The Beasts of Juarez, R.B. Schow [books to read for self improvement .txt] 📗

work until midnight then we will take you to an offsite location where you will sleep in your own designated spot. In the morning you will shower, we will feed you, and then you will come back tomorrow and do it all over again. Doesn’t that sound grown up?”

Maisie’s eyes started to water and she said, “Can you please take us back to our mommy?”

The hunched man knelt down before her, took her little chin into his hand, and tilted it toward him so that they were looking eye-to-eye. “Don’t you remember what I said? I told you that you would never see her again. Now, don’t be a little asshole or I will kill you myself and throw you away like we throw away all the bad little girls.”

Maisie started to cry now, so the man grabbed her face, and that’s when Zoey stepped forward, took her sister’s free hand, and said, “I will help her learn. And we will sleep in the place you want us to sleep, and eat the food you want us to eat. We won’t be bad little girls.”

With Maisie’s face still gripped in his hand, he looked deep into the eight-year-old’s eyes and said, “Your big sister just saved your life. For now. If I see any more tears from you, I will cut out your eyes.”

Maisie nodded her head as much as she could in his grip. He then let go of her face, stood up tall, and in a cheery voice, said, “Your time here can be as easy or as hard as you make it.” He looked down at Maisie. “It will be easier for you if you do what your sister is doing, and that’s doing exactly what I say. Soon you will be somewhere else, wishing you were back here. But by then someone else will have taken your place and I will have forgotten all about you.”

Throughout the rest of the day and well into the night, an older woman named Olina showed them their part in making the jeans. When they got the hang of it, Olina left them to their work, checking on them less and less.

Their tasks were not that hard, but Zoey’s feet, legs, and back hurt just as much as the raw ends of her fingertips. And it was boring work. When they weren’t served dinner, her stomach started to growl and hurt. It had never felt so hollow before. When Maisie asked Olina about dinner, she said, “Only breakfast.”

“One meal a day?” Zoey asked, floored.

Olina looked up toward the man’s office they had come from, then shushed them and made the finger-across-the-throat sign that likely meant they would kill you for talking. Based on what the man said before, Zoey was pretty sure Olina hadn’t made the gesture halfheartedly.

When the man finally emerged from the office hours later, he whistled and all the children put their tools down and followed him.

“Zoey, Maisie, you as well!” he called out in English.

She and Maisie followed several other kids into the back of a large pickup truck. The kids draped blankets over themselves, then two of the girls waved Zoey and Maisie closer, sharing their blankets with them.

In the grip of a midnight chill, they drove for a short time before turning into a large dirt lot with another building similar to the one in which they had been working all day and night. They followed the other kids’ leads and got out of the truck. When they walked inside the giant warehouse, there were hundreds of other kids already asleep on their cots.

The group they had arrived with had their own section of cots which was where the girls had taken them. Zoey introduced her younger sister to a man overseeing them. He had asked for their names, studied a list, then nodded and pointed to two nearby cots. Zoey and Maisie crawled into their scant beds then lay there trying to get comfortable.

“I miss Mommy,” Maisie whispered.

“I do, too,” Zoey said.

Zoey reached out with her hand and Maisie found it. She wasn’t sure if Maisie was crying or sleeping but it didn’t matter. The man who had taken their pictures said there were times to work and times to cry, and right then, Zoey realized it was time to cry.

Chapter Fourteen

CALLIE FOX

Guillermo Calderon looked over sixteen-year-old Callie Fox, smiling at what he saw. He stepped forward and sniffed her hair and her skin where it wasn’t covered with clothing. Satisfied, he said, “Show me your teeth.”

She did.

To Callie, Guillermo was not an attractive man, but he wasn’t ugly either. Not physically. What tightened her skin into goosebumps—the bad kind of goosebumps—was that he was looking at her like a predator and sniffing her the way a dog sniffs another dog’s asshole.

“What is wrong with you?” she asked, low like she wasn’t confident in saying anything at all but offended enough that she couldn’t keep her mouth closed.

Despite her instincts to be quiet and remain small, her father always told her that when a dog growls at you, you stand your ground and growl back harder.

“Plus,” her father had said, “you never turn your back and run. That’s how you hold your power in front of a savage animal.”

Would that work with Guillermo? She prayed to God the way she treated this mutt would yield her the results her father promised. But then he responded to her and she knew, almost immediately, that the move she made with this particular dog was the wrong move altogether.

“When a little girl stands before me knowing she is not where she is supposed to be, knowing that the strange man in front of her is having illicit thoughts, they do not presume to think they can talk, let alone