The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez by Jimmy Breslin Read Free Book Online

freight train. Others flattened themselves against the side of the trestle. Four died.
    Silvia went on the railroad tracks, stepping from one tie to another, free of the fear of snakes and with no Border Patrol in sight. They walked that way for an hour, she remembers, and then one of them turned in the darkness. “Tren!” They hadn’t bothered to look, and they could hear no sound even in the stillness of the night. Silvia remembers that the one big light seemed a long way off. People sauntered off the tracks. She looked as she was getting off and suddenly the light was closer. She jumped off the tracks and went down the embankment just as the train moved through anight that thwarted depth perception. Two engines raced by furiously, and behind them came freight cars whose wheels squealed as if they were being ground. She turned icy as she realized how close the train had been. And now that she was off the tracks, she had to worry about snakes again. Anything you can see that looks different is a snake, she told herself. But mostly she could not make out the ground itself and stepped blindly.
    At dawn, the group stopped while the guide looked at his watch and muttered. A truck was supposed to be here, he said. They waited for two hours. Then in the first heat of morning, Silvia walked into a town with her uncle and Moisés, Eduardo’s cousin, to buy food. Suddenly a white Border Patrol van came onto the street. The three crouched behind bushes—big bushes that could hide them all day, Silvia thought. Some moments later, she heard a sound alongside her. Next to her now was the polished boot of an immigration agent. Several Border Patrol cops with guns in their hands stood over them. They put Silvia, her uncle, and Moisés into the van and drove them through the border station over the small bridge across the river and threw them out in Matamoros.
    “Don’t ever come back or we’ll put you in jail,” they told her.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    I n San Matías and the thousand other Mexican towns where hope sits in a fading light, the young never did consider the idea of danger of going north to the United States. Their destination is the Job, not the town or city. And ahead of them, a country fearful and hateful of them has its fences up at the logical crossing points: Tijuana into San Diego on one coast, and through Nogales and Douglas in Arizona and Laredo in Texas and on into El Paso in the middle of the Southwest, where the Mexicans are pushed into the desert as if they are going through a turnstile. After that, they walk until they make it or die. They walk for the Job. There is no time to the Job. It is before all and after all.
    They come across the riverbanks and the dry borderlands, these people who want to work, who want to scrub floors and clean pots, or mow lawns, or live in shacks alongside the farms they work on, or show up every day in the grimmest of factory jobs, or wash dishes in the coffee shops of the country—or work construction in Brooklyn for low wages on jobs on which white union members are paid five times as much.
    And trying to get there, in all the dust from the wind and the powdered earth rising from their feet, crystals of air snap and unseen fingers high up in the dust clouds suddenly determine the fate on the ground. Nobody disputes this. It happens too often.
    Bleached bones were found in the desert outside of Dateland, Arizona. A birth certificate in the sand alongside the bones identified Oscar Peña-Moreno, who had left Guasave, Sinoloa, in May 1996 with two lifelong friends. Their trip north would logically have been through El Paso, but with that town now heavily patrolled, they must have headed west. The three were married to sisters. They were not heard from again. Agents came upon the bones on December 4, 1997, and brought them to the coroner in Pima County, which is Tucson. Of course the flesh was no more. Desert hogs, coyotes, and birds had eaten all. Oscar Peña-Moreno’s wallet, which