The Guilty Page 4

  It took me a while to get back into the rhythm of things. I went to a doctor’s office opposite Gate 6 of Estrella Stadium. I became a fan of electric massages, and then I became a fan of Marta, a dark-skinned girl who touched me with the tips of her fingers more than was strictly necessary, barely grazing me with her long nails. The first time I made love to her, she confessed she was in love with Patricio. That detail had stopped surprising me. Sooner or later, they all asked: “Did he really save your life?”

  Yes, Patricio had saved me. He had searched for me in the ruins of the Nefertiti alongside the firefighters, while in Mexico City they were already performing my funeral mass. He was still Argentinian, but even my parrot missed him.

  Around that time, people were talking about the triplets. How they were killed with dynamite. They had only identified one, by his Che tattoo. But the other two had also been there. The police knew this because they’d counted the teeth in the rubble. The triplets died next to a warehouse full of contraband Chinese toys.

  I remember the day they came to visit me with the case of beer. “We rise like foam,” they’d told me. They were younger than me. Their bodies had swollen up as if they knew they wouldn’t live very long. All three of them, as if they had made a pact to inflate together.

  Against every prediction, Estrella Azul made it to the finals against Toltecas. Patricio called to wish me luck. Then, casually, he added:

  “The board of directors needs new recruits. They put a price on my contract.”

  Every three or four years, Toltecas overhauls their roster. No other team makes as much in commissions. People like the triplets blow up. People like us get traded.

  The first leg ended in a dirty 0-0. Patricio was kicked viciously. The referee turned out to be my parrot’s vet. He hated Argentinians. He didn’t call the fouls made on my friend. Even I gave Patricio a few extra kicks.

  I don’t know what that second leg looked like from the outside. I never saw it on TV. For me, that afternoon marked the end of soccer, though movement remained an unending agony. We were 0-0 at minute 88. You could smell the disappointment of a final gone to penalties. Patricio had played like a ghost. We’d kicked him too much in the first match.

  Suddenly, I swept the ball away and kept it. It was as if everything was spinning and the sun was beating down from inside me. There was a shattering silence, like when I woke half dead in the Nefertiti. I looked up, not at the field, but at the sky. Then I saw the grass all around me; an island, the very last island. It was like breaking open a fortune cookie. Everything stopped: the water in the electric waterfall, the sweat on the triplets’ cheeks, Nati’s hands on my back, the twelve teams who’d kicked me, the red, white and green jersey I never got to wear, the needle feeling for my nerves. And then I saw nothing, just the desert, the only place I could make a backwards play.

  I heard a whistle. Patricio was open on the forward line. I saw his jersey, an enemy to both of us. I passed him the ball.

  He was alone in front of the goalie, but simply scoring wasn’t enough for him. He launched a beautiful little curve shot that caressed the ball towards the corner. I admired this, the play I’d never been capable of making, which was now just as much mine as the jeers and insults and cups of beer they threw at me, and which finally meant something different.

  I walked off the field and started my life.

  THE GUILTY

  The shears lay on the table. They were enormous. My father had used them to butcher chickens. Since his death, Jorge has carried the shears with him everywhere. Maybe it’s normal for a psychopath to sleep with a gun under his pillow. My brother isn’t a psychopath. He isn’t normal, either.

  I found him in the bedroom, doubled over, struggling to pull off his T-shirt. It was 108 degrees. Jorge was wearing a shirt made of coarse cloth, the kind that sticks to you like a second skin.

  “Open it up!” he shouted, his head swaddled in fabric. He gestured vaguely to the weakest point in the weave; a part I had no trouble finding.

  I got the shears and cut his shirt. I eyed the tattoo on his back. It annoyed me that the shears were good for something. Jorge made senseless things useful; for him, that’s what having talent meant.

  He embraced me as if being anointed with his sweat was some kind of baptism. Then he looked at me with eyes sunken by drugs, suffering, too many movies. He had energy to spare, an inconvenient thing on a summer afternoon on the outskirts of Sacramento. His last visit, Jorge had kicked the fan and broken off one of its blades. Now the machine made a noise like a baby’s rattle and barely nudged the air. Not one of us six brothers thought about replacing it. The farm was being sold. It still smelled like birds; white feathers still hung on the barbed wire.

