The Dead Women of Juarez (16 page)

“They come to me and they say here is the body, here are the terrible things that have been done and here are the men closest to her. In Juárez, you know, we are always looking for
el extranjero
, the monster we have never seen before who will do us harm, but we hurt ourselves so well, Kelly, we don’t need strangers. We are a city of dead women. We feed on our own.”

“I didn’t—” Kelly began.

“Okay,” Sevilla said. He put a hand up for silence. “Okay.”

Sevilla rose from the table. He came around and offered his arm. Kelly used the old cop like a crutch and they walked together to the covered window. Sevilla drew the blinds up. On the other side wasn’t sun or open space, but another room like this one.

Kelly recognized both policemen on the far side of the glass. One was young, maybe only twenty-five, soft in the middle and already beginning to lose his hair. The other was older, stronger and wore his mustache and graying hair like a military man. The older cop used his fists a lot. His name was Captain Garcia. The younger sometimes asked questions, though now he was silent.

Estéban sat between them with both hands cuffed to the table. Kelly saw the washbasin and the head-sack discarded in a corner. The table was washed in water turned pink with oozing blood. Estéban’s face was a welter of swelling and bruises. His lips were split a half-dozen times. He was stripped to the waist and his chest was badly marked.

“Wake up, asshole!” Captain Garcia shouted. He took Estéban by the scruff of the neck and pointed toward the window. Kelly saw Estéban’s eyes flickering, alive, and then he realized the window was just that, and not a two-way mirror. Kelly put his hand on the glass. “There’s your fucking friend,
puto!
What’s he going to do for you?
¡Nada!
”

“If you didn’t do it, then tell me who did,” Sevilla said in Kelly’s ear.

“I don’t know,” Kelly said.

“Enrique, go get it,” the older cop told the younger.

“You’re small fish, Kelly. I always told you that. Why did they kill her, Kelly? Give me names and it can be
them
in here instead of you.”

Kelly’s good eye stung with salt tears. “I don’t know,” he said.

The younger cop, Enrique, disappeared from sight. When
he returned, he gave something to Captain Garcia. Kelly saw it when Enrique stepped away: a cut-down baseball bat wrapped in masking tape and stained by dirt and old blood. Estéban saw it, too; Kelly recognized fear, but Estéban didn’t plead.

“Don’t do this,” Kelly said instead.

“
We
aren’t doing this,” Sevilla replied. “
You’re
doing this.”

“Hold his goddamned hand,” the older cop told Enrique.

Kelly struck the window. The policemen ignored him. He tried to push away from Sevilla, but he was too weak and his uncooperative leg refused to hold his weight. Kelly sprawled against the glass and only Sevilla kept him from falling.

Enrique pinned Estéban’s right hand.

“You want to say something now?” Garcia asked.

“
Chinga tu madre
,” Estéban replied.

Captain Garcia raised the bat and Enrique looked away. Kelly could not.

One blow smashed three fingers and left them bent in different directions. Estéban screamed. Kelly felt it through the window, shaking the glass, or perhaps it was Kelly’s voice, because Kelly didn’t know himself anymore. The bat came down again and again and once more after that until there was torn flesh and pieces of shattered bone sticking out. Estéban’s pinky was mush, oozing blood and pink meat and flecks of white.

“Stop it! Stop it, goddammit,
stop!
”

“
Make
it stop, Kelly! Tell me who did it. If it wasn’t you, then who was it? Tell me, Kelly! I’m begging you, just talk.”

Kelly’s stomach turned over. He broke from Sevilla and toppled onto the floor spitting up bile and water and coral-colored foam. Kelly lunged for the closed door on all fours. He still heard the shrieking and the steady, crunching blows of the bat like a butcher at work.

Sevilla grabbed Kelly by the shirt and half-hauled him from the floor. Kelly swung wildly, felt his knuckles connect and then he was at the door. There was no handle on his side to grab. He
pounded his fists against the metal. “Stéban!
Stéban!
Paloma, I’m so sorry.
Lo siento, lo siento, lo siento
.”

Kelly heard Sevilla yelling and the door suddenly bucked. He could not stand. The floor reached up for him. Two guards pushed in through the half-open door and then all Kelly saw and felt were clubs and boots and pain until everything went away.

