This Love Is Not for Cowards Read Online Free PDF Page A

it seriously. We went to Monterrey for two weeks just by ourselves, just to train. We …” He stops talking for a moment. He puts down his plastic spoon, then looks at me with a nervous smile. “It’s making my hair stand on end just to think about it.”
    As YouTube can confirm, the Indios won the promotion that sent la gente of Ciudad Juárez into the streets. Down in León, at the stadium after the decisive game, Marco crumbled into his locker. He cried as hard as a twelve-year-old left alone in Guadalajara. He cried like he told me he’d cried when he washed out with Tigres and believed his career was over. He thought of his family and what they must be feeling. He thought of his dad most of all. Marco was twenty-two, in the tenth year of a professional career plucked from the remainder bin. And now, with the victory over León, he was what he’d always wanted to be: a player in the Primera. At the top, back in Mexico.
    Marco bought a house in Juárez with his promotion bonus. His new wife, a Juárez native, came attached to an extended family that all live close by. The immediate goal, Marco tells me, is to save the Indios, to keep the team in the Primera. He wants to stay in the big leagues. He wants to remain in the city that gave him his opportunity.
    â€œI go to Dallas now and it’s not home anymore, you know?”
    MARCO AND I don’t go to lunch every day. I might eat at the Indios’ clubhouse commissary and catch a ride home from someone in the front office. When Marco and I do hook up, and when we finish eating, we usually swing by his house to pick up Dany. It’s a nice address they share, especially for Juárez. Modern, two stories tall, with a garage and a small yard in the back where Dany’s purebred shih tzu can play. This afternoon I try climbing into the backseat so Dany can sit up front, but she won’t hear of it. She’s twenty-one, just back from her classes at UTEP, the University of Texas at El Paso. Her hair is jet black and straight, shoulder length. She favors skinny blue jeans and severe black stilettos the way Marco favors Ed Hardy T-shirts. Her parents own a bus company that transports workers to maquiladoras every morning, taking the workers home again in the afternoon. She and Marco have been married for eight months.
    â€œAren’t you scared to be here?” she asked when we first met, about a week after I’d arrived. “Yes,” I said. “Aren’t you?”
    I’d spent my second day on La Frontera searching for an apartment. After touring what I had been told were the better parts of town, I ended up choosing Colonia Nogales, one of Juárez’s oldest neighborhoods. The other options were way out there, isolated from the city and hidden behind guard gates. I wasn’t blasé about my safety, but I didn’t want security to consume me. Colonia Nogales is about a mile square, a neighborhood of mature houses in the Mexican style, meaning from the street they appear to be only a wall and a door; everything interesting hides on the inside. Several of the houses are impressively large, real mansions sprawling across as many as seven lots. The other houses are more modest, and are often kind of cute. There are only a few apartment buildings, the largest of which I’ve decided to live in.
    My place is a furnished two-bedroom, one of forty-five identical units dispersed among five rectangular buildings—or barracks, if we’re going just on looks. Each building is two stories tall, and each is painted a different, admittedly obnoxious pastel, making the complex look like military housing for an army of Teletubbies. My billet isn’t fancy, I’ll admit, but it only costs me three hundred dollars a month. ( “Still too much!” I’ve been chastised.) There’s a small park nearby and a decent burrito restaurant up the street. I can walk to a gym that I’ve