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Her destination was a tiny brick bungalow in a neighborhood of
tiny brick bungalows. The neighborhood was entirely Mexican-
American and it seemed like 90 percent of its population was
clustered around this particular house. She had to park her car a
couple of blocks away and excuse her way through the crowd until
she reached the epicenter.

The center of attention wasn't the house itself; it was a pickup
truck parked in its driveway. A yellow Chevy pickup, at least
twenty years old, rusted in many places, with a white fiberglass
camper cap attached to the back, held on to the box by means of four C-clamps. The truck's tailgate and the rear window of the
camper cap was spread open like a pair of jaws to provide a view
inside: a couple of bulging Hefty bags filled with clothes, and a
flannel sleeping bag, zipped open to expose its colorful lining
(mallards in flight over a northern wetland) and spread out flat on
the rusted steel floor to soften its corrugations. There were a couple
of pillows shoved into the corners and some wadded-up sheets and
blankets.

And there were a lot of flowers too. A number of bouquets had
been tossed in on top of the sleeping bag. More bunches were
leaning against the side of the truck or resting on the roof of the
fiberglass cap.

At the very center of the action were two men whom Eleanor
recognized. One of them was a tall, good-looking young man in
jeans and a blazer. With his black ponytail he could have passed for
a full-blooded Apache. This was Ray del Valle. He was talking to a local newspaper reporter who covered the Chicano affairs beat.

Eleanor didn't pay much attention to them. She just made her
way through the crowd, trying to suppress a gag reflex that was gradually rising in her throat. She got close enough that she was
practically standing in between the two men, staring into the maw
of the pickup truck.

Last night, the four children of Carlos and Anna Ramirez had
lain down on that sleeping bag to sleep while their parents, sitting up front in the truck's cab, had driven them across the high plains
southeast of Denver. They had gone to sleep quickly, and slept
well, not because it was cozy but because the back of the truck was
full of carbon monoxide leaking from the truck's exhaust. Three of
the children had died. One was in the hospital in critical condition,
with irreparable brain damage. Carlos and Anna Ramirez had not known what was going on until they had arrived here, early this morning, at the home of Anna's sister.

She knew all these things from her phone conversation with Roger. He had run through the story quickly and tersely and she
had listened in much the same spirit, looking at it as a political
problem to be solved. But now that she was here in the middle of
a sniffling and wailing crowd, looking into the bed where the innocents had died, the emotional impact suddenly hit her like a truck. Eleanor put her hand over her mouth, closed her eyes, and
tried to suppress the urge to become physically ill.

"Eleanor," Ray del Valle said, "come on, let's talk somewhere else. You don't want to dwell on this." Eleanor felt Ray's arm tightening around her shoulders. He led her around the truck and
into the backyard, gently but surely, like a ballroom dancer leading
his date around the floor.

She took the opportunity to rest her head on his chest for just a
moment. She didn't exactly cry, though tears were in her eyes.

"It's a hard thing for a parent to look at, isn't it?" Ray said. "It's
our worst nightmare come to life. Like an image from the
Holocaust."

Eleanor took a half step away from Ray and drew a few deep
breaths. "Are the parents inside?" she said.

"Yes. Anna has been sedated. Carlos is drinking a lot and vowing to kill himself. Anna's family is trying to keep him on an even keel.
It's very difficult."

"I heard that there is a problem with the surviving child's
medical care and I am here to inform the Ramirez family that
Senator Marshall is at their service in whatever capacity is needed.
Do you think that you could go in and relay that message to them?"

Ray snorted with just the tiniest hint of amusement and glanced
down at his wristwatch. "The Senator runs a tight ship. As always."

Ray went into the house and came out a couple of minutes later
with Anna's sister Pilar. From a distance Pilar seemed utterly stonefaced, but from arm's length her eyes were swollen and red
and she looked stunned, rather than impassive.

"I told her what you said," Ray said. "She has authorized me to explain the child's medical situation."

"Okay."

"When they arrived this morning and found their four children unresponsive, they called the ambulance. Three children were pronounced dead at the scene. The fourth, the eight-year-old girl
Bianca, still had a pulse. The ambulance took her straight to
Arapahoe Highlands Medical Center."

"Why there?" Highlands was a private hospital, well endowed,
certainly not the closest to this bungalow. Not the kind of place
where migrant workers ended up.

"Carbon monoxide poisoning was obviously the culprit here.
And Highlands has a hyperbaric oxygen chamber. It is the best
treatment. So that's where they went. The emergency room staff at
Highlands treated Bianca but they refused to admit her for
hyperbaric oxygen treatment. Instead they dumped her back to
Denver County, where she is now."

"How can they justify that?"

Ray just shrugged. "As we say in the Third World,
Qui
é
n sabe?"

Something clicked in the back of Eleanor's head. Maybe it was
her temper breaking. She squared her shoulders and flared her
nostrils. "Would you please come with me, Ray?" she said.

"Okay. Where we going?"

Eleanor realized that she didn't even know. "We're just going to take care of a few things, that's all."

