LITMIR.BIZ

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family ate at all, they shared a pot of beans or a pan of potatoes, tortillas divided into two or sometimes four. She remembers what it was like to be so hungry she would have eaten dirt. After a while she realizes that, if she does not precisely look forward to meals or eat them with pleasure, it’s a relief how they break up the day at six in the morning, high noon, and five in the afternoon. She manages to choke enough of them down so that she—who has always run thin, who has been nicknamed La Flaca since girlhood—begins to put on a little weight. She no longer swims in her orange scrubs.

      The third thing she thinks will kill her is the group of four women that attacks her one afternoon. It happens during the hour of recreation when the doors to the cells in her gallery are left open. Esperanza often forgoes the yard; the concrete slab frightens her, surrounded as it is by cement and razor wire, guards with guns and pepper spray, gringa and morena prisoners whose language she barely understands. She also likes to stay inside because Pamela, her cellmate, always leaves, and it is the only time of day she can be alone. She has been drowsing on her cot, the lyrics to an old song revolving in her head—if this isn’t a dream, you are my other half—when she realizes that the four are standing in front of her bed. One of them, the stubby stocky one with the shaven head, talks quickly, saying things Esperanza can’t make out. The woman has a smile on her face as if she is telling a joke. The others are grim. The tall dark one with the stud in her nose grabs Esperanza by the collar and pulls her to her feet. “¿Qué haces?” she asks, although none of them speaks Spanish. The tall one pushes her into the stubby one, who loses the smile and pushes her back against the others. And then the four of them are knocking her back and forth as if she were a volleyball. In a tight circle, they manage to keep her aloft in the small cell, until they decide they would prefer her on the ground.

      Every year in Puroaire, for a week in the middle of July, there was a fair commemorating Santiago Peregrino, the town’s patron saint. Esperanza’s mother would take the kids to church, where the entryway had been festooned with balloons and crepe paper of red, green, and white, the colors of the Mexican flag. Sometimes a few pennies would be scraped together so they could go to the food stalls on the street by the chapel and share a buñuelo, a square of crispy, deep-fried dough bathed in sugar syrup and sprinkled with cinnamon, or an ear of roasted corn slathered in mayonnaise and powdered chile. But there was never money for the rickety merry-go-round or that other ride where they strapped you into a metal bullet that went around in circles.

      Esperanza would have done anything to be one of the children screaming inside the bullets painted purple, green, or blue. One summer when she was six or seven she pestered her mother about it so persistently that somehow Mamá had found a few pesos—saved from what she earned sewing and washing, or maybe stolen from her husband’s pants pockets while he slept—so Esperanza could be fastened into a golden bullet. The first moments of coasting were exhilarating, liberating, an experience so exquisite she wished the ride would last forever. But once the speed picked up, she regretted she’d ever been born. There was such violence to the velocity and the jerking of the cars that she thought her insides were being plastered against her bones, that her stomach would make its way out of her mouth. The fluorescent lights, the shouting toddlers, the painful jolts, all made her yearn for death. On the other side of the circle a boy, his black hair in flight like a bat’s wings, cried out for the ride to be stopped, but people only laughed at him. Esperanza kept her mouth shut. If she could just withstand it a little longer, it would be over.

      She remembers that scene as her head bangs against the concrete floor and the four women kick her. With one hand she tries to protect her head and with the other her sex. The tall one pulls her hair. The one with the snarling mouth kicks her buttocks, another her ribs. When she moves her hand to shield her side, the stubby one kicks her in the face, opening skin. If it were one woman, Esperanza might try to defend herself, even though she isn’t a fighter. But what is she supposed to do against four attackers? They are a force of nature that can’t be stopped, like one of those summer deluges in Puroaire that send the tin-roof adobe shacks cascading down the ravines. Or the other storm that brought her to a monstrous world of houses collapsed under the weight of their roofs, or stood upright but with entire walls missing, the rooms exposed like a gigantic doll’s house.

