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  He watches a blister form over his right knuckle under the scalding faucet. He takes his hands out of the water and opens the medicine cabinet over the sink. He looks for a cream, but only finds a pack of condoms, a brown glass bottle of vitamins and a Swedish steel straight-razor with a stain of dried blood.

  He takes the packet of condoms out from behind the mirror and shakes it. Chuckles to himself. He puts the condoms back before downing two vitamins from the brown, glass bottle and taking the straight razor with him into the shower to shave.

  The little mirror that hangs from the showerhead fogs up as Uli takes the razor and holds the blade up to his face. He watches the little dot of blood wash away from the steel as the water glides over it.

  Of all things to think about just then, he remembers a story his father used to tell him about the first beating he had ever taken.

  “One time I met Holy Death in my dreams,” he’d start.

  He said he prayed to her daily, to Santa Muerte, and when she finally came to him, she was cutting silver strings with a wet scythe. She grazed his cheek with the back of her wet finger. She talked to him in a language he never knew but understood. He asked if he was going to die that night, and she said, “Worse than death is dying. But not to worry—you will have a good death.”

  His father was so scared, he went to confession the next day. He asked the priest, “Is it wrong to pray to her?”

  His entire life, Uli’s grandmother would sit her son down in front of Santa Muerte’s image, an intricately painted ceramic statue with smoky, velvety eyes and a long, blue cape. She’d push his father’s hands together so that he could pray for the return of his own father from the North where he worked. Uli’s father prayed to her every night without fail.

  “What is she?” he asked the priest. “Is it wrong to pray to her?”

  “Yes,” said the priest, “yes, you satanic, idol-worshipping fool. You’ve prayed to a demon in the guise of a saint. You’ve forsaken the Holy Spirit and put a curse on your family, which can never be undone.”

  Uli remembers that his father had said he was sorry, that he’d never do it again and then he said his penance.

  “Wait,” said the priest as his father stood to leave the confessional. “I want you to go home and prepare a dish. I want you to take it to the people who live in the fields across the railroad tracks on Calle Tres Cruces. As charity. And I want you to come back in the morning and tell me what happened.”

  So, his father did. He prepared the only thing he knew how to make, chicken with mole sauce from a jar, hungry the whole time because of the fasting that comes with penance. It wasn’t until he reached the edge of the lot that he smelled the makeshift village: the soggy, wet fumes of burning cardboard, the smell of vinyl tarps, the propane tanks on full blast.

  A dozen bodies appeared. They walked quickly toward him, dark, naked and dirty.

  “And then what happened?” said the priest.

  “They beat me,” said his father. “They beat me, and the dish I cooked fell to the ground.”

  “And then?”

  “And then they beat each other. They fought over the food. They ripped the flesh from the bones of the chicken like dogs. They licked the mole from the dirt. And then they beat me for my money.”

  “And did you give it to them?”

  “Yes,” his father said.

  “And what did they say to you?”

  “Your money or your life,” his father said.

  “And how did you feel?” the priest asked.

  “All alone.”

  “And that,” said the priest, “is Santa Muerte.”

  By the moonlight in the window, Uli puts the tip of the straight razor to the back of his blistered knuckles and presses down. Pus and blood stream pink down the drain. Just then, an incandescent bulb pierces the creeping darkness outside. His blood glistens in the glow.

  He looks out the shower window. A porch light across the street. A man in the driveway with purple boots and a Stetson hat.

  He’s parked his burnt-orange Ford Lobo in front of their house. He’s talking with another man who’s behind a screened window. Uli turns off the shower and creeps down so just his eyes are peeking above the tile. A woman appears in the threshold of the door. She takes the hand of the man in the driveway and leads him into her home. Even from that distance Uli can tell she’s the most gorgeous woman he’s ever seen.

  “Forget about her,” says June to Uli the next day in the backyard. “Only thing you have to know about her is that she’s your neighbor. That’s it.”

