The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez Read Free

with an uncle, two brothers, and various cousins. When he heard older people in town talking about going to America, he thought of going there to get money so he could build a new room in the one space left in thedusty compound. He would build the one room and a second atop it. He saw an iron staircase going up to it. He would paint the outside blue.
    Dreaming, he could look to the north, to a sky of many colors billowing with white clouds. Somewhere up there—he knew because everybody said so—was a place of excitement and money. Breathing the sultry air on Calle Libre, he could not smell the air of Brooklyn, of Middleton Street in Williamsburg, with buses and an el, and streets so often cold and wet, and of the sound of creaking building walls.
    A LL HIS YOUNG DREAMS gave him no idea of the dangerous path ahead. The young dream of everything except death. There was no vision of working alongside Nelson Negrón, for example, who cannot read or write in Spanish or English and who does what he is told, climbing the scaffold until he is chest high to the third level of a construction site on Middleton Street in Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, his right side straining under the fifty-pound sack of cement on his shoulder, looking up at a roof that is being held aloft by virtually nothing. If there are no roof beams, he reasons, what could there be under this third floor he is about to throw his sack onto?
    There are twenty workmen crawling over the row of three-story brick condominiums being built. If the builder were legit, the workers would cost him about $15,000 a week. But the builder is Eugene Ostreicher, a man in his middle sixties who fled Hungary in 1944. He hires mainly Mexicans, and they take short money and like it or they’re gone and Ostreicher finds somebody else for the same or less. His Mexican payroll is $5,000 a week.
    Negrón is looking up at Eduardo, who is standing on a deck that moves when something is dropped on it.
    In San Matías, Eduardo could not see himself here on this deck.
    “The boss told me he wants it this way,” Eduardo says.
    Negrón drops the bag from his shoulder and shoves it at Eduardo’s feet.
    The floor went up and down.
    “It’s going to go down,” he told Eduardo.
    A CROSS THE STREET from the Benito Juárez School was an open-air tortilla store. A young woman in black stood at the end of a moving belt, and as a tortilla came off, smoking hot, she grabbed it with her right hand and snapped her wrist as if pitching a baseball, making the tortilla flip over, taking some of the heat off her fingers. She put the tortilla on a stack and immediately, continuing the motion, grabbed the next hot one from the moving belt. Every few moments another young woman took the growing stack of tortillas over to a counter, draped a towel over them, and sold them to people coming down the street.
    The two jobs do not change, ever. Neither does the pay. Twenty dollars for a seventy-hour week.
    Next to the tortilla store was the tiny box of a store where Silvia Tecpoyotti’s mother, Olivia, watched the group of teenagers growing into men, one of whom could be for her daughters. Olivia Tecpoyotti Daniel sat in her store on the dirt street, a crammed closet of a store. She sold socks, packs of crayons and boxes of white paste for children’s projects, sodas, and chips and tacos for the young men who came in from the street corner to play the two video game machines—among them, Tomás Eduardo Daniel Gutiérrez, eighteen. Right away, the mother’s eye picked him out for her daughter. Silvia Tecpoyotti was only fourteen, but life starts suddenly in the dust.
    Olivia had seven daughters, with Silvia the third oldest. Olivia’s husband had a brickyard across the street. When Silvia was thirteen and sleeping in a room with three of her sisters, the father had a bedroom added to the house. The father and mother moved into it, and soon Silvia announced that she didn’t want to sleep with anybodyanymore. She