The Barbarian Nurseries

by Héctor Tobar

  This is like living with el señor Scott and la señora Maureen: they cannot decide what they want for dinner, or if they want dessert, so they have me going two ways at once.

  “That’s a good girl,” the captain said, and did not notice as Araceli gave him another penetrating stare for that unnecessary bit of condescension.

  Janet Bryson’s contribution to the campaign to return Araceli Ramirez to jail, and eventually back to Mexico, began at the southernmost point on her big fold-out map of Orange County, in the community formerly known as Leisure World. She was out collecting handwritten and signed letters, having been rallied to do so by the One California activist organization, and her first stop placed her underneath the hanging ferns inside a Leisure World veranda of breeze blocks, where a woman held a dog in her purse, and stroked its long hair and compliant head. “God bless you for doing this,” the woman told Janet, recounting how her Shih Tzu had been frightened by the firecrackers on the Fourth of July, set off a mile away in the uncontrolled neighborhoods where “those people” lived. “It was so unfair, because Ginger had just had surgery, the poor thing.” They were united, Janet Bryson and the woman with the dog, by their sympathy for Maureen Thompson and their contempt for illegal immigrants and lawbreakers of all stripes, but when she drove away Janet Bryson could only think about how lonely the woman seemed, and how unnatural it was to carry a dog that way. Next she drove her son’s Toyota C elica northward into the suburbs of central Orange County—her own Chevy Caprice having again failed to start this morning—and wondered about the meaning of the pink dice hanging from the rearview mirror. Was that a gang thing? This worrying possibility stayed with her as she advanced along Main Streets and First Streets lined with the rusting steel and broken glass tubes of the neon signs of their heyday. Once people drove their rumbling Ramblers and El Caminos down and across these overlapping grids, along Beach Boulevard and Katella Avenue, the thoroughfares that carried people of her father’s generation past malt shops and burger joints, to the tower marquees announcing double features at drive-in theaters. The drive-ins were all Swap Meets now frequented by the illegals and the Vietnamese. She remembered sitting in the backseat of her father’s Ford Falcon, unbuckled and unworried, behind his parted and moist hair, and feeling her bare legs sticking to the vinyl seats. Janet Bryson knew she could never make those old days come back. Instead, in this work of letter-gathering, this volunteer activism, she felt like a woman weather-stripping her windows and basement in September: it was something she did not so much with the hope of making things better, as much as to keep them from getting worse.

  The letters Janet Bryson carried were filled with warnings of the impending criminal and budgetary doom wrought by the legions of illegal crossers; she was retrieving these missives personally for afternoon delivery to the Orange County Board of Supervisors. The One California group had emailed and faxed its members talking points to be included in the letters, and a separate list of individual crimes and crime-types attributable to illegals, including: the “epidemic” of identity theft; the murder of a sixteen-year-old boy outside a beach park the previous August by members of a Los Angeles street gang; a sudden spike in DUIs in Anaheim; and the rape and murder of a twelve-year-old girl in Fullerton. Each writer chose from this felonious buffet and plopped phrases into one of five different form letters written by One California. They wrote in the creaky cursive of a septuagenarian, or squeezed five hundred words of all capitals onto a single page of notebook paper, or typed on old IBMs and Olivettis. The writers had been encouraged to fill their letters with their own observations about the larger problems of illegal immigration, and at red lights Janet stopped to peruse these sections.

  Araceli N. Ramirez should be arrested and deported no matter what the outcome of the criminal proceedings the County undertakes against her. Illegal Mexican labor lowers wages while demanding entitlements. Examples: Title One schools, WIC, Medical Care, Bilingual education. Not to mention they breed like there’s no tomorrow, regardless of whether they can support their children because they know the state will subsidize them.

  The Latino movement backing this woman is AGGRESSIVE. The pressure and the outright numbers of people moving into this country, the outright force of the Spanish language is a clear statement of revolution. I am shocked by this Latino movement which is now supporting this woman despite her obvious crimes against two innocent American children.

