Chupa Cabra and the Chocolate Envelope, BrothersBound [bookstand for reading .TXT] 📗

Chupa Cabra and the Chocolate Envelope

It was a white envelope, pristine as untouched snow. Your regular 3X5 the type used to mail letters or hold checks. This one sat innocuous on a kitchen counter, seemingly benign with its sealing flap-bedaubed in maple colored glue mixed with spit slightly flavored by recently eaten McDonald’s-pressed firmly against its main bulk.
Juan took a drink of his Sprite washing down the last bite of his Big Mac and looked at the envelope proudly. Within its white interior lay two thousand dollars. Two thousand dollars was the price of his sister’s future happiness. Right now this “happiness” was somewhere in Chinatown, in one of its many bridal gown shops. Probably one with an ancient tiny Chinese Lady behind the counter with bones as frail as fortune cookies, who says “chum in, chum in” in a funny foreign accent.
And there would be the dress, as white and pure as the envelope that held the means for its purchase. In Juan’s mind it did not look like a two thousand dollar dress. In fact Juan could not think of any dress that looked like it was worth two thousand dollars. But girls were weird and he’d have greater luck and interest in figuring out why camels and baseball players spit the same way than in women and dresses.
Anyways Louisa wanted it, though you would never be able to tell, she was the type of girl who never asked for anything. But if you looked real close when her and Bobalita their grandmother, flipped through wedding magazines, the ones with beautiful ivory skinned, raven haired women on the front covers, you would see it floating small but bright in the corner of her eye, a dress as soft and smooth as the bottom skin of Bobalita’s upper arm, as white as her skin was dark. You would hear the shape and price of it in Louisa’s sighs, feel the untouchable dream quality of something wished for but never expected in the way she turned the pages.
Louisa did everything for her brothers and Papa. She was a big sister first, but following right behind a second mother. She cooked, cleaned, washed, shopped, drove to school, picked up, and taught and told stories of their heritage to make them proud of their skin color and the way they talked.
She even as Juan liked to put it “had your back”. Once a big white kid at school had said “something” about Juan’s family. Juan being Juan replied in Spanish “something” about the boy’s mother. Unfortunately some white kids know Spanish. A ham-sized fist had come for Juan’s face in the international language of “get ready for a butt whoopin”. Luisa’s fist had struck first, her famous left hook, the one she learned from Mama by watching her use it on Papa when ever he came home late and forgot to call. Nobody big or small said things about Juan’s family after that.
For all this and more her four brothers and Papa decided to make the ghost of the dress hiding in the corner of her eye, the one that moaned softly in her sighs, and made their hearts sad when it turned pages with Louisa a reality. Banish the ghost. Drive it out with extra jobs, shut it up with longer hours, and tie its hands with saving here, and give it the boot with pinching there. Two weeks to her wedding they had the ghost in a corner; it lay trapped in a 3X5 envelope as white as snow.
And now Edgar was out there looking for the body from whence the ghost came. In spice and meat smelling Chinatown he roamed, hunting for the Fortune Cookie Chinese Lady and the dress that was the substance of Louisa’s dreams. And when he found her, he would return home for the money, and relieve Juan of his guardian duties over a ghost filled envelope.
Juan scooped another portion of double-brownie- chocolate-fudge ice cream into his bowl. He needed to keep up his strength so he could stay alert after all. Three mountains of chocolate sin lay heaped up against each other. One disappeared in a matter of seconds, as one spooned an entire scoop into his mouth. The others would never be eaten.
Something with a terrible strength shoved Juan from his chair and onto the floor. He broke most of his fall with his right arm, but the left holding a spoon full of dessert that would never make its rendezvous to his mouth lay trapped beneath him.
Stunned, confusion reigned in his mind, a complete befuddlement that prevented all coherent thought from entering. But suddenly everything became frighteningly clear as a tomb heavy weight settled upon Juan’s back, and a single very scared thought broke through, "I’m being robbed."
The attacker leaned close and Juan could feel his throaty breath, like a wet rag dragged across gravel, on the nape of his neck. Fear is a chemist and it began its work on Juan’s stomach, sending moist icy tendrils numbing their way outward from his navel.