  June rolls Parvo pills up into little balls of processed cheese in the kitchen and feeds it to Atómico, whose tongue smacks dry against the roof of his mouth as he tries to swallow his medicine. June pours him a bottle of Coke and pushes the container toward his snout. Atómico lazily cranes his neck toward the Coke and makes a mess lapping it up, the liquid splashing everywhere around his face.

  While he’s distracted, June redresses his bandages, applying a topical antibiotic to his sutured wounds so they don’t get infected.

  “He gonna be all right?” asks Uli, petting the dogs legs with his own busted foot.

  “He’s already all right,” says June.

  “You ever met her?” asks Uli, shifting the subject back to the lady.

  “I know of her,” says June, cutting a length of gauze with her teeth and tearing along the seam. “Tape,” she says, nodding toward a band of vinyl electrical tape by Uli’s foot.

  Uli hands it over.

  “What is she? A witch?” says Uli, jokingly.

  “Something like that,” says June. She takes a long stretch of tape and pulls it around the dog’s neck like a collar.

  “She keeps this part of the city safe, anyway. Neutral turf, if you catch my drift.”

  “I don’t.”

  “She keeps a lot of dangerous men happy, and they’re all interested in her keeping on as she’s keeping on.”

  “Does she make you happy?” Uli says to June, a smile creeping across his face now.

  “Money makes me happy.”

  “That’s because you’ve got a hole in your heart,” says Uli. “Always trying to fill it.”

  “You’re gonna have a hole in your face if you don’t let it go.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You know. Let it go or you’ll find out,” says June, looking at him, serious all of a sudden.

  She takes another fistful of processed cheese balls filled with melatonin supplements and throws it at Atómico for him to lap up while they’re gone. Too much movement isn’t good for a recovering dog, or so June says. Melatonin will keep him calm, keep him knocked out.

  “Why do we even have to work today?” says Uli.

  “We work every day. Right now it’s easy, but soon you’ll see—it’ll get lean. Leaner than lean. You’ll reach for that kilo of tortillas, and it’ll be gone. And then you reach for your money and only half as much is there than you last remembered. And then you wish you would have saved, wish you would have kept working. You work in the lean, and you work in the fat. Especially the fat.”

  “Are we fat right now?”

  “We’re about to get fatter,” says June, throwing her arm into a backpack strap.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To get some copper,” says June, handing him the handle to a wagon full of smelting equipment: a butane torch, some gloves, a rubber hammer and rope.

  June watches the military jets in the sky as she walks. She makes a game of spotting them before they come. At first, they appear as tiny glints of gleaming metal before quickly ripping the sky apart at its seams. She loves the feel of the noise in her heart. She marvels at the way something so relatively small can make a tear in the sky so loud as to drown out the sounds of a city itself. Even the dogs shut up for a second as jets pass overhead, and she loves that too. She thinks sometimes that’s the way she’d like to be. Here and gone. A blast of noise in her wake.

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sp; Just then, she thinks about the car bomb, the charred stink of it still on her clothes. She wonders if charred skin isn’t just scar tissue and if so, was anything still breathing in that mass of flesh? Could they have survived? she wonders. A certain heaviness falls upon her heart. Don’t be dumb. They were dead, she reassures herself. Though just thinking on it, she can’t help but think back to her own scar that formed over the charred skin of her face.

  She lugs the wagon filled with scrapping supplies between the boulders in the street, Uli is close behind and remembers how it felt to be left for dead at one time. Sometimes, June wishes she would have died that night. Or any other night really. Maybe she wishes she would have died sooner, like her older sister who was found by a priest down by where she worked.

  June’s sister, Gloria, built transmissions in the maquila by the river. They’d moved to the border from Michoacán along with their mother who made and sold licuados and aguas at the gate of the maquilas.

  Like most every other migrant soul in San Miguel, they’d been bottlenecked here by accident. So close to the border.

