The Infinite

by Nicholas Mainieri

  “The fuck happened?” asked the kid with the skateboard.

  Jonah kept quiet. The skateboard’s wheels rumbled low on the pavement and faded away. The neighbor’s door hinges squeaked. Jonah was alone, and his embarrassment burned in his face. Another feeling had arisen by the time he climbed back into his truck, however, and he nearly snapped the key off in the ignition.

  4

  JONAH STOOD WITH HIS FRIEND COLBY IN THE WARM HALLWAY. Jonah was laughing at him.

  “You don’t know shit about style, Mickey-Bee,” Colby retorted, jacking his sneaker against the lockers and running his fingertips along the fin of his new haircut, a short Mohawk. Sweat glistened in a fine glaze where his head was shaved above his ears. “I could give you my barber’s number if you interested in learning, though.”

  First bell had rung some time ago, but the hallway was as crowded as ever. “My head ain’t as shiny as yours,” Jonah said. “Wouldn’t look right.”

  Colby smiled and hooked his thumbs on the straps of his backpack. “I don’t think he knows how to cut white people’s hair anyways.”

  The school, downtown on Carondelet Street, was big and old. Cracked marble, an air of former grandeur. It was in the Recovery School District, which had been a mess since Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans, more than four years ago. The city was going to close the school come the end of the semester, no secret, and reopen it again as a charter school. New administration, new students, new money. All the kids who had been able—most underclassmen, good athletes, and decent students—transferred to other public schools on the fringe of the city’s attention. Most of the faculty members spent their days fretting over their careers. The leftovers were those without any other recourse, waiting for the end. Jonah was here because he’d been expelled from two previous schools.

  “They won’t let you keep that hairdo, you know.” Jonah meant the army. Colby was planning to enlist upon graduation, and Jonah had said he’d do it with him. Jonah didn’t actually want to enlist, but he went along with Colby’s talk, with his jokes, for his friend’s sake. This was easier than focusing on the absence of other options. Jonah thought of Bill and knew where they sent guys like himself and Colby, kids who came from nothing—the same place they sent his brother, the same war.

  “Course they won’t let me keep the ’hawk,” Colby answered. “Why I’m rockin’ it now.” His eyes never stopped moving, never stopped scanning. He muttered to a passing kid, “Got good weed,” but the kid ignored him. To Jonah, “I been researching. Lots of cash in bonuses if we sign up right. Like, if we sign up now saying we’re in when we graduate, that diploma gets you a bonus. What you think about that?”

  Bounce music played down the hall, a high-capacity rat-a-tat thumping through the crowd. Jonah was watching another kid rip up the black strip of electrical tape that had been stuck down the center of the corridor only the day before. The tape had been the brainchild of the principal—stay on the right side of the tape when you walk down the hallway. It was a measure to curb the fights between bells, during class time, whenever; fewer and fewer teachers felt compelled to make students sit in their classrooms.

  “I’m telling you, Mickey-Bee,” Colby went on, grinning sidelong. “You make a lot of money up front, and you could take care of that little chickadee.”

  “Uh-huh,” Jonah said. The kid in the center of the hall was winding the tape around his fist, making his arm into a tangled nest of black.

  “Need weed?” Colby muttered to a passerby. The kid stutter-stepped, marched on.

  Jonah waited. “How’s the army gonna feel about your bonus when you get busted for selling drugs?”

  “It’s a better living than whatever else you got right now, Mickey-Bee,” Colby said, spreading his arms to encompass the chaotic stretch of hall, “and this is a good market.” He turned and slapped Jonah’s arm. “Don’t worry, this time next year we’ll be arguing about who shot the most Talibans.”

  Jonah feigned a laugh. The kid with the electric tape was backpedaling as he ripped it up, and soon enough he bumped into another guy. Jonah saw it coming. Fights struck like lightning, often only because you brushed against somebody who didn’t want to get clowned in front of his boys. The kid with the tape turned, a stupid smile on his face. The other guy shoved him, heels of his palms to collarbones, and then they were grappling each other to the floor. Handfuls of shirt, electrical tape flaring and snaking around them. The hallway collapsed, kids crying out, cheering, calling for blood. Cell phones blinked to life, documenting this occurrence forever. It happened multiple times every day. Colby’s potential business was gone for the moment.