      They go through her pockets, find nothing, disappear. She lies on the floor, bent into a crescent, exhausted and bruised, silent tears blending with blood on the concrete. It is a relief to be alone again, until she realizes someone is standing outside the cell. It’s Woodruff, the enormous officer, mammoth bones and solid curvature under the blue uniform, the one who runs her stick across the bars and makes sucking sounds, her tongue against her front teeth, one of which is capped in gold with the shape of a star cut out. Her hair, extravagantly curled and pomaded, is painted red.

      “They been picking on you, baby? Don’t make no nevermind. They only playing. Ain’t got nothing better to do with their time.” Esperanza has little idea of what the guard is saying but the voice, although stern, reassures her. She realizes she had almost stopped breathing and inhales deeply. “Now get your butt up off that floor, baby.” She lies motionless. “Right now, girl,” says the guard. She doesn’t know what Woodruff said, but from the tone of her voice perceives the command and pulls herself upright.

      All that happened months ago, weeks after the monolithic metal door painted the glossy green of an after-dinner mint slammed behind her with a frightening finality inside the jail in the Plaquegoula Parish Sheriff’s Office. The first day: the shower, the cavity search, the insecticide spray, the baggy white underwear and the orange scrubs, the long walk down the green reeking hall to the cell block. The irreversible closure of that huge metal door, the impossibility of turning around and walking outside, the idea that she might spend the rest of her life staring at the concrete walls and never again see the sun or hear the chirp of a bird.

      “You don’t have any of those salty peanuts?” Pamela, her cellmate from Honduras, asks. “I like those salty peanuts.” After her pronouncement Pamela begins to laugh and then rock back and forth on her cot. Esperanza nods without saying a word. She tries to be invisible before Pamela and responds only if it’s absolutely necessary. Pamela will sometimes jabber in fragments of sentences. The words may be Spanish, but when Pamela talks she makes as little sense as the gringas and the negras yammering in English. She is thirty-five and flabby with lank brown hair. Her mouth is always open, her wide gums exposed, teeth as big as a horse’s. Every day someone comes with a cart and gives her medicine.

      Esperanza’s first cellmate had been an unsmiling woman with a close-cropped natural and a dull gray finish to her skin, who read the Bible all day and never directed a word to her. Then she was gone, replaced with a güera with freckles, pimples, broken teeth, and greasy red hair, uncombed and creeping toward her shoulders. She was in her mid-twenties, about the same age as Esperanza, and because of her lax bathing habits had a sour odor. She spent most of the day directing invective toward Esperanza, words that became easy to ignore because she didn’t understand them, and because the redhead never looked her in the eye when she said them.

      The bowl of the seatless steel toilet is two feet from the cot where Esperanza sleeps. At first she panicked at the idea of using it in front of her cellmates. Even in Puroaire, with a dilapidated bathroom, she and the others in her family took care of their necessities privately. But to pull down her pants and squat before strange and hostile neighbors? She peed only when she couldn’t hold it in any longer. Because of the starchy diet absent in fiber, a week went by before the institutional victuals caught up with her and she had no choice but to defecate. It was a thunderous, fluid, suppurating cascade of bile; it felt as if she was evacuating her internal organs and she couldn’t stop herself from groaning. She caught her Bible-reading roommate gaping at her and glared back. When the other woman turned her head, Esperanza felt in a curious way triumphant.

      “Maybe they’ll give us that thing with the peaches tonight,” Pamela says. She refers to a dessert in which a canned fruit encased in solidified syrup is perched atop a hard starchy chunk. The powers that be thought they were doing the few Spanish-speaking inmates a favor by pairing them up in cells. That is how Pamela entered Esperanza’s life. Pamela, who growls gutturally and laughs when nothing remotely funny has been spoken. Pamela, who grinds her teeth and snores while sleeping. Pamela, who grunts

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