by Sam Hawken
He had never known a boy could be so full of blood. The asphalt was painted with it, deep red and almost pink intermingled. The boy was torn open so that his hipbones were visible. The other children were caught in his orbit, too frightened to come close, too shocked to flee.
Kelly’s lungs were empty, or he might have screamed. He couldn’t feel his arms or legs. He was still the way the dead boy was so terribly still and he could not bring himself to look away. The train kept coming, hauling car after car. Kelly heard its fading horn.
The boy’s limbs were shattered, twisted up like the bicycle. One mangled hand pointed toward the sky, perched on the remains of a forearm and a crushed elbow. Shorts and T-shirt were stained darkly and the pool of blood kept expanding. Where did it all come from?
He was moving before he realized he could move. The knot of children broke apart. Some ran, some cried and others looked to Kelly. He turned his face from them. Numb hands found the open car door, helped him clamber in and turn the key. The Buick’s engine hitched once before it started. Kelly swallowed his heart.
The car laid an oily trail of rubber on the road behind it. Kelly drove fifty miles without slowing or stopping, but only a hundred before he took another drink. Then he turned toward Mexico.
TWELVE
KELLY WOKE CRYING. HE STARTED on the narrow bunk mattress and felt pain everywhere he could still bear it. The rest of him was beyond hurt; when he stirred those injuries he felt suddenly and deeply sick to his stomach, but retching only made the suffering worse.
“Kelly,” Sevilla said.
One of Kelly’s eyes was swollen shut. He saw Sevilla outside his cell. It was so quiet and so still that for a moment Kelly wasn’t sure whether he was dreaming again or whether this was real. The pain was real enough. He remembered the crushed body of the little boy in the road; that was real, too, but left behind.
“Help me,” Kelly said.
“Open it up,” Sevilla said.
A guard moved into Kelly’s vision. A key was put to the lock and the door was opened. Kelly needed the guard and Sevilla to get to his feet. Something warm and wet flowed down Kelly’s leg: he couldn’t stop himself from pissing. “Eso es repugnante,” the guard said, but he didn’t let go.
When they marched Kelly past the other cells there was silence. The men behind bars simply watched. Kelly walked dragging his right foot; he couldn’t make it work right and he was too far gone to care about impressions. The end of the cell block seemed a dozen miles away. When they reached the door, the guard didn’t bother commanding Kelly to lean against the wall; he had no energy to run.
They passed the steel doors with their plain numbers and judas holes. Kelly had an arm across Sevilla’s shoulders. He clutched at the material of Sevilla’s suit and his grip was weak, terribly weak. “Please,” Kelly said. He hated the sound of his own voice.
Kelly held his breath as they approached Room 2, and then they went by. He prayed they would pass them all, but Sevilla and the guard stopped at Room 4. Another lock and another key and now Sevilla helped Kelly alone into another space with another bolted-down table and another pair of immobile chairs.
The guard locked them into the room alone. Sevilla put Kelly in one of the chairs and stopped to straighten his jacket and tie. Kelly let his head fall back and he saw above, tucked in the corner, another video camera watching, but this room was different: a set of cheap plastic blinds covered a window across from the table. If the blinds were opened, Kelly could look through the window from where he sat. Maybe he would see the sky, or a little open ground. Maybe he would feel real sun.
Sevilla didn’t open the blinds. He sat opposite Kelly.
“I won’t ask you how you feel,” Sevilla said.
“I need a doctor,” Kelly replied.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
Without a clock on the wall, time in the room went on forever. The chipped surface of the table had something that looked like dried blood caked in the cracks. No matter how he sat, Kelly’s body protested. He would almost rather lie on the bare concrete floor, but he didn’t want to sleep because then he might dream of the little boy on his bicycle and the crowd of children around him. Or worse, he would dream of Paloma the way she was in Sevilla’s photos.
“They asked me to talk to you one more time,” Sevilla said. “I need for you to listen.”
