The Infinite

by Nicholas Mainieri

  Jonah paused, cleared his throat.

  “Pop brings his face real close and tells me: If you’re ever in a fight, you beat him until he’s fucking retarded. Or else as soon as you turn around, he’ll get up and kick you in the back of the head.” Jonah snorted, a kind of laugh. “I was, like, nine.” Jonah glanced at Colby. “Then Pop picked up Uncle Dexter and he lived with us for a while and then he got caught in Biloxi. What you think about that?”

  Colby shrugged. “It makes sense.”

  Jonah recalled the fight that had gotten him kicked out of his second high school, the expulsion that had brought him to Luz and to Colby. This second high school was full of second-chance white kids—teenagers who’d been booted from previous private schools for drugs or cheating or fighting or, as in Jonah’s case, breaking zero-tolerance policies. It was the last stop on the private side of education, and it was a school full of bullies and wannabe tough guys. The kid had been picking on Jonah and wouldn’t stop when asked. Jonah broke the kid’s nose there in the hallway. He knew it when he hit him. The kid never imagined what it would look like, his own blood speckled across the lockers. That had been his problem. There was blood on Jonah’s fist, too. Even before the kid fell to the ground, a hush coursed through the boys looking on, all the private-school boys wearing their shirts and ties. None of them had foreseen such an outcome, either, not from a fight they urged on and did indeed wish to happen. The reality of the redness. And when the teacher arrived, he saw Jonah’s knuckles and regarded him as one might regard an animal. Jonah remembered that look.

  “I used to cruise with Jamal.” Colby said it softly.

  Jonah looked at his friend.

  “Not all the time, you know. But he asked me to come along sometimes. Me, I was just a boy. He had this red Grand Prix, and he’d play the music real low, just a quiet little pulse. If I went to jack up the volume, Jamal would say, Naw, naw. That was how he liked it, real easy like. I loved cruising with him. Never told him that, though. You leave those feelings alone.”

  “Right,” Jonah said.

  “We’d roll past this house or that house where some boys were chilling on the steps. They’d be just staring at us, all hard like. And Jamal, he say, Don’t you smile now. Give ’em that look right back, ya heard? Finally we’d stop at this pink shotgun, his boss’s house. He’d run inside, leave me in the car. Afterward, he’d drive through the daiquiri shop. Always had these crisp new twenties. I remember that. Jamal was a tough dude—still, he loved him some strawberry daiquiris.” Colby chuckled.

  Jonah smiled. The traffic started and stopped. The sun glared against the Houston skyline. He thought about the month he spent here with his father after Katrina. They stayed at the camp in the months after that, until they could return to New Orleans. It would have been during that time that Luz had arrived with her father, when all the work was just beginning. Almost five years ago. Jonah and Luz, they’d been hardly more than children. “I never need to spend any more time in Houston,” Jonah said, believing Colby would take his meaning.

  “Me, I liked it here.” Colby watched the tall buildings glint.

  “Come on.”

  “We stayed with some cousins for almost a year.” Colby grinned. “It was the first time I ever seen black kids and white kids playing together. Here, in Houston.”

  “Really?”

  Colby told him about an outdoor basketball court ringed with chain-link. Jamal and Colby would go down there with their cousins. It was mostly black guys playing pickup, sure, but there were white boys, too. Colby stood on the sideline more often than not, watched everyone play. It was good pickup—some shit-talking and you better have some grit, but it was honorable, no cheap fouls, no whining. Sometimes Colby got in and ran around the unpainted arc, hoping someone would dish him the ball so he could chuck one up. “Right after the storm,” he said, “I saw my brother smile more than ever before.”

  Back home, the water still hadn’t receded. Once it was clear they weren’t returning to the city anytime soon—and maybe never, according to the news—Jamal’s people, the crew from the pink house, turned up in Houston. “After that,” Colby said, “Jamal didn’t have time to play no more. It was back to business.” Colby, though, kept playing ball at the court. He found himself thinking about their New Orleans neighborhood, and the strange white family on their street, the only white family he knew of on their side of St. Charles Avenue. “It was y’all, Mickey-Bee,” Colby chuckled. He told Jonah how when he was young and sitting with Jamal and his friends on the porch, they used to see one of the older white kids walking along the street, under the cemetery wall. “It was your brother Dex,” Colby said. “We just thought he was weird.”

