The Witches of El Paso: A Novel

1

It’s your fault, Sofia spits at Marta, sitting across the desk from her. My husband left me. My children won’t talk to me."

Cases like this take a long time, Marta says, trying to be patient. Sofia is Marta’s age, mid-forties. Marta and Sofia are speaking in Spanish. Marta takes a breath. I know it’s been hard for you.

Your life is nothing like mine. You’ve got citizenship. Your husband’s a doctor. You’re a rich lawyer, Sofia says, hugging her purse to her chest.

Marta leans forward, the edges of the desk cutting into her forearms. Nobody could think Marta’s getting rich from the work she does, that any of them in the firm are in it for the money.

Why did you come to the office today? Marta asks, trying to sound pleasant.

I wish I’d never met you or Linda.

Too late for that, Marta says. Easy, girl, easy.

You’re witches. You put the evil eye on me.

Marta’s never been called a witch before by a client, never been told she’s cursed anyone. And Linda Camacho, the community worker, is the most genuinely religious person Marta knows.

All we’ve done is to try to help, Marta says, hating her martyrish tone. She feels a buzzing start up in her left ear, and she shakes her head.

Sofia stares at Marta, her already bulging eyes protruding further from her round face. I’m going to tell the investigators I was wrong.

Wrong about what?

About Soto. I’ll tell them he never touched me.

Marta’s whole body goes cold, and the buzzing grows louder. She rubs her temples. If you change your testimony, you’ll be admitting to perjury.

I don’t know what that is, and I don’t care.

Don’t be stupid, Marta snaps.

Sofia recoils like she’s been slapped, shrinking into the chair across from Marta. Marta could have put it in a nicer way, but she’s not sorry she’s spoken the truth. Sofia has no idea what she’s doing, what work she’s undoing.

Sofia jerks unsteadily to her feet, dropping her purse on the floor. It spills open, its contents scattering. Marta walks around the desk, squatting down to pick up a hairbrush, a compact, a tube of lip gloss, a little mirror, a pack of cinnamon gum, and a laminated prayer card with an image of Santa Muerte. She passes these things to Sofia, who stuffs them back in her purse. Marta spots a blue glass bead that’s rolled by the leg of the desk. She picks the bead up, holding it in her palm. Sofia snatches the bead from Marta.

I’m going to tell the other women how you’ve treated me. They’re not happy with the case either, Sofia says on her way out the door.

Marta’s glad to see her go. Sofia’s always been a problem, even early on, when she raised a stink about the contingency fee, convinced that Marta was in line to receive a personal cut of the settlement funds, as if Marta were a partner in a corporate law firm instead of the deputy director of a legal aid nonprofit teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

Marta turns to look out the windows at the craggy Franklin Mountains. Plumes of dust blow from the west, yellow against the blue sky. Below, cars slide through the streets of downtown El Paso. In San Jacinto Plaza, the paths glow from the light of the dipping sun.

When the firm brought the sexual harassment case against Soto Pecans and its owner, Marta warned her clients it would get ugly. During the discovery process, the women and everyone close to them have been subpoenaed and deposed, their secrets revealed. With the revelation of each new ugly detail, Soto’s team has gone even harder against the plaintiffs. Meanwhile, with each new attack, Marta can feel a piece of herself splitting off.

Sometimes Marta wonders whether she’s really helping at all, whether she wouldn’t have been better off working to become a judge, like her grandma Olga and everyone else expected. On days like this, it seems like the Soto case has done more harm than good for the hardworking, strapped-for-time clients.

Clients like Sofia.

Marta feels a rush of prickly heat as regret settles in her jaw.

She hates losing her temper. No matter how glorious it feels in the moment, remorse follows shortly after. She can’t afford to lose any clients in the Soto case. She knows it wouldn’t take much for the case to fall apart. If Sofia can convince even a few other women to withdraw, then any hope of reaching a settlement, let alone winning at trial, will go out the window. Marta worries she’s spread too thin to be the lawyer she once was.

The firm needs a big settlement to keep the doors open. Marta knows this all too well. She’s in charge of the budget. The executive director, Jerome, nicknamed El Tiburón by his wife, Patricia, because of the myth that sharks must swim constantly to breathe, is almost eighty, still litigating cases. He’s a very good lawyer, and a friend, Rafa’s godfather, but Marta can’t seem to get him concerned that there’s only enough cash for a couple months of payroll. If the Soto case fails, Marta will be responsible, and the firm will be one step closer to shutting down. If that happens, who will Marta be?

A ladybug lands on her hand, walking across her thumb knuckle, tickling her skin. Marta wonders how the thing got in here. None of the windows in the building open. The insect’s shell is like hard candy, a brilliant red. Marta’s college roommate had a theory about this shade, that the biggest brands in the world used this red to appeal to young people because of its resemblance to blood. Marta had always thought she meant that youth is fixated on danger. But blood means other things. Blood is another word for family.

