By the end of Jonah’s afternoon work shift on Thursday he had resolved to go there himself, to rap on the door, to speak with her father, and to make himself clear.
When he entered their street, however, Luz was sitting on the front steps with her elbows on her knees. Jonah’s throat went scratchy. She saw his truck and stood. She looked as if she had been waiting for him. Jonah parked across the street, and she ran to meet him as he exited. Locusts thrummed. The sound was growing and something was wrong.
“Jonás,” she said as she crashed into him.
“What happened? Did you tell him?”
“I couldn’t,” Luz said, “I couldn’t, not with him bleeding like that.”
“What are you talking about? What happened?”
“He’s already bought the plane ticket, Jonah. I’m leaving tomorrow.” Her voice broke.
“What, Luz, no. No.”
“It was my fault. He was almost killed because of me. I couldn’t tell him no, Jonah. I—” She reached into her pocket, withdrew a scrap of paper, and pressed it into his hand, saying it contained her grandmother’s address. “I have to.”
“No,” Jonah said. “No. I can make it work.”
And she rose onto her toes and kissed him. Taste of salt on her face.
“I’ll call you when I’m home.” She was crying.
Her father appeared at the door, his face purple and swollen around an eye.
“Ven aquí, Luz.”
As Luz pulled away from Jonah, she was speaking Spanish. Hushed and hysterical. Weeping as she did, and speaking too fast.
“Vuelve conmigo, por favor. Jonás. Ven conmigo.”
“Wait—Luz!—I don’t understand!”
She turned and ran and went up the steps.
For a beat her father glared at him.
“Wait! Luz!”
Her father yanked the door shut.
But she was already gone. She was running home.
III
Old Mexico way, huh?
1
THE CLAMOR OF A GARBAGE CREW IN THE STREET, THE DRONING of the engine and the shouting of the men. The squalling as the maw of the truck’s ass end opened, and the slamming of the trash bins against the street. Jonah blinked to life, vision quaking, whiskey burn lingering in his throat. He sat up on the couch under the eyes of the photographs and began frantically searching for his phone. He had gone to sleep with it in his hand, hoping Luz would call. He found the phone between the cushions. Today was Monday. Luz had gotten onto a plane Friday. Her father had kept her away from him after the tearful good-bye in the street, and then she was gone. Jonah scrolled through his messages, his e-mails. Nothing from Luz. Three days, and not a single word. He was sick with worry, and when he set out for school he realized he was still a little drunk from the night before.
There was a gap in the chain-link fence behind the school where Jonah could go through the back door and not wait in line for the metal detector. If the liaison officer knew about the entrance, he couldn’t do anything about it. Through the door, Jonah turned the corner into a ruckus. A fight was being broken up. A teacher, a big man named Mr. Sise, was pinning Colby against the wall with a forearm across his throat and straight-arming another student away, grasping a handful of T-shirt. A mug lay in shards, coffee streaking over the tile. Mr. Sise had been a college basketball player, and they had once watched him demolish the school’s best player in a game of one-on-one out on the courtyard’s concrete half-court after the kid wouldn’t stop harassing him. There was only a finite number of ways to earn respect.
Colby was screaming fuck-you’s at the other kid.
“Are you talking to me?” Mr. Sise’s voice had heft.
“No, sir!” Colby said, even as the other guy screamed that he would kill Colby.
Mr. Sise swung the kid around and slammed him into the wall next to Colby. He brought his face in close: “You walk away right now, you hear me?”
The kid nodded, enthusiastic.
“You ever spill my coffee again,” Mr. Sise threatened, and shoved him away. The crowd fell apart, in search of the next entertaining thing.
Jonah’s previous school, his second private school, had expelled him after he got into a particularly nasty fight, but they didn’t kick you out for that kind of thing here. Sometimes they joked: you end up in jail or the cemetery, or you graduate.
