explicate

1. explicate: v.t. To explain in detail

My uncle looks like a cartoon character.  My grandmother, someone plucked right off of a horror flick. Tingi, my cousin, is pure Newyorican. Nova, Tingi’s sister and my other cousin, on the other hand looks and talks and even dresses like a white, preppy girl. I don't know how to describe myself because I look like me and nobody else, although I think you get different opinions from other people.

The five members of the Bonilla clan, along with the ugliest, craziest cat known to mankind, live in a 20-year-old blue house. Of course we haven't lived in it that long. I just moved in six months ago. My grandmother bought it about five years back. The four-bedroom house faces another four-bedroom house across the street, the only difference is the color. On the left of our house is another house looking just like ours, but on the right there's nothing but an empty lot with pecan trees, old tires and a rickety shed.

Baptist Road is the name of our street… Or Road. I really don't know the difference between the two. It's a straight street with not too much traffic that has a dead-end about half a mile down with the biggest church I've ever seen at the dead-end. You guessed it, it's a Baptist church, the Faith Baptist Temple, but we don't attend that church. On Christmas and Easter we go to the downtown Catholic Church which I don't even know the name of.

Killeen, Texas is a small town in central Texas about an hour away from Austin. (it is an hour away when my uncle is driving.) Like I said, my uncle, Tio Roco, looks like a cartoon character in the whole essence of the description. He's about two years older than my father and, thank goodness for small miracles, they don't look anything alike. Tio Roco looks funny, acts goofy, and get it gets into these off-the-wall situations. My uncle swears that one day he'll win the lottery. I say that God makes people like my uncle so he can have a good laugh every so often. Everybody needs a good laugh every so often.

Well, Killeen is a small city instead of a small town. It has a nice mall, big Walmart and Kmart, and little stores, plazas, and supermarkets along with the Taco Bell, McDonald's, Burger King, and a bunch of other fast food joints. I think Killeen is really the heart of Texas because I folded the map of Texas twice in with the two creases met was a small board bold print and of Killeen. Isn't that interesting?

All in all, I’m pretty bored living with my widowed uncle and his two daughters and Mamabuela, what we call our grandmother. My parents left me here five months and two weeks ago because they were having financial problems and my loving grandmother said that she would take care of me while my dad, mom and little sister, Clara, went back to Puerto Rico to jump start a new life. I'm still waiting for them to ring the doorbell and take me away. They promised someday they would. I'm still waiting, but I stop holding my breath. 

What makes my grandmother seam spooky is hard to explain. She's old, about 70 years old, but if you look, no, stare at her you'll notice a couple of things.  She's got no wrinkles; her skin stretches out and is always so glossy like tight saran wrap. She has no liver spots, all of the baby blue veins on top of her hand sort of bulge out. Mamabuela’s skin color is like a sheet of copper brown which doesn't go with her grey eyes but her grey eyes do match her white silk like hair. She's not a hefty woman at all. She’s pencil thin. Fragile like. Except nothing about her leads you to believe she’s fragile. Her skin droops and sags in areas like her arms and Jowls. With 20/20 vision and no need for walking cane, my grandmother can pass for an old woman possessed by a young lady. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the erie part.

Mamabuela has her own ways, period. Nothing more, nothing less. If you cough, you're automatically required to stay at home and drink nasty hot tea from her herb plants in the front garden. She fears that it might be pneumonia or bronchitis or the bubonic plague, even if it's just one of those cost to clear your throat. 

I always buy my lunch at school for the simple reason that Mamabuela doesn't believe in packing an easy to do ham and cheese sandwich in a lunch bag. No. The one time I asked her to make me lunch for school, she placed foil wrapped fried chicken, rice and beans in a blue plastic container and a half pint of white milk in a big brown H-E-B grocery bag stapled at the top… Three times. I accidentally left the hearty meal on the bus and spent lunch time buried in the library.

Tingi and Noble are lucky: they are in high school. Tingi (I would tell you her real name but she'd kill me) is a junior and I think she's part of this gang Latin Queen's or something like that. She's real hard and mean. She had natural dark hair, but she dyes it jet-black almost blue. She colors her hair about once a month and it’s an ordeal. In a one bathroom household, you have to plan your bowl movements against four other inhabitants. To match her vampire hair, she lines her lips with dark red pencils and lines her eyes with dark blues and blacks. 

Tingi’s mouth is the mother factory of cuss words, but Tio Roco thinks of her as an angelic being. Sheila wears jeans 10 times bigger than she is with an even larger T-shirts or skimpy skirts that are so short she shouldn’t even bother wearing anything. Also, Tingi has this talk.  It’s fast and  chopped up. It's kind go high-pitched and reminds me of Rosie Perez, only when Rosie uses bad words in the movies, she smiles cause it's just her way of talking. Tingi, on the other hand, gives you the dirtiest, most ugliest looks to make you want to gulp saliva by the gallon. One thing I love about Tingi, however, is that she is nothing like Nova. I could have never made it for six months with two Novas.

Nova is a nerdy ninth grader. Saying she's of fair complexion is such an understatement. Nova is pure ivory, bone white. While Tingi has a shade of an olive complexion, Nova is arctic snow-white void of even the subtle hint of pink. She speaks with five dollar words. She has this vocabulary of long dictionary type words. Let’s just say that if I was really restless one night, I’d ask Nova to talk to me and I would quickly fall asleep. Nova is such a regular looking person. Nothing about her stands out. Brown eyes, brown hair, small nose, okay lips, not overweight or underweight, and just the right height. She dresses blandly too. She only owns solid colored shirts (save a stripped one here and there but heaven forbid a plaid) and ten pairs of white Keds. However, there is also one thing I love about Nova" she is nothing like Tingi. God have mercy on my poor soul if there were two Tingis roaming this earth.

