Every time I look out over across the sullen desert, I remember him. The torrid sun baking down on steaming concrete, the waving mirages that evaporate in coiled heat, sometimes as I cruise along that old highway I almost expect to see him in the distance, walking slowly toward the road, dust devils erupting at his black-booted feet.
I was born to be a wild bordertown girl. The Juárez nightlife had been my weekend haven for years, as it had been for generations of El Paso families. I had grown up watching my older brothers leave excitedly just before my bedtime, begging our mother to iron their shirts. Later she would stand at the door and give them the sign of the cross as they piled into their friends blue Camaro. I would watch the car lights disappear out of the driveway, and I always wanted to go, too. Years later I ended up running into some of my brothers' friends little sisters, and they were just like me. All of them held waiting blades in their laughing eyes.
We were jumping through moving Mexican trains in miniskirts and high heels to get to the famous Kentucky Club bar at fifteen, dancing on counters until three, four in the morning. We knew how to deal with Mexican police, and more than once had to get our girl out from the back of a cop car or paddy wagon. We smuggled joints across the bridge in our bras and smoked them out in the middle of the dance floor. Once time we found ourselves stranded in some drug dealers' large marble mansion and had to get to school in the morning. We had seen people get beaten so bad the next time we saw them they were in wheelchairs. By the time I had reached my early twenties, the drug world wasn't really surprising or scary anymore, although seeing very large quantities of cocaine still made me a little nervous.
Days like this remind me of him, and of who I used to be, and in many ways maybe still am. I suppose that's why I always think about those bodies buried out there. Maybe there's some half-dead part of me smashed beneath a rock somewhere by those Franklin Mountains, too. Some ugly part I never want to see again, but still feel a dull comfort in visiting.
You never intend to befriend a hitman. I mean, it's not something people usually share when you first meet. He was a well-known, reliable drug connect. I started out scoring sacks of marijuana from him, and since he made his money off of cocaine after a while he would just give pot to me, asking me to roll him a couple of joints out of the bag before I left.
The landscape shift shapes quickly as I drive. The neon blue desert sky is deafening, causing the copper outline of the Franklin Mountains that surround this city to resemble jagged fire, flames licking the sky. These twin cities are burning as the world watches.
The joint perched in the ashtray, I searched the seat next to me for my yellow lighter a bit frantically, until I found it and was able to take a good long drag and finally relaxed, puffed lips blowing a wild plume of smoke out of the open window.
When I was a little girl we used to take long drives down these freeways during the holidays. I don't know why but it seemed that on Christmas night, more than any other night in the desert, if you looked real close, you could see all of the jackrabbit families out, their eyes glittering across the desert like wild diamonds. My mother would always point them out to us, and in the moonlit desert that lived in my mind, it seemed there were thousands of them.
"Miren, miren, las liebritas!"
Maybe we only saw them because they were reflected through our mother's gemstone eyes, because I haven't seen anything like it since I was seven, eight, years old. But that was long before I discovered that the busied noise of the desert at night sometimes also enveloped secrets no child could bear. Just beginning to remember made me nervous, made me step on the gas. I can't wait to leave this place, and never look back.
