The Dead Women of Juarez (15 page)

“I could fuckin’ kill you,” Dennis said. He put his back to Kelly
again. “How dumb do you think I am, Kelly?
How dumb
? Stub my toe,
that’s
an accident. What you are… it breaks my heart.”

Dennis teleported across the room, or maybe Kelly blanked for a second. All of Dennis’ things were packed away and the bag gone — no, it was by the door — and Dennis was suddenly there above Kelly, blocking out the light. A corona burst around Dennis’ head. Kelly’s brain shuddered. He was coming down finally, really coming down.

“Denny,” Kelly said.

“It ain’t the money,” Dennis said. His hand zoomed in and out of Kelly’s vision, abruptly larger, then smaller, then gone and then back again. Kelly’s eyes drifted unfocused. He was acutely aware of Dennis’ skin, but the old man’s eyes were impossible to see. “It’s the
waste
, Kelly. Do you even know what’s wastin’?
Time
. You’re wastin’ my
time
, Kelly. Hell, you’re wastin’
your
time. You ain’t gonna live forever.”

“I don’t want to live forever,” Kelly said.

“That’s good, because you won’t.”

Dennis was gone. Kelly stared at the light overhead. Dennis was back. Kelly felt paper pressed into his hand.

“What is this?”

“That was your life, Kelly.”

A door closed. Kelly tried to read the notice from the athletic commission, but the
chinaloa
shut all that out; he saw shapes and colors and sometimes he saw the air moving, but words were a jumble.

“Denny? Denny, come back.”

Kelly’s fighting trunks were still laid out for him. His robe was beside them. All of Dennis’ things were gone. When did he take them? Dennis was just there, right? Kelly heard him talking. The shower was on. Dennis must be in the shower. Why was he taking a shower?

“Denny, I don’t know… help.”

He made it from the bench to the shower. The water was on,
but Dennis wasn’t there. Kelly turned back toward the room too quickly and his knees went wobbly. He sat down hard with his legs sprawled.

“Denny? Denny, I need you.”

He didn’t want to, but he cried. Getting up was too hard and his brain wasn’t thinking right. He felt everything too much because the high was wearing off all the clean gears and sticking. Dennis gave him something… there it was on the floor: a yellow sheet of paper, a form marked with pen scribbles. Confused, confused.

“Denny, I’m sorry.”

Beer helped. Kelly bought a case of Red Dog and drank one after the other in the parking lot behind the wheel of his old gray Buick. Beer killed the headache that always came after a long high, cleared up the fog and took the edge off the world. He spent time drinking, not sleeping. When he saw a cop eyeing him for loitering, he moved on.

Three times Kelly used a pay phone to call Dennis’ number, but the old man wasn’t home or wasn’t answering. Kelly wanted to be angry, but he could muster it only for a little while and then he was sad again. There was no more of the heroin to put feelings out of his mind, and the little Mexican who sold Kelly the stuff dealt only at night.

It was too bright to drive around. Even with sunglasses on, the sun was too much for Kelly. He parked in the shade of a coin-op car wash and watched the traffic go by. He didn’t know the town or the things to do, and anyway tourist hangouts weren’t what he needed; Kelly didn’t want people in his world right now.

The beer was all gone. Kelly dozed with the motor running so he could keep the a/c going. When the fuel light went on, he tooled for a while instead of gassing up. Maybe he was daring the car to die.

He paid cash for a full tank and used the pay phone to call Dennis again. A dozen rings went without an answer. Kelly cursed and pounded the phone with the receiver until the plastic cracked
and the handset fell into two pieces. Inside the gas station Kelly bought another six-pack of something cheap. He drank one in front of the pump and cracked a second for the drive.

Eventually he had to go home, he knew, but Kelly kept circling neighborhoods he didn’t know, driving down nameless streets. He was alone here. No one could see him when he was in his car.

The floorboard in front of the passenger seat was littered with empty cans. Kelly finished another and let it fall. He steered the Buick with his knees while he popped the tab on the next. On his left were a bunch of businesses all jumbled together the way bad Texas zoning let it happen, and on his right were streets with houses and trees and lawns. He saw kids on bikes or playing in sprinklers. Up ahead a railroad crossing cut the road diagonally and the lights were flashing. There was no one up ahead.

