The Dead Women of Juárez

by Sam Hawken

  He still had energy when normally he’d be tired. He prowled the apartment and realized just how little he had to do; he was too keyed up for television and he hadn’t listened to music since his CD player broke.

  In the end he wrapped his hands and stepped out onto the balcony out back to hit the heavy bag. His first punches weren’t much; just enough to put fist to leather and feel the firmness and weight behind it.

  Kelly paid more attention to form than power. A real punch came from the hips, torquing the whole body behind the shoulder to apply mass that two knuckles on the punching hand didn’t have. A good punch sounded a tone in the flesh like a deep, ringing bell. Out in the ring for Ortíz, taking hits and bleeding, he never felt the magic of a punch well thrown, but he could have it here if he could make his muscles remember the way.

  Sweat came fast, and hard breathing, just like on his run. Kelly found himself holding his breath when he punched, and he reminded himself breathe, breathe after that. Punching without air sucked oxygen right out of the muscles. A fighter lost all his power without breathing right, and he could even pass out. Kelly wiped his forehead with the back of his arm.

  He didn’t want to punch himself out, but it felt good to do something the same way it felt good to get out there and run even though his lungs weren’t up to it and his legs didn’t have the power they ought. He worked the heavy bag until he felt weight in his arms that made it hard to throw punches correctly and then he stopped.

  Across the plain of roofs he saw a line of trucks come out of the GM maquiladora. Below, at the foot of Kelly’s building, a cat rummaged through tall grass and discarded junk – tires and boxes and half-broken cinderblocks – looking for a mouse or a lizard to eat. Kelly sucked air greedily. It was only when he stopped blowing that he went back inside, put his wet wraps over the back of a chair to dry and started a shower.

  In the summer even the cold water wasn’t completely cold. Kelly soaked the oil and sweat from his body, stood with his hand underneath the spray and let his skull hang forward until the ligament at the base of his neck popped.

  Endorphins still skidded around his system. He wouldn’t feel any of this until tonight or tomorrow. Right now he only had the good tired and the pleasant ache of exertion. He enjoyed it for the same reason he avoided it all these years: because it reminded him of before.

  After his shower he toweled off and lay on the bed letting the still, dry air wick away the last moisture from his skin. This, too, he’d forgotten for good or ill. He drowsed for a little while and then fell asleep for less than an hour before waking to a room that looked and felt exactly the same, as if time hadn’t moved forward at all.

  He felt different, and it wasn’t just the mixture of energy and tiredness that followed a good workout and a better nap. Kelly vaguely recalled dreaming of Paloma and Estéban, too. The place and the happenings were mixed up in his memory and fading quickly, but he knew that everything he’d done this morning had to do with them.

  The telephone rang. Kelly got up naked and left the bedroom. The thin carpet felt oily and gritty on his clean soles and he resolved to borrow a vacuum cleaner from Paloma to do something about that.

  “Hello?” he answered.

  “Hola,” Estéban said on the other end. “¿Qué tal?”

  “Nothing,” Kelly said.

  “Hey, listen, I’m going shopping tonight. How’s your face look?”

  “All right,” Kelly said. The bruises were pretty much gone, though his nose was still healing up on the inside. He didn’t look like a zombie anymore.

  “That’s good. That’s good. Hey, listen: you up for shopping? Two, three hours and I’ll cut you in for the usual. What do you say?”

  Kelly looked around the apartment. It seemed too small to him now. Something was going on in his head and maybe getting out would cure it. “Okay,” he said. “What time you want to meet?”

  “Meet me at nine,” Estéban said.

  “Nine,” Kelly said. “All right.”

  NINE

  ANY NIGHT IN CIUDAD JUÁREZ WAS at least busy when it came to hookers and booze. It was too easy to cross the border and good times came too cheaply for workingmen in El Paso to say no, despite all the warnings about pickpockets and muggers and drug dealers and AIDS. They came over the walking bridge as daylight failed, sometimes straight from work, their trucks parked in clusters in lots laid out expressly for pleasure seekers headed south. Sometimes they were already a little bent and the idea of Mexico entered their brain through the bottom of a beer mug or in a shot of yellow-tinged tequila.