  To those who want to point out how much these illegal immigrants like Araceli N. Ramirez contribute to their society because they like their housekeeper and their gardener, and because they like paying less for tomatoes, spend some time looking at the real California around us. Look at our full prisons, our higher insurance rates, our lowering education standards, the new diseases spreading in our cities. For me, I’ll pay more for my tomatoes.

  Janet Bryson’s journey took her next to a Garden Grove apartment block the color of overripe avocado flesh, where a too-thin woman of about forty with bony, sunburned shoulders handed her a letter through a security gate and said, “Don’t go yet, hon. Want some iced tea?” Janet climbed up briefly to the woman’s apartment and living room and sipped and listened to the woman describe “the unraveling of my life.” Her husband had succumbed to liver problems three years earlier, “and my mom died a year ago this week in Kenosha.” She too complained about the Fourth of July noise and smoke, but also about the disability bureaucrats and her glaucoma, and the neighbors who stole her newspaper, and how she heard her dead husband speaking in the hallways on certain warm summer nights, until Janet finally said, “I’m so, so sorry. But I really have to go.” It pained Janet Bryson that she could not listen more. She picked up the last letter at 3:45 p.m. on Citrus Avenue in Yorba Linda, four blocks from the Richard Nixon Library and Museum, and made her away southward on the State Highway 57 freeway to Santa Ana. By 4:55 p.m., she had managed to deliver one copy of each letter by hand to the five offices of the members of the Orange County Board of Supervisors.

  At 5:30 p.m. she was back on Interstate 5, heading north toward South Whittier in heavy traffic, but feeling light and free of the congestion of red lights braking and cars inching forward. She touched the passenger seat, where the letters had lain, and gave a sigh of satisfaction, thinking how she would type Mission Accomplished in the subject line of the email she would send to the One California office when she got home. And then she remembered the woman with the dog, and the woman who heard ghosts, and thought she had helped them that day simply by listening. Owe no man anything, but to love one another, for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law. She felt attached to something larger than herself. Not just the story of the wronged American family, but also to other homes and automobiles where women looked out their windows and into the city and tried to make sense of what they saw. She turned on the radio and found it tuned, by her son, to some Spanish hip-hop monstrosity: so she changed the station, finding some rock-and-roll songs from her father’s era. Those joyous anthems with their ascendant guitars and big soul choruses matched the way she felt. Her reverie lasted through forty more minutes of bumper-to-bumper, until she reached her exit at Carmenita Road and she turned northward home.

  John Torres was well inside the house on Paseo Linda Bonita before Maureen became aware of his presence. He had talked his way past the useless guards at the front gate easily enough: they were quickly persuaded that a seventy-year-old man was harmless, and Maureen was sweeping in the kitchen when he opened and stepped through the unlocked front door. He quickly found his grandsons in their bedroom—“You guys are reading? In the middle of a summer day?”—and was hugging them and bribing them with twenty-dollar bills by the time Maureen could rush into their room. She glared at the old man with a how dare you! affixed to her lips that died, undelivered, when she saw Brandon and Keenan waving greenbacks ecstatically before her.

  “Look! Grandpa gave us money!”

  “Hello, daughter,” John Torres said with a stiff cheerfulnes
s, and Maureen wondered if he knew how much she hated hearing him call her that. He was dressed like an angry workingman forced to play a round of golf against his will, copper jowls resting over the collar of his polo shirt, khaki pants affixed to his bony frame by a belt that was about six inches too long. Now he grabbed at its flapping leather tongue as he waited for her to reply, because he sensed that she was studying it and judging him and his simplicity. She was, in fact, looking at his fingers and hands, and thought that the contrast of the wounded digits at the end of arms stuffed into a teal shirt summed up all his contradictions, and for that reason she resisted the temptation to say, Hello, Juan, which was his birth name, after all. Scott had discovered this a few years back, when helping the old man with some Social Security paperwork, and Maureen had rather spitefully called him that on that last time he had come to this home, two years ago. It was during Keenan’s sixth birthday, in a moment of high dudgeon following his outrageous, bigoted, and incorrect observation that Keenan was “the white boy” and Brandon was “the Mexican.” It was the sort of thing he said when he had too much alcohol, which was nearly every time he arrived for a family gathering, and she had resolved at that moment to banish him from Paseo Linda Bonita for at least a dozen birthdays.

