This Love Is Not for Cowards (19 page)

“Our young people, they don't watch what they're doing, so we send them to El Paso. But we're all going to stay. We have a mission here. When our mission is up, then we'll go up.”

She pointed not north, to Franklin Mountain, but straight up, to the sky. What is her mission?

“To love people. To help people.”

EACH WEEK, AS the Indios' demotion grows more certain, the Juárez press comes up with ever more creative ways to describe the worst team in the history of Mexico's Primera division. After the blowout loss to Estudiantes—the team from Guadalajara scored three minutes into the game—a cartoon in
PM
featured an owl (the Estudiantes mascot) pushing an Indian into a fiery pit of flaming skulls.

“You guys are horrible,” I tell Marco at the first practice after the team returns to Juárez. “Really, really bad.” He'd asked if I'd watched the game, which of course I had. I'd watched it at Applebee's, naturally, along with most of the Indios' front office. Adir from the press department was there, along with the office manager, some men and women from sales, and the youth coach hired to replace Pedro Picasso. Half of those employees have since been laid off. Budget cuts. It's leaked out that even the players haven't been paid in weeks, a rumor Marco confirms for me, sort of. “Weeks? It's been more than a month, dude.” Money is so tight the players were afraid there wouldn't be funds to fly back from Guadalajara, that they'd have to chip in and charter a bus.

It's Marco's turn to give the press-pool interview after practice. He tries to stick to soccer. He tells a handful of voice recorders the old line about how the Indios are not yet mathematically eliminated. He says they've got to play hard and fight this Sunday at home against a team from Querétaro. The reporters, suddenly all Roberto Woodwards, ask only about the budget crisis. Has he been paid or what? And if not, what does he think of an organization that's supposedly major league but can't make payroll?

Marco dodges the money questions in the interview, but walking back to the locker room with me, he allows that the problem is so bad the players are talking about striking. They've decided not to only because stories about “the financial disaster in Ciudad Juárez” would further stain reputations already discolored by their disastrous play on the field. He agrees with my assessment of their play. “Horrible” and “really, really bad” sound about right. It's kind of late for a turnaround. The Estudiantes loss pushed the Indios to the brink of a fiery pit. There is no more wiggle room. They must win every single game from here on in, all seven remaining matches on the schedule. No ties. All must be wins, starting with Sunday's game against Querétaro.

Game day is beautiful, a spectacularly nice afternoon for the team funeral we all expect to witness. I walk up to the stadium in shorts and a red Indios polo shirt, my exposed skin absorbing the delicious sun. A silver pickup rolls past, its driver and two passengers wearing Indios jerseys. The driver stops and motions for me to hop into the bed. Ken-tokey remains amazed that I hopped into his SUV back in the preseason, the first time I met him. “You didn't even know us!” he says. Yeah, but I could tell Ken-tokey was a decent guy, just as I can tell today's truck driver and his passengers are
simpático
. For as much danger as there is in this town, there's even more love. The free ride in the truck is the sort of random generosity extended to me every day in this warm and wonderful city.

“
Semillas!
Pistachios! Trident gum!” The vendors are out. The banners are up. El Kartel crowds into the south bleachers. Gil Cantú sits in the owner's box next to Francisco Ibarra, who has shaken off the insults from the Tigres game. (His son Paco, though, is conspicuously absent.) I switch things up and sit in the north bleachers, behind the Querétaro goal, with all six fans of the visiting Gallos Blancos, or White Roosters. Six fans. No more than that were willing to travel a thousand miles to weekend in the most dangerous city in the world. I'm spread out and sunning myself as I watch the Indios play surprisingly good soccer. The players from Querétaro are much taller, and their black-and-blue uniforms fit their physical style of play; one of their forwards shatters the eye socket of our Argentinean defenseman. Yet Los Indios are hanging tough. They're playing well, especially for unpaid amateurs. Christian makes a big save off a free kick and throws the ball to Marco, who calmly distributes it forward. No room to hit Edwin on the right side? No problem. Marco fires a long pass clear across the width of the field, to where Maleno stands in open space. Juárez's favorite son surges forward, the Indios on the attack.

“Far away are those days that Juarense Daniel ‘Maleno' Frías looked bold and sassy before trembling enemy defenses,” stated
El Diario
after the Tigres loss. “These days, Maleno is only a shadow of the player he was not even a year ago.”

Maleno, on the right side of the field, passes the ball to Edwin, who passes it on to a streaking Indios defender named Tomas Campos, who is open on the left side, wide of the goal. Tomas sprints forward with the ball, then lofts it toward midfield. His pass appears to be headed to Querétaro's goalie, but from my seat behind the net I notice Maleno slipping into the penalty box. Before the goalie can catch the ball, Maleno sticks out a cleat to redirect the ball into the goal. The shot is so amazing, the result so unexpected, that I scream out loud, my act suddenly blue: Holy fucking shit. We've scored! Maleno scored. We're winning! I don't have a beer, but I want to throw one in the air, just to do it. We have scored. The Indios have scored.

