The Dead Women of Juarez

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 Juarez, and that was saying a lot. Kelly felt eyes on him always.

He passed children carrying water in plastic bottles from a communal pump. They streamed around him and moved past without a look back. Their voices and laughter made them sound like birds. He descended a steep row terraced into broad steps, but nearly lost his footing. From where he stood he saw the colonia spill down the hillside and beyond the farthest edge a field of pink crosses.

Ella Arellano’s home had a pink cross of its own, and underneath block letters painted in the same color: JUSTICIA. A front window had a roughly trimmed square of screen stapled into place to keep the bugs out and old-fashioned shutters with metal hinges on the inside for when the cold came. Its front door hung awkwardly, but the shanty’s face was whitewashed and mostly clean, the hard-packed dirt out front swept. Some of the homes in the colonia were little more than piles of scrap; the Arellanos lived with dignity.

He knocked and waited but no one answered. Kelly looked up and down the crooked throughway, expecting to see someone lingering, watching, but he was alone. He knocked again. This time he heard movement beyond the door.

Ella opened her door only enough for Kelly to catch a glimpse of her in shadow. “What do you want?” she asked in Spanish.

“I want to ask about Paloma,” Kelly replied. “When did you see her?”

“I don’t know nothing about it,” Ella said, this time in English. The words sounded funny coming from her, or maybe it was her voice; she slurred a little. “Go away.”

The gap closed. Kelly put his hand on the door. “Wait,” he said. “You know she’s missing? Just tell me when you saw her. Where did she go? Did she talk to anyone?”

Ella pushed, but Kelly was stronger. “No se cualquier cosa. Go away!”

“Just five minutes! I need to know!”

“I tell you go away!”

On the other side Ella threw her weight against the door. Kelly shoved back with both hands. He bulled his way into a dim room with a dirt floor. There was room enough for a little table, a tiny wood-burning stove and a few blankets for sleeping. The shanty had a back room, too; a curtain stood half open between front and rear. Perhaps five or six people would live in this space, men and women and children alike.

Ella retreated. She wouldn’t look at Kelly. “You get out! Get out!”

“When you tell me,” Kelly said. He had to stoop inside because the roof slanted. Ella looked rumpled and her hair was unwashed. It fell in her face. At Mujeres Sin Voces she was always neat. She was not the same here.

“I didn’t see her. I don’t know anything.”

“You’re lying to me,” Kelly said.

She tried to slip into the back room. Kelly grabbed her arm. Ella pulled and they ended up together on the other side of the curtain where a cast-iron bed and a few modest pieces of furniture made a private space for the man and woman of the house. A plaster statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe stood in one corner. Prayer candles in red glass burned on either side of her.

“You let go of me!”

Kelly’s heart was beating hard now and his breath came fast. He took hold of Ella without thinking and he shook her hard enough to make her head rock. He saw the deep blue and purple bruising around her eye then, and her broken lip. When his hands sprang open, Ella fell back against the bed.

“What the hell is going on?” Kelly asked.

Ella covered her eye. “Why don’t you leave me alone? Go back across the border.”

He wanted to touch her again, gently this time, but his feet wouldn’t move. The little room did not seem to have enough air. Kelly’s grip opened and closed on nothing. “What’s going on?” he asked again.

“Just get out.”

“I can’t.”

“I don’t want you here!” Ella shouted at him. Her hand came away from her face and Kelly saw again the closed eye and the bleeding under the skin that stained her face from cheek to forehead. On the side of her mouth bloomed a dark, unhealthy bruise.

“Did you see her?” Kelly asked.

“Get out!”

“Did you see her?”

Ella came at him with spread hands. Kelly let her push him backward through the curtained doorway and into the front room. His heel hit the leg of a little chair and he stumbled. Ella cried, but only from her open eye. “Why don’t you leave me alone?”

Her nose ran and Ella wiped it with the back of her wrist. She shuddered when she breathed. Again Kelly wanted to touch her, but he knew he shouldn’t. Ella turned her back on him. When her knees buckled, she sank to the floor slowly like a dead leaf and sobbed there.

“Did you see them take her?” Kelly whispered. Ella didn’t answer. She choked on sobs, kneeling and bent in her rumpled dress. Like a child she rocked back and forth and she hugged herself with her arms.

Kelly took a chair and settled into it. He was conscious of his weight, as if everything inside of him was turned to scrap iron and pulling him toward the center of the Earth. Ella’s home was small before, but now the walls closed in on him. In this place there was not enough light from the window and not enough space to even breathe. He imagined himself here as Ella and he imagined himself in prison. Something fell on his cheek. Kelly wiped it and saw wet on his fingers.

After a long time, Ella’s tears died. Her breath stilled and hitched until finally they were silent together in the hot little room. Kelly could not bring himself to ask the question again. Neither said anything for what seemed like forever.

“I could do nothing,” Ella said at last, and Kelly’s stomach turned.

“?Donde sucedio?” Kelly asked.

Ella spoke without looking at Kelly. Instead she gazed at the corner, arms still around herself. Little aftershocks took hold of her when she talked; her voice caught, but it was also hollow. “At the church. With the mothers. Paloma asked me to come with her. I didn’t know why. I think she knew. She wanted me to see. Do you think she knew?”

“I don’t know,” Kelly said. He tasted something bitter.

“When the Mass was over, they came. One of them, he used a bat on the mothers to drive them off. Paloma fought them. I tried. They beat me.”

Kelly wanted to ask a question, but first his lips worked without a voice. Then it came: “Who were they?”

“Men. I didn’t know them. They had a truck. A new, black truck.”

Ella put her face in her hands and she cried again. Kelly was rigid in the chair, imagining the road, the church and the mothers of the missing — he had never seen these things because Paloma wouldn’t allow it, wanted it to be hers and not theirs — and the moment when the men came. In his mind the men had empty faces that were somehow still angry.

“Did you call the police?” Kelly asked, but Ella didn’t answer. “Did you call the police for help?”

He had to wait until the tears stopped again.

“Did you call them?”

“What good would it do? She is dead.”

Kelly didn’t want to ask the question, but the words came unbidden: “You saw her die?”