by Héctor Tobar
The train slowed to a walking pace and a valley of smooth concrete walls suddenly opened alongside the tracks, stretching more than a mile in the distance, with several bridges vaulting over it. “What’s that?” Keenan asked.
“It’s the river,” Araceli said.
“That’s a river?” Brandon said, perplexed, until he noticed the bottom of the chasm held a narrow channel of flowing water with perfectly straight edges. “What’s it called? Why is it made out of cement? It hasn’t rained, so where does the water come from?”
“Too many questions,” Araceli said.
“Too many?” No one had ever told Brandon such a thing.
“Yes.”
Brandon looked at the river and saw that a giant with a paint can had covered the top of the valley with a mosaic of sparkling elephant-sized letters, spelling words in mongrel greens and tainted yellows that pulsated inside a pool of gray-blue swirls. Or at least it seemed a giant had painted them. He wondered if he should ask Araceli, then decided against it. Probably it was a giant.
“Hey, look, there’s people down there,” Keenan shouted, loud enough to get the attention of the four or five other adults in the car, who looked up from their newspapers and laptops just long enough to glance at and quickly forget the familiar sight of the soiled caste who lived by this stretch of track.
“Los homeless,” Araceli said.
Brandon pressed his nose against the glass and looked downward, spotting a line of shelters between the train tracks and the river, teetering house-t ents of oil-stained plywood, sun-bleached blue tarpaulin, frayed nylon rope, and aluminum foil. They looked like ground-hugging tree houses, improvised assemblages built by children and taken over by tubercular adults. A few humans sat on chairs in between their creations in this village as it followed the curve in the tracks, their roofs a quilt of tarpaulin and wood forming a long crescent dotted with the occasional column of smoke. Brandon searched for the sources of these fires, and spotted a gangly man in aviator glasses tending to a kettle on a grill. The train rolled slowly toward the man, and for a few seconds Brandon was directly above him. He bore a long scar on his cheek oozing red and black liquids. A battle wound? Brandon wondered. A cut inflicted by a knife or a sword? A month earlier Brandon had finished the last volume in a four-book series of novels, The Saga of the Fire-Swallowers, and as he sat in the train with his nose pressed to the glass, the violent and disturbing denouement of that epic narrative seemed the only plausible explanation for the existence of this village of suffering passing below him. These people are refugees; they are the defeated soldiers and the displaced citizens of the City of Vardur. The novels were a fantasy tale for young-adult readers set in a world of preindustrial stone villages. His father had bought the entire set and read them some years earlier, leaving them forgotten on a shelf for his oldest son to discover, Brandon’s fascination growing with each chapter he spent in the company of its villains, a cult of rugged men and boys who engaged in the ritual eating of flames before and after battle. There was something about this homeless camp that seemed to belong to the ancient times described in those books, a way of life untroubled by electricity, or modernity in general. In truth, Brandon never should have been allowed to read the Fire-Swallower books, given their graphic descriptions of scorched-earth warfare, including the slaughter of entire villages and their children with blades forged from various metals, real and fanciful, and the antagonists who filled their speeches with fascistic rationalizations about “the weak,” “the strong,” and “the pure.” It was all meant to be an allegory about the cruelty and demagoguery of the modern age, and its imagery drew heavily from the outrages of the twentieth century, so much so, and so realistically, that the sharp-eyed Brandon had long ago concluded that the story was not entirely the product of a writer’s imagination. Long before this train journey Brandon had begun to warm to the idea that the Fire-Swallower saga was, in fact, a thinly veiled, detailed account of a real but primitive corner of the actual world. Entire cities emptied of good people, civilians tortured, their homes and their books set to the torch. How could such injustice exist, how could humanity live with it? He knew he should speak of what he read to his mother, who obviously had no idea about the taboos being broken in the works of literature he carried about the house: “You’re such a good little reader,” was all she said. It was stunning to be confronted with such adult naïveté, though it was undeniably cool to possess knowledge forbidden to eleven-year-olds who were not as precocious readers as he. Still, the stories told in the saga caused him to lose sleep some nights, until he finally convinced himself that what he was reading was indeed fantasy. And now this, a wounded man, an actual victim of the Fire-Swallowers’ wrath, driven to seek shelter by the concrete river with his fellow Vardurians.