  Jonah laughed. “No shit.”

  “Yeah. So you know, that’s why I said hi to you when you showed up in school last year. I recognized you from around the way.”

  “Huh,” Jonah said, gripping the wheel. Traffic picked up and he kept his eyes on the highway.

  “I think about it,” Colby went on, “ . . . maybe I never woulda said hey if I didn’t play with all kinds of kids in Houston.”

  An uncomfortable feeling took root in Jonah’s gut. He’d never considered that their friendship began with something akin to an act of pity on Colby’s part. He pushed the conversation in a new direction: “You talk to Jamal ever?”

  “Me and Mom write him letters.” Colby bumped his shoulders. “See, what happened was we came back to New Orleans in August, a year after the storm. Jamal got a second possession charge, right off the bat, and they tacked something about an illegal gun to it, too. The city was fucking crazy that fall. Everybody coming home and carving out territory all over again. Judges weren’t playing.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I figure they probably wanted him to flip on his crew, but that ain’t Jamal. After a while, somebody come looking for me, wanting me to help out to pay Jamal back. But you know, Mickey-Bee, I ain’t never hustled like Jamal. I never been in that pink house. I never wanted to climb like he did.” Colby sighed. “I ain’t cut out for it the way my brother was.”

  Jonah glanced at his friend, but Colby was looking elsewhere. “I get it, bud.”

  2

  THEY REACHED SAN ANTONIO IN THE AFTERNOON. THEY PULLED off the interstate toward downtown, and Jonah was looking for Luz’s cathedral. He recalled the weight of her head on his chest, the soft words she spoke, the fragile memories shared. After he brought her back to New Orleans, he thought, they would take a road trip together to San Antonio. She could show him around. He saw it. They’d push a stroller around.

  “You all right?” Colby asked. “You missed, like, four parking spots.”

  “Yeah,” Jonah said. “Sorry. Thinking.”

  “Something’s been bothering me,” Colby said.

  “Huh?”

  “We going to visit Luz. And you say we’re gonna come right back, graduate, and enlist. You gonna be cool with that? I mean, saying hey to Luz and coming right back?”

  “Well,” Jonah said, “no.”

  “So . . .”

  “I’d like to be with her and help when the baby gets closer.”

  “But you can’t. Not if you wanna be able to bring her back.”

  “I guess not. Gotta get back to graduate and enlist. That’s where the money will come from. But if I can look at her, you know?—see her in person and make a plan, I think it’ll go over better. Don’t you?”

  “Sure,” Colby said.

  “I can’t get her on the phone, anyway. Not unless she calls,” Jonah said. “This way, I can see her and make her a promise.”

  “Yeah.”

  Jonah parked the truck along a small park. A lot of people were out and about. They opened the cooler Dex had given them and took out the containers of chili, and they set off following the crowd. Signs directed them toward the PASEO DEL RIO / RIVER WALK. The street wound gently downhill and ended where the narrow green river passed through the shade of the buildings. Tr
ees grew from cutouts in the flagstone. Shops and restaurants hemmed in the water. People sat at outdoor lunch tables. There were water taxis and tour boats. Music, somewhere. A tour guide’s voice buzzed from a loudspeaker as a boat passed, and the boys crossed the river on a skinny arch of stone steps.

  “This is sweet,” Colby remarked. “Luz tell you about this?”

  “Once or twice.”

  Jonah stopped a man and asked for directions to the San Fernando Cathedral, and the man jerked his thumb in the direction the crowd was moving.

  “Mickey-Bee, a church?”

  “Like a historical church.”

  “But this is nice down here.”

  “Something I wanna see. Come on.” And Colby groaned, but he followed.

  The crowd led them to an open plaza where the stone cathedral and its boxy spires rose above the throng. A martial drumbeat built: one . . . two . . . one-two-three-four.

  “Hear that?” Colby said.

