The Infinite

by Nicholas Mainieri

  “You have to do something. You have to try.”

  She stood up. She leaned against a clear piece of wall and stretched her calves. If Cicatriz returned again, alone, perhaps she could surprise him by being on her feet. She reached for her toes, stretched her hamstrings, a good feeling ruined by the rush of blood to her head and the aching cut over her ear. If she could somehow get past him and get out of the shed, perhaps she could outrun him. She lunged to one side and then the other. She wouldn’t be able to run full speed with her wrists bound, though. And if she did get past him and she did outrun him, where would she go? There was no way of telling what was out there.

  She sat down again, woozy and wondering if she had a concussion. She’d never been hit in the head before. She thought of the fights at school. Her near invisibility in that place, the worlds she lived between. In New Orleans her thoughts began arriving in English, and though she had returned to Mexico her thoughts continued to arrive in English. She was still something different. The shed walls seemed to collapse on her and draw away, like the respiring of a black lung. She was hungry and thirsty and her mind raced. And underneath all of it still was her pregnancy and its claims.

  Pain seared through her fingertips—she’d been nervously scratching at the mortar between the tiles in the floor. The grout, damp from her sweat and urine, had crumbled a bit. She scraped at it again and felt the hard edge of one of the floor tiles.

  Her fingertips sang and it wasn’t long before blood slicked the groove. She smelled the iron, saw Papá bloodied on the couch. How could she have said no to him? There had been no other option. The mortar came away in pebble-sized chunks. The nerves in her fingers howled. She worked her nails beneath the tile and pried until she thought she’d lose them, and then she scoured the mortar again, feeling her nails break. Water filled her eyes. She wedged her fingers beneath the tile and it popped loose, skittering off across the floor into the dark. When had it gotten dark?

  Her pulse throbbed in her fingertips. She crawled, patting the ground until she found the tile. It was flat and hard edged, about the size of a saucer. She put it in her lap and scooted on her ass to sit alongside the door and wait.

  9

  LAUGHTER. A BURST OF MUSIC, A DOOR SLAMMING. SHE JERKED where she sat with her ear to the tin and stood, holding the tile at her waist. A pair of boots shifted and crunched in the grit outside. The chain rattled and clanged and then the door swung open, the orange glow of the yard. In came a flashlight, beam bursting and banishing the shadow from the back of the shed. Next came a clay bowl, some beans and rice. In stepped Cicatriz.

  Luz swung from her shoes, putting all of her behind the tile, leading with its hard edge into the bridge of his nose. His face knocked the tile from her hands. She didn’t feel a crunch, didn’t feel an impact at all, but the food erupted from the bowl and he dropped in the doorway. She crashed into the wall with her momentum. His hands were to his face and he rocked on his shoulders, and she leaped over him into the yard.

  A barren stretch of brown grass and dirt. A woodpile and a long-handled ax. Music pumped from the adobe house. Smoke shifted pale over the roof.

  Cicatriz grabbed her ankle. He was rolling, trying to get up. Wet grunts coming through the black smudge of his face. Blood roped to the dust. Luz pivoted and kicked him, heel to ruined nose, and he flopped onto his back.

  She picked up the flashlight. She saw the big knife on Cicatriz’s hip, and while his hands were over his face she bent and drew the blade—heavy, awkward in her bound hands along with the flashlight—and she turned and sprinted to the back of the house. She slid along the wall and crouched beneath a windowsill.

  They were listening to hip-hop inside. The smell of woodsmoke and roasting meat. She switched off the flashlight and peeked over the sill. Men sat at a table playing cards, firelight against the cards fanned in their hands.

  A moan. Cicatriz rose to his knees. Luz took off, running, leveling the knife and the flashlight ahead of her.

  The pickup and two Jeep Wranglers were parked next to the house. The Jeeps sat on tall off-road wheels, and their racks of roof lights bristled like the hackles of angry dogs. She sprinted from the sphere of light around the house, and the stars descended.

