This Love Is Not for Cowards (29 page)

Paco shows me a video on his iPhone. One of the TV stations got there before even the first blast. A camera broadcast back to the station what appeared to be a routine crime scene, nothing special, not even a dead body. Just a police officer shot and lying in the street. A paramedic attended to the wounded officer. Technicians unrolled yellow caution tape. And then the first blast—the first one to rock the sports bar—blows everything orange, including the camera, which stops transmitting. The jolt is severe, even on a four-inch screen. We can feel it. We both jump a little even the third time Paco replays it.

We catch up on the details. It was the first cartel car bomb in Mexican history. Twenty-two pounds of C-4, all packed into that old car I saw, the bomb activated via cell phone by someone who must have been in the line of sight. La Línea orchestrated everything, perhaps J. L. personally, in retaliation for the earlier arrest of cartel leader El 35. (The initial report from my photographer friend was a bit off.) First they kidnapped a man and dressed him in a police officer's uniform, wounded him, and dumped him in the street, knowing an officer down would draw attention. An ambulance arrived first. A doctor who'd happened to be only a block away rushed over to help. The first explosion killed the decoy, the paramedic, the volunteer doctor, and a
federale
. That initial and lethal blast attracted every remaining officer in the city, the parade of trucks zooming past as I continued to watch the game.
As I continued to watch the game!
The second explosion, it is presumed, was an igniting gas tank.

It sinks in, the horror of it. The doctor, the paramedic, the original victim they'd dumped in the street. I was really close, too. Not so close that I could have been killed. But it went down just a couple blocks away, on the same main street. World-class terror, and I was right there. And I didn't even realize it, really. I brushed it off like it was an everyday happening, routine anarchy. In my car, as I cross back into Mexico after lunch, I ponder how detached I've become. When I get home, I feed Benito and change into nylon running shorts. I pull on my racing flats and head up to the San Lorenzo Cathedral. By the time I get there, to the starting line of a 10K road race, I've moved on. The two-phased narcoterrorist car bomb is pretty much out of my system.

SAN LORENZO IS the Indios' church, the cathedral where fans lit candles for the team before the big game against León, and where the Indios threw the victory party after the win. Exactly 104 runners join me in a small plaza outside the church. It's the entirety of Juárez's running scene, most everyone familiar to everyone else. They try to hold twelve races in Juárez a year, including a marathon in November. I hand over my entrance fee of twenty pesos, which is less than two dollars. My name is recorded in pencil in a small notebook and I'm handed back a cheap digital wristwatch so I can track my time. An air horn sounds and we start running.

We move in a pack for safety, navigating major roads still live with traffic. A motorcycle cop usually—though not always—stops cars on cross-streets. We run right up to the border, turning at the university, where a family has hung a banner seeking information about their missing daughter, who must have been a student. Volunteers hand out baggies of drinking water at Olympic Stadium, where that
federale
's severed head was found the other day. We run right past City Hall and the still-dented light post where the two Americans from the consulate crashed their car and then were murdered. From there we duck under the Santa Fe Bridge, proceeding to the Puente Negro, the railroad bridge where the U.S. Border Patrol shot that kid dead. Finally we turn into a residential neighborhood and the race's last leg. For a short while we run on Avenida 16 de Septiembre. The same street from last night, the same avenue as the bombing. A woman with a garden hose sprays water to cool us off, and we climb a hill and in a hundred more yards we cross the finish line. I give my name to the race director, who records it in his notebook. He hands me a T-shirt printed with a silhouette of two runners in stride and, below them, an image of the Virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus.

We've ended up at another church, joining a festival in full swing. Vendors sell corn slathered in mayonnaise and chili pepper, that no-thank-you snack I first saw for sale down in San Luis Potosí. Shaved ice makes a cooler alternative, and I'm tempted. Church workers serve up burritos, frittatas, and taco platters. Rickety amusement rides clatter and clank in a parking lot. It's a good crowd, a lot of people out and about. A man weaving thread into bracelets crafts me one in red, with the white letters CD. JUÁREZ. I decline to buy one of his other options: green and red thread embroidered with the word SINALOA and an image of two pistols. I bump into the head groundskeeper from Olympic Stadium, and we're both a little discombobulated; we've never seen each other away from the field. He gives me a hug even though I'm all sweaty. This is his neighborhood, he says. He goes to this church.

