The Dead Women of Juarez (3 page)

The woman was topless, dark skinned and had a heavy-featured, almost Indian look. She didn’t smile at Kelly. “What do you want?” she asked.

“He’s lookin’ for me, honey.”

Kelly saw the fat man on a little bed in the room. Light from the television made him seem pasty and blue. He reclined with his pants down around his knees and his cock was somewhere under a heavy pudding of fat.

He covered himself up when Kelly came in. The man wore a Texas State shirt half buttoned with a sweaty white tee underneath. Everything about him was large and fatty, including his hands. The woman put her blouse on.

“You want me to come back when you’re done?” Kelly asked the fat man.

“Nah.”

The fat man paid the woman off. They squabbled about the price because he hadn’t popped his nut. Kelly stood in the corner of the little room and stared into the bathroom; too small for a tub, it had a standing shower infested with roaches. A thick, brown carpet of
shiny palmetto bugs gathered in the center around the drain. Kelly wondered whether they would scatter if he turned on the light over the sink and if they did, where they might go.

“You only going to pay
me
half?” Kelly asked the fat man.

“You got the full kilo?”

“Sure.”

“Then I got no complaints. Let’s see it.”

They left the television on and didn’t switch on a lamp. In the flicker of the tube, Kelly brought out the
motivosa
tightly wrapped in four flat packets of plastic film. He put the packets on the bed. The fat man took a roll of hundreds out of his pocket and counted out twenty. Then he took off his Texas State shirt.

“Want me to call the girl back?” Kelly asked.

“Funny,” the fat man said. He removed his T-shirt. His body wasn’t hairy, but it looked like it was melting; great folds of pallid flesh drooped from his frame. He had breasts bigger than a stripper.

Kelly took the two grand and recounted it. He put it in his breast pocket, zipped up his bag and prepared to leave. This was the awkward part; some buyers liked to chat, others were all about getting the hell out of there. Kelly preferred the latter. “You’re not gonna put it in a belt, are you?” he asked. “They watch for that.”

“Nah,” the fat man said. He palmed one packet of weed in one hand and lifted a roll with the other. Kelly imagined a musty smell. “Got my own safety deposit box.”

The fat man stowed the weed and put his shirts back on. Kelly couldn’t tell the difference.

“It’s a pleasure,” Kelly said at last. “I’m gonna go.”

“See you next time,” the fat man said. “I’m Frank.”

“Good luck, Frank,” Kelly said and he left.

His chances of seeing Frank again were slim. Every white guy with a dream of making a quick buck on a hop across the border had to try running a little
motivosa
, and the odds were good, but when
the first batch sold and it was time for another run, nerves got the better of them. Would they make it? Could they make it? What if they didn’t make it? And that was that; the head game was harder than the deal.

Smart buyers and sellers used cutouts to divide the risk. The ones that came over themselves, like Frank, were amateurs. But so long as the money was good, there were no complaints from Estéban.

Kelly took a taxi home because it was late and he had money in his pocket. The ride was only five bucks.

In this neighborhood people went to bed early and got up before sunrise. All-night parties were for gringos and losers; around here people worked for a living, and they worked hard. To stay out of the city’s temporary suburbs of particleboard, cinder blocks and plastic everyone in a family had to work hard. It was the way.

He put the outside light on, just a bare yellow bulb without a fancy cover, and went inside to wait. He had beer in the little fridge and drank until his legs felt heavy and relaxed.

Paloma knocked after midnight. Kelly let her in.

Maybe she wasn’t beautiful, but she was everything Kelly liked. She had wide hips and a full body that stupid men up north would call chunky. Kelly liked her short hair and her tan skin. He liked the way she smelled.

“Hi,” Kelly said.

“
Dinero
,” Paloma replied.

Kelly gave her the money. “You owe me extra for cab ride.”

“Pay your own cab fare,” Paloma said. She counted out the cash. She wore snug jeans and kept a wallet in her back pocket like a man. The two thousand went up front. She paid Kelly from the wallet.

Kelly found extra for the cab, after all. “Thanks,” he said. “I don’t like the buses at night.”

“Cabs are a rip-off,” Paloma said. “You got any more of that beer?”

