by Sam Hawken
Getting to his feet was all right; Kelly used the wall for a brace. He straightened his shirt and ran a hand over his head. His hair was getting long and it felt greasy and gritty. Out on the sidewalk he recognized the street. Walking home would only be a matter of minutes. His wallet was still in his pocket and his watch was on his wrist. He couldn’t have been out overnight, Kelly thought, though it seemed like morning all over again.
When he reached his block he took the long way around so he wouldn’t have to walk past the pink telephone pole and the forest of flyers on it. He knew he wouldn’t see Paloma’s face there among the others, not yet, but he imagined it being there and that was bad enough. Going by, he might see a girl who looked similar enough to play tricks on his mind and Paloma would be there and he would have no choice but to imagine terrible things.
He went up the steps to his apartment and let himself in. It was hot. He opened the windows. A work-whistle sounded at the maquiladora across the way. Kelly saw the way the sun fell on the plain concrete blocks of the factory and knew it was morning. He had passed the night in an alley sucking on the neck of a tequila bottle as the city and the turistas and the hours marched by blindly. Kelly felt shame.
A memory of Sevilla played at the edge of his mind while Kelly fixed himself breakfast. It was a dream, not the man himself, that Kelly remembered. They were in the alley passing the bottle like vagos with a taste for the cheapest stuff they could afford, though Sevilla wore a suit. What they talked about, Kelly couldn’t recall, but he did remember Sevilla and his wallet and a photograph.
“Have I ever told you about my daughter?”
Kelly ate without tasting anything that passed his lips. It was always this way now. He was aware of the chewing, the swallowing and then the sense of fullness in the belly that told him to stop, but it was all purely mechanical. Once he enjoyed food, especially when he was with Paloma or when he was cutting weight and couldn’t afford an ounce of bad fat to tip the scale. The dish and the fork went in the sink. He rinsed them and dried them and put them away.
Sitting on the couch was intolerable, even with the television on. Later, as the evening light turned yellow and red, he changed to sweats and a T-shirt and wrapped his hands. This was a meditation for him, the wrapping, and he found he could disconnect from everything while he did it. Wrapping was his rosary — the thumb, the wrist, the knuckles and between the fingers. Tighter and tighter, but not too tight, and his mind was empty.
He punched the heavy bag and ignored the buzz and bite of mosquitoes drawn by the odor of his sweat. The maquiladora came alive when the night came, festooned with white lights and spotted with the glow of windows transformed from daytime black. Kelly’s shoulders started to burn — he was throwing arm punches, not bringing them in from the hip — and his lungs felt shallow. Where had he gone, that Kelly at the palenque? For that matter, where was the Kelly that never touched a needle, and whose favorite pastime outside the gym and the ring was a cold beer on the tailgate of an old pickup truck?
An answer drifted to the surface: that Kelly was as dead as Paloma.
“Motherfucker,” Kelly spat. He slugged the heavy bag once more and stepped away breathing hard. The trance was gone, the meditation of the hand-wrapping and the stillness in its wake. He could not think of Paloma and stay in the peaceful place, but now he could think of no one else.
He put his hands on the balcony rail and squeezed. He kept his eyes shut and tried to follow the splashes of light on the inside of his lids.
“Have I ever told you about my daughter?”
“No,” Kelly said aloud to the Sevilla of his dreams. When he opened his eyes it was all there: the city, the maquiladora, the lights and the sky turned sick orange by all of it, but Paloma was a smaller part of it. He didn’t cry. Part of him was proud of this, another angry; didn’t Paloma deserve his tears? Ella Arellano cried for Paloma. Even Estéban cried for her, and he cried for no one.
Kelly unspooled his wraps. He stood under the shower for an hour in the dark, heedless of the cost. In his imagination he walked a field of pink crosses and every one of them had the name of someone he knew.
He considered calling Estéban. What Ella told Kelly, Estéban would want to know. But with his skin still wet from the shower, his muscles spent, his mouth finally cleansed of the taste of sour old tequila, Kelly did not want to talk about it. Besides, where Kelly went Estéban had surely gone, too. It would make sense. Estéban didn’t need Kelly telling him what he already knew.
