The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez (9 page)

The smoke and sand of the border carries with it something much more dangerous than leaves that make people dizzy and dazed. Over in Texas, almost to San Antonio, there is a Border Patrol stop, but it is just another obstacle to brush past.

At Dixon, Illinois, a trailer truck was stopped on the highway and state police were inspecting it for violations, they said, but they were really going over it for drugs.

In New York, a police commissioner named Howard Safir, who came out of a third-rate drug enforcement agency to pander his way into the New York job, attended several conferences in Washington in which Border Patrol people described their tremendous success in stopping drug peddlers. They gave reasons for search and seizure that would not play in New York, even if the police chief was all for it and his mayor, as sick as they come, would love it. A judge would thwart them. So on the East Side of Manhattan at Thirty-sixth Street, a block short of the entrance to the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, the police had traffic cones set up and cars had to roll slowly through a wall of police. A cop stops you.

“Hi. This a friendly stop,” he says.

“Have you got a warrant?” he is asked.

“I said it’s a friendly stop.” He hands in a flyer. “You can go up to the yard on the West Side and get a free car inspection,” he said. “It’ll be good for your insurance.”

The flyer gave directions to the lot where the police keep towed vehicles. Of course they would look over your car for drugs.
They couldn’t do it here on the street without a warrant. But if you took the car to the pound, then they could go over it for the least smattering of drugs, top to tires. A catastrophe blots out the Constitution. Streets are closed, pedestrians stopped, and police play martial law by blocking traffic for hours.

The stop is more proof that each puff of powdered dirt coming from Mexican footsteps far away at the border is a smoke signal that you can lose your liberty as it always is lost, a yard at a time, a mile at a time, a stop at a time.

CHAPTER TEN

A
fter being dumped back into Mexico, Silvia, her uncle Rogelio, and her friend Moisés went back to the Fontana Hotel, and all three made small moans when they had to pay another $400 for the room. Silvia bought a phone card at a stand next door, after which she called her cousin Belén in College Station.

“You know what? They sent me back,” Silvia remembers calling out over the phone.

The cousin told her, “You’ll do it again. Everybody who tries again makes it.”

The cousin gave her the name of a coyote who was known for getting people through quicker than the ones Silvia had used. “If you need money, I can give you some,” the cousin said.

Silvia, Rogelio, and Moisés went to a small restaurant on the same street as the hotel. Silvia asked the cashier if the coyote her cousin recommended was known. The cashier said sure. Silvia gave the cashier the hotel room number.

They sat down to have tortilla sandwiches.

“I can’t wait to cross again,” Silvia said.

Moisés lowered his eyes and ate his sandwich. The uncle arched his brows in a questioning look. Silvia remembers telling herself, the two of them want to go home.

“You don’t want to go to Texas?” she said to Moisés.

“Why is it better than San Matías?” he said.

“Maybe it isn’t,” said Rogelio.

“You can make more money in Texas,” she said.

“I don’t like the river,” he told her.

He didn’t. He had turned many colors of fear when the cold water came up to his chin on the river crossing.

“Did the river frighten you?” she said to her uncle.

“No, it did not frighten me. It was just that it was cold.”

She remembered the same cold as he did, but didn’t bring it up. When they came back to the hotel, a burly guy with a wood match in his mouth talked to them. Yes, he remembered Silvia’s cousin. He got her to Texas, and she paid. He could trust them and they could trust him. He needed $1,200 from each to get across the border.

The uncle swallowed. He had borrowed money from everyone in the family to get the original $600. Moisés winced. He even had some of Eduardo’s money in his pocket. They went up to the room to talk it over. It was late afternoon. Silvia stretched out on the bed. Moisés was on the floor. Her uncle Rogelio sat in a chair and looked at her.

They talked for a half hour, during which she discovered that they had two choices in mind: either get the night bus to Puebla and San Matías, or wait until the morning bus. Silvia told Moisés that she knew Eduardo would try again if he were here, and therefore he should honor Eduardo’s loan and try again. Moisés shrugged. She told her uncle that she would not dare call home to tell the family that she couldn’t go because her uncle wanted to come home. She told Moisés that her father had told her that the only way he would let her go was with the uncle. If she called him now, he would make her come home. Her uncle said nothing.