I haven't been up here before, at this church or on this hill. Below us unfolds the whole valley, both sides. I take in Franklin Mountain and the Wells Fargos and Chase banks of El Paso. There's the river and, closer, in Mexico, El Centro. I can see the Rio Grande Mall, where my
parquero
friend Mario is still watching cars at this hour. Two blocks south of the mall, green banners continue to cloak Teto Murguía's campaign headquarters. I can make out the pastel paint of my apartment complex, which sits an unfortunate ten kilometers due east. (That's the rub when a road race heads in only one direction.) The light of the setting sun gives everything a warm tint. All of it looks pretty, even Juárez. A band plays on a stage set up in front of a pink cross and a banner with the single word PAZ, or
peace
. All in all, not a bad afternoon. I got in a workout, earned a cool T-shirt, bumped into a friend, bought a new bracelet, and toured a neighborhood I'd never visited before. So I can't say the race itself was the last straw.

THE LAST STRAW drops a few days later, and the race is part of it. The car bombs exploded on a Thursday. The race and the church festival took place on Friday. The following Tuesday evening, I'm in my apartment doing nothing much, just watching a telenovela, when my Mexican cell phone rings. It's Manuel, the pastor. He's very emotional, almost crying. He's just driven up to the bomb site. He had to do it, he tells me. He had to go there. He needed to see the black scars in the asphalt and the jagged glass of storefront windows shattered in the double blasts.

“Everybody's acting like nothing happened!” he shouts. It's five full days after the bombing, an eternity. I ate at McDonald's only one day after the consulate murders. I went running along the river just one day after they dumped
federale
body parts up and down my normal route. When they finally cleaned up the two dead bodies off my street last week and I could drive in my car again, I raced to the Laundromat worried only that I had but a half hour before closing time to wash all my clothes. Five days is five lifetimes in this city, yet Manuel is dismayed to see everything already back to normal. They've cleaned up the bomb site. Traffic flows again. Manuel had to wait for breaks between cars before he could dart into the road in search of fragments of glass or charcoal scorch marks from the blast or red streaks of blood from the murdered first responders or something. “Something!” he tells me, still shouting.

I'm not sure why Manuel gets through to me. Why I don't just tell him to get over it and move on like the rest of us. So much of what I've seen has dribbled off my psyche. I'm Teflon by now. I'm tough. Manuel's a grown man, a native who'd left for a while but returned, Chihuahuaense. He's the father of two adult children, a pastor with a church he's trying his best to keep alive. A man who once told me it was a dream that brought him back to Juárez, a dream of doing good, of bringing God to the city. He may have broken through because a man of his age and stature, at least around here, isn't supposed to be affected, to show weakness or fear. He tells me it's not even that the car bombs went off, as unspeakably horrible as they were. It's that we
are not speaking about them!
We're acting as if it was no big deal. As if
nothing happened!

“I started to doubt it myself!” Manuel cries. “I look on the TV and there's no stories about it. I look in the papers and they're writing about something else already. That's why I went up there. I had to see the scene. Did it really happen? And it did, Robert. It really happened!”

He gets through to me. His words—his plea for me to wake up, for all of us to wake up—pierce my calcified skull. Everything hits me. Months and months. They murdered Pedro Picasso. They dropped two bodies in the drive-through lane of a convenience store and the store stayed open for business. They murdered that crusading mother, and while we admire her, we remember above all to
stay on the line
. They murdered Maleno's brother only a few months ago, and he acts as if it happened twenty years in the past—like, whatever, gotta keep moving forward. They shot up a house full of high school students. They kidnapped, tortured, and murdered a groom on his wedding day. I was this fucking close to a car bombing, right down the same fucking street where I was drinking a beer and watching soccer and finishing off a plate of chicken wings. Chicken wings! And I ran a road race on the same street not twenty-four hours later, after they murdered four people! That's what I ignored during my nice afternoon outside, my solid workout. They murdered a doctor who'd rushed to the scene because he felt he could do some good. They killed him. They fucking killed him. J. L. killed the goddamn doctor and the ambulance driver and whoever it was La Línea dressed in a policeman's uniform in the first place when they set the whole murderous mousetrap. And I ran a 10K on that same street the very next day. A 10K! A road race! How ridiculous is that?! It all hits me, and it hurts me, and I'm feeling pain, and the pain is telling me that I'm not yet dead. That somewhere inside me I'm conscious and human and still sane. And by the time Manuel and I end our conversation, I'm feeling my own tears. And when I click off the phone they just come, the tears. I start to cry. I open up and I cry and I cry and I cry. And my face is so twisted and ugly even my dog is wondering what's wrong with me, what the fuck is going on, and Benito licks the tears that fall onto my arms, and I know I've got to get out. I can't stay here. I've got to go.