  “Hello, Grandfather Torres. To what do we owe the pleasure?”

  He seemed a bit taken aback by the polite greeting, having failed to notice the sarcasm in it. “Well, I have a television,” he began. “And I’ve been watching my grandsons on it for a couple of days now, and the one time I called here I got some stranger who hung up on me when he heard me say, ‘What’s going on over there?’ So I figured I’d have to come over here and see for myself.”

  “As you can see, everything is under control.”

  “Is it?” He looked around the room, at his grandsons, who were now busy putting away the two twenties he had given each of them in little plastic safes with numbered combinations. “The newspaper said they were going to investigate you.”

  “No, Scott just …” Maureen stopped and gestured with her palms in the direction of the boys. “Should we be having this discussion here?” But John Torres was looking straight into her eyes, demanding an answer to soothe a kind of skeptical parental concern she recognized. “Scott just called,” she lied. “He went to talk to those people at the county. And they dropped it.”

  “Because they arrested that Mexican girl you had here. Right?”

  “What, they arrested Araceli?” Brandon shouted. “They’re going to put her in jail?”

  “No, no, they’re just asking her questions,” Maureen said, and would think later that it had been a long time since she had deceived her children.

  “Someone needs to cut the grass,” the elder Torres said abruptly.

  “Scott will do it.”

  “No. I will.” The old man touched each of his grandsons on the head, and left the room with the air of a man eager to get started on a new job. Ten minutes later she heard a grinding roar from the front yard, and she looked out to see a septuagenarian in a polo shirt digging his leather Top-Sider shoes into the overgrown, spongy grass. The old man pushed the machine over the sloped lawn with surprising efficiency, though after less than thirty seconds he was already covered with beads of sweat, and she wondered if he might have a stroke. He tackles this physical task with the same gusto Scott attacks a programming problem. After an hour of grinding, whizzing, and sweeping with various implements, motorized and muscle-driven, he was done. When Samantha woke up from her nap Maureen wandered out with her daughter to inspect his work. He had cut the lawn with a perfection that made the living thing look plastic, or painted, an evenness that was unnatural but also pleasing to the eye.

  “Your grandfather knows how to cut a lawn,” Maureen said.

  21

  First came the excitement of rushing through the jail, after being told she would face the judge, and then finding there was an anteroom before you got to the court. The guards guided Araceli into a cube-shaped room and directed her to wait alongside two other women on a bench bolted to the floor, one a Latina with eyebrows that looked like they were drawn with a 0.5-millimeter drafting pencil; the other an African-American woman with a head covered with parallel rows of hair and skin, as if plowed by a miniature farmer. The old cement walls of the cube-cell were freshly painted, and in their bone-colored blankness Araceli sensed hundreds of existential agonies, endured by people in much worse situations than hers. Araceli knew that her fate ended in Mexico, that at the end of her current visit to purgatory she would step into the disorderly but familiar sunshine of a Mexican border town, and that afterward she would walk to a bus station or a telephone booth and decide what to do next. It might happen in a year, or two, or maybe even in a few days, but eventually that would be her fate, and it calmed her to know this with certainty. The Latina woman to Araceli’s right apparently did not have such knowledge to settle her nerves, because she was repeatedly folding and unfolding a piece of paper. Finally she looked up at Araceli and showed her a row of crooked teeth, as if to say hello. She was gaunt and sallow-faced, with the nervous energy of a twenty-year-old, though she seemed a decade older than that, at least. She also seemed battered and confused, but not especially worried about being that way.