Sevilla’s card was on the kitchen counter with other litter from the mailbox and Kelly’s pockets. Kelly waited a while before he dialed, but when he finally did there was no answer. He tried a second time. Before he called a third time, Kelly stopped himself; he had nothing to tell Sevilla anyway. But maybe Kelly simply wanted to learn about Sevilla’s daughter, or if he had one at all.
This time when he turned on the TV he was able to find some distraction for a while. He found himself looking at the clock too much and before midnight he switched off the television and all the lights and went to bed.
Sleep didn’t come right away because Kelly couldn’t close his eyes. Whenever he did, Paloma was there, so he had to will himself unconscious while staring at the ceiling. It made no difference, because when he drifted off Paloma came to join him in bed and he held her close to him and wept silently against the back of her neck and told her he loved her. Like always, she never told him she loved him back.
“Have I ever told you about my daughter?” Sevilla asked them. He was by the bed in his suit, smoking a cigarette in the dark.
Kelly yelled at Sevilla to get the hell out so he could be alone with Paloma, but when they were alone again Paloma said, “You should have let him tell you.”
“I don’t care,” Kelly replied. “I don’t care about anyone else but you.”
EIGHT
KELLY KNEW IT WAS SEVILLA knocking just from the sound of it. He stirred from sleep at the rap of knuckles on the door, less sure whether he was awake or still dreaming, but Paloma wasn’t with him and she would have been if it was a dream. Putting his hands over his face didn’t keep out light from the window. Sevilla knocked again, more insistent this time, and Kelly heard his voice: “Kelly? Open the door, Kelly.”
“Go away,” Kelly said, too quietly for anyone to hear. He clambered out of bed, pulled on sweats from the day before and made his way to the door. He unlatched the chain and turned the lock. He could almost feel Sevilla on the other side.
Sevilla had two armed policemen with him, one on either side. They were dressed in dark blue and black, armored and wearing plastic tactical helmets that looked like the kind skateboarders wore. Goggles covered their eyes. Between them, Sevilla looked smaller than usual, more rumpled than was customary for him. The bags beneath his eyes were heavier still.
“Kelly,” Sevilla said.
“What the hell?” Kelly replied.
The armed and armored police bulled past Sevilla and into the apartment. One stiff-armed Kelly and he stumbled backward. More cops came in pairs behind them: two more, four more… six. Suddenly there was shouting and the crash of things being knocked over, being broken, being trodden underfoot. Kelly grabbed the arm of the closest cop and the policeman’s partner clipped Kelly on the side of the head with the butt of his automatic weapon. Being struck made Kelly reel.
His hip connected with the edge of the couch. Two cops — maybe the same ones, maybe two more — charged into Kelly as one and lifted him bodily over the couch frame. They slammed him to the cushions. One put his knee on Kelly’s chest. More shouting followed, and the sound of shattering dishes in the sink.
Kelly wanted to yell at them, but the pressure of the knee kept his lungs from expanding. Kelly wriggled beneath the policeman. His hand flopped against the top of the coffee table, seeking purchase and finding none. The cop didn’t even look down at him. The urge to punch came and went; Kelly was not so far gone.
Sevilla appeared. H
e showed handcuffs to the big policeman. The pressure went away. Kelly sucked air hard enough to choke. The cop moved off. Sevilla helped Kelly sit up. “Put your hands behind your back,” Sevilla said.
“What the… what the hell?” Kelly asked again.
“Damn it, Kelly, put your hands behind your back or I can’t help you.”
Any other time Sevilla might have pushed him, Kelly would have been too hard to give. Now Sevilla turned Kelly, hooked one wrist in steel and then another. Cops in body armor were everywhere, opening everything, destroying what they found. The floor was littered in bits and fragments of broken things. Kelly saw a policeman rifling through his refrigerator and just tossing what he found onto the floor. More were in his bedroom, some with knives. They shredded the mattress he shared with Paloma.
“Now get up,” Sevilla told Kelly. His words were low, urgent and delivered right to Kelly’s ear, as if they could not afford to attract the attention of anyone around them. The police moved like a whirlwind and left nothing untouched. “Look at the floor. Don’t look anyone in the eyes.”
Kelly still felt the cop’s knee on his sternum. He let Sevilla get him to his feet and steer him toward the door. There were questions, a hundred questions, but he didn’t ask them.
