The Dead Women of Juarez (11 page)

He owned no fancy shoes or slacks, so had to wear sneakers with jeans, but it would be enough. He went to the front room. “Bathroom’s open,” he said. “You want to hurry up and—”

“Estéban isn’t here,” Rafael Sevilla said. He sat on the couch where Kelly and Estéban shared their quiet, simple dinner the night before. “He’s down with the locals. Says his sister’s disappeared. He’s not so dressed up like you, Kelly.”

“What the hell are you doing in here?”

“The door was wide open.”

The door was open still and the glare was bright. Kelly had his shoes in his hand and he felt stupid standing in front of Sevilla in his Sunday shirt, his skin still damp from the shower and Estéban long gone. “When did he go?” Kelly asked.

“I don’t know, but they called me a couple of hours ago. I tell the locals who I’m interested in and they pass word on to me. Same with you. That’s how I know when you’re in the shit again, Kelly. And you’ve been in the shit, haven’t you?”

Kelly didn’t look Sevilla in the face. He went to the kitchen, though there was nothing there to keep him. He had only one unbroken glass for water and he used it. “I fucked up,” he said.

“I know. But that’s the kind of fuck-up you can’t afford, Kelly. I told you before: I turn a blind eye to the
hierba
, but not the other. I thought you were smarter than that.”

“I guess not,” Kelly said with his back to Sevilla.

“No. But all you addicts are stupid when it comes to
heroína
, eh?”

“I’m
not
an addict. I fucked up. That doesn’t make me a junkie.”

“Then look me in the eye when I’m talking to you, Kelly.”

“I’m not some kid you can boss around.”

Sevilla had a quiet voice, but it had strength. Kelly heard it before and he heard it now. Sevilla said: “A
man
could look me in the eye.”

Kelly turned. He looked at his feet and then the counter, the phone, the sliding glass door at the back of the apartment and finally to Sevilla. The old cop sat utterly still. His eyes seemed sadder and the lines around them deeper. Just looking at Sevilla made Kelly feel tired, as though there was an unwelcome weight shared between them.

“I slipped,” Kelly said. “It wasn’t what I wanted. I got right again.”

“Until the next time.”

“No. There’s no next time.”

“If you were with Paloma I’d believe it, Kelly,” Sevilla said. “But she’s not around. Where did she go?”

“I don’t know.”

“What did Estéban tell you?”

“Nothing. He said… he said she went to check up on me and, hell, I don’t know.” Kelly’s eyes burned and he rubbed them. He didn’t want to cry in front of Sevilla. That would be too much.

“Who sells Estéban his heroin?”

“Oh, for Christ’s fucking sake!” Kelly shouted. “The man’s sister is
gone
, all right? She’s just… just fucking
gone
and I don’t give a
shit
who gives Estéban what and what for! Now why don’t you just get the fuck out of my place?!?”

Sevilla didn’t move, but his expression settled into something hard. He wore a suit, but like all of them it wasn’t pressed and had the impression of age. Sevilla took the handkerchief from his breast pocket and held it out to Kelly. “You want to wipe your snotty nose?”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Kelly demanded, but he touched his nose with the back of his hand unconsciously.

“I mean if you’re going to be a spoiled little boy—”

“I’m not anybody’s—” Kelly began.

Sevilla cut him off: “
¡Parate!
Right now I talk and you listen. And listen closely, Kelly, because I don’t want to lose my temper with you.
You
don’t want me to lose my temper with you.”

Kelly closed his mouth. Sevilla rose from the couch and walked the room the way he did: a slow circuit that never paused long, but missed nothing. He lingered at the sliding glass door and touched the thick splatter of dried butter leavings. When he looked back to Kelly, his eyes were dark and no longer sad.

“She’s been gone ten days,” Sevilla said. “I know because I asked around. You were gone, too — crawled up into your fucking needle — but Estéban was also missing. Did he tell you that? Did he say he was out of town?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so.”

Kelly waited for Sevilla to say more, but instead Sevilla looked out toward the
maquiladora
beyond Kelly’s balcony. He was quiet for a long time, until Kelly couldn’t stay silent anymore. “Where was he?”

