The Infinite

by Nicholas Mainieri

“No.”

  “Yeah. Jamal.”

  “Your brother made you start selling?”

  “No, that ain’t what I mean. Jamal, see, he got sent away after the storm. He’s got some years left still. He older than me. Anyway, it’s the crew he worked for. They came around after that. Wanted to help out, take care of me. A lot of history there, ya heard? Has something to do with why I can’t take you up on all your mechanic offers and shit. I mean, the money is there, too, but, you know. Complicated, like I said.”

  Jonah didn’t know what to say. All the inaccessible world, it enraged him. But at this moment an opportunity unfolded. It was clear: “We should visit Luz.”

  “Ha,” Colby coughed. “We should.”

  “I’m serious. I mean, let’s just go.”

  Colby glanced at him. “You saying this just because she ain’t called you yet.”

  “No. Maybe. But I mean it. We could drive and be in Mexico in no time, man.”

  Colby waved his hand. “We gonna fix this, Mickey-Bee. Need to be patient.”

  “I know, I know,” Jonah said. “We’ll be fucking saluting people before you know it. But life is about to pick up and move on, you know what I mean?”

  Colby scratched his chin. “An adventure before the adventure, huh.”

  “Yeah.” Jonah bobbed his shoulders. “And it’ll be good to get you away from all this bullshit for a while, right? Just get out of town.”

  Jonah liked the idea that he could do something about what had happened to him, that someone had been taken away but for once was not lost. He promised himself, right then, that once he got the first US Army bonus check he’d bring Luz and the baby back to America. But first he could visit—he could prove something to himself and to her. He could show her that coming back to be with him was the right and best thing to do. Here was promise. Here was purpose.

  Colby looked like he was thinking it over. It would be good for him, too, Jonah thought. For Colby to get out of New Orleans and away from the daily grind in which he took part. They’d come back soon enough, and school wouldn’t have missed them. They would still graduate and enlist.

  “Shit,” Colby said. He laughed with something like relief. “Let’s do it.”

  When Jonah got home and passed through the ghosts of the house, he felt buoyed by the decision. As if he had already begun to alter the shape of his own reality. He found some old road maps in a drawer, hunched beneath the lamp in the kitchen, and traced their route with a marker after he searched it out on the Internet. He saw a link to an article or two about drug-related violence in Mexico, but he hadn’t seen it much in the news before and didn’t linger on it. After all, whatever was happening in Mexico couldn’t be any worse than what they saw every day. No one was surprised by a shooting at a basketball game, for God’s sake. He had Luz’s grandmother’s address in Las Monarcas. He’d need a new map of Mexico. He felt good. He looked at the border. Others had made this journey, many others. But this would be for his reasons, his purpose, and that would make his crossing different. He believed it. And in making the crossing himself, he might learn something about Luz, something that might bring them closer. He could understand her in a new and essential way.

  6

  THEY HASHED OUT A FEW MORE DETAILS AT SCHOOL THE NEXT day, but before anything else could happen Jonah needed to retrieve his truck with the dead battery from Mid-City. He rode the streetcar out in the afternoon and gave the ignition a few futile tries before an older man with skin the color of pecans appeared in the window and asked him if he needed a jump.

  “That’d be great.”

  The man removed his tattered baseball cap and gestured at the corner bar Colby had wanted to visit the night before. “Time for a beer first?”

  “I dunno, I’m kind of in a hurr—”

  “Quick beer,” the man said, already turning and beckoning. He smiled, revealing a gap between his front teeth. “Everybody got time for that.”

  The man’s name was Gil, and his hand was large and rough when they shook. A rooster stalked along the serrated top of a wooden gate next to the bar. It hopped to the ground and strutted, pecked at something in the grit.

  “Lookit that thing,” Gil said. “You know, the feral chickens go around screwing the pigeons.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” Gil answered, busting up into laughter. “Making a bunch of chigeons.”

  Gil rang the bell at the door and the bartender, a pretty blonde, buzzed them in. Small candles flickered on the bar top and on the tables arranged against the wall, and the lamps suspended from the ceiling were the same color as the candle flames. Paintings of vintage nudes hung on the walls. Cigarette smoke slithered, and the video poker machines in the back of the room jingled in the lull between jukebox tracks.

