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

contained his identification, was found in a pair of pants recovered with the bones. For some reason, the coroner cremated the bones and held them in an urn for the family. The people in Guasave pooled whatever money they had and sent the mother of Oscar Peña-Moreno and his wife, Ramona, to Tucson. She took the urn from the coroner and stood motionless with it. Then she put it down on a counter.
    “This is not my son,” she said.
    The coroner explained that of course it was her son. Here is his birth certificate.
    “This is not my son,” she said.
    She went back to Guasave.
    Victor Chacon, who is with the federal public defender’s office in Tucson, shrugged when he caught the case. This would not be the first time that something in the sky was right and everybody here was wrong. Later, the widow of Oscar Peña-Moreno, whose name is Ramona Quintero, said that of course the mother was right in refusing the ashes. “She prayed to the saint,” she said. “She awaits his return. He is alive somewhere.”
    After which, in the matter of Peña-Moreno’s ashes, he found itunsurprising to receive unrelenting pressure from the mother, who said her son and the two who had been with him were working in a logging camp in Utah.
    Victor Chacon mistrusted the identification found in the desert. He stated in his report, “Illegal immigrants are often accosted by bands of robbers in remote areas. The robbers make the victims remove all of their clothing. This way the robbers know that the victims are not hiding anything of value. The coroner stated that because clothing gets mixed up, identifications are lost or wind up in other clothes. He states that he has had two cases recently in which the dead person was carrying someone else’s identification.”
    Before the cremation, an autopsy had showed the victim had sixteen teeth in the upper jaw. Peña-Moreno’s mother said that one day he had jumped on a bike and had gone to have a throbbing upper molar pulled. She didn’t know the dentist. Chacon called every dentist in Peña-Moreno’s area. None kept records. His phone calls and the realization that many were dying unidentified have now caused dentists to begin keeping records. However, a woman dentist said that she remembered taking the molar from Peña-Moreno’s upper jaw. There was no evidence of any missing molar in the remains examined in Tucson.
    The mother was right. The sky had told her so.
    For Silvia and the others from San Matías, their being women didn’t hinder them from attempting the crossing. The tragedy of the border could be seen on the television now and then, but not enough to stop them. There were only some distinctions that caused special attention: a pregnancy or a babe in arms. Otherwise, women went walking the same as men under a pitiless sun that raises temperatures to 140 degrees.
    T HE NURSE STANDS in the hospital in Bisbee with a hand on the little boy’s shoulder as he sits on the examining table. The boy’s feet dangle in muddy ripped little tennis shoes.
    A nurse looks at the thin man in the doorway, sees his bleak look, and says nothing. He has on a short-sleeved shirt and tie.
    The man has been trying to think of something he can do for this kid, and when he sees these ripped and muddy tennis shoes he tells himself, new shoes.
    Now he hears people coming along the hall, and his mind out-races the sound of their feet. He knows exactly what it means, and he doesn’t want to deal with it. At sixty-five, Miguel Escobar Valdez, the Mexican consul in Douglas, Arizona, has been everywhere for his government. He was in Chicago when they reassigned him here. He is calm enough to be helpful at a moment like this, in this room in the Copper Queen Hospital in Bisbee, the next town up from Douglas, a town of a few empty streets that are the last ones in America.
    He is here because this little boy, Carlos Bacan, five, started out ten days ago with his eleven-year-old sister, Ana-Laura Bacan, and their