“Somewhere,” Sevilla said. He put his back to the view and fished a pack of cigarettes out of an inside pocket. “I could make a guess, but I don’t have real answers. That’s because I don’t know
names
. Names like who supplies Estéban with heroin.”

“Goddammit, I told you I
don’t know
.”

Sevilla knocked one cigarette from the pack, perched it in the corner of his mouth and lit it. He inhaled deeply and exhaled through his nose. He came away from the sliding glass doors and closer to Kelly. He used the cigarette as a pointer. “Then let me tell you what’s happened. Estéban and his good friends you don’t know, maybe they aren’t such good friends after all. Maybe Estéban makes too much money, or maybe he doesn’t make enough. Someone gets angry or he gets angry, but the end result is the same: Paloma goes for a ride and until everyone’s happy again and made friends again she stays away.”

Kelly shook his head. “No,” he said.

“No? Maybe she doesn’t come back at all. Maybe she’s dead already.”

“No, that’s not what happened.”

“I don’t know what happened, Kelly,” Sevilla said. He moved closer and left fading streamers of smoke in his wake. “I don’t know because I don’t have
names
. With names I can get faces and places and times.
Then
I can know.”

Kelly felt flushed, breathless, and put his hand on the counter by the sink. A shard of broken plate pressed against his palm. “She’s not dead. No dealer took her.”

“You know that for certain, do you, Kelly?”

“I know it.”

Sevilla was close enough to touch. The smell of cigarette was all around Kelly, and the aroma of his aftershave. Kelly wanted to push Sevilla back, but he was afraid he might fall; he was lightheaded and the smoke didn’t help. “You
don’t
know, Kelly. You
can’t
know. But we can… if you help me.”

“I don’t know what I can do for you,” Kelly said. He closed his eyes. He felt nauseous.

“Help me cut through Estéban’s bullshit. What he tells the locals I don’t care; we both know these men, these
distribuidores de la heroína
… they’re bad men. You’re not a bad man, Kelly; a woman like Paloma would never love a bad man.”

“Get away from me.” Kelly shoved Sevilla. The cop stumbled and his cigarette hit the floor. Kelly staggered backward and got tangled in his own sockfeet. He toppled onto his rear. When he looked up Sevilla had his hand on his gun and his face was flushed red.

“Don’t be
stupid
, Kelly! I want to find her, too. You think I don’t want to? After all the good she’s done? You don’t know how many people owe her, Kelly. You’ll never know.”

“Get the fuck out of here,” Kelly said. His eyes stung and he blinked away tears. “You just… you just get the fuck out of here now.”

“If I leave here now, Kelly, you’ll get no help,” Sevilla said.

“I don’t want your help. I want you to leave.”

Sevilla sighed. The high color drained from his face and he let his hand move away from his pistol. He crushed the fallen cigarette into the vinyl tile with the tip of his shoe. When he went to the door he paused as if to say one last thing, but Kelly wouldn’t look at him and finally Sevilla just left. Kelly put his face in his hands and all the words and pictures and ideas and fears and hopes whirled around behind his eyelids until they could only come out in more tears.

He felt it again: shame, warm and hot as blood. He smelled that blood, too, and it was then Kelly realized his palm was cut after all.

E
STÉBAN DIDN
’
T COME BACK THAT
morning. Kelly waited into the afternoon and watched shadows slide with the sun until he couldn’t stay still anymore. He left the apartment and made for the bus stop. He turned his head from the pink telephone pole when he passed it, though his mind framed the image on its own:
Justicia para Paloma
.

It took hours to reach the familiar street, the leaning building and the office with the pink door, or so it felt to Kelly. Every stop, turn and delay on the bus route was agony. Everyone moved too slowly. Those who talked on the bus were too loud. The sun was too bright and it was too hot in his plastic seat.

Kelly felt unshackled when he stepped onto the sidewalk. He walked quickly, and then ran, but his stamina was gone and he gassed before he got halfway there. Even so he took the steps to the second floor two at a time. At the last moment he was afraid the office would be closed, but the door was open and Kelly heard a typewriter from inside.

He expected Ella, but it was another woman, one he didn’t recognize. She was older, like most of Mujeres Sin Voces. When Kelly came in, she made a sour face as if he smelled.

“Excuse me,” Kelly said. If he’d worn a cap, he would have taken it off. “
Estoy buscando
Ella.
Mi nombre es
Kelly.”

