They came to a stable near the edge of the manor’s property. Trejo banged on the door and shouted something in Mejise. The hostlers scuttled like beetles beneath an overturned rock, grabbing saddle gear and leading palfreys and hitching up a covered wagon. They worked fast, and after only a few minutes of Trejo’s glowering a harried coachman, his hair disheveled into spikes like a rooster’s comb, leaped onto the perch and readied the horses to ride.
Trejo opened the coach door and shoved Selena inside. He climbed in after her, slammed the door, and barked a couple of syllables at the coachman. Selena didn’t catch them, but the coachman obviously did, for he snapped the reins and the horses trotted off.
They rode in silence. Trejo folded his arms across his chest and pouted, as if the outing were Selena’s idea and he was a little brother dragged along for the ride. Just looking at him lit a flame beneath the kettle of Selena’s rage, which threatened to boil over. She leaned against the coach wall and looked out the window instead.
The coach rolled away from the haciendas and into the heart of Juarez. It followed Calle de Jefes past the plazas and the amphitheater and continued until the peasant hovels on the town’s northern fringe came into view. It turned down a narrow road and wound through courtyards and alleys, spilling onto a narrow strip with cobbles crumbling to gravel and boardwalks warped and rotting. Adobe buildings pressed close on either side, blocking out the afternoon light. Lanterns burned on iron posts, bathing the street in oily light.
Trejo climbed out of the coach and Selena followed. He led her down the boardwalk and through a pair of swinging doors.
The shadows from the street thickened into gloom. It rolled like mist through the long low-ceilinged room. Corn oil lamps glowed on tabletops, their feeble light flickering like distant stars. Men sat around the tables, playing cards and downing drinks. Bars of this sort were usually raucous places, the walls echoing with guitars and fiddles and off-key singing, patrons leaning over steins and shouting to be heard. Yet the atmosphere in this bar was almost funereal—not sad, exactly, but muted. Occasionally a table would break out in a collective chuckle at some comment, but overall the noise was minimal.
Past the tables, a green curtain divided the room into two. Trejo brushed past it into the rear of the building. Here the light was better, corn oil lamps replaced by lanterns of brighter-burning rendered fuel, but the effect made the room seem even dingier somehow, granting greater depth to the shadows and spotlighting the rumpled floorboards and discolored patches of grime.
The room flared out to either side like the top of a capital T. A bank of doors ran along the far wall, each five or so feet from the next. Some were closed, but most stood open, revealing tiny chambers containing a steel-frame cot with filthy linen, a wooden side table, and a woman chained to the bed by her ankle.
Selena watched as a middle-aged man with a wide-brimmed hat worn low over his eyes approached one of the doors. A woman accompanied him, her gray hair drawn back in a severe bun, her figure sculpted by a corset and buried in ten pounds of lace and satin. She motioned to a slim, brown-haired girl in one of the rooms and said something to the man. He responded with a question, which the proprietor seemed to answer to his satisfaction, for he handed the woman a stack of pesos and entered the chamber, unfastening the buttons of his shirt as he went. Selena saw the girl’s face in the instant before the man closed the door. A look of bored resignation lidded her eyes, though beneath it, Selena sensed a flash of something darker, a feeling the girl probably had to smother on a regular basis.
Trejo walked Selena down the length of the hall, his slow strides ensuring she had ample time to soak in all the details. The girls varied in color and size. Most were young—some much younger than Selena; she spotted one with straw hair and gimlet eyes who could have been no older than ten—but a few were middle-aged, their stretch marks and wrinkles buried under drifts of masking powder. Two were visibly pregnant, their swollen bellies hiking up the hems of their skimpy shirts. What united them was neither age nor physique, but instead a rough cast of their faces and a hollowness behind their eyes, as if they were not flesh but living mannequins. None smiled. The coy, satiny ambiance of Mr. Todd’s party was nowhere in evidence. Todd’s barracks felt a little like a harem, even if the central male never partook. This place felt like a prison.
“These women are all marcada,” Trejo explained. “Men with the brand have many roles. Women, not so much. Their keepers rent a chamber for a small fee. Men come and pay the house, and the house pays the keeper. It is very profitable. This house is well known, but it is far from the biggest. And there are more every week.”
