The Dead Women of Juarez

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 Esteban 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 Esteban 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. Mazatlan 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 Juarez it was tiny, but the air was cleaner and the streets less crowded. Kelly might have lived there, but Mazatlan was a retreat, not a place to make a home. He didn’t really understand why Juarez was one and Mazatlan 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 Esteban 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, cabron!”

“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 Juarez, the dead women of Juarez, because they were all certainly gone and gone forever.

“Excuseme, senor. ?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 Juarez 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.

FIVE

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