“Ella Arellano?” the woman asked.

“
Sí
.”

“Señorita Arellano
no está aquí.
”

Kelly hesitated. The flyers in the office drew his eye, demanding
justicia, justicia, justicia
like every time before, but the faces were different because he saw them now. He came no farther than the doorway; he didn’t dare enter the room and be surrounded by all those faces.

“
¿Señor?
I say she no here.”

He had to stop looking at them, but they would not stop looking at him. Kelly dragged his eyes back to the woman. “Yeah. Where… um, where is she? It’s about Paloma.”

The woman crossed herself. “
Estamos esperando noticias
.”

“I know,” Kelly said. “I’ve been… away for a while. I want some news, too. Can you tell me where I can find Ella? They worked together a lot here.
¿Por favor?
”

The woman was silent, and Kelly felt the hesitation coming from her mixed with fear. Ciudad Juárez was a city of fear, and Kelly was white and a stranger to be feared most of all.

“
¿Por favor?
” Kelly asked again.

Kelly needed another bus, this one headed into the porous boundary between Ciudad Juárez and the sun-bleached wild beyond. Where streetlights and paving ended, the
colonias
sprang up. In the States this would be where the suburbs grew — endless, identical blocks of perfect green lawns and interlocking streets with themed names and an ever-vigilant homeowners’ association — but here the broken landscape was thick with shanties built from scrap wood and corrugated aluminum.

Throughways were decided by default, sometimes wide enough for the few cars there were and other times barely enough for two to walk abreast. Chicken wire and scraps of old cabinetry and cinderblocks and discarded shipping pallets were the building materials. A window was a hole in the wall. When the wind shifted the stench of raw sewage was overpowering.

There was nothing here but dirt, sand and a few water-starved trees. And people.

The only solid constructions were the bus shelters on the battered-down gravel road. The people of the
colonias
fed the buses and were disgorged by them, day and night in a steady shift-cycle from the
maquiladoras
. A worker from a
colonia
could ride to work three hours one way before the sun came up and get home after sundown. Kelly rode out of the city on a bus loaded with women in uniforms stitched with their names and the name of their
maquiladora
. None of them wanted to look at him and he obliged by staring out the window as Juárez went away.

He got off where he’d been told to and stood squinting in the harsh afternoon sun. Some of the women got off with him, while others boarded. Conversation stopped around him. Kelly was alien: white and male with money in his pocket. The only white people who came to the
colonias
were do-gooders or crooks, and Kelly didn’t carry a Bible. The bus left him in dust and diesel fumes and only when he was alone did he set off toward the
colonia
sprawl.

Not all the
colonias
were like this one. Some were almost like real neighborhoods and the workers who lived there built solid homes and even managed to get services like water and sewerage. In twenty years they might be absorbed by the city and become poor but proper parts of the whole. Ella’s
colonia
was not one of those.

The people here put up no signs, but the handmade structures were individual enough that a stranger could navigate by landmarks if he could remember them. The homes were swept up out of the desert from scrap, held together by rusty nails and staples and ropes and baling wire. Kelly looked for a green plastic garbage can cut and unfolded and used as part of a wall. When he found that, he could orient himself, or so he had been told.

The
colonia
was not a maze because mazes were designed with a solution. A rat could learn a maze but get lost in a
colonia
like this one, where the only constant was need and everyone fought for space. Houses here were not tall, but squat, irregularly shaped and set at imperfect angles to one another. Kelly heard music on radios
and saw a black-and-white TV running on batteries inside the darkened hutch of one home. He looked for the signs of passage — a fence topped with a red ribbon, a yellow dog with a black splotch on its face, the broken-down shell of an old Buick — and kept on.

A few awkward, makeshift power lines drooped from poles and simple boards planted in the ground. Orange extension cords served instead of real cables, and sometimes not even that; in places bare wire without a trace of insulation waited for the unwary to catch hold and be electrocuted to death. Ella’s
colonia
received no services, so somewhere an enterprising resident had put together a tap from the main line. A few of the larger shanties even had outdoor lights, but these were few and at night the throughways would be utterly dark except for the stars and the moon. Crime was worse here than anywhere in Juárez, and that was saying a lot. Kelly felt eyes on him always.