“I’ll be honest with you,” Brother William said, rising to his feet and guiding Fulgencio toward the door. “I’m as curious about your ranch as I am bored of sitting in my office. Summers are long and monotonous here. That said, I will entertain your proposition, having once benefited from an even more dubious deal struck within these very walls.”
Standing in the doorway slightly bewildered, Fulgencio looked up tentatively at the towering Brother. He was unsure exactly what the Brother meant.
“Tomorrow morning right before sunrise,” Brother William snapped, making Fulgencio’s head bob with every word. “Meet me behind the school. We’ll drive out to the land.”
Patting Fulgencio on the back and nudging him gently out of the office, his eyes twinkled with mischief: “Remember. No promises. Don’t get your hopes up and don’t be late, Don Fulgencio. I don’t tolerate tardiness.”
Fulgencio felt a rush of excitement, thanking the Brother profusely as he exited through the waiting room occupied by the eavesdropping secretary now crowned by a head of white hair. As he left he directed a final question at the Brother who lingered in the doorway, “One thing before I go, Brother. Why do you call me Don Fulgencio? No one has ever called me that before.”
“Well you are a landowner, aren’t you?” The brother smiled and winked.
Fulgencio Ramirez smiled too as he skipped through the dark and vacant halls, the click of his heels echoing throughout the slumbering school. As he ran out into the relentless summer, he looked up at the cornflower sky and let it burn his skin as he made the sign of the cross in thanks to God, the Virgencita, and all the Saints above. He took his time walking home, passing in front of the downtown store windows, seeing himself in a different way for the first time. In the distorted reflections, he saw a boy that walked a little straighter and held his head a little higher than the others on the street, than he ever had before. Sure, he was poor and the son of a simple tire man with a bad temper. But like Brother William said, he was a landowner too.
The next morning, enveloped by the cool, blue light of the courtyard behind the three-story brick structure of the Academy, Fulgencio shook hands with Brother William. They climbed into the green jalopy the Brothers had shared since cars first arrived in La Frontera, and they rode through the slumbering streets of downtown toward the drawbridge. By the time the unforgiving sun burned at the horizon’s edge—having rambled through the hauntingly quiet colonial streets of the still-dreaming Nueva Frontera—they rolled over the narrow road to the beach.
Outside the compact Mexican village, a vast expanse of meadows paved the earth green as far as the eye could see. The highway wound through the ejidos, communal farming parcels carved from the Spanish lands originally granted to the thirteen founding families of the region, the Cisneros clan included, and redistributed to the campesinos in the days following the Mexican Revolution. In theory, this was what the Revolution had been fought for, to return the land to its people, or so Brother William told Fulgencio as they headed due east toward El Dos de Copas. Fulgencio listened with interest, as he was unfamiliar with the history of his own land. The campesinos that worked the ejidos in unison were called ejidatarios, Brother William explained. They were a proud, hard-working stock, at least until decades later when the allure of easy drug money would steal the young boys away from their fathers, causing the lands to fall into desolate ruin. As they passed a bend in the road, Fulgencio pointed at a small hand-painted sign that marked a dirt path disappearing beyond a thicket of mesquites.
“That’s where my friend Cipriano lives,” Fulgencio informed Brother William. “We can get sodas there on the way back.”
Brother William smiled as the warming wind whipped through his hair, rushing in through the open windows of the rattling and jostling jalopy. “We’ll surely require some refreshment once the sun rises higher into the sky.”
About forty-five minutes later, Fulgencio again broke the tranquil spell of their repose, pointing at the dirt road that led to the ranch, off the left-hand side of the highway.
“There!” he exclaimed. “El Dos de Copas.”
“I guess whomever named this ranch was a gambler,” Brother William commented, veering onto the bumpy path. A cloud of dust trailed them as they passed the row of young mesquite saplings toward the unassuming hut on the edge of the ranch.
“How many acres?” he asked Fulgencio as he brought the car to a squealing halt in the clearing in front of the house.
“About five hundred,” Fulgencio answered as they stretched their legs, stiff from the ride.
“Well, I’m curious,” Brother William admitted. “Show me around.”
A modest stable sagged behind some trees near the house. Fulgencio vanished for a moment around the corner and reappeared in what seemed like an instant, towing two horses behind him. “Do you ride, Brother William?”
“I sure do, Don Fulgencio,” he retorted, taking a set of reins from Fulgencio’s hands and admiring the amber tone of the horse’s coat. “This looks like a Golden Palomino.”
“It is, sir.”
“This is a good horse,” the Brother said, running his hand over the fine, short horsehair, stroking its creamy mane. “What do you call him?”
“That one is called Trueno,” he said, motioning to the horse Brother William had adopted. “This one,” patting the equally tall and sinuous black mare to the right, “is called Relámpago.”
“Thunder and Lightning!” Brother William translated. “Great names.”
“Thanks. I made them up,” beamed Fulgencio.
“So, these are yours?” Brother William asked, his eyebrows arched high upon his forehead. “Who takes care of them?”
“My cousin El Chino, who lives nearby, watches over them,” Fulgencio replied. “They were my grandfather’s. He won them playing poker. But he gave them to me and let me name them. See here, they have the brand of the ranch.” He pointed at a scar on each of their rumps in the shape of the number two followed by a goblet.
Brother William traced the brand on Trueno with his fingers and whispered, “El Dos de Copas.” Then he turned with a boyish smile on his weathered face, his graying hair tussling in the Gulf breeze. “Let’s ride!”
He looked as if he were about to jump on the horse’s back that very instant, but Fulgencio restrained him.
“Brother William,” he said, “we should saddle them first.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” Brother William stammered. “Let’s saddle them up!”
Fulgencio disappeared around the corner again and emerged with a grimy, tattered saddle over each shoulder. He handed one over to the Brother and proceeded to saddle Relámpago. The brother, pretending he knew what he was doing mimicked Fulgencio’s every move, and in a few minutes they were mounted and ready to go. Fulgencio dug his heels instinctively into Relámpago’s flanks and shot out of the clearing yelping.