Tio Roco is a chubby Puerto Rican, the Santa Claus type. Only the cause of my uncle’s gut is not cookies and milk but chicken and beer. He has one of the thickest nastiest mustaches. It looks like a hairy slug crawled up his face and decided his upper lip smelled decent. He's bald. It's not a nice bald, either. Too Roco is bald at the back of his head on top almost in a perfect circle. I think when I look at it hard enough in the back of the car when he's driving that it's a model of a hurricane because what little hair he does have in the circle grows to the side and out. His eyebrows are miniature versions of this mustache with less gray hairs and he has the teeniest of eyes… two black pen marks.

And what does my uncle do for a living? Tio Roco is a truck driver. What else could he be A model? An executive at some fancy business? Yeah right! He sounds most of the week on the road and spends maybe five days out of the month at home. He loves his truck driver life, though. Tio Roco gets all these crazy stories about himself or from hitch-hikers he picks up along the way. If I remember any I’ll make sure to share the wealth. 

Finally we have arrived at me. My name is Eduardo Bonilla. I;m in the eight grade. I make “C’s” and “D’s” but consider myself an “A” student. If an “A” means very good, then I’m very good at making “C’s” and “D’s”. Ha! 

Yea, Mamabuela didn’t find laugh at that joke either. Go figure.

See, the school year is ending and my grades aren’t looking to fabulous. I’m praying, the best way I know how, for two totally opposite things. I’m praying for God to help me pass. I’m thinking, if I pass my dad will reward me by getting me out of here. But then again, he can also argue that being here stuck with my awful relatives is doing me some good and leave me here forever!

Which brings me to the second thing I pray for: That I may fail. If I fail, Dad will pull me out of here because Killeen, Texas ain’t doing me a bit of good. But, and there is always a but, if I fail he can reason that if I can’t hack it here where English is the spoken language, then I surely can do no better in Puerto Rico. See, I can speak Spanish fairly well but I can not read it or write it too good.

The door bell rings!

What time is it? Eight o’clock on a Thursday night. No, it’s not my dad.

I made a probability chart (I’m good at math, I just don’t get good grades because I don’t apply myself) that shows the most likely time and day my family would come to pick me up and get me out of here. That is, if they want to surprise me. The best time is noon on a Saturday which is why I’m always watching TV on the couch by the door while everybody else is outside playing street ball or tag. The least time is after five on weekdays.

I’m wondering, who’s a the door? It just might be Tingi home from one of her cruises with her homey girls, but it’s eight o’clock. Too early for Tingi.

“Nova!” My grandmother has the driest, ear jerking voice ever heard. She’s calling from the living room but it sounds like she’s got her thin lips right next to me delicate ears. “Nova, llego tu papa.”

So I guess Tio Roco is home a day early. I wonder why. I can hear Nova/Tingi’s door open and she walks pass my room with a smile. She loves that man, my uncle. I don’t really know why. He’s so goofy looking. Plus he’s never around. Maybe that’s why his daughter turned out so weird. And them there’s the thing about him being partially responsible for the death of his wife. He signed some paper saying they could pull the plug on her.

“Tito!” Gosh, I hate that voice of hers and that stupid nickname. I want to scream, “For the umpteenth time, my name is Eduardo and I prefer Eddie!” but decide against it for obvious reasons.

Mamabuela yells again, “Tio Roco llego. Ven dale un beso.” I’m fourteen and I’m still required to give my uncle a kiss on the cheek when he comes home. There should be a law against that. And it should go under child labor laws. 

Nova is sitting on the brown couch opening a small box her dad brought her. I walk up to him and he brushes the hairy slug of a mustache across my cheek while I make a noise pretty close to a cold kiss. “How ju doin’?” he asks me. His accent is amusing and pathetic. I shrug my shoulders and he pulls out a Snickers bar for me. It’s a king sized Snickers bar. I try to hold all the excitement inside of me and just smile. 

“Thanks.” I take the candy and head back to my room.

“Espera un momentito,” calls Mamabuela with her bony hand son her hips, those skinny hips of hers. “Vas a comer”

I really don’t feel like eating, but if I say no she’ll give me an earful. “What’s for dinner?”

She hates it when I speak English to her, but she understands it. She’s afraid I’ll lose my heredity or culture or my ethnicity if I speak English more than I have to. “Sopa de pollo con arroz.”  It never fails: rice with everything. Rice with beans, rice with chicken, even if she makes lasagna, Mamabuela will make white, sticky rice. But today it’s rice and chicken soup. And folks, this ain’t clear broth, campbell’s chicken noodle soup. No. It’s chicken swimming in an orange pool of vegetables and little oily circles floating on the surface. She either forgets to take off the yellow, goose bump infested skin from the poultry or she does it just to gross me out. Personally, I think she does it to gross me out. 

I nod my head reluctantly and walk to the kitchen. Tio Roco says he ate at Burger King on the highway and goes off to take a shower. Nova already ate, so it’s just me and this huge bowl murky liquid with a chicken breast or leg with bumpy skin still on it. Maybe, just maybe there’s a claw in there. There was one time. I swear. There should be a law against this under Cruelty to Children or Domestic Violence even.

Mambuela stands by the refrigerator and I know she’s going to stay there until the last grain of rice and trace of soup has disappeared from the bowl. I wish the doorbell would ring again and she’d be forced to answer it. Then I could flush the soup down the toilet real quick. I’ve done it before. 

Nope. That wouldn’t work. Tio Roco is taking a shower. Jeez, if it’s not one thing then it’s another.