Sam Hawken is a native of Texas now living on the east coast of the United States. A graduate of the University of Maryland, he pursued a career as an historian before turning to writing. The Dead Women of Juárez is his first novel.
A complete catalogue record for this book can be
obtained from the British Library on request
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of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Copyright © 2011 Sam Hawken
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real
persons, dead or alive, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
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First published in 2011 by Serpent’s Tail,
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3A Exmouth House
Pine Street
London EC1R 0JH
website: www.serpentstail.com
ISBN 978 1 84668 773 0
eISBN 978 1 84765 655 1
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REGARDLESS OF WHAT IT SAYS ON the cover, every book is a team effort. With that in mind, I must thank Dave Zeltserman and my agent, Svetlana Pironko, for championing my work when even I had my doubts. Thanks also go to Pete Ayrton and John Williams of Serpent’s Tail for taking a chance on me.
Most of all I thank my wife, Mariann, for allowing me the opportunity to pursue a career as a writer, for being my first reader and prime defense against bad writing, and for being the cornerstone of our family. Without her, there would be no novel for you to read.
For las mujeres muertas de Juárez
ROGER KAHN WROTE, “BOXING IS smoky halls and kidneys battered until they bleed,” but in Mexico everything bled in the ring. And there was also pain.
When Kelly Courter fought in the States he was a welterweight, but he didn’t fight Stateside anymore and he was heavier. No amount of sweating and starving would take him out of the middleweight class now. This mattered little to the man who paid the purse. If pressed he would call these catchweight fights, but they were really just demolition without a weigh-in or any formality beyond money changing hands.
The Mexican kid was leaner and harder than Kelly, and that was the point; Kelly was here to be the kid’s punching bag. Mexicans liked to see La Raza get one over on a white guy. It was twice as good if the white guy came from Texas like Kelly did.
They circled. Kelly’s blood was on the canvas because he was gashed over the right eye and his nose was dripping. Vidal, the cut man working Kelly’s corner, wasn’t much for adrenaline and pressure alone couldn’t stop the leaking. The crowd wanted to see the bolillo bleed anyway.
Kelly worked the jab to keep the kid at a distance. He connected, but he wasn’t putting enough hurt behind the punches to make a difference to the outcome. His shoulders burned and his calves threatened to cramp. He started the match dancing, but now he was shuffling.
They traded punches. Kelly soaked up the kid’s straight right with his cheekbone and when his head rocked he heard and felt his neck bones crackle. He hooked a punch into the kid’s ribs, but his follow-up left windmilled. And then they were apart again, circling. If Kelly could keep the action in the center of the ring, he might manage to stay on his feet through six rounds.
The bell rang. The crowd was happy. Under the ring lights a layer of tobacco smoke was as thick and gray as a veil.
Vidal wiped the blood off Kelly’s face and pressed an icy-cold enswell where it would do the most good. In the other corner, the Mexican kid’s trainer talked the boy up while he got all the best stuff, from ice packs to adrenaline hydrochloride. Kelly didn’t have a trainer with him because he wasn’t that high-class; he was just the designated sacrifice. Vidal came with a ten-year-old boy who worked the bucket and iced down Kelly’s mouthpiece. Kelly paid them both ten bucks a round.
“Can you do something about my nose?” Kelly asked Vidal after his gum shield came out. “I can’t breathe right.”
“Don’t get punched in the face no more,” Vidal replied, but he stuffed a soaking Q-tip up Kelly’s left nostril and swabbed it around. “Here, suck it up.”
Kelly snorted and his sinuses flushed with the stink of alcohol and blood. Kelly felt nauseated. The boy held up his plastic bucket. Kelly spat into it instead of throwing up.
“You going to make it?” Vidal asked.
“What round are we in?”
“You can fall down any time now. Fall down or get knocked down.”
“He can knock me down.”
“Then you’re stupid.”
The bell rang. Vidal yanked the Q-tip out of Kelly’s nose too roughly, but the bleeding didn’t start again.