Now, after thirty minutes of getting nowhere, Silvia put a slight tremor in her voice and a small sadness in her eyes. She said that she was going to continue. As she had no brothers to protect her, she only had Rogelio, the uncle, and Moisés, the friend. When she had left San Matías with them, she felt like they were her real brothers. She had counted on them and still did. Don’t let me go across the border alone, she said. I am afraid. Tears in her eyes. She was still fifteen years old.

This time they were taken on a different path to the river, which was knee deep with a lazy current at the point they crossed.

As they were paying $1,200 each, they were driven in a Honda Accord to a house in the center of nowhere. Silvia’s cousin had wired money by Western Union to the coyote at the Fontana. They were the hardest dollars in the land. After a couple of years of work, she was empty. But she was expected to put up the money. Mexican families are large, with cousins usually taking the role of friends. When somebody needs money, especially to get to America, the family pitches in. There she was, an expensive traveler at fifteen and a half years old, but she was sure she would be able to repay the cousin quickly because of the good paying job she was sure to get.

Now, the coyote, with payment for a second trip in his pocket, moved Silvia’s party from the house into an auto repair shop next door. Her uncle and Moisés stretched out on the greasy floor. Silvia was awarded an old couch that was about as busted down and filthy as you can get, but she remembers that it felt luxurious. The coyote took a look at the uncle and Silvia in the morning. The men’s clothes looked like they had been clawed by a mountain lion. Silvia’s clothes were also shredded. The coyote said they could not land in the Houston airport dressed like that. They would be arrested and their plane impounded. He disappeared and returned with new jeans and shirts.

After that, they drove to a private airstrip. A man put five of
them into a single-engine plane and flew them to Houston. Silvia and her uncle and Moisés got into a cab and said they wanted to go to College Station. The cab driver said he wanted to see their papers. Silvia’s uncle showed him money. Two hours later, she walked into the bare rooms of a ground-floor apartment in College Station, Texas. There was only a table and a couple of chairs, and bedding on the floor inside the two rooms where they would sleep. Silvia would start out by sleeping in one of the crowded rooms. But only for now. A tape player was on the living room floor. Silvia took a cassette out of her suitcase and put it on. The soft music of Bryndis filled the barren room.

S
ILVIA GOT UP
on the first morning and went up the block to an Olive Garden restaurant. They hired her as kitchen help. The hours were 4
P.M
. to midnight.

Several blocks from there was a barbecue restaurant. She got a job making salads from seven
A.M
. until noon.

She was fifteen and a half years old and she was in America and she was working sixty-five hours a week and she thought it was glorious. She was earning $420 a week, the salary of a rich person in Mexico. When he hears how much I am making, Eduardo will come to College Station, she told herself.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

E
duardo’s mother didn’t like the idea of her son leaving. She had a vision of a place she had never seen, of dark buildings rising from a black volcano. She pointed to the black smoke covering the snow at the top of the simmering volcano that rose out of the struggling land outside Puebla. It was many miles away, but still too close for her. “Something will happen,” she told Eduardo. “New York is too big.”

The father remembers blessing him at the airport, which was the only show of emotion between them. Eduardo flew to Tijuana.

When Eduardo got off the plane, a young guy wearing a black shirt met him, and Eduardo followed him to a taxi. He asked if they were going to the blue pharmacy that Chockaloo had glorified. The coyote smirked. The pharmacy, he said, faced an army camp. They rode for twenty minutes to an old sprawling ranch house that sat in the dust and scrub. Inside the house was a series of cubicles with twenty-five young Mexicans sleeping on the floor. The place had been set up as a motel, Eduardo thought, but they probably saw it was far better to fill it with Mexicans paying some of their $1,500 here, rather than running a motel renting for $49 a day to people in
love. Eduardo gave the coyote $1,000 of the payment due. He’d hand over the remainder when he reached New York. This was a pleasant fiction, as if he could withhold payment somehow. Both he and the coyote knew that he could be killed for $500. The coyotes were smuggling people because they didn’t want to risk decades in jail for drug smuggling. A drug smuggler would spit at $500; the immigrant smuggler would kill for it.

