The Dead Women of Juarez (12 page)

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.

“H
AVE
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.

Getting to his feet was all right; Kelly used the wall for a brace. He straightened his shirt and ran a hand over his head. His hair was getting long and it felt greasy and gritty. Out on the sidewalk he recognized the street. Walking home would only be a matter of minutes. His wallet was still in his pocket and his watch was on his wrist. He couldn’t have been out overnight, Kelly thought, though it seemed like morning all over again.

When he reached his block he took the long way around so he wouldn’t have to walk past the pink telephone pole and the forest of flyers on it. He knew he wouldn’t see Paloma’s face there among the others, not yet, but he imagined it being there and that was bad enough. Going by, he might see a girl who looked similar enough
to play tricks on his mind and Paloma would be there and he would have no choice but to imagine terrible things.

He went up the steps to his apartment and let himself in. It was hot. He opened the windows. A work-whistle sounded at the
maquiladora
across the way. Kelly saw the way the sun fell on the plain concrete blocks of the factory and knew it
was
morning. He had passed the night in an alley sucking on the neck of a tequila bottle as the city and the
turistas
and the hours marched by blindly. Kelly felt shame.

A memory of Sevilla played at the edge of his mind while Kelly fixed himself breakfast. It was a dream, not the man himself, that Kelly remembered. They were in the alley passing the bottle like
vagos
with a taste for the cheapest stuff they could afford, though Sevilla wore a suit. What they talked about, Kelly couldn’t recall, but he did remember Sevilla and his wallet and a photograph.

“Have I ever told you about my daughter?”

Kelly ate without tasting anything that passed his lips. It was always this way now. He was aware of the chewing, the swallowing and then the sense of fullness in the belly that told him to stop, but it was all purely mechanical. Once he enjoyed food, especially when he was with Paloma or when he was cutting weight and couldn’t afford an ounce of bad fat to tip the scale. The dish and the fork went in the sink. He rinsed them and dried them and put them away.