Sevilla pointed Kelly toward the door. “I’m taking him out,” he said. “¿Entiende? Outside.”
One of the cops stopped what he was doing. Perhaps he was one of those first two through the door with Sevilla, but Kelly couldn’t be sure because he did as Sevilla commanded; his eyes were on the floor. “The captain said for you to wait.”
“I’m going to put him in the car. La Bestia can complain to me if he wants,” Sevilla said. He pushed Kelly forward, one hand on a forearm, another latched to Kelly’s waistband. He held Kelly closely, and once Kelly felt the hard shape of his weapon between them. “Move it, Kelly. No bullshit.”
They negotiated the door as still more cops came in. The sun blazed white outside. Kelly tried to raise his hand against the light, but his wrists were cinched behind him. He closed his eyes until he was nearly blind. Sevilla watched the way for both of them.
“Steps,” Sevilla said in Kelly’s ear. They went down. Murmured Spanish and moving shadows made Kelly look up. His neighbors watched from landings and balconies. He didn’t know their names or even most of their faces, but Kelly was ashamed nonetheless. His cheeks burned. Staring at his feet didn’t help now.
Police vehicles crowded the street such that even the pink telephone pole was invisible. In five years Kelly had never seen so many police in one place, even when the federales came to town in their hundreds to fight the narco cartels. Vans and trucks jockeyed for position on the street with cars, all with revolving lights and all lit. The largest truck was marked Unidad Especializada. Stateside they would call that SWAT.
“Here,” Sevilla said. His car was nestled among all the others, a simple vehicle without armor or gun ports or official seals. He steered Kelly to the back seat, held Kelly’s neck when he got in and then closed the door. Kelly let himself slump forward across the seat. His heart raced, but he felt drained, not invigorated. He was vaguely aware of Sevilla getting behind the wheel or turning over the engine. Kelly felt the air-conditioning start.
“She’s not here,” Kelly said at last.
Sevilla turned around in the driver’s seat. Kelly saw Sevilla was flushed, perspiring hard, the veins in his temples showing. “What?” Sevilla asked.
“If they want Paloma,” Kelly said. “She’s not here. I talked to—”
Sevilla cut him off: “Shut up, Kelly. Listen to me now and say nothing, you understand? If you want to live through the day, you don’t speak unless you are spoken to. If you can’t answer a question yes or no, keep your mouth shut.”
“I know—” Kelly started.
“¡Tú no sabe cualquier cosa! You don’t know anything at all, Kelly. No, don’t sit up; just stay down like that. I’ll tell you again: you have nothing to say to these men that you won’t tell me first. This is the only favor I will do for you, Kelly. Don’t waste it.”
Armed police passed Sevilla’s car. They didn’t stop to look through the windows. Kelly felt the cool air wicking away nervous perspiration. His wrists were hurting in the handcuffs. Old vinyl seat covers stuck to his exposed skin. “I don’t understand.”
“Paloma,” Sevilla said.
“She’s gone,” Kelly said. “They took her. I talked to one of the girls at the place… Ella. She said there were men that took her.”
Sevilla glanced over his shoulder. When he looked back, he shook his head. “You should have come to me, Kelly. You should have done what I asked you to do. Why did you have to be so goddamned stubborn? How many times did I offer you a way out?”
Salt-sweat got into Kelly’s eyes and stung them. He squinted and blinked and rubbed his face against the seat. “I don’t understand,” he said again. “I told you everything I knew. I was going to call you. We could find her.”
“Don’t you understand, Kelly?” Sevilla asked. “She’s already been found.”
A cop rapped on the driver’s side window. Sevilla turned away from Kelly. Everything he said to the cop fell into empty space. She was found. Not alive, not dead, only found. She could be anything.
Kelly trembled. He couldn’t breathe deeply and he felt more sweat in his eyes, but it wasn’t sweat; this time it was fresh tears. When he turned on his back, his arms were pinned beneath him and the cuffs dug into his flesh. “I want to see her,” Kelly said.
“Shut up,” Sevilla said. He spoke again to the policeman and the cop said something back. They were talking in gibberish.
“I said I want to see her!”