As far as smokers went this one wasn’t too big: about forty men surrounded the ring and the walls were close. Everybody had something to drink and there were lots of cigars. Old Mexican faces heavy with wrinkles and extra chins and dark eyes grew darker in the shadows of a fight so that looking out beyond the ropes a fighter saw only dozens of dead, unblinking holes.
“¡Délo a la madre!”
Give him to the Mother. Roughly it meant kick his ass to death.
The Mexican kid came straight at Kelly and so did the first hard jab. Maybe Kelly was distracted, or maybe he was slower than he thought, but the punch came through his hands and cracked him right between the eyes. It shouldn’t have rocked him, but it did.
Kelly took a step back. A left hook took him flush and the combo right to the body made his guts shake. He had his hands up, but they weren’t where they needed to be, so the kid battered him left-right, left-right, and he fell while all the old men cheered the blood.
Back in the States the ref would step in once Kelly’s head bounced off the canvas, but this wasn’t the States. Kelly’s nose was gushing again. The Mexican kid was over him. Another punch slugged down from the heavens and blocked out the ring lights. Only then was the bell rung. The ref raised the Mexican kid’s hand and Kelly Courter disappeared for everyone in the room.
IF THE PLACE HAD DRESSING ROOMS, they weren’t for bolillos. They set Kelly and Vidal up at the back of the men’s room. While drunken viejos wandered in and out to use the piss trough, Vidal helped Kelly get the tape off his fists and get changed. He cleaned up Kelly’s face the best he could, but he worked corners and wasn’t a doctor.
Green and white paint on the walls peeled from neglect and humidity. The men laughed at Kelly and insulted him in Spanish because they didn’t think he understood them, but he did. “His face looks like a bowl of frijoles refritos,” one of the old men said to another. Kelly might have argued, but he saw himself in a mirror coming in and knew they weren’t far wrong; the Mexican kid did a dance on his face.
Vidal put his thumbs on either side of Kelly’s nose and pressed until cartilage crunched. Needles of pain stabbed through Kelly’s forehead then and when Vidal put tape across the bridge of his nose to keep things stable. Kelly would have two black eyes for a while.
Ortíz came in. The room reeked of urine and shit. There wasn’t a breath of fresh air inside four walls. Ortíz didn’t look like the kind of man who’d wash his hands in a place like this even if the sink worked. He took a wad of American bills out of his jacket and counted out $200.
“What did you think of Federico?” Ortíz asked Kelly.
Kelly gave Vidal two twenties. The old cut man put the money away and packed up. “I think he punches hard,” Kelly said.
“Oh, yeah,” Ortíz agreed. “Without gloves on, he could kill you.”
“Then I guess I’m lucky he had gloves on.”
Outside the bathroom the crowd revved up again. Kelly’s match wasn’t the only fight on the card, but the rest of the fights were all brown on brown. Now that the spectators had their appetites whetted, good matches would go down smooth.
“You want I should call a taxi for you?” Ortíz asked.
“I don’t want to waste the money.”
“Hey, it’s on me, Kelly.”
Vidal was already out the door. Kelly got up. His bag and jacket were inside a stall with a broken toilet. Ortíz’s money went in Kelly’s pocket. “You already paid me. And I’m not fuckin’ crippled,” Kelly said. “I’ll take myself out.”
“Hey, amigo,” Ortíz said, “I might have something for you next month, you heal up okay. You want I should let you know?”
A month would give the cuts time to close and the bruises to fade. Every dollar in Kelly’s pocket would be gone, too. The only constant was the demand for gringo blood.
“Yeah, okay,” Kelly said, and he left.
It was hot and still light on the street. Kelly could have gone right to bed. People outside the fights — too proper to care, or too sophisticated to admit it — didn’t understand what a fighter gave up in the ring. Every drop of sweat had a cost and every punch thrown or taken did, too. Kelly was tired because he was all paid out.
He left the smoker behind. Old cars crowded the broken curb on both sides of the street. Rows of fight notices were pasted up beside the entrance. Even out here Kelly still heard the spectators hollering.
Kelly didn’t have a car, old or not. He drove a slate-gray Buick down from El Paso five years before and sold it for a hundred bucks and some Mexican mud. He was already so bent that the culero paid him half what he promised and Kelly didn’t notice until it was too late. So he walked, bag over his shoulder, and kept his swollen face pointed toward the pavement. Juárez had plenty of buses.
