“Then that’s what I’ll be!” Fulgencio Ramirez uttered in self-recognition and wonderment.
Mr. Mendelssohn startled a bit and leaned back, stroking his smooth chin. “It takes a lot of education.”
Fulgencio frowned. The public schools in La Frontera were so impoverished he often went without textbooks to read or a desk in which to sit. “Where did you go to school, sir?”
“San Juan del Atole and then the University of Texas at Austin.” He assessed him skeptically. “But those are expensive schools.”
“I will find a way, sir. If you hire me, I’ll save all my earnings for school. Will you give me a job here in your store, so I can learn?”
“Well,” the pharmacist pondered, surveying the piles of half-opened boxes hiding behind the counter. “I do need a stock boy.”
“When can I start? It’s summer vacation, and I’ve got time.”
“How about tomorrow? What’s your name?”
“Fulgencio Ramirez.”
“Full-hen-see-oh,” Mr. Mendelssohn mouthed slowly, committing the name to memory.
“It’s an honor to meet you,” Fulgencio said. “I’ll be here bright and early tomorrow morning.”
With the pleasantries dispensed, and his first business deal closed, Fulgencio thanked Mr. Mendelssohn and bolted out the door, running all the way home to tell his mother the news. He hummed “Don’t Be Cruel” as he passed a blur of bustling downtown shops and their shiny storefront windows: Zepeda’s Hardware, J.C. Penney, Sears & Roebuck, Maldonado’s café. He picked up his pace as he passed the line of moviegoers waiting to catch the evening feature at the Victoria Theater on Fourteenth Street. And he was practically running with excitement by the time downtown gave way to his dilapidated neighborhood. Hurriedly, he turned onto dusty Garfield Street with the faded clapboard shacks crammed with half-naked kids, rib-cage dogs searching desperately for a scrap, flaccid abuelos and abuelas dozing in metal rocking chairs on sagging porches. He burst into the cozy kitchen with the smell of refried beans thick in the hot and humid air, blurting out his news to his disheveled mother.
“¡Mamá! ¡Mamá! ¡No lo vas a creer ! I got a job . . . I . . .”
His brother Fernando was wrapped around his mother’s right leg, sucking on his thumb and crying, tears and dirt running down his ruddy face. She held a stirring spoon in one hand and the baby, Little David, in the other. Her eyes burned like coals as the rage that had been smoldering within her for the three and a half decades of her hard and tortured life drowned out every syllable of her son’s rantings and ravings.
“¿Trajiste mi medicina? I don’t see a bag. Where’s my back medicine?”
His frantic words (“I’m going to be a farmacéutico . . .”) trailed off, falling clumsily to the wooden floor like a child’s broken toy as he realized in horror what he had done.
“You forgot! ¡Eres un idiota! You can’t do anything right!” she screamed, bearing down upon him.
Even the wood tasted like burnt beans—in the corner of the cramped kitchen, under the rickety table they ate at—where he landed after the blow. Burnt beans and blood. Maybe a little dirt. Salty. Or were those just his tears? Splinters bristled like porcupine quills on his forearms from the violent slide across the floor. She must have hit him with the spoon too. Boy, the woman could hit. Not as hard as Papá, but harder than most men. He knew. He’d been in more than a few fistfights in his day. All he could do was crouch there beneath the table and wait for the storm to blow over. Pots and pans clanged. His mother yelled. Babies cried. Screeching. Shrieking. And he didn’t even wonder his usual beneath-
the-kitchen-table thoughts about whether his dad would let him have it again when he got home, and whether it would be with the hand or the belt, with or without clothes on. He just smiled dreamily through the bitter taste in his mouth. He bet Carolina never had to go through this. She probably didn’t even know the taste of thrice-refried beans. No señor. All he could picture her eating were vanilla milkshakes so thick she required a silver spoon to scoop them into her mouth. There, in the elegant dining room of her two-story home with the white picket fence, surrounded by well-dressed family like he saw on the TV sets at his friends’ houses. With her daddy’s brand-new Buick shining in the driveway, rosebushes blooming beneath her window. And someday he could have it all. Because he was going to be a pharmacist too. So he could take care of her. And give her the life he hadn’t even dreamed of until then. Not this life of a pobre méndigo dozing off on a dirty floor. No, the life of creamy vanilla milkshakes and gleaming soda fountains. His fantasies drowning out the din of the tumultuous household, he slipped into sleep to the sound of Elvis echoing in his ears: “Please forget my past. The future looks bright ahead . . . I don’t want no other love. Uh, baby, it’s still you I’m thinking of.”
Three
At 1448 Garfield Street, Fulgencio’s mother, Ninfa del Rosario Cisneros de Ramirez, still lived there all these years later, surrounded by sons who had never amounted to anything. On a compressed block of receding huts and shanties, crammed between the rushing traffic of Fourteenth Street and International Boulevard. It had once been a quiet neighborhood of decent, hardworking Mexican immigrant families, people searching for a better way for their children. It had once been a sleepy little village, dirt road, the cry of roosters punctuating the dewy dawn. Now the state was erecting an elevated highway right over the block. The newspaper said it would connect Fourteenth and International with the Free Trade Highway running between Mexico and the United States. Instead of choking up Fourteenth Street every night with diesel fumes and smokestack filth, the colorful parade of tractor trailers would slingshot over that loop, down the Highway, onto a Free Trade Bridge to the south, over the Rio Grande and into Mexico. But in the meantime, the last five years, to be exact, dust and caliche polluted the once-clean air of his youth, blanketing the tiny homes and decrepit cars with the fine, powdery soot of construction. The rising shadows of the cement behemoth loomed over 1448 Garfield, threatening to block out the sun fully and forever upon completion. The gaping jaws of steel girders hovered overhead, promising change, politicians calling it progress.
But this morning, Fulgencio scarcely noticed the mess, the diaper-clad children slopping in the puddles of mud and cement muck, the flea-bitten, mange-ridden dog lying dead on the cracked, weed-infested sidewalk. The rattle and roll of his 1978 Toyota pickup deteriorated into a tired cough and sigh as he slowed down and stopped steps from the waist-high chain link before the old house. No, today was different after all. No time to let the thoughts wander. Just time for action. The metal pickup door groaned shut, the chain link gate swung open and he strode toward the porch. Stetson hat pulled low over his brow. Khaki coat flowing like a cape in the chilly Gulf breeze. The mist of a dragon enveloping him.