House of Bone and Rain (eBook)

Gabino Iglesias (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024
434 Seiten
TITAN BOOKS (Verlag)
978-1-83541-192-6 (ISBN)

Infos

From the Shirley Jackson and Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Devil Takes You Home, a group of five teenage boys in Puerto Rico seek vengeance after one of their mothers is murdered. Set during a vicious hurricane, a Latinx Stand By Me with a haunted, dark heart. For childhood friends Gabe, Xavier, Tavo, Paul, and Bimbo, death has always been close. Hurricanes. Car accidents. Gang violence. Suicide. Estamos rodeados de fantasmas was Gabe's grandmother's refrain. We are surrounded by ghosts. But this time is different. Bimbo's mom has been shot dead. We're gonna kill the guys who killed her Bimbo swears. And they all agree. Feral with grief, Bimbo has become unrecognizable, taking no prisoners in his search for names. As the boys strategize, a storm gathers far from the Puerto Rican coast. Hurricanes are known to carry evil spirits in their currents and bring them ashore, spirits which impose their own order. From the Shirley Jackson and Bram Stoker Award®-winning author, this is a harrowing coming-of-age story; a doomed tale of devotion, the afterlife of violence, and what rolls in on the tide.

Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist, professor, and literary critic living in Austin, TX. He is the author of the Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson Award-winning THE DEVIL TAKES YOU HOME, as well as ZERO SAINTS and COYOTE SONGS and he's the editor of BOTH SIDES and HALLDARK HOLIDAYS. His work has been nominated multiple times for the Bram Stoker Award as well as the Locus Award and won the Wonderland Book Award for Best Novel in 2019. His nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Electric Literature, and LitReactor. He also writes regular reviews for The New York Times, NPR, Publishers Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, Criminal Element, Mystery Tribune, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other venues.

Textauszug

1

GABE

Two bullets to the face

The wake

A baquiné

Brotherhood of the gun

The church of anger

The last day of classes, our last day as high school students, marked a new era for us. We wanted it. We feared it. We had plans for it. Then Bimbo’s mom hit the sidewalk with two bullet holes in her face, and the blood drowned out all those plans.

Bimbo called to tell us the day after it happened. His real name was Andrés, but we mostly called him Bimbo because he was brown and chubby and looked like the mascot bear of a brand of cookies. It’s normal for people to report the death of a parent. Old age. Cancer. A heart attack. Whatever. Old people die and we expect it, accept it even. It’s normal. Murder is different. Murder is a monster that chews up whatever expectations you had regarding death and spits them in your face. Murder is an attack on someone’s life, yes, but also an attack on those left behind.

When Bimbo called to tell me about the death of his mother, María, I felt attacked. “They shot my mom, man.” Five words about the recent past that were heavy enough to crush our future.

I said nothing because there was nothing to say. Death swallows words, or at least shows you how fucking useless they are.

*   *   *

María had been working the door at Lazer Club for a few years. All she did was check IDs and yell at the gorillas inside if anyone got belligerent. At least that’s what everyone thought. What most people didn’t know—and we knew only because we were Bimbo’s best friends—was that she also dealt on the side. But no judgment: mothers are sacred. Mine definitely is.

In the pregnant silence that followed Bimbo’s words, María’s coarse laugh came to me, a ghost made of sound. I wondered what would happen to the spaces that laugh was supposed to fill in the world, the ears it was meant to touch, the conversations it was supposed to decorate with its humor. I saw María climbing into the shitty Chevy Malibu she drove everywhere, Héctor Lavoe screaming nasally from those busted speakers, his voice leaking out the window like the perfect soundtrack to María’s perpetual smile.

When my pops died, when I was ten, I didn’t want to be home, because he haunted every corner of it. He’d hung every picture on our walls. The kitchen table smelled like his aftershave. He’d painted my room. He was everywhere, so I spent a lot of time at Bimbo’s place, and María had welcomed me then, fed me arroz con salchichas and asked me about my mom while scolding Bimbo that only assholes hit girls after he had pushed his sister.

I wanted to tell Bimbo about these memories, to let him know that I’d loved his mom, too, that he didn’t have to carry the pain alone, but I couldn’t say shit. Any question I asked would be stupid, and anything I said would fail to bring María back, but I had to say something, so I mumbled the same thoughtless sympathy I’d utter at anyone else. Bimbo made a noise that was a Yes, okay, choking on it.

Then Bimbo cleared his throat and said he’d be in touch. As we were hanging up, he paused. “She loved you, man.” I sat there on my unmade bed and thought about never seeing María again. Then I imagined my own mom dead on a sidewalk outside a club in Old San Juan. My insides filled with something so heavy it was hard to breathe. If someone killed my mom, I would burn the world to cinders.

*   *   *

Soon after Bimbo called us, we called each other. Xavier, Tavo, Paul, and me. Along with Bimbo, we were a crew. Brothers, really. You know, like the tight-knit group of kids in a Stephen King novel, except with three brown dudes and two Black ones running around and getting in trouble. We didn’t have much to say, but we needed to know the rest of us were still there, that we still had each other. Their voices were a familiar place where I could hide from whatever Bimbo was feeling and the awful way in which we all imagined ourselves in his shoes. Just hearing each other that day was enough to get us through. Men are weird when it comes to love, but sometimes a You good, man? on the phone is as good as I love you, brother.