  The beat drummed up images in Jonah’s memory—the marching band in its regalia tromped in step beneath the boughs of the live oaks, snare drums counting it out and bass drums punctuating. The dance team sashayed and the steppers walked it out. A whistle shrilled and the brass jumped in—trumpet, trombone, sousaphone. The three of them shook it in the street, laughing. Jonah saw Luz. Hold onto this: she dances, eyes downcast but a smile on her face. She backs against the night, the parade. The flames of the marching flambeaus glow all around her. Then they pass and the costumed folk on stilts move in the shadow over her shoulders, and Jonah sees her.

  Jonah and Colby pushed to the front, near the cathedral. Jonah waited for the music, for the brass. But nobody danced, nobody smiled. The band wore red and gold plumed helmets—a drum corps only. They marched slowly. In their midst a man wore a ragged and bloody piece of linen and bore a wooden cross, the crux of it over his shoulder and the foot of it scraping along the cobblestone behind him. Blood dried in the creases down his face, beneath his crown of thorns. Other men dressed like Romans cracked whips and shouted, but they shouted in Spanish. The cross clattered to the street and the soldiers swarmed the man, whips flailing. After a while, they got the man back up and he dragged the cross onward.

  “That real blood?” Colby asked.

  A man nearby whispered, grave, “Sí.”

  Jonah nudged another man. “That real?”

  “No.” The man shook his head.

  The drum corps slid by, one . . . two . . . one-two-three-four.

  They backed out of the crowd. Colby was troubled. “I forgot it was Good Friday.”

  “Me too.”

  They made for the River Walk and sat on an iron bench next to the river, the leftovers from Dex in their laps.

  “Easter’s the only day of the year I go to church with my mom,” Colby said. He stirred food, spooned a bite, dumped it back into the container. “Fuckin’ water rats.”

  Jonah, chewing, nodded to the narrow green waterway. “Ain’t much of a river.”

  “Nah,” Colby agreed. “Luz liked this place, huh?”

  She had loved it. Why? The gruesome parade told Jonah nothing new about her, though he sensed some truth of hers in this place, thrumming just out of reach beneath the flagstones. The way the river had been beaten down to this narrow dribble suddenly infuriated him. “Let’s go,” he told Colby.

  VIII

  El que nada debe nada teme.

  1

  LUZ AND FELIPO HALTED IN THE LEE OF AN OLD STONE WALL. IT had been something once, but this L-shaped corner was all that remained. Luz unrolled their sleeping bags while Felipo tended to the horses. He wanted a fire but there was no wood to be found. With a lighter he lit handfuls of dry grass that flared brief and oily then shriveled to ash.

  Luz sat, thinking of a good day, when she had walked with Jonah to a small park near his house. They carried baseball gloves he’d pulled from a closet. Hers was a soft and supple thing, dark leather. Along the thumb she saw his brother’s name, Dexter, written in faded permanent marker. She lifted the glove to her face, examined the pocket, sniffed the leather. She liked the smell; she liked the feel. She had never worn one before, but it slipped easy and snug and comfortable onto her hand. Jonah slapped the pocket of his and said he wished their school had a team.

  He positioned her in the park where the grass had been worn nearly to dust, backed away, and lobbed her the baseball. She caught it, took it from her glove, and fired it back. Whoa! he cried. You’re a natural! She laughed. They settled into a rhythm, and the silence and the proficiency with which they received and returned held her mind steady.

  They were sweating when they left the park. He told her how he had wanted to play baseball for his first high school, but he hadn’t been there long enough, and he’d not been allowed to play at his next one. By the time he was old enough to have a serious catch with his brothers, Bill was gone and Dex had moved to the swamp. His father played with him back then, but that faded, too. Luz reached and squeezed his shoulder, and he looked at her, a reflective smile on his face, and she understood what they had shared, tossing the rawhide baseball back and forth. I can be this for you, she thought. I will be this for you. She believed it right then, had faith in it.

  Luz wiped a tear from her cheek. How the moment makes us forget what we know of providence. The horses snuffled. Crickets sang in the chaparral. The stars were thick enough to seem like a net strained with sky.