Mr. Sise let Colby free, slapped him on the back. Jonah overheard: “I’m glad you stuck up for yourself, but you gotta be careful.” The teacher nodded to Jonah and marched away through the hall.
Colby’s lips were dry and he rubbed his face with a trembling hand. “I dunno. Kid runs into me and next thing I know we bump into Mr. Sise. He’s strong.”
“I’m sorry I wasn’t here,” Jonah said. “I woulda stepped in.” Jonah’s head ached, and he needed an outlet. “I coulda used it.”
2
THE GUY WHO MONITORED THE COMPUTER LAB HAD VANISHED. A couple of boys and a girl with a heavily pregnant belly sat in the back row, laughing at something on a computer screen. Jonah went up and down the aisles, punching power buttons until one of the machines wheezed to life.
At Jonah’s first school he had worn a tie every day and kept his hair short. He was able to attend the private academy on a scholarship, based on his good junior-high grades. He intended to try out for the baseball team. Early on in his freshman year, he’d sat in computer class thinking about Bill, trying to imagine what life had been like for his brother in Afghanistan. Jonah thought a lot about that Soviet land mine, left over from the eighties. He wanted to understand the mechanism that had killed Bill because there was so little he could know about his brother at all anymore. So Jonah searched for Afghan minefields. From page to page he went—land mines, Dragunov rifles left behind, newer IEDs. Weapons of all kinds. Did another young man, brother to someone else, bury that bomb, pat the dirt firm atop it? Did he have any notion that it would wait more than twenty years to erupt and call Jonah’s brother from reality? But Jonah couldn’t know anything. That was what he learned. And later, during a free period, the computer teacher went through the browsing history of the machines as he was required to do, and he reported Jonah for looking up how to build bombs. The private academy had a zero-tolerance policy, and like that, there was no more scholarship money.
Jonah waited for his e-mail to load. Behind him, the group watching the video groaned. The girl said, “Nasty.”
Jonah scanned the subject lines of his e-mail. Advertisements, potential viruses. Nothing yet from Luz.
3
THE FLOODLIGHTS GLARED ON THE COURT. THE STUDENTS SAT and bickered and laughed. Some watched the game, but most did not. They had cigarettes or sweet cigarillos tucked behind ears and plastic flasks tucked into pockets, and some concealed pistols tucked into waistbands. Metal cradled warmly to skin. Some students feared for themselves because of lingering arguments or past drama. Many stoked anger in their hearts. Anger that he or she folded into rage for something larger and impossible to name, harbored in deep, secret places. And here they all were, hot and irritable and packed together on the gym bleachers, but where else could they be? The fans caged high in the walls spun, drawing the heat from the court and expelling it out into the night, but the temperature never seemed to drop. From where he sat, Jonah watched the fan blades spin and thought that something was always being lost but nothing ever changed.
Jonah lowered his eyes to the game just as an opposing player stripped the ball from Colby, took it coast to coast, and tomahawk jammed it. This was the final game of the season and they were down by thirty points in the third quarter. It was typical.
Jonah took his cell from his pocket. No missed calls, no new text messages. He tapped his foot nervously, and the game played on before him without registering. He thought of her crying, saying something in Spanish to him that he couldn’t understand. He needed to hear her voice.
He was sitting dumbly when the students around him began to shout, to grap
ple, to climb over one another. There was a lot of noise. Jonah reacted like a man coming out of sleep. He turned his head and a knee caught him across the jaw, clacked his teeth, woke him up. He recognized the gunfire now. He stood and joined the flood, tumbling, clawing down the bleachers. Two more reports cracked and crackled back. The mob pushed, crushing, sweeping the players away and the game with them. Rubber soles shrieked against the court. Jonah was lifted and moved, pressed between bodies.
He couldn’t breathe. The mob swelled toward the doors.
He caught a glimpse of the corner, where the police liaisons were pinning someone to the court. Another kid was on his side, walking himself around his shoulder, smearing a pinwheel of blood through the glare of the floodlights. Jonah raked at someone’s collar to stay on his feet and lost sight of the wounded kid. Then he was bundled through the gym doors into a night that felt suddenly much cooler.