After the phone calls, I walked out of my room and told my mom, who was sitting at the little kitchen table while watching over something she had on the stove. “Virgen Santísima,” she said, her hands covering her mouth. Then she crossed herself, kissed her fingers, and stood up to hug me. I hugged her back a bit too hard, feeling very lucky that she was still with me, and wishing I could crack my chest open, put her inside there, and keep her there forever so nothing could touch her the way it’d touched my father and María.

“Déjame saber si Bimbo necesita algo,” she said. She didn’t ask any questions, only told me to let her know if Bimbo needed anything. She knew that María led a life that flew too close to danger, but she had never said anything about it or about her, and had even gotten the cops off her back a few times with a few lies and a big smile. They were women raising kids by themselves, and that brought them together in a way only other women like them would understand.

My mom let me go and sat down.

“María…,” she started, then stopped. She took a deep breath. “María came to see me a few times after your father passed away. She asked me if I needed money. Then she said her brother…would take care of things if any man tried to take advantage of me. She was a good woman. Don’t let anything you hear now distract you from that, okay?”

I nodded, but I’d had no clue. María had been good to me, but knowing she had also reached out to my mom made me feel a different, bigger love and respect for her. It made me hurt for Bimbo even more.

Two days later, we sat in Bimbo’s living room and he told us what he knew: a couple of dudes with Scarface dreams had approached María at the club and asked her to sell for them. She’d refused. Whoever owned Lazer paid her to work the door, but as far as María was concerned, her brother, Pedro, was her one and only boss, and María was comfortable with that. The men who had talked to her apparently didn’t like that answer, so they drove by again the next day and rained down bullets on María and three other unlucky people standing near the door. The other three had survived. María left a hole in the world. Of course, as with everything else in life, what we knew could have been a pebble at the bottom of the mountain of everything we ignored, and there was a chance at least half that pebble was bullshit.

*   *   *

The wake was on a Thursday. We all went. Xavier picked me up. He was a good dude. Smart. He played tennis, a bit of soccer, and had full-ride offers from a few colleges. He was a bit taller than me and good-looking. He was dark, but he had what folks on the island call “good hair,” so he was seen as an indio instead of Black. He was a thinker, too, methodical. We relied on him to figure things out. While we watched action flicks and horror movies, he watched documentaries. He wanted to get a degree in electrical engineering, like his big sister. We knew he’d do it. Some folks have everything they need to win at life regardless of where they’re born. He lived with his parents in a neighborhood so bad it didn’t have a name, right behind the largest housing project in the United States. To the outside world, it was tierra de nadie; a lawless, violent place you stayed away from at all costs. For Xavier, it was home.

We ran into Tavo in the funeral home’s parking lot. Tavo was a surfer. Taller than the rest of us. Blond with green eyes, which made him stand out. He was a pure soul, like he was made of ocean and clear blue skies instead of the shit the rest of us are made of. He’d been waiting around for someone else to show up because he didn’t want to go in alone. The three of us strode in like dudes in a Tarantino movie, but as soon as we saw Bimbo, we all melted into a weepy mess.

Once we had collected ourselves, Bimbo said he had to talk to the other people and left us there, feeling hurt, sad, and awkward, so we went up to the casket because it seemed to be the right thing to do. We had to pay our respects.

María’s casket was closed. That was fine by me. Next to the casket, mounted on a wooden easel, there was a big black-and-white photo of her with Bimbo and Bimbo’s younger sister. They were in front of a Disney World castle. Bimbo’s father had never been in his life and neither had his sister’s father, so I guessed they’d asked some fellow tourist to take their photo. The big smiles on their faces seemed out of place, like diamonds in a catacomb.

María had been a loud, rotund woman who used to scream at us whenever we turned her house upside down looking for quarters so we could go to the corner bar to play the old Pac-Man and Street Fighter II arcade games. I wanted to remember her that way, so I tried to think about her laugh instead of wondering what her face might look like in that casket. My brain refused to cooperate and served up the ugliest, most painful image possible. Two bullet holes in her face, leaking blood onto the grimy sidewalk, and her eyes open but not seeing anything.

We moved a few feet away from the casket and watched silently as people came and went. They were all part of the ritual, just like we had been when we arrived.

Paul showed up about an hour after we got...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 8.10.2024
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror ► Horror
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Schlagworte: award-winning horror books • Bram Stoker Award • Coming-of-age • Gabe Bimbo • Gang violence • Ghosts • ghost story • Horror • horror books • horror evil spirits • horror storm • Hurricane • Latinx horror • Latinx horror books • Puerto Rican Ghost Story • Puerto Rican Horror • Puerto Rican horror books • Puerto Rico • shirley jackson award • Supernatual Horror • Vengeance
• ISBN-10: 1-83541-192-4 / 1835411924
• ISBN-13: 978-1-83541-192-6 / 9781835411926