When he heard it coming, he could feel the fear racing by its side. What would he do? Who would get hurt? Who might pay the cost of his misdirected vengeance?
As a child, it had been schoolyard and neighborhood playmates, whom he had stunned with the surprising swiftness and sting of his fists. The wrong word, a miscalculated or misinterpreted glance or expression could set Fulgencio off. The normally cheerful and placid boy would erupt, punishing his victims until he was pulled away and punished himself. By the teachers with the paddle. And then again at home by his mother with the shoe. And then again by his father with the belt. Kneeling for hours outside before a bowl of frijoles, forced to stare at the food but denied for hours the permission to consume it.
He struggled to train himself to listen and look out for the rage, to cut it off at the pass and detour it away from his mind, to prevent himself from repeating his acts of hostility and violence, but more often than not, he failed. And when it caught him by surprise, in the aftermath of catastrophe, he flailed to stay afloat in a sea of drowning guilt.
It was this propensity to violence that made Fulgencio Ramirez a feared football player. Brother William had been quick to recognize the danger of Fulgencio Ramirez’s condition. One afternoon, after an especially bone-crushing football practice, Brother William spoke eloquently on the subject, pacing in front of Fulgencio, who sat hunched on the locker room bench.
“Lurking in the shadows of your soul, there is a cauldron of tumult,” he exclaimed, throwing his arms up in the air. “One way or another, that energy is going to escape. You can either channel it in a positive way, like a river that has been dammed and levied. Or you can allow it to be unleashed as a destructive force, one which kills everything in its path, like a river which has overflown, wiping out the cities built upon its banks. Which would Christ choose? Which will you choose?”
Fulgencio Ramirez was too young to take such philosophizing about his feelings to heart, but he trusted Brother William. He was willing to try anything to prevent his temper from tampering with the course he had charted toward his goals. For a brief time, it seemed to work. Whenever his anger or jealousy threatened to derail him, he focused his energy on football or work. It seemed for a moment during his sophomore and junior year that perhaps he could overcome these destructive tendencies. With Brother William’s coaching and Carolina’s companionship, Fulgencio felt invincible.
Only a person with a much broader perspective might have foreseen the drastic turn that Fulgencio’s tortured psyche might force him to take. One day, a few months after Fulgencio had begun dating Carolina, he bumped into his mother at the grocery store. Standing in the produce section, weighing avocados on the scale, his mother’s pained gaze seared his heart.
“Mamá!” Fulgencio exclaimed, yearning to be cradled in her arms just like he had as a child fleeing his night terrors.
“Fulgencio.” She nodded curtly.
It was the first time he had seen or spoken to any member of his family since the day he ceased sleeping beneath their roof months earlier.
“How is everyone, Mamá?” Fulgencio asked, stuffing the avocados into a large brown paper sack, inching closer. She wore a faded pink housedress and the weight of the world upon her shoulders. “How’s Little David?”
“Everyone’s fine,” she said. “Don’t worry about us.”
“But I do, Mamá. I worry every night while I say my prayers to the Virgencita.”
“Well, if you worry so much,” she perked up, “when are you coming home?”
Fulgencio’s face crashed to the dirty floor. He had no desire to return to that volatile world.
“I hear you’ve done very well at your fancy private school,” she said, her stark eyebrows angled high as her eyes scanned him. “You look like you’ve grown.”
“Yes, Mamá. And when I graduate I will go to the University of Texas at Austin to become a Registered Pharmacist like Mr. Arthur Mendelssohn.”
“And then?” she asked.
“Then I will marry his daughter, Carolina, and live happily ever after.” He smiled, reciting the plan he so often reviewed in his mind.
“It sounds like you have it all mapped out,” Ninfa del Rosario said slowly. “It doesn’t seem like we play a part in your life anymore.”
“This is my new life, Mamá,” he said, “but I still love you all.”
“Well,” she said, regaining her senses, “I have to hurry. You know how your father gets if dinner’s not on the table when he comes home.”
As she turned away, Fulgencio realized the extent to which he had abandoned his mother and siblings. Thinking only of himself and of his dreams, he had not stopped to consider that they were still living in that hell he’d found the courage to escape. He felt like something he’d never felt before, like a traitor.
Almost as if she’d read his thoughts, Ninfa del Rosario whipped her head around and stared at him vindictively, a flash of uncontrolled anger blazing in her dark eyes. “You can run as far away as you want, Fulgencio Ramirez Cisneros, but you will never be able to escape the dark side of who you are and where you came from.” She opened her mouth to continue speaking, but then she seemed to catch herself, her hand flying to her mouth, her teeth biting down anxiously on her lower lip right before she covered her face in dismay.
Mother and son stood mere feet apart on the grimy linoleum floor, but they felt separated by the kind of vast chasm that was carved by rivers over millennia. Their tense silence hung as heavily between them as a thick drape being lowered between stage and audience. Just when both were about to retreat to their corners and vanish into the shadows of disparate aisles, they were startled by an unnoticed eavesdropper.
“Tienes razón, Ninfa,” interjected La Señora Villarreal, a distant relative whose family also hailed from the lands near El Dos de Copas. Shaking her head despondently, she added, “El pobre niño carga la maldición. Just like his grandfather, and his grandfather’s father before him, he has abandoned his family and never looked back. Que Dios te salve, m’ijo . . .” She made the sign of the cross as her avocados rolled across the hanging scale, “If you’re not careful, the blood that you carry inside will turn those dreams that you so love into nightmares.” She watched him gloomily, her watery gray eyes glimmering like crystal marbles set in the baked stone mask of her dark skin. Nodding politely at both of them, she swept her avocados into a brown paper bag and towed her endless string of children toward the butcher counter.
The blood had fled in a panic from Fulgencio’s face, rendering him for a moment as white as a gringo. His arms hung lifeless. His mother left her cart in its place and exited without another word through the nearby entrance.
Later, in the back seat of Mr. Balmori’s borrowed car, clasped in the tender embrace of Carolina’s arms, Fulgencio asked.