The Dead Women of Juarez (5 page)

Kelly thought it was sappy as hell, but Ayala and his band were huge in Mexico and in the States. They did their recording Stateside and lived there, too. Mexicans bought their own music back from American companies. Kelly didn’t understand that, either.

He climbed the steps to his apartment and heard the voice of Eliseo Robles, Ayala’s singer during the band’s boom years, crooning over the bouncy accordion:

Un rinconcito en el cielo

Juntos, unidos los dos

Y cuando caiga la noche

Te daré mi amor
…

Breakfast was as burly as if Kelly had fought the night before. He’d forgotten how ravenous he got after running. He ate to fill the hole in his belly and even washed dishes afterward.

He still had energy when normally he’d be tired. He prowled
the apartment and realized just how little he had to do; he was too keyed up for television and he hadn’t listened to music since his CD player broke.

In the end he wrapped his hands and stepped out onto the balcony out back to hit the heavy bag. His first punches weren’t much; just enough to put fist to leather and feel the firmness and weight behind it.

Kelly paid more attention to form than power. A real punch came from the hips, torquing the whole body behind the shoulder to apply mass that two knuckles on the punching hand didn’t have. A good punch sounded a tone in the flesh like a deep, ringing bell. Out in the ring for Ortíz, taking hits and bleeding, he never felt the magic of a punch well thrown, but he could have it here if he could make his muscles remember the way.

Sweat came fast, and hard breathing, just like on his run. Kelly found himself holding his breath when he punched, and he reminded himself
breathe, breathe
after that. Punching without air sucked oxygen right out of the muscles. A fighter lost all his power without breathing right, and he could even pass out. Kelly wiped his forehead with the back of his arm.

He didn’t want to punch himself out, but it felt good to do something the same way it felt good to get out there and run even though his lungs weren’t up to it and his legs didn’t have the power they ought. He worked the heavy bag until he felt weight in his arms that made it hard to throw punches correctly and then he stopped.

Across the plain of roofs he saw a line of trucks come out of the GM
maquiladora
. Below, at the foot of Kelly’s building, a cat rummaged through tall grass and discarded junk – tires and boxes and half-broken cinderblocks – looking for a mouse or a lizard to eat. Kelly sucked air greedily. It was only when he stopped blowing that he went back inside, put his wet wraps over the back of a chair to dry and started a shower.

In the summer even the cold water wasn’t completely cold.
Kelly soaked the oil and sweat from his body, stood with his hand underneath the spray and let his skull hang forward until the ligament at the base of his neck popped.

Endorphins still skidded around his system. He wouldn’t feel any of this until tonight or tomorrow. Right now he only had the good tired and the pleasant ache of exertion. He enjoyed it for the same reason he avoided it all these years: because it reminded him of before.

After his shower he toweled off and lay on the bed letting the still, dry air wick away the last moisture from his skin. This, too, he’d forgotten for good or ill. He drowsed for a little while and then fell asleep for less than an hour before waking to a room that looked and felt exactly the same, as if time hadn’t moved forward at all.

He felt different, and it wasn’t just the mixture of energy and tiredness that followed a good workout and a better nap. Kelly vaguely recalled dreaming of Paloma and Estéban, too. The place and the happenings were mixed up in his memory and fading quickly, but he knew that everything he’d done this morning had to do with them.

The telephone rang. Kelly got up naked and left the bedroom. The thin carpet felt oily and gritty on his clean soles and he resolved to borrow a vacuum cleaner from Paloma to do something about that.

“Hello?” he answered.

“
Hola
,” Estéban said on the other end. “
¿Qué tal?
”

“Nothing,” Kelly said.

“Hey, listen, I’m going shopping tonight. How’s your face look?”

“All right,” Kelly said. The bruises were pretty much gone, though his nose was still healing up on the inside. He didn’t look like a zombie anymore.

“That’s good. That’s good. Hey, listen: you up for shopping?
Two, three hours and I’ll cut you in for the usual. What do you say?”

Kelly looked around the apartment. It seemed too small to him now. Something was going on in his head and maybe getting out would cure it. “Okay,” he said. “What time you want to meet?”