He stopped two blocks down to spend some of his money. A little bar with a jukebox playing norteño beckoned Kelly inside. He had six bottles of Tecate, one after the other, and that took the hurt off some. The alcohol stung a cut in his mouth. He was the only white man in the place; the rest were rough brown men who worked with their hands under the sun or with machines in the maquiladoras. They ignored Kelly and that was fine.
“Oye,” Kelly asked the bartender. “You know where I can find some motivosa? ¿Entiende?”
The bartender pointed. The bar was long and narrow and lit mostly with strings of big-bulb Christmas lights. Posters for the corridas, the bullfights, were on the walls beside pictures and license plates and any other junk they could put up with a nail. Booths with high backs marched all the way back to the baños.
Kelly checked each booth until somebody made eye contact. He put his bag in first and sat down next to it. “Motivosa,” he said to the woman.
“How much you looking for?” the woman asked. She was flabby and braless and wore an unflattering shell-pink top that showed too much arm and neckline.
Kelly put a couple of Ortíz’s twenties on the table between them. “Keep me busy.”
The woman took Kelly’s money and stuffed it into her shirt. From somewhere under the table she produced a shallow plastic baggie of grass. Kelly put the baggie away. “You that white boy they like to knock around at el boxeo, eh?” the woman asked.
“What of it?” Kelly asked.
“Next time you around, come see me.”
“What for?”
The woman smiled. She had even, white teeth. Kelly realized they were dentures. “I like boxeadores,” she said. “Next time you come around, I get you relaxed.”
Kelly got up. “That’s what I get the herb for.”
Kelly Courter wasn’t a good-looking man. He’d seen uglier, both inside and outside the fight world, but he wasn’t a model and that was okay with him. Kelly’s nose had a crook in it and bent slightly. Even when he didn’t have raccoon eyes he always looked tired because he always felt tired; his body was older than he was.
At thirty he felt like a grandpa getting out of bed in the morning — all aches and protesting joints and sore muscles — and more decrepit still on the day after a fight. He carried too much weight around his middle and his hair was falling out, so he shaved his face and head once a month and let it all grow at the same rate.
He lived in an apartment building ten minutes away from the border crossing into Texas. Just a few miles, a line of police and a mostly dry riverbed separated Kelly in Ciudad Juárez from El Paso. Standing on a street in Juárez with closed eyes, just listening to the sound of Spanish, the rush of cars and smelling exhaust, it was easy to pretend the cities were the same, but Kelly didn’t go north anymore.
His apartment had a concrete balcony. Kelly kept a heavy bag there, though he rarely hit it. For Ortíz’s smokers Kelly didn’t need to be in shape and didn’t need to keep his skills sharp; all he had to do was show up more or less at weight and take a pounding. That he could do. That was what he had left.
He put his stuff in the bedroom and because the air was still went out on the balcony to roll a magic carpet. Sitting in a folding lawn chair with an old, chipped plate for an ashtray, he had a perfect view of a maquiladora that turned out automobile seats for GM. Night and day the seats came off the assembly line and went into truck-portable cargo containers for shipment back across the border. Wages started at a buck an hour and topped out before hitting three.
Mexican weed bought away from the tourist traps was always better than anything a man could find on the other side. Some Canadians told Kelly once that their marijuana was primo, but he didn’t believe it. Call it malva, chora or nalga de angel, Mexico grew the best shit; if Kelly was going to acostarse con rosemaria, go to bed with rosemary, he would do it south-of-the-border style.
The marijuana took the edge off. He didn’t even feel his heartbeat in his nose anymore. Kelly kicked his shoes off and let his bare feet rest on the cement. The car-seat maquiladora was lit up like a parade float at Disney World and was pure entertainment.
Once upon a lifetime ago, Kelly got mixed up with heavier stuff and learned to love the needle. He kept it up until he couldn’t even think straight anymore and ended up sweating and puking and shaking in a Juárez hospital for four weeks. On the outside and broke all over again, he swore he wouldn’t touch that shit for the rest of his life, and he hadn’t. Now he stuck with the mota.