“Come on,” Kelly said. He didn’t see the train, but now the safety barriers dropped. He was annoyed. The brake was an imposition. Kelly balanced the beer on top of the steering wheel and goosed the accelerator. “Come on, come on.”

A side street split from the main road and ran parallel to the track. Kelly saw some kids in the grass on the shoulder, idling with their bikes, watching for the train he still didn’t see, seven- or eight-year-olds needing entertainment on a Saturday.

Fifty yards away and the train appeared. Kelly touched the brake and then let off. He angled for the side road. The sign said YIELD. He passed the kids at forty-five miles an hour with the clanging of the train signal filtering through the closed windows, the sound of the Buick’s engine and Kelly’s thoughts.

Impact came just past the turn. A bicycle transformed into a tangle of rubber and metal on impact and tumbled across the hood. A pedal struck the corner of the windshield and cracked the glass.

“Goddammit!”

Kelly heard children shrieking and the train horn blowing. He swerved and the bicycle fell away. He lost his fingertip grip on the beer can and it hit the dashboard spraying foam. The Buick
skidded, the wheel alive under Kelly’s hands. Kelly stomped with both feet, got the brake and the gas. The engine revved and the wheels screamed. He came to a stop across two lanes. The Buick stalled.

His crotch was soaked. Kelly smelled piss. He struggled with the door and when he got it open he tumbled onto the blacktop. The kids were in the street. The mangled bicycle was thirty feet away. The train churned past on steel wheels, heedless of it all. Kelly’s eye drifted back to the children, how they gathered around and how the shrieking hadn’t stopped, and how they concealed nothing.

He had never known a boy could be so full of blood. The asphalt was painted with it, deep red and almost pink intermingled. The boy was torn open so that his hipbones were visible. The other children were caught in his orbit, too frightened to come close, too shocked to flee.

Kelly’s lungs were empty, or he might have screamed. He couldn’t feel his arms or legs. He was still the way the dead boy was so terribly still and he could not bring himself to look away. The train kept coming, hauling car after car. Kelly heard its fading horn.

The boy’s limbs were shattered, twisted up like the bicycle. One mangled hand pointed toward the sky, perched on the remains of a forearm and a crushed elbow. Shorts and T-shirt were stained darkly and the pool of blood kept expanding. Where did it all come from?

He was moving before he realized he could move. The knot of children broke apart. Some ran, some cried and others looked to Kelly. He turned his face from them. Numb hands found the open car door, helped him clamber in and turn the key. The Buick’s engine hitched once before it started. Kelly swallowed his heart.

The car laid an oily trail of rubber on the road behind it. Kelly drove fifty miles without slowing or stopping, but only a hundred before he took another drink. Then he turned toward Mexico.

K
ELLY WOKE CRYING
. H
E STARTED
on the narrow bunk mattress and felt pain everywhere he could still bear it. The rest of him was beyond hurt; when he stirred those injuries he felt suddenly and deeply sick to his stomach, but retching only made the suffering worse.

“Kelly,” Sevilla said.

One of Kelly’s eyes was swollen shut. He saw Sevilla outside his cell. It was so quiet and so still that for a moment Kelly wasn’t sure whether he was dreaming again or whether this was real. The pain was real enough. He remembered the crushed body of the little boy in the road; that was real, too, but left behind.

“Help me,” Kelly said.

“Open it up,” Sevilla said.

A guard moved into Kelly’s vision. A key was put to the lock and the door was opened. Kelly needed the guard and Sevilla to get to his feet. Something warm and wet flowed down Kelly’s leg: he couldn’t stop himself from pissing. “
Eso es repugnante
,” the guard said, but he didn’t let go.

When they marched Kelly past the other cells there was silence. The men behind bars simply watched. Kelly walked dragging his right foot; he couldn’t make it work right and he was too far gone to care about impressions. The end of the cell block seemed a dozen miles away. When they reached the door, the guard didn’t bother commanding Kelly to lean against the wall; he had no energy to run.

They passed the steel doors with their plain numbers and judas holes. Kelly had an arm across Sevilla’s shoulders. He clutched at the material of Sevilla’s suit and his grip was weak, terribly weak. “Please,” Kelly said. He hated the sound of his own voice.

