The Dead Women of Juarez

“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 Esteban’s bullshit. What he tells the locals I don’t care; we both know these men, these distribuidores de la heroina… 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.

SIX

ESTEBAN 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.

“Si.”

“Senorita Arellano no esta aqui.”

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.

“?Senor? 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 Juarez 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 Juarez 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 Juarez 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