They left the way they’d come. Selena exhaled, glad to be gone from that horrible place, but Trejo’s determined stride suggested he wasn’t done with her yet. Sure enough, they passed the coach and made their way down a narrow passage between two buildings. Too tight to be properly called an alley, it was more of an architectural abscess, a hollowing in the adobe begun by age and widened by vandals seeking passage through the building to whatever lay beyond. An earthy, spoiled smell wafted through the gap, reminding Selena of a root cellar with poor drainage.
They emerged in a courtyard of sorts. Sheets of moth-eaten canvas hung from poles hammered into the adobe, forming a crude awning. Planks of punky wood balanced between cinder blocks served as benches, on which sat a dozen haggard women clothed in rags. They turned their faces up to Trejo and Selena for a moment before returning to their private endeavors: mumbling to themselves or scratching figures in the dirt or simply moaning out notes in a constant and ever-modulating chorus of misery. A woman in a grey robe tended to their sores, daubing them with a rag soaked in acrid-smelling liquid.
Many of the women were disfigured in some way, scarred by violence or disease or a mixture of the two. She saw women without fingers, women missing eyes, women with gashes from cheek to chin. Women whose teeth had crumbled into brownish rubble, whose bodies bulged with tumors, whose noses had rotted off their faces, leaving a messy black hole like a cruel and sightless third eye.
“Welcome to the retirement home. Pretty, isn’t it? Clients are sometimes screened, but signs are missed, and most girls catch something sooner or later. And of course, you can’t screen out the men who want simply to cut a woman, to hurt them in some way to pay for private demons they can’t explain.”
Trejo held his arms out expansively. “All this may have been yours, girl. It may be still. It is by the grace of one man that you aren’t in one of those chambers, chained by the ankle, and you spurn him with your childish behavior. Such gratitude.”
“A slave is a slave.”
“You think Mr. Todd is your enslaver? Fool! Mr. Todd is your savior. You’d do well to remember that next time you are asked to perform and think it better to pull some petty stunt. There are always more chains waiting for those who don’t listen.”
With that, Trejo led Selena from the alley and back to the coach.
The ride back to the barracks was as silent and unpleasant as the ride out had been. Trejo resumed his sulky posture, arms crossed, lips pursed. Selena had expected a smug smile to break through in the wake of his scolding, but he seemed if anything even gloomier than before. Nor were Selena’s spirits all that high. Part of her knew Trejo’s little demonstration had been bluster—if Todd wanted her gone, he’d have simply tossed her out, not made a big show of it—but she wasn’t foolish enough to see the threat as entirely idle. Life under Mr. Todd was unacceptable, and she would need to escape eventually. But it was one thing to plot your climb when you were already at the bottom. Her trip to the brothel had opened a crack in the floor, giving proof to the knowledge that as deep as the chasm currently seemed, there was still a lot farther to fall.
16: A Grim Patchwork
Barring all other information, you could always tell where you were in Juarez by the quality of the roads.
The city’s provisional government, all but neutered in its othe
r areas of influence, maintained a flawlessly cobbled thoroughfare through the city’s center. The route thrived at the behest of the city’s merchants, who insisted on good roads to facilitate trade. The pandilleros, who skimmed protection money from the merchants freely, were likewise supportive, as well-dug channels allowed the river of commerce to flow unmolested. Its north and south streams formed an estuary at the city’s main plaza, its pristine surface spilling along nearby streets in a tangle of sandstone tributaries.
Beyond these areas the cobbles grew cracked and uneven, their seams buckling from the slow undulations of the earth, individual stones pummeled into powdery shards or pried up and taken for some unknown purpose. Past the untended cobbles the roads turned to gravel, beyond the gravel hardpan, and at the hardpan’s fringes a slough of dirt that morphed into mud with every rainfall, churned by passing carts and hooves and feet before drying into a wasteland of hillocks and furrows and axel-snapping crevices.