“Help yourself.”

Kelly sat on one end of a ratty convertible couch. Paloma sat on
the other. They drank and looked at each other for a while. Kelly felt her eyes on his bruises.

“You look like shit, Kelly.”

“I got to make a living. You and Estéban were out of town.”

Paloma nodded. She drank beer like her brother: hard from the bottle and no flinching. Kelly hadn’t ever seen her smoke a joint or touch a needle. These were also things he liked about her. “Our cousin Ines got married.”

“That’s what Estéban said. How was it?”

“Better than
your
weekend.”

Kelly laughed. Paloma smiled. She had dimples and white, white teeth.

They sat a while and Paloma told him about the wedding. Mazatlán was on the Pacific coast and was beautiful all year round. Kelly saw cliff-divers there once and ate so much fresh fruit over a weeklong visit that he felt like a health nut gone wild. Compared to Ciudad Juárez it was tiny, but the air was cleaner and the streets less crowded. Kelly might have lived there, but Mazatlán was a retreat, not a place to make a home. He didn’t really understand why Juárez was one and Mazatlán the other, and not the other way around.

Paloma talked about vows taken in the shade of a white tent on the beach with a view of the old lighthouse. Dancing and drinking and eating followed. And family arguments and embarrassing drunkenness. “I would have invited you,” Paloma told Kelly. “But Estéban said you wouldn’t come.”

“Not my thing,” Kelly lied.

“Next time,” Paloma said.

“Sure.”

The beer didn’t last and neither did the wedding stories. Paloma got up to turn off the light and came to Kelly on the couch. He lifted her blouse in the dark. Paloma had small breasts and when Kelly put his mouth on them he felt the little steel barbells in her nipples on his tongue. She had other piercings elsewhere — in her tongue
and at her navel. The stitched wool of a green scapular around her neck fell against him when they kissed.

Kelly was sore, but Paloma was careful. She did the work, put him inside her and set the pace. Kelly loved the sound of her breath in his ear when it quickened, and her hair in his face. He put his hands on her hips; let his fingers sink into her flesh. The smell of her was stronger than the fresh scent of beer.

“I’m close,” Kelly said.

Paloma lifted herself off Kelly and knelt between his legs. Her grip on his was tight, insistent and her mouth was searing. He felt her tongue stud on him. When he came, she swallowed. Afterward they lay together on the couch. Drying perspiration kept them cool.

For the first time that night, Paloma touched Kelly’s face, but delicately. “When are you going to stop fighting?” she asked him.

“Whenever they stop paying me.”

“I don’t like it when you get your nose broken. How are you supposed to eat my pussy?”

Kelly smiled in the dark. “Who says I was going to?”

Paloma hit him on the shoulder, but not hard. “You better,
cabrón
!”

“I know. I’ll go down for an hour when I’m better.”

“If you got to do it more than ten minutes, you’re not doing it right,” Paloma said, and laughed. “Maybe that’s the problem.”

“Oh, fuck you.”

He was tired and the alcohol was working on him. His mind drifted and he fell asleep. When he woke up, the sun showed through the windows and he was alone. A quilt from the closet was draped over him from the waist down.

Kelly showered and had beer and eggs for breakfast. Paloma didn’t leave a note, but she never did. Later he would call her, or maybe he would catch a bus and surprise her for
comida corrida
in the afternoon. Mexicans ate late and so did Kelly. In the meantime he walked. He had money in his pocket and nowhere to be.

At the end of the long row of apartment buildings a telephone pole was painted pink halfway up its length. Black crosses of electrical tape were fixed to it and below them a forest of multicolored flyers stirred whenever the wind blew.

Kelly saw a woman at the pole tacking up a new flyer. She was gone by the time he reached her and he stopped to see what she left behind. A photocopied picture of a teenage girl on green paper smiled out at him. Her name was Rosalina Amelia Ernestina Flores. She seemed too young to work, but that was the
Norteamericano
in Kelly thinking; in Mexico there was hardly such a thing as
too young to work
. Rosalina made turn signals in a
maquiladora
for a German car company. She had been missing for two weeks.