“Meet me at nine,” Estéban said.

“Nine,” Kelly said. “All right.”

A
NY NIGHT IN
C
IUDAD
J
UÁREZ WAS
at least busy when it came to hookers and booze. It was too easy to cross the border and good times came too cheaply for workingmen in El Paso to say
no
, despite all the warnings about pickpockets and muggers and drug dealers and AIDS. They came over the walking bridge as daylight failed, sometimes straight from work, their trucks parked in clusters in lots laid out expressly for pleasure seekers headed south. Sometimes they were already a little bent and the idea of Mexico entered their brain through the bottom of a beer mug or in a shot of yellow-tinged tequila.

Shopping with Estéban happened on Fridays and Saturdays. These were the nights when the crowds were heaviest, the white faces most common, and cops had a harder time figuring out who was who and doing what.

They met outside the
farmacia
where the
turista
Juárez stopped and the Juárez of the
Juárenses
began. The place was open long hours, had broad aisles and a well-lit, clean atmosphere. A tacky green-and-red “trolley,” just a bus made up to look like a streetcar, ferried Americans back and forth across the border in air-conditioned comfort and dumped them right on the doorstep. Around the
farmacia
the white people were mostly older and looking for cheap drugs to fill their American prescriptions, but there were plenty of younger folks, too, picking up steroids and Viagra and other things, things that kept the party going all night long.

Estéban came out of the
farmacia
with two plastic shopping
bags. He crossed the street with Kelly and they sat down under the orangey splash of a streetlight to get ready. Kelly saw a flyer tacked to the lamppost:
justicia
.

“Put five pills in a baggie,” Estéban told Kelly. “The price stays the same, okay?”

“Okay,” Kelly said.

From one shopping bag came little self-sealing plastic baggies of the kind soccer moms used to pack their kids’ lunch snacks in: too small for a sandwich, but just right for a serving of goldfish-shaped crackers or, in this case, five capsules of OxyContin or hydrocodone. The drugs were in the second shopping bag in clean little orange-plastic bottles with neatly printed labels.

They divvied up the score. Kelly wore loose pants cinched tightly around his waist by a belt, the cuffs turned up on the inside so he didn’t look too much like a hick. The front pockets were roomier than they would be if he wore his size. He stowed the baggies in the front where they wouldn’t be crushed.

When they were done with the legal stuff, Estéban passed the
motivosa
. These baggies went in back pockets that zippered shut. In the end Estéban carried nothing. He gave Kelly a wad of pesos. “You can keep the change.”

“Thanks,” Kelly said.

They walked north without talking. The farther they went, the more they separated, until Estéban was well ahead and Kelly had him just in sight.

Hookers were out on all the corners, standing alone or in clusters. The sidewalks were jammed with gringos, mostly young and a lot of them drunk. Kelly felt himself blend in among them; that familiar sinking sensation. No matter how many times it happened, it felt strange. He wondered whether Frank the fat man was still hiding weed in his folds and getting away with it. He wondered whether Frank was somewhere out here tonight.

Estéban picked the places and Kelly followed. Kelly passed
a uniformed policeman with a holstered gun and a baton in his hand. The cop’s eyes slipped over him without a pause; Kelly was invisible to him. On shopping nights, cruising the
turista
bars, Estéban was the one who stood out. Where the
Juárenses
spent their Friday evenings the police wore body armor and carried automatic weapons, not a little pistol and a stick.

Anyone with half a brain could get bent south of the border on just about anything. The Rio Grande Pharmacy and a thousand others just like it made their livelihood catering to those who knew the score. But
turistas
were stupid: they paid too much for beers, too much for sex, too much for everything. The draw of the
farmacias
was that prescriptions were sometimes optional and the prices were low, but college kids, and teenagers especially, either didn’t know this or figured the
farmacias
were some kind of trap. They’d rather pay American prices to a man like Estéban than spend five minutes doing the same thing for less in a place without the noise and smoke and crowds.