The hospice sat at a bend in what could have perhaps once, with a degree of charity, been called a road. Scraggles of tarwort broke through the crusted earth like the hands of dead men prematurely buried. Their gnarled fingers tugged at Marcus’s serape as he stepped over them. He paused at the threshold, wincing inwardly at every sign of the building’s dereliction. Cracks twined up adobe walls, gaping wide enough in places to admit a probing finger. Broken windowpanes cowered behind plywood eyepatches or else stared, lensless and blind, at the road. The door, chewed by rot into an amorphous, splintery shape, hung tenuously from rusted hinges. Marcus raised his hand and knocked lightly on the punky wood. He knew to enter without knocking and expected no reply, but savored the additional moment outside that the motion afforded him. He waited a few pointless seconds, drew a breath, and entered.
Inside the building was one large room. Nooks and alcoves offered some semblance of demarcation, but most of its floor space consisted of a single L-shaped sweep of dull tile. A sooty dimness coated everything. The Grey Sisters had done what they could to combat it, whitewashing the plaster walls and polishing the metal fixtures to a lusterless shine, but they were too few and too overworked to make any real difference, and the room itself seemed to conspire against them, its sharp corners swallowing light. Agave blooms died slow, pointless deaths in chipped vases. A dry, sour odor clung to the under-circulated air.
Marcus made his way down the corridor. Their footsteps echoed off the tile floor, adding a backbeat to the chorus of moans and coughs and laryngitic wheezes rising from the cots. Small, weathered-looking women in grey smocks paced the floor with brisk efficiency. These were the Grey Sisters, a religious order of women in spartan attire who gave solace and care to the city’s most vulnerable residents. Though funded only sporadically by alms and all but destitute, they were competent clinicians and tireless in their efforts. They greeted him with a few whispered words or warm but frugal nods. Marcus walked with his head down, avoiding their gaze.
Despite the absence of rooms, the Grey Sisters had made some effort to give each patient their own space. Curtains or plywood dividers offered patchwork privacy, and each bed was oriented independent of the others, eschewing the typical dormitory style in favor of something a bit cozier. Marcus couldn’t fault the Grey Sisters for their efforts, for they toiled with unyielding if stoic compassion, their services rarely respected and never fully repaid. He’d never heard of one mistreating her wards or shirking her duties, never known a soul, no matter how bereaved, to speak an ill word against them. But they repulsed him all the same in their open-armed embrace of mortality, which he found slightly grotesque, almost profane. Death—natural death, that is, outside of the fighter’s circle—should be a quick and private affair. What sort of person willingly walked among its gardens every day, tending the bitter seeds time or circumstance had sown until they reached their macabre bloom?
Still, he’d brought his mother here, hadn’t he? That must tell you something about the Grey Sisters. Or about you, muttered a voice in his head.
Her bed stood near the far end of the corridor, its left edge pressed tight against the wall. Grubby curtains hung from the ceiling, in one instance bisecting a window to partition its light between her and her neighbor. Apart from the bed, her only furniture was an upended bucket serving as a nightstand and a small Lucite table bearing a statue surrounded by candles. The statue depicted a woman with a skeleton’s face, her empty eye sockets enigmatic, her teeth clenched in the mirthless grin common to skulls. Garlands woven from reeds and twigs hung about her neck, their dry twists festooned with bones and baubles and dead snakes dried into strips of leather.
“What is that doing in here?” Marcus asked, his voice low and sibilant.
“The Sisters brought her.”
“They had no right to do so. This is a hospice, not one of their shrines.”
“Your mother asked for her, Marc. She gives her peace.”
Marcus pursed his lips. He’d never adhered to the worship of Santa Muerte, though she was revered often among those in his profession. Personally, he found the beatification of death unseemly and naïve. Death had been his business for many years; he could tell you there was nothing holy about it. A man was so much wet slop in a rubbery sac. Poke a hole in the sac, and a bit of the man leaked out. Make enough holes, and he drained away to nothing. It was a biological function, no more transcendent than screwing or shitting. He had seen many deaths up close—slow deaths and fast deaths, deaths by blade and bullet and fire, clean deaths by garrote and messy deaths by fist or boot or bludgeon, stupid deaths from carelessness or ill luck and tragic deaths by disease, just about every sort of death you could imagine—and not once had he ever found beauty in any of them. Honor, perhaps, but never beauty.