  Shopping with Estéban happened on Fridays and Saturdays. These were the nights when the crowds were heaviest, the white faces most common, and cops had a harder time figuring out who was who and doing what.

  They met outside the farmacia where the turista Juárez stopped and the Juárez of the Juárenses began. The place was open long hours, had broad aisles and a well-lit, clean atmosphere. A tacky green-and-red “trolley,” just a bus made up to look like a streetcar, ferried Americans back and forth across the border in air-conditioned comfort and dumped them right on the doorstep. Around the farmacia the white people were mostly older and looking for cheap drugs to fill their American prescriptions, but there were plenty of younger folks, too, picking up steroids and Viagra and other things, things that kept the party going all night long.

  Estéban came out of the farmacia with two plastic shopping bags. He crossed the street with Kelly and they sat down under the orangey splash of a streetlight to get ready. Kelly saw a flyer tacked to the lamppost: justicia.

  “Put five pills in a baggie,” Estéban told Kelly. “The price stays the same, okay?”

  “Okay,” Kelly said.

  From one shopping bag came little self-sealing plastic baggies of the kind soccer moms used to pack their kids’ lunch snacks in: too small for a sandwich, but just right for a serving of goldfish-shaped crackers or, in this case, five capsules of OxyContin or hydrocodone. The drugs were in the second shopping bag in clean little orange-plastic bottles with neatly printed labels.

  They divvied up the score. Kelly wore loose pants cinched tightly around his waist by a belt, the cuffs turned up on the inside so he didn’t look too much like a hick. The front pockets were roomier than they would be if he wore his size. He stowed the baggies in the front where they wouldn’t be crushed.

  When they were done with the legal stuff, Estéban passed the motivosa. These baggies went in back pockets that zippered shut. In the end Estéban carried nothing. He gave Kelly a wad of pesos. “You can keep the change.”

  “Thanks,” Kelly said.

  They walked north without talking. The farther they went, the more they separated, until Estéban was well ahead and Kelly had him just in sight.

  Hookers were out on all the corners, standing alone or in clusters. The sidewalks were jammed with gringos, mostly young and a lot of them drunk. Kelly felt himself blend in among them; that familiar sinking sensation. No matter how many times it happened, it felt strange. He wondered whether Frank the fat man was still hiding weed in his folds and getting away with it. He wondered whether Frank was somewhere out here tonight.

  Estéban picked the places and Kelly followed. Kelly passed a uniformed policeman with a holstered gun and a baton in his hand. The cop’s eyes slipped over him without a pause; Kelly was invisible to him. On shopping nights, cruising the turista bars, Estéban was the one who stood out. Where the Juárenses spent their Friday evenings the police wore body armor and carried automatic weapons, not a little pistol and a stick.

  Anyone with half a brain could get bent south of the border on just about anything. The Rio Grande Pharmacy and a thousand others just like it made their livelihood catering to those who knew the score. But turistas were stupid: they paid too much for beers, too much for sex, too much for everything. The draw of the farmacias was that prescriptions were sometimes optional and the prices were low, but college kids, and teenagers especially, eit
her didn’t know this or figured the farmacias were some kind of trap. They’d rather pay American prices to a man like Estéban than spend five minutes doing the same thing for less in a place without the noise and smoke and crowds.

  Kelly bought identical beers in identical bars with Estéban’s pesos while loud American music busted out on speakers overhead. The air reeked of bodies, drink and cigarettes. Estéban cruised the crowds and from time to time he fell back to Kelly. He pressed US money into Kelly’s hand and placed an order. “Two oxy, one aracata,” he might say, and Kelly would pass two baggies of pills and one of weed.

  Estéban didn’t carry on shopping nights. This was the way it worked because Kelly’s was the face the cops couldn’t see, or didn’t want to. Estéban held only on the short walk back to the buyer, and then he was clean again.