Chapter 23

Exodus: Part 2

Ken-tokey throws me a fist bump. “Hey man, good to see you again.” I spy Sofia and Juvie from Las Cruces, along with Chuy and Sugar and the grandmother forever to be known as Chicharrón. Big Weecho's in San Diego attending a Tool concert, but Sugar's sister, the nurse who doesn't drink or take drugs, is here, and she kisses me on the cheek. Tonight's tailgate feels like a class reunion, or perhaps more like the first day back at school after a long summer break. I buy the El Kartel shirt-of-the-week. The
barra brava
's arts-and-crafts subcommittee hands out long, thin red balloons for everyone to carry inside. The white flag flying over Olympic Stadium signals that once again it's game day—actually game night—on La Frontera.

Federales
patrol the parking lot, which is a new development. They search every truck and car, hunting for bombs. (Though I don't know what they'd do if they found one, other than die on the spot.) They pat us down as we file into a stadium that's not even half as full as the last game I saw here, the Primera swan song against Pumas. The federal police don't make us safer. Just the opposite, actually.
Federales
are bomb magnets. They're the ones La Línea wants to blow up. But even though we've been taught there are no neutral zones in Juárez, no safe spaces removed from the war, we're not worried as we watch the now-minor-league players take the field against some team I've never heard of. There's very little chance La Línea will try something at an Indios game. We know J. L. is a fan.

Maleno starts at striker, his hamstring injury healed. Gabino, still the head coach, wears his same black suit from Marco's wedding. On the chest of the Indios' jerseys, the S-Mart logo has been replaced by the logo of the team's new sponsor: Peter Piper Pizza. Free advertising—a straight trade, I'm told, for Francisco's free house in El Paso. Beer flies through the air when Juárez scores the first goal. El Kartel cries “
Puto!
”—Asshole!—whenever the visiting goalie punts the ball into play. A Border Patrol helicopter buzzes the stadium, and shadows stretch across the grass until the sun—the desert sun, the summer sun—finally falls behind the Juárez Mountains. When the referee blows his whistle to signal halftime, the temperature remains 103 degrees Fahrenheit.

Stadium floodlights flicker on. I check in with Adir in the press box. He's in charge of media relations now, a staff of one, handling everything. He offers me a potato chip drizzled in Valentina hot sauce. I inquire about his wife, pregnant with what will be their first child, a girl.
You have to believe in the future to have a baby, right?
When the Mexican national team plays the United States, Adir promises me, his daughter will root for the men in green. But she'll be born in El Paso, a U.S. citizen at birth, just in case. The game restarts and the Indios score again, taking a 2–0 lead.

“This is the best Indios team we've ever assembled,” declares Gil Cantú, shaking my hand when I find him in his usual seat. He tells me he was up late last night talking to a prospect in Spain, a midfielder unaware of how violent Juárez has grown, of the club's money troubles or of the press conference where Francisco Ibarra said extortionists are terrorizing his players. Although Gil wishes he still had Marco to anchor the midfield, he's proud his reclamation project has moved up to such a good club. I tell Gil it's a little sad to see the Indios down in the minors. He nods his head in agreement.

“But what a beautiful run, brother. What a beautiful run.”

I don't see Francisco in his regular seat. He's here, I've been told, but it takes me a while to finally spot him up in the stadium's one luxury box, walled behind glass and all alone. He waves for me to come up and join him. As soon as I step inside the box, a cool blast of air-conditioning washes over my skin, making me understand why Francisco has sequestered himself. At the same moment, just as I step into the box, the Indios score again, taking an incredible 3–0 lead.

