The Guilty Read Online Free PDF Page B

told me. “Which would you rather have, a tiger salary or an orca salary?” He narrowed his mysterious Chinese eyes.
    I know nothing about animals. My salary went up, but I never knew which animal it corresponded to.
    I liked Mexicali, especially the food. Peking duck, wontons, sweet and sour pork ribs. That’s the traditional food around there. In one of the restaurants, I met Lola. She was working as a waitress. Her parents were Chinese, and she pronounced her name “Lo-l-a.” I likedto sit in front of the electric waterfall painting. I’d watch it until they pulled out the plug. Lola told me a Chinese guy had been hypnotized once, watching the painting. He only woke up when they put a phone playing “Yellow River” to his ear.
    â€œHave you ever heard that song?” Lola asked me.
    I told her I hadn’t.
    â€œFancy music, Yangtze music.” Sometimes she’d talk like that. You didn’t know if she was saying two different things, or if the words that came after cancelled out the ones she’d said before.
    The hypnotized Chinese guy had worked for the triplets.
    â€œDon’t believe what people say about them,” explained Lola. “They’re not from the Pacific cartel. They work for the other Pacific. Their mafia is from Taiwan.” She said the last part as if it was a really good thing.
    After meals, Lola would hand out toys. Little plastic cats with light-up bellies, things like that. They all fell apart ten minutes later.
    â€œThe triplets bring the toys,” she told me as I walked out with something broken in my hands. It was very presumptuous of me to think they’d bought my contract with drugs. They’d paid for me with toys that fell apart.
    The triplets promised that the Toucans would have no Argentinian players, but one of them took a trip to La Pampa anyway. He came back with a tattoo of Che Guevara. Some people said the wind in Patagonia drove him nuts. Others said he got high on a boat headed to a glacier, fell into the icy water, and was pulled out frozen stiff. Now he wanted everyone to call him Triplet Che.
    Part of his craziness was good for the team. He had hired a very rare kind of player for the Toucans, one with more of a future than a past. Patricio Banfield had just turned 22 and was coming from Rosario Central. He kicked the ball like he was advertising shoes. “You gift-wrap yourself,” the trainer told me when Patricio proved he could punt me all over the field.
    The only weird thing about Patricio was the way he’d whistle to catch your attention. “It’s a habit from the pueblo,” he’d say. “I like everyone to know where I am.” I got used to recovering balls and hearing his whistle, way off in the distance. I’d shoot hard in that direction. We didn’t perform any miracles, but Patricio scored consistently. A long-suffering ace, trying to shine in a place that only existed because the Chinese had survived the sun.
    I don’t like animals, but I was tired of coming home to a silent house, so I bought a parrot. It talked as much as an Argentinian. I offered it to Lola, but she told me, “Parrots bring bad luck.” That was the first sign of what was going to happen. Or maybe not. Maybe the first sign was how good I felt in La Rumorosa, staring at the cars that had gone over the edge. “In soccer, the end comes soon enough,” Lupillo had told me when I was just starting. “That’s not the problem. The problem is it never stops ending. Memories last a lot longer than legs: you’d better make them good.” I was in the desert, ending a career of bad memories, but I wasn’t sad to be there. A place to make my exit, for everything to end and nothing to matter.
    I even got used to the parrot. I’d sit with it on the porch of the house. A one-story house with screens inthe windows. Across the street, there was a trailer home where a gringo