  Teachers made their way in, tried to pry the combatants apart. The police liaison dashed down the hallway, swimming past students. He elbowed gawkers aside and put the tape kid in a bear hug. A graying teacher clutched the other. Only then did the crowd begin to disperse. Once the thrill was over, it was over.

  Students here had learned to enjoy what they could while they could. Enough of them had friends or classmates or family members involved in the drug trade or other rackets. Murdered or jailed or simply disappeared. Often enough, students ferried blood feuds and drug drama from their neighborhoods into the hallways. Not many here envisioned old age. Jonah hadn’t grown up looking at the world this way, but he could understand it, for he was in similar circumstances, even if he didn’t deal drugs. For somebody like Colby, deciding that the army was the best choice he could make ensured something, even if—Jonah was thinking of old, unknown land mines—that something was another roll of the dice.

  Jonah felt a thrilling lurch when he spied Luz navigating the crowd and coming toward them. She clutched her books to her chest and she was as beautiful as she was serious. She had told Jonah that this had been the only school that would enroll her. But she seemed to make the best of it, crafting what opportunities she could. Jonah had witnessed her in nearly empty classrooms, standing at the teacher’s desk and asking earnest questions about something or other in the textbook. She also ran on the ragtag track team, and she was pretty fast, one of their better runners. She was the lone Latina in the school, and she seemed to have a knack for steering clear of much of the fighting, even the basic macho posturing. Sometimes, she had told Jonah, I am invisible.

  “Señorita,” Colby said to her, tipping an imaginary hat.

  Luz winked at him. “I like your new haircut, Colby.”

  Jonah gathered Luz in his arms. She asked if he had work later—he was a part-time mechanic at the Walmart auto shop on Tchoupitoulas Street. “No,” he said. “Free.”

  “Me, too,” Luz answered. She pulled away, saying she was going to class. “Adiós, Colby.” And with a sly grin: “Adiós, Jonás.”

  Once she had disappeared, Colby mimicked: “Jonás, Jonás. Sound like she saying ‘ya own ass.’”

  Jonah started to laugh.

  “Adiós, ya own ass, adiós. She was saying good-bye to your ass, Mickey-Bee.” Colby, grinning, ran his fingers over his hair. “Likes my ’hawk, though, ya heard?”

  5

  T HAT AFTERNOON THEY LAY IN HIS BED, LUZ’S HEAD AGAINST his chest, and she told him about San Antonio, Texas, and the time she had spent there. Sharing a bit more of the history that had been only hers, that she would have him keep now, too. They have a cathedral there called San Fernando—she whispered it to him. She told him how people had gone there for hundreds of years. Wars were fought, the city’s flag turned over. They were Spanish and Mexican and Texan and finally American. And all the Latino families would gather at the cathedral for the parade on the feast of Guadalupe. There were other children who were her friends. Not like a Mardi Gras parade, she explained. They gathered and marched from the cathedral with a portrait of la Virgen. Flowers and music and dancing in the street. “It is a beautiful place,” Luz said, “and I miss it.”

  The weight of her head on his chest was something Jonah could not lose. He asked if she loved San Antonio more than she
loved New Orleans with him.

  She sighed, laughed. “That’s not what I mean.”

  Luz had known her father only sparingly through her childhood. There were brief telephone calls and postcards written in his poor print, and his few journeys home to Coahuila, during which she was expected to pretend she loved him and missed him terribly—which she did, in a way, because her mother instructed that she must. Luz was eleven when she crossed with an uncle, who delivered her to her father in San Antonio. She was a little girl who had lost her mother and made a terrifying journey. She did come to love her father very much during their time in Texas.