“Gracias a Dios!”
Francisco cheers, pointing his fingers at the heavens.
“Gracias a Dios!”
he slaps his palms against the glass. He spins in a circle and then points his hands toward the sky one more time. “Please excuse my passion,” he asks me before returning his attention to the good news unfolding on the field. His team is rewarding his faith. He can see how it's all going to play out. The Indios will return to the Primera, and quickly, within the year. The team's redemptive journey, from disgrace back to glory, will inspire his hometown. The violence will fade away. He'll be able to sleep in his mansion on this side of the river. Juárez will thrive once again, evolving into a new Monterrey or Guadalajara or Las Vegas only Mexican, so better. God wants his Indios to win, Francisco believes, mistakenly.

The team will play solid ball in the first of the two annual seasons. Good enough soccer to reach the playoffs but not quite good enough to win a title. In the second short season, they'll fall back big-time. They won't make the playoffs. They'll look like candidates to drop down yet another rung, to division three. The air will deflate from Francisco's big dream as if it were a soccer ball ruptured by a bullet. He'll sell the club, something he has been saying he'd never do. His health is suffering, he'll announce at a press conference hosted at an Applebee's restaurant. And he's tired of the constant criticism. He'll move more and more of his life over to El Paso. At the World Cup, his second son, Paco's younger brother, rooted for the United States.

The Indios' new owners will appear to be the state of Chihuahua, though that's not entirely clear. “It's an absolute mystery,” the reporter from
El Diario
will write. The team's new executive committee—Gil Cantú and Gabino will lose their jobs in the transition—will say only that, in addition to receiving substantial state funding, the team is owned by “entrepreneurs,” none of whom they care to identify. One of the first things this new and mysterious ownership group will do is entice the league's most talented striker, the scoring champ from the previous season, to transfer to the border.

If we were laundering money, we'd have the best players in the league.

You have to remember that Chihuahua is a narco state. The government and the cartels are one in this city. The drug dealers give the money to the government, and the government gives the money back to the people.

If the secretive new Indios owners return to the Primera, they will join the top league's newest team, the Xolos of Tijuana. That club's owner, a gambling magnate named Jorge Hank Rhon, served as Tijuana's mayor at the same time Teto first ruled Juárez; they share a political party. In 1995, Hank was arrested at the airport in Mexico City and charged with smuggling. In 1988, two of his bodyguards were convicted of murdering a newspaper columnist who had criticized Hank in print. According to the Associated Press, a “1999 report by the U.S. National Drug Intelligence Center singled Hank Rhon out as an associate of drug smugglers.” It was Hank's father, also a prominent public official, who first said the famous line “A politician who is poor is a poor politician.” One month after the Xolos joined the Primera, Hank was arrested in a predawn raid of his Tijuana mansion. Army soldiers found a large cache of illegal weapons, including forty rifles, forty-eight handguns, 9,298 bullet cartridges, seventy ammunition clips, and a gas grenade. Two of the guns were linked to earlier murders. Hank spent ten days in jail before all charges were dropped, for lack of evidence.

Before the car bombing, Marco and Dany rented out their Juárez dream house. After the bombing, they sold all the furniture inside it. They're not coming back. A
rutera
driver working for Dany's family will be murdered. “He was a very good man. A very extraordinary worker for us,” Dany's mother will tell me. “And he was innocent. I don't know why they killed him.”

It won't take long for Marco to crack Pachuca's starting lineup. In a profile posted on an American soccer site, Herculez Gomez will rave that Marco “brings a calmness to the game.” But then Pachuca will switch head coaches and Marco, as always, will land back on the bench. Although he will fly to Dubai for the Club World Cup, he will not play in any games. He'll ultimately end up in León, of all cities, of all teams, starting every game for the Esmeraldas and trying to play his way back into the big time.

Mayor Teto will return the bullfights to La Frontera. He will also change the official name of his town to Heroic Ciudad Juárez. I will be told J. L. is dead. Definitely dead. Gunned down in Chihuahua city. Those who tell me this will admit that no super-fucking-fat dead body has yet turned up. Other people will tell me J. L. is still alive. Most people will tell me he's dead. I'll decide he's dead. Once a week, as if visiting the Stations of the Cross, Arson's mother will continue walking to the police station in Juárez to ask if they've made any progress in their investigation of Charlie's murder.