H
E AWOKE WITH SOMEONE FLICKING
warm water on his face. His left eye still wouldn’t open. Concrete pressed against his wounds because Kelly was on the floor of his cell and not the bunk. He saw a thin, dark man in a white T-shirt and work pants with a metal bowl and dripping fingers. The T-shirt had a big, black peace symbol printed on it.

The man saw Kelly was awake. He smiled thinly and cast more water on him.

“It’s all right,” Kelly said.

The man showered more water from his fingertips. Kelly’s shirt was soaked.

“Cut it out!”

The man shrugged. He put the bowl aside and reclined on Kelly’s bunk. His build was lean, almost like a hungry dog, but he wasn’t weak. A boxer read a man’s body in the ring and out, saw emotion and skill tied up together in muscle and bone. This man was not afraid of anyone.

Kelly managed to sit up. He looked at his hands. They weren’t smashed. Seeing his fingers, he saw Estéban’s and heard the sound of them breaking beneath the bat. The memory made Kelly feel sick again. He was out of breath from the effort of moving even a little.

“
¿Cómo le llaman?
” Kelly asked the man on his bunk.

The man didn’t look at Kelly. “Gaspar,” he said.

“I’m Kelly.”

Gaspar shrugged again. He studied the underside of the upper bunk with his thin arms folded behind his head. Kelly saw the man was barefoot; his slip-on shoes were set neatly by the door of the cell.

“I don’t think I can get to the top bunk,” Kelly said. “
Estoy lastimado
.”

“Everybody gets hurt in here eventually,” Gaspar said. He spared Kelly a look out of the corner of his eye. “You want to sleep off the floor, you climb,
cabrón
.”

Heat rose to Kelly’s face. He wanted to stand, grab, kick, punch, but just thinking about it made him feel exhausted. Instead he did nothing. “Whatever,” he said finally.

“Whatever,” Gaspar repeated. He closed his eyes and Kelly watched the man’s chest rise and fall in instant slumber beneath the peace symbol.

Kelly lay down on the concrete again. He listened to the voices calling back and forth between cells and the crash of metal on metal. His body was exhausted, but he was beyond easy sleep. Being unconscious was not the same as rest. Every part of him ached inside and out and the pain clung tightly to the memory of Estéban and the room and the bat.

Gaspar stirred awake. He sat on the edge of the bunk again and took up the metal bowl. For a moment he seemed to consider showering Kelly with water again, but then he simply drank. He offered Kelly the leftover.

“Thanks,” Kelly said. He managed to rise on one arm, take a drink and keep it down.

“What the fuck are you doing in here?” Gaspar asked.

Kelly shook his head. “You don’t want to know.”

“They say I raped a girl,” Gaspar said. “I say that
puta
, she took my money, I get what I paid for. You can’t call that forcing her.”

“I guess not,” Kelly said, and he lay back on the concrete.

Gaspar watched Kelly for a while. His face was narrow and
he had a long nose broken in two places. Finally he rose from the bunk and offered Kelly his hand. “Get up off the floor. You’re going to get sick lying there like that.”

His joints were on fire and his muscles shrieked, but with Gaspar’s help Kelly got to the bunk. He couldn’t lift his bad leg; Gaspar picked it up for him. When they were done, the wiry man turned down the bedding on the top bunk and clambered up. Kelly saw the shape of him on the springs overhead.

Gaspar’s voice floated down: “El Cereso is not a good place for a white boy.”

“I know,” Kelly said.

“Whatever they want you to say, you should say it.”

Kelly heard the thump and crunch of wood and bone. “I can’t,” he said.

“What, you think you are some kind of tough
hombre
? Believe me: you aren’t so tough as you think.”

This time Kelly only nodded. The lumps in the bedroll were like knives in his flesh. He closed his eye and willed himself to sleep without dreams or memory. The babble of a dozen conversations happening all at once — shouted and whispered — turned into the drizzle of raindrops on a windowsill.

Somehow Kelly knew it was nighttime when he came around again. The fluorescent lights were the same, and he saw the outline of Gaspar on the top bunk as if the man hadn’t moved an inch. The quality of talk outside the cell had changed. A guard wandered past the barred door and paused to look at Gaspar’s shoes before moving on.

Rest made Kelly stronger and he was able to rise on his own. He used the toilet and ignored the blood that ran thick in his urine. The upper bunk creaked and when Kelly turned around, he saw Gaspar watching him. “How do I look?” Kelly asked, but he couldn’t smile.

