The Guilty by Juan Villoro Read Free Book Online Page A

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 tofeel 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