The Soup and Sorrow Digest

Before the Night Takes Us

Love, pray, confess, believe, submit, be good, be kind to your sisters—unwieldy Catholic ideas on the good life that Ricardo Mendez could do without, but he liked the proscriptions against birth control. A battalion of aunts, uncles, cousins, was a boon when your life was a game of hide and seek from angry parents. But then, boon became bane after his brother Jesús was rushed to the emergency for stab wounds.

It happened on one of those winter days cursed with unnatural sunshine. Students were ushering out of classes for lunch and rumbling and chattering in the hallways. Jésus strode along and smiled wide. In a hand was a lunchbox of left over chicken mole. 

Another classmate, Hernandez, a few paces behind him, bellowed just over his right ear, “Yo, dickhead! I let you go after you looked at my girl wrong.  Now your brother’s a pato? Something shitty runs in your family.”

Jésus’s face slacked grim before Hernandez’s deformed smirk. “What did you just say?”

“You heard me. Tell your hermano, I’m going to crack his skull for feeling up my cousin’s crotch—”

Jésus had bounded three, four steps and connected a swift punch against Hernandez's stubbly jaw. Hernandez did not stagger or waste time to comprehend the moment. He replied with a punch of his own to Jésus’s belly. Then the scuffle degenerated into fists, blows, teenage jeers for someone to cut somebody already. But Ricardo was nowhere in the main building to help his brother José. He was in the parking lot, inside an electric-blue coupe, balls deep in another boy’s ass.

Sirens whined. Paramedics scurried. Teenagers scrambled for the good seats to view the theatre. No one noticed the coupe under the streetlamp rollicking and frolicking. The smell of clove cigarettes thick and hot inside. The car radio blaring the top hit of the year by Micheal Jackson and Paul McCarthy.

“Say, say, say, what you want …”

“Rico … Rico …”

That was Steve, man of Ricardo’s moment. Blazing hot Steve with the cute dimple. Tight Steve muy excellente on the trombone.  But a force, titanic, assaulted the car, knocking Ricardo out of his reverie. On the windows were plastered faces fractured in disgust.

And that was the end of that.

Jesus lay limp in a coma.  Hernandez was struggling with belly wounds. Everyone in their East Los Angeles neighborhood murmured of dark days and dark afflictions. Who knew the what, the why, the when about Ricardo being gay? How could you have been mistaken about the straight soul behind his coffee eyes?  The flatter-than-Kansas buzz cut, the stocky shoulders, and tall swagger?  Ricardo had deceived them. Really he had. He didn’t lisp, droop his hands, say honey or mi’ja, couldn’t even eat a slice of dulce trés leches. In fact it was less than a week ago when Ricardo tackled Carlos for catcalling at Rosa on the street.

“I knew him to be unnatural after he watered my pansies, and they died in three days,” Inez, Ricardo’s aunt, said.

Men and women nodded sourly over Jesús’s corpse-straight body festooned with pipes and tubes, the sterile hospital smell, the heart machine beeping.

“You said my cat was unnatural because it killed your pansies,” Guillermo said, “You blamed my cat for Rico killing your pansies?”

Everyone nodded again. Inez Cruz, in her youth, married Jesus in a convent then cheated on Jesus. Now She lived as a severe math teacher. She gave up being Catholic (a rabble of idolatry) for the true Christian fellowship of Iglesias Pentecostal de Dios. And now she was shaking her head morosely, wishing her spent, thin prayers over the pansy and would-be-brother killer had been supplemented with thirty-day fasts.