Kitchen tile imprinted itself on the exposed areas of Juan’s arms, and in their polished surfaces he saw ghost of his sister’s happiness escaping.
Fear is a chemist but so is Anger, and Juan could feel it start to set up shop. It heated his neck with thoughts of all the hours, sweat, and missed TV shows he had endured for Louisa. Of his dad coming home late, and receiving lefties for not calling, not because he had forgotten, but because in his own words “it’s our secret mis hijos, and telling one woman is as good as telling all women.” Of his brothers walking in stained and tired, but smiling and treating him like a man because he was dirty and tired too for the same reasons.
His assailant pressed something cold and wet into Juan’s neck, his nose. Anger packed its bags and slipped hurriedly away. "He’s crazy. A crazy man is sitting on my back and stealing our money. People who put their wet noses into other people’s necks are crazy. Crazy people are capable of anything,, that’s what Crazy means," thouht Juan. El Loco began barking in huge ear shattering blasts. Anger came rushing back with more bags and a whole laboratory.
“Chupa Cabra!!!!!!!! You stinking, mangy, good for nothing dog. Get the hell off me now!!!!!!”
The assailant a Great Dane Pit Bull mix obliged his request, lifting its massive bulk off the youngest member of the Chavez brood. Juan was mad, no he was furious, no he was what was that American term….. pissed. Yes Juan was Pisssssed.
Chupa did not notice, he came up and began licking Juan’s shirt, like a sock hanging from a laundry basket his oversize tongue lapped at Juan’s belly fear. Apparently fear comes in double-brownie-chocolate- fudge ice cream flavor, that’s what had numbed his stomach, and which now stained his shirt with a soggy brown smear. Juan was not pissed he was explosive.
“I’ll gonna kill you Chupa. When Edgar isn’t looking I’ll sell you to some restaurant in Chinatown, they’ll cook you up and serve you as a main course, or maybe put you in some soup. How does Chupa Soup sound?” Chupa began wagging his tail.
“Holy Spa-ge-kees,” Juan only used made up words when he was truly panicked. On the counter his bowl lay upturned; two small mountains of chocolate now much smaller fed a slowly growing lake of fudge with their melting run off. In the midst of this emerging lake was the envelope, surrounded on three sides by chocolate goop, the fourth soon to be enveloped.
Juan plucked the envelope from the encroaching tide, scanning it for potential “Juan causing Harm” as in Juan would be harmed if the two thousand green guardians of a ghost were drowned in chocolate. It was O.K only the edges were soaked, guardians and were still intact. The envelope went back on the table a safe distance away from Brownie Lake.
He gave the dog a withering glare. “Stupid Dog”. Chupa had the indecency to have a most self satisfied look on his face.
Juan stormed into his room, a potential killer of dogs with thoughts of canine murder. He changed his chocolate flavored shirt for a clean one. The soon to be dead dog was leaning on the counter when he returned, his slimy coat-tie sized tongue licking up the last of a dessert created lake.
The thought that he would not have to clean up the mess did not make him any less angry. He was a room filled with dynamite ready to explode. The absence of the envelope from the table did diffuse a couple of sticks, but made the ones that were left burn all the brighter.
“Grrrrr. Where did you put the envelope Chupa?” Scanning the floor his left eye almost twitching with anger revealed a plastic bowl now sitting upside down, and nothing else. A couple of more sticks went out. Juan remembered something Edgar once said, “Chupa will eat anything even his own poop if we let him.”
“Chupa.” Juan’s hands pressed against the sides of the massive doggy head. “Please, please, please tell me you didn’t eat the envelope?”
Thinking this a game Chupa grinned, and there stuck between his teeth, a speck of white, a fleck of green. Dynamite imploded creating a hole leading down to where a partially digested mountain of chocolate began to quake and rumble, the sea of stomach acid it lay floating in churned, sending waves splashing against its’ sides.
Juan could feel it all, the way his eyes dried up like wet sand in the sun, how his breath seemed stuck, lodged somewhere in his throat to afraid to come out, how his legs no longer felt connected to his knees, and neither felt connected to his body. Then the mountain of chocolate revealed itself to be really a volcano. It had only been dormant, sleeping, waiting, waiting for…