The smoke wanted to put him to sleep, but Kelly was a soldier; he finished the joint before he went to bed. Without bothering to change out of his street clothes, he sprawled across the mattress, pulled the sheet over his chest and slept.
OVERNIGHT THE SWELLING CAME up on his face and his nose was more bent than usual. Under a lukewarm shower, Kelly straightened it out as best he could and let fresh blood swirl down the drain. He ate a monster breakfast to make up for lost calories. The sliding glass door to the balcony was open and he heard the whistle for the morning shift. Working Juárez had places to go and things to do, but Kelly Courter had some free time.
For a fighter it was better to run, but Kelly walked because he didn’t have stamina for anything else anymore. He put on his sneakers and locked up the apartment and headed out. He saw no one because everybody was at work. The only people without jobs in Ciudad Juárez were the very old and very young and sometimes they worked, too, if there was money to be had.
Deeper into Mexico the people got poorer and living conditions rotted away with them. Juárez was a little better because since 1964 it had the maquiladoras: factories turning out everything from tote bags to engine parts, mostly for American companies. Like most fighters on the Mexico side, Kelly used Reyes boxing gear, and all that was made in the maquiladoras, too.
Wages in the factories were criminal and the cost of living in a city like Juárez was higher than the interior, but for the most part it evened out. Ciudad Juárez had its shantytowns and hellholes in the colonias populares, but the maquiladoras kept them from taking over. A family could live here. The air was dirty and the city was crowded. There was crime and death, too — more now than ever before — but there were parks and schools and paved roads. Even though many maquiladoras were losing business and their production heading to China because even Mexican goods weren’t cheap enough for Wal-Mart.
Kelly had been to Tijuana and didn’t like the filthy streets and circus atmosphere. Over in Nuevo Laredo it was nothing but whorehouses and bars and places to buy worthless tourist bullshit. He settled in Ciudad Juárez because it seemed enough like home, but wasn’t, and partly because it worked out that way. Things were changing with all the bloodthirsty traficantes moving their business farther and farther north and east, but Kelly wasn’t going anywhere.
He walked a mile and then two. He sweated under his shirt, took off his jacket and tied the sleeves around his waist. His face was hidden under a cap and sunglasses, but anyone looking closely would see the beating he took. Fresh tape on his nose was a dead giveaway.
Kelly walked all the way to El Centro, skipping the buses in favor of roadwork, though they roared by at regular intervals and blasted him with hot exhaust. Kelly hadn’t been behind the wheel of any kind of vehicle since he sold that Buick. Driving was no good anyway, especially when the streets were so thick with traffic that he passed block after block of cars and trucks baking in the sun and sweating out the people inside. On foot he could move. On foot he was free. He didn’t want to be trapped or singled out, and pedestrians seemed to be invisible to everyone with wheels.
El Club Kentucky was his stop. He dashed across the street and got a horn and a curse for it. It was cool under the bar’s green awning and milder still inside. The ceiling was high and lined with heavy wooden beams. A few chandeliers with yellow lights, fake candles, dangled overhead, but most of the light came by way of the street glare.
Only a few men were there at this hour in the middle of the week. Kelly took a stool at a dark-varnished oak bar that stretched all the way to the back. A TV showed fútbol, but the screen was over Kelly’s head so he couldn’t watch even if he wanted to.
The Kentucky was almost a hundred years old, but it was in good shape because customers and money kept coming in. They said Bob Dylan drank there and Marilyn Monroe, too. The bar fixtures were as old as the place: big, serious-looking wood and glass and age-foggy mirrors. The bartender was an old man wearing an apron. He gave Kelly a Tecate in the bottle with a little bowl of lime slices.
“¿Dónde está Estéban?” Kelly asked the bartender.
“¿Quién sabe?” the bartender replied.
Kelly had beer and lime and waited. If it were later in the year, he’d see what tickets to the bullfights were available and lay out for cheap seats he could hustle to drunken turistas who didn’t know they could just walk in and get better views for less money.
