The Soup and Sorrow Digest

Andrew finds a way.

“How are you going to get that house in Bel Air, if you turn away loyal customers?”

Alexandro’s brows fell off the sides of his face as he rubbed his clean-shaven mouth in circular motions of worry. “The house is going to have to wait. Money is fleeing sideways at the moment. Relatives always need something green. They don’t get that I earn in dollars and spend in dollars.”

“At this rate, you’re going to be working here till you’re ninety,” Ricardo jeered.

“Hey, hey, don’t you curse me. I’m going to make it.”

“What’s it about Bel Air anyway? I like East LA just fine. I get your tacos. I run into people I know everyday on the street. All those big houses on Mulholland drive. Men, they’re like prisons. The streets are too quiet, too clean. You cough, the cops come after your ass. No es para mí. Not for me.”

With meditative bemusement, Alexandro raised his white cap and sleeked back his hair. “You keep being stupido, and your dreams will come true.”

Ricardo neighed a laugh and rubbernecked for Andrew behind Alexandro. “Renacuajo, and what do you say?”

Andrew lifted his head automatically to that call to his smallness. Renacuajo, tadpole? Was that better than being called Andy?

“The ocean is good for you, perfect for tadpoles,” Ricardo said.

Rivers, you unthinking fuck. Tadpoles don’t live in the ocean.

“Later.” Ricardo was repositioned his backpack and was out the door.

Andrew tried to settle back into the concentrated peace of the dictionary, but Ricardo’s thick face and his tiny eyes were mapped over the jigsaw of letters. Now was it. This was the time to say something. He flounced out the door and marched for the broad green back threading through the street crowd. Ricardo walked fast, too fast. Or was it his long stride that measured for two of Andrew’s?

Ricardo turned onto Celina Street and its paint-peeling decay of American Craftsman style houses. The green back moved like a manful ghost down the sidewalk. Andrew’s lungs were burned as though steeped in bleach. At a minor crossroads, Ricardo paused, nodded an internal rhythm as a woman crossed by him. Then again, off he shot past the mailboxes to the most dreadful and miserable house on the block.

The house had been the site of a triple murder one years ago. The lakes of blood had since fertilized the lawn forest of ragweeds and milkweeds. Shingles hung askew and rotted from the gables. This monstrous black body was wedged in between the renovated houses, sucking up miasma and bedlam, reflecting the miasma and evil memory with the light prying from in between the boards slatting the windows.

Andrew stayed back by the mailbox of the neighboring house and ruminated the length of sidewalk and the steps into the house. Ruminating… ruminating … He was still thinking when Ricardo came out the house and barreled into him.

“The fuck, Renacaujo? You're following me?” Ricardo’s eyes narrowed to piercing points; he leaned into him, loomed over him. Andrew was the reed flailing against the base of a cliff. Feeling vacated his heart.