The Guilty by Juan Villoro Read Free Book Online Page B

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 myown 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.
    â€œRob a bank,” I told him.
    â€œCrime 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 minivan came from him? Was Jorge his messenger? Was my brother harboring someoneelse’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