And the Indios hold on. Seventy minutes played, now eighty. Still 1–0. With only five minutes left, the nylon tunnels to the locker rooms start inflating. I relocate to the owner's box, arriving just as the final whistle blows. The players on the field hug in a pyramid of relief, Marco leaping on top as if summiting a small mountain. Gil shakes Francisco's hand. It's the first win either man has witnessed in more than a year. Their Indios remain alive, still in the Primera, not yet relegated. Positive thinking comes through in the clutch.

“We're playing with fire, brother!” Gil shouts to me as he makes his way down some stairs, heading toward the locker room. I follow him. Players give interviews in the tight and enclosed space between the lockers and the parking lot. “Pachuca, Chivas, Pumas. We have tough teams coming up, but we're not dazzled anymore,” Marco says into a bouquet of fuzzy television microphones. None of the reporters ask about the team's emerging financial crisis. No one cares, not right now. Marco showers and dresses quickly, stepping out to the parking lot to sign autographs on posters and jerseys and even, by request, onto the skin of one boy's back.

“We want Maleno!” shouts El Kartel. “We want Maleno!” The local hero, the man of the match, emerges from the locker room a prodigal son, the lost striker who has regained his sassy touch in front of trembling defenses. In the mass of Karteleros seeking Maleno's autograph I spy the grandmother arrested for exposing her breasts at the season opener in Monterrey. “Chicharrón!” I call out. She sees me and smiles. “Oh,
ganamos
!” she cheers. She hoists a can of Coors Light over her head. A cigarette smolders in her other hand. “We won! The whole world is in crisis, Robert, but today the Indios won and I'm just so happy!”

Chapter 14

Lost

Not ten minutes outside the city, Juárez disappears. Did it ever exist? Pale sand dunes dip and rise into gentle peaks, a mocha meringue. Squiggly ridges blown onto the sand are broken by the tracks of a lynx, or maybe a rabbit; I don't know my desert wildlife very well. The only animals I can confidently classify are a pack of
Homo sapiens
in pickup trucks zooming across the dunes as if the Chihuahuan Desert were a giant skateboard park. And also, closer to where I'm sinking into the sand, three more humans. One's a photographer. The others are a young woman in a black dress and, next to her, the well-groomed physique of a seriously metrosexual soccer player. Marco and Dany are posing for their official engagement photos, and I'm serving as a sort of general assistant. I'm holding Marco's flip-flops and Dany's stiletto heels and a bottle of Gatorade that Marco bought on the short ride out here, and which he prefers to drink because, in his words, “I hate water.” The photographer is trying to take as many pictures as he can before the sun sets behind the Juárez Mountains, which won't be long now.

“Okay, now Marco, you stand behind Daniela,” he says in Spanish. “Okay, good, hands on her arms, the upper arm. Right. Now Dany, you turn back to gaze into his eyes.
Con amor, por favor
.”

Without her heels, in her bare feet, Dany stands half a head shorter than Marco, kind of a perfect fit. They look good together. The other day at the Cielo Vista Mall in El Paso, shopping for this photo shoot, Dany tried on eight dresses, though she has ended up just pulling from her closet a simple and stretchy number as dark as her straight hair. (“I'm terrible with choices,” she explains.) Marco's wearing tight white linen pants and a V-neck T-shirt colored turquoise. No Ed Hardy logos embellish the shirt, to my surprise. Marco still manages to signify baller status with the appropriate accessories: two diamond studs in his ears, his bulky white Diesel watch, Armani sunglasses, and his hair fauxhawked and glistening with a thick application of styling gel. The photographer commands him to hold Dany's hand and march to the top of a dune immediately to the east, opposite the waning sun.

“Now Dany, drape your hand over his neck in a way that lets us see your engagement ring.”

Marco and Dany met at the gym. At Total Fitness in Las Misiones Mall, where all the Indios work out for free. Marco had just finished lifting some weights and had just ended a long relationship with his girl back in Dallas. He found Dany heading for the elliptical machines, not really going anywhere in particular. Her classes at UTEP are largely to please her parents, who want her to get a degree. She cooked food at Disney World for four months, which she jokes is the only job they let Mexicans do. She agreed to go out with Marco, the first date went well, and he put the clamps down after that, right away. No other boys ever again. We're together now and we're going to be together forever. She happily agreed to his terms. They legally wed in a courthouse in Dallas only a few months after that first meeting in the gym. Marco feels certain he has married up. Her family's established in Juárez. He can see himself transitioning into their maquiladora bus business when his playing days come to an end.