And I will leave. Before my original visit to the border, the plan had been—hopefully, if it could be done—to make Juárez my permanent home. Juárez is energizing. To live in a city where you can be killed at any moment, as Ramón Morales first put it, is to answer, every day, a fundamental question: How badly do you want to remain alive? Just answering that question, just saying that you want to live—very much so, please—is a kind of gift. It's natural to take life for granted sometimes. It's impossible to do it in Juárez. When I'm on La Frontera, I'm conscious that I'm alive, and that I want to stay that way.

The city's inspiring, too. At least the people are. The ultimate purpose of government, I've been taught, is to protect us from ourselves. In a state of nature, man is inherently wicked, all selfish id, out to kill and fuck and terrorize. Juárez challenges this lesson. The city is a failed state, obviously. The most wicked of all crimes, murder, is legal.
Go ahead! Have at it!
Yet almost nobody in this town is a murderer. So many people—almost everybody here—pursue remarkably normal lives. They go to work. They marry, they raise their kids, they follow soccer teams. It's not lightly that I drop the name Anne Frank, but when I think about this city, she keeps popping into my mind. Juárez has made me believe that, deep down, people are fundamentally good. Juárez is where my neighbor tells me her mission in life is to help others and to love.

And the food here is the best. I wanted to stay. But Manuel made it obvious the endgame could not be avoided. Over the phone, he shook my shoulders and slapped my face and pinched my skin to prove I'd gone numb. And when you go numb in Juárez, that's when you have a problem.

It won't seem wise to start over somewhere else in Mexico, much as I've grown to love this country. Eight are killed at a bar in Cancún. Ships from Princess Cruises stop docking in Puerto Vallarta. My initially rosy take on Monterrey is proving way wrong, very naive. “Monterrey is becoming the new Ciudad Juárez,” reports the Associated Press. Extortions are up, as are carjackings. Fifty-two people are killed in a casino firebombing. Cartel assassinations fuel a murder rate that, while not yet on par with Juárez, is climbing rocket-ship fast. President Calderón sends in the
federales
, and we know how effective that'll be.

“The day-to-day reality is a violence that is out of control,” the AP concludes. Drug killings scar Guadalajara as well. Even in Pachuca, Marco and Dany's home for a season, someone tosses seven dead bodies down a well.

Juárez is the start of what will end up being a second Mexican revolution.

I'll again pack up my car with everything I own, adding a small Mexican dog to the pile. My landlady will say she's coming over to retrieve my keys, but then she'll call to report there's been a shooting on her street and she can't leave her house for a while.

“I think it's getting worse,” she will tell me.

I'll drive across the river, back into my country, heading ultimately back to Miami. An hour after I cross, maybe two hours this time,
poof:
Juárez will vanish, as if the city never existed. Except I can't forget Ken-tokey, who's unable to cross the border like I can. I can't forget Lorenzo and Karina and their father who still drives every morning to the machine shop where he was kidnapped. I can't forget Ramón and Adir and and my landlady and the Karteleros and my dog-walking neighbor and everyone else living life as best they can. The city really happened. Juárez does exist.

“We are going back to the Primera!” Francisco shouts. He's again pounding the window of his luxury box with both palms, making me recall the way the windows at the sports bar vibrated from the car bombs. Juárez has scored a fourth goal, the game a blowout. One of the Indios left from last season fired a low shot that slipped under the visiting goalkeeper's arms. “This is good! This is good! We're going right back up to the Primera, I assure you!”

He turns to make sure I'm listening.

“We're going to stay as long as God permits,” he adds. “We will continue here as long as God gives us the strength!”

A professional soccer team runs around one of the best-maintained fields in Mexico. I can hear the drums of El Kartel thumping even up in the luxury box. A hoppy tang hangs in the air from so many beers tossed aloft in this runaway win. As long as people continue to believe in the team, Francisco tells me, then the Indios are doing their job, which is to help people. The man who brought the Primera back to the border for a few beautiful years looks down upon his creation as if what he's seeing—as if a soccer ball finding the back of the net—were the sweetest thing happening in his city.