  “Do you think,” Felipo suddenly asked, “it has always been like this?”

  Luz cleared her throat. “What do you mean?”

  “El Narco.”

  Luz searched her memory but found only blank spots. “I don’t know. I don’t remember what it was like when I was a girl.”

  “I forgot that you grew up here.”

  “Do I seem different?”

  “A little, yes.”

  “Sometimes,” Luz said, “I think the world has always been one way and I never noticed. Other times I think I do know the world, but moments make me forget.”

  Felipo tapped a stick against the weathered stone wall. “My grandmother tells a story that several years ago she drove to Monterrey with a friend, and along the way they came to a barricade. An old truck pulled across the road. Robbers came to the car and took a silver bracelet and some money. That was all they had. One of the thieves, she says, bent to the window and she saw herself in his sunglasses like mirrors, and he smiled and had a gold tooth. Here.” Felipo tapped his canine.

  “They go on to Monterrey and stay with a friend for a day or two and then start back for San Cristóbal. They come to a municipal police checkpoint, where the policemen check all the cars for contraband. And my grandmother says that as they pulled even with the sandbags, one of the police smiled at her, and he was the robber, wearing a uniform, holding a rifle. The same gold tooth. She saw it.”

  Luz asked if his grandmother ever told anyone, or tried to.

  “Who to tell?” Felipo answered. “The good and the bad, there is no such thing. They all do what they want.” He sighed and tossed the stick off into the night. “How can one person fight any of it? There are too many men like my cousin. They set so many evils into motion that you can only find a seam to hide in. But eventually that closes up, too.”

  He grew quiet. He was thinking of San Cristóbal, perhaps, of his grandmother and his brother, and of seams closing.

  2

  PEGASO AND CANGURO PLODDED ALONG, FOLLOWING PARALLEL dirt tracks through farmland. At this pace, Felipo thought they could reach Las Monarcas by the next morning if they rested only briefly that night and got started early. They shared the canteen, and Luz lost herself in the sound of the horses’ hooves. There was no traffic on the country road. Luz’s headache had begun to fade and the cut over her ear itched. The scrapes on her fingers burned when she wiped the sweat from her brow. She stank and she needed to brush her teeth, but none of that mattered right now, and Luz realized she was having a good time, in a way, on the move through
the country on horseback.

  A short wall of piled rocks, who knew how old, separated the trail from a field. The irrigated earth was a rich brown. Small green shoots in the rows. Corn, maybe. They crested a slight bump in the trail and passed the edge of the cornfield, and the rock wall fell away. Felipo halted Canguro, and Pegaso stopped in turn.

  Staked sheets of black mesh shadowed an acre of land. Absurdly green bushes grew beneath the mesh. Luz recalled in an instant the time Colby handed her an open ziplock and told her to sniff it. Good, he had said, huh?

  “Mota,” Felipo said. Marijuana. He rested his forearms on the saddle horn and grimaced at Luz. “This is a special farm.”

  3

  THE TRAIL BECAME AN UNPAVED ROAD AGAIN OUT IN THE FLAT. For fear of traffic, Felipo led her away from the road and up a ridge to camp out of sight against the pine forest at the foot of a hill. As promised, they were up before sunrise. The horses were fidgety and recalcitrant as Felipo saddled them. “Do you smell that?” he asked Luz. And she did. Smoke. They set out on foot, leading the animals along the ridge with the reins in their hands. The scent grew stronger.

  “Maybe the army burns the mota,” Felipo ventured. “Maybe the farmers burn back their own crops. You can’t be sure if it even matters. Do not worry.”

  But as the light rose, so did a column of black smoke, ahead and to the south, drifting with the wind. Midmorning, they discovered the skeleton of a barn situated on a dirt road, down across an expanse of arid ground. The distant frame beams were charred, and fire had licked into a wheat field beyond it, carpets of flame so hot they were nearly clear.

  A black pickup truck was parked in the foreground near the barn. The truck’s doors hung open. Four dark heaps lay on the ground around the truck. The bodies were far off—Luz estimated nearly three hundred meters—but they both saw it, clearly, when one of the forms raised an arm, as if to wave to them.