Ever since their wedding, Dany's been planning their wedding. Their official wedding, the church ceremony here in Juárez. She might not be good with choices, but she has a clear vision of how the day is going to unfold. Marco riding up to the chapel on a horse, if they can pull it off. Butterflies released during the ceremony. The reception at her family's house, the one her parents returned to after El Paso proved too boring. She's going to transform the backyard into a nightclub. White leather couches for lounging, small round tables for intimate talk, a row of larger tables—“ooh, with champagne-colored tablecloths”—for dinner and as a safe space for older relatives to sit witness. A live band, of course. But also mariachis. And one of those chocolate strawberry fountain things. Marco is paying for much of it, he tells me. During one discussion of flower arrangements, he made a show of objecting to the price of each bouquet, but it was clearly a show, and he clearly doesn't object. When I asked him how much he was willing to spend on the wedding, he said he didn't care, whatever it costs.

Both of them picked out the photographer. They stumbled onto his shop one afternoon, liked a picture he'd taken of a pregnant woman, and told the photographer to start thinking about sand and sunsets. Dany's vision included portraits on the dunes, even though she's never been out here before. The photographer hasn't been here, either. He's clearly excited by the creative possibilities of this shape-shifting landscape. As the sun sets, the dunes change colors almost instantaneously. One moment they glow with a yellow tint. Not ten seconds later the sand seems to burn a bright pink.

“Okay, Marco, it's time for the sunglasses to go,” he says. Marco hands me his Armani frames. “Okay, now guys, lean in for a kiss. Dany, kick up your heel. You know what I mean, right? That's it!”

Dany and Marco are compliant models. They relocate, on command, to a tuft of scrub brush. Marco positions himself behind his wife, both of them facing the light as if looking into their future. Sand stretches out as far as they can see. Those guys in their dune buggies take up only a small patch of a granular ocean, miles and miles of breathtaking dunes. Juárez isn't far away, yet the psychic pressures of the city have lifted. I have to prod myself to remember all that stuff about killing and murder and mayhem. I'm outside of the city. And when I'm out of Juárez, as always, Juárez seems to disappear.

“WHEN I'M NOT in Juárez it feels like a dream,” says Manuel Estebane. He's the pastor of a Baptist church located due south of Juárez's Central Park. I first saw his church a few months ago, when Felipe Calderón gave a speech in the park. The church is a big yellow shoebox. With its flat roof and right angles, it looks more like an industrial warehouse than a traditional house of worship. Curiosity—what's a Baptist church doing in Juárez?—compelled me to stop in and introduce myself. Turns out that Manuel's a recreational runner, like me. We've started meeting up now and again for early-morning jogs from the townhouse where he lives with his wife over to the new U.S. Consulate and back.

Manuel is fifty-three years old, a bit full in the face and soft in the midsection. He started jogging only when his doctor, “one of those running freaks,” told him to sweat his triglycerides down to a safer elevation. On the mornings we meet up, we start out just before sunrise and jog slowly along a circuit of sidewalks that ring his subdivision, which is located close to Las Misiones and the consulate in the emerging city center. I was shocked the first time we approached the consulate to see maybe three hundred people already lined up for visas. Bodyguards loitered in the parking garage of an adjacent hospital. Manuel is a Chihuahua native, born in that tiny apple town where the Indios keep their minor league team. He's worked in the United States for most of his pastoral career, primarily at a church outside Kansas City. He returned to Mexico three years ago because Juárez seemed like it could use some help, and he felt up to the task. Now he feels like he's in over his head. People have been kidnapped off the very sidewalks we run together, at the same
hour
when we run together. Extortionists have phoned in threats to kill Manuel if he doesn't tithe them a certain percentage of the church's income. Manuel insists he doesn't have any money to pay out, which I believe is true. I've attended a couple of his all-day-long Sunday services. His flock is passionate and committed, but small. If there are enough worshippers for the church to break even, then they're doing so by the slimmest of margins.

Manuel and I never run terribly fast. Sometimes we'll quit early and walk a few laps instead, labeling our laziness a therapeutic “cooldown.” We talk about how unsettling Juárez can feel. He tells me about how the hair rises on his neck when his wife announces she's going to dash over to the S-Mart for some groceries. Will she come back? Are extortionists tracking their cars? Juárez has him so frazzled that his home church in Missouri has ordered him to spend at least one week every three months away from the city. Just for his mental health.

“Did that ever happen?” he asks himself when he's out of town. “I can't believe I ever actually lived in Juárez.” I catch the past tense. He lives here
now
. He has a house, a car, a small congregation to attend to, and an occasional running partner. It's a tense slip I identify with. I often slip myself. When I leave the city I forget about it, too. Like, I can't believe I ever actually lived there.

