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

land upon which the Indios play used to actually be in El Paso, back when the riverbanks meandered, before concrete canals were poured and President Lyndon Johnson signed the property over to Mexico in a ceremony marred by a blinding sandstorm.
    The seats on the west and east sides of the Benito, as it’s sometimes called, are red or white or black plastic buckets spelling out, when empty, INDIOS and, in smaller letters, UACJ, the initials of the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, the big college in town, a regular, respectable school with philosophy majors and literature majors and a champion track team that trains at the stadium, which the university owns. The most striking thing about the Indios’ home, if you can look past the cauldron, is the way the stadium’s north end frames Franklin Mountain, El Paso’s natural landmark, a brown pyramid illuminated at night by a white lone star.
    Olympic Stadium first opened in 1980. Back then it was a joke. The Cobras, the only other team from Juárez to ever rise to the Primera (where they stayed for just one season before folding), played on an uneven pitch more dirt than sod. The Indios’ grounds crew has solved the turf problem, winning admiration throughout Mexican soccer for a natural grass field that stays flat and green through all of the frontier’s intense seasons. Or flat and at least reasonably close to green on this biting January afternoon. It’s the Indios’ last preseason exhibition. The opponent is Atlante, from down in Cancún, a last-second replacement after the scheduled opponent from Brazil decided not to visit what is being called the deadliest city in the world.
    It’s Sunday, three days after Marco and I shared our lunch at the mall. Walking to the stadium about an hour before kickoff, I step onto Avenida Malecón, a main street. I fall in behind a ragtag marching band: six bass drums, three snares, and two brass trumpets. Flags and banners trailing the instruments identify the band as El Kartel. Their logo, the letters E and K inside a gunsight, waves on their flags and vibrates on the heads of the bass drums. I even spy the logo tattooed onto the calf of the one man brave enough to wear shorts in the winter cold. Because of the low temperature, the group actually marching is fairly small, maybe fifty people. Most of El Kartel trail in their cars, where it is warm and where they can continue to drink.
    â€œHey, how’s it going?” asks a guy leaning out of a white SUV, a Styrofoam cup in his hand. He speaks English perfectly, like a gringo. “Going to the game, I presume. Get in!”
    He slides over in the backseat. “You want some?” he says, offering his big white cup, which is filled with beer, Clamato, Tabasco, and lime, the rim ringed with fiery red salt. “Los Indios son mi pasión,” cheers a young woman in the front seat. She’s wearing an airbrushed Indios hat cocked to the side of her head. Her fingernails are painted in team colors. Her name is Sofia. She’s a student at UTEP, she lives in El Paso, and she is the girlfriend of the driver, a guy who introduces himself as Ken-tokey. All three say I’m lucky to have found them. El Kartel, they insist, is the coolest club anyone can ever join. Of all the booster clubs, or barras , that support the Indios, El Kartel prides itself on being the most hardcore.
    â€œI’m going to have to use Spanish to describe some things,” Ken-tokey says. “We’re a barra brava . We’re smoking weed and drinking beer and doing drugs. Cocaine, drugs, pills. Other barras are las porras —chill. We’re not. The songs we sing have swear words and talk about cocaine.”
    I stick with El Kartel all the way into the stadium. I’d like to write that we stormed the south bleachers, our conquest of the playing field thwarted only by the chain-link fence, the moat, and the line of municipal police