  They sat at the bar and Gil asked Jonah if he was picky. Jonah shook his head. The bartender brought them beers in cold cans, and Gil said, “Couple roll-a-days, too. The young man feels lucky to me.”

  The bartender retrieved a plastic cup, rattling the dice inside it. “Who’s first?”

  To Gil, Jonah said, “Show me how it’s done.”

  “What’s the pot up to?”

  The bartender scanned a page in a lined notebook. “Twenty-one hundred.”

  Gil whistled. “Five of a kind wins the pot. Easy as pie.”

  He lifted the cup and slammed it, opening side down, as if no outcome would surprise him. He lifted the cup again, and the dice gave him a mix of numbers. “That’s that.”

  The bartender slid the cup to Jonah, wrote his name in the ledger, and winked.

  Jonah allowed himself a quick, silent wish before slamming the cup down.

  I could visit her again, at the very least. Maybe stay for a little while longer.

  He lifted the cup. Four threes and a one.

  “Roll again!” the bartender said. “Four of a kind gets you another.”

  Gil slapped Jonah on the back. “Think good thoughts, young man.”

  Jonah gathered the dice, shook the cup, and flipped it over.

  “Hey!” Gil cried. Jonah had again rolled four of a kind. “Hey, now!”

  The jukebox switched tracks and Jonah could hear his heart in his temples. Something was happening. He flipped the cup.

  Two pair and a solo.

  The bartender swept the dice away. “Sorry, babe,” she offered.

  “Still,” Gil said. “Damn lucky. Should take you to the track with me. Drink up.”

  Gil paid for the beers and the dice rolls. Jonah thanked him, and then Gil said, “Woulda been enough for a new car battery and then some, eh?”

  Jonah shrugged. He’d steal a new battery from work. “What would you do with the money, Mr. Gil?”

  Gil looked at him sidelong. “Well. Let’s see.” He lit a cigarette and exhaled smoke. “Suppose I’d like to put it toward a bike. Had my eye on a ’69 Triumph some cat down the road’s selling. But . . .” He paused and laughed, a rich sound. “Probably I’d tell my wife we won some money and we’d take a vacation. Then we’d come home and I still wouldn’t have that bike.”

  “I’d use it. I’m taking a trip.”

  “Where to?”

  “Mexico.”

  “Old Mexico way, huh?”

  “Well. I got a girl.”

  “So you know what I mean, then.” Smoke trailed from his smile.

  “She lives in Mexico.”

  “I see.”

  “Yeah.”

  Gil nodded thoughtfully. He exhaled. “Since forever, men been doing stupid things for the women they love.” He sipped his beer and set the bottle down on the bar, and then he placed his palms flat on the bar top and stared at his hands. “But if there be a worthier cause for foolish action, I don’t know it.” He lifted his beer again and drained it. “Come on. Get you jumped.”

  Dark had fallen. The rooster regarded them from his fence. They got Jonah’s Ford started and shook hands.

  “Ride that good luck of yours a whi
le yet,” Gil offered. “Take care, young man.”

  7

  JONAH LEFT THE TRUCK RUNNING AT THE CURB AND WENT UP THE couple of steps to the Hidalgos’ front door. He knocked and waited. Knocked again.

  “You.”

  There was her father returning home, swaying down the sidewalk with his friend. They were leaning on each other. Mr. Hidalgo’s face was drawn, leathery. Gray flecked his hair. His hands had always seemed huge. He had a black eye. Jonah thought of the way he’d once looked at him, when he’d stopped playing the guitar and dragged Luz inside.

  “You,” he said again.

  “Can I talk to you, Mr. Hidalgo?”

  The men staggered forward, one at a time grasping the railing and climbing the steps. They listed around Jonah.

  “Please,” Jonah said. “I just want to know she got home okay.”

  “Is all your fault,” her father said, and he unlocked the door and went in, followed by his friend.

