The Dead Women of Juárez

by Sam Hawken

  He felt it again: shame, warm and hot as blood. He smelled that blood, too, and it was then Kelly realized his palm was cut after all.

  SIX

  ESTÉBAN DIDN’T COME BACK THAT morning. Kelly waited into the afternoon and watched shadows slide with the sun until he couldn’t stay still anymore. He left the apartment and made for the bus stop. He turned his head from the pink telephone pole when he passed it, though his mind framed the image on its own: Justicia para Paloma.

  It took hours to reach the familiar street, the leaning building and the office with the pink door, or so it felt to Kelly. Every stop, turn and delay on the bus route was agony. Everyone moved too slowly. Those who talked on the bus were too loud. The sun was too bright and it was too hot in his plastic seat.

  Kelly felt unshackled when he stepped onto the sidewalk. He walked quickly, and then ran, but his stamina was gone and he gassed before he got halfway there. Even so he took the steps to the second floor two at a time. At the last moment he was afraid the office would be closed, but the door was open and Kelly heard a typewriter from inside.

  He expected Ella, but it was another woman, one he didn’t recognize. She was older, like most of Mujeres Sin Voces. When Kelly came in, she made a sour face as if he smelled.

  “Excuse me,” Kelly said. If he’d worn a cap, he would have taken it off. “Estoy buscando Ella. Mi nombre es Kelly.”

  “Ella Arellano?” the woman asked.

  “Sí.”

  “Señorita Arellano no está aquí.”

  Kelly hesitated. The flyers in the office drew his eye, demanding justicia, justicia, justicia like every time before, but the faces were different because he saw them now. He came no farther than the doorway; he didn’t dare enter the room and be surrounded by all those faces.

  “¿Señor? I say she no here.”

  He had to stop looking at them, but they would not stop looking at him. Kelly dragged his eyes back to the woman. “Yeah. Where… um, where is she? It’s about Paloma.”

  The woman crossed herself. “Estamos esperando noticias.”

  “I know,” Kelly said. “I’ve been… away for a while. I want some news, too. Can you tell me where I can find Ella? They worked together a lot here. ¿Por favor?”

  The woman was silent, and Kelly felt the hesitation coming from her mixed with fear. Ciudad Juárez was a city of fear, and Kelly was white and a stranger to be feared most of all.

  “¿Por favor?” Kelly asked again.

  Kelly needed another bus, this one headed into the porous boundary between Ciudad Juárez and the sun-bleached wild beyond. Where streetlights and paving ended, the colonias sprang up. In the States this would be where the suburbs grew — endless, identical blocks of perfect green lawns and interlocking streets with themed names and an ever-vigilant homeowners’ association — but here the broken landscape was thick with shanties built from scrap wood and corrugated aluminum.

  Throughways were decided by default, sometimes wide enough for the few cars there were and other times barely enough for two to walk abreast. Chicken wire and scraps of old cabinetry and cinderblocks and discarded shipping pallets were the building materials. A window was a hole in the wall. When the wind shifted the stench of raw sewage was overpowering.

  There was nothing here but dirt, sand and a few water-starved trees. And people.

  The only solid constructions were the bus shelters on the battered-down gravel road. The people of the colonias fed the buses and were disgorged by them, day and night in a steady shift-cycle from the maquiladoras. A worker from a colonia could ride to work three hours one way before the sun came up and get home after sundown. Kelly rode out of the city on a bus loaded with women in uniforms stitched with their names and the name of their maquiladora. None of them wanted to look at him and he obliged by staring out the window as Juárez went away.

  He got off where he’d been told to and stood squinting in the harsh afternoon sun. Some of the women got off with him, while others boarded. Conversation stopped around him. Kelly was alien: white and male with money in his pocket. The only white people who came to the colonias were do-gooders or crooks, and Kelly didn’t carry a Bible. The bus left him in dust and diesel fumes and only when he was alone did he set off toward the colonia sprawl.

