This Love Is Not for Cowards (13 page)

This is a record. In a bad way. Not even thirty seconds have ticked off the clock. I turn to the television for a replay. The kickoff soared over to King Kong. Instead of clearing it forward, he headed it backwards and onto the feet of an Atlas striker. A quick pass, a quick shot, and a one-goal deficit for the Indios to climb out of. The television shows Edwin throwing up his hands in disgust. Gil and I are still digesting this disaster when Atlas scores again. Not much later, Atlas scores a third goal. Christian, the Indios' regular starting keeper, strained a hamstring in the game against San Luis. His backup got the start tonight. I've never seen worse play at any position at any level of the game.

“This goalie stinks,” Gil spits. “We've known it for four or five years, but Treviño likes him.” A more talented backup goalie quit the team last year, fleeing Juárez with his family after receiving an extortion attempt.

Reserve players who did not dress step into the skybox. They'd gotten lost, and they haven't seen any of the action on the field. The score shocks them. There's a momentary lift when Jair nets the first intentional Indios goal of the season, off a corner kick: 3–1. That's the way it stays for only nine minutes, until Atlas scores yet again, off a very stoppable shot. The home team somehow adds one more after that to make it an amazing 5–1 at halftime. God wants Atlas to win. This is far worse than the Monterrey beat-down. And there's still forty-five minutes left. Gil runs down to address the team in the locker room. I stay up in the box, smart enough not to step into that scene. I prepare for the postgame by flipping through my Spanish dictionary for the word “condolences.”
Condolencias
. Gil comes back, the second half starts, and Atlas scores again. I open a beer. Fuck it.

Will the Indios win? That narrative died at kickoff. Now the question is just how bad it's going to be. Can Juárez stop the bleeding? Can the Indios retain some dignity, perhaps net a few more shots to make the margin less embarrassing? The referee calls a foul on our number 3, Juan de la Barrera, a central defender and the Indios' team captain. The foul is harsh enough to merit the formal warning of a yellow card. The call also wins Atlas a penalty kick, a gimme they easily convert to make the score 7–1. The crowd starts chanting
“Ocho!”
I open another beer. The carnage stops only with the final whistle. It's the worst defeat in Indios history. It's the worst loss for any team in the Primera this season. Stretching back to last season, the Indios have now gone twenty-three straight games without a win. That's a record, too. Again in a bad way. The Indios are officially the most pathetic team in the history of the Mexican major league.

“The Indios have fallen within a foot of the second division,” declares one Guadalajara-based sportswriter as he waits for Atlas players to sit for interviews. Another writer suggests maybe the Indios should skip the second division and drop straight down to the third. The insults stop only when the Atlas players emerge from their locker room. They address the reporters, then drive off with their girlfriends or wives and in some cases also their small children. Marco and the visitors stay in their locker room for another hour and a half. I wait outside with the Indios' goalkeeper coach, who has reason to feel ashamed. We sit silently, listening to accusations from player to player, from player to coach, from coach back at player. The venom bleeds through the closed door, the message easy to translate: It's over. Not technically—the Indios remain statistically alive. But for all practical purposes, the locker room confrontation is a heated progression through all five stages of grief. The Indios needed two wins this road trip. They got none. Atlas's record is almost as sad as the Indios', yet Atlas just pasted Juárez by an embarrassingly high score. Seven goals! When the players and coaches finally emerge, nobody has anything left to say. Treviño still wears that black smudge on his forehead.

On the bus back to the hotel, there is no music. Just throat clearing, heavy sighs, and the bump of tires on an unforgiving road. The only thing to look forward to is a return flight to the most dangerous city in the world.