“I didn’t kill her.”
Sevilla had no reply. He brought out a pack of Benson & Hedges, took a cigarette for himself and left the pack on the table. Kelly didn’t touch it. He watched Sevilla light and drag and exhale toward the ceiling. The sound of shouting carried through the walls.
Kelly’s head throbbed. He closed his eye and saw patterns in the dark.
“Have I ever told you about my daughter?” Sevilla asked.
Kelly didn’t open his eye. “No.”
“I know every father thinks so, but she was beautiful. The most beautiful girl in all of Mexico. Too beautiful for this world. And my granddaughter… oh, you should have seen her, Kelly. Something so lovely would break your heart.”
More shouting. Kelly thought he recognized a voice, but his ears hurt as much as the rest of him. He put his hands on the table. The room swayed around him and his stomach protested. Kelly wondered whether his eardrums were damaged. A boxer who burst an eardrum couldn’t fight; balance is everything.
“All we want is the truth, Kelly,” Sevilla said at last.
“I didn’t kill her.”
“Kelly, look at me.”
Kelly opened his eye and he saw Sevilla wreathed in smoke. The man was haggard, sweating. Something thumped hard against the wall behind Sevilla and the blinds jumped. “I did not kill her,” Kelly repeated.
“Paloma didn’t kill herself, Kelly. And the men in charge… the man they see is a drug addict working with a known narcotraficante. They know about the heroin, Kelly. They know about Estéban and Paloma and how the money came. They know you can’t go back to the States. All of this they know, and yet now they must take your word for something so serious? Think about it, Kelly. Think about it and save your life.”
“What will you do?”
“Whatever I can do.”
“That’s not enough.”
“That’s all you get,” Sevilla said, and for an instant Kelly saw Ortíz in Sevilla’s place, and smelled beer and limes.
“Goddammit.”
“All these years, Kelly, I’ve been watching you, talking to you… but we were never friends. I always liked you, or maybe I just felt sorry for you.”
“Fuck you.”
Sevilla dismissed Kelly with a wave of his cigarette. “And then you had Paloma. Of course, she was a drug dealer’s sister and I know when she went with Estéban to visit their ‘cousin’ in Mazatlán they were really making contact with Estéban’s supplier. What, you didn’t know this? I’m surprised at you, Kelly.”
Kelly wanted to spit on the table, but his mouth was dry and tasted of blood. “I don’t believe a goddamned word of it,” he said.
“Believe it or don’t believe it,” Sevilla replied. “It’s true. I had no illusions about her or her brother, but her work — her real work, Kelly, not the other things – that was real. I told you before: you wouldn’t believe how much good she did.”
“I don’t want to talk about her anymore,” Kelly said.
“You need to tell me who did this to her, Kelly.”
“I can’t.”
“Because you’re still keeping secrets.”
“Because I don’t know.”
Sevilla stubbed his cigarette out on the table and tossed the butt into the corner. The weight beneath his eyes seemed to deepen. When he shook his head, Kelly thought Sevilla might weep.
“They come to me and they say here is the body, here are the terrible things that have been done and here are the men closest to her. In Juárez, you know, we are always looking for el extranjero, th
e monster we have never seen before who will do us harm, but we hurt ourselves so well, Kelly, we don’t need strangers. We are a city of dead women. We feed on our own.”
“I didn’t—” Kelly began.
“Okay,” Sevilla said. He put a hand up for silence. “Okay.”
Sevilla rose from the table. He came around and offered his arm. Kelly used the old cop like a crutch and they walked together to the covered window. Sevilla drew the blinds up. On the other side wasn’t sun or open space, but another room like this one.
Kelly recognized both policemen on the far side of the glass. One was young, maybe only twenty-five, soft in the middle and already beginning to lose his hair. The other was older, stronger and wore his mustache and graying hair like a military man. The older cop used his fists a lot. His name was Captain Garcia. The younger sometimes asked questions, though now he was silent.
