This Love Is Not for Cowards (16 page)

If they were anybody but the Indios. Toluca scores late in the second half to make it 2–0. Then they score again to make it 3–0. Another shellacking. The radio color man repeatedly says the words “
muy mal
.” Applebee's patrons in their Indios kits file out to the parking lot. Only the broadcast crew and I hold out until the end, which is bitter. As I put on my coat and as the broadcasters pack up their microphones and cables, we acknowledge the open secret: Pepe Treviño is out of a job. This was his last of many strikes. When the team returns to the Juárez airport tonight, he shouldn't bother unpacking his bag. I like Pepe, and I feel bad for him, but clearly he can't coach. What is it now? Twenty-five straight games without a win? That's not acceptable at any level of sport, or even in any other profession. I throw fist bumps to the radio crew and head out into the same ugly sleet from my morning run. I wonder whether those guys in the red truck launched another assault on the border fence.

They'd peeled out of the Olympic Stadium parking lot immediately after returning to their truck. When they were out of view, I stepped from my car and slipped through the hole in the stadium fence, the excitement from their attempted breach enough to get me finally running. Three green-and-white Border Patrol Jeeps were parked on the opposite bank, right above the spot where I'd seen the men trying to hide. Farther down the canal, at an open fence gate, a patrol agent swept his eyes up and down the river, looking for more migrants, then looking at me suspiciously as I started to jog. I ran west, my normal route, though at a quicker pace than usual.
An attempted border crossing in broad daylight!
I'd presumed it would be easiest to cross at night, but maybe that's when the Border Patrol is most vigilant? Downtown El Paso seems particularly well policed. Why hadn't the men marched to somewhere more remote, like Marco's father had? I guess it's a risk/reward thing. If you cross right into downtown El Paso, you're immediately home free. How could anyone tell an illegal migrant in El Paso from everybody else? If that immigration bill passes, El Paso police are going to have to spend their time questioning just about everyone.

On the return leg of my run, when I came upon the point where I'd started (and where the men had attempted to cross), the Border Patrol trucks were still there. A fourth truck had joined the pack, a pickup with a tank of acetylene stacked in its bed. I could see an agent with a blowtorch and a welding mask repairing the fence. The other agents waved at me. Did they think I was about to make a break for it? I waved back. As I did, I noticed a lone vehicle on the Juárez side, slowly headed in my direction on the otherwise empty John Paul II Highway. The vehicle crawled closer and I realized it was the same red pickup truck. The three men were still inside. They looked over at the Border Patrol and at the fence, no doubt taking notes for their next attempt.

Chapter 11

Paco

“Where are you going?”

“To Albuquerque. Just for the day.”

“For the day? Back and forth, that's a ten-hour trip.” It's already two in the afternoon. I shrug my shoulders. The U.S. Customs agent takes my passport, issued in Miami, pausing to inspect stamps from multiple visits to Bogotá. She looks me up and down. I'm a single male traveling alone. I haven't shaved in a few days. When she asks where I live, I tell her Juárez. She raises her eyebrows. Yes, it's my permanent address.

“All I'm doing today is making a run. A friend and I are going to drop something off and then we're coming straight back.”

Her eyebrows arch higher.

“What's your friend's name?”

“Paco.”

She takes her time handing me back my passport, first typing a few notes into her computer and asking her colleague to hand-inspect my backpack. The American government is growing suspicious.

Paco—Francisco Ibarra's twenty-two-year-old son—greets me in the Free Bridge parking lot. I climb into the Jeep his father bought him and we exchange the customary fist bump. A twenty-seven-inch Apple Cinema Display rests in the backseat. That's our mysterious cargo, the package we're delivering to Albuquerque, home of the closest Apple Store. Paco turns up the volume on the Jeep stereo. His favorite band, the Mars Volta, screeches and whines as we pull onto I-10, the starting line of our till-midnight run.

Paco is an aspiring filmmaker. The broken computer monitor usually serves a Power Mac G5 on which he edits his works in progress. One feature film so far, a couple music videos, and a handful of short mood pieces: a good-looking girl takes off her clothes and swims in a pool. Or, in another film, another good-looking girl removes her shirt and smokes. Each of the shorter movies is four or five minutes of atmosphere, the kind of brief and focused meditation that reminds me of smoking a cigarette, which really is the entire plot of that second film: Topless girl lights up. These unhurried works stand in contrast to Paco the person. He's hyper, sometimes all over the map, the kind of guy who tweets and updates his Facebook status every three minutes: “It's off to the gym!” “I'm hungry for Subway!” “El Paso:
aburrida esta noche
!”

“I'm not the kind of person who can shut up,” he admits.

