The Dead Women of Juarez

Esteban came out of the farmacia with two plastic shopping bags. He crossed the street with Kelly and they sat down under the orangey splash of a streetlight to get ready. Kelly saw a flyer tacked to the lamppost: justicia.

“Put five pills in a baggie,” Esteban told Kelly. “The price stays the same, okay?”

“Okay,” Kelly said.

From one shopping bag came little self-sealing plastic baggies of the kind soccer moms used to pack their kids’ lunch snacks in: too small for a sandwich, but just right for a serving of goldfish-shaped crackers or, in this case, five capsules of OxyContin or hydrocodone. The drugs were in the second shopping bag in clean little orange- plastic bottles with neatly printed labels.

They divvied up the score. Kelly wore loose pants cinched tightly around his waist by a belt, the cuffs turned up on the inside so he didn’t look too much like a hick. The front pockets were roomier than they would be if he wore his size. He stowed the baggies in the front where they wouldn’t be crushed.

When they were done with the legal stuff, Esteban passed the motivosa. These baggies went in back pockets that zippered shut. In the end Esteban carried nothing. He gave Kelly a wad of pesos. “You can keep the change.”

“Thanks,” Kelly said.

They walked north without talking. The farther they went, the more they separated, until Esteban was well ahead and Kelly had him just in sight.

Hookers were out on all the corners, standing alone or in clusters. The sidewalks were jammed with gringos, mostly young and a lot of them drunk. Kelly felt himself blend in among them; that familiar sinking sensation. No matter how many times it happened, it felt strange. He wondered whether Frank the fat man was still hiding weed in his folds and getting away with it. He wondered whether Frank was somewhere out here tonight.

Esteban picked the places and Kelly followed. Kelly passed a uniformed policeman with a holstered gun and a baton in his hand. The cop’s eyes slipped over him without a pause; Kelly was invisible to him. On shopping nights, cruising the turista bars, Esteban was the one who stood out. Where the Juarenses spent their Friday evenings the police wore body armor and carried automatic weapons, not a little pistol and a stick.

Anyone with half a brain could get bent south of the border on just about anything. The Rio Grande Pharmacy and a thousand others just like it made their livelihood catering to those who knew the score. But turistas were stupid: they paid too much for beers, too much for sex, too much for everything. The draw of the farmacias was that prescriptions were sometimes optional and the prices were low, but college kids, and teenagers especially, either didn’t know this or figured the farmacias were some kind of trap. They’d rather pay American prices to a man like Esteban than spend five minutes doing the same thing for less in a place without the noise and smoke and crowds.

Kelly bought identical beers in identical bars with Esteban’s pesos while loud American music busted out on speakers overhead. The air reeked of bodies, drink and cigarettes. Esteban cruised the crowds and from time to time he fell back to Kelly. He pressed US money into Kelly’s hand and placed an order. “Two oxy, one aracata,” he might say, and Kelly would pass two baggies of pills and one of weed.

Esteban didn’t carry on shopping nights. This was the way it worked because Kelly’s was the face the cops couldn’t see, or didn’t want to. Esteban held only on the short walk back to the buyer, and then he was clean again.

They repeated the process over and over, working north block by block until even the hardiest partyers began to thin. Kelly’s pockets were almost empty. Some nights Esteban let him hold back a little motivosa for himself if they ended up with more than they could move. Tonight, though, they got rid of it all.

Kelly’s end was fifteen percent. A member of La Raza would take less, but he couldn’t glide beneath the radar the way Kelly could, either. As much as for his pockets and his skin, Kelly got paid for trustworthiness, too; he never held out on Esteban.

They sat down in a booth at an all-night taqueria. “Good night,” Esteban remarked. He counted money on the table where no one could see and gave Kelly his cut. Kelly put the dollars together with his leftover pesos.

“Yeah,” Kelly agreed. He yawned into the back of his hand. The food came, they ate and he felt better.

“You coming to dinner tomorrow?” Esteban asked.

“Sure. Why wouldn’t I?”

“Just asking,” Esteban said. He ate, but stopped with food still on the paper plate in front of him. His eyes were bloodshot and bleary. “I’m fucking tired, carnal. You want a lift back to your place?”

“Yeah, okay. You all right to drive?”

“Better than a bus driver,” Esteban said.

Esteban left a tip for the old lady who cleaned the tables and he and Kelly went out together. The night was cold the way it always was, and the sky was stained an ugly color from the city lights. Away from the turista Juarez it was quieter and the shadows were deeper. Hardly anyone was on the streets and cars were rarer still.

TEN

SHE WOKE AT FIRST LIGHT WITHOUT needing an alarm clock because it was Sunday morning and she always went to bed early on Saturday nights. This was her habit since she was a little girl, when her mother and grandmother were still alive and Sundays were the most important days.

Esteban was asleep and wouldn’t wake until afternoon. Even if he hadn’t gone “shopping” the night before, he wouldn’t go to church. As soon as their mother died, Esteban abandoned the churchgoing habit and left it to Paloma to say prayers for both of them. He was like their father that way, and their grandfather, too, though at least he stayed and didn’t slip away to another town, into a bottle and then into oblivion.

Esteban’s one concession to faith was a little statue of Jesus Malverde, the narco-saint, and a pair of Virgin Mary candles to go with it.

Their house was small and old fashioned. Paloma had a white enamelware basin with blue flecks in her bedroom, which she filled from a matching pitcher. Soft light filtered through the yellowed drapes. Paloma removed her nightshirt and washed her body with a wet cloth.

On Sundays she didn’t wear the post in her tongue. She put the barbell in a glass of water with a tablet that made the water fizzy and blue, as if she were cleaning dentures. She brushed and flossed and put on her best dark dress and made sure her hair looked right. Makeup was for other days, so she wore none.

On Sundays Paloma didn’t drink coffee. When she left her room she prayed at a little shrine for Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe. A replica of the icon hung from a wire and a nail in the corner. A low bench with a hand- stitched pillow for the knees had supported the women of their family on Sunday mornings for decades. Paloma recited the Glorious Mysteries with her mother’s black rosary.

On Sundays she walked two miles to the church. She could have taken the car, but when she was a little girl the family owned no car and the walk was even longer. This she did, like so many other things, to remember her women by.

The church was not the biggest in Ciudad Juarez, nor the richest. It was an old structure with deep roots, made from stone bricks and so traditional that it verged on the ugly. It centered a poor neighborhood of gathered homes and apartments, the streets crisscrossed overhead with thick tangles of electrical wire. Some roads were paved and others not. As Paloma walked, other pilgrims joined her. The church bells pealed.

On Sundays she met with a dozen women, all older than she. Some could have been her mother and some her grandmother. To a woman they wore black: black dresses, black hats and black veils. They gathered near the open church doors in the bright morning, speaking to no one nor to one another. Each woman’s face was heavily lined from age, work and sorrow. The only time they smiled was when Paloma arrived and hugged each one of them in turn.