“Marcito?” croaked a voice. A head swiveled on its lumpy pillow. Marcus studied its face with sadness and a resigned lack of surprise at its disrepair. He approached it as one might a childhood home long abandoned, its paint peeling, its fixtures cracked and faded, the slow shift of its foundation bending once firm angles into warped and droopy joints. The bedrock of fat and muscle had eroded further since his last visit—months ago, or could it have been years? Surely not—and the skin above it hung loose. Eyes looked up at him through a grey-white film.
“Marcito.”
His mother smiled. Her teeth startled him with their healthy whiteness. He took her hand in his. Bones and ligaments rustled beneath the skin like a bundle of twigs loosely bound. A sharp squeeze could snap the lot of them.
“Hello, Madre,” he said. The Mejise came effortlessly now. She spooled it out of him, a bedridden Clotho spinning him backward into her distaff. “How are you feeling?”
“Oh, you know. It changes day to day. There is pain, sometimes, but the Sisters are kind.” The words were spoken lightly, as if over a tea of wild herbs in their cottage on the hacienda, the pot burbling contentedly over the hearth fire. The cottage that had been hers, once, the meager and well-earned spoils availed to dutiful peasantry after a lifetime’s service. The cottage that should be hers still, with its blinds lowered against her fading health, its linens washed and pillows plumped by the younger homesteaders who paid homage to their elders, as she had once done to hers. The cottage that had been snatched away as collateral against a foolish son’s debt—the wicked spawn of his arrogance and an ill-fated, catastrophic wager—leaving her prey to the austere mercies of the Grey Sisters.
“That’s good, mother,” he said.
I was supposed to free her from this. The prodigal son, returning in triumph to amend for past sins. Some triumph. Some amending. What a joke. He squeezed her hand gently and winced at the flash of ill-concealed pain on her face. To think her so frail. He’d barely tightened his grip at all. Such a strong boy you are, chided a voice. To make a sick old woman cringe at the faintest touch. He could do no good here. He wished he’d never come. His touch gave pain over comfort, his presence brought only bad memories. He was a Midas of misery, a killer so satura
ted with death that its bitter fluid leeched out of him wherever he went, staining all he touched.
“It’s good you are home. I fear for you so when you travel. It’s a dangerous world.”
“That’s so.”
She looked as if she had more to say. Her lips pressed together, their corners turned downward. Marcus leaned forward to better catch her words, but for whatever reason, she left them unspoken. Perhaps she’d never intended to speak them in the first place. She closed her eyes and settled deeper into the creases in her thin mattress. Her breath escaped with a rumbling harrumph, a sound of sudden yet anticlimactic collapse. Marcus wondered if she’d gone to sleep, and if so whether he wanted to wake her. There seemed so much to say, but when he primed his lips to say it, he found the words absent. Years of unvoiced thoughts congealed into a mushy grey pile in his head, their meaning dissolved into incomprehensibility. Only their mass remained: enormous, suffocating, immovable.
He stood for a moment over her bed, watching the steady rise and fall of her chest beneath the blanket—a grim patchwork of threadbare cloth, but clean and neatly pressed; the Sisters did what they could. Her hand still gripped his lightly. He set it on her lap and began to withdraw his fingers when her grip tightened for an instant.
“Light a candle for me, Marcito,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper.
Marcus glanced over to the statue of Santa Meurte. She grinned back at him, eyeless yet anything but blind.
“Of course, mother.”
He drew a matchstick from a tin bowl at the corner of the table and studied the array of candles, his thumbnail scratching absently at the match’s sulfur head. They came in many colors, some whose purpose he knew, others not: gold for money, red for love, purple for healing, brown for wisdom (a good candle for your sake, fool), green for justice. He found a purple candle burnt lower than the others, lit the match, and touched its flame to the blackened wick. It caught easily. He paused, the matchstick burning down toward his thumb and forefinger, and lit the green candle as well. Healing first, but let there be justice.
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