Read The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez for Free Online

many trucks?” Nor a war.
    The immigrants don’t have the complicated daily life of a drug carrier. The drug carriers risk millions and millions. They could lose their freedom and frequently even their lives. They have enemies when they leave and enemies when they arrive.
    Immigrants have to risk danger, and more of them die crossing the border, and the prize is the chance to go to work for below minimum wage and be lonely in America.
    E DUARDO’S FATHER REMEMBERS that a most improbable man named Chockaloo was the first to leave San Matías for the United States.
    “Why go there?” he remembers asking Chockaloo.
    “Trabajo.”
    “You don’t even work here,” Daniel said.
    Reluctantly, many of the men in town donated something and wished Chockaloo great luck. Some even thought he was brave. Nobody they knew had ever done this. Daniel recalls kissing him goodbye. He was off to America, facing a new life with only the clothes he was wearing, a shirt and pants.
    The owner of a grocery store on the main road outside of San Matías told Daniel that Chockaloo bought several bottles of beer and drank them on the roadside while waiting for the airport van. He drank enough beer to allow him to open a bottle of tequila that he had also bought. Later, off into the sky went Chockaloo. As he had never been higher than the roof of a brickyard shack, the alcohol was the only thing that kept him on the plane.
    Some months later, Chockaloo’s mother was at the money order window in the appliance store—stoves, television, sound systems—in Cholula, asking if anything had arrived for her. She got what she expected—nothing,
    “Mama, Chockaloo is home!” a nephew shouted as she came back to her house. Here suddenly was her most wonderful son back in the house.
    “He told everybody that the police beat him in New York and he couldn’t work,” Daniel says.
    He sat on street corners and told everybody of his trip to the United States. He did not know that daily Tijuana bristled with more new, young, eager, heavily armed law enforcement agents and that no longer could you merely run across a highway. The most expensive coyotes were needed.
    Chockaloo had no idea of this. He had gone through Tijuana. He thought that made him a sage. He told Eduardo that crossing the border at Tijuana was the same as walking across Calle Libre. He told Eduardo that he stood on the first street of Tijuana, at a drugstore painted blue that sold coffee, and was at the exact edge of the highway, only yards away from the United States line, and that everybody in front of the store used the outdoor pay booths to call people and tell them what they were seeing, that their car just passed through the inspection plaza, and when there would be a change of shift for the guards.
    There is no way of knowing how many young people listenedto Chockaloo on the street corner, bought him a bottle of beer, and then went up to Tijuana and were terrorized by the guns of border guards and thrown back like refuse. Silvia’s uncle told her that if she wished to be eaten by animals in the desert or thrown in jail in the United States, then she should listen to Chockaloo or anybody else in town. “I will take you. If they say Tijuana, we’ll go the other way.”
    The fences at Tijuana were erected by a government that doesn’t know the history of the last twenty minutes.
    There was a night in Berlin in 1989 when crowds cheered in the damp night air for each sledgehammer that thudded into the Berlin Wall. And two women who took their first subway ride out of East Berlin in twenty-eight years came up the steps in West Berlin. The commercials of the West had drifted over the wall and into the taste buds of the people on the desolate streets of East Berlin.
    They were astonished by the blinding neon of democracy. Right away, one of them said: “Ah, look. Burger King.”
    And as if Berlin had never happened, the United States government boasts that it has a wall that can keep