Blood is life, and Marta is at least halfway through hers. For the past twenty years, this firm has been Marta’s life, Jerome and the other lawyers and staff her closest friends, her other family. But there’s a secret part of Marta that longs for something different than the world she lives in. The secret part wants to take control, if only to lose it, to be outrageous, irresponsible, to blow it all open, to be free. If the secret part were in charge, Marta would have an affair, just to see what it was like. She would lose the Soto case, intentionally. She’d be so incompetent that she’d be fired and unable to ever work as a lawyer again. She’d start over, leaving the boys in El Paso with Alejandro while she traveled with her lover, a younger man, visiting the great swimming pools of the world and having wild sex in fancy hotel rooms.

The ladybug crawls to the center of Marta’s palm. It digs into her skin, as if it has little claws at the end of its legs. Marta brushes the thing off her, disgusted.

She has to get a grip. This is just daydreaming.

What Marta needs is to focus, to win the Soto case in a major way. A settlement of a couple million dollars would keep the practice afloat and might even be enough to convince Jerome to retire, so that she can finally be in charge. She’s tired of waiting. If Jerome needs a shove to make him leave, she’ll give it.

For now, Marta pops two ibuprofen tablets and goes to the kitchen for a cup of burnt coffee, all their ancient drip machine knows how to make. She heads toward Jerome’s office to tell him about Sofia. Jerome is still the boss, and Marta has always sought his advice, whether she follows it or not. The suite looks the same as the day she joined the practice, somehow feeling both under-furnished and cluttered at the same time. Dusty law books sit on sagging shelves, boxes of files stacked on top of dented filing cabinets. The humming fluorescent lights show the wear of the office, the brown institutional carpet threadbare, stained with spilled coffee. In the open area in front of Jerome’s office, Linda is parked at the paralegal Cristina’s desk.

Linda shakes her head, her hoop earrings moving back and forth as she laughs, a rich peal. Marta is struck by her love for these women. She’s not going to allow them to lose their jobs through any fault of hers.

She raps forcefully on Jerome’s open office door, startling him.

He throws down his pen and stands up.

I screwed up with Sofia Hernandez from the Soto case, Marta says, taking a sip of her coffee. I called her stupid.

Not good, Marta, not good, Jerome says, shaking his head, but the corners of his mouth twitch. Marta doesn’t think this is a laughing matter.

We can’t afford to lose this case. Have you looked at the quarterly profit-and-loss statement?

That’s not good either, Jerome says. That’s why you’re going to win the Soto case. You’ll bring the chingona energy, and you’ll get it done.

Marta doesn’t like that word. A man is never said to be pushy.

It’s Nena on the phone, Cristina says from the door.

I’ll call her back, Marta replies. It’s odd for her great-aunt to call in the middle of the day.

She’s had a fire at her house, Cristina says, as Marta rises, worried. Don’t freak out. She says the fire department came and everything’s fine. But she wants you to come over.

I’d better go check on her, Marta says to Jerome.

She’s your tía, the witch? Jerome asks.

Don’t call her that.

2

For part of May and all of June, Nena had been hearing a hum, a noise that vibrated along the surface of her skin. Nena had been afraid to ask her sisters if they also heard it, knowing she’d be scolded for speaking again about things that no one else heard or saw, like the flickers in the corners of her vision, or the whispers of people long dead. It was 1943, and no one was supposed to talk about sustos and corazonadas anymore. But her sisters definitely saw the ladybugs that followed Nena around. Every time Nena went anywhere, from the kitchen to the bathroom, to the Obregons’ grocery store, to the post office, las mariquitas came with her, a swarm of little red dots clinging onto her clothes, like living embroidery. When the ladybugs came too close to Olga, she brushed them away, saying, Que bonita! how pretty, in a high-pitched voice that meant the opposite. Luna squashed as many of them as she could reach.

Ever since their parents had died, Nena and her sisters had lived all together on West Overland Avenue, so close to the Rio Grande that from the street corner they could see Mexico. Olga was four years older than Nena, and Luna three. When Nena was growing up, she watched them, not sure if she would end up more like Olga or more like Luna. One was smart, the other was beautiful. Olga polished her shoes without being told, she kept her pencils sharpened, she didn’t chew her nails. She did her homework long before it was due, and she prayed every night, using the rosary Papá gave her for her first Communion. Olga was awarded a full scholarship to Southern Methodist University, and Nena had been very angry on her sister’s behalf when she wasn’t able to go, there not being enough money to pay for travel or books.