  In the wash of moonlight, the desert filled with nebulous shapes. Scrub trees and agave and cacti, rushing out of the dark. A distant cordillera existed because the mountains themselves were not filled with stars. Her ghost runner sprang to life. Cold and growing. She felt she could hear him breathing, gaining on her. Run. Her legs were weak, her breath thin. She had grown out of shape and she was beat up.

  She was perhaps three hundred meters from the house when she heard the vehicles roar to life, one after the other. She glanced, saw the manifold high beams, and felt her ghost runner brush past her face. Something like a brick—the paddle-shaped limb of a cactus tree—slammed into her shoulder and spun her. She hunched, pulling scorching breaths. The air tasted like blood. A heavy burning in her shoulder from the cactus. The vehicles climbed into gear, a sound fleet and menacing over the desert. Luz wedged the flashlight into the crutch between two limbs of the tree and flipped the switch on. Then she turned and ran in the opposite direction, parallel to the mountain range.

  The vehicles angled toward the flashlight. When Luz stubbed her foot against a rock and fell, she rolled to avoid impaling herself on the knife. She retched, bile stringing from her lips. She wiped her mouth and got up and ran. Come on. Push.

  Another fifty meters and she paused. The vehicles had converged on the flashlight, and shadowed figures moved through the high beams.

  Luz scrambled on, bear-crawling up an outcrop of stone, shins banging against rock. The headlights swung like distant alien spotlights, but once she crested the stone they vanished from view. She gasped into dust. The air was suddenly cool, soaking into her skin. She dragged herself through a sandy wash and then down the bank of a dry arroyo and onto the parched bed.

  She sat with her back against the embankment. Listening for engines, for voices. A deep, slow breath helped a little. She squeezed the handle of the knife between her knees, placed the twine around her wrists against the blade, and sawed up and down. Her bindings fell away and the air tickled her numb wrists. Somewhere, a creature yipped.

  V

  I never hear you say anything.

  1

  THE RESIDUE OF THE NIGHTTIME SLUGS GLEAMED LIKE VEINS OF quartz in the sidewalk as Jonah walked out to the truck. He had determined that they’d stop to see Dex at the camp, and as Jonah turned the ignition he contended with memory. He had truly been a little boy then. It was the day Dex had been booted from the high school basketball team. Bill was still alive, but war was suddenly imminent; they would see him maybe once more before he deployed, and that would be the final time they’d ever see him. Dex had been fighting at school. Now he’d been caught smoking pot in the school washroom, too, and it was more than likely that he’d be expelled. Dex and Pop were screaming at each other. Jonah stood by and watched the old man drop Dex, felt the thump of his brother’s back against the floor. Dex ran out, and Jonah followed. Dex sat behind the wheel of the truck, blood trickling over his lip. The same truck Jonah now brought to rattling life. They drove to the camp, Jonah and his brother, and in the morning they boated out to a blind and hid with their shotguns. Jonah had shot a duck—the first of his life—and it crumpled and fell out of the fog, splashing dead in the water, and Dex had clapped him on the back. The words Dex had said branded themselves into some secret place and Jonah could still hear them: You crunched it!

  Colby came out of his house with a gym bag under his arm and jogged to the truck. “She was still asleep,” he said. “I left her a note.”

  “You okay with that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’d you say to her?”

  “That we was going on a road trip, I’d be back soon.” Colby pulled a roll of rubber-banded bills from his pocket. He shrugged at Jonah’s look. “We might as
well use it for gas.”

  They lifted out of downtown on the interstate. The tall buildings and gigantic sun-drenched bulb of the Superdome. Next came the concrete suburbs, then soon enough the second-growth cypress swamp. Limbless trees, gray and dead looking. Far off, the spines of a chemical plant bristled. The massive bridge over the river assembled in the haze ahead, rising up and up out of the low-lying pastures. Colby remarked that the bridge was weird and scary out here in the country, without a city around it. At the apex they saw ships chugging upriver or unloading containers onto barges. The truck descended to sugarcane fields. The two-lane highway seemed unchanged. Jonah pulled off into a half gas station, half casino.

  While he pumped gas he asked Colby if he’d ever been to a duck camp.

  “Big-screen TV and sexy serving chicks, right?”

  “You got it.”

  “What’s your bro like?”