“Those flame-swallowing bastards!” Brandon cried out, in imitation of the hero of the saga, the noble Prince Goo-han.
“¿Qué dices?” Araceli said. “¿Bastardos?” Suddenly the eleven-year-old was saying swear words. He’s only been out of the house and into the world a few hours and already he’s being corrupted.
“It’s the Fire-Swallowers,” Brandon said in a tone of patient explanation, having realized quickly that Araceli had never read those books: they were in English, after all. “The Fire-Swallowers made these people refugees. They destroyed their towns and houses. They fled and they’ve come to live here by the river. I read about it in Revenge of the Riverwalkers. The Fire-Swallowers burned down their village, Vardur, because they wouldn’t swear loyalty to the evil king. So they had to seek shelter on the riverbanks, but I never thought …”
“Estás loco,” Araceli said. “You read too much.”
No one had ever told Brandon such a thing: in the Torres-Thompson home reading was a sacred act; it was the one activity the children were allowed without time limits or parental supervision. Books were powerful and good, they told truths, and Brandon decided he should ignore his temporary caretaker’s remarks and study the Vardurian camp and see what secrets it might reveal. Brandon’s memory stretched back only a few years beyond the time they moved into the Laguna Rancho Estates, and his idea of what homes looked like was deeply influenced by the repetitive conformity of his neighborhood, with its association-approved paint schemes and standard-sized driveways. Below him, now, was a place where every shelter was entirely different from its neighbor, many with tiny yards fenced in with loops of electrical wire and plastic bags tied together to form a kind of rope. Before the train made one final turn and headed into the station he spotted one last Vardurian: a woman with a fountain of silvery hair who was sweeping out her shelter with a broom.
Maureen stood over the portable crib in her hotel room and studied her daughter as she took an afternoon nap. Samantha slept on her back, clutching the yellow blanket that accompanied her day and night, her closed eyes peaceful hemispheres, with her rusty eyelashes as delicate equators. With her eyes closed Samantha’s oval face was nearly identical to her oldest brother when he was the same age, the boy’s sleeping face recorded in a photograph framed in mahogany in their living room gallery: Maureen’s separation from Brandon for more than seventy-two hours only heightened the sense that she was looking down at her son and not her daughter, and she began to feel the deepening absence of her boys from her life. When you see your children sleeping you understand the full glory and beauty of being a mother; you stand tall and awake before their silent need, before their purity and vulnerability. She looked up at where she was, in a hotel room of slightly overdone southwestern décor, with a Navajo rug nailed to the wall opposite the bed and an authentic, desert-baked ram’s skull hanging on the door, and could hear the startled voice of her conscience screaming out, What have I done? My son! My sons! She picked up the phone and called home.
At that moment, Maureen’s boys were walking dutifully behind their Mexican caretaker, taking their first steps off the train at Union Station. They walked along one of several parallel platforms between loc
omotive behemoths, one of which was ringing a bell as it rolled away, roughly at the pace of a walking man, into open tracks toward the city beyond. Brandon and Keenan saw porters wearing stiff caps, and seniors defeated by the stacks of luggage on steel carts, and heard a speaker pronounce, “Last call for the Sunset Limited … all aboard!” and thought that at last they’d arrived at a real train station. The boys wanted to linger out on the open-air platform, in the meaningful presence of all that rolling stock and those travelers, but Araceli was telling them to follow her, with an impatient “Órale, por aquí,” and they descended down a long, sloping ramp, going underground.