  Jonah glimpsed the futon and small television with rabbit ears. Jonah got the toe of his boot in the door before it shut, and the friend turned, face reddening, saying something in Spanish.

  “Please,” Jonah called.

  Her father returned, pushed his friend aside, and caught himself with a hand on either side of the doorframe. “This is no place for her.” Sweat slid down his face, and now Jonah spotted the purpled cut running through her father’s eyebrow, where he’d been pistol-whipped. Jonah could smell the booze, too, just like he’d been able to smell it with his own father.

  “Mr. Hidalgo—”

  “This is no place for a baby.” He slapped his chest. “For my grandchild.”

  “You mean my kid.”

  The man stared for a breath, then he grunted and lunged. Jonah sidestepped, and her father stumbled against the railing, reeled around, and lost his balance. He fell down the few steps and landed on the concrete. The friend was shouting at Jonah, and Jonah jumped down to try to help her father up, but the man slapped Jonah’s arm away and sat. He waved a hand to shut up his friend and braced himself, palms on concrete.

  “I haven’t heard from her,” Jonah said. “Tell me, please.”

  Her father sighed and labored to his feet. “I don’t want to talk to you about Luz.”

  “I wanted to keep her here,” Jonah went on, his voice cracking. “I woulda took care of her.”

  “You cannot do this,” he said, as he climbed the steps. “You do not understand.”

  “Yeah. But you coulda helped me to.”

  Jonah pivoted and got into his truck, and he floored it away. Through his anger, the question glared. Why hadn’t Luz called him?

  He called Colby from his cell: “I’m leaving tomorrow. You in?”

  IV

  I’m not from anywhere.

  1

  THE AIRPLANE TOUCHED DOWN IN MONTERREY, A CITY LUZ had never visited. She disembarked onto the tarmac and followed the crowd toward the terminal. Heat danced over the runway. Already the air tasted different.

  Her father had called his mother in Las Monarcas, and Luz had spoken with her. Her grandmother would expect her home this evening. We will take care of everything, her grandmother said. But all Luz could think of was the last time she had seen her abuela, the night Luz’s uncle took her away, bound for El Norte. She ended up crossing the river in the dark, early hours. There was a group of them—they’d waited in the willows for the coyote, and her uncle put her on an inner tube in the water and held on, trudging and then swimming alongside her and guiding her as the water pulled at them. Today was the first time she’d ever been on an airplane, and she had boarded, relieved that she’d been passed through security. She’d flown with her forehead pressed to the porthole glass, watching the earth turn far below. She sought the border, but from her vantage tens of thousands of feet above the ground she couldn’t even locate the river.

  Her father had reserved a taxi service for her online. In the loop she found the apple-red sedan with the company name stenciled across its doors. The driver was a young man with a toothpick in his mouth and an oxford shirt open at the throat. He loaded her bag into the trunk and hustled her into the car. An old woman was already sitting in the backseat. A man with white hair sat up front, wringing his hands. The elders would be dropped off in Monclova en route to Las Monarcas, the driver explained.

  He drove fast, shouting into a cell phone. The cab rocked and pitched, and it was hot inside, in the roiling stink of the driver’s cologne. Luz was queasy. To the south, the mountains cut the haze like colossal incisors. The old woman grinned at Luz, eyes sunk in her creased face. Luz dozed and dreamed of her mother, her eyes that changed in a flash when she scowled. The look reminded Luz of warrior ancestors.

  2

  SHE WOKE TO THE WOMAN DRUBBING HER SHOULDER WITH A clawed hand. The woman’s wrinkles deepened. Her Spanish was slow, careful: “You are very beautiful.”

  Luz was sweating and her heart pounded. The highway carved through a fin of rock. Lime-colored lechuguilla bristled on the shoulder. Luz needed a moment to gather her bearings, to remember where she was. Her father’s bloody face, his eyes blinking at her, the lids slick and red. The guilt surging. The cab banked and leveled out along the scorched scrubland, and Luz breathed deeply to settle her stomach. Power lines swooped in and out of view, strung along wooden telephone poles. A green ridge arched on the horizon. Luz did not know how long she’d slept. Was she almost home? Home. The word tolled in her skull. The place she had left behind forever.