  “Dex,” Jonah said. “He’s kinda tough, right. I mean, he lives alone in a swamp and makes his living hunting all year. Gator, duck, deer. Whatever.”

  “What he say about us coming?”

  Jonah shrugged. “He doesn’t know we are.”

  Driving again, Colby scrolled through radio stations. He settled on a zydeco channel and danced in the passenger seat. Jonah knew his friend was trying to make him laugh, so he laughed. Colby paused.

  “You think Luz will be happy to see me?”

  “Yeah.” Jonah glanced at him. “Course she will.”

  “I mean, she won’t be bummed it ain’t you alone?”

  “Nah, man. She loves you.”

  Jonah recalled Mardi Gras day. Luz must already have known she was pregnant. Colby had knocked down that coconut that was going to hit her, and then she had kissed him on the cheek. Jonah watched Colby place a hand along his face, as if to hold the feeling there. Jonah had waited for Colby to start teasing him, but his friend never said a word.

  2

  THE UNPAVED ROAD RAN PARALLEL TO A NARROW CHANNEL beyond which began the intricate mesh of waterways and spongy islands, shallows where speckled trout and redfish swam. Individual camps were built along the bank. Low structures of clapboard or vinyl siding stood on cinder-block piers or floated in the water on pontoons. Pickup trucks with steel gun cabinets in their beds were parked in the driveways.

  The old McBee camp had new siding, and there was a satellite dish bolted to the roof. A shiny Dodge Ram was in the driveway. Jonah pulled the F-100 in and parked. His head felt light and he closed his eyes for a moment.

  “You cool?” Colby asked.

  “Yeah. Yeah. Let’s go.”

  They shouldered their bags and knocked at the camp door, but nobody answered.

  “Musta stepped out,” Colby said.

  “Out on the boat, maybe.”

  Around the back of the camp they sat on a bench butted up against the wall. A large nest rested in the upper tangle of a cypress tree across the channel. Jonah searched and found the eagle, circling in a thermal. He nudged Colby and pointed it out. Colby whistled. “Nice out here.” He slapped at his forearm. “Except the mosquitoes.”

  “All you can do is ignore ’em.”

  A grass-and-weed lawn sloped down to the channel. There was a cleaning shed and a grill. A footpath furrowed the bank at the water’s edge.

  “We used to have a dog,” Jonah said, “when I was a kid. A black Lab, you know, to retrieve the ducks. I’d race her up and down that path.”

  “What y’all call her?”

  “Girl.”

  “Girl?”

  “Yeah. When we got here, Girl would be so excited she’d jump out the truck and dive into the water. I was always scared a gator would get her.” Jonah chuckled, shook his head. “Stupid.”

  After a moment Colby asked, “That how she die?”

  “Old age. Couple years ago.”

  “Oh. You sure you good?”

  Jonah nodded, and then he saw his big brother coming up the footpath.

  A dog, a puppyish black Labrador, trotted at Dex’s heels. Dex wore rubber muck boots and camouflage overalls and a long-sleeved thermal shirt. Brown hair spilled out from the back of his baseball cap, and his eyes glared within the telescoped bill. In one hand he carried a cooler and with the other a plastic grocery bag. A fabric rifle case was slung over his shoulder. He halted, briefly, when he noticed Jonah and Colby.

  Before Dex was within earshot, Colby asked, “When you see him last?”

  “Last year.”

  Dex neared. “Jonah. Hey, man.”

  “Hey, Dex.”

  Colby jumped to his feet, extended his hand, and introduced himself.

  Dex set the cooler down and shook but didn’t say anything.

  The Lab bounded to Jonah and tried to bait him into a fight but settled for a scratch behind the ears. “What’s his name?”

  “Donald,” Dex answered. “Donald the dog.”

  Jonah glanced at his brother. “Named him after Pop?”

  Dex grinned quick, small. He cleared his throat and hefted the grocery bag, which was full of things that looked like long, withered carrots. “Gotta go turn these in.”

  Colby asked what they were.

  “Nutria tails.”

  Colby’s face went stricken.

  “Lemme let y’all in,” Dex said.