  They repeated the process over and over, working north block by block until even the hardiest partyers began to thin. Kelly’s pockets were almost empty. Some nights Estéban let him hold back a little motivosa for himself if they ended up with more than they could move. Tonight, though, they got rid of it all.

  Kelly’s end was fifteen percent. A member of La Raza would take less, but he couldn’t glide beneath the radar the way Kelly could, either. As much as for his pockets and his skin, Kelly got paid for trustworthiness, too; he never held out on Estéban.

  They sat down in a booth at an all-night taquería. “Good night,” Estéban remarked. He counted money on the table where no one could see and gave Kelly his cut. Kelly put the dollars together with his leftover pesos.

  “Yeah,” Kelly agreed. He yawned into the back of his hand. The food came, they ate and he felt better.

  “You coming to dinner tomorrow?” Estéban asked.

  “Sure. Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Just asking,” Estéban said. He ate, but stopped with food still on the paper plate in front of him. His eyes were bloodshot and bleary. “I’m fucking tired, carnal. You want a lift back to your place?”

  “Yeah, okay. You all right to drive?”

  “Better than a bus driver,” Estéban said.

  Estéban left a tip for the old lady who cleaned the tables and he and Kelly went out together. The night was cold the way it always was, and the sky was stained an ugly color from the city lights. Away from the turista Juárez it was quieter and the shadows were deeper. Hardly anyone was on the streets and cars were rarer still.

  TEN

  SHE WOKE AT FIRST LIGHT WITHOUT needing an alarm clock because it was Sunday morning and she always went to bed early on Saturday nights. This was her habit since she was a little girl, when her mother and grandmother were still alive and Sundays were the most important days.

  Estéban was asleep and wouldn’t wake until afternoon. Even if he hadn’t gone “shopping” the night before, he wouldn’t go to church. As soon as their mother died, Estéban abandoned the churchgoing habit and left it to Paloma to say prayers for both of them. He was like their father that way, and their grandfather, too, though at least he stayed and didn’t slip away to another town, into a bottle and then into oblivion.

  Estéban’s one concession to faith was a little statue of Jesús Malverde, the narco-saint, and a pair of Virgin Mary candles to go with it.

  Their house was small and old fashioned. Paloma had a white enamelware basin with blue flecks in her bedroom, which she filled from a matching pitcher. Soft light filtered through the yellowed drapes. Paloma removed her nightshirt and washed her body with a wet cloth.

  On Sundays she didn’t wear the post in her tongue. She put the barbell in a glass of water with a tablet that made the water fizzy and blue, as if she were cleaning dentures. She brushed and flossed and put on her best dark dress and made sure her hair looked right. Makeup was for other days, so she wore none.

  On Sundays Paloma didn’t drink coffee. When she left her room she prayed at a little shrine for Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. A replica of the icon hung from a wire and a nail in the corner. A low bench with a hand-stitched pillow for the knees had supported the women of their family on Sunday mornings for decades. Paloma recited the Glorious Mysteries with her mother’s black rosary.

  On Sundays she walked two miles to the church. She could have taken the car, but when she was a little girl the family owned no car and the walk was even longer. This she did, like so many other things, to remember her women by.

  The church was not the biggest in Ciudad Juárez, nor the richest. It was an old structure with deep roots, made from stone bricks and so traditional that it verged on the ugly. It centered a poor neighborhood of gathered homes and apartments, the streets crisscrossed overhead with thick tangles of electrical wire. Some roads were paved and others not. As Paloma walked, other pilgrims joined her. The church bells pealed.

  On Sundays she met with a dozen women, all older than she. Some could have been her mother and some her grandmother. To a woman they wore black: black dresses, black hats and black veils. They gathered near the open church doors in the bright morning, speaking to no one nor to one another. Each woman’s face was heavily lined from age, work and sorrow. The only time they smiled was when Paloma arrived and hugged each one of them in turn.