  The old man labored to pivot and peer at Luz over the headrest. Toothless, his gullet bounced as though he was gumming something. “Yes,” he said, “you are beautiful.”

  He was old, but still something hungry glimmered in his eyes. Early on, boys at the school in New Orleans had looked at Luz and suggested nasty things, well within earshot; she was a new body to them. And even after she faded again into near invisibility, from time to time she’d catch a boy leering at her in the hallway. Men had looked at her this way for a long time, and she had noticed it even before she was able to explicitly define what that look meant. She had noticed it when she was crossing into America. After the river they were walking, and her uncle gave her a plastic jug of water to bear. This is your water. Yours alone. And she sat on the ground during a midnight break, cradling the water in her lap and watching the heavens, stars as distant as her own destination, as different. Word came back that it was time to walk again, and they trudged forward, the dry land winnowing individuals away. There were the men all around her, watching her. She carried the jug of water and the men watched, and Luz saw that it was not simply thirst glowering in their eyes.

  3

  THE TAXI ENTERED A SMALL TOWN AS DARK CAME ON. Streetlamps spilled in a pallor across gas stations and boxy truck-stop restaurants. The driver paused his cell phone conversation and said they were not far from Monclova now. Las Monarcas next.

  They rounded a bend, slowed with the mild traffic, and then came to a stop. Behind them a large truck with a covered bed honked. Luz jumped, took a deep breath, and placed a hand on her stomach. Her belly was as flat as ever.

  The old man still watched her over the headrest, gullet bouncing. Luz turned her eyes to the row of businesses and noticed a red graffito like a fresh cut alongside the open-air entrance of a café. The painted symbol consisted of a large letter C with a slash through it, resembling the sign for American cents. Faces in the dimly lit café lifted from their coffees. Pale and sad-faced phantoms. A shiver passed through Luz.

  The woman nudged her, and Luz realized that the old woman had been speaking. “Excuse me?”

  “I said”—the woman dropped her eyes to Luz’s hand, still pressed to her belly—“you have received good news. You have, yes?”

  A lance of cold shock. The old man’s mouth sagged as he looked at the woman and then at Luz and then at the woman again.

  “I am a midwife my whole life,” the woman continued. “I sense these things.”

&nb
sp; Luz’s mouth went dry. Would others sense her pregnancy now, too? She cared little for what others might think, but would her grandmother care? The vantage into her future constricted to a keyhole. Options peeled away like wood shavings, and she imagined not leaving her grandmother’s apartment for months. She put herself back in Jonah’s bed that night she’d told him. His quiet acceptance, his promise for their future together. Would he still mean it? Would she still want it? Right now she did. Right now she needed to be out of this cab. To be back there with him. She needed to hear his voice, to hear his promise.

  The woman watched her, eyes glittering, waiting for some response. The cab started and stopped. The truck behind them honked again. The woman waved her hand and opened her mouth to speak, but it was as if this was some kind of signal: an angry buzz skewered the taxi, and with it Luz’s eardrums depressed and the air inside the cab ballooned. Her cheeks pulled out from her face while pressure jabbed her sternum. The woman’s skull snapped backward and unzipped itself onto the headrest, and the rear windshield shattered. The old woman’s corpse slumped against the safety belt.

  The driver dropped his phone and clamped a hand to his throat. Blood spurted from between his fingers, spraying across the windshield and the spiderweb-like bullet holes in the glass. The old man opened his toothless mouth and screamed. The engine revved and the taxi leaped from its standstill, tearing through the back corner of the car ahead. Luz was a pair of eyes atop something formless, bolted into the seat. A white-hot silence filled her. No thought or feeling or sound.

  A car speeding in the other direction clipped them. The world yawed, and the cab slammed into an aluminum billboard. The windows atomized. The cab came through the billboard and the ground fell away and night sky swung around the vehicle. Luz’s stomach bottomed out, and then the cab crashed sidelong into the roadside ditch. The seatbelt punched the wind from her lungs. Sound surged back, the complex weaving of it—gunfire, sporadic reports linking into an automatic rip.