  June’s mother said they’d wait, they’d work, until their luck came along and they could cross over. San Miguel killed each of them except for June

  Gloria was killed for no reason other than the fact that she was a woman. Like all the other women who’d been killed in San Miguel, she was killed in the early morning on her way to work. Her body had been cut from pubic bone to sternum in one single rip. No motive, nothing taken from her.

  It was a priest who found her on her side. When the police came, it was said the priest, who was red from his fingers to his waist, had tried for hours to make Gloria whole again. He told the medics, when they finally arrived, that he didn’t want to move her because he knew if you moved a patient, you might hurt them worse. And the medics looked at each other. They didn’t know what to make of that.

  If the priest seemed touched at the scene, he was quickly forgiven by the medics, the police, the ejército, the maquila boss too, all who came to see the scene more out of rage than grief. Because it should be said that Gloria, like her sister June, was one of the most beautiful women in San Miguel. And it wasn’t long after her death that the whole city took a keen interest in her murder, despite countless other women from the maquila having been killed before. But this one mattered, everyone said. The papers even declared it in bold print.

  An autopsy was done at the request of the mayor, who wanted confirmation that she hadn’t been raped before she’d been murdered.

  Over time, Gloria’s virginity became sacred to San Miguel (and by extension its reputation), and there was a sigh of relief when illustrations of the autopsy were published in the newspapers (a vertical incision that cut her open twice, running parallel to the wound that actually killed her) revealing that she did, indeed, die a virgin.

  Parties were held in the streets, tesoritos were stamped with her name on them and they were hung in churches. One man even wrote to the Pope for her to be canonized. But all of this was too much for June and her mother, who felt the burden of public fascination too much.

  Her mother stopped eating and grew ill. And neither of them could handle the priest who’d found Gloria. He stopped by at all hours of the day with his rusty, brown hands. He refused to wash them of Gloria’s virgin blood, possibly saint blood, he’d say. He would stay for hours on end, begging forgiveness from Gloria’s mother for finding her too late.

  The smell of his hands made June’s mother sick, but she always accepted him for no other reason than that he was a priest. When the dried blood finally faded, rubbed away with time and the shock of Gloria’s death, June took to disappearing for days on end if only to escape the priest. And, of course, her mother, too, who could not be consoled.

  June wandered the city night and day—by bus, by foot, by taxi whenever she got lost, which was often. At first, she walked only the triangle between Galeana, Mejia and Lerdo streets, where the prostitutes sashayed and the arcades were full. It wasn’t long before she discovered the diesel pesero buses with their rambling engines that purred something smoky toward the back, where you could lean your head up against the cool, scratched glass, close your eyes and let sleep fall over you with a heaviness that can only be undone by time.

  It was in this way that June came to know the entire city of San Miguel, wandering from bus to bus, station to station, for days on end. And it was in this way, too, that the entire city came to know her. Not only as Gloria’s sister but as a different being altogether.

  Over time, June’s clothes wore themselves ragged. She took to cutting her hair short. Her skin hung heavy and grey on her face. She barely ate, and her days all blended together. Chapped lips, sunken eyes, she looked like she’d been dead for weeks.

  The city took to calling her the sleeping girl or the druggy girl. But the people who rode the pesero buses built their own mythology around her, and it wasn’t long before her image became synonymous with Gloria’s spirit: ragged, cut and dead.

  To those who had read the newspapers in the days following Gloria’s death—to those who’d read every gory detail alongside Gloria’s picture—June was the spitting image of her sister. And soon it was out all over town that the devil himself had brought the murdered girl back to life.

  The papers caught the story and published a picture of June sleeping in her Sex Pistols T-shirt. From then on, everyone who rode the peceros crossed themselves in her presence. Old men would ask her for favors. They would try to get June to contact their friends in the afterlife, as if she was some kind of human Ouija board. Children would wake her up just so she could tell them the exact date and time of their deaths and whether or not it would hurt. All of this was too confusing for June, who just wanted to sleep, who’d missed the entire spectacle surrounding her existence. So she ignored both the men and women. She would answer every child’s question with, “Ants. Sixty years old. Noon.”