They entered a long and wide hallway with low ceilings that reminded Keenan of airports he had visited. Araceli had passed through here during her first days in Los Angeles, and the sight of the crowds of people with huge duffel bags and boxes tucked under their arms reminded her of that other, more innocent Araceli. Sola. With a hard-shell suitcase the smuggler had mocked for its patent impracticality, dazzled by the city’s alien and sleek feel, suffering a kind of weird agoraphobia because she was in a vast plain of unknown things. The reencounter with her recent past only made Araceli more uncomfortable, more anxious to reach her destination. She looked left and then right and decided to go right, beginning to walk very quickly, navigating smartly between the crosscurrents of passengers, like a chilanga again, almost losing Brandon and Keenan because she was in such a hurry.
“Hey, Araceli, wait up,” Brandon shouted, and Araceli turned back and gave him a mildly exasperated look identical to the one she showed him two or three times a day in his own living room, bedroom, and kitchen.
Walking side by side now, they passed an electronic sign announcing destinations and departure times, LAS VEGAS BUS, TEXAS EAGLE, SURFLINER NORTH, and then suddenly entered a room where the low ceilings disappeared and the space above them opened up, causing Brandon and Keenan to crane their necks skyward. They marveled at the vaulted ceiling, which was covered with tiles of vaguely Mediterranean or Arabic styling, exuding both warmth and largeness. Chandeliers resembling baroque spacecraft hung from the rafters and both boys silently mouthed the word Whoa as they walked underneath them. There were rows of high-backed, upholstered benches where boys in baseball uniforms and weary, sunburned Dutch and Italian travelers sat with clusters of nylon backpacks at their feet. A crew that was in the second day of a music-video shoot was packing up in the unused and locked wing of the station where tickets had once been sold, where the oak-paneled ticket windows served as permanent and oft-used sets.
“I’ve seen this place in the movies,” Keenan said. “I thought it was pretend.”
They passed through an arch high enough for the tallest troll or giant to fit through, and then walked out the main door of the station, where they were confronted by the summer sunlight, and cars and pedestrians all moving purposefully northward and southward on streets and walkways. Behind this shifting tableau stood the imposing backdrop of the downtown Los Angeles skyline, the glass skyscrapers of the Financial District, and the stubby stone tower of City Hall, which had a ziggurat pyramid on top, so that it resembled a Mesopotamian rocket ready for launch.
“No, por aquí no es,” Araceli said, and she circled back into the waiting room again, the boys scrambling behind her.
She walked up to the information booth and the tall, lean, sclerotic man standing there, the name tag on his jacket announcing him to be GUS DIMITRI, VOLUNTEER.
“We are looking for the buses,” Araceli said.
Gus Dimitri was a spry octogenarian and a native of South Los Angeles, old enough to remember when that black and brown ghetto of today was a whites-only haven for Greeks, Jews, Italians, Poles. He had seen more L.A. history than any other employee or volunteer at this transit hub, and when he looked at Araceli and her charges he understood, immediately, that this was a servant woman from Mexico hired to care for the two children that accompanied her.
“Well, where are you headed, exactly, ma’am?”
As the woman fumbled in her backpack for an address, Gus Dimitri took time to think that California had really pushed this immigrant-servant fad to the extreme. Is it really wise, he’d like to ask the parents of these boys, to have a Mexican woman guiding your precious children across the metropolis like this? To have them in the care of a woman lost at Union Station? At about the time Gus Dimitri had retired from the workforce, California had gone mad with immigrant-hiring—from front yards to fast-food joints, these people did everything now. They were good workers, yes, real old-fashioned nose-to-the-grindstone types. But jeez: Didn’t Americans want to do anything for themselves anymore? When he was about the age of this older boy here, he’d sold newspapers on the street himself, making a killing hawking extras on Crenshaw Boulevard for the Max Schmeling—Joe Louis fights. But did American kids even have paper routes anymore? His own paper was delivered via pickup truck by a Mexican guy (he assumed) named Roberto Lizardi, according to the Christmas card that arrived with his paper once a year.