Eduardo waited there for eight days. For food, he walked down to a Taco Bell, which stood on the edge of town. He was in Mexico, but if anybody made him for what he was, a young guy with money in his pocket to pay a coyote, they would become so jealous that they would not be able to restrain themselves from going out with a shotgun and robbing him, or rushing to the police to report the presence of somebody about to commit an illegal act by crossing the border. The Mexican border police had a reputation of snatching anybody they thought was going over the border, issuing a beating, and taking the person’s money.

Ted Conover wrote in his book
Coyotes
that he and a Mexican were stopped by Mexican judicial police. They took the Mexican into a room, tilted his head back, covered his mouth, and poured carbonated water up his nose and into the sinuses. The Mexican screamed to God during the torture. Then they took his money.

Eduardo waited for eight days, while the twenty-five Mexicans in the ranch house increased to over fifty. Sleeping was accomplished with somebody’s foot in the face.

At $1,500 a head, the cash value of this group was somewhere close to $75,000. The money had to be split among the local steerers back in the Mexican towns, the coyotes on duty at the Mexican border, the owners of the safe houses on both sides of the border, and the drivers, who considered their trips hazardous and demanded real money. They also had to buy airline tickets for those being smuggled all the way to New York. At the end, the money had to be like anything else in crime, something for boasting but not buying,
because despite the news reports of $200,000 Bentleys, you can’t hand a car dealer a pocketful of dust.

Finally, a truck pulled up outside and a fat man with plaid pants and a black shirt got out, and Eduardo’s friend Mariano remembers hearing him call to Eduardo and those around him, “All right. Let’s go. Get up. We’re going to start walking.”

They remember walking for two hours through scrub and up into the first high hills that ran into gloomy mountains that climbed above the highway. The fat man led them to a black van that sat in the bushes. They got into the van, elbows into each other, and the fat man drove them the five hours to Phoenix. In a deserted block of low factories closed for the weekend, they pulled up alongside another van. Eduardo and the others had no idea of whether they were in Mexico or the United States. This time, they were driven all the way back to Los Angeles. The fat man explained that this was the most direct route to Los Angeles from Tijuana. These coyotes were knowledgeable about getting through the desert and rivers to America, perhaps, but they seemed cockeyed whenever they read a map of America. At the Los Angeles airport, the fat driver waved to a guy lounging at the baggage desk in front of the American Airlines section. The young guy walked up and handed Eduardo a ticket to New York.

At Kennedy Airport, Eduardo remembered going up to the New York coyote who awaited him. He started to give the guy the remaining $500, knowing he would be shot dead if he tried to leave the airport without paying. The coyote stopped him, saying it would look like a narcotics transaction. They walked outside the terminal and down to the end of the walkway, where Eduardo handed him the cash. Somebody would come to take him on the subway to Brighton Beach, which is in Brooklyn, in America.

Once, they came in dreadful old ships, from Magilligan in Northern Ireland, from Cobh in southern Ireland, from Liverpool and Naples and Palermo and Odessa. The prow went into gray
waves with freezing white foam whipping from them, and sometimes it seemed that the prow would not come up and that it would take the whole ship under the gray water. When it finally came up, the passengers vomited and fell off bunks and cried; an old man died and a woman was unconscious and babies bled. Those able to stand always scoured the horizon, through sleet and snow swirls, for the first look at the city where the streets were decorated, if not paved, with gold.

But this was the spring of 1998, and Eduardo was entering a town whose mayor was Rudolph Giuliani. He would get lucky with a war and become an improbable hero. But now he was merely a strange, sneering man who attracted people equally strange, particularly a chief of staff, Bruce Teitelbaum. Teitelbaum was Jewish and a Republican, and in New York this is as common as a camel train.