Chapter 8

The Devil

There's a woman in juárez who has turned her house into an Indios shrine. She started outside, painting the team logo across her front facade. The image stretches from one side of the house to the other, INDIOS and the soccer ball with the red bandanna covering the wall and the front door and climbing up onto the roof. Her tribute continues inside. Posters and newspaper clippings and team scarves blanket the interior. Every itineration of the team jersey is on display. There's the uniform from back when the team's main sponsor was a cement company. There are last year's Joma-branded uniforms and also this year's jerseys, which look similar but are sewn by the Italian sportswear company Kappa. She reads
Vamos Indios
, the monthly Indios fan magazine, while sitting in a custom-made Indios reclining chair. She sleeps under an Indios bedspread colored red, white, and black. Her head rests on pillows shaped like soccer balls. Logo carpets pad her tile floor, and red Indios curtains drape her windows.

Players visit the house to pay their respects. The woman asks each player to sign one of her interior walls with a black permanent marker, leaving space for a friend of hers to airbrush in the player's portrait. Edwin, Marco, former star striker Sebastián Maz—they're all up on her wall. Maleno Frías is up there, of course. Francisco Ibarra's up there, too.

“I just love this city and this team,” the woman says. “I can't really explain it.”

I've begun assembling my own shrine inside my new apartment. I moved into a better unit in my complex. It's on the second and top floor. From the front door I can now see El Paso's Franklin Mountain. A small porch in the back overlooks a cement courtyard. Air whooshes through my living room and kitchen when I open the windows. Sun flows through those windows all day long, immediately curing my seasonal affective disorder. At no time does the apartment smell like sewage. I'm papering one wall of my new place with all the team paraphernalia I've collected so far. My press passes from the away games against San Luis and Atlas. Gil Cantú's red business card. The Kappa tag from a jersey I bought, and the jersey itself, which I also tacked up on the wall. There's a photo of Marco hoisting the trophy in León after the Indios won their way into the Primera. That snapshot cozies up to the cover of a game program from the last home match against Morelia. I've got the season schedule taped up, too. I planned to highlight every win with a yellow marker. Six games have been played so far, one-third of the season. I haven't used the marker yet.

Some of the blank spots on my Indios wall have been filled in with pictures clipped out of newspaper sports sections. Mostly fan shots of El Kartel. There's Juvie from Las Cruces, who got arrested in Monterrey. And capos Mike and Don Roberto showing off their Indios tattoos. The biggest clip on the wall is of a guy in El Kartel named Arson Loskush. There's no special reason his photo takes up so much space. The newspaper happened to have printed the photo large, most likely because it's a pretty sweet shot. Arson's at a game, crying out in support. His round scalp is shaved smooth. He looks a little menacing, to be honest. Like it's a good thing he's rooting for our guys and not for the other team.

Arson Loskush isn't his real name. Loskush is slang, a form of “Fuck you” in border Spanish. His self-selected first name is English, and it means what you think it does. He's twenty-seven years old. He fathered his first child when he was seventeen. He lives with his mother, who dotes on him, and he works intermittently at his stepfather's factory in El Paso. He's a big Indios fan. Really big. The team occupies the very center of Arson's life. Yet he didn't ride the bus with us to the season opener in Monterrey. He hasn't attended any Indios home games since the season started in January. I've only met him once in person, and then only briefly. His absence is excused by the rest of El Kartel. They know the guy's been through a lot.

THE INDIOS RESUME practice at the Yvasa complex. Head coach Pepe Treviño finds himself on a death watch; he may be fired at any moment. Mexican authorities arrest a drug lord nicknamed “La Barbie.” They make a big show of it, parading him before television cameras in his Ralph Lauren polo shirt. La Barbie is a young guy, light-skinned, an American born in Laredo who rose to the top of Mexico's Beltrán-Leyva Cartel. He doesn't look too upset about his arrest, at least not on television. He smiles throughout his perp walk, as if he's in on some joke. In interviews, he claims to know who shot Club América's star striker six days before the game against the Indios. When asked, he helpfully breaks down the current cartel alliances. The Zetas, a collective of rogue soldiers who work the Gulf of Mexico, are “unspeakably sadistic.” The trouble between the Sinaloa Cartel and the cartel in Juárez started, La Barbie claims, when an agreement allowing the Sinaloans to work the border was broken by a man named Juan Pablo Ledesma. I know about this guy, Ledesma. He's one of La Línea's top men. People in Juárez call him J. L., pronounced, in Spanish, “
ho-ta el-lay
.” He's also known as Dos Letres. Another of his nicknames: the Beast.

