The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez by Jimmy Breslin Page B

opening. He often lost out to a shoulder and a fully slammed door. The most familiar sound in the house was that of someone rapping on the bathroom door to get the occupant to hurry.
    In the kitchen there was a stove and a sink; a house with running water in San Matías was at best rare. A turn of the handle brought a flame out of the stovetop. Magic. There was a large round table for the group to eat at. They each paid $95 a month in rent and $25 a week for food. Martha, who was the sister of Gustavo and Mariano, lived in the small bedroom with her husband. She was on the lease and handled the rents and cooking. Martha had three children at home in San Matías with her mother in the rooms right behind where Eduardo’s family lived. Her brother Gustavo had left two children in Mexico with his wife. One day Gustavo’s wife left the children with Gustavo’s mother in San Matías and said she was going to look for work. Instead, she went off with a man and never returned. This left the grandmother in San Matías with six grandchildren. All her upbringing and beliefs told her there was something worse ahead, a catastrophe, a tragedy falling from the sky, and she never could see it, but now suddenly it was in front of her at night. In a dream she had, she was in line at the window of the appliance store for the money order from Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, and instead of a man with her money order, there was a skull, a death’s head, with eye sockets fixed on her.
    In the morning she told this to Eduardo’s father at the brickyard.
    He didn’t believe her.
    “If it happens, what will I do with all these children to feed?” she asked him.
    He doesn’t remember what he said, exactly. He knows he just went to work at bricks. Of course her death’s head vision nevermaterialized. Something worse would: a clerk in the window shaking his normal head. No, no money order from Brooklyn.
    Alejandro lived on the floor next to Eduardo for the same reason as Eduardo: to send enough money home to soften the path when he returned. But every night he reminded himself that he’d never thought he would be here living alone and his wife would be home in Mexico with his children. On most nights he thought of his marriage. He’d married his wife in a civil ceremony with his mother and father present. He wore a shirt and he knew she’d worn a dress, but he couldn’t remember what it looked like—you only wore a white dress for a big church wedding. He remembered going with her to the clinic for their first baby. He was there at 6 P.M . and waited with her in one room, where she was monitored, and then she went into the delivery room and he stayed outside. They didn’t know whether it would be a boy or girl. Each wanted a niña , and that’s what they got.
    He’d set up an upholstery shop in a room in the house opening onto the street. He had to rent a compressor because he couldn’t afford to buy one. He had to borrow or rent other equipment. Air pistols, saws to cut—they would cost another 20,000 pesos.
    His biggest job had been for 7,500 pesos. He did the whole room—walls, sofa, love seat, and chairs—in fifteen days, and was very proud of it. Fine. But often he could not get a compressor to rent and he had to tell customers who showed him photos of what they wanted that he couldn’t get to them until the week after next.
    He had been earning the equivalent of about $150 a week. Alejandro and his wife and her brother talked about Alejandro changing what looked like a bleak future: He was going to earn $150 a week and probably less for all of his life. Alejandro and his wife had been talking of his going to America and had agreed that he could try heartbreak for a year and a half for the money. He could earn enough to buy upholstery tools. Then he could work at home and support a family without sweating blood. But this was not Italy,where the men leave Sicily for seasonal work in desolation and loneliness in the north, in