This Love Is Not for Cowards by Robert Andrew Powell

Author:Robert Andrew Powell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

Chapter 11

Paco

“Where are you going?”

“To Albuquerque. Just for the day.”

“For the day? Back and forth, that’s a ten-hour trip.” It’s already two in the afternoon. I shrug my shoulders. The U.S. Customs agent takes my passport, issued in Miami, pausing to inspect stamps from multiple visits to Bogotá. She looks me up and down. I’m a single male traveling alone. I haven’t shaved in a few days. When she asks where I live, I tell her Juárez. She raises her eyebrows. Yes, it’s my permanent address.

“All I’m doing today is making a run. A friend and I are going to drop something off and then we’re coming straight back.”

Her eyebrows arch higher.

“What’s your friend’s name?”

“Paco.”

She takes her time handing me back my passport, first typing a few notes into her computer and asking her colleague to hand-inspect my backpack. The American government is growing suspicious.

Paco—Francisco Ibarra’s twenty-two-year-old son—greets me in the Free Bridge parking lot. I climb into the Jeep his father bought him and we exchange the customary fist bump. A twenty-seven-inch Apple Cinema Display rests in the backseat. That’s our mysterious cargo, the package we’re delivering to Albuquerque, home of the closest Apple Store. Paco turns up the volume on the Jeep stereo. His favorite band, the Mars Volta, screeches and whines as we pull onto I-10, the starting line of our till-midnight run.

Paco is an aspiring filmmaker. The broken computer monitor usually serves a Power Mac G5 on which he edits his works in progress. One feature film so far, a couple music videos, and a handful of short mood pieces: a good-looking girl takes off her clothes and swims in a pool. Or, in another film, another good-looking girl removes her shirt and smokes. Each of the shorter movies is four or five minutes of atmosphere, the kind of brief and focused meditation that reminds me of smoking a cigarette, which really is the entire plot of that second film: Topless girl lights up. These unhurried works stand in contrast to Paco the person. He’s hyper, sometimes all over the map, the kind of guy who tweets and updates his Facebook status every three minutes: “It’s off to the gym!” “I’m hungry for Subway!” “El Paso: aburrida esta noche!”

“I’m not the kind of person who can shut up,” he admits.

His one full-length movie is strange. The female half of a young couple is cursed with the ability to see the future, a gift that has informed her the world will end in a week. Total destruction, everybody’s going to die. She and her boyfriend pass the week sulking through a road trip from El Paso to Ruidoso, a New Mexico ski town where border wealth likes to weekend. First there’s some moody brooding in the backyard of the El Paso house where Paco, in the Mexican tradition, still lives with his parents, his sister, and his two younger brothers. Blood drips from the actress’s mouth, somewhat biblically. There’s the obligatory sex scene. (I knew her shirt

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