Away from the border, La Línea is usually described as the Juárez Cartel's enforcement arm. That is indeed how La Línea started out: as disgruntled policemen recruited to help the cartel crush its enemies. Yet that's no longer how things stand. Now people in Juárez refer to the cartel itself as La Línea, because the enforcement arm has overtaken the operation. When cartel kingpin Amando Carrillo died during plastic surgery in 1997, control fell to his brother, Vicente, a guy so hands-off, or maybe simply so ineffectual, there is speculation he might have retired. La Línea stepped into the leadership void. The names Pedro Sánchez and Chalo González are bandied about in print, but I don't know who these guys are. J. L. is the name I recognize. He's usually described as La Línea's number two, I guess after Vicente. He's a strategist, the leader ordering assassinations and drafting the narcomanta warnings dropped around town to scare the visiting Sinaloans. When he kills someone himself, he always fires one .38-caliber bullet in the head, his signature move. The
New York Times
calls J. L. La Línea's “point man in Juárez,” “the local crime boss,” and a man trying “to establish himself as a gangster in the U.S. tradition, controlling extortion rackets, prostitution, gambling as well as cocaine traffic.” J. L. is omnipresent in the city, even if I haven't yet knowingly seen him.

“He's this big guy, super fat. Super fucking fat,” says Saul Luna, one of my better friends in El Kartel. Saul is twenty-five. He played soccer at a small college in New Mexico but dropped out to be closer to his mother, who has breast cancer. He's asked me to wear a pink wristband in her honor, which I've paired with a red-and-black nylon bracelet from El Kartel. Saul has reenrolled in college at New Mexico State, in nearby Las Cruces, where he's majoring in bilingual education. He works nights at a Lowe's. He's growing out his hair so he can donate it to Locks of Love. Saul knows what J. L. looks like because there was a time when the local crime boss partied with El Kartel.

“Arson's brother Charlie is the one who brought him in,” Saul tells me. “When we first won the championship over there in León, we came back and started throwing these parties at a bar owned by a friend of ours. Every Friday El Kartel would have our meetings there. Someone would speak for like thirty minutes on what we're going to do for the next season, blah blah blah, and after the meetings we'd just party. This one night we were all there when Charlie shows up. He had a friend with him, Charlie did. I'm like, ‘Man, this guy is, like, fat. Like daredevil-fat-guy fat.' And he's sweating. And he's dressed as a cowboy. He's got the boots, got the belt. He's bald. And he's sweating like a motherfucker. I saw him and my first impression was ‘Wow, this guy's really fat,' you know? I didn't think anything else.

“ ‘You guys want a beer?' he asked. Sure, dude. Get us a beer. We drank, like, half our beers with him, then he and Charlie kind of went away. Later on that night, driving back to El Paso, Arson asked, ‘What do you think of that guy?' I said, ‘Whatever. I didn't even catch his name.' Arson tells me.

“ ‘
J. L.?!
Are you fucking serious? We could have been targets!' ”

I often hang with Saul when I cross into El Paso, which I've started to do now that I've got my car. We'll lunch at Chico's Tacos or we'll go to his sister's apartment to play FIFA on an Xbox. I'll be Barcelona, the best team in the world. Saul will play as Indios, the worst team in the international soccer hinterland of Mexico. He'll always win. One time when he defeated me, the computer skipped over Lionel Messi to name Marco Vidal the player of the match, which was surreal. I'd heard that Charlie, Arson's brother, ran with La Línea. And that he was murdered last September. I ask Saul to tell me the story.

“It was Arson who was into the Indios first. We all went to El Paso High—the Lady on the Hill—and we used to party in Juárez all the time. Charlie started showing up just because he wanted to hang out with Arson. Charlie had been living in Juárez for like two years, because he'd been deported. He'd been arrested in El Paso for breaking and entering. He couldn't cross anymore, yet he was still really close to his brother. One day Arson told him he was going to be going to an Indios game, so Charlie asked if Arson could maybe get him a ticket. At first the stadium was more of a place where they could see each other, but after a while Charlie just fell in love with the Indios, like everybody else.