Estéban didn’t show for over an hour and two beers later. He passed Kelly without seeing him but when Kelly called his name, Estéban turned around like he wasn’t surprised at all. “Hey, carnal. ¿Que onda?” Estéban asked. “Where you been, man?”
Estéban took the stool next to Kelly. He was lighter than Kelly and shorter, but his skin was blasted deep brown by genes and time in prison work crews on the American side. He wore sunglasses, but took them off inside. Kelly kept his on.
“I been around,” Kelly said. “Lookin’ for you.”
“Hey, I ain’t hard to find. What happened to your face? You been at el boxeo again? When you going to learn, man?”
“I guess never,” Kelly said. “What you drinking?”
“Gonna spend big today, huh? I’ll have a cerveza if you’re buyin’.”
Kelly ordered a Tecate for Estéban and another for himself. The bartender brought fresh limes.
“It’s that puto Ortíz,” Estéban complained to Kelly. “People he knows… you don’t want to be no part of that world.”
“I just want to lace up my gloves,” Kelly said. He wished Estéban would stop talking about it. “I don’t want to fuck the guy.”
“Everybody he fucks, you fuck,” Estéban returned.
“That doesn’t make any goddamned sense.”
“To you, maybe not.”
They drank. Finally Kelly asked, “You got someone else carrying for you?”
Estéban put his hand over his heart. “What you thinking, man? I been on vacation for a few days, you think I forgot all about you? I ain’t some asshole; I know about loyalty.”
“Well, I took that fight because I couldn’t find you. Rent don’t pay itself,” Kelly said.
“I was down in Mazatlán for a while to see my cousin get hitched. Me and Paloma both. You offending me, man.”
Kelly finished his beer. “I don’t want to argue; I want to get some work.”
“What, like Ortíz gets you work?”
“Shut up about him.”
“Hey, all right,” Estéban said. He clapped Kelly on the shoulder. “Listen: I’m back in town and I gots plenty of stuff for you. In fact, I was goin’ to call you today and see if you wanted to carry some shit for me.”
“What kind of shit?”
“The usual kind of shit. Don’t bust my balls, okay?”
Kelly signaled the bartender for another beer. He put some money on the rail and the old man made it disappear. A fresh bottle of Tecate came, still sweating water from the cooler. “Okay,” he told Estéban. “Tell me when and where.”
MORE THAN CHEAP FACTORY GOODS crossed the border from Ciudad Juárez into the States. Too many trucks and too many people meant too many places for dope to hide. The cops tried their best to catch the crooks, but it was a losing battle. More than that: it was a rout. Now the hardcore traficantes, the ones that came up in places like Mexico City, were even taking their fights and their weapons into Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.
Estéban’s product was weed, but he handled a little gumersinda from time to time. He knew Kelly was off the hard stuff, so when raw heroin came through he had one of his brown runners take care of it. Estéban showed respect for Kelly that way, and that was why they kept on together. That and because of Paloma.
Kelly carried a Reyes gym bag with boxing gear on top and a kilo of weed underneath. A setup like that could never make it past the border guards with their dogs and checklist of suspicious parcels, but for a gringo walking around here it was nothing a cop would glance at twice. Maybe not even once when Kelly had been through the grinder like the night before.
He came north, this time by bus, and then walked the rest of the way to a neighborhood so close to the border that he saw the lights of El Paso clearly. Every night was party night on these blocks, with white-boy tourist trash circling around the strip clubs and legal brothels getting drunker and drunker until they staggered back across the downtown bridge with their wallets and their pockets picked clean.
People knew Kelly here; at least enough to let him pass without trying to sell him fake Cuban cigars, flowers, Mexican fly and everything else under the sun. While the rest of Ciudad Juárez settled down for dinner and bed, these blocks hopped. This was where the city came close to being like all the other turista carnivals along the border, and why Kelly only came here when he was being paid.
The place was La Posada del Indio, the Inn of the Indian in English. A large animated neon cartoon Indian, complete with feather headdress of the kind never seen south of the border, marked the door. Inside it was no inn and was barely a saloon: tiny stage for a single dancing girl, a compact bar with two men doubling as bartenders and pimps, plus a dozen tables around which girls constantly circulated.