¡Justicia para Rosalina!
the flyer said.

Other flyers overlapped Rosalina’s, other girls and other faces. Flyers were two or three deep. All pleaded for
justicia
: justice for Rosalina; justice for Yessenia; justice for Jovita. There were so many that the city had a name for them:
las muertas de Juárez
, the dead women of Juárez, because they were all certainly gone and gone forever.

“
Excúseme, señor. ¿Usted ha visto a mi hija?
”

Kelly turned away from Rosalina and her sisters. He saw the woman again. She had a fistful of photocopies on green paper. She looked old in the misleading way the working poor of Juárez often did; she was probably not forty.

“
¿Usted ha visto a mi hija?
” the woman asked again.

“
No la he visto. Lo siento
.”

The woman nodded as if she expected nothing different. She walked down the block and stopped at another telephone pole. A flyer there would be torn down by the end of the day, but she had to know that and Kelly didn’t feel right saying so. Only the notices on the pink-painted pole were untouchable.

M
UJERES
S
IN
V
OCES HAD A SMALL
office on the second floor of a ramshackle building housing a pharmacy, a chiropractor and a smoke shop. Bright pastel-colored paint chipped and peeled from plain concrete walls. Signage was blasted white by endless days of sun. Somewhere along the line the foundation settled unevenly, so the whole structure leaned.

The office door was painted bright pink and had three locks. The word
justicia
was stenciled at waist height in rough black. Self-adhesive numbers marked the address, but no sign or label announced the occupants.

Kelly knocked once and let himself in. Two desks and a trio of battered filing cabinets crowded the small front room. The back of the office was used for storing paint and paper and wood and signs. Once a month the members of Mujeres Sin Voces – Women Without Voices – dressed in black and gathered near the Paso del Norte International Bridge crossing into El Paso. With posters and banners on sticks, they paraded silently along rows of idling cars waiting to enter the United States. They reminded the
turistas
that while
they
came to Mexico for a party, women were dying.

Paloma used the desk closest to the office’s single window. She was here four times a week, sometimes alone, sometimes with another member of the group. When Mujeres Sin Voces marched, she marched with them. A dusty box fan turned in the window, circulating warm air. The group had one secondhand computer with an internet connection and a bulky, hideous IBM Selectric
typewriter, the kind with a golfball-shaped element. Ella Arellano was the group’s typist, though she could only hunt and peck with two fingers.

The women looked up when Kelly entered. Ella was younger by a few years than Paloma and skinnier. Her sister was one of the dead women of Juárez, gone for more than ten years. She smiled at Kelly. She spoke no English. “
Buenos días
,” Kelly told her.

“
Buenos días
, Señor Kelly,” Ella said.

“What are you doing here?” Paloma asked Kelly.

“I thought maybe we could get something to eat.”

“We’re busy right now; the president’s coming next month. We have to be ready for him.”

The walls of the office were like the pink telephone poles, littered several layers deep with flyers demanding
justicia, justicia, justicia
. By tradition, missing women were never referred to as
dead
, but this was just a way of keeping the faith. Sometimes families kept on the charade even after the bodies were found. Some part of that annoyed Kelly, but he couldn’t say why.

“I just want an hour,” Kelly said. He sounded more irritated than he meant to, and the swelling in his nose pitched his voice up a notch.

Paloma frowned at him. “
¿Tú tendrá todo razón sin mí
, Ella?”

“I will be fine.”

“One hour,” Paloma told Kelly sternly.

She got her purse. They left the office. Out in the sun, Kelly saw she’d put dark red highlights in her hair. She wore a bright yellow pullover that blazed against the color of her skin. Kelly realized he loved her, but he couldn’t say so; Paloma wouldn’t want him to.

“You should call first before you come,” Paloma said.

They walked up the block to a restaurant popular with the locals. The place and the neighborhood were too far off the beaten track to draw tourists.

The restaurant had no menus for the big meal. The inside was too crowded, but they found a place outside in the semi-shade,
sharing a picnic table and benches with a quartet of men wearing street-construction vests and hard hats. They talked to each other in rapid Spanish. Kelly and Paloma used English.

“I wanted to surprise you,” Kelly said.