The Dead Women of Juarez by Sam Hawken Page B

hand on her forearm. “Hey,” he said. “I thought you said you liked
boxeadores
.”
    The woman paused. She looked Kelly over again. Seeing her up close and without a film of exhaustion, Kelly realized she was older than he thought before. Maybe she was close to fifty, the extra weight she carried pushing out the deep lines that formed on the faces of lean, worked-raw mothers in the city. He still didn’t find her attractive.
    “Why don’t you say you were that white boy?” the woman asked finally.
    “How many white boys you see in here?”
    The woman shrugged and settled back into her seat. She smiled her denture smile again. “You want to get more
hierba
? You don’t look so beat today.”
    “I’m not fightin’ today,” Kelly said.
    “Maybe you come around for something else?”
    “What else you got?” Kelly asked.
    “Come back and see.”
    She took him to the ladies’ room and got on her knees. Kelly let her take his cock out. She jerked it and sucked it and though it took a while to get hard, she still managed to make it happen. Kelly turned her around and took down her pants. The woman grabbed the sides of the sink and Kelly fucked her without looking at her flabby ass, the flesh stitched with dark spiderweb veins. She didn’t ask for a condom and he didn’t use one. He came inside her and when he backed off she dripped on the dingy floor.
    “Again,” the woman said. “You can put it my ass if you want.”
    “No, thanks.”
    Kelly was the first one out of the restroom. He went to the bar and drank two beers in a row. The bartender gave Kelly a look he couldn’t read, but whatever the man was thinking it couldn’t be any worse than what swirled around the drain in Kelly’s mind. He heard the ladies’ room door creak, but he didn’t look over; he felt the woman watching him. It seemed like forever before Kelly could go to her.
    “You want some hard-on medicine?” the woman asked Kelly when he sat down again. “A young
boxeador
like you should be able to fuck longer than that.”
    “I got pain,” Kelly said.
    “Okay. I’ll fix you up.”
    She gave Kelly something wrapped tightly in plastic film. Kelly put it in his pocket without looking at it. The thing weighed almost nothing; in the back of his mind Kelly could calculate a packet like that down to the milligram, or damned close. He felt hot and he was sticky under his arms.
    He offered the woman money. She waved it away. “Not today,” she said.
    “I’m gonna go,” Kelly replied.
    “Next time I give you something to keep your
aparato
working,” the woman told Kelly. “You don’t last long enough, white boy.”
    “Maybe it’s your fat ass I don’t like.”
    “
¡Bolillo!
”
    “Like I ain’t never heard that before.” Kelly turned his back on the woman. She said something else, something about how he had a little white prick, but Kelly wasn’t listening. The woman was still yelling when he hit the street. By then Kelly’s mind was somewhere else completely.

TWO
    H E SMOKED THE FIRST BATCH OF the stuff because it was low-grade heroin that wasn’t worth fucking up a syringe to shoot. The whole time he argued with himself about it, but he knew his conscience was just going through the motions; after a while even the best herb couldn’t do what the cheapest brown could.
    Smoking
motivosa
outside was one thing, but Kelly knew to keep this indoors. He closed the windows and put down the blinds and in the still air the smoke was like acid fumes in his eyes. When the heaviness came and all the nerves went out of his body and all he could do was lie on his back in the bedroom and stare at the insides of his eyelids, Kelly realized that it was impossible to remember this kind of high; every time it was all new and just as wonderful.
    Going back to the woman in the
norteño
bar wasn’t an option, but there were other places to get what he wanted. He stayed clear of anyone he recognized, any of the faces that surrounded