“Thank you, Fulgencio, for keepin’ me company.” The short order cook reached up and put his arm around Fulgencio’s left shoulder as he walked him out—bags in hand—through the vacant diner.
“Ya know, Fulgencio,” Buzzy said, throwing the door open, the tiny silver bell on the handle ringing in Fulgencio’s ears. “Ya always kept me on my toes. Ya was always able to surprise me. And that’s not easy to do to an old deckhand like me.”
Fulgencio smiled as they strolled out onto the sidewalk. The sun was setting, the breeze cooling the concrete.
He continued, “It ain’t been easy springin’ a surprise on you, though. You’re highly alert, a certified Longhorn.” Buzzy pointed toward the UT Tower looming in the orange sky.
Fulgencio admired the tower, then scanned the gate he had passed through so many times. Unlike all the others who dashed in and out, oblivious to its message, he had always repeated the words as he passed through its shadow. “Enter ye seeking knowledge,” he mouthed.
“So, tell me, Fulgencio, before you go . . .” Buzzy motioned toward the curb, his arm sweeping toward a gleaming, red 1957 Corvette Convertible with white vinyl seats and a matching cove gracing the doors. “Ya surprised?”
For an instant Fulgencio forgot his sorrow and his emptiness as his eyes widened to take in the sparkling sight of the roadster parked before the diner, glowing purplish along its curving lines beneath the neon blue of Buzzy’s sign.
Fulgencio ran his hands along the smooth curves and chrome, his mouth gaping in disbelief. No one had ever given him anything of material value, with the exception of the typewriter his father had presented him upon graduating from high school.
“It’s your graduation and going-away present!” Buzzy beamed. He had never had children of his own. Never married. Fulgencio was the closest thing to a son he had ever known. “Don’t say a word. Just take it and go. Fast and far. And don’t look back. A good sailor, like a good cowboy . . . never looks back. We just sail toward the horizon, or ride into the sunset. No regrets. No tears. No goodbyes.” Buzzy placed the keys in Fulgencio’s hand and folded it shut. “Now go. C’mon! Giddyup!”
Buzzy threw the leather bag into the back seat and closed the driver door as Fulgencio slid behind the three-spoke steering wheel. Then—as Fulgencio adjusted the chrome outside rearview mirror—he added, “Jis wait a second.” He ran back into the store, emerging moments later with a battered, oversized Polaroid camera. “Alright, jis sit there and smile!”
Fulgencio still could not find words to describe his gratitude to this man who had opened his business, his heart, and his storage room to him during these difficult and lonely years of labor and loss. He smiled his first true, warm smile in two years. It hurt as the flash popped.
“Just in case!” Buzzy hollered. And he waved from the curb beneath the sign on Guadalupe Street as Fulgencio Ramirez rode his gleaming steed into the burnt orange sunset.
Twenty-Two
He roared into town during the summer of ’63 with the top down, his hair whipping in the wind, and his tortoiseshell wayfarers masking the resentment in his eyes. He had harbored mild hopes that perhaps somehow, he could set things right with Carolina Mendelssohn, for he realized that life without her was futile. But the day of his arrival, Bobby Balmori met him with the news of Carolina’s marriage, to none other than Miguel Rodriguez Esparza. Fulgencio Ramirez tasted the putrid fruit of betrayal yet again.
“Miguel?” Fulgencio had to sit down at the Balmori’s dinner table to process the shocking blow. “Miguel?”
Fortunately, the two were alone in the house, for the torrent of Spanish curse words that spewed from Fulgencio’s mouth in response to the revelation was unprecedented.
“It’s hard to believe,” Bobby said, bringing two cold beers from the kitchen.
The two drank in silence as Fulgencio replayed the events leading up to his breakup with Carolina. “Miguel played us. All that time we trusted him. All that time I thought he was my hometown friend up at school. What if all along, he was plotting to divide us? I could kill him!” he shouted, slamming his empty beer bottle on the table.
“Don’t do anything you’ll regret,” Bobby advised him. “You’ve worked too hard and come too far. You’re an educated professional now. You’ve got to act like one.”
“But Miguel?” Fulgencio ran his fingers through his hair in exasperation. “It would make more sense to me if she’d married that Anglo soldier I saw her dancing with in her living room. That would have been what the whole town might have expected. But to marry someone no better than me? Maybe she did it to spite me.”
“Well, you disappeared on her. He was there to comfort her.”
Fulgencio frowned, glowering angrily at Bobby, “Whose side are you on, anyway?”
“There are no sides, Fulgencio,” Bobby tried to explain. “It’s over.”
From that moment on, Fulgencio went about his business with a vengeance. He realized that Bobby Balmori was right; there were no sides. There would be no competition. It was over. Carolina was a married woman. And the only solace he could draw from the fact that she had wed Miguel Rodriguez Esparza was that he did not have to feel guilt for wishing him an early death. He was a sneak and a traitor and he deserved whatever punishment La Virgencita saw fit to send his way.
He obtained a loan from La Frontera bank where Old Man Maldonado’s son now worked as a loan officer. And he found a perfect spot across from Market Square to open his own pharmacy, La Farmacia Ramirez. There, he built a little world where la raza could come in and share their woes, get some medical advice in Spanish, and fill their prescriptions, sometimes with little more than a promise to pay. “Un rinconcito de Mexico en el corazón del Valle,” Fulgencio liked to say. A little corner of Mexico in the heart of the Rio Grande Valley. And in the afternoons, the guitarists would swing by before heading off to their nightly gigs, warm up with Fulgencio, la voz de oro, the voice of gold, his heart yearning through the rafters.
The years glided by as he began his morning ritual of scanning the obituaries for those detested twenty-two letters that had ultimately spelled his demise. Though it would be a long time before he fully understood the depth and extent of Miguelito’s betrayal, he hated him for marrying her, hated him for punctuating with a period, punto final, the most glorious chapter of his life.
Through the ravages of time, the battering of the elements and unrequited emotions, he grew harder and colder. His charm remained vibrant, although his will to live was slowly fading. And what kept him most alive was his pain. He relished and he reveled in it, proclaiming it for the world to hear in the bars and at the dances, in the way he wrung every last drop of emotion from each and every note, every word, in the songs he loved to sing.