The Dead Women of Juarez

The man showered more water from his fingertips. Kelly’s shirt was soaked.

“Cut it out!”

The man shrugged. He put the bowl aside and reclined on Kelly’s bunk. His build was lean, almost like a hungry dog, but he wasn’t weak. A boxer read a man’s body in the ring and out, saw emotion and skill tied up together in muscle and bone. This man was not afraid of anyone.

Kelly managed to sit up. He looked at his hands. They weren’t smashed. Seeing his fingers, he saw Esteban’s and heard the sound of them breaking beneath the bat. The memory made Kelly feel sick again. He was out of breath from the effort of moving even a little.

“?Como le llaman?” Kelly asked the man on his bunk.

The man didn’t look at Kelly. “Gaspar,” he said.

“I’m Kelly.”

Gaspar shrugged again. He studied the underside of the upper bunk with his thin arms folded behind his head. Kelly saw the man was barefoot; his slip-on shoes were set neatly by the door of the cell.

“I don’t think I can get to the top bunk,” Kelly said. “Estoy lastimado.”

“Everybody gets hurt in here eventually,” Gaspar said. He spared Kelly a look out of the corner of his eye. “You want to sleep off the floor, you climb, cabron.”

Heat rose to Kelly’s face. He wanted to stand, grab, kick, punch, but just thinking about it made him feel exhausted. Instead he did nothing. “Whatever,” he said finally.

“Whatever,” Gaspar repeated. He closed his eyes and Kelly watched the man’s chest rise and fall in instant slumber beneath the peace symbol.

Kelly lay down on the concrete again. He listened to the voices calling back and forth between cells and the crash of metal on metal. His body was exhausted, but he was beyond easy sleep. Being unconscious was not the same as rest. Every part of him ached inside and out and the pain clung tightly to the memory of Esteban and the room and the bat.

Gaspar stirred awake. He sat on the edge of the bunk again and took up the metal bowl. For a moment he seemed to consider showering Kelly with water again, but then he simply drank. He offered Kelly the leftover.

“Thanks,” Kelly said. He managed to rise on one arm, take a drink and keep it down.

“What the fuck are you doing in here?” Gaspar asked.

Kelly shook his head. “You don’t want to know.”

“They say I raped a girl,” Gaspar said. “I say that puta, she took my money, I get what I paid for. You can’t call that forcing her.”

“I guess not,” Kelly said, and he lay back on the concrete.

Gaspar watched Kelly for a while. His face was narrow and he had a long nose broken in two places. Finally he rose from the bunk and offered Kelly his hand. “Get up off the floor. You’re going to get sick lying there like that.”

His joints were on fire and his muscles shrieked, but with Gaspar’s help Kelly got to the bunk. He couldn’t lift his bad leg; Gaspar picked it up for him. When they were done, the wiry man turned down the bedding on the top bunk and clambered up. Kelly saw the shape of him on the springs overhead.

Gaspar’s voice floated down: “El Cereso is not a good place for a white boy.”

“I know,” Kelly said.

“Whatever they want you to say, you should say it.”

Kelly heard the thump and crunch of wood and bone. “I can’t,” he said.

“What, you think you are some kind of tough hombre? Believe me: you aren’t so tough as you think.”

This time Kelly only nodded. The lumps in the bedroll were like knives in his flesh. He closed his eye and willed himself to sleep without dreams or memory. The babble of a dozen conversations happening all at once — shouted and whispered — turned into the drizzle of raindrops on a windowsill.

Somehow Kelly knew it was nighttime when he came around again. The fluorescent lights were the same, and he saw the outline of Gaspar on the top bunk as if the man hadn’t moved an inch. The quality of talk outside the cell had changed. A guard wandered past the barred door and paused to look at Gaspar’s shoes before moving on.

Rest made Kelly stronger and he was able to rise on his own. He used the toilet and ignored the blood that ran thick in his urine. The upper bunk creaked and when Kelly turned around, he saw Gaspar watching him. “How do I look?” Kelly asked, but he couldn’t smile.

“You look dead already,” Gaspar answered. Before Kelly had seen only boredom in the man’s eyes, but now there was the wet shimmer of fear. This, too, Kelly recognized from the ring and from his own mirror on mornings he would rather not recall.

He tried to push it away. “Did I miss food?” Kelly asked.

“No.”

“Good. I’m hungry,” Kelly said, and he was. He did not remember the last meal he was able to eat and keep down, but now the craving for something in his belly was strong and growing stronger. Food would put power back into his muscles again. He didn’t like the way his foot continued to drag, or the way his calf felt strange and half numb when he touched it.

He sat but didn’t lie down again. The same guard passed his cell again, and this time the man looked at Kelly. When their eyes met, the guard turned his head away and hurried on.

Gaspar descended from his bunk and crouched on the floor with his back against the wall. “They can see it, too,” he said.

“What?” Kelly asked.

“When they come back for you, I get the bottom bunk again,” Gaspar replied.

Kelly watched the cell door. The guard didn’t reappear. “They won’t kill me,” he said.

“No,” Gaspar said. “They don’t kill nobody in here. People just die.”

“I’m not going to say what they want me to say.”

“Then you are more stupid than you look.”

Gaspar fell silent and Kelly turned his eye on the man. He looked at Gaspar’s shirt and his clean work pants and his bare feet. Gaspar had heavy calluses on his toes, especially his big toe, and the faded lines of old scars. He had scars on his hands, too.

“Are you a cop, or are you just working for the cops?” Kelly asked.

Stretching made Gaspar look like a rangy stray cat. “Nobody asks questions like that in here,” he said at last.

“I’m asking.”

“I don’t got an answer for you,” Gaspar said, and then he looked away.

Kelly smiled to himself. “You tell them whatever you want to tell them. Get what’s coming to you.”

“Did you kill that girl?”

The smile died. “She wasn’t a girl. She was a woman.”

“Did you kill her?”

“No.”

“You know I got to ask. It’s nothing personal.”

“I didn’t kill her,” Kelly said. “And I’m not saying otherwise to anybody. You tell them that. Tell them that and see what they do.”

FOURTEEN

GASPAR CALLED FOR A GUARD AND after a while one came. He left without saying goodbye to Kelly. That was fine. Another jailor brought food that Kelly ate with his bare hands, chewed with loosened teeth and barely tasted. He shoved the tray back out through the bars when he was finished and someone picked it up.

Only when he was alone did Kelly feel fatigue pressing down on him again. He lay on the bunk and slept and this time when he woke the lights were almost all shut off and the cellblock was utterly still. The cell itself was