“To Thirty-ninth Street,” Araceli said. “In Los Angeles.”
“That’s back, the other way,” he said. “Patsaouras Plaza.”
“Thank you.”
Araceli quickly circled back into the long, low-ceilinged passageway.
“Where are we going?” Keenan asked. “Why are we going underground again?”
“We are going to take the bus,” Araceli explained. “Tenemos que ir a la otra estación. Another station, not this one.” They reached a wide cement staircase and climbed into a sunlit atrium with several exits. This was the transit center where the buses departed, but Araceli could not remember which gate led to the buses serving the neighborhood in Los Angeles where el viejo Torres lived. She approached another information booth and the boys’ attention was drawn upward again, this time to the mural on the wall behind the desk: an old steam engine rushed toward a village set amid verdant fields, advancing through a series of orchards, leaving a column of black smoke in its wake. To the left, there was a second mural in which the steam engine ran alongside a blue ribbon of river, which itself snaked past a city thick with squat buildings; in a third panel to the right the same city gleamed with skyscrapers and the river had morphed into a concrete channel.
“Is that what was here before?” Brandon asked, before Araceli could get her own question in.
“Yeah,” said the man behind the counter, an MTA employee. “And let me tell you something else—this’ll really blow your mind. Where we’re standing, right now—it used to be Chinatown. There’s all sorts of archaeological stuff they found buried underneath here. Chinese stuff.”
“So what happened to the Chinese?”
“Ah, they knocked all that down ages ago. Flattened it.”
“Well, that’s disturbing,” Brandon said, parroting a phrase his mother used quite often.
Brandon pondered the revelation about Chinatown as the man explained to Araceli where she could catch the bus they needed to take. The ground he and his brother were standing on was older than the oldest person he knew, and probably older than the oldest Vardurian, which was a horizon-opening realization for an eleven-year-old boy. Probably if you dug down deep you could find not just Chinatown, but also the ruins of many other cities and villages of the past, just like in that picture book on his shelf where you see the Stone Age, the Roman Age, the Middle Ages, and the Modern Age all inhabit the same stretch of earth beside a river, with battles fought and buildings burned and people buried and cities rebuilt and torn down and rebuilt again as you turn from one page to the next.
“Ya, vámonos,” Araceli called out. “Es por aquí.”
The boys followed her to one of several parallel sidewalks and within seconds an empty bus had pulled up and Araceli and the boys climbed in. This bus, Brandon noted immediately, was a battle-worn version of the first bus they had taken in the Laguna Rancho Estates earlier in the day. It appeared to have traveled through a few hailstorms, given the scratches on the pla
stic windows, and as it headed out of the shady transit center and into the sun of the Los Angeles streets and the light shone inside, Brandon noted the worn seats and the assorted scribbling in the interior. “It stinks in here,” Keenan declared. A sweaty, vaguely fecal aroma seeped out of the seats, and the sour sweetness of spilled sugar beverages attached itself to the humid air molecules in the aisles, the smells riding the bus up and down and across the city all day for free.
They rolled slowly away from the transit center, to streets that brought them closer to the glass towers of the Financial District. Brandon and Keenan had seen this stretch of the city many times before, in the company of their parents, from the high perch of a car speeding along elevated freeways. That was the Los Angeles they had always known, the city center that was home to the Dodgers and the Lakers. On those trips they had glided over the heart of Los Angeles, traveling near the tops of its palm trees, driving to museums and parks that were somewhere on the other side of a vast grid of stucco buildings and asphalt strips that stretched as far as one could see into the haze. Studying this landscape from the ground level for the first time, Brandon noticed how every object appeared to be built from bare metal, brick, and concrete, arranged into simple geometric forms: the right angles formed by the traffic lights welded to poles, the open rectangular mouths of the storm drains, the strange tower on the roof of one building assembled entirely from triangles. It was all more linear and rough-edged and interesting, to his young eyes, than the curvy contours of Paseo Linda Bonita.