Kelly held his breath as they approached Room 2, and then they went by. He prayed they would pass them all, but Sevilla and the guard stopped at Room 4. Another lock and another key and now Sevilla helped Kelly alone into another space with another bolted-down table and another pair of immobile chairs.

The guard locked them into the room alone. Sevilla put Kelly in one of the chairs and stopped to straighten his jacket and tie. Kelly let his head fall back and he saw above, tucked in the corner, another video camera watching, but this room was different: a set of cheap plastic blinds covered a window across from the table. If the blinds were opened, Kelly could look through the window from where he sat. Maybe he would see the sky, or a little open ground. Maybe he would feel real sun.

Sevilla didn’t open the blinds. He sat opposite Kelly.

“I won’t ask you how you feel,” Sevilla said.

“I need a doctor,” Kelly replied.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

Without a clock on the wall, time in the room went on forever. The chipped surface of the table had something that looked like dried blood caked in the cracks. No matter how he sat, Kelly’s body protested. He would almost rather lie on the bare concrete floor, but he didn’t want to sleep because then he might dream of the little boy on his bicycle and the crowd of children around him. Or worse, he would dream of Paloma the way she was in Sevilla’s photos.

“They asked me to talk to you one more time,” Sevilla said. “I need for you to listen.”

“I didn’t kill her.”

Sevilla had no reply. He brought out a pack of Benson & Hedges, took a cigarette for himself and left the pack on the table. Kelly didn’t touch it. He watched Sevilla light and drag and exhale toward the ceiling. The sound of shouting carried through the walls.

Kelly’s head throbbed. He closed his eye and saw patterns in the dark.

“Have I ever told you about my daughter?” Sevilla asked.

Kelly didn’t open his eye. “No.”

“I know every father thinks so, but she was beautiful. The most beautiful girl in all of Mexico. Too beautiful for this world. And my granddaughter… oh, you should have seen her, Kelly. Something so lovely would break your heart.”

More shouting. Kelly thought he recognized a voice, but his ears hurt as much as the rest of him. He put his hands on the table. The room swayed around him and his stomach protested. Kelly wondered whether his eardrums were damaged. A boxer who burst an eardrum couldn’t fight; balance is everything.

“All we want is the truth, Kelly,” Sevilla said at last.

“I didn’t kill her.”

“Kelly, look at me.”

Kelly opened his eye and he saw Sevilla wreathed in smoke. The man was haggard, sweating. Something thumped hard against the wall behind Sevilla and the blinds jumped. “I did not kill her,” Kelly repeated.

“Paloma didn’t kill
herself
, Kelly. And the men in charge… the man they see is a drug addict working with a known
narcotraficante
. They know about the heroin, Kelly. They know about Estéban and Paloma and how the money came. They know you can’t go back to the States. All of this they know, and yet now they must take your word for something so serious? Think about it, Kelly. Think about it and save your life.”

“What will you do?”

“Whatever I can do.”

“That’s not enough.”

“That’s all you get,” Sevilla said, and for an instant Kelly saw Ortíz in Sevilla’s place, and smelled beer and limes.

“Goddammit.”

“All these years, Kelly, I’ve been watching you, talking to you… but we were never friends. I always liked you, or maybe I just felt sorry for you.”

“Fuck you.”

Sevilla dismissed Kelly with a wave of his cigarette. “And then you had Paloma. Of course, she was a drug dealer’s sister and I know when she went with Estéban to visit their ‘cousin’ in Mazatlán they were really making contact with Estéban’s supplier. What, you didn’t know this? I’m surprised at you, Kelly.”

Kelly wanted to spit on the table, but his mouth was dry and tasted of blood. “I don’t believe a goddamned word of it,” he said.

“Believe it or don’t believe it,” Sevilla replied. “It’s true. I had no illusions about her or her brother, but her work — her
real
work, Kelly, not the other things – that was real. I told you before: you wouldn’t believe how much good she did.”

“I don’t want to talk about her anymore,” Kelly said.

“You need to tell me who did this to her, Kelly.”

“I can’t.”

“Because you’re still keeping secrets.”

“Because I don’t know.”

Sevilla stubbed his cigarette out on the table and tossed the butt into the corner. The weight beneath his eyes seemed to deepen. When he shook his head, Kelly thought Sevilla might weep.