The two of them got into Eleanor's car and headed in the
direction of Denver County Hospital, were Ray knew some
doctors.

"This happens hundreds of times every year," Ray said. "All over North America."

"What happens?"

"Exactly this situation. Remember what a migrant worker is:
someone who migrates. These people cover a lot of territory and
the vehicle of choice is a pickup truck. It's always the same: the
parents sit up front in the cab and the kids lie down in the back and
try to sleep. The exhaust comes up through holes in the floor, or
else it leaks through the crack under the tailgate. In warm weather
they open the windows and survive. But if it's chilly, like it was last
night, they close the cab up and suffocate."

"You'd think that they would have gotten some indication
before. That their kids would have gotten headaches or felt
woozy."

Ray snorted. "If you drove for eight or ten hours in the back of
a truck, you'd feel that way even without carbon monoxide."

At the county hospital, Ray tracked down Dr. Escobedo, a
young internist who was looking after Bianca. They all sat around
a table in the corner of the cafeteria.

"Should Bianca be here, or at Arapahoe Highlands?" Eleanor
said.

"At Highlands," Dr. Escobedo said without hesitation, and without rancour.

"Why?"

"They have a hyperbaric oxygen chamber."

"And that is the standard treatment for this kind of thing?"

"Not exactly," he said. "That's the problem."

"What do you mean, not exactly?"

"Well, for example, there are a lot of migrant workers up in
Washington State, and this kind of thing has happened up there on
a fairly regular basis. Now, there is a hospital in Seattle that has a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, which is basically used to decompress
divers with the bends. When you put a patient with carbon
monoxide poisoning into such a chamber, it helps get oxygen into
their tissues, which is what such a patient needs. So people up there have learned that when an unconscious kid is pulled out of the back
of a pickup truck, you send them straight to the one hospital with
the hyperbaric chamber. But this is kind of a new practice, and in
the eyes of some, it's experimental."

"And that's what the people at Highlands think."

"Exactly. If this treatment were standard medical practice, they'd
have no excuse not to admit Bianca. But because they can label it experimental, there's no way they'll admit her. Because they know
they'll lose money."

"Why does Denver have a chamber like this?" Ray said. "We
don't have many scuba divers around here."

"It's used for diabetics and other people with poor circulation,"
Escobedo said. "So it's popular in areas with a large middle-aged
and elderly population that's well insured. It's an expensive
treatment with a high profit margin for the hospital. Which is why
they don't want to tie up the chamber with a charity case."

"Okay, I get the picture," Eleanor said. "Now, who is in charge of Arapahoe Highlands Medical Center?"

"The chief administrator is Dr. Morgan," Escobedo said.

Eleanor stood up and yanked her jacket off the back of the chair.
"Let's go kick his white ass," she said.

Ray and Escobedo looked astonished and glanced at each other, a bit nervously. "You might want to call ahead and find out where
he is first," Ray suggested.

"I'm sure that an important man like Dr. Morgan has a secretary
who is very good at putting people like me off
- over the phone," Eleanor said. "The more I get in that secretary's face, the more
helpful she'll be."

"This may not be an appropriate time for me to get political," Ray
said, after they had been driving in silence for a few minutes,
humming down Broadway toward the rolling, prosperous southern
suburbs. "But this is going to be a long drive and I can't help
myself."

"Shoot," Eleanor said. " It would be unlike you not to get
political."

"Okay. Well, there is one question you have forgotten to ask me
about this whole affair."

"What question is that?"

"Why did the Ramirezes suddenly jump into their truck and
take a six-hour drive across the prairie in the middle of the night?"

Eleanor thought that one over, feeling slightly embarrassed. "I
thought you said this was what migrant workers do. They migrate."

"They're human beings," Ray said.

"I know that," Eleanor said, somewhat testily. Ray had a
tendency to be a little too obnoxious in his political correctness.

"So they have to sleep. They generally do it at night. And they
drive during the daytime, like everyone else."

"Okay. So tell me, Ray, why did the Ramirezes suddenly get it
into their heads to jump into their truck and go on a long night
drive?"

"Because a couple of months ago, after the State of Union
address, there was a stock market crash."

Eleanor looked over at Ray. He was smiling back at her
mysteriously.

"I'll bite," she said.

"The capital markets crashed. People sold their stocks and
needed somewhere else to put their money. In times of economic
uncertainty, people tend to invest in commodities. So, on the
Chicago Board of Trade, the price of beef went up. Raising cattle
became a money-making proposition. But it takes time to raise cattle, you don't make a full-grown steer overnight. So cattlemen
in this state began to raise a larger number of calves than usual.

"In the expectation that they'd be able to make more money off them when they were full-grown," Eleanor said. She did not know
the first thing about ranching but this concept seemed simple
enough.

"Right. Well, by now, these calves are starting to get big and
starting to need more food - you know how growing children are.
In this part of the country, cattle graze - they eat grass out on the
range. Much of the range land is owned by the federal
Government, and cattlemen are allowed to graze their cattle on that
land.