“You look dead already,” Gaspar answered. Before Kelly had
seen only boredom in the man’s eyes, but now there was the wet shimmer of fear. This, too, Kelly recognized from the ring and from his own mirror on mornings he would rather not recall.

He tried to push it away. “Did I miss food?” Kelly asked.

“No.”

“Good. I’m hungry,” Kelly said, and he was. He did not remember the last meal he was able to eat and keep down, but now the craving for something in his belly was strong and growing stronger. Food would put power back into his muscles again. He didn’t like the way his foot continued to drag, or the way his calf felt strange and half numb when he touched it.

He sat but didn’t lie down again. The same guard passed his cell again, and this time the man looked at Kelly. When their eyes met, the guard turned his head away and hurried on.

Gaspar descended from his bunk and crouched on the floor with his back against the wall. “They can see it, too,” he said.

“What?” Kelly asked.

“When they come back for you, I get the bottom bunk again,” Gaspar replied.

Kelly watched the cell door. The guard didn’t reappear. “They won’t kill me,” he said.

“No,” Gaspar said. “They don’t kill nobody in here. People just die.”

“I’m not going to say what they want me to say.”

“Then you are more stupid than you look.”

Gaspar fell silent and Kelly turned his eye on the man. He looked at Gaspar’s shirt and his clean work pants and his bare feet. Gaspar had heavy calluses on his toes, especially his big toe, and the faded lines of old scars. He had scars on his hands, too.

“Are you a cop, or are you just working for the cops?” Kelly asked.

Stretching made Gaspar look like a rangy stray cat. “Nobody asks questions like that in here,” he said at last.

“I’m asking.”

“I don’t got an answer for you,” Gaspar said, and then he looked away.

Kelly smiled to himself. “You tell them whatever you want to tell them. Get what’s coming to you.”

“Did you kill that girl?”

The smile died. “She wasn’t a girl. She was a woman.”

“Did you kill her?”

“No.”

“You know I got to ask. It’s nothing personal.”

“I didn’t kill her,” Kelly said. “And I’m not saying otherwise to anybody. You tell them that. Tell them that and see what they do.”

G
ASPAR CALLED FOR A GUARD AND
after a while one came. He left without saying goodbye to Kelly. That was fine. Another jailor brought food that Kelly ate with his bare hands, chewed with loosened teeth and barely tasted. He shoved the tray back out through the bars when he was finished and someone picked it up.

Only when he was alone did Kelly feel fatigue pressing down on him again. He lay on the bunk and slept and this time when he woke the lights were almost all shut off and the cellblock was utterly still. The cell itself was inked in darkness.

It hurt to move, but he sat on the side of the bunk and removed his shoes. He put them side by side, neatly, the way Gaspar had done. His bare feet picked up the slight vibration of the living structure; hundreds of moving bodies translated through the concrete to something Kelly could feel, like trembling. One foot felt more than the other. A part of Kelly realized his injured leg would never function properly again, and strangely knowing that didn’t bother him so much.

“I’m sorry for everything,” Kelly whispered aloud. His voice was scratchy and it hurt to speak. Once more he didn’t recognize himself. “I’ve been an idiot. I’m sorry.”

Kelly put his hand on his knee as though he were touching the head of that poor dead boy in the street, or Paloma in her sleep. His fingers trembled. He was crying again.

“I didn’t think about it… everything. I know that’s not enough,
but it’s all I got. And I’m not gonna be the one who fucks things up anymore. I promise. I’ll make it right somehow. If God’ll let me, I’ll make it right.”

He used the bunk to help himself stand, and from the bunk to the wall. He forced himself to walk the six feet from front to rear three times before collapsing into the bunk again, his flesh soaked in perspiration. His heartbeat surged and fluttered.

A locked door opened and heels rang on cement. The inmates didn’t stir. The jailors patrolled the block hourly, sometimes alone and sometimes in pairs, the sound of their passing like a great ticking clock. Kelly panted on his bunk. He waited for the shadow to pass in the half-lit passageway beyond the cell door.

The man came to his cell and stopped. Kelly recognized the older cop’s frame — broad shoulders, big head and thick neck — by shadows alone. The cop said nothing, but Kelly heard him breathing.