The Soup and Sorrow Digest

José, José

Ricardo tried again to visit his brother in the hospital, but not before he had escaped Elena, who in a whirlwind of hallucinatory furor, chased after him with a filched fencing foil yelling, "EN GARDE." Ricardo held his breath on the bus ride to the hospital. He held his breath to the cumulonimbus clouds floating like Everests in the sky. He held his breath to the pimpled José, proud hands in his pockets, stepping out of the hospital entrance. Ricardo gave over instantly to a dull heat of memories. A discomfort grew around the waistbands as the doors ejected more familiar faces: Juan, Hernandez grumpy in a wheelchair.

Hernandez rested his stubbly chin on his fist and looked dispiritingly at a taxi coasting to a stop. "I can't, Juan. I got to keep out of trouble."

Juan took a moment to clamp the wheelchair. "First day out of the hospital, and you just want to take it easy?"

There was hardly a moment to judge the relative merits of recuperating and ribaldry before Jose flamed deeply on the ridge of his nose.

"Si, si." Jose, coloring fresher, nudged Hernandez's shoulder. "Tonight's the night. Thick and juicy mamacitas tonight." He proceeded in abominable detail to talk about the threesome (with girls) he had been engineering for the past week. "Hernandez, come on. Good drinking tonight."

"Ack," Hernandez blurted. "Because of your shit, I've been suspended. The police is on my case. I gotta keep low or Mami's going to toast my ears."

"Sure, sure," José said morosely. "I'll keep all the betties to myself."

Juan patted Hernandez's shoulder, demanding his particular attention. "Jose's sprung on the girls. He has to fuck them all or there'll be a crisis on our hands."

Ricardo was hot under his shirt, hot around the ears, hot in his mind throbbing with the memory of José's wet warmth. They came to him in flooding detail, the flurried hands, the ill-aimed kisses, the impatient shuffling in a nook hidden away from the bliss of party horns and cheers. While Benito would sing in soothing baritones, with an arm outstretched dramatically for the teary-eyed Selena, Ricardo strummed along on guitar, scanning rapt faces for José's impervious stare. He remembered the quick determined footsteps that followed behind him as he put away instruments in the trunk of the station wagon and the not-so-impolite bump when José announced his presence.

Ricardo emerged from the disarray of memories, feeling faint and betrayed. José's words, 'bending the chicas, mashing up with the chicas, flipping over the chicas,' were like many muddy hands running over the pristine paintings of those escapades. Cómo te atreves? How could you? His throat was heavy, and a nasty sourness filled his mouth.

The boys hushed mischievously when Hernandez's parents exited the hospital doors. But José continued to poke Hernandez's shoulder, ticking his head at him, in a surreptitious demand to reconsider. The sight compounded Ricardo's anger with the outrage of sacrilege. He smashed past the people in his way and for front door.

Juan pointed out the dark figure approaching them with impolite speed. "Is that Rico?"

Rico? What Rico? How Rico? The questions passed round, like a joint. Bewilderment silenced their tongues, then knuckles began cracking and insincere suggestions to ignore him were murmured. José took the initiative to walk away, but Ricardo had crossed the final driveway and boomed, "José."

José kept walking.

Ricardo said, "You remember Emeralda's party? Or Juanita's quinceneria? The locker-room?" José did not abate. Ricardo winked at Juan balling his fists over the handles of the wheelchair. "Don't look at me like that, Juan. I beat him up and raped the wuss three times."

José spun around and bounded back to him, and pushed up his bulging eyes into his face. Ricardo did not flinch.

"Go on, take a punch, defend yourself, DO SOMETHING." Ricardo fleered. "Right. You wrestled me in the locker room, and you lost. We both know how I like to celebrate."

The quiet was all around them. Jose's eyes twitched at the corners, but their aim was true and intent on Ricardo. But Jose stepped back, a smirk forming on his face, and tilted his head.

"Tía, Rico's loco."

Ricardo flinched round to the frowning portrait of his parents and sisters. Shame mauled him to a splat.

Hernandez's parents crowded around them. The shameful, disgusting, animal, they rattled in rapid Spanish above Benito's icy mien, above Selena's repeated "Perdona, I'm very sorry." Jose laughed just a little as he gloated over Ricardo's dead face.

"Your Mami just saved you. The next time I see you, I'm kicking your ass." Jose waved him away and caught after Hernandez and family chugging away in chattering scorn.

Ricardo looked on the ground and its starry map of mica particles. Selena took out unsteadily a handkerchief from her sequined handbag and with it muffled her mouth. Marisol tapped repeatedly Magdalena's shoulder and whispering repeated questions about the locker room. Benito had Ricardo fixed under a glare of undisguised disappointment. Then the wind rained its piney cool scent upon them. The freshness of it was whimsical as it was chilling, but that it kickstarted the gears of movement again. And so they edged around Ricardo in stony silence and disappeared into the yawning black doors of the hospital.

Ricardo slugged like a whale, lethargic, unfocused, in an obscure direction toward the blue flag of the bus stop. The sky was still cloudy and impenetrable. Life was uncaringly lively, as cars stopped and moved, stopped and moved, and people sallied confidently up and down the sidewalks.

The bus howled to a stop, and he lumbered inside, not even eying the sluggard bus driver grunting at his stupid fumbling for transit fare. After several blocks down the boulevard, feeling returned to his limbs. Feeling also returned its vile flutter in his gullet. Everything was flittering away from him, like a child in MacArthur Park frightening a flock of geese at the pond then scampering about desperately to gather the geese back to beautiful placidity.

The roads rolled by in a yellow, unsettled blur, the smell of the diesel and unwashed hair was bothersome, and when the doors coughed open and he was thrown out into the rolling sunshine of activity, he realized, he didn't even get to see Jésus.