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

mother, Rosalia Bacan Miranda, thirty-three, from the town of Coacoalco, outside of Mexico City. At 10:30 in the morning of the tenth day they were walking for the long last day before reaching the border, which was forty miles away. Two days earlier, they were in Agua Prieta, a Mexican town that is on the other side of a fence, and one pace in the sand, across the border from Douglas. The fence and the Border Patrol agents at Douglas force people to walk far out into the desert to go around the fortifications. The mother and children were trudging with two neighbors from their hometown. The boy could not keep up with the adults, and neither could his mother, who moaned as she lifted her foot for another step. The neighbors said they were going ahead to see if any Border Patrol agents were around. They said they would return to Rosalia and her children. Sure they would. When the sand turned to snow. They walked off. They left the mother and two children to suffer through hours of hot dirt and the sweeping bitter fields of unyielding knee-high thorn bushes. In the distance on three sides, dark mountainscrowded into clouds. Ahead was a sky the color of heat. The mother, Rosalia, had brought only a large bottle of water; most of it was gone, and though she was dehydrated, she took only tiny gulps of water and gave the rest to her children.
    The blood of an adult at all times needs five to six liters of water, and when there is less, the vessels contract, the kidneys become dangerously inactive and simultaneously the heart deals with less blood for all the body. Sometime soon, the problem is solved by either fluid or death.
    That day it was about 110 degrees everywhere, but out in the desert, where the land throws off heat that mixes with the rays of the sun, the temperature is measured by what it does to people. Rosalia sat, then tumbled full-length into the red sand. Her breathing came from a strangled throat. The daughter tried to give her water, but the mother said no. Her hand waved weakly. You and the boy take the water. She passed out.
    The daughter thought she had fainted. She shook the last drops of water onto the mother’s cracked lips. The mother didn’t respond and the water dripped from her lips. Ana-Laura told her brother to stay with the mother. She walked through thorn bushes until she came to a brown rutted road. She saw and heard nothing. Suddenly, a gas company truck came along and pulled over. The driver called the Border Patrol.
    At the hospital, somebody called the Mexican consul, Miguel Escobar Valdez, in his office in Douglas. Now he is standing in the doorway to this first-floor room at Copper Queen Hospital in Bisbee, gathering himself for the sounds coming down the hall.
    The girl, Ana-Laura, walks alongside the doctor. She is short and very dark. Her eyes are dry and fixed straight ahead. She has on a T-shirt and jeans. The tennis shoes are caked with mud.
    The consul is going to say something to her as she passes, but he does not. I know this one in my heart, he tells himself. She will do this her way.
    Ana-Laura stands in front of the brother, whose legs dangle from the examining table.
    “Mama murio,” she tells the little face.
    Escobar sees that the boy doesn’t understand.
    “Mama murio,” Ana-Laura tells the boy again.
    He shows nothing.
    She leans to him and whispers.
    The boy moves just this little bit.
    She leans forward again and whispers.
    Does he nod?
    I am not about to get near her, Escobar tells himself. The nurse and doctor keep their distance. They understand that these are sacred murmurings, not for their ears.
    The girl steps back and looks steadily and solemnly at Escobar.
    She has told her brother that the mother is dead. Now what would you have me do?
    She says to the brother, “Ven para aca.” Come over here.
    He slides off the table and stands next to her. She walks over to Escobar. The boy is with her. The boy looks at her, expecting a decision from her. Now she is the