  Then Katrina came, and the flood followed. Her father was one of the thousands who came for work. The apartment they currently lived in was one half of a double, and they shared it with a friend of her father’s, a former stonemason from Matamoros named Rodrigo. A revolving group of Hondurans lived in the other half of the house. Luz and her father had stayed in this apartment for a while now—housing was in demand as the city continued to fill—but in those early days they had moved around a lot.

  “I was only thirteen,” she told Jonah. “I was scared.” She had discovered, upon moving to New Orleans, that not many of the other men like her father had their children with them. Things had been different in San Antonio, where there were families and friends. But post-flood New Orleans was a place for young men or grizzled veterans only. Workers who shared decaying apartments and wired meager amounts of money home. Those first few months, the nights were impossibly dark, impossibly quiet. Soldiers in the streets, window-rattling Humvees. There were few people in the neighborhoods. More grim-faced workers arriving each day. “It was different,” Luz said. “That’s what I mean.”

  “Damn,” Jonah said. “Pop and me, we couldn’t come back for months. We evacuated to Houston. Didn’t know it would take so long for them to open the neighborhood back up, so we went to the camp. Pop and Dex, they were at each other’s throats the whole time. It sucked.” Jonah inhaled the scent of Luz’s hair. Then he said, “You wanna go for a ride with me?”

  “Hmm?”

  “There’s something I want to show you.”

  Jonah drove an old Ford F-100 that had belonged to his brothers before him and their father before that. He had kept the thing running when it should have died years ago. He drove with the windows down, glancing at Luz and feeling good when she tucked her thrashing hair behind her ears and smiled. The steering wheel was smooth in his grip. The suspension groaned and creaked against the buckled roads. He hung his arm out the window and enjoyed being on the move.

  He pulled over across from a one-story cinder-block building half swallowed by creeping vines. Boarded windows. Tangles of graffiti snarled across the battered garage doors, above which the fading sign was just legible: MCBEE AUTO. The spray-painted X alongside the door—a code left by security forces after the flood, once they’d booted in the door and looked for bodies—still remained. Red paint bleached to faint orange. There were numbers and abbreviations scrawled in each of the X’s quadrants. The building had been Pop’s business. Both of Jonah’s brothers had worked here, too, when they were growing up.

  “Is this where you learned to fix cars?” Luz asked. She had come to look forward to the motor-oily scent hanging about him when he’d meet her after her own work shift at an upscale restaurant on St. Charles Avenue, where she washed dishes to help her father and Rodrigo pay the rent.

  “The storm took the shop,” Jonah explained, meaning that he was too young to work when it was open. But there were memories, he said, of standing in the grease-stained pit with Pop or with his eldest brother, Bill—once or twice with Dex, even—beneath the lift while they reached with blackened hands into the undercarriages of cars and explained their movements. But those times felt distant, when his family liked to share things with one another. “Pop never even tried to reopen. There was some insurance money, but I think he drank most of that up.”

  The business had already been falling apart, truthfully, before the storm. Jonah’s father lost interest, lost energy—well, he lost too many things. “After Mom died,” Jonah said, “Pop kept on drinking. After Bill enlisted shit just got crazier around the house, Dad and Dex fighting and all. Once Bill died, well, Dex just got the hell out of town. Went to hide down the bayou.”

  Jonah felt Luz reach across the bench seat and take his hand, and he knew that she understood: one tragedy begets another. The humidity pulsed, and the neighborhood seemed apprehended between breaths. The squat, ugly auto shop was a ruined monument to a world that made more sense than the one Jonah presently occupied. But now he had Luz. Fortunes were changing. He felt drawn to her out of a great and hopeless dark.

  Luz jutted her chin at the shop. “Do you ever think about reopening it?”

  Jonah looked at his lap. “Not really. Sometimes. But it’s like a fantasy, you know? It would take a lot of money.” He raised his head. She was looking at him, her dark eyes waiting. There was a sheen of perspiration on her face, and he felt himself sweating, too. “The world’s getting on fine without McBee Auto.” He squeezed her hand and smiled. “I’m getting on fine.”