  After the Dodge fired up and pulled out, Colby cried, “The fuck he got a bag of nutria tails for?”

  “You get paid by the tail,” Jonah said. “Five bucks apiece. Didn’t know that?”

  “People use them things for something?”

  “Invasive species, man. State’s got a bounty on them. Tails are proof.”

  “Five bucks,” Colby said, “to touch one of them things?”

  The interior of the camp had not changed much in the few years since Jonah had been there. A ratty couch and armchair, linoleum floor, wallpaper made to look like wood. Donald leaped onto the armchair and fell asleep. There was a new gun rack by the door, as well as a new coffee table with three picture frames propped on it. The first photo was the one of Jonah and his two brothers, the same one he had up at home. The second frame held two photos, cropped to fit. They were the shots of Jonah’s father and mother, the duck blind and the river. Lydia, Jonah thought, and it felt strange to think his mother’s name. He hadn’t thought it in a long time, maybe. Colby tapped the third photo, a smiling blond woman before a pastel backdrop, and asked who she was, but Jonah had no idea.

  When Dex returned, Donald woke and leaped from the couch. Dex patted the dog on the head, set his keys on the coffee table, and then went down the hall to change clothes.

  Colby whispered, “Hey, do your bro like black people?”

  “He’s just quiet, man.”

  Dex returned in jeans and a T-shirt. He sat in the armchair. “So.”

  Jonah held up the picture of the blond woman. “Who’s this?”

  “My girlfriend. Sharon.”

  “You got a girlfriend?”

  Dex nodded. “She’s a nurse in Houma. Comes over here on the weekends.”

  “That’s nice,” Colby tried.

  Jonah looked around the camp. “I haven’t been here in a long time.”

  “I know it,” Dex said.

  “Surprised?”

  Dex shrugged. “Come anytime you want. It’s your camp, too.”

  Something twitched in the pit of Jonah’s stomach as he stared down the uncompromising depth of history.

  “School’s not out yet, right?” Dex went to the fridge, retrieved a beer, and cranked the cap off.

  Colby answered when Jonah didn’t: “Long story.”

  “Huh.” Dex sipped the beer. “I caught some nice specks today. Gonna grill ’em up. Jonah, come help me out back. Beers in the fridge, Colby.”

  The sun failed quickly. Dex flipped on the floodlight that cast an alley down to the water. Some creature’s eyes gleamed and vanished with a splash.

  Inside the shed, Dex removed three good-sized speckled trout from
the cooler. Bodies curved and stiffening. The light of the lone bulb in the shed ran through their green-purple skin. He set them on a cutting board next to a long, thin-bladed knife. He hefted a bag of charcoal from the back of the shed and asked Jonah to fillet the fish while he got the grill going.

  Jonah placed his hand around one of the cold bodies. His palm came away coated with fish slime. He looked at his brother.

  Dex answered: “You’ll remember how. Keep going.”

  Jonah worked the knife in behind the gills and sawed toward the tail.

  Charcoal clinked against the grill bottom. “So, what’s up?”

  It felt funny to try to explain it to Dex, brother or not. “You’re gonna think I’m crazy.”

  “That’s all right.”

  Jonah pared the skin away from the fillet and flipped the fish over. “There’s a girl.”

  “Okay.”

  “She’s gonna have a baby.”

  Jonah waited for Dex to say something, but Dex didn’t speak.

  “My baby.”

  Dex kept quiet. The fish on the board was head and spine and guts and tail.

  “She’s Mexican. I mean, like, straight up from Mexico. Her pops sent her back when she told him she was pregnant. Anyway, ” Jonah said as he bent to work on the next fish, “I’m on my way to Mexico.”

  “Mexico.”

  “Yeah.” Jonah finished the fillet, dropped the knife, and turned toward Dex. “Gonna visit, but eventually”—and he felt his stomach seize with doubt as he said it aloud to his brother—“I’m gonna bring her and our kid back to the States. I got a plan.”

  Dex nodded slowly. Then he entered the shed and gathered the fish parts in both hands. “We’ll wait a minute for the grill to heat up.” He walked out, and Jonah followed.