Solace

By Wando Wande

Springtime 1985. The Night Stalker murders his way across Los Angeles, but the municipality of Willow Heights isn't too concerned. The 24/7 news coverage of rape and murder is boring compared with the news of fifteen year old Ricardo caught in flagrante delicto with a boy named Steve in the high school parking lot.
One by one, relatives, friends, repudiate Ricardo. He'd never been one to feel alone or afraid or be the kind of person who backs down, but when his parents kick him out, Ricardo's not-so-peaceful life is shot to hell.

Family is family--Ricardo is too stupid to believe anything otherwise. He means to go back home again, even if he has to bash on a tadpole loser classmate and his God-crazy aunt or be chummy with ruthless gangs. He might even be willing to shed some of his ugly prejudices. Even then, all his determination might not be nearly enough, not when the Night Stalker has dark plans in Willow Heights ....

Solace is the first episode of a coming of age suspense serial, featuring amidst the 1980's AIDS scare, a macho gay boy, a tadpole straight boy, and their harrowing encounter with a serial killer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wando Wande
• Release date: Apr 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310955136

Wando Wande

A crazy fish who lives in a mangrove paradise. Daydreamer. Professional Procrastinator. Likes the smell of bees and the buzz of flowers. Claims to be the most interesting author in the world, who has fought against lions in the Serengeti, trekked with penguins across the Antarctica, makes a mean chicken Parmesan. But I digress.

Book preview

Solace

Part One of the Soup and Sorrow Digest

By Wando Wande

Smashwords Edition

Copyright By Wando Wande 2014

http://omnifish.wordpress.com


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Blurb:

Springtime 1985. The Night Stalker murders his way across Los Angeles, but the municipality of Willow Heights isn't too concerned. The 24/7 news coverage of rape and murder is boring compared with the news of fifteen year old Ricardo caught in flagrante delicto with a boy named Steve.

One by one, relatives, friends, repudiate Ricardo. He'd never been one to feel alone or afraid or be the kind of person who backs down, but when his parents kick him out, Ricardo's not-so-peaceful life is shot to hell.

Family is family--Ricardo is too stupid to believe anything otherwise. He means to go back home again, even if he has to bash on a tadpole loser classmate and his God-crazy aunt or be chummy with ruthless gangs. He might even be willing to shed some of his ugly prejudices. Even then, all his determination might not be nearly enough, not when the Night Stalker has dark plans in Willow Heights ....

Solace is the first episode of a coming of age suspense serial, featuring amidst the 1980's AIDS scare, a macho gay boy, a tadpole straight boy, and their harrowing encounter with a serial killer.

Chapter 1

Love, pray, submit—Of the many unwieldy Catholic ideas on the good life, Ricardo Mendez quite liked its proscriptions against birth control. A battalion of aunts, uncles, cousins was a boon when your life was a game of hide and seek from bitchy parents. But when his brother, Jesús, was rushed to the emergency, boon became bane, or as he would say, shit flew out the garden hose.

The day of the accident began like another of those Los Angeles spring days unnatural for its stupendous sunshine. Students were ushering out for lunch and rumbling and chattering in the hallways as Jesús bungled down the stairs with a pinched smile in anticipation for his chicken molé lunch.

A classmate Hernández behind him, growled just over his ear, "I can handle you looking at my chica wrong, but man, your hermano’s a puto? Something shitty runs in your house."

Jesús’s face slacked grimly before Hernández’s deformed smirk.

The fuck you say?

You heard me. Tell the faggot, I’m going to crack his skull for jumping my cousin—

Jesús had bounded three, four steps and connected a swift punch against Hernández's stubbly jaw. Hernández replied dazedly with a punch to Jesús’ belly. One punch, a feint, another blow, and the scuffle degenerated into kicks, curses, teenage jeers for someone to cut somebody already, then the wrathful tumble of bodies down the stairs. Someone could swear they heard a distinct crack, someone winced at the bright flame of blood on Hernández’s cheek, and another wondered about the baby brother in question. But this fifteen-year-old baby brother was nowhere at the stairwell or inside the school either

Ricardo was in the parking lot, in an electric-blue coupe, balls deep in Steve’s ass.

Sirens whined, paramedics scurried, pupils scrambled for the good seats to cheer the bloody theatre. No one noticed the car under the streetlamp rollicking and frolicking to a rhythm of conquest.

The smell of clove cigarettes colored thickly inside the car, hotly over their damp exertions.

Steve had been the man of Ricardo’s moment for exactly seven minutes, if you believed the clock above the dial car radio blaring the top hit of the year by Micheal Jackson and Paul McCarthy, Say, say, say …

Fuck, fuck, fuck … That was Steve, man of Ricardo’s moment, blazing hot Steve with the cute dimple, tight Steve muy excellente on the trombone.

Their ruckus of heat, sweat and wild feeling rode on the cusp of triumph. But then something, titanic, assaulted the car, knocking Ricardo out of his looming climax. On the windows were plastered with faces fractured in disgust.

And that was the end of that.

***

Jesús lay limp in a coma. Hernández’s heart was flat-lining as nurses flurried over belly wounds. Everyone in the municipality of Willow Heights murmured of dark days and dark afflictions. Ricardo’s relatives, not the least of all his parents, bickered over who knew the what, the why, and the when about Ricardo being a cocksucker. How could they have been mistaken about the ordered soul behind his coffee eyes, the flatter-than-Kansas buzz cut, the stocky shoulders, and tall swagger? Ricardo had deceived them.

Really he had, as he did not lisp, or droop his hands, or say honey or mi’jo, or could not even be bribed to eat a slice of Dulce Tres Leches. In fact it was less than two weeks 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 the corpse-straight body festooned with pipes and tubes, the chemical hospital smell, the beeps of the heart machine.

You blamed my cat for killing your pansies, Officer Guillermo said.

Everyone nodded again.

Inez Cruz, in her youth, married Jesus in a convent, cheated on Jesus, now lived as a severe spinster math teacher. She gave up Catholicism (a rabble of idolatry) for the true Christian fellowship of Iglesias Pentecostales de Dios.

Every Sunday in a hole-the-wall church, you could see her in a navy blouse and knee-length black skirt, stamping her hand at the air as if she alone could hold back the tide of principalities, powers, the rulers of darkness, spiritual wickedness in high places, but apparently not the wickedness in Ricardo.

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.

If Ricardo were there in the hospital ward, he would stick out his tongue at her and call her Aunty Abomination. But he was in his bedroom, splayed on the top-bunk and searing amongst the hot coals