There are others. There's a drawer of them. There's a whole shelf. I don't have time, because the truck is coming back.
I take the one on the desk and I take a key off a cup hook by the door because it's the only one there.
I don't know what it opens and I’ll find out later, or I won't, and then I'm out and moving.
My back has stopped being painful and started being something else, cold and far away, which I know is bad, which I will deal with when I’m a person again.
Fuck, the corridor… I have to go past the doors.
I could go around.
There's forty extra yards in going around, and forty yards is nothing, forty yards is a gift, and I stand there in the dark with a ninety-nine-cent notebook against my chest, and I know exactly what will happen if I go through… and I go through anyway.
Because I'm not leaving without seeing it.
The long row. Doors on both sides. A strip of light under each one and a slot at the bottom for the trays.
They hear me.
They know the sound of every man on this property and I don't sound like any of them, and by the fourth door somebody is up off the mat and her fingers are in the tray slot, white in the dark.
"Quién es?—"
"Hey. Hey. HEY?—"
"Is somebody there, please,please?—"
They come alive down the whole length of it like a fuse burning.
Hands in the slots. Palms on the doors.
My name isn't a name in here, but there's a girl at the eighth door on the left who was brought in eight months ago and cried for a week.
I never said one word to her, not one, because saying words is how you get watched, and she's screamingtake me, take me, take meand she's beating the door with both hands.
I stop.
God help me, I stop, and I put my hand flat on the eighth door on the left, and the wood is warm from her hands.
I could open it.
That's the truth and I'm going to carry it.
The key's in Wes's desk, and Wes is at the west fence, and I could open every door on this corridor in ninety seconds, and I could get eleven women into a desert.
Into the desert, with no shoes, no water, but they would catch us.
All of us. Inside an hour.
And they'd kill two as an example and they'd move the rest, and they'd move themtonight.
For years, I had to learn one thing: you can't help anybody from inside a hole.
"Volveré," I say.
It's the first thing I've said out loud in longer than I can hold in my head, and my voice comes out ruined.
I put my mouth close to the gap so she can hear me over the noise.
