“¡Más loco que una cabra!” yelled Eleodoro. Crazier than a goat.
Fulgencio shook his head in disappointment. He seemed to be getting closer every time, but still it wasn’t enough to repair the seemingly permanent damage that his cousin had sustained over years of lunacy.
El Primo Loco Gustavo seemed to have forgotten all about his near recovery and the effort that had gotten him there. He simply oscillated back and forth on his chair, fiddling with his horn-rimmed glasses and counting the bus riders through the storefront windows. “Seventeen,” he said. “Seventeen . . . on average, that’s 4.538 percent of all people riding a bus in La Frontera.”
Fulgencio shook his head and returned to filling prescriptions. The second hand thundered on. Little David limped in through the back door with a broad grin on his face.
“She took the letter,” Little David told his brother.
“She did?”
“Yes, right there on the porch. She took it. She said, ‘Thanks, Little David.’ And she went back inside.”
Fulgencio’s hopes soared to new heights. He surveyed his pathetic entourage. Eleodoro the Cabrito Man was assembling himself a cabrito taco. El Gordo Jimenez snored sonorously, his triple chin jiggling on his chest. El Primo Loco Gustavo struggled to catch a fly with chopsticks, missing badly because of his incessant swaying.
Fulgencio’s eyes landed on the typewriter. This was proving to be a long year, but maybe if he wrote Carolina once a week, it would pass more quickly. He resolved to do so, patting Little David on the back and sitting down at the idle typewriter. He wished it were a week later already. The second hand thundered and echoed. El Primo Loco Gustavo muttered something about flies outnumbering humans and feasting on their own regurgitation.
Fulgencio sighed: “What the hell, I may as well start writing now.”
Fifteen
He thought of her that day, at the onset of the blistering summer of ’59, as he stood on the blacktop headed north out of town. Arm outstretched. Thumb reaching for sky. His grandfather’s worn leather suitcase in one hand. His typewriter case on the asphalt.
He had bid his farewells the day before, making the rounds at 1448 Garfield Street, Mendelssohn’s Drugstore, and Carolina’s house.
He hoped to leave without much fanfare, promising himself that he would not shed a tear. And he managed as much when he said goodbye to his parents, as well as when he shook Mr. Mendelssohn’s hand at the drugstore, refusing to accept the wad of bills his boss pressed into his palm.
“I just want to help you, son,” Mr. Mendelssohn said.
“Thank you, sir,” Fulgencio replied. “You’ve helped me enough already. I’m going to do this on my own. I am eternally indebted to you already.”
Mr. Mendelssohn shook his head, smiling, “You’ve always been different, Fulgencio. Despite what some people may say, that’s why I like you.”
After a tight embrace, Fulgencio looked him straight in the eyes, “No, Mr. Mendelssohn. That’s why you respect me.”
As Fulgencio walked toward the door he had first stumbled through three years earlier, the clerks all shook Fulgencio’s hand as Old Vera wept over the soda counter. With one hand on the door, Fulgencio turned back and waved, a broad smile on his face. His voice rose like an angel flying homeward to heaven: “¡Ay, ay, ay, ay . . . Canta y no llores . . . porque cantando se alegran . . . cielito lindo . . . los corazones!” The store came alive with cheers: “Eso Fulgencio! Make us proud! We’ll be waiting for you!” The quivering smile on Mr. Mendelssohn’s face warmed Fulgencio’s heart as he headed out into the punishing sun.
His parting from Carolina was not as easy. His wish to somehow avoid an overt display of emotion proved completely unrealistic. From the moment she opened the door in a simple white dress, his heart ached.
“You look like an angel,” he told her.
“An angel who is about to lose her wings,” she cried, her tears beckoning his own sorrow forth.
“We swore we wouldn’t lose each other,” he said. “We have to get through, just this one year.”
“And we will.” She set her jaw with determination. “I’ll be waiting for you, Fully.”
He’d never forget her standing in the doorway as he finally left, murky tears and mascara streaks staining her once pristine dress, her grief-filled eyes glistening like shattered amber oozing forth her pain.
The heat rose in waves from the blacktop as Fulgencio wiped his brow. That morning it had still been dark outside when he awoke in the bed next to Bobby Balmori’s. His bag lay neatly packed already at the foot of the bed. He dressed himself in the clothes of the day, chinos and a loose aqua-colored bowling shirt with wide white stripes running down either side of the front. His black, wavy mane was slicked back, and he tucked his tortoiseshell wayfarers with the green lenses into his breast pocket. The house still lay in the silence of slumber as he walked out the back door through the yard and into the alleyway. The sun rose as he reached the outskirts of town. And by the time he was halfway to Austin, sitting on the hard, rattling metal bed of a merciful pickup truck, he had changed out of his wannabe college-boy duds into his traditional, cooler Mexican clothes: khaki pants, white guayabera, straw cowboy hat. Few of the boys his age dressed like that. It was too Mexican. His brothers Nicolas and Fernando taunted him, saying he looked like a ranchero. But he didn’t care. He was comfortable this way. After all, who cared how he dressed? He was going to the University of Texas at Austin to become a pharmacist, not to win a fashion contest.
The farmer that picked him up on the northern edges of La Frontera was headed to Dallas, so it was no big deal for him to drop Fulgencio off smack in the middle of Austin as the setting sun cast its burning orange glow on the monumental UT tower.
Fulgencio’s wide eyes surveyed the town as he walked toward the campus. To him this was a metropolis. The tower was the tallest building he had ever seen. Gleaming cars filled the streets, baby blues with white vinyl, lime greens and chrome, candy apple red. Crisp, clean-cut boys waved and hollered from their ragtops at the impeccable sorority girls with wispy golden hair batting eyelashes in their convertibles.
He marveled at the tall, brick buildings of downtown. He wondered where he might spend his first night in this new world. And he didn’t even notice the puzzled looks on passersby as they stared at this lost manchild from another land.
At the edge of the campus, his eyes lit up at the sight of a massive gate with the University’s shield hanging overhead. “Enter here ye seeking knowledge,” the stone spoke in chiseled tones beneath the emblem.
Fulgencio looked around. He crossed the street and stood beneath the gate, his head arching backward as he took in the looming shadow of its greatness. He mouthed the words as he stepped through the gateway, “Enter here ye seeking knowledge.” He smiled. He felt smarter already. Sure, he was tired, thirsty, and covered by a thick layer of dried sweat and dust from the long ride up, but he didn’t feel that now. He felt like a college man, a Longhorn, a pharmacist to be.