  I had proposed a different place for us to meet, but Jorge needed something he called “accordance.” We had all lived there once, crammed in. We read the Bible at meals, scaled the roof to watch shooting stars. We were beaten with the rake used to scrape up chicken shit, dreamed about running away and returning to burn the house down.

  “Come with me.” Jorge went out to the porch. He had arrived in a Windstar minivan, a real luxury for him.

  He pulled two buckled cases out of the van. He was so thin that in the absurd immensity of the desert, it looked like he was holding scuba tanks. They were typewriters.

  He put them at opposite ends of the dining room table and assigned me the one with the stuck ñ-key. For weeks, we would sit face to face. Jorge imagined himself a screenwriter. He had a contact in Tucson, which isn’t exactly the Mecca of cinema, a gringo who was interested in a “raw story” that apparently we could tell. The Windstar and a two-thousand-dollar advance were proof of his interest.

  The gringo believed in Mexican cinema as in a quintessential guacamole. There was too much hatred and passion at the border not to exploit it on-screen. In Arizona, farmers shot at migrants lost on their land (“a hot safari,” the man had said; Jorge made him sound like an evangelist). Then, the unlikely producer had mixed a red margarita. “Mexican essence,” he said, “rests among a pile of corpses.”

  The gringo’s greatest extravagance was trusting my brother. Jorge’s filmmaker training consisted of driving American drug addicts around the Oaxaca coasts. They told him about movies we had never seen in Sacramento. When he moved to Torreón, he would go to the video store every day just because it had air conditioning. They hired him to make his presence seem normal and because he could recommend movies he’d never seen.

  My brother came back to Sacramento with a strange look in his eyes. I was sure it had something to do with Lucía. She had been so bored out here, in this wasteland, that when Jorge returned she gave him a chance. Even back then, when he was still a reasonable weight and had all his teeth, my brother looked like a cosmic nutjob, like someone who’d been abducted by a UFO. Maybe he had the pedigree of a man who’s gone great distances; the point is Lucia let him into her house behind the gas station. It was hard to believe someone with Lucía’s body and her obsidian eyes couldn’t find a better candidate among the truckers who stopped to pump diesel. Jorge took the luxury of leaving her, as well.

  He didn’t want to tie himself to Sacramento. But he wore it on his skin: he had shooting stars tattooed on his back, the “Tears of San Fortino” that fall each year on August 12th. It was an incredible spectacle we watched as children. Plus, his middle name is Fortino.

  My brother was made for leaving, but also for coming back. He arranged his most recent return by phone. He said our broken lives looked like those of other filmmakers. Latin artists were making it big. The man in Tucson believed in fresh talent. Curiously, the “raw story” was mine; that’s why I had a typewriter in front of me.

  I had also made it out of Sacramento. For years, I drove semis on both sides of the border. In the shifting landscapes of that period, my only constant was Tecate beer. I joined Alcoholics Anonymous after flipping a truck full of fertilizer in Los Vidrios. I was unconscious on the freeway for hours, bre
athing in tomato-enhancing chemical powder. Maybe that explains why I took a new job where the suffering seemed gratifying. For four years after that, I delivered I.V. bags to undocumented workers lost in the desert. I ran the routes from Agua Prieta to Douglas, from Sonoyta to Lukeville, from Nogales to Nogales (I rented a room in each of the Nogales, as if I were living in a city and its reflection). I met the polleros who smuggled people across the border, Immigration agents, members of the Paisano program. I never saw those who picked up the I.V. bags. The only undocumented people I ever found had already been detained. They were shivering under a blanket. They looked like Martians. Maybe the coyotes were the only ones who drank the liquid. The sum of all the corpses they find in the desert is called The Body Count. That’s the title Jorge picked for the movie.

