The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,99
Los Angeles River, the three-note carols of American robins, and the Morse-code tapping of woodpeckers hunting for acorns stored inside the utility poles. As their ears adjusted to the quiet, they heard fainter sounds still: the whistling of air through the wings of the mourning doves, and the creak and rustle of tree branches moved by the weak flow of the July wind. They were small-t own sounds, country sounds, and they had the effect of making those who heard them more aware of the charms of their time and place, and of all that was comforting and homey in the cluttered workingman’s paradise that Huntington Park wanted to be.
The quiet caused Victorino Alamillo, the only man awake and outdoors on his block, to pause in the unfurling of his American flag, contemplating for a moment his 1972 Chevy truck and camper shell in repose in the driveway, until his eye was drawn skyward by the sight of a crow bullet-gliding one hundred feet in the air. After climbing to the top of his ladder, he stopped again, flag in hand, because from that perch the spread of the quiet across the neighborhood was all the more apparent. He could scan the roofs of his neighbors’ houses, see their satellite dishes and kitchen vents and the nearby district of salvage shops, and hear a few distant but sharp sounds: the fee-bee? fee-bee? question posed by a black phoebe, and then, most improbably, the braying of an invisible goat. ¿Un chivo?
Suddenly, the spell was broken by a clack-clack coming from the sidewalk.
“Excuse me,” Araceli said. “Excuse! Me!”
Araceli and her charges had stopped at their first encounter with a person who seemed capable of helping them—a man whose flag seemed to imbue him with authority. They had been watching him for several seconds, beginning with his climb up the ladder, flag in hand, looking to Brandon and Keenan like a man claiming a piece of real estate for his country at the end of a battle.
Victorino Alamillo looked down at Araceli, and hearing her marked accent answered, “Espérate allí un momentito.” Seeing this lost trio, obviously in flight from some familial mash-up, brought him fully back to the real Huntington Park, reminding him of the transient, unsettled place this really was. Suddenly, the flag and the hammer he was holding both fell from his hand.
“I think the star means he has a kid who’s in the war,” Brandon said, pointing to a rectangle with a single blue star that was affixed mysteriously to the inside of the home’s living room window.
“Correct,” Victorino said, as he descended to retrieve the flag. “My son in is Kandahar. En Afghani stan. He is a medic.” He pronounced this last word in a way that conveyed pacifist fatherly pride.
“That’s cool,” Keenan said.
“Estamos buscando esta calle,” Araceli said. “La calle Rugby.”
“Está del otro lado de Pacific,” Victorino said, pointing westward. “Regrésate por allá”
“¿Está seguro?” Araceli asked, rather impertinently. “Porque una coreana nos dijo que era por aquí.”
“Sí, señorita,” Victorino said. Switching to the authoritative sound of English, he added, “I’ve lived here fifteen years. It’s that way.”
Araceli grave a curt “Gracias” and without further ceremony headed west, with Brandon and Keenan trailing after. They had entered a landscape of very old American dreams. Huntington Park was a collection of truck farms subdivided a century ago into a grid of homes, and inhabited ever since by men and women lured in by affordable mortgages, by a shared belief in the value of square footage in a U.S. city, the nearby factories, warehouses, and freight trains be damned. For the first third of its history Huntington Park had been homesteaded by English-speakers with Oklahoma and Iowa and other flat American places in their pasts, and for the next third of its history those proud but paranoid people had fought to keep various dark-skinned others out, until finally evacuating in favor of those who dominated Huntington Park in the most recent third of its history: transplants from South Texas, Jalisco, Zacatecas, and East Los Angeles, and other places filled with Spanish-surnamed people. All these home owners, in all these epochs, came and found comfort in the perpendicular streets, in the surveyor’s patient construction of uniformity and efficient use of space, in the stop signals, and in the city workers who cleaned the parks. A red-and-white-striped flag and its blue field with white stars had long been a symbol of that nurturing and protective order, and it remained so for many