“Juárez doesn't exist,” Paco Ibarra once told me. Now that he lives in Texas, and especially now that his trips into Juárez have become rare and surgical, he feels more than merely disconnected from his hometown. “When I see it from El Paso, it's a different reality, a different place. Now when I drive past it, it feels like it has a dark side.”

Juárez may be only a concept, or a rumor. It's an island unto itself. When I was in San Luis Potosí and Guadalajara with the Indios, the people I talked to regarded Juárez (and its problems) much the way El Paso does: as belonging to someone else. It's in Mexico, yes, technically, but it's not
really
in Mexico. The newspaper in San Luis overflowed with stories of mayoral reports and public works, tourism data and sports scores. The big news in Juárez at the time—the Student Massacre—was reduced to a little bullet item buried on the National page. News, but nothing someone in central Mexico need really worry about. In my Guadalajara hotel room, I was startled when Juárez flashed on the TV screen. Univision had sent a reporter to the border to film handguns shattering under the heavy steel roller of a street paver. The police are cracking down on illegal weapons, the reporter said. The “secretary of state for security” or something like that came on-screen to assure viewers that Juárez is under control, that all is well. No need for me or anyone in Guadalajara to engage. I flipped up to a higher channel and a Hollywood movie dubbed in Spanish.

“Juárez doesn't exist,” one of the Indios assistant coaches told me before he lost his job in the purge of Pepe Treviño. He was talking about the tribulations of coaching a losing team. The worst part, he said, is when your family reads the negative stories in the papers. I knew that this coach was from Mexico City and that his family had not moved to Juárez with him. Was he saying his wife gets online to read the Juárez papers?

“No, no, no, man. Those guys don't matter,” he replied, referring to the reporters at
El Diario
,
El Norte
, and
El Mexicano
. “I meant the Mexico City papers. In Juárez they could write that I've grown a third arm and nobody would ever read it. To the rest of the country, what goes on up here doesn't even happen.”

The sheer number of dead bodies makes it hard for anyone outside Juárez to really comprehend the violence. It's almost cartoonish, the amount of blood, like it can't possibly be real. Even the desert climate is a separating factor. In that story I watched while in Guadalajara, armed
federales
shivered in winter coats and face masks while, outside my hotel room, a soft wind rattled a stand of palm trees. It would be hard for anyone in Jalisco to feel connected to the border. How much worse is the separation in Cancún or Acapulco? That phrase President Calderón rolled out, “We Are All Juárez,” is a great slogan, I think, a necessary reminder that Juárez is Mexico, too. That Juárez isn't just the national ghost town, its haunted house.

When I'm in Juárez, I feel like myself. I'm living an essentially normal life, going about my business as I would if I were living anywhere else. And when I leave Juárez, I think of a popular American television show winding down to its final episode on the day Marco and Dany and I trek out to the dunes. On the show, survivors of an airplane crash are stranded on a tropical island. Will this ragtag collective make it back to the mainland? Can they learn to work together, to surmount cultural differences and stereotypes? These were the questions when the show first aired, when it seemed as if we were going to get a simple character study. The show soon proved much darker than that. The island has a personality, a life of its own. It moves around in the ocean, and disappears sometimes. It draws the characters back in. An actor might escape, only to be compelled to return to its shores. People get killed on the island all the time. Is it even real? The characters on the island, are they dreaming it all up?

I think of the show when I'm riding around El Paso at night. I might have just gone for Shiner Bocks at the UTEP bar Liquor Dicks. I'll have met up with Weecho and even Arson Loskush and we'll have stayed until last call and then the mandatory run for the bacon Whataburger with cheese Saul Luna demands as payback for his chauffeur service. We'll be in Saul's car, shooting east on I-10. Maybe it's a night when Orbita radio—Rock Sin Fronteras—matches the mood just right by pumping out a hypnotic bass line and Jim Morrison breaking on through. Or maybe it's a night when Orbita makes me smack my forehead by being the last station anywhere to spin “Beth” by Kiss. I'll look outside my passenger-seat window at yellow lights, so close, a dot paper grid rising and gently falling. It won't occur to me that I'm about to march over the Free Bridge, that I'm about to pass Border Patrol agents and then Mexican soldiers sipping coffee while bemoaning their assignment to the graveyard shift. I won't remember my new dog, and how he's waiting for me to give him a walk. Instead, the news of the day will be in my head. Eighteen killed, or perhaps as many as twenty-five killed. What a crazy fucking city. That's it, right, over there? That's Juárez?
I can't believe I ever lived there.
I've actually thought this, momentarily overlooking that I
still
live there, and that I'll be sleeping there that night.