  Not all the colonias were like this one. Some were almost like real neighborhoods and the workers who lived there built solid homes and even managed to get services like water and sewerage. In twenty years they might be absorbed by the city and become poor but proper parts of the whole. Ella’s colonia was not one of those.

  The people here put up no signs, but the handmade structures were individual enough that a stranger could navigate by landmarks if he could remember them. The homes were swept up out of the desert from scrap, held together by rusty nails and staples and ropes and baling wire. Kelly looked for a green plastic garbage can cut and unfolded and used as part of a wall. When he found that, he could orient himself, or so he had been told.

  The colonia was not a maze because mazes were designed with a solution. A rat could learn a maze but get lost in a colonia like this one, where the only constant was need and everyone fought for space. Houses here were not tall, but squat, irregularly shaped and set at imperfect angles to one another. Kelly heard music on radios and saw a black-and-white TV running on batteries inside the darkened hutch of one home. He looked for the signs of passage — a fence topped with a red ribbon, a yellow dog with a black splotch on its face, the broken-down shell of an old Buick — and kept on.

  A few awkward, makeshift power lines drooped from poles and simple boards planted in the ground. Orange extension cords served instead of real cables, and sometimes not even that; in places bare wire without a trace of insulation waited for the unwary to catch hold and be electrocuted to death. Ella’s colonia received no services, so somewhere an enterprising resident had put together a tap from the main line. A few of the larger shanties even had outdoor lights, but these were few and at night the throughways would be utterly dark except for the stars and the moon. Crime was worse here than anywhere in Juárez, and that was saying a lot. Kelly felt eyes on him always.

  He passed children carrying water in plastic bottles from a communal pump. They streamed around him and moved past without a look back. Their voices and laughter made them sound like birds. He descended a steep row terraced into broad steps, but nearly lost his footing. From where he stood he saw the colonia spill down the hillside and beyond the farthest edge a field of pink crosses.

  Ella Arellano’s home had a pink cross of its own, and underneath block letters painted in the same color: JUSTICIA. A front window had a roughly trimmed square of screen stapled into place to keep the bugs out and old-fashioned shutters with metal hinges on the inside for when the cold came. Its front door hung awkwardly, but the shanty’s face was whitewashed and mostly clean, the hard-packed dirt out front swept. Some of the homes in the colonia were little more than piles of scrap; the Arellanos lived with dignity.

  He knocked and waited but no one answered. Kelly looked up and down the crooked throughway, expecting to see someone lingering, watching, but he was alone. He knocked again. This time he heard movement beyond the door.

  Ella opened her door only enough for Kelly to catch a glimpse of her in shadow. “What do you want?” she asked in Spanish.

  “I want to ask about Paloma,” Kelly replied. “When did you see her?”

  “I don’t know nothing about it,” Ella said, this time in English. The words sounded funny coming from her, or maybe it was her voice; she slurred a little. “Go away.”

  The gap closed. Kelly put his hand on the door. “Wait,” he said. “You know she’s missing? Just tell me when you saw her. Where did she go? Did she talk to anyone?”

  Ella pushed, but Kelly was stronger. “No sé cualquier cosa. Go away!”

  “Just five minutes! I need to know!”

  “I tell you go away!”

  On the other side Ella threw her
weight against the door. Kelly shoved back with both hands. He bulled his way into a dim room with a dirt floor. There was room enough for a little table, a tiny wood-burning stove and a few blankets for sleeping. The shanty had a back room, too; a curtain stood half open between front and rear. Perhaps five or six people would live in this space, men and women and children alike.

  Ella retreated. She wouldn’t look at Kelly. “You get out! Get out!”

  “When you tell me,” Kelly said. He had to stoop inside because the roof slanted. Ella looked rumpled and her hair was unwashed. It fell in her face. At Mujeres Sin Voces she was always neat. She was not the same here.

  “I didn’t see her. I don’t know anything.”

  “You’re lying to me,” Kelly said.

  She tried to slip into the back room. Kelly grabbed her arm. Ella pulled and they ended up together on the other side of the curtain where a cast-iron bed and a few modest pieces of furniture made a private space for the man and woman of the house. A plaster statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe stood in one corner. Prayer candles in red glass burned on either side of her.

