The second explosion is minor, a concussive aftershock. Now every police car in the city zooms past our door. Some of the kitchen staff rush outside to see what’s happened. There goes Channel 44, confirmation that we’ve got a dead body, which I’d already deduced. A second surge of federal police trucks. Then another ambulance. Then a convoy of green army trucks. Then finally the transitos, city traffic cops, blocking off the street in every direction.
I watch the rest of the game. It’s amazing how unfazed I am by the explosions. I see cops running around, but there’s Herculez Gomez on the TV, about to sub into the game. The American was traded to Pachuca, too, and is Marco’s new roommate on the road. I watch last season’s Primera scoring champ dart around the field, and I’m disappointed when he fails to put the ball in the net. The game ends 2–1, the Pachuca loss not really a bummer—it’s preseason. I leave enough pesos on the table to cover my bill, then step outside. I walk toward my car, planning only to drive back home. But it’s a nice evening, and still light out. All those cops have clustered only a few blocks away. I decide to walk down and check it out. What the heck.
The closed road has a block-party feel. Kids swoop past me on bicycles, laughing at their freedom. I stroll to the ornate, block-long mansion of the singer Juan Gabriel, the most famous Juarense until Maleno Frías came along. The rock star reporters at Channel 44 set up a feed outside the mansion, attracting a crowd; everybody’s excited their neighborhood will be on TV. A black husk of what once was a federal police truck smolders in the middle of the road, just beyond the mansion. The burning shell of another vehicle, an old car, also litters the avenue. I see a couple bodies, charred and bloody. Was there an accident? Why are so many police around: a hundred or more total officers—city, state, and federal—along with army soldiers in green uniforms? I see a photographer I know and ask him what happened. Bomb, he confirms. Two federales killed, retaliation for yesterday’s ambush of two city police officers. Federale: Sinaloa. City police: La Línea. The bomb is a new twist, but it’s an old and well-established battle.
I’m intrigued by the word “bomb,” but not enough to stick around. You’ve seen one dead body, you’ve seen ’em all. As I walk back to my car, the street remains abuzz, perhaps even happy. I almost feel like I should be licking an ice cream cone. Men ask me what I know and share with me what they’ve heard. I don’t watch the news when I get home. I wind down the night thinking mostly about the Pachuca game; I bet Marco sees some playing time in the next match. The bombing doesn’t strike me as a particularly big deal.
IT DOES HIT me, though. Real emotion. Devastation and shock. For maybe half a day. When I open the paper in the morning, I learn that the bomb was a much bigger deal than I’d realized. Much, much bigger. By the time I make it over to El Paso to meet Paco for lunch, my American cell phone is blowing up like it has several times this year. Family, friends, distant friends, colleagues who’d warned me that moving to Juárez was my stupidest idea yet. I meet Paco at the Subway by UTEP, near his house. He arrived first, and when I walk in, we give each other a hug. Because we need to, because it feels heavy, what we we’re carrying. I hand him a copy of El Diario, with the screaming (and justified) headline “Narcoterror!” The main photo shows blasted body parts and the once-blue police truck that’s exploding in bright orange flames. A federale runs away from the fireball to save his life. “World-class” are the words that pop into my head when I look at the photo. This is world-class terror. This is as bad as it gets anywhere. They’re going to reprint this picture in Tokyo and Berlin and Cape Town, and they should. This is a major event, a big deal.
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.
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