Kelly bought an overpriced cerveza from the bar. He didn’t attract a swarm of girls, either because of his looks or because they knew the score; La Posada del Indio was a good place to get business done, and the men who came for money instead of pussy had a certain air about them.
“¿Usted está buscando el hombre gordo?” the bartender asked Kelly.
“How did you know?” Kelly asked.
“He was waiting. You’re here.”
Kelly shrugged, but now Estéban would have to come up with a new place for a drop; they knew Kelly too well here. “So where is he?”
“He was waiting a long time. He got a girl.”
Kelly looked around the place for a fat man. Because it was midweek, most of the faces here were Mexican brown and bodies working-lean under the florid lights. Coming closer to the weekend the complexion would shift and the men would get doughier. There would be more cash changing hands, too.
“You want to get your dick sucked?” the bartender asked. “There is a girl, she’s new. She won’t mind your face.”
“No, thanks,” Kelly said. He unconsciously touched the tape on his nose. Even now, after a handful of aspirin, his face throbbed with his heartbeat. “What room did the fat man get?”
The bartender told him. Kelly finished his beer and went out the front door. A narrow alley brought him to the next street where a ramshackle apartment building with rusty iron balustrades sulked in darkness. Women and girls moved up and down concrete steps, leading men in and sending them away.
Kelly ignored the women and they did the same for him. In the bar they were selling, but back here it was business. He went to the third floor and rapped on the last door. He heard nothing from inside until a short, dumpy prostitute opened the door and then the sound of a television game show reached Kelly’s ears.
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.
MUJERES SIN VOCES 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.
“I know.”
“Sorry,” Kelly said, though he wasn’t.
“I know. Forget about it.”
A short, apple-shaped woman brought them deep bowls of pozole. Mexicans had plenty of different ways to make the stuff, but the base was always hominy. This cook prepared pozole with pig’s feet, slices of avocado and raw onion and a garnish of chilis. A wedge of lime took away the heat when the spice got to be too much.
They ate in silence for a while. The men at the table seemed to sense the tension and they left as soon as they could. No one took their place, though the restaurant bustled.
“You look better today,” Paloma told Kelly at last.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. But your nose isn’t going to heal right. I can see it now.”
Kelly resisted the urge to touch his face. He shrugged. “It was fucked up already.”
Paloma sighed and shook her head. Kelly didn’t have to ask what she was thinking; they had argued over it enough times.
Empty bowls were replaced by a serving of tortilla soup. The heat and the spice of this and the pozole made Kelly’s nose run and he could feel his bruised sinuses opening up. Food like this was good for the belly and good for healing. Watching Paloma eat was a pleasure because she ate heartily, but still like a woman. It was the same way she made love.
“Estéban wants to know what you’re doing tomorrow night,” Paloma said.
“I’ll have to check my calendar.”
“Don’t be an asshole.”
“Okay, I’m not doing anything. What does he want to do?”
“Get drunk. Smoke hierba. What else?”
“Weed pays the bills,” Kelly said. He used his napkin to wipe his lips. A fresh throbbing started in his nose, but it was the good pain of swelling going down; he’d been through this often enough to know.
“He should sell it, not smoke it.”
“I’ll tell him that.”
“I said don’t be an asshole.”
Kelly finished his soup. He changed the subject: “I saw a new flyer today.”
“Rosalina?” Paloma asked.
“You know about her?”
“We heard.”
“Do you think—”
“Kelly,” Paloma interrupted, “you don’t have to talk about that if you don’t want to.”
“I’m just trying to be interested.”
“I know, and that’s good, but it’s… don’t worry about it.”
A shadow passed over Paloma’s expression and Kelly realized it had been there all along, only he hadn’t noticed. She seemed distracted, but not by the food or his condition. He was angry at the office and the flyers all over again; Paloma was meant to shine.
“I was thinking about Mazatlán,” Kelly said. “Maybe next month we could go together. Get a room at that one hotel on the beach. You remember that one? It has those two swimming pools by the restaurant?”
