Free This Love Is Not for Cowards by Robert Andrew Powell Page B

people outside the S-Mart closest to my apartment, where I continue buying my tortillas. These murders have not been isolated incidents. A car waiting in line for gas at the station two blocks from my home was pumped with bullets fired by automatic weapons, the driver slain as morning commuters whizzed down López Mateos. Five diners were assassinated at a Chinese restaurant across the street from that gas station. It’s very hard to deny that Juárez—everywhere in Juárez—is violent like nowhere else.
    Before I got here, I figured all the players on the team lived in El Paso, for safety. None of them actually do. Not one. Crossing is too much of a hassle. There was one kid in the Indios’ youth program who tried commuting for a while. The youth teams play their games immediately after the regular Indios games, in stadiums emptied of fans. So many kids are trying to climb up through the system that their jerseys display absurd numbers as high as 168 or even 217. They don’t interact with the players on the big club very often, but sometimes they’ll be at the training complex at the same time, practicing on the other of the two full-size fields. I was sitting on the bleachers one morning when a kid named Jorge approached and asked if I spoke English. He told me he was from Phoenix. His dad had played professionally for the Cobras, and he, Jorge, had recently dropped out of high school to follow his father’s path. Even though his father was Mexican, Jorge didn’t speak any Spanish. That seemed more tragic to me than his decision to drop out of school.
    â€œHave you seen any bodies yet?” he asked. He’d seen two, and he’d only been with the organization about a month. He saw his first body in the street outside the house he shared with some other prospects. The second body landed on the very doorstep of that house. Jorge had to hop over the body to get outside. His parents immediately moved him to El Paso. Jorge told me the commute wasn’t working out that well. A little while later he quit the team altogether.
    This makes Gil the only one in the organization who pulls it off. (Francisco Ibarra lives in El Paso, but he’s not a regular commuter; he’s visited the practice compound only once this season.) Although Gil was born in Monterrey, he’s an American citizen, and has been for a while. “You can really see your tax dollars at work in El Paso,” he has told me. “You see it every day in things like trash pickup, electricity, water. You can live in a very comfortable way. I got an offer for another job down in Cancún, but I don’t want to leave El Paso.”
    More than ten thousand cars and trucks cross the Zaragoza Bridge every day. When we pull up to the bridge, I notice the road forks in two. Gil steers his passenger car to the left, away from maybe two hundred tractor trailers lined up on the right. There are a lot of cars ahead of us. Gil’s Pontiac rolls to a stop because of the traffic, so I grab my duffel bag, get out of the minivan, and tell Gil I’ll see him on the other side—he’s not allowed to take a passenger with him through the express line. A pedestrian walkway arcs over the Rio Grande. The river is mostly dry, just a small stream of water I could probably leap across if I had to. As I walk, I study the long line of trucks. Swift. Mesilla Valley Transportation. A couple flatbeds carrying neat stacks of two-by-fours. The trucks (and also the passenger cars) are backed up as far as I can see. This isn’t the clean bridge Gil was hoping for. I veer to the left with the passenger cars. As I approach the gates where customs officers inspect each car before letting it into El Paso, I notice that all but one of the seven tollbooth-ish bays have been cleared. Steel gates affixed with stop signs have been lowered across every lane, preventing any cars from moving forward. Only one car remains