And then there was Luna. When she was six, she took a knife and chopped the heads off a half-dozen chicks. When Mamá asked her what she was doing, Luna said, I’m playing butcher. In high school, Luna wanted to be a gangster’s moll, and she dressed the part, wearing skirts that she hemmed very short. She was a cheerleader for Bowie High School, and she was so famously beautiful that young men from other high schools asked her to dances.

Now that Nena was no longer a child, she understood she would never be like either of her sisters, and that was fine with her. In the spring, she’d fallen in love with the movie For Whom the Bell Tolls. Señor Obregon’s daughter Fina worked at the Palace Theatre ticket booth, and Fina had always said that Nena could come as much as she wanted for free. After her ninth viewing, Fina’s boss said Nena couldn’t come to the theater anymore.

It didn’t matter, because by that time, Nena had memorized all of the dialogue in the movie. She’d never seen anyone as beautiful as Ingrid Bergman, who played Maria, an orphan and a fighter with short-cropped hair and too-big trousers, neither of which stopped her from having a grand romance. But who most fascinated Nena was the character Pilar, a fierce commander of anti-fascist partisans who could ride a horse and shoot a gun better than any of her men. And like Nena, Pilar saw things other people couldn’t.

Pilar was also very ugly, her face and clothes grimy, the opposite of Ingrid Bergman, who glowed. Nena had curly hair, and she thought if she cut it short, she could make it look like Ingrid Bergman’s in the movie, yes, black instead of blond, but with the same kind of fluffy glamour. Nena used Olga’s sewing scissors, carefully snipping, evening out the sides, one and then the other, as she looked in the mirror, cutting and then cutting again until there was hardly anything left.

When Luna saw Nena’s hair, she crossed herself in an exagerada way. You tonta, don’t you know why Maria’s hair is cut short in the movie? Luna asked Nena, but of course Nena knew. Pilar tells the hero Robert Jordan that Maria had the worst time a woman can have, if you know what I mean. Nena could guess what Pilar meant, what men could do to women.

Using all of her savings, Nena bought herself trousers from The Popular, justifying the purchase by wearing them every day. This drove Olga and Luna crazy, neither of them thinking it proper for a lady to wear pants, even though many women did now that there was a war on.

Anyhow, Nena didn’t care what her sisters said; she was preparing for the trouble to come. There were rumors that the Germans and Japanese would come through Mexico to invade the United States, and when they did, Nena would be ready for them. In the desert, almost every plant protects itself with sharp thorns, and Nena was a child of the desert. She didn’t know how to fire a rifle yet, but she’d learn quick. She already knew she had the courage to do what was necessary. One morning, Olga found a rattlesnake curled up on the back step. She ran out into the street to find a man, and Luna threw her hands up, screaming like she was being murdered. But Nena didn’t waste time; she found a shovel and cut the head off the snake.

Luna worked as a waitress at the officers’ club at Fort Bliss, and Olga operated the switchboard at the Hotel Cortéz, a tall building overlooking San Jacinto Plaza, where the alligators lived in their pond. Luna’s and Olga’s husbands were away at war, Olga’s in Europe and Luna’s, Beto, in the South Pacific. Nena stayed home and took care of the babies, Olga’s daughter and Luna’s son, both nine months old, biding her time until the Germans attacked.

She sang to the babies, played with them, jiggled them on her hips, one on each side. She washed diapers and did the household laundry, keeping pots of water boiling on the stove. She cooked all the meals except breakfast, she swept and mopped the floors, she dusted, and she tended to the chickens. But even though she was up at five and worked all day, the house never stayed tidy, the laundry never got completely done, and the babies were rarely clean, full, or happy at the same time.

One day, the babies fussed all morning, refusing to nap all afternoon, and then they had a competition to see who could cry louder and harder, far into the evening. By the time Olga got home, Nena felt like she’d been awake for three days straight, her skin greasy, her eyes dried out by the heat of the summer.

Why do you insist on always leaving the dirty water in the laundry basin? Olga asked. Always was a terrible word to use, and it wasn’t even accurate. Nena only sometimes forgot to dump out the water. She knew better than to speak these thoughts out loud.

Late that night, Luna flung open the front door, kicking off her shoes in the corner and singing The Battle Hymn of the Republic. She danced through the house, the sour scent of beer trailing after her as she picked up a sleeping Chuy from his crib. He woke up crying. This woke up Olga’s daughter, Valentina, and then both babies cried and cried and cried some more. It took forever to put them down again.

Please, Nena prayed when she was finally able to go to bed. Please end this war and bring back the men. Please let me have something of my own.