His one full-length movie is strange. The female half of a young couple is cursed with the ability to see the future, a gift that has informed her the world will end in a week. Total destruction, everybody's going to die. She and her boyfriend pass the week sulking through a road trip from El Paso to Ruidoso, a New Mexico ski town where border wealth likes to weekend. First there's some moody brooding in the backyard of the El Paso house where Paco, in the Mexican tradition, still lives with his parents, his sister, and his two younger brothers. Blood drips from the actress's mouth, somewhat biblically. There's the obligatory sex scene. (I knew her shirt was coming off at some point!) There's also a long and languid exchange in a church: stained glass and sunlight and lots of unspoken angst. It's heavy, knowing the world is about to end. She's thinking about killing herself ahead of time, so as not to witness the death of everyone she loves.

“It's not either your fault or mine,” her boyfriend counsels. “It's how God wants it.”

During the Indios' rise to the Primera, Paco served as team cinematographer. He shot videos of preseason training on the beaches of Cancún. He filmed the bus ride to that spooky and crucial playoff game in Cruz Azul's empty stadium. He has an idea for a new feature film about the team, a complex weaving of the stories of his father trying to bring soccer to the border, of a player like Marco Vidal trying to keep the Indios in the Primera, and of a fan who, in Paco's fictional world, tries to use his love of soccer to keep his brother from running with La Línea. When I met Paco for lunch a few weeks ago at Tacos El Campeón in Juárez, he was transitioning into self-funded commercial work. He's been thinking it might be cool to open a branch of the Ibarra family restaurant in El Paso. That's certainly the trend. El Taco Tote, Flautas Los Canarios, Aroma: The biggest names in Juárez dining have migrated north of the river, along with the families who run them. A new restaurant will need televised advertising, Paco figures, and that's what really gets him going.

“I've got all these ideas for commercials,” he told me as I sampled a simple beef taco garnished with guacamole and spritzed with lime juice. “I want good production values. I'm such a sellout, I know, but I can see a naked woman, just with a taco covering her nipple, barely covering it to where you can almost see it. Then the words ‘Want a bite?' I'm such a sellout! I know! But if they're excellent films, like three minutes long and way better than you'd expect for a taco stand, people will be watching them on YouTube. I also see a guy, a douche in a nice suit. We'll have a taco fly at his face, hitting him like a pie in the face of a clown. Then at the end we'll just have the words ‘
al Campeón
.' This great cinematic film, just for a taco. I can see it. I've got so many ideas.”

Paco is not all talk. He has an admirable track record of finishing his projects and accomplishing the goals he sets. Yet I don't expect Paco will ever open a restaurant. Zoning and staffing and construction permits aren't details he's wired to tackle. Stick to movies, kid. He seems to be flirting with the taco business simply because he needs something to do. He's stuck on the border. After graduating from an elite prep school in Juárez, Paco studied film for a couple years in Orlando. He returned to La Frontera upon graduation, intending to stay only briefly before flying off to start his career in Barcelona. But Spain wouldn't let him in.

It was because of the violence in Juárez. Paco was born in El Paso, the first in his family with automatic American citizenship. Though he was raised south of the river, when the killing escalated he became an unplanned anchor baby, the reason why his parents were granted residency in the United States. Paco claimed to miss his mother and father. He said he wanted them in El Paso, where, after Orlando, his parents had propped him up in a house on the upscale West Side. A good enough story for the State Department. But if Paco missed his parents so much, the Spanish government wondered, then why did he immediately apply for a visa to live in Barcelona? The Iberians told him to wait a few months, maybe even a couple years.

So Paco is marooned here for a while. That's not so bad, he admits. There's a decent film community in El Paso and a great film community in New Mexico. He's also found a serious girlfriend in Juárez, Karina Garcia, a chemist at a maquiladora. She and Paco are the kind of couple who overshare on Facebook about how much “I miss your smell” and “I love it when I wake up next to you” and “I love you, too, baby, mwaaaaah!” Unlike Mike, the El Kartel capo who can't return to Mexico for six months because of his residency application, Paco is free to cross into Juárez and back. Unfortunately, it's no longer safe for Paco to cross the river. His name has appeared on lists of potential kidnapping targets. On the rare occasions he does cross, like when I met him at Tacos El Campeón, he travels with a bodyguard in one of the family's two bulletproof SUVs, then he returns to El Paso as quickly as possible.

“Paco, he's like a woman,” says Lorenzo Garcia, Karina's younger brother. “We can't go to the movies with him like everyone else. We can't go to a bar. He's a target.”

Kidnapping ranks up there with extortion as an entrepreneurial growth industry, in Juárez and apparently all over Mexico. It's becoming so much a part of the culture that a kidnapping-related commercial airs before and after televised soccer games. The commercial advertises one of the national cell phone companies. A taxi driver in Chiapas witnesses an armed kidnapping. Using his cell phone, he alerts the municipal police and also his taxi-driving friends, who coordinate a blockade that traps the kidnappers. The commercial ends before I can watch the kidnappers gun down the taxi drivers and behead the victim, which is what would happen if anyone tried to pull that stunt in Juárez. Still, it's an amazing selling strategy. Kidnapping tops 4G and “more bars in more places” as a reason to subscribe to a particular cellular service.