  6

  THE LIGHT WAS FADING AND LUZ NEEDED TO BE HOME BY DINNERTIME. Jonah drove while the orange streetlamps came on. Luz was thinking about the empty auto shop and the X painted next to the door. You still saw them on a lot of buildings. The abandoned buildings, certainly. Some folks left them on renovated homes as points of pride. The first thing she’d looked for on the front of the empty auto shop was the number in the bottom quadrant of the X. Thankfully, she had seen a zero.

  Her father had learned what the codes meant so he knew what to expect in a house he’d been hired to gut. He’d explained it all to Luz one evening back then: Sometimes you see boys going into a house, no mask or anything. God knows what they get in their lungs.

  The top and left quadrants formed by the X indicated the inspection date and the specific security force that conducted the inspection. The right quadrant explained hazards: rats, black mold, chemical spill. The bottom quadrant was always a number, and what you wanted was a zero because this meant that no corpses had been found inside. In homes such as these, some of the bodies would have lain there for a month or more while the waters receded. Papá had indeed been hired to remove rotten floorboards and drywall from structures that had crooked numbers painted next to their doors.

  One time he told Luz, in an unusual fit of confession, that he had worked in a home with the number four beneath the X. How could that not have been a family? he whispered. Young Luz was sitting with him after a long day, his guitar cast aside. He didn’t feel like playing, and that was all right because Luz didn’t feel like singing, either. Papá’s eyes were seeing other things. I wondered, he said, where they had lain. He pointed, seeing once-fine cypress floorboards. Maybe there, he said. Or maybe there. And the smells, too. Which one is death? And what is that stain, that one? You wonder if a person’s soul leaves a mark, like a burn. Papá had shaken his head, had said to himself, Basta, Moses. Then he’d said, I’m sorry, my Luz.

  Luz came out of memory with the bouncing and pitching of Jonah’s truck. Some streets deep in forgotten neighborhoods were broken to the point of being unnavigable. Asphalt pinched into steep crests or fell away into sinkholes. The streets had sat underwater for too long and everything beneath them had shifted too much. Nothing was where it used to be.

  “They’re never going to fix ’em all,” Jonah said.

  “What?” Luz asked.

  “The streets. I don’t see how they’ll ever get to them all.”

  “No.” After a moment she added, “Thank you for showing me the shop.”

  Jonah shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “I wanted to.”

  “I don’t have anything like that to show you. Not here.”

  Jonah glanced at her, his brow quizzical.

  “I mean,” she said, “I don’t have any landmarks to show you. To say, I did this, or this was whe
re something happened. Nothing to tell you, Here is where I lived my life. I am a recién llegada.” She translated: “It means, like, I’m new here.”

  “Shit,” Jonah answered. “You’ve been here for almost five years. Half the city wouldn’t exist anymore if guys like your pop hadn’t rebuilt it.”

  “People like me and my papá, we’re always newcomers. That’s what I have learned. We are always just arriving. Where is home when that is how people see you? Any places I would like to show you, those things are all in another city.”

  “Las Monarcas,” Jonah said, glancing at her. “Maybe you can show it to me one day. We can take a trip.”

  “Sure.” Luz smiled, but she didn’t say anything else.

  A purple light had descended by the time he pulled to a stop in front of her apartment. Down the street, silhouettes danced in front of the corner bar. Taillights streaked red across the overpass where it cut the neighborhood in half. Luz looked to make sure her father wasn’t outside or peering through the window, then leaned over and kissed Jonah good-night. “I’ll see you at school tomorrow,” she told him, and got out.

  She waited for the old truck to whistle away before she went inside.

  Rodrigo sat on the futon, eating a sandwich. The small television was dark, but the radio was tuned to the local Spanish station. Rodrigo had kind, hazel eyes and chubby cheeks. His wiry hair tufted at his sideburns and winged at the nape of his neck. “Buenas noches,” he whispered, and Luz grinned, taking the meaning of his tone—her father was angry with her, and Rodrigo didn’t wish to be the one to announce her arrival.