “Araceli!” he called out again in the living room. Finally, he opened the sliding door and stepped into the backyard, walking up to the edge of the new desert garden, looking past the alien form of the ocotillo and into the garden’s deeper recesses, which were populated by shorter succulents and sandy paths. He turned away from the cacti and returned to the kitchen, and used the phone there to call his wife, but