  Loneliness makes you a babbler. After driving alone for ten hours, you gush words. “Being an ex-alcoholic means spinning tales,” someone told me in AA. One night, after the rates went down, I called my brother. I told him a story I couldn’t quite make sense of. I was driving down a dirt road when my headlights lit up two yellow silhouettes. Migrants. These ones didn’t look like Martians. They looked like zombies. I braked and they put their hands up like I was going to arrest them. When they saw I was unarmed, they screamed for me to save them in the name of the Virgin and for the love of God. They’re crazy, I thought. They were foaming at the mouth, grabbing at my shirt; they smelled like rotting cardboard. They’re already dead. This seemed logical to me. One of them begged me to take him anywhere. The other asked for water. I didn’t have a canteen. The idea of travelling with dehydrated, crazed migrants made me feel scared or disgusted or something else. But I couldn’t leave them there. I told them they could ride in the back. They thought I meant the back seat. I had to use a lot more words to explain that the trunk, the boot, would be their place of travel.

  I wanted to get to Phoenix by dawn. When spiny plants scratched the yellow sky, I stopped to take a leak. I didn’t hear any sounds from the back. I thought the migrants had suffocated or died of thirst or hunger, but I didn’t do anything. I got back in the car.

  When we got to the outskirts of Phoenix, I pulled over and crossed myself. I opened the trunk, and saw the motionless bodies and the red-smeared cloth. Then I heard laughter. Only when I noticed the seeds splattered across their shirts did I remember I had been carrying three watermelons. Unbelievably, the migrants had devoured them, rinds and all. They said goodbye with a dazed happiness that left me just as troubled as the thought of accidentally murdering them.

  That’s the tale I told Jorge. Two days later, he called to tell me we had a “raw story.” It was no good for a movie, but it was good enough to impress a producer.

  My brother trusted in my knowledge of illegal crossings, and in the correspondence writing course I’d taken before becoming a trucker, when I still dreamed of being a war correspondent because it meant getting far away.

  For six weeks, we sat across from each other, sweating. From his end of the table, Jorge would shout, “Producers are assholes, directors are assholes, actors are assholes!” We were writing for a commando of assholes. That was our advantage: without their knowledge, we would maneuver them into transmitting an uncomfortable truth. Jorge called it “Chaplin’s whistle.” In one movie, Chaplin swallows a whistle that keeps making noise inside his stomach. That’s what our screenplay would be like, the whistle the assholes would swallow. There would be no way to stop it sounding off inside them.

  But as if every word needed the ñ that was stuck on my keyboard, I couldn’t make sense of the story. Then Jorge spoke as our father had at the table. We needed to feel guilty. We were too indifferent. We had to fuck ourselves over to deserve the story.

  We went to a dogfight and bet the two thousand dollar advance. We picked a dog with an X-shaped scar on its back. It looked blind in one eye. Later we found out that rage made it wink one eye shut. We won six thousand dollars. Luck was on our side; terrible news for a screenwriter, according to Jorge.

  I don’t know if he took some kind of drug or pill, but I’m sure he didn’t sleep. He settled back in a rocking chair on the porch, gazing at the desert acacias and the abandoned chicken coops, the shears open across his chest. The next day, while I was stirring my instant coffee, he shouted at me with crazed eyes, “No guilt, no story!” The problem, my problem, was that I was already guilty. Jorge never asked me what I had been doing on that dirt road in a Spirit that didn’t belong to me, and I had no desire to tell him.

  When my brother had abandoned Lucía, she left with the first customer to come by the gas station. She went from one spot on the border to another, from a Jeff to a Bill to a Kevin, until there was someone called Gamaliel who seemed stable enough. He was married to another woman, but still willing to provide for Lucía. He wasn’t a migrant but a “new gringo,” a son of hippies who looked for baby names in the migrants’ Bibles. Lucía filled me in on the details. She’d call from time to time and make sure she had my contact information, as if I were something she hoped she’d never need to make use of. A bit of insurance in the middle of nowhere.

