The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,96
apparently; there was no way around that, which was unfortunate, because after the fight over the new garden Maureen had a newfound appreciation of the buying power of the money she would be throwing down the drain by leaving. But more serious than wasted cash was this new fact about the traffic. “Look, I just came in off the Ten, and it isn’t pretty in either direction. It could take you five hours to get into the city. It’s the Fourth of July tomorrow.” Maureen contemplated five bumper-to-bumper hours with a volatile, well-rested baby girl in the backseat. “But if you leave first thing in the morning, it’ll be free and clear. And you can have the breakfast buffet you already paid for. We’ll have fresh croissants!”
When she balanced the traffic and the croissants against the unanswered phone, the idea that her boys were probably out with their father on some “boys-only” adventure seemed more plausible. They were out, running away from the shut-in fever that gripped the residents of 107 Paseo Linda Bonita on long weekends. She imagined them camping in a forest, the boys snuggled next to their father after sunset, asleep in their underused nylon sleeping bags on a bed of pine needles, underneath the darkening summer sky.
Araceli awoke to the feel of the stiff floor beneath rising and falling with a wavelike motion, and opened her eyes to see the unilluminated, bare lightbulb above her in a pendulum swing. ¿Un temblor? Unmistakably, yes. And then it was over. Now she took note of the white summer-morning light streaming through the gaps in the thick rubber skin of the curtains, dust dancing in the shafts. She propped herself up from her position on the floor in the center of the living room, and saw Keenan asleep on Tomás’s bed, and Brandon on the floor between her and Tomás, resting upon billowing rafts of polyester comforters imprinted with parrots, Japanese action figures, and the logo of a Mexican soccer team. Brandon lay with an open mouth and craned neck that suggested to Araceli a tortured, uneven sleep, and Keenan with a wet hitchhiker’s thumb before his mouth. They had slept through the morning street cacophony that seeped past the iron bars and through the curtains: a motorcycle sans muffler, a truck whose passing weight caused the wooden floor to shift, a wino’s squealing call to prayer: “Wooooo ooohhh! Mother-fuuuuuuuckers! Earthquake! Come an’ get it! Come on!” Araceli considered the pathos of the well-fed and long-haired Torres-Thompson boys amid the exterior noises of poverty and addiction, asleep inside the cramped nest of the bungalow living room, with its particle-board dressers and walls whose gray paint seemed to perspiring. The boys’ thin hair was moist with sweat and they gave boy-sized puffs of breath that floated upward toward the bare glass bulb, now still again. What would Maureen say and do if she were to suddenly appear and see her two princes sleeping in a room with a Salvadoran and a Mexican boy? Her jefa would lower her thin, lightly sculpted eyebrows into an aggressive prow of disapproval, she would make assorted English half-word noises of outrage. Humph! You brought my children here? To this disgusting little bungalow tenement? To sleep next to an orphan boy?
Yes, señora, Araceli would say. You were gone. And that would be the end of the argument.
Araceli stepped carefully over the boys on the floor, opened the front door, and walked out into the street, toward the liquor-grocery and its public telephone.
14
Their bus headed eastward, deeper into the modern industrial heart of the metropolis, over the north-south thoroughfares and railroad tracks that carried cargo and commerce, into districts of barbed wire and sidewalks blooming with fist-sized weeds, past stainless-steel saltwater tanks excreting briny crystals, past industrial parking lots with shrubbery baked amber by drought and neglect, past storage lots filled with stacked PVC pipes, past stunted tree saplings and buildings marked CHOY’S IMPORT and VERNON GRAPHIC SERVICES and COMAK TRADING, and through one intersection where a single tractor-trailer loomed and groaned and waited. The setting triggered no new reveries in Brandon’s overactive imagination, because he was too sleepy to think, having stayed up late into the night thinking about Tomás and his stories about the crossroads on Thirty-ninth Street, and then being forced to get up early by Araceli for the departure to their next destination. They were headed for a park where it was said his grandfather might live.