The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez (6 page)

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 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 mountains
crowded 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 mother.

Escobar asks her where she is from and for the names of her relatives, and the girl tells him that he must call her aunt in her hometown. The girl has the phone number memorized.

The nurses show them a table of food in another room. The boy sits down and eats. The girl wants only iced tea and then drinks only some of it.

In the town where they come from, people collected money to send the uncle to Douglas. The consulate paid for the mortuary dressing of the mother, and she is now being shipped home. The uncle and two children go across the border to the shabby bus station at Agua Pietra for the long ride to Hermosillo, and a plane to Mexico City and home.

Escobar stands at the bus as the family gets on. He pats the boy. Now the eleven-year-old girl, with the demeanor of a diplomat, steps up to him and shakes hands. She thanks him for their new tennis shoes.

Escobar throws his arms around the girl and hugs her. When he lets her go, he is crying.

She is not. Her eleven-year-old face does not change. She gets on the bus.

In Douglas, at the last alley that runs off the last yards of the American side of the Pan-American Highway, there is a tan picket fence, without barbed wire at the top, that separates the last houses of Douglas and the first of Agua Prieta, Sonora. Two kids in T-shirts, twelve years old maybe, climb the fence easily on the Mexican side and then climb down into the first alley of America.

Suddenly a white immigration jeep pulls up, and a woman agent gets out and starts walking purposefully toward the kids, who now are the heart and soul of the danger to America. Illegal Mexican immigrants. Right away, when they see her, they climb the fence back to Mexico.

A second white immigration van pulls up, and another one after that.

There are six officers to answer the call on kids climbing a fence. The female agent, who has caught the case, walks toward the fence.

From the top, one of the kids cackles and gives the woman the arm. One, two, three times. Which is the only reason he went over the fence to begin with.

Now a woman holding a baby walks from a house on the American side and goes up to the fence. A man comes out of the last house on the Mexican side. He stands at the fence and the two talk through the pickets for some time.

Our country spends billions for protection from these most dangerous enemy acts.

CHAPTER EIGHT

A
t the heaviest center for border commerce in the country, the narrow river crossing from Nuevo Laredo in Mexico to Laredo in Texas, customs agents estimate trailer trucks account for something like $30 billion in business each year.

Immigration and Border Patrol people in the Laredo area estimate that they catch one of every eleven who scurry across the border illegally.

All those people can barely understand the barbed wire and patrols when they approach American cities in the Southwest. Back in their home villages and towns, they learn in classrooms and at dinner tables that all this land was owned by Mexico, and that the cities and rivers and mountains keep their Spanish names because they are by common law Mexican. The Rio Bravo is the river, the Sierra Madre is the mountains, and the cities are San Diego, Laredo, Nogales, Albuquerque, and El Paso. California once was Mexico. To a traveler from Mexico, these are places that cannot be so far from Mexico; the names tell you that they must be so close that they are merely places that you go to and then return. They are baffled at
being hunted at the border by the helicopters and searchlights and jeeps filled with men in uniform with guns. How can you oppose my coming across your line in the sand as I go from Tijuana to San Diego, a place that once was my country and remains that way now by population alone?

The journey to Chicago and New York is the foreign experience for Mexican immigrants. These American cities have far fewer Mexican tones than the Southwest. Much more so in New York, where Mexicans aren’t the dominant Hispanic group and have less history and are at the bottom of the Hispanic staircase, the foreigners of the Hispanics. They are more likely to have prominent Indian features than other Hispanics. When they come to Arizona, they feel they are walking on lands they have owned for centuries.

Still, the Border Patrol had a crackdown called Operation Hold the Line that drove people out to places where nobody with sense would dare go, into the worst of the desert.

Margarita Alvarado, thirty-two, and her brother-in-law, Juan Manuel, nineteen, walked into the plaza at Nuevo Laredo, a couple of short streets from the bridge going over the river to Laredo, Texas. The square has a fountain in the center and benches where common people sit to rest and inspect the air. They are alongside the street royalty, the young men who claim that for cash they can guide you across the river and into the land where money floats through the air.

The streets around the square are lined with open-air drugstores, some of which sell American prescription drugs at the lowest of prices and others proclaiming “Farmacia Express,” meaning all you want of what you want.

Strolling into the square are people in dresses and tight jeans, some of whom might be women. The yellow and white church, Santo Niño, is on one side. Through the open door you can read a great banner hanging inside and advertising La Indulgencia Plenaria del Jubileo 2000. For the anniversary, a plenary indulgence is granted
somehow. A plenary indulgence sends you through the gates of heaven as if you actually belonged.

The indulgence is believed in by most everybody, and, because of such things, the Mexicans come north with a faith that seems as deep and strict as that of the Irish.

The interior of the church in Nuevo Laredo is painted gold. In San Matías, which is even poorer and thus spends on worship until there is true pain, the pillars have many decorations of heavy gold in the form of wreaths. The gold goes to the ceiling and across it, and candlelight causes the entire church to seem to burst into small fires.

Now in Nuevo Laredo, Margarita Alvarado walked up the steps to the church, said a prayer, and returned to pay the coyote whatever she had and followed him out of town, into the desert of thorn bushes and, after that, great stretches of sand fire. Apparently they had bought one gallon of water in a store off the square. A gallon weighs nine pounds. The woman would actually need five gallons alone, but she couldn’t carry forty-five pounds. Margarita risked thirst rather than trudge along with the five gallons she needed.

She got through the desert brush, in heat that made her stagger, and then she collapsed and died on the bank of the shallow narrow river.

She was another name on a roster of people who died looking for the Job.

CHAPTER NINE

U
ntil the attack on New York, the United States believed in the word
war
as a vital part of any effort against the things troubling the country.

Lyndon Johnson had a war on poverty.

There is a war on cancer.

There is a war on illiteracy.

There was Jimmy Carter’s moral equivalent of war on an oil shortage.

And there is the war on drugs.

There is a peace wing to this war. “Just say no,” Nancy Reagan said with a straight face.

“We can get the job done with a helicopter gunship,” promised General Barry McCaffrey when he was the nation’s official drug czar.

However, the word
crusade
then came into the language and replaced
war
. All the real Crusades did was kill innocent people who believed in a different faith, but the word has lived on to imply Christian valor.

The dates of the Crusades suddenly are eerie. They were held in 1350. Muhammad appeared on or about 650. Now, 1350 years old,
Islam produces terrorists who attack America in a crusade that uses another name, just as Rome sent out its Crusaders in the year 1350.

Now we say there is an antidrug crusade.