  “I’m going to make a run for it,” the woman whispered into Araceli’s ear. Seeing Araceli’s confusion, she switched to thickly accented Spanish: “Voy a correr. Para ser libre.”

  “¿Qué?”

  “When we get into the court, there’s just a little fence. Chiquito.” The woman glanced at the other inmate on the bench, who seemed to be nodding off, and then raised her voice well above a whisper. “It’s a tiny fence about as high as your waist. I’m going to jump over. And I’m gonna book it for the back, and into the hallway, and down the stairs if I’m lucky. If I’m lucky I’ll get to the front steps and out the door. Now I can do it, because I’m still in my own clothes. Later, they’ll have me in jail blues, and I won’t make it. I have to do it now, because if I don’t, I’ll be locked away forever.”

  Araceli gave the woman a glance that said, Please stop bothering me with your lunacies.

  “I ain’t lying. Because this is my tercer strike. Uno, dos, tres strikes. ¿Entiendes? I got my first two strikes with my crazy novios. Armed robbery and ADW. Assault with a deadly weapon. Now they got me because I was making eyes at an undercover cop over on Pico. They got me good. And for looking at that cop, and asking him for fifty bucks, I’m looking at twenty-five to life, believe it or not. I said, ‘Okay, honey, if you ain’t got fifty, forty’ll do,’ and that’s when he showed me his badge, the tiny, ugly little fuck. So I told him, ‘Don’t do me that way, Officer. I’m begging you. I got two strikes. I’ll do you for free, just let me go.’ But he was a real tight-ass, and that’s why I’m here, and that’s why I gotta run.” She gave Araceli a wild-eyed look of desperation and mischief. “You’re not understanding me, are you?”

  “You’re going to run?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t tell me,” Araceli said. “I don’t want trouble for me.”

  The door opened and the paper-folder left, giving Araceli one last ugly smile. Araceli listened to the closed door for a minute or so, in anticipation of the noises of anarchy the inmate’s attempted escape would set off, but heard only mumbling vibrations of calmly spoken words. Five minutes later, the paper-folder returned with her head bowed, and a palm filled with paper shreds. She averted her eyes from Araceli, sniffled, and began weeping loudly. Before Araceli could ask what had happened, the bailiff called out, “Ramirez and Jones,” and Araceli stood up with the other inmate and followed her braided head into the courtroom.

  Unlike Araceli, Jones wore a thin chain around her arms and legs, and a blue jumpsuit. The bailiff directed Jones to a chair in front of the judge, and Araceli to a steel folding chair next to the door they had just passed through. “You’re next,” the bailiff said to her. Forms were shuffled before Jones, an attorn
ey sat next to her and whispered in her ear, and she was asked over and over again if she understood a statement about rights and procedures. Jones nodded several times, and looked impassively at forms that were placed before her, and at the finger of a man who was either a clerk or an attorney and who indicated places she should look. Then he gave her a pen, and whispered into her ear, and she began to sign her name. Araceli had never been in an American court before and wondered if most legal business was conducted this way, with gestures, mumbles, and whispers. Nearly everyone drifted through the proceedings with heavy, tired eyes, even the bailiff, who spent most of his time at his desk. What could be producing this drowsiness? Was it the early hour, the long banks of fluorescent lights, was it something in the air-conditioning? Was it all the paperwork, the forms in triplicate, the stacking of so many manila files? Araceli sensed that the bad-teeth, tres-strikes girl had entered this room determined to run, but had been anesthetized by the lights and the drone of bored voices. Now the judge began to speak. He looked like a schoolteacher, and sounded as if he was reading to the defendant from a prepared text, but he wasn’t looking at any papers before him and for a second it seemed as if he was reading words that were suspended in the air. What a strange trick! When the inmate stood up to leave, Araceli saw that her wrists and ankles were still shackled and linked together, even though she looked too lethargic to be a threat.

  Finally, the judge said, “We’re ready for Ramirez, Araceli.”