“Kelly, I told you to shut up!”
The back door of Sevilla’s car swung wide. Cool air rushed out and hot air swarmed over Kelly. The cop wasn’t at the front window anymore, but here. He wore a lighter version of the body armor, what the police called a stab vest. His arms were bare, long and ropy with muscle. He blocked out the sun.
The cop dragged Kelly from the back of the car by his ankles. Sevilla shouted, but Kelly only heard the thud of his skull against the lower doorframe and then the asphalt outside. He caught a boot to the ribs that he couldn’t block or twist away from. He sensed a descending fist before it crashed into his face.
Sevilla threw himself on the cop and they struggled over Kelly like titans mantled by the sun. The cop pushed Sevilla off and there followed more kicks, more punches. Kelly’s skull rebounded on the pavement. He saw flashes of new light that didn’t come from the sky. Unconsciousness came like exhausted sleep. One blow after another raised the blanket and there was only darkness underneath, warm and safe and free of pain, where even the sensation of knuckles on flesh became distant.
Kelly was dimly aware of Sevilla shouting and the other cop’s voice cutting through, driven behind every punch: “You want to see? You want to see something? I’ll show you something, pinche puto! I’ll kill you! I’ll fucking kill you!”
Ring the damned bell, Kelly thought. Ring the bell. This one’s over… right?
NINE
THE CEILING WAS MADE OF STEEL springs and cotton. Kelly opened one eye first and then the other, but slowly; his head felt swollen on the inside and even the flesh behind his eye sockets was sore. He felt cool concrete beneath him and sore muscles from sleep without comfort.
Kelly was on the floor. His head lay half beneath the lower of two bunks. The air smelled heavily of chlorine, as if Kelly were in the dressing room at a YMCA, underlaid with perspiration and urine. These were the fear smells, the ones that could not be blanked out by any other. Kelly reeked of them.
He moved. Sevilla’s handcuffs were gone and his hands were free. Kelly rolled onto his back, touched the sore places on his sides and chest and face. His nose was prone to breakage, but this time it was only swollen.
Sitting up was hard. Kelly used the wall to help himself into a corner beside a toilet without
a seat or lid. The cell was six-by-six, the cinder blocks whitewashed and chipped and riddled with graffiti. Tú madre es puta y pendeja, one scrawl proclaimed in letters three inches high.
Both bunks were empty. The bottom rack had a thin mattress patterned with red and white, the stripes stained and faded by years. The top rack’s mattress was rolled up. Kelly could look up from his place on the floor through the wire mesh to the low ceiling. The lower bunk had no pillow, no sheets.
Men called to each other in Spanish in other cells nearby. The light in Kelly’s cell came from a compact fluorescent bulb screwed into a protected socket overhead. Without a window, he couldn’t know the hour. Kelly didn’t remember arriving.
He managed to get onto his feet. He was still in his sweats and barefoot. It took effort to urinate and when he did Kelly spotted flecks of blood in the stream. He used the cell’s little sink to rinse his mouth and scrubbed his gums and teeth with his finger. This brought more blood. Some of his teeth were loose.
Kelly walked to the bars and tried to look left and right, but the cells ran along one wall, making it impossible to see from one into the next. The air was crowded with voices and odors. The fluorescent lights made everything sallow.
Kelly had thirst he satisfied with warm water out of the tap. It seemed clean enough and it washed away the last bad taste of unconsciousness. He was too sore to pace, so he sat on the edge of the lower bunk, clasped his hands between his knees and prayed without praying that way he had in the field of pink crosses, but without knowing what to ask for.
Somewhere a heavy door opened and closed. The chatter from unseen men in other cells surged and then subsided. Kelly came to the bars of his cell and looked again. Hands with little mirrors sprouted from neighboring cells, angling toward an invisible stretch of corridor where footfalls rang. Kelly’s stomach knotted.
Seeing Sevilla was not a relief. He came with another man Kelly didn’t recognize, though the uniform was familiar enough. Once Kelly had to pick up Estéban from the city jail; all the men there wore the same tan shirts and slacks, shiny patent-leather shoes and a belt adorned with a billy club and a can of mace. Sevilla’s face was leaden. He didn’t greet Kelly and Kelly kept quiet.