Estéban sat between them with both hands cuffed to the table. Kelly saw the washbasin and the head-sack discarded in a corner. The table was washed in water turned pink with oozing blood. Estéban’s face was a welter of swelling and bruises. His lips were split a half-dozen times. He was stripped to the waist and his chest was badly marked.
“Wake up, asshole!” Captain Garcia shouted. He took Estéban by the scruff of the neck and pointed toward the window. Kelly saw Estéban’s eyes flickering, alive, and then he realized the window was just that, and not a two-way mirror. Kelly put his hand on the glass. “There’s your fucking friend, puto! What’s he going to do for you? ¡Nada!”
“If you didn’t do it, then tell me who did,” Sevilla said in Kelly’s ear.
“I don’t know,” Kelly said.
“Enrique, go get it,” the older cop told the younger.
“You’re small fish, Kelly. I always told you that. Why did they kill her, Kelly? Give me names and it can be them in here instead of you.”
Kelly’s good eye stung with salt tears. “I don’t know,” he said.
The younger cop, Enrique, disappeared from sight. When he returned, he gave something to Captain Garcia. Kelly saw it when Enrique stepped away: a cut-down baseball bat wrapped in masking tape and stained by dirt and old blood. Estéban saw it, too; Kelly recognized fear, but Estéban didn’t plead.
“Don’t do this,” Kelly said instead.
“We aren’t doing this,” Sevilla replied. “You’re doing this.”
“Hold his goddamned hand,” the older cop told Enrique.
Kelly struck the window. The policemen ignored him. He tried to push away from Sevilla, but he was too weak and his uncooperative leg refused to hold his weight. Kelly sprawled against the glass and only Sevilla kept him from falling.
Enrique pinned Estéban’s right hand.
“You want to say something now?” Garcia asked.
“Chinga tu madre,” Estéban replied.
Captain Garcia raised the bat and Enrique looked away. Kelly could not.
One blow smashed three fingers and left them bent in different directions. Estéban screamed. Kelly felt it through the window, shaking the glass, or perhaps it was Kelly’s voice, because Kelly didn’t know himself anymore. The bat came down again and again and once more after that until there was torn flesh and pieces of shattered bone sticking out. Estéban’s pinky was mush, oozing blood and pink meat and flecks of white.
“Stop it! Stop it, goddammit, stop!”
“Make it stop, Kelly! Tell me who did it. If it wasn’t you, then who was it? Tell me, Kelly! I’m begging you, just talk.”
Kelly’s stomach turned over. He broke from Sevilla and toppled onto the floor spitting up bile and water and coral-colored foam. Kelly lunged for the closed door on all fours. He still heard the shrieking and the steady, crunching blows of the bat like a butcher at work.
Sevilla grabbed Kelly by the shirt and half-hauled him from the floor. Kelly swung wildly, felt his knuckles connect and then he was at the door. There was no handle on his side to grab. He pounded his fists against the metal. “Stéban! Stéban! Paloma, I’m so sorry. Lo siento, lo siento, lo siento.”
Kelly heard Sevilla yelling and the door suddenly bucked. He could not stand. The floor reached up for him. Two guards pushed in through the half-open door and then all Kelly saw and felt were clubs and boots and pain until everything went away.
THIRTEEN
HE AWOKE WITH SOMEONE FLICKING warm water on his face. His left eye still wouldn’t open. Concrete pressed against his wounds because Kelly was on the floor of his cell and not the bunk. He saw a thin, dark man in a white T-shirt and work pants with a metal bowl and dripping fingers. The T-shirt had a big, black peace symbol printed on it.
The man saw Kelly was awake. He smiled thinly and cast more water on him.
“It’s all right,” Kelly said.
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 Estéban’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.
“¿Cómo 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, cabrón.”
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 Estéban 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.