When she was alive, Nena’s mamá often told the girls that they could be whatever they wanted, except maids. But what was Nena other than a muchacha—a servant girl, nanny, and cook for her sisters? Nena couldn’t stand the long days anymore, she couldn’t take the humming noise or the ladybugs flying in their swarm, buzzing with messages that she couldn’t understand, but that they seemed bent on delivering anyway. Help me, she prayed.

Nena was twelve the first time she had a serious vision, when they were still living in the old house. For Nena’s whole life, her papá was only able to speak in a raspy whisper, his lungs so tattered from being gassed in France during the First World War that he couldn’t work with his brothers at the family trucking company.

Nena’s mamá worked as a cook in a restaurant. She didn’t make enough money to support the family with that job, so on Sundays she sold pozole in the little park across from the church. During the week, the Montoya girls made the soup, soaking the hominy in lye to better slip the skins off the kernels, wringing the chickens’ necks and plucking them, making the broth, and then on Sundays, Nena and her sisters helped their mamá carry the heavy pot wrapped in blankets, along with sawhorses and planks to form a table.

The soup was hot and spicy, warm in the winter, and in the summer, it felt nice to eat something even hotter than the air. All afternoon on Sundays, Nena ran back and forth to their house, cleaning the clay bowls and bringing back refills of the condiments—the chopped-up onion, the chiles, the cilantro. People milled about in their Sunday finest, talking and gossiping and flirting. In the middle of the park, a pack of dogs nibbled at their fleas, scratching themselves. There were always lines to buy the soup. When someone couldn’t afford a bowl, Nena’s mamá gave it away for free.

Weekday mornings, Nena’s mamá helped her papá out of his bed, letting him lean on her as they slowly made their way through the house and onto the little piece of concrete that he called his patio, a corner of the small, dusty yard. When he was having a strong day, he pulled Nena up onto his lap and told her stories from his childhood in New Mexico.

The family house had been built low and close to the ground, adobe covered with stucco, four rooms with a woodstove, clay tiles on both floor and roof. The house was dark in the morning where it sat on the western side of the Tularosa Mountains, high on a mesa for protection from the Apaches when the place was first built. By the time he was born, only the house, the corral, and a patch of garden remained of the many acres that had been granted to the family in the eighteenth century. Centuries before this, the family had been at the side of the explorer Oñate when he claimed the land north of the Rio Grande for King Philip II of Spain, in what Nena’s papá called La Toma, The Taking.

Who did they take the land from? Nena once asked, and her papá had laughed, explaining, From your cousins the Indios, of course.

One night, a pack of dogs dug their way into the chicken coop, devouring all the chickens. In an instant, there were no eggs for the family to eat, no meat or bones to make the broth for the pozole, and no extra money to make up the rent shortfall.

At the end of the month, Señor Echeverria, the landlord, came by the house, as he did every month, to collect rent. Nena’s mamá explained that she would have it for him soon. Señor Echeverria grunted at the kitchen table, dunking his pan dulce in the chocolate Nena’s mamá had made for him, squishing the pastry in his mouth with ugly slurping sounds. When he was done, he wiped his hands on his pants instead of on the napkin that had been placed in front of him.

He got up fast, pushing his chair away, backing Nena’s mamá up against the counter, pressing his body then his lips against hers. Her hands flew up to his chest to shove him away, but he was too big, his belly pinning her. He pulled open the front of her dress, the buttons flying off, tapping on the floor. He reached into her dress with one hand, touching her breasts, using his other hand to muffle the sound of her yelling. Nena’s papá was in the bedroom, too weak to help even if he heard the commotion. Nena knew she was the only one who could come to her mamá’s aid. The big knife for butchering the chickens was right there in the drawer. She would pull it out and stab Señor Echeverria in the space between his ribs.

Before Nena could reach the drawer, a buzzing started in her ears, the room wobbled, and then she found herself on a crowded street. Nena was inside Señor Echeverria’s chest, and something was wrong, broken, and then she was at a funeral mass. When Nena’s mind returned to the kitchen, she was splayed out on the floor, her head in her mamá’s lap. Señor Echeverria was staring down at them.

Nena sat up, meeting his hard eyes. You have three weeks to live, she told him.

Her vision would prove to be correct, but it wouldn’t do Nena or the rest of the Montoya family any good. Señor Echeverria evicted them before he died, and in the years after that, Nena made things even worse by using her ability to try to fix their situation.

Help me, Nena prayed in her hot little room. Please let me be something other than what I am now. Please, God, let me be brave and have adventures.

The three sisters shared one fan, and it was Luna’s night to use it. Nena had set a bowl of tap water next to her cot so that she could dunk a washcloth in the water and lay it across her forehead, but the washcloth grew hot so fast it was hardly worth the effort. Nena kicked the sheet off herself and spread her legs, hanging one off the side of the cot, pulling her nightgown up and flapping