NOPD cars, lights bursting in blue pulses, soon tore into view and barricaded the lot. People yelled, shoving one another. Others embraced, weeping. It took Jonah a long while to find Colby.
His friend wore a T-shirt pulled over his basketball jersey. The flashing lights beat in the sweat on Colby’s face, making him look cold.
“Fuck was that?” Jonah asked.
Colby was shaking his head.
“What?”
“That was Davonte, man. Dude came in to get Davonte.”
Jonah looked at the gym doors, as if there might be more to see. He imagined Davonte restless, needing to get out of the house. This was the first time anyone would have seen him in two weeks. Maybe someone had sent a text saying, Davonte’s here at the game. Jesus. Jonah put his arm around Colby.
They were held in the lot until the ambulance left. Whispers through the crowd that Davonte wasn’t dead, shot through the arm. Nobody else caught a bullet. Lucky.
“You know,” Colby whispered to Jonah, “Davonte and me, we sell for the same crew.”
Jonah looked at him. “What?”
“Same crew, same dude.” Colby glanced around the lot, seeming suddenly fearful. He mopped his face with his shirt. “Let’s get outta here, Mickey-Bee.”
4
COLBY NAVIGATED THEM TO A NEARBY BAR THAT HE CLAIMED they could get into. A residential block. Shrubs with leaves like green elephant ears flourished in the gaps between the shotguns. The power lines bellied, tangled, out of the sky, cables buzzing. A jukebox pumped from within the corner bar, a narrow structure of sand-colored brick and blue stucco. As Jonah and Colby rounded the corner, though, a security cop in a black uniform regarded them from a folding chair next to the entrance. He nudged his glasses higher onto his nose and thrust his chin at their school’s logo on Colby’s shorts.
“Kidding me, right?”
“How long they had you for?” Colby asked.
“Few months.”
“How come?”
“Somebody get stabbed inside, somebody gonna take note.” He removed his glasses, breathed on the lenses, and buffed them. “Well, sometime they do.”
“We could slide by?”
The man put his glasses back on, smiled, shook his head.
Jonah grabbed Colby by the arm and pulled him away. “Y’all be good,” the cop called.
Back in the truck, the starter clicked. Nothing. Dead battery.
Colby went, “This piece of shit.”
“Let me know when you get a car, all right?”
There had been a day when they’d gone cruising, no plan. They ended up in the East, lifting over the industrial canal on the high rise, driving toward the abandoned Six Flags. They parked in the desolate lot and sat a while on the hood, watching the roller coaster rails where they arched from the tall grasses like vertebrae. Colby suddenly turned to Jonah and asked if he could teach him to drive. And so they made circles around that big empty lot, Colby starting and stopping, whooping and laughing, and eventually he did get it, driving smoothly, tires bouncing over the bubbled tarmac. When he braked and levered the truck into park, he turned to Jonah, smiling and out of breath as if he’d run instead of driven. There was no one else around in that desolate place. They felt the absence of stricture and perception. They were two friends, and that was all that mattered.
But now the truck wouldn’t start and so they walked out to the grass bank of the bayou where it split the neighborhood in a gentle curve. Jonah paused when they came even with a bright corner store. The air smelled like fried chicken and spilled gasoline.
“Come on,” Jonah said. “Gonna cheer you up.”
He instructed Colby to walk around where the cashier could see him. They went in, and the tall aisles obstructed Jonah from view while he removed a couple of tall boys from the drink coolers in the back and stuck them inside his shirt. Then he walked back down the aisle and out the door. He crossed the street and waited by the water, and when Colby joined him he tossed him a beer.
They sat on a set of crumbling steps that led down to a swamped canoe. A breeze stirred and died, the faint odor of rotten sea life. A fish the color of the moon leaped and splashed, leaped and splashed. Mullet, Jonah thought. He took out his cell phone and stared into the darkened window.