  Just a few days after the story was published, a street gang came to June believing that if she could never die, then she would be an asset to their group. They’d make her their own Santa Muerte, their own virgin to ward off evil.

  June, growing lonesome in those days, was all too willing to fall in with any group that would have her. And so, when the gang took her in—those boys and girls who called themselves the F.U. Mordida—she didn’t fight back. She became the ghost everyone needed her to be.

  One day, a boy from the F.U. Mordida boarded June’s pesero bus. His head was shaved and he was dressed in black. He spotted June sleeping in the very last seat in the very back of the bus—exactly where the papers said she’d be.

  The boy called out June’s sister’s name, Gloria. “Gloria!” he kept shouting. “Gloria, is that you? Gloria?” Silence. The crowd watched on.

  When the bus stopped, June woke up and stared at the boy calling her sister’s name. She acknowledged him with the slightest of nods before standing up to stretch, though to everyone else it looked like she was standing to answer his call.

  A collective gasp could be heard throughout the bus as June stood. Even the driver looked back in his rearview mirror.

  June exited the bus, ushered on by F.U. Mordida, and wandered back with them into the guts of the city. It didn’t even take a day for the rumor to be confirmed: the devil himself had, indeed, brought Gloria back from the dead. And suddenly everyone feared the F.U. Mordida because, it was also rumored, that evil could not die. F.U. Mordida became invincible, if only in the eyes of their enemies. Everyone feared the gang, even the police, who had it printed in all the papers that no one from that gang was to be arrested, not even for dog fighting, which was how certain gangs made their money in San Miguel and how June became an expert dog fighter in the first place.

  Dog fights kept peace among the gangs of San Miguel. The dogs were mainly street dogs, which kept the playing field level. Before the ejército came, the fights themselves were meant to be a lottery of sorts, a pack of dogs rounded up and a s
ingle coin tossed to see which gang got which dog and which fought first.

  Every gang put in their five hundred peso buy-in, and this one particular night, weeks after June had been taken in by the F.U. Mordida, all eyes were on June who, rumor had it, could never lose.

  The night of her first fight, all eyes were on her—the spitting image of her dead sister—until they shifted their attention to one dog in particular. This big, sloppy mutt had a bark that stunk like ash, which everyone said was proof the hound was from hell. And just as everyone expected, the coin toss proved that it belonged, by destiny, to June.

  The dog’s bark was all growl—heavy and low. He flashed the whites every so often so as to give off this manic look, his pupils fully dilated, his irises full of blood.

  When the dog entered the ring, he pulled June and the chief of the F.U. Mordida (that bald boy dressed in black) behind him, the dog loping one giant leg at a time over the ankle-high plywood that made up the periphery of the ring.

  The dog moved sprightly, although with a heaviness in commanding the space. He barked and the room shut up. Among the spectators, bookies and betters, there was a vague unease at being in the same space with this wild thing. But there was also money to be made, and everyone stayed to watch, to bet, to see if this devil-girl could never lose.

  One of the bookies, some surly boy in charge of crowd control, kept his finger on the trigger of his silver pistol (just to show he meant business), the barrel pointed toward the ground.

  The spectators shoved their backs to the corners of the room with the white gloss of their eyes showing in the dark. The fluorescent lights hung like operating table lamps over the blood-soaked beige carpet.

  Of course, everyone bet on June’s beast. Just as the bookie signaled for the fight to begin, a shot rang out. The dog’s eyes split away, his skull undone.

  A flash of aspirated bright, red poured out into the air and everyone’s eyes were on the bookie whose smoking pistol sat snugly in his grip, his index finger extended fully so as to show everyone that his finger was off the trigger. But, of course, the shot had rung out and there was only one person holding the gun.