Kelly bought identical beers in identical bars with Estéban’s pesos while loud American music busted out on speakers overhead. The air reeked of bodies, drink and cigarettes. Estéban cruised the crowds and from time to time he fell back to Kelly. He pressed US money into Kelly’s hand and placed an order. “Two oxy, one
aracata
,” he might say, and Kelly would pass two baggies of pills and one of weed.

Estéban didn’t carry on shopping nights. This was the way it worked because Kelly’s was the face the cops couldn’t see, or didn’t want to. Estéban held only on the short walk back to the buyer, and then he was clean again.

They repeated the process over and over, working north block by block until even the hardiest partyers began to thin. Kelly’s pockets were almost empty. Some nights Estéban let him hold back a little
motivosa
for himself if they ended up with more than they could move. Tonight, though, they got rid of it all.

Kelly’s end was fifteen percent. A member of La Raza would take
less, but he couldn’t glide beneath the radar the way Kelly could, either. As much as for his pockets and his skin, Kelly got paid for trustworthiness, too; he never held out on Estéban.

They sat down in a booth at an all-night
taquería
. “Good night,” Estéban remarked. He counted money on the table where no one could see and gave Kelly his cut. Kelly put the dollars together with his leftover pesos.

“Yeah,” Kelly agreed. He yawned into the back of his hand. The food came, they ate and he felt better.

“You coming to dinner tomorrow?” Estéban asked.

“Sure. Why wouldn’t I?”

“Just asking,” Estéban said. He ate, but stopped with food still on the paper plate in front of him. His eyes were bloodshot and bleary. “I’m fucking tired,
carnal
. You want a lift back to your place?”

“Yeah, okay. You all right to drive?”

“Better than a bus driver,” Estéban said.

Estéban left a tip for the old lady who cleaned the tables and he and Kelly went out together. The night was cold the way it always was, and the sky was stained an ugly color from the city lights. Away from the
turista
Juárez it was quieter and the shadows were deeper. Hardly anyone was on the streets and cars were rarer still.

S
HE WOKE AT FIRST LIGHT WITHOUT
needing an alarm clock because it was Sunday morning and she always went to bed early on Saturday nights. This was her habit since she was a little girl, when her mother and grandmother were still alive and Sundays were the most important days.

Estéban was asleep and wouldn’t wake until afternoon. Even if he hadn’t gone “shopping” the night before, he wouldn’t go to church. As soon as their mother died, Estéban abandoned the churchgoing habit and left it to Paloma to say prayers for both of them. He was like their father that way, and their grandfather, too, though at least he stayed and didn’t slip away to another town, into a bottle and then into oblivion.

Estéban’s one concession to faith was a little statue of Jesús Malverde, the narco-saint, and a pair of Virgin Mary candles to go with it.

Their house was small and old fashioned. Paloma had a white enamelware basin with blue flecks in her bedroom, which she filled from a matching pitcher. Soft light filtered through the yellowed drapes. Paloma removed her nightshirt and washed her body with a wet cloth.

On Sundays she didn’t wear the post in her tongue. She put the barbell in a glass of water with a tablet that made the water fizzy and blue, as if she were cleaning dentures. She brushed and flossed and put on her best dark dress and made sure her hair looked right. Makeup was for other days, so she wore none.

On Sundays Paloma didn’t drink coffee. When she left her room she prayed at a little shrine for Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. A replica of the icon hung from a wire and a nail in the corner. A low bench with a hand-stitched pillow for the knees had supported the women of their family on Sunday mornings for decades. Paloma recited the Glorious Mysteries with her mother’s black rosary.

On Sundays she walked two miles to the church. She could have taken the car, but when she was a little girl the family owned no car and the walk was even longer. This she did, like so many other things, to remember her women by.

The church was not the biggest in Ciudad Juárez, nor the richest. It was an old structure with deep roots, made from stone bricks and so traditional that it verged on the ugly. It centered a poor neighborhood of gathered homes and apartments, the streets crisscrossed overhead with thick tangles of electrical wire. Some roads were paved and others not. As Paloma walked, other pilgrims joined her. The church bells pealed.