  One afternoon she called to ask me for a “big, huge favor.” She needed to send a package, and I knew the roads well. Curiously, she sent me somewhere I had never been, close to Various Ranches. After that, she always used me to deliver her smaller packages. She told me they were medicine that didn’t require a prescription here and was worth a lot on the other side, but she smiled in a strange way when she said it, as if “medicine” was code for money or drugs. I never opened a single envelope. That was my loyalty to Lucía. My loyalty to Jorge was not thinking too much about the breasts under her shirt, the thin, ringless hands, the eyes aching for relief.

  When we’d decided to sell the farm, all six brothers got together for the first time in a long while. We fought over prices and practical details. That’s when Jorge kicked the fan. He cursed us between phrases pulled from the Bible, raving about wolves and lambs, the table with a place always set for the enemy. Then he turned on the fan and heard the sound of the baby rattle. He smiled, like it was funny. This brother who’d helped me pull off my pants to feel the delicious cold of the river after a lashing now imagined himself a filmmaker esteemed enough to kick fans. I hated him like never before.

  The next time Lucía called me for a delivery, I didn’t leave her house till the following day. I told her my car had broken down. She loaned me the Spirit that Gamaliel had given her. I wanted to keep touching something of Lucía’s, even if the car came from another man. I thought about that on the road. It made me want to leave my own mark on the Spirit. That’s why I stopped to buy watermelons.

  I never saw Lucía again. I returned the car when she wasn’t home and I tossed the keys in the mailbox. There was an acrid taste in my mouth; I felt like breaking something. That night, I called Jorge. I told him about the zombies and the watermelons.

  After six weeks, blue circles ringed my brother’s eyes. He cut the dollars won at the dogfight into little squares, but that didn’t bring us creative guilt either. I don’t know if his concept of punishment came from life on the farm with our fanatical father, or if the drugs on the coast of Oaxaca had expanded Jorge’s mind into a field for reaping regrets.

  “Rob a bank,” I told him.

  “Crime doesn’t count. We need guilt that can be overcome.”

  I was about to tell him I had slept with Lucía, but the chicken shears were too close.

  Hours later, Jorge was smoking a twisted cigarette. It smelled like marijuana, but not enough to counter the stench of fowl. He looked at the saltpeter stain where the picture of the Virgin had been. Then he told me he was still in contact with Lucía. She had a modest business. Contraband medicine. He asked me if I had something to tell him. For the first time, I began to think the screenplay was a set-up to make me confess. Without a word, I went out to the porch and looked at the Windstar. Was it possible that the “producer” was Gamaliel, that the money and the m
inivan came from him? Was Jorge his messenger? Was my brother harboring someone else’s jealousy? Could he have degraded himself with such precision?

  I went back to my chair and wrote the whole night without stopping. I exaggerated my erotic encounters with Lucía. In this indirect confession, shamelessness could cover me. My character took on the defects of a perfect son of a bitch. To Jorge, it would have been realistic for me to act like the weak man I really was, but he couldn’t credit me with such magnificent villainy. The next day, The Body Count was ready. It had no ñ’s, but it was ready.

  “You can always count on an ex-alcoholic to satisfy a vice,” he told me. I didn’t know if he was referring to his vice of turning guilt into film or satisfying the jealousy of others.

  With the chicken shears, Jorge made some cuts to the screenplay. The most significant was my name. He made money with The Body Count, but it was a bland success. No one heard Chaplin’s whistle.

  As for me, something kept me in front of the typewriter, perhaps a line of my brother’s from his last night on the farm:

  “The scar is on the other ankle.”

  I had slept with Lucía, but I didn’t remember the site of her scar. Making things up was my refuge. Was that the vice Jorge had referred to? I would keep writing. That night, I limited myself to saying,

  “I’m sorry, forgive me.”

  I don’t know if I cried. My face was wet with sweat, or tears I didn’t feel. My eyes hurt. The night opened up before us, like when we were boys and we’d climb onto the roof to make wishes. A light streaked the sky.

  “August 12th,”Jorge said.

  We spent the rest of the night watching shooting stars, like bodies lost in the desert.