The Dead Women of Juarez Read Online Free PDF Page B

of the swine flu scare. Occasionally a
maquiladora
bus rumbled down the main thoroughfare splitting Kelly’s neighborhood. In the States the buses would be lit up from the inside, but this was Mexico and pennies mattered, so riders sat in the dark.
    Kelly sucked in deep lungfuls of air through his busted, healing nose and blew out through his mouth. He did this twice before a coughing fit snaked up from the bottom of his lungs and doubled him over. He hacked up a glob of something nasty and spat it on the sidewalk. The sky in the east turned red.
    This time when he breathed deep he didn’t cough. His lungs felt shallow, and though Kelly tried to let the air fill him up from belly to sternum, he could tell he’d lost a lot of his capacity. Five years seemed like ten.
    He forced himself to breathe in and out, hard and full, until his ribs ached and early-morning colors grew vivid at the edge of hyperventilation. When his lungs were as saturated as he could get them, Kelly ran.
    Compared to his memories of running, this was nothing; he picked up an earnest, low-speed shuffle that wasn’t much faster than a brisk walk. Almost immediately he began to sweat and his body demanded more air to feed his rapid heartbeat, but he knew he had to keep his breathing even for as long as possible, or everything would spin out of kilter and he’d have to stop sooner rather than later.
    The pink telephone pole came up quickly, aglow in the first rays of the sun. The numberless flyers demanding
justicia
fluttered as Kelly passed, as if trying to draw his attention away from silly pursuits and into their world of the dead. Kelly managed to make it to the end of the block before he had to stop, the telephone pole twenty yards behind him and a broad street busy even at this hour with the traffic of business.
    Kelly put his hands on his knees, his sternum throbbing with his struggling heart. A wave of nausea passed over him, but it wasn’t as bad or as long as he feared it would be. A few feet away in a concrete bus shelter a dozen woman in
maquila
uniforms – neat, plain blouse and pants and rubber shoes – watched him as the sun chased away the veiling shadows. They didn’t laugh or point; Mexicans were not as rude as gringos.
    He straightened up and ran some more, past the bus shelter and along an uneven sidewalk in the shade of apartment blocks just like Kelly’s. Again he had to stop, this time in the parking lot of a tiny convenience store beside a
taquería
. He coughed like he had before and spat up another gooey mouthful of something foul. The taste made him gag.
    Three more times he pushed himself to run until he felt his pulse beating in his gums and everything hurt too much to continue. He finally came to rest on a low bridge crossing a broad concrete flood ditch. Sitting on a cement buttress, he let the wind from passing trucks whip him. The sun was free of the horizon now and the night chill evaporated.
    If there was a constant in Juárez, it was trucks: going to the
maquiladoras
or coming back from the
maquiladoras
. When the streets jammed up with American cars trying to escape north from their holiday destination, the trucks were always with them, spewing black diesel smoke as they idled, sweaty drivers behind the wheel, lungs turning to asphalt with every breath.
    From where Kelly sat he could see the same line of factories just visible from his apartment. From a distance they were all the same, but stamped on the boxes in the backs of all those trucks were American names. Kelly had GM practically on his doorstep. Out there it was easy to find General Electric, Honeywell, Du Pont, even Amway. Kelly thought maybe
this
was why he stayed here; so much of America lived right across the border that it was possible to be in two places at once. Kind of.
    In the end his pulse stilled and his stomach settled. His lungs no longer burned. Kelly hopped down from his perch. The urge to run had passed, so he walked like he always did,