  “You let go of me!”

  Kelly’s heart was beating hard now and his breath came fast. He took hold of Ella without thinking and he shook her hard enough to make her head rock. He saw the deep blue and purple bruising around her eye then, and her broken lip. When his hands sprang open, Ella fell back against the bed.

  “What the hell is going on?” Kelly asked.

  Ella covered her eye. “Why don’t you leave me alone? Go back across the border.”

  He wanted to touch her again, gently this time, but his feet wouldn’t move. The little room did not seem to have enough air. Kelly’s grip opened and closed on nothing. “What’s going on?” he asked again.

  “Just get out.”

  “I can’t.”

  “I don’t want you here!” Ella shouted at him. Her hand came away from her face and Kelly saw again the closed eye and the bleeding under the skin that stained her face from cheek to forehead. On the side of her mouth bloomed a dark, unhealthy bruise.

  “Did you see her?” Kelly asked.

  “Get out!”

  “Did you see her?”

  Ella came at him with spread hands. Kelly let her push him backward through the curtained doorway and into the front room. His heel hit the leg of a little chair and he stumbled. Ella cried, but only from her open eye. “Why don’t you leave me alone?”

  Her nose ran and Ella wiped it with the back of her wrist. She shuddered when she breathed. Again Kelly wanted to touch her, but he knew he shouldn’t. Ella turned her back on him. When her knees buckled, she sank to the floor slowly like a dead leaf and sobbed there.

  “Did you see them take her?” Kelly whispered. Ella didn’t answer. She choked on sobs, kneeling and bent in her rumpled dress. Like a child she rocked back and forth and she hugged herself with her arms.

  Kelly took a chair and settled into it. He was conscious of his weight, as if everything inside of him was turned to scrap iron and pulling him toward the center of the Earth. Ella’s home was small before, but now the walls closed in on him. In this place there was not enough light from the window and not enough space to even breathe. He imagined himself here as Ella and he imagined himself in prison. Something fell on his cheek. Kelly wiped it and saw wet on his fingers.

  After a long time, Ella’s tears died. Her breath stilled and hitched until finally they were silent together in the hot little room. Kelly could not bring himself to ask the question again. Neither said anything for what seemed like forever.

  “I could do nothing,” Ella said at last, and Kelly’s stomach turned.

  “¿Dónde sucedió?” Kelly asked.

  Ella spoke without looking at Kelly. Instead she gazed at the corner, arms still around herself. Little aftershocks took hold of her when she talked; her voice caught, but it was also hollow. “At the church. With the mothers. Paloma asked me to come with her. I didn’t know why. I think she knew. She wanted me to see. Do you think she knew?”

  “I don’t know,” Kelly said. He tasted something bitter.

  “When the Mass was over, they came. One of them, he used a bat on the mothers to drive them off. Paloma fought them. I tried. They beat me.”

  Kelly wanted to ask a question, but first his lips worked without a voice. Then it came: “Who were they?”

  “Men. I didn’t know them. They had a truck. A new, black truck.”

  Ella put her face in her hands and she cried again. Kelly was rigid in the chair, imagining the road, the church and the mothers of the missing — he had never seen these things because Paloma wouldn’t allow it, wanted it to be hers and not theirs — and the moment when the men came. In his mind the men had empty faces that were somehow still angry.

  “Did you call the police?” Kelly asked, but Ella didn’t answer. “Did you call the police for help?”

  He had to wait until the tears stopped again.

  “Did you call them?”

  “What good would it do? She is dead.”

  Kelly didn’t want to ask the question, but the words came unbidden: “You saw her die?”

  “No. But she is dead.”

  They had nothing left to say to each other and when Kelly left they didn’t even exchange farewells. Ella closed the door behind Kelly. He knew he would never see her again. Paloma was the link between them, and now Paloma was gone.