“Charlie was involved with the wrong people. After he got deported, his way of making money was selling. He was so involved in selling drugs that he got to work with J. L., who was the main leader of La Línea. They were pretty much in Juárez on their own, La Línea was. There was no Juárez Cartel. There was no Cártel de Sinaloa or Cártel del Pacifico. These guys were kind of like
the
guys who decided who could sell and who did what. Charlie was working with J. L. for La Línea probably for like six months. He stopped working with him maybe nine months before he got shot.

“He saw a murder, is what happened. Two guys from where he worked took two other guys out. They were shot at an OXXO, one of those convenience stores, and Charlie saw the whole thing. He told Arson what he had seen and said he had to get out. He changed. He got a job. It was at some warehouse in Juárez. He still couldn't cross, so he had to stay in Juárez. Charlie realized he had gotten in too deep. He was showing up at games so drugged out. So he just stopped. He quit all that stuff, said ‘Enough is enough.' He tried to break from La Línea. He wanted a normal life.

“It's not that easy to get out. The guy who lived in front of Charlie, Fernando, was a really big pusher. He would show up at Charlie's house to party. It was a constant party. They were doing drugs and shit, partying for three days and shit like that. Once Charlie decided to get out, he tried to avoid Fernando. Charlie would pretend to not be home. He tried to stay friends with everybody, but he was pushing the bad people away.

“One day Fernando says to Charlie, ‘Go with me to distribute this, and then we're going to pick up some money.' Charlie had to go with him on some occasions. Fernando was a tough guy. If you would look at him bad, or if he got the impression you didn't want to talk to him, he'd tell you straight out. He was just kind of a maniac. Even Arson was scared of him. Fernando beat Arson's ass a couple times to set him straight. To be pretty powerful, you have to do pretty bad stuff. Once you start growing, you're a target, you're a threat to everybody else now.

“The day he got killed, Charlie was at this club called Coco Bongo. He and a friend were drinking some beers and apparently these four men walked in and they asked, by name, for two guys: Charlie and this other guy.

“ ‘What the fuck do you want?' Charlie asked. ‘Who the fuck do you think you are?'

“One of the four men says, ‘Hey man, we were just asking,' and then they walked out. Charlie and his friend kept on drinking. Ten or fifteen minutes later the four men came back in. They didn't say a word, they just shot 'em. That's it. The other guy died, too. I don't know who he was. I'm guessing he was one of Charlie's friends who was involved in the whole drug scene. That had to be, or why else would he be a target?

“They had a funeral service even though Arson and his family are not Catholic. They're Christian. They cremated Charlie and they brought the ashes to El Paso. He finally got to cross back. They did a little service that we went to. I went over to Arson and we hugged and we both just broke down.

“J. L. got to be
the guy
by doing bad stuff. He made it known that if you come at him he'll kill you. Yet Chapo came in and was killing all of J. L.'s people. That's the main thing that this whole drug war is: Chapo started wanting J. L.'s territory. They're going toe to toe. But Chapo has too many people on his side. Chapo's gaining control. Pretty much everybody in La Línea is getting killed. J. L. is recruiting kids now, because he doesn't want to give up the power yet. But it's true, like, that Chapo has this territory now. It's basic greed with El Chapo. If you're capable of grabbing more territory, you do it. All mankind works that way.
Lord of the Flies
is how I see it.

“Two weeks after we first saw J. L., he came by again. Everyone in El Kartel was at this club in the Pronaf District, those bars off Lincoln Avenue. The club is not open anymore; somebody torched it. But back then you would walk in and it looked like a black-and-white theme party. After you got past this little entry foyer, you were in a huge room with black couches and white banners. There was a bar to the left, and to the right was a DJ booth. There was another room in the back where they had pool tables. It used to be a gay bar at first. Then it went with the black-and-white theme. It looked upscale. J. L. just showed up that night, again with Charlie.