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She said she knew many languages, but she never spoke them. She would sing all the time, but she sang badly. Her favorite songs were very romantic. She moved around the crazy place like a queen. She read the Bible a lot. She remains a myth even standing in the yard at the crazy place. El Pastor decided that 5 percent of what she says is true and the other 95 percent is her imagination.

That is the world of Miss Sinaloa, a place of dreams and songs, a place for a beauty queen to rule. She sits and draws, mainly lines and spirals. And lips, lots of kissing lips.

She dresses well, always a blue dress that shows her legs to advantage. Also, high heels—she navigates the asylum in stilettos.

To El Pastor’s horror, she says a lot of bad words. He thinks maybe the rapes made her talk this way.

He prays with her and she closes her beautiful brown eyes.

She never mentions her family.

She only talks about her beauty. Nothing else really, just her beauty.

She is Miss Sinaloa, after all.

So when the family comes to retrieve their daughter, the father draws an obvious conclusion—that El Pastor and his patients have been having their way with her.

El Pastor is horrified and there is a terrible argument and then, Miss Sinaloa leaves for home with her family.

But as we stand in the dust and wind outside the asylum walls and he recounts that moment—“I am a family man!”—we both understand the reaction of the family. They are middle-class people, El Pastor notes. They had a nice car and they paid for all the medical bills Miss Sinaloa had run up. But in a country where the weak are always prey, where the favorite verb is chingar, to fuck over, such a conclusion is inevitable. Just as the gang rape for days of Miss Sinaloa in the Casablanca is the normal course of business.

The warehouse waits on the side street off a fashionable avenue in a middle-class neighborhood. The army has blocked the streets, and the men wear black uniforms, flack jackets, and blue trousers and clutch automatic rifles. Their faces are covered with black masks lest someone make their identity. A few weeks ago, they hit this very warehouse and found 1.8 tons of marijuana and two men. The two men were taken away.

And now the military is back at the warehouse in an operation sponsored out of Mexico City. Inside, a backhoe digs and two cadaver dogs help in the work. The story floating among the Mexican television, radio, and print people outside is that the informants said there were twelve bodies buried in the warehouse. The work began at 8 A.M., and now it is almost noon and nothing has been found.

Pigeons coo on the roof of the three-story concrete block and window-less building. The street is lined with two-story houses, trees, big iron walls, and gates to protect cars, people, and appliances. Here and there, large dogs stare out through bars. A cluster of cops stands around down the street, but mainly nothing goes on but the slow rhythm of life in a middle-class neighborhood. The press tries to snare the locals in a conversation, but they are not anxious to speak. This is the normal neighborhood with the normal death house—no one saw anything, no one heard anything. And of course, no one smelled anything. A slight woman of about twenty with light skin, tight jeans, and maybe ninety pounds of flesh does a standup for television. Then the torpor returns as everyone waits for the shot they want—bodies coming out.

There is a sound that is everywhere in Juárez, and it is not of sirens or gunshots or the cries of the dead and dying. It is the skittering of litter down a street by a warehouse of death, the flapping of plastic bags caught on the barbed wire, on fence posts, on iron bars. The city has this skittering and flapping, and all is wrapped in endless waves of dust and plumes of exhaust pouring out the tailpipes of dying buses carrying workers to endless toil. Also, the scraping of shoes on the ground as tired people, usually very dark and dressed in cheap clothing