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

that immediately becomes steep. At the top there is a house on the Mexican side that is right up against the fence. The front porch of the house is as high as the fence and requires only the easiest of leaps to go from the porch to America.
    “Where does the fence end?” the customs agent was asked.
    “Right up there a few hundred yards out of town.”
    “What happens when the fence ends?”
    “They all come through,” he said, waving a hand. Yet too few realize this and go out into a dangerous desert.
    At the top of a hot dirt hill, whose street signs said East East Street, there was a Postal Service jeep parked on the side street, North Short Street. It was a low-level slum of houses that appeared to be empty. The street ended at the border fence a few yards away. On the other side of the fence, at the house with the porch touching the fence, a man stood and watched the mailman, Tom McAlpin. Tom was born in Cabrini Hospital on the East Side of Manhattan and has a distant connection to the old Hotel McAlpin on Thirty-fourth Street. He was opening rows of silver mailboxes on a neighborhood stand outside one of the dry, cracked one-story houses. He said that there were no mixups with letters to Nuevo Nogales, Mexico, and to Nogales, Arizona, because, he said proudly, they handle the mail with great efficiency at the post office.
    “The Border Patrol parks here a half hour, then goes off for a half hour, then comes back, but they still come over the fence as if nobody was around,” McAlpin said. “They put a baby in a basket and lower him over the fence on a rope. Then the father climbs over the fence after him. Sometimes they ask if they can hand me the baby while they climb over. I’m not against the kid. I was a baby myself. But the least I can do for my country is not help them break the law. Besides, we had some guy take the baby and the Mexican jumped over holding another kid and he breaks his leg. The Mexicanwith the broken leg gets taken to the hospital and who knows when you see him again. Now the guy here has not only one baby but two.”
    “Where do they go when they don’t break their legs?”
    He looked around the street of silent decrepit houses, the fronts overgrown. “The house right behind us. I don’t want to look, but you can. Just quick.”
    The house was boarded up and had a rusted tin roof.
    “I bet there’s thirty-five of them in there now,” he said. “They call this a safe house. Sleep on the floor with rats. Then they get out of here. They go up to Terrace Avenue and catch a van.”
    On Terrace Avenue, there are two hundred licensed taxis and parking lots filled with vans with signs advertising Nogales-Tucson or Nogales-Phoenix. The taxis are numerous, but they, along with cars, can be confiscated if the Border Patrol finds the back packed with Mexicans. The law states that vans cannot be grabbed no matter how many passengers are yanked out and taken to the detention center. Of course the Greyhound buses are best. Nobody touches them.
    The vans are for rushing immigrants away from Nogales and on the way to their American dream. One woman van driver complained to the mailman that it was a slow day. “She says she’s made only thirteen hundred dollars so far today,” he said.
    At 42 Terrace Avenue, five men sit under an umbrella in front of a store. None of them has a job, and all of them are on cell phones. They look over a rail at the thousands of cars coming through the customs plaza from Mexico. They know what they are looking for in the river of metal. A fortune coming through in one car, two cars, three cars, maybe a dozen cars.
    The largest number of immigrants coming through Nogales—when overwhelmed, the county sheriff says a million a year, and thus far nobody has refuted him—come by foot. All the sophisticatedsensors and night lighting and cameras are in the end useless against a population that starts moving like a glacier. In Nogales the modern technology comes down to