The Soup and Sorrow Digest

continuation of part 1

His maternal aunt, Yolanda, had agreed to let Ricardo stay for a ‘few’ of days. But after her St. Bernard spurned her lap for his lap, she amended to the agreement to one night only. Ricardo accepted gratefully without complaint; after all he had make fun of her thirteen-year-old daughter during Emeralda’s party, teasing her to the point of stormy tears, of her pink and neon-green striped legwarmers.

The next day Ricardo, duffel bag in hand, shambled off to school.  When he alighted off the metro bus and upon the school gates, did the grand stupidity of his presence dawn on him.  Already in the school courtyard a red carpet of sneers, twisty faces, murmurs of ‘f***’ unrolled cosmically before him.  Lucky or unlucky for Ricardo, he had never been one to seem gentle.  Gentleness yielded no dividends from the boys who would mistake it for being like the slimy weak-ass Andrew Salazar. Girls would not think you were not killer enough like the Night Stalker making his murderous rounds throughout Los Angeles.

Slinging his duffel back against his back, Ricardo looked straight ahead, strode over his royal red carpet.  He ignored Cherry whispering evilly into her friend’s ear, ignored Andrew hobbling pathetically (everyone ignored the tadpole), but could not ignore a square-faced Miguel muscling up to his direction. For a split second, Ricardo could not decide between a welcome smirk and a repellant frown towards his loser-in-arms since fifth grade.  But Miguel’s cheeks were a patchwork of red, his flat nose was within an inch of Ricardo’s.

“You’ll stay away from me,” Miguel said into Ricardo’s face.

“I think I can do that,” Ricardo said easily.

Miguel’s eyes were darkly slit, and behind him a clique of congratulatory jeers howled. Ricardo felt the ground burn through his sneakers and rethought tensely coming to the school the next day. But that was a faraway concern, for there was still the matter of the night’s lodgings.

That evening he went to his Uncle Rolando’s. His uncle, father and he used to play in an amateur band around the neighborhood.  Rolando leaned heaving at the doorway, scratching his big paunch, nodding helpfully to Ricardo’s entreaties for day or two of help. Then his seven-year-old son squeezed himself between his big waist and the door, looked up to Ricardo with eyes like brown stones, and asked, “what did you do to the white boy?  Everyone refuses to tell me anything.”

Ricardo broke down into silence while Rolando’s big cheeks sloughed down his face. Five minutes later, on Rolando’s lame suggestions, he plodded to his Uncle Gaspar’s. The stout man had helped him two week when he fell into trouble because of Carlos. He had even concurred, rather boyishly, that he had done the right thing by punching out the shamefaced drug dealer.

Luckily, Gaspar was not home, and his wife was too frazzled over an unfinished order of a wedding dress to take note of Ricardo’s particular transgressions.  Bliss lasted until the next evening when Gaspar returned and said, “Maricón stay with maricón. I want no part of it.”

Now on the third evening, Ricardo, facing a wall of oil stains, was seated in a taquería, dim and grim over his last ten dollars and a packet of tamarind candy. The shop with three tables was gratefully empty, except for the cooks and Alexandro behind the shine of the steel counter. Ricardo was blind to the florescent glow overhead, and deaf to the bandying of the cooks in want of orders.