The Infinite

by Nicholas Mainieri

  The old horses were breathing hard, stamping their hooves. Luz had never been on a horse before, and she’d expressed her fears while Felipo rushed to saddle the old animals, Pegaso and Canguro. He explained that his family used to run a ranch and these were the last of their horses. The horses had been raised handling tourists who’d never ridden a day in their lives. “Just get on and hold the reins,” he said. “They know what they are doing.” And he’d been right.

  The great heaving of Pegaso’s rib cage beneath her knees, the nimble yet powerful strides as he found the solid spots in the steep mountain trail—it amazed Luz. She hadn’t needed to do anything as Pegaso followed Canguro up the rocky switchback. But now she watched the Jeep’s lights below and guilt overpowered any other emotion. Felipo’s grandmother was still down there, and so was his brother, Ignacio. The little boy had been asleep. They hadn’t even said good-bye.

  Felipo’s face was stoic in the dark. Canguro tossed his head and snorted. The Jeep began to move, and soon enough the vehicle crawled out of the village along the road.

  “What,” Luz ventured quietly, “did your grandmother mean when she said your family knew Cicatriz?”

  Felipo shook his head. “Let’s get a little farther.” Pause. “I don’t think he’d hurt them.” Before Luz could say anything, Felipo turned Canguro away from San Cristóbal and Pegaso stepped to follow.

  They stopped for the night on the far side of the mountain, on the way down. San Cristóbal was gone, as was Monclova, out on the plain. Eastward, the valley lay in shadow. A twinkling homestead here and there. The twinned headlights of an automobile on an unseen highway, arcing silent as a satellite. A warm wind blew, and Felipo found them a little stone flat, sheltered by a fist of rock. He took care of the horses, and Luz busied herself unrolling their blankets. They lay down in silence.

  Luz looked at the sky and felt lost, afloat in an ocean. She closed her eyes and saw the woman in the cab, the unreal emptying of her skull, and she opened her eyes again and kept them open. Her pulse jumped in her neck and she clasped her hands together and reached for her mother.

  “My grandmother,” Felipo started, a quiet voice in the dark, “she says that if El Narco touches a place, it is there forever.”

  Luz listened, jaw muscles tensing.

  “I think she is right, but it came to our home a long time before you did, Luz.” The boy sat up in the starlight. “Cicatriz,” he went on. “His real name is Juan Luis Medina. He is my cousin.”

  Now Luz sat up