Karina's father was kidnapped in Juárez not long after I moved to town, and only about a month after Paco started dating her. I met the father once, when I stopped by the family's house to watch a movie with Lorenzo. Señor Garcia didn't seem like a particularly pugnacious man, but Lorenzo tells me he's always been a fighter. He fought for his education and for his family and for his career. And when he was kidnapped, he successfully fought for his life.

He was abducted outside his fabrication shop, where he mills aluminum and steel fixtures for larger maquiladoras. Three men were waiting for him when he drove up in the morning, and they nabbed him as soon as he stepped out of his car. The men bound Señor Garcia's wrists and ankles with plastic zip ties, covered his eyes, threw him in a car, and brought him to a safehouse still within Juárez city limits, not far from the municipal jail and the Indios' training complex. The kidnappers dialed up the Garcia's home phone, where it fell to Lorenzo to do the negotiating.

“I had to grow up quick,” Lorenzo told me. “My sister is three years older than me. She was twenty-six, but she got real young. Like a girl, like a baby. She couldn't handle it. My mom couldn't handle it, either. I was all alone. I just felt all alone.”

The kidnappers asked for ridiculous amounts of money, far more than the Garcias are worth. Lorenzo called a lawyer friend for advice. The friend told him to go ahead and call the police. They couldn't think of anything else to do. “It's something you have to deal with in Juárez,” Lorenzo said. “You have to work around it.”

Back at the safe house, Señor Garcia had no intention of waiting for the police. Two of the three kidnappers had driven off, possibly to pick up food. Quietly, he wriggled out of the ties that bound his feet and hands, pulled off his blindfold, and tiptoed to the front door, where the remaining
ladrón,
a kid no older than eighteen, sat watch. Señor Garcia threw open the door. The kid was so startled he took off running. Karina's father chased after him for a while, out of anger. Eventually, he stopped and asked a woman in the neighborhood to let him use her phone to call home. Lorenzo, who'd expected the call to be from the kidnappers, cried with relief. Karina, snapping out of her stupor, pulled out her cell phone and called her boyfriend. Paco and his bodyguard drove to the neighborhood where Karina's father had said he was hiding. When they got there, Señor Garcia scurried out from behind some bushes and hopped into the SUV.

“And that,” Paco says, “is when I met my girlfriend's father for the first time.”

THE DRIVE TO Albuquerque doesn't take quite five hours. More like four. We get to the Apple Store right as a power outage shuts down the entire shopping center. Paco's able to leave his monitor at the store, but nobody can fix it until the power is restored, which won't be for a while; he'll have to come back another day to pick it up. We had talked the whole drive up about how we were going to eat dinner at a California Pizza Kitchen. I'm not a particular fan of that restaurant—
what, no Applebee's around here?
—but all our talking really fixed my appetite on a barbecue chicken pizza. Unfortunately, the power is out at the restaurant, too. I joke about this third-world country we've landed in. We don't know where in Albuquerque there's a restaurant untouched by the outage, and we've got a long drive back, so we just pick up some potato chips and sodas at a highway gas station and return to the road.

The drive out from Juárez was eerie. Blond vistas. Tumbleweeds. A town with the strange name of Truth or Consequences. The landscape oddly meshed with the operatic and arrhythmic guitar solos of the Mars Volta, a progressive rock supergroup I'm afraid to tell Paco I'd never heard of before I moved to the border. Our ride back is in the dark. There's nothing to see out the window except the headlights and taillights of other cars on the road. Paco and I fall in and out of easy conversations. He came back from Orlando to find Juárez had changed. He'd been noticing the changes, little by little, when he'd return from film school on short breaks. By the time he came back for good, a year ago, his city was unrecognizable … Legalization of drugs won't solve Mexico's problems, he doesn't think. It'll just force the cartels to ramp up their kidnappings and other nefarious moneymaking activities … He had this “Macedonian fuck buddy” in Orlando who was insatiable … He thinks the planet earth is trying to kill us humans off, to save itself. We just talk, about a lot of stuff.

I find Paco's life story pretty interesting, even if he's young. His grandfather is passionately Mexican, yet we're speaking English in the car, a language Paco says he learned from watching television; his parents don't speak it. He's a Mexican, yet he's also an American, more and more so. He's a young man in both cultures in the Fussion sense, but he's also an unwitting pioneer. The rich and connected of Juárez are all setting up shop in El Paso these days. Even Paco's high school, the most elite prep school in Mexico, is opening its first American branch in El Paso.

“I want to build crazy-ass jails,” Paco says, slipping back to our talk of drugs and cartels and crime. “Like awesome super-jails where we could lock people up for the rest of their lives. If their crimes are related to drugs, then they get a lifetime sentence. It would be like getting rid of them. I don't believe the system rehabilitates them. Not at all. I think that most of us are criminals if we are allowed to be. So if they did something once, they'll do it again. I say we have to deny them the chance.”