It’s a major case of hero worship, Erika for Marisol.

Marisol knows it.

“Do you think,” she asked Keller a few weeks ago, “I should offer her a makeover?”

“A what?”

“A makeover,” Marisol said impatiently. “You know, like on the television. Hair, makeup, clothes…”

“Why not?” Keller asked, still unsure of exactly what she was talking about.

“I don’t know, it might offend her,” Marisol answered. “She’s a pretty girl, but the clothes and the hair—she’s such a cejona, a tomboy. A little of the right makeup, if she could lose ten pounds…the boys would come running.”

Keller had assumed that Erika was gay.

“No,” Marisol said. “In fact, she has a crush on this EMT in Juárez. Very cute guy. Nice guy. Sweet.”

“I’m sure coming from you, any suggestions would be welcome.”

“I don’t know, I might bring it up,” Marisol said. “I thought one day we could go into El Paso, do girly things. Hair, spa…lunch.”

“What is it with women and lunch?”

Now he notices that if there hasn’t been a makeover, Marisol has had some influence. Erika’s long straight hair hasn’t been cut, but it has been brushed, and he thinks he detects a trace of eyeliner.

She’s a good kid, Erika, and if people treated her taking the police job as a joke at first, they don’t any longer. You’d expect looting in a town that’s half boarded up, but Erika has kept it to a minimum, and her obsession with enforcing parking regulations has become almost a source of perverse pride in the town.

“Say what you want about Erika,” the talk goes, “she does her job.”

Even the soldiers have started to treat her with grudging respect, no longer whistling or hooting as she walks by. This came about largely as a result, Marisol reported, of one soldier calling Erika a marimacha and her stopping, turning around, and punching him so hard in the face that he went down. His buddies laughed at him, and no one called Erika a lesbian or anything else after that.

When the show is over, she gets up from the sofa. “I have to go.”

“Stay and watch another,” Marisol says.

“No. Early morning. But can I help clean up?”

“No, that’s why I have Keller.”

Erika kisses Marisol on both cheeks. “Thank you for dinner.”

“Thank you for the salad.”

“Are you all right walking home?” Keller asks her.

“Sure.” Erika slings her rifle over her shoulder, waves good night, and goes out the door.

“Does the makeover include a different choice of firearm?” Keller asks.

“Some men like that kind of thing.”

Later, in bed, Marisol says, “We haven’t made love since…”

“I haven’t wanted to hurt you.”

“I thought maybe you were…disgusted.”

“No. God, no.”

“If I lie on my side with my back to you…”

She wriggles her butt into him. He holds her by the shoulders or strokes her hair and moves gently inside her, even when she pushes back as if to demand more. When he finishes, she says, “Oh, that’s nice.”

“What about you?”

“Next time. Can you sleep?”

“I think so.” He’s not sure he wants to. “How about you?”

“Oh, yes.”

Keller does fall asleep.

His dreams are bad and bloody.

Ciudad Juárez

Autumn 2010

The blog first appears just before the Day of the Dead.

It’s a national sensation before New Year’s Eve.

Pablo first sees Esta Vida when he logs in at the office one morning and calls Ana over. “Have you seen this?”

This Life has photographs somehow smuggled out of the San Fernando massacre site. It’s grisly, brutal, frank, and asks in red fourteen-point Times New Roman typeface, “Who Are These Zetas and Why Do They Kill Innocent People?”

“Dios mío,” Ana says. “That’s graphic.”

It’s nothing a newspaper could or would print, even if they were covering the narco-wars anymore. Skulls, parts of skeletons, bits of clothing sticking up from the red earth. The accompanying article gives details of the mass murder that only the police could have known and is signed “El Niño Salvaje.”

“The Wild Child?” Pablo asks.

A new story comes out the next day. Titled “Terror in Tamaulipas,” it’s an in-depth analysis of the war between the CDG and the Zetas.

“Whoever the Wild Child is,” Pablo says, “he knows his stuff.”

“It’s the new journalism,” Óscar opines, looking over their shoulder and wincing at the graphic images. “Some call it the democratization of journalism, others might call it anarchy. The problem is, there’s no accountability. Not only are the articles anonymous, but there is no editing process to separate fact from mere rumor. It’s self-serving, but I still think there’s a role for editors in the media.”

The next article, put out the next day, cuts closer to home.

“Who Killed Giorgio Valencia?” is classic investigative reporting. There are photos of Giorgio on the job, snapping pictures, other photos of his body at the murder scene, even an image of the grinning skull left on the car outside his funeral.

“This is offensive,” Pablo says.

“His murder was offensive,” Ana snaps.

“Jesus…Ana…”

“Don’t look at me, kiddo,” she says. “I ain’t no Wild Child.”

The long article goes on to ask why there has been no investigation into Valencia’s death, excoriates both the state and national government for their “supine neglect” on the issue of murdered journalists, and openly accuses the Zetas of Valencia’s murder, claiming that they had tried to enforce a news blackout on the attack on Marisol Cisneros.

The next post is harsher than anything seen in even la nota roja, showing a hacked-up, limbless body on a Juárez street. “The Cleansing” talks about the murderous chaos in Juárez, how it now seems to affect only the poor, and wonders out loud if the government really cares, or whether it is standing by and letting “social outcasts and undesirables” be hosed off the street like so much garbage.

It directly echoes Pablo’s own thoughts on the matter, thoughts that he can no longer write for his own newspaper, thoughts that he has expressed to Ana, who sees the blog and asks him directly, “Are you the Wild Child?”

“I’m anything but a wild child.”

It’s been a grim autumn for him. He’s made one trip to Mexico City to see Mateo—an awkward visit that only highlighted their continuing, gradual estrangement—and have the obligatory quarrel with Victoria, which was only sharpened by her announcement that she’s “seeing someone seriously.”

“Who?”

“He’s an editor here at the paper.”

“Has Mateo met him?”

“Well, I’m not going to keep him a secret, Pablo.”

“Does he stay with you?”

“Of course not,” Victoria said.

“I don’t want Mateo waking up and finding him there.”

“We’re discreet,” Victoria says, ending the discussion with that thin-lipped frown that used to challenge him sexually and that now he just hates.

The violence in Juárez has just gone on and on. Attacks on parties seemed to be the popular theme for the autumn of 2010. Six killed at a party, then four, then five more. Pablo dutifully went out to cover them, then wrote bare-bones articles that barely reach paragraph length—the number of dead, the approximate time of the attack, the rough neighborhood. Not the names, not the exact address, and for God’s sake not who did it or why, because that might upset the narcos.

He’s watched Óscar shrink before his eyes.

Almost literally—El Búho seems to be getting physically smaller, and certainly slower, more dependent on his cane. More and more he stays in his Chaveña home, rarely coming out for parties or even readings.

His newspaper keeps churning out dull, dutiful stories.

Not so Esta Vida.

Its next post is called “Our New Vocabulary” and gives a glossary, with accompanying photographs, of the words used to describe murder victims now: