Nine
Fulgencio reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out the tiny bag containing the gold medallion. He let it slip out onto his hardened hand. He stood in the entrance to his drugstore with the door locked behind him. Remembering. Wishing he could change the past. Twenty-five miserable years. Nearly three decades without her. How could he ever make up for the wasted time? And would she even allow him to try? At the campo santo, she had cried out in pain, accusing him of ruining her life. He could taste the bitterness of loss in his mouth. It was a flavor only tequila could mask. He ambled slowly up behind the counter to the office he kept in the back storage room, piled high with paperwork. Pulling a bottle of tequila out from his desk, he served himself a shot and leaned back into his wooden armchair. Mr. Mendelssohn’s office had been much like this, he realized, a modest, cramped, and unadorned space as good for reflection as it was for getting work done.
Mr. Mendelssohn. May he rest in peace. Back at the cemetery, after Carolina’s limo had disappeared, Fulgencio had felt obligated to pay his respects to his old boss. Strolling somberly through the graveyard, Fulgencio made a beeline for the plot. He walked with the surety of someone who’d made the pilgrimage many times before.
His mentor had died too young, of cancer, about five years earlier. He remembered still opening the paper on that bleak winter day, alone in the shadowy damp chill of the drugstore at dawn.
Arthur Mendelssohn, dead at the age of sixty-two, survived by his wife and daughter. In lieu of flowers, donations could be sent to San Juan del Atole or the American Cancer Society.
Arthur Mendelssohn. Seventeen letters. Not the ones he’d been searching for during his daily ritual.
He had not attended any of the services for he did not wish to harm himself with the sight of Carolina standing next to her husband. He had, however, visited the gravesite over the years, wishing he could speak with Mr. Mendelssohn again, the way he continued to do with the spirits of his grandfather and Brother William. But he was never there. According to Fernando Cisneros and Brother William, ghosts demanded a particularly compelling reason to materialize. And when they did manage it, they did not loiter in mass, commercialized graveyards. They preferred to remain close to their bones only if they were buried in a place of personal significance to them. This was one reason why Brother William had been resolute in his wish to die—and be buried—at El Dos de Copas. He had figured it was a great place to remain for an eternity. And he had also harbored a hunch there was a mystery to the place that might provide him the kind of challenge he would need to avoid boredom in the afterlife. Plus, it came with the added bonus of open fields, a pond, the Gulf breeze, horses, a drinking and gambling buddy in Fulgencio’s grandfather, and the expressive Virgencita on the wall.
Unfortunately, Fulgencio figured this meant that in order to spend time with Mr. Mendelssohn’s ghost, he would have to be allowed entry into the special sanctum of his home, the one he had so often picked Carolina up from on their dates, the one with the rosebushes under the window, the one where he had sung so many serenatas for Carolina bathed in moonlight and backed up by Fat Victor, Bobby Balmori, and Joe Lopez on guitar. He had hoped maybe now that reconciliation with Carolina was a possibility, he might gain that access and see him once again. But the brief encounter with her at her husband’s funeral had dealt a harsh blow to his dreams and desires, making him wonder if they might be mere delusions. It seemed Carolina did not have reconciliation on her mind. At least not yet.
Strange how life worked out, he thought, his eyes skimming over the dusty drugstore shelves. It was night now. The downtown streets had fallen back into their troubled sleep. The cross-dressers would be out roaming soon, their high heels clicking and echoing through the alleys. Cats banging through trash cans. Police sirens wailing their nightly lament. He had worked so hard to become a pharmacist. He had tried to follow Mr. Mendelssohn’s footsteps. All for the love of one woman. And he had missed the mark completely. He had accomplished and acquired all the things he had believed would be necessary to win and keep Carolina’s love. And yet he’d lost her, not because the challenges of achieving the American dream had proven insurmountable, but because his temperament had mixed toxically—and explosively—with the haunting pull of his family’s troubled past.
El Chotay cleared his throat and coughed from his rickety metal chair in the corner, reading Fulgencio’s mind. “Don’t be so hard on yourself, patrón.”
Fulgencio nearly fell out of his chair. “Chotay. You almost scared me to death. I’ve told you not to do that.”
“Well, maybe that’s exactly why I do it.” He flashed his jack-o’-lantern grin. “Maybe I want to scare you to death so I can put you out of your misery. If you were a horse, I’d just shoot you.”
“Pinche Chotay.” Fulgencio smiled, sipping his tequila. “Thanks for coming. I could use an old friend right now.”
“Tell me about it,” El Chotay said. “You look bad, boss. Amolado.”
Fulgencio looked at his old sidekick with more than a tinge of sadness in his eyes. Pobre Chotay. Talk about amolado. He was a wreck, looking just the way he did on the morning of his death two years earlier.
Obviously, El Chotay was short. Hence the nickname, “El Shorty,” which—when pronounced by the mostly Spanish-speaking coworkers, fieldhands, truckers, and drugstore clients that knew him—became “El Chotay.” Sí, señor. Short. Thin as a rail. His dark, flaccid skin was that of a ninety-year-old woman. But he was just one year younger than Fulgencio Ramirez. His clothes always hung on him several sizes too big, presumably because he kept losing weight and couldn’t afford to keep his wardrobe in step with his deteriorating physique. In his postmortem era, he sported brown polyester pants that looked like they were always about to fall off and a navy blue T-shirt with paint splattered all over it. His wily black hair streaked with gray, his bushy eyebrows and mustache punctuating his angular and animated face. Depending on El Chotay’s condition at any given time, his looks reminded Fulgencio of either a dog, a weasel, or a raccoon. Black circles beneath his charcoal eyes. But no one had worked as hard as El Chotay in his time, nor for as little money. El Chotay, along with many of Fulgencio Ramirez’s followers and hangers-on, was a throwback to the loyal henchmen and vassals of medieval times. One day in the prime of Fulgencio’s youth and business career, El Chotay simply materialized at the perfect time. Business was overflowing at the drugstore, the customers were lined up and down the aisles, pending deliveries were piled up to the ceiling in white bags, and Fulgencio was all alone. The delivery boy and the storefront clerk had both called in sick. It was the middle of flu season, and everyone in town was ailing, including his own staff. Surveying the chaos in Fulgencio’s store, El Chotay walked in and climbed up behind the counter as if he’d worked there all his life.
“All right, boss, what do you want me to do first?” he’d asked nonchalantly.