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81 2 • Structural Conditions Finding Panchito The word on the street is always garbled, mangled, never pure and unadulterated news. In a climate of suspicion and scarcity even the most basic of information—for example, when someone changes territory—is wrapped in double-talk and deliberate misinformation.1 There tends to be a kernel of truth, a tiny seed of real events, in every piece of gossip that circulates, but having to peel back the layers of the fantastic or malicious to reach that seed is a daunting, if necessary job. Three months previously we had received reports from a number of different kids that Blue Eyes had been shot at Montesino’s in a drug deal that went sour. He had just turned eighteen. He and his best friend Alejandro, a tall, gangly Haitian with impossibly large hands, disappeared completely. I went to police stations and even the main Homicide Department, where the nearly illiterate, toothless detective let me rummage through old reports. There, on the sticky plastic chair in the airless, windowless room about halfway through a three-inch stack of typed reports, I found the paper that turned me cold despite the infernal heat. “Malecón and Montesino,” it was headed in anonymous typescript. Two bodies found, one shot in the temple , dead; the other wounded in the back and taken to the hospital. Both bodies unidentified, but the one shot in the back had (adolescent) inserted in the description. I didn’t have to be a forensic scientist to read the scene. One guy shot point blank in the temple, the other one gunned down as he ran away. There was the kernel, the part of the story that was, morbidly, true. We had no way of knowing if it was Blue Eyes or not. Even though the 82 Life on the Malecón report was over a month old, there might be a chance the kid was still in the hospital. I convinced Héctor to go with me to the hospital to see if we could find him. Blue Eyes was not a well-known youth to most of the new team. He no longer did daily activities with us and only seemed to find us when he had a problem needingtobefixed.IhadseenhimandAlejandroalmostdailyforfivemonths straight,alwayssittingonthesamegreenmetalbenchinfrontofwherethecollective taxi dropped me off from work. We had a conversational relationship. When Blue Eyes noticed I had once had both my ears pierced, he invented his version of who I was in my younger years—some streetwise womanizer and heavymarijuanasmoker.Hecouldn’thavebeenfurtherfromthetruth,buthis erroneous projection of who I was cemented our relationship. Héctor and I arrived during the last half hour of visiting hours, which was lucky, because trying to enter a public hospital on off-hours could be like trying to see the queen. Darío Contreras is the closest thing Santo Domingo has to a trauma-one hospital.2 It is where all the victims of gunshot wounds and motor accidents go in this city of over a million inhabitants. If you have a broken bone or had a round of lead unloaded into you, you must come to Darío Contreras; the other hospitals will turn you away. “Who are we looking for again?” Héctor asked as we climbed the wide cement stairs to the men’s wing. A smell of antiseptic could not mask the bouquet of decay: odors of urine, sweat, and the metallic tinge of old, dried blood. “Blue Eyes. You know, Alejandro’s friend. Quiet, calm, always high on pot?” It wasn’t ringing a bell. I hated to do it, but I had to resort to Dominican color codes. “You know, the white one who looks like he’s from the Cibao but is really from Baní.”3 “Víctor? Always hangs out with Alejandro down in Hostos Park?” There were twelve rooms for men at Darío Contreras, separated along three corridors. Each room held between ten and twelve beds. Besides the patients, the rooms would also have the designated caretaker for each patient, usually a woman family member, who stayed through the night. Without a personal caretaker, patients would not receive timely checks and needed care. No one would bathe them or take them to the bathroom. We started in the first room, stepping just inside and looking at the faces of patients to see if Blue Eyes was somewhere among them. The room was [3.144.96.159] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 14:02 GMT...

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