LITMIR.BIZ

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never stops. Atop a cement bunk and an inch-thick foam mattress, Esperanza is constantly disturbed out of a fitful sleep by the bark of shouting arguments, the buzz of a radio, or the blast of a TV infomercial, a solo droning rap or the harmony of several voices in song. In Puroaire she was sometimes awakened by the arguments when her father came home drunk. That happened periodically but predictably; here she doesn’t know from one night to the next what will wake her or prevent her from sleeping at all. Still, she has become more or less accustomed to the interruptions, to the fluorescent lights in the hall that are kept on through the night, to slumber in fits and starts. She wonders whether she is capable of getting used to anything.

      She hears the sucking sound of Woodruff’s tongue on her teeth. Sometimes the officer stops outside the cell and talks for a few minutes. Esperanza doesn’t understand why; the words are almost entirely a mystery both to her and to Pamela.

      “Where you at, Falanza?” the guard asks, peering into her cell. Esperanza nods. Woodruff has never learned how to pronounce her name so she more or less makes up a handle each time she addresses her. Esperanza can’t say her jailer’s name either. “How they treating you? Ain’t no one been up in your shit lately?” She speaks playfully, but there is little comfort in the singsong tone; she holds her stick in a vertical position as if to warn Esperanza not to even think of defying her. “You getting to like partying here at the Ponderosa? They worst places in the world. Don’t make no nevermind if you like it or not, ’cause you going to be on the inside a long time.” She extends the word long in a breathy drawl.

      Pamela doesn’t like the guard. She gets up from her cot, begins to walk around the cell and mumble. In Spanish, she tells Woodruff that she is a fat idiot, and that she cannot cause Pamela any harm because she is protected by San Charbel. Soon the officer will be burning in hell where the devil will make her dance like Juana la cubana. Woodruff ignores her.

      “I can’t figure you out, girl,” says the jailer to Esperanza. “Most of these motherfuckers up here is simple as shit, but you like a mystery.”

      The jailer fixes her gaze on Esperanza, who looks toward the floor.

      “I seen all kind of freak-ass bitches up in here. Cutthroat hoes steal the yellow out of an egg or the white out of your teeth. Wack-ass bitches who give up all the pussy they got for five dollars worth of crank. Pimpstresses dumb enough to do two dimes for riding in a car with the soldier that pulls the triggers.” Pamela stands next to the bars making faces at Woodruff, sticking her tongue out and barking like a dog. The guard barely glances at her. “And plenty that ain’t right in the head, like you friend over there.”

      Between Pamela’s bark and Woodruff’s drawl, Esperanza is on the verge of a panic attack. What wouldn’t she do to be back in Puroaire? How happily she would divide a tortilla in four just to see her mother’s vanquished eyes once more, to taste a spoonful of homemade beans, to look over the valley and the trees and the sun in the spring. Was life hard there? Backbreaking hard, so hard it turned humans into ghosts by the time they were forty. But she had no idea what hard was until she came to los States.

      “I get all that shit, but what I can’t understand is a bitch like you that kill you own childrens.” Woodruff shakes her head. Her eyes penetrate and her tone gets higher. “You must be out of your motherfucking conk, girl. How could you do that to you own baby?”

      Since she arrived in the United States, Esperanza has worked with Mexicans, eaten with Mexicans, made love with Mexicans, and lived on the outskirts of a town in a neighborhood where nearly everyone was Mexican. Her whole life here has been in Spanish; the closest she got to speaking a foreign language was figuring out the slang of the Hondurans. Yet in her months in jail, through osmosis, she has learned enough English to understand the sum and substance of Woodruff’s speech. It’s true: Esperanza has been charged with killing an eleven-month-old baby, a blameless infant named Yesenia who spent nine months in her own belly before living a miserable and thankfully brief near-year until her death. The memory of holding the baby in her arms when she still gurgled with life fills Esperanza with a horror so complete that she freezes.

      The guard begins to laugh. “Baby, you know she crazy and she don’t mean nothing by it, but you best watch out for your friend. She up in your drawers right now.” She walks away, chuckling and banging the bars with her stick.

      Pamela has indeed grabbed a pair of Esperanza’s panties from the shelf and has them in her mouth. She pulls them with her hands, tears them to shreds with her teeth.

      The Ponderosa may be a ghastly place, but no horror can compete with the death of Yesenia. Esperanza realizes that she isn’t afraid that prison will kill her. She wishes prison would kill her. She wants to die. There is even a little comfort in the knowledge that, if the state has its way, she will be put to death. And still more in the assurance that, whatever Louisiana has in store for her, God will give her what she deserves.

       WHERE THE DEVIL LOST HIS PONCHO

      The house was squat and square, of cinder block and cement. One of these days they might get around to painting the facade. It was one story tall with rebar popping out of the roof. In towns like Ojeras, rebar represents hope: hope that one of these days there will be money to build a second story.

      The woman behind the door was a foot shorter than me, her face crosshatched with wrinkles. Her gray hair was pulled back in a bun, the top button of a flimsy black sweater fastened across her chest. Although she looked like The Mummy’s little sister, she was probably no older than sixty. That’s how carefree life is in towns like this.

      “Sorry to bother you, señora,” I said, offering a pleasant smile. “I’m looking for someone who I believe lives in this town. His name is Juventino Escobar.”

      Although she understood me perfectly well, she was going to take as long as she needed to size me up before answering. Who was I? A slender gringo in need of a haircut, in black jeans and a carelessly ironed white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. A black backpack over my shoulder. My presence couldn’t possibly mean good news. Did I want to kidnap Juventino? Arrest him? Sell him drugs, or buy some? Could she trust anyone who spoke with an accent like mine? Did I represent the CIA? The FBI? The DEA? Disneyland?

      “Do you know Juventino by any chance?” I asked. I wasn’t going to stand in her doorway all day, particularly in the early September sunshine that baked the earth after the rain. If she thought the existence of her neighbors was a state secret, there was always the next house. And the next one and the next one, each with its own plucky rebar.

      “No,” she said finally. “I don’t know him.”

      “Okay,” I said. “Many thanks, señora. So sorry to bother you.” I turned my back. The taxi was parked across the street.

      “But I know his mother.”

      I stopped in my tracks. “Excellent. Where does she live?”

      “They say he might have come back. From el gabacho. I don’t know.” El gabacho. Also known as los States, Norteamérica, Gringolandia, or el otro lado.

      Waving my hand, I motioned for the taxi driver to come over. Despite all the years I had lived in this country, I never understood when a Mexican gave directions. He would never send you left or right, east or west. It was always “up” or “down.”

      The cabdriver lived more than two hours away in Puroaire. He was slender with short hair and a winning smile. As the woman explained how he would have to go up there, and then down the other way, somewhere over the rainbow, he nodded sagely, as if he understood perfectly. He might have been to Ojeras before, but he didn’t know it very well. He got us lost along the way.

      “Did you get all that?” I asked, once we were back in the cab.

      “Yes, absolutely,” he said. After a pause, he added, “But if I didn’t, we can ask someone else.”

      Sometime before the next millennium, the local bureaucrats might decide that it would be worthwhile

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