  On Sundays this church gave the Tridentine Mass. Other churches served their flock in Spanish, but here were the Latin words recited by a pair of ancient priests with hair the color of ash and snow.

  On Sundays Paloma sat with these old women and worshipped. She prayed fiercely, and when the time came for Remembrance of the Dead, she and the women linked hands and held tightly, as if the strength of their human chain was the only thing keeping them in the pew.

  The air grew warm and thickened with the mingled odor of flowers, incense and sweat. Lingering smoke drifted high in the vaults of the ugly old church, visible in the light coming through the upper windows. Sooty black stains remained on the stone where countless masses left their mark before.

  When the mass was finished, Paloma and the women filed out with the other parishioners. They shook hands with the priests and emerged into the bright morning. Only now that they had said their prayers and received blessings did the women speak to one another. Paloma stayed with them.

  The first question each woman asked was always the same – “Have you heard anything?” – because they had all lost someone. In Juárez the bodies of dead women were often found, but other times they vanished and never reappeared. To Paloma, these were the worst, because the women and girls could not be dead if they couldn’t be buried, so they existed forever out of reach in Limbo. When the old women in black held onto each other during the Remembrance of the Dead, they held onto their hope, too.

  Paloma had no news for any of them this week. She let her eyes wander the half-dirt street, past a line of battered old cars, and settle on a pick-up parked along a broken curb.

  New trucks weren’t unusual in Juárez; even when a family couldn’t afford a proper home and squatted in the colonias, sometimes and somehow they could still pull together enough money for a shiny truck. This one was black and had tinted windows and a long cab with double doors for a back seat. Four men lounged against it, the rims of their sunglasses glinting. One man pointed a little camera at the women in black and the ugly church. He was too far away for Paloma to hear the click of a shutter. He lowered the camera again.

  Paloma stepped away from the women. The women were talking and would talk for a long time before walking to a late breakfast. The street was littered with yellow-slate rocks. She stooped to grab one. When she straightened again, the man with the camera took another picture.

  She hurled the stone. The men scattered and the rock smacked the side of the truck, bounced and hit the ground. One of the men started toward her, but another held him back. Behind Paloma, the women in black fell silent.

  “Go home!” Paloma yelled at the men.

  One of the women in black made a hissing noise. “Paloma, ¿qué tú está haciendo?”

  The men by the truck lingered. One
of them, the angry one, made an obscene gesture at Paloma. She stood in place, ready to pick up another rock, ready to yell or fight or even flee to the church. The men got into the truck. The taillights flashed, big tires in the back crushed gravel and then the truck was gone.

  Paloma turned back to the women in black. They stared and suddenly Paloma felt embarrassed. At the door of the church, other parishioners were frozen in place and watching.

  “Vamos,” Paloma said.

  She went to the women and they left together, away from the ugly church and the empty space on the curb the truck abandoned. They would have a light meal together and talk some more and pray and hope before parting ways until the next week.

  On Sundays that was the way it was.

  ELEVEN

  KELLY WOKE LATE AND LAY IN THE slanted rays of sun casting from the bedroom window. For a while he just stayed there, but in the end he forced himself to rise and visit the bathroom for a piss and a shower. He wrapped a towel around his waist. Maybe he was a little thinner lately; he wasn’t sure.

  He opened a front window and the door to the balcony to let some air flow through the place. Breakfast was light because he hadn’t had time to shop, but with money from the night before he could afford to splurge at the grocería come Monday. Some Sundays he had a beer to wash it all down, but not today.

  Sunday was a day for dressing up, or at least putting on a shirt with buttons and better shoes than his ratty high-tops. He shaved his neck but left his beard-growth alone. He wore a leather belt with a silver-and-turquoise buckle that was a Christmas gift from Paloma.

  It was close to noon before Sevilla knocked on Kelly’s door. Kelly saw him through the open window first, leaning against the iron railing outside with his jacket open against the burgeoning heat, a holstered automatic against his side. Kelly opened up and Sevilla walked in without further invitation.