This Love Is Not for Cowards Read Online Free PDF

joined, and also to two grocery stores, a butcher, and a full-on shopping mall. Although practice is held too far away for me to taxi, I can at least walk to the stadium where the Indios play their home games.
    On the day after I moved in, the front page of PM , a bloody tabloid newspaper, featured a photo of a gasolinero murdered in the men’s room of his station. I’d washed my hands in that same bathroom the day before, which was the day the man was murdered. Not three days later, still in my first week in the city, I tried a torta for lunch. Tortas are a Juárez staple, the functional equivalent of a fast-food hamburger: chicken or ham or beef plus pineapple and avocado on a bun. Not really my thing, but I was glad I tried it. And glad, in retrospect, I left the restaurant when I did. That night, Channel 44—the popular broadcast equivalent of PM —showcased the bleeding torso of a man lying outside the same restaurant, shot more than a hundred times by bullets fired from three different guns.
    Nothing has spooked me as much as the murder of Pedro Picasso. He was the head coach of the Indios’ youth program. He was shot dead, along with his uncle, inside his uncle’s cell-phone shop. I learned about his murder on the very day I signed my new lease.
    â€œYou know the real story behind that, right?” Marco asks. We’re still in his car, not far from my apartment building. We’ve just zipped under the Rotary Bridge, Dany reminding me that it was only a few weeks ago a body was found hanging from its girders, then smiling because she knows that freaks me out. “It was extortion,” Marco continues. “Like I’ve been telling you about. They targeted his uncle’s cell-phone shop. They said if he didn’t pay up they would kill him. Picasso happened to be there on the day they came to collect. The uncle refused to pay, so they killed them both.”
    Marco delivers this analysis casually, like it’s no big deal. Everyone around the Indios has been acting as though the murder was just a bad break Picasso suffered, the emotional equivalent of a lost wallet. In the days following my arrival, not even a week after his murder, I never heard Picasso’s name mentioned. No one seemed particularly distraught, even though when I’d ask about Picasso everyone would insist he was a great guy, a humble family man, the last person to ever get mixed up in the drug game, totally innocent of all wrongdoing. A tragic loss, in other words. But not tragic enough to keep anyone from their business.
    Marco pulls up to my street, rolling his fronterizo to a stop so I can climb out. I thank him, I help Dany out of the backseat, and I give her a kiss on the cheek. After dropping me off, they usually proceed to one more restaurant for Dany’s first and Marco’s third lunch of the afternoon. A three-hour workday with three lunch breaks—nice gig. I speed-walk to my apartment, turning the four locks on my front door and slipping inside before quickly bolting the locks behind me.
    THE INDIOS PLAY their home games at Benito Juárez Olympic Stadium. That cracks me up: Olympic Stadium. There’s even a cauldron welded above the south-end bleachers, waiting to be lit someday by Mexico’s most revered athlete. (Who would that be? Soccer player Cuauhtémoc Blanco, I’m told.) It’s considered Olympic because the red rubber track circling the field conforms to international standards, yet it’s hard to imagine Bob Costas hosting the Summer Games here for his American audience, relaying the medal count along with the day’s body count. The stadium is a shallow bowl of concrete, painted red on the outside, the west grandstand shaded by an aluminum roof. It’s not impressive in size, only 23,000 seats, but it looks a lot more like a stadium than the bleachers-and-floodlights assembly at El Paso’s Bowie High, visible right across the river. The