Paloma reached across the table and took Kelly’s hand. Kelly imagined he could feel her darkness in her touch. “I remember,” she said.
“It doesn’t have to be too long. Just a couple of days if you want.”
“I’d like that.”
“You would?”
“Yes, okay?”
“Good.”
The little fat woman came to their table with the main course. The corrida comida wasn’t called “the big meal” for nothing. Paloma pulled away from Kelly and for the rest of their time together they were more concerned with eating than talking.
ESTÉBAN CAME BY EARLY, DRIVING a dusty white truck with a flat bed. Kelly rode shotgun and they started drinking cold bottles of Tecate from a Styrofoam cooler before they got to where they were headed.
Kelly didn’t know whose idea it was to build a massive skate park in Ciudad Juárez, but it was built and the skaters came. It was a broad, open space at the edge of the city that looked like a moonscape of cement craters. A massive tower of concrete stood at the center, looming sixty feet into the air alongside a winding framework of metal and wood steps. All day long climbers mounted one side while others rappelled down the other to the echoing sound of clattering skateboards and shouting.
White concrete blinded and reflected heat. In the middle of the day Parque Extremo was punishingly hot. It was possible to lose pounds just sweating it out in the half-pipes and skating ponds.
Neither Kelly nor Estéban skated, but this was their drinking spot. The politicians who celebrated the park’s grand opening had a lot to say about health and safety and keeping kids off drugs, but the smell of motivosa was as common as the odor of wholesome perspiration. Skater punks from the US came to show off their skills and score at the same time. Sometimes Kelly and Estéban sold here.
They bought some tamales from a snack vendor and sat underneath a metal awning to watch a trio of Mexican kids run their BMX bikes up the sides of a nine-foot practice pond. The kids hit the upper lip and caught big air before crashing down wheels-first for another run. Kelly liked the rubbing buzz of the bike wheels on cement, but not the bone-jarring rattle of metal returning to earth. That took him back to something he would rather forget but could not. A part of Kelly wondered whether he agreed to come here for the reminder.
The tamales were good: spicy and filling. Kelly and Estéban ate with their hands, spinning the packed, corn-meal cylinders of the tamales out of their cornhusk jackets. Some people liked to pour sauce over theirs, but Kelly enjoyed a tamale eaten plain and Estéban shared his tastes in most things, including this.
They filled up and had some more beer. The BMX kids moved on. Kelly and Estéban stared at the empty practice pond. “Why did you tell Paloma I wouldn’t come with you to Mazatlán?” Kelly asked at last.
“You know why.”
“No, I don’t, or I wouldn’t ask,” Kelly said, and he looked right at Estéban.
“Hey, don’t to make me feel bad, man. You know I love you. But nuestra familia, they got some – how do you want to call it? – they got some old-fashioned ideas in their heads.”
Kelly turned away. He looked over to the next practice pond, where a group of skateboarders, Mexican and white, traded stunts on steep concrete walls. He considered getting up and moving closer, but there was no good shade there and he was comfortable already.
Estéban continued: “I see you, I see a good guy. Paloma, she loves you. But you know how some vieja gente can get with white boys. And my sister is una mujer fina; she deserves the best.”
“I know,” Kelly said, and he knew before Estéban explained. He wondered why he asked in the first place, knowing the answer was just going to make him feel lousy. The tamales didn’t sit right anymore, huddled in the pit of his belly.
“Maybe next time,” Estéban said.
“Next time. Sure,” Kelly replied. It was as though he were talking with Paloma about it all over again. He stood and stretched, but put his hands on the wooden crossbeam rather than on the corrugated aluminum roof of the awning; the metal was hot enough to sear meat.
“I tell you one thing,” Estéban said after the silence grew too long, “you got to stop putting your face in front of those young boxeadores. Ain’t you ugly enough?”
“I got to be handsome now?”
“No, but you can’t get nobody’s respect looking like you got hit by a truck. I don’t know how Paloma can look at you. I wouldn’t kiss nobody look like you do. People talk, man. They call you ‘Frankenstein.’”
“That’s funny. What people?”
“Ain’t no joke, homes. Just people. Paloma, she has respecto. More than you or me.”
motivosa