The Soup and Sorrow Digest

Andrew could see a light.

Enrique and Andrew rumbled down the boulevard, past the plastic bag rolling indecisively over an oil slick. Store signs, banners, billboards jutted blearily into the sky shell of haze, and above its pink corrugations, Andrew sighted the cloudy forms of Ricardo and Rosa wafting in fluffy bliss. Fair? He closed his eyes and waited to smell the smoke of his heart burning.

“You’re grounded,” hollered Enrique as he slammed on the brakes to make the stop at the red light.

The cage of the car reverberated with the might of his intent, but the radio trumpeted through his wake, an aggressive baritone firing on about Commando trucks, Monster Commando trucks.

Andrew shifted in his seat as he recalled his past two days of irritating conundrums. Instead of scolding him for absconding from Maria’s for the cowardly solace of books, Enrique drove him tensely and quietly to the emergency room. Questions about his wounds defaulted to the reply “the stairs were very clever.”

A squat nurse had pinched his ribs tightly. “Well, the stairs did not break your ribs.”  She opened his mouth. “The stairs spared your teeth.” She eyed Enrique belligerently over his shoulder. “The stairs gave you knife cuts?”

“The stairs were full of knives,” he intoned.

And when the doctor was giving the prescription, he said to Enrique. “Please make sure he doesn’t fall the stairs again.”

“If you have a pill for stupid, give it to him,” Enrique retorted.

Andrew spent the quietude of the night, relieved that he did not have to explain the fight that went wrong or Emilio and friends. During the morning Mass the next day, Flora flounced bravely to present Enrique the Thriller jacket; but within a glance of his battle scars, blotchy splatters exploded on her farded cheeks.

“Dios. All that reading makes you estupido.” She held up his chin with phrenological erudition to predict Andrew’s romantic future. “This is bad. It’ll scar, and no neña will want you … We can fix this … Maybe.” The wind blew through the church lot, dumped pollen on windshields, and knocked down his palace of relief.

“It’s nothing. I just fell down the stairs,” Andrew mumbled.

“Stairs?” A grimace ruined her nose and lips. She looked more pointed ly at Enrique squirming at his new Jacket gift. “Stairs don’t give cuts like that. Enrique, what really happened?”

“He said it was the stairs, so it’s the stairs,” Enrique muttered.

Andrew chuckled. He did not know what cut him more, his failed bid to dominate Ricardo or Enrique’s gullible aloofness. Suddenly this aloofness and the dependability of it was something he could be proud of, even though he felt intimately how much Enrique believed his silly lie just to preserve a the most unflattering opinion of him. 

But on the drive back home, Enrique failed to move after the light turned green. Horns blared impatience, engulfing Andrew in the dome of his own annoyance, but Enrique demanded, “What happened?”

“I fell.”

As cars swerved around them, Andrew grew embarrassed by the every green-lit second. He sighed.  “I and Ricardo got into a fight. He won, I lost. Now can we drive home?”

Enrique’s brows slid down a hard decline to the right. “You fought the f***?”

Enrique’s tone could be mean faint praise or damnation for his foolishness.  Andrew clenched silent, cautiously optimistic.

“He pulled a knife or something?” Enrique asked.

“A razor, I think.”

 Enrique nodded knowingly and pushed on the gas pedal. A few moments later, he added, “Nah … the f*** pulled knife? That wasn’t a fair fight.”

“What does it matter if it is fair?”

“You two should have duked out blow for blow. Ok, you’ll get thrashed, because you don’t know shit about shit, but it would be fair.” Then He swerved hard to the right and to Andrew’s chilling embarrassment, Enrique was pounding down the doors of Benito’s house.

And now after the confrontation, the arrangement of a restitution that served more his father than it did him, the sight of Rosa and Ricardo, happy and delightful together, life was assuming a radioactive yellow of yuck. Andrew bristled in his car seat to Enrique yelling, “You’re grounded.”  The word ‘fair’ revolved in his brittle mind, the length and the height of it found wanting to the nth decimal point.

Fair?

Andrew obliged to engage the face bleeding with sweat. The itinerary of his looming sequestration riffled with the long lonely hours reading in his bedroom, or the analytical cooking experiments in search of good lasagna. Throwing himself back into the nook between his seat and the door, Andrew huffed to the window view of sky thick to the sun’s rays.

“Emilio’s a useless rat in the street,” Enrique sneered.

“But he makes great fish tacos.”

“Fish tacos are all it takes for you to be a gang blockhead?”

“Fish tacos and bratwursts.”

“You think this is funny?”

“No, Dad.  You’re very serious.  I can hear that,” Andrew droned.

“Smart… You can go be clever with your nana and your tío in Escondido when the semester’s over.”

Escondido—Andrew suppressed a snort—their visits were a remarkable orchestra of Enrique popping his fingers while his mother twittered about her stud Pomeranians and his brother waxed catatonic in his special chair. The visits ended with Enrique muttering irascibly as he drove Andrew back to their lonely hull of a domicile.

Out the passenger window the building-sized mural of the Virgin Mary held into view, with the blues of her starry halo and the sad browns of her eyes. Her open-faced hands, its painted corporeality, its painted aura of welcome, beckoned to Andrew to embrace earthiness of his life.  With the flinty sense of his own colorless skies, Andrew grasped that his father did not hate him, could not hate him even if he wanted, and that was a tragedy

After another two blocks, a right turn, they were back in the claustrophobic warmth of their home. Enrique splashed his keys on the counter, shuffled through the mail while Andrew looked bluely into the incandescent emptiness of the fridge.

“Your mother wrote you again.” Enrique flung a thick-looking envelope over the glazed tile counter. 

Andrew flopped the letter, feeling for the weight of her maternal intention. Her fifty page missives came about twice year, and now he wondered if this would be the last letter for the year.  Thinking led to ghastly astonishment, and he found himself sliding it over to the trashcan.

“Aren’t you going to read it?” Enrique asked bluffly. “The least you can do is read.”

Andrew slid it lamely back to him. “You can read it.”

A look of expectant curiosity lifted Enrique’s face before his eyes spiked into shards. “I don’t want to read jalada from the puta.” Then he shambled out to the jangling brilliance of the corridor, words buzzing around him like flies.

With meditative dread, Andrew flexed the envelope plump with, what he imagined, squat prints looping miraculous contradictions of the motherly love that could at once reject him and possess him wholly.  Fear was working through him now, slackening his hold on the letter. He sighed at his immutable self. But there was a good thing in his studious cowardice: the real chance of Columbia in three years.  He just had to steady the course. Keep being the narrow-minded cockroach, and freedom will come.

The square thick facer of Enrique’s titled from the wall of the corridor. “Tomorrow I’ll pick you up from school. You’ll follow me through my workday, and learn how to be responsible.”

And he was gone again as if an apparition. Andrew, frazzled, tore open the letter. In it might be better options than living like a cockroach.