“You worried, huh?”
Jonah didn’t need to answer.
“Phones don’t work in Mexico,” Colby said.
Jonah scoffed. “If phones work in this broke-ass city, they work in Mexico.”
“Shit,” Colby agreed, drinking to it.
“Told you her pops got pistol-whipped?”
“Say what?”
“That’s why she went. They were arguing and he went for a walk and came back all bloody. Mugged. She couldn’t say no anymore.”
“Mexicans get paid cash, yo. People know it.” Colby hawked and spit into the bayou. “He okay?”
Jonah shrugged. “I don’t think it’s the first time it’s happened.”
“Something I don’t get,” Colby said. “If the kid is born in America, it would be an American, right?”
“It?”
Colby waved his hand. “She.”
“She.” The word hung in the air over the water.
“Boy, then.”
“A son.”
“Whatever, man. You see what I’m saying, though? American grandbaby ought to appeal to her pops.”
Jonah flicked the tab on his beer can with a thumbnail. “They can barely afford to stay here together, how could they afford a kid, too?”
“That’s where you come in, Mickey-Bee.”
“Well. That ain’t how her old man sees it.”
Colby belched and crushed the empty and tossed it into the canoe.
“Here.” Jonah held out his untouched beer.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
A dark shape scurried along the cement embankment on the bayou’s far side. The nutria stopped and sniffed and moved on, dragging its long ratlike tail.
Jonah elbowed Colby. “Check it out.”
“Sick.”
“They all right.”
“Big-ass water rats. That’s all.” Colby set his beer down and raised an imaginary rifle. He bumped his eyebrows at Jonah. “My turn, right?”
Jonah slipped into their practiced charade, hefting his own rifle. It was easy, this pretending for his friend. “What you smoking? You got the last one.”
“You must be crazy. You shot the last three Talibans in a row.”
Jonah stayed Colby’s rifle with a hand. “Man, I thought we was a team. How’s that if you the one shooting everybody?”
Across the way, the nutria flopped into the bayou waters.
“There you go,” Colby said, beginning to chuckle. “Another one got away.” He sipped his beer and sighed. “This time next year you’ll have enough money to bring her and y’all’s baby back.” He paused. “And I gotta tell you, it’ll be good to have Luz back. I miss that sweet ass.”
Jonah laughed.
“An ass that could launch a thousand ships.”
“Where’d you get that one?”
“I don’t know.”
5
ON THEIR WAY HOME AN OLD MAN SPOKE TO THEM WITH A damaged voice. He sat on his step with his elbows on his knees, offering a metal thermos. “Hey, kid, you wanna pop?”
Colby replied, “What you got?”
“The good shit.”
“Don’t,” Jonah said.
But Colby grabbed the thermos and swigged from it. He coughed, spitting out what he could. “Fuck is that?”
The old man swiped the thermos back. “Finest mouthwash money can buy.” He took a long pull and cried, “Yessir!”
The old man’s laughter chased them down the street. “Stupid ass,” Jonah said.
“I mean, mouthwash.”
“I told you.”
A car roared through the intersection, stereo pumping. The sound like quick jabs to the breastbone. Colby tensed next to Jonah, but the car was already gone, bass beat dissolving to nothing.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” Colby said. “Thinking about Davonte.”
Jonah gripped Colby’s shoulder. “Come on.” Sirens blipped and faded out there. Colby wasn’t speaking, so Jonah decided to broach it. “Dude don’t play.”
“Huh?”
“Dude you sell for.”
“Oh. No. He don’t.”
They passed through the Central Business District and into their neighborhood, walking again along the cemetery wall. A tugboat’s whistle soaked through the air, mournful. The street ran through several stoplights to end at the river levee a mile farther, and the lights of a gigantic cruise ship slid past the neighborhood’s canopy like a mobile, fantastic city.
“It was my brother got me into it,” Colby said. “I ever tell you that?”
The Infinite Page 6