  Kelly wandered unmoored in the colonia. Before he had been seeking, but now he was lost inside himself and let the patchwork houses drift by one after the other without really seeing them. From time to time he saw the field of pink crosses. Each time it was a little closer; he gravitated toward it unconsciously. Finally he was free of the narrow confines between buildings and before those markers and he was still inside and out.

  Some of the crosses bore photographs or sprays of dried flowers. Others were marked with names, painted on or spelled out in adhesive letters. Still more were simply blank. Perhaps they stood for someone or perhaps they were just a reminder: justicia, justicia, justicia.

  The ground was rocky and only patched here and there with hardy desert grass that could grow anywhere. No one allowed the crosses to be overgrown, though. Kelly took a step without thinking and then another and then he roved among the crosses as he wandered in the colonia, without direction or purpose.

  Justicia para Sangrario.

  Justicia para Chita.

  Justicia para Miguela.

  Justicia para Noelia.

  He stood before a blank cross. “Justicia para Paloma,” Kelly said aloud. He fell on his knees and for the first time in five years he prayed. It was a prayer without words. Instead he offered God everything that stirred inside — his anger and fear and sorrow and remorse — and sealed it with an amen. The sun glared overhead, a furious eye. Kelly sweated and cried and the mingled water fell into the dry earth. “Justicia para Paloma.”

  If God listened, he did not answer. Not even a breeze stirred the field of crosses. Kelly wiped his face with the palms of his hands. When he pushed himself back to his feet, slate-colored dirt clung to him. He wished for a knife for carving or a marker so he could put Paloma’s name on the empty cross, but he had neither.

  She is dead, Ella said.

  She is dead. Dead.

  “She is dead,” Kelly tried, but the words felt wrong in his mouth. He dusted his hands, but the dust was like mud and it stuck to him like clumps. Instead he made fists and ground the dirt inside them.

  Now the crosses themselves watched him. He walked fast to get away, through the field and back toward the bright stretch of worn-down dirt that was the road back to the city. Once he brushed one of the crosses. A sun-bleached piece of tape gave way and a whitened photograph fell facedown onto the ground. Kelly knelt to pick it up, but suddenly he didn’t want to touch it, because he knew that on other side he would see Paloma’s face regardless of whose picture it was. He left it there.

  The bus could
not come fast enough. He stood in the shade of a covered bench, apart from the girls and young women in their maquiladora uniforms. Kelly didn’t look any of them in the eye. They were all watching him, whispering to one another about him, angry with him because he was not there when the men came for Paloma and they drove the mothers of the missing away with baseball bats. Ella Arellano was there, but Kelly was not; he was inside a needle and swimming in chinaloa, and if Paloma called for him he was beyond hearing it.

  A rushing sound of blood in his ears became the roar of a diesel bus engine. Kelly overpaid his fare. He stood instead of sitting and he felt like a zombie. The moving air through the open windows of the bus was not enough to cool him and he was bathed in sweat that reeked of shame. All of the women could smell it. Even the bus driver looked at him with disgust.

  He left well before his stop and wandered the streets. He drank a soda he didn’t taste, ate a taco that settled in his stomach like shot. Everywhere people glared at him because they knew. A part of Kelly knew it was insane, but Ciudad Juárez was insane. Drug dealers had firefights in the streets and it was insane. Women were dying and it was insane. Paloma was dead and it was insane. Kelly was alive and it was insane.

  It was insane.

  SEVEN

  “HAVE I EVER TOLD YOU ABOUT my daughter?” Sevilla asked.

  Kelly opened his eyes. He was mostly in the shade, but his legs were out in the sun and he leaned against a bare concrete wall in a narrow alley. A bus roared past on a street six feet away, churning dust and diesel smoke in its wake. Kelly’s head throbbed. He looked at his forearms automatically. The old scars were there, but no new marks.

  When he moved, an empty tequila bottle toppled onto its side. Now Kelly recognized the taste in his mouth and the ugly pain behind his eyes that snaked back into his brain. He didn’t remember getting to this place or even the drinking, but it wasn’t a small bottle, either.