Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [98]
The boy had been in treatment before, and failed. Then, last Friday, the family could tell he was on drugs again, and so they took him next door and put him in the center. He’d basically been raised by his grandmother. After the shooting, the boy was one of the wounded put in a van for transportation to the hospital. He didn’t make it and was left on a street corner. His grandmother found him and wailed. His head was a mess, he was covered with blood, and he seemed very still to her. He was gone. The old woman had planned to take him out of the center that Saturday. Thursday morning, she was taken to the hospital with a heart attack. And now, at the wake on Friday afternoon, everyone is quiet and tired and the mother shrugs when explaining what ambition her son might have harbored.
There is nothing puzzling at the wake next door to the slaughterhouse. The killers give no reason for killing, they simply fire. The army parks down the street and does nothing. The neighbors hide during the fifteen minutes of murder. No one wants a real name publicized. The police do not come, the ambulances stay away. Gang kids paint a sheet, drift into and out of the wake, and look at the body with blank eyes. The girl, maybe sixteen years old, is pregnant, and she sips Seven-Up a few feet from her boyfriend’s body. The mother answers questions with a flat voice. And a whisper begins: that the church deacon killed had a premonition that he should not come. That he froze when he was to read a Bible verse and could not speak. Soon other signs will be remembered, and somehow the blood and the flies will be erased and made smooth by legend. The baby leaning over the coffin—the glass top now covered with rosaries brought by local people, the base surrounded by carnations and gladiolas and daisies and roses—will grow up learning tales and stories and miracles associated with the killing, and this will be part of being alive on this street with the dust in the air. After all, one pregnant woman at the meeting survived—the dead deacon’s body was draped over hers. She will be proof of God or the devil or some force besides the flies and dust and sun, the water that fails, the electricity that comes and goes, the police who might kill you, the army who might kill you, the gangs that might kill you. And the gang that is all you have or ever will have in your short life. After all, there is that photo of you and your friends taped on your coffin lid, and you are all tossing out gang signs with your fingers.
So much depends on a blue carnation and fingers flicking messages into the void. The white carnations have a blue dye by the body resting in the coffin. And I think, okay, this is what it is about, doing the best, the very best one can do under the circumstances. So much depends on the people in the neighborhood, who say the gunshots could be heard for blocks and blocks. About the time of the killings at the center, the government announced that there have been about 839 murders in the Juárez area this year, but only eighteen people have been charged.
So much depends on the worker at the center who is busy loading the vans so that all can flee Juárez, and I ask him, just what do you think is going on here? and he says, “Something evil. Something very, very evil.”
To ask what your son wanted to become is to imagine a world that is not a thought in the yard with the dust, the canvas hoisted on poles for shade, the vine wilting on the fence in the afternoon sun, and the coffin resting in the kitchen by the dirty pots and pans.
On the kitchen wall, the tear-away calendar has stalled at August 13/14, the night of the killing. But of course, time goes on, and the boy in the box will not be the last to die, nor the last member of Locos 23. We are in a place without beginning or end, and all the ways to tell the story fail me and repel me. There are many dead, and they each have a tale. Beyond that,