The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,97
“But I know who to ask.” She told them about her friend Marisela, and the uncle of hers by marriage who lived in Huntington Park, su tío político, a man said to occupy an orderly American suburban house in a neighborhood that was also the one el abuelo had moved to, according to Mr. Washington back on Thirty-ninth Street.
“This uncle of my friend can help us,” she said.
“You have a friend?” Keenan asked, and wasn’t surprised when Araceli didn’t answer.
Already, it seemed to Araceli, things were going more smoothly than she expected, the bus was advancing quickly through streets with little resistance from the usual weekday morning traffic. For a moment Araceli was struck by the emptiness, and the sense that she might be missing a key piece of information that explained this strangely quiet Tuesday.
They switched lines on California Street and headed southward, now inside a bus in which they were the only passengers, alone with the driver’s unauthorized personal radio. “That was a four-point-eight, centered in Barstow,” the radio declared. “L.A. County Fire Chief Bill Abrams asks that we all use fireworks safely … There’s a red-flag warning in the canyons of Los Angeles and Orange counties, which means acute fire danger … It’s clear sailing on the freeways for all you holiday travelers …” The bus entered a neighborhood of cream-colored mini Mission cottages with arched doorways, and unadorned apartment buildings that resembled Monopoly hotels, the skyline behind them dominated by the steel monsters of twin power trunk lines, and a half-dozen parallel strings that drew the boys’ gazes upward to watch their arcs descend and rise from one tower to the next.
“We’re following the electricity,” Keenan said.
“Yeah,” Brandon said. “We’re like electrons or something.”
They reached their final stop and moved to the door at the front of the bus, Araceli taking a moment to ask the mustachioed driver, who looked Mexican, “¿Qué se hizo toda la gente?”
“Es el Fourth of July. ¿No sabías?” the driver said, the English coming out as harsh as a native’s, the Spanish flat and unused. “Wake up, girl. Haven’t you been listening? It’s a holiday!”
Maureen rolled her car out of the spa at the early but sane hour of eight-fifteen in the morning. She arrived at Paseo Linda Bonita without stopping three hours and twenty-six minutes later, according to the onboard computer in her automobile. By then, the sun was noon-high and July-strong, and for some reason her husband’s automobile was baking in the driveway instead of the garage, an incongruity that nevertheless lifted the anxiety that had overtaken Maureen the night before. Scott is here. She opened the garage door, parked her car, and took pleasure in the feeling of having returned to take charge of the home she had built. With her daughter on her arm, Maureen walked purposefully to the door that led from the garage to the kitchen, stepping inside with a shout of “I’m home!” Her eyes settled on the familiar and spotless kitchen, each square of clean tile, each gleaming plane of marble a musical note of order. “I’m home!” Maureen shouted again, putting a little rasp into it this time. The sound echoed through the home without an answer, and for a second or two Maureen concluded this must be a silence of resentment, and that her sons and husband would soon emerge from one of the rooms glowering at her because she had left them for four days.
They debarked from the bus onto a wide avenue that seemed very new to Brandon and very old at the same time. A line of storefronts rose over the street, each edifice a bold, rectangular robot emblazoned with the names of commercial concerns: SOMBREROS EL CHARRO, KID’S LOVE, SPRINT MOBILE. The multitudes that filled this shopping district on most days were absent, and in the soft light of that holiday morning there was only an eight-foot-tall teenage girl with braces and a billowing white dress to greet Araceli and her charges. She was frozen giddily in two dimensions behind a curtain of black steel bars, and when Brandon peeked into her darkened storefront prison at the merchandise that surrounded her, he saw glittering, child-sized crowns and pictures of chariot limousines. This was a place, he concluded, where girls came to be transformed, by dollar and by ritual, into princesses. But Brandon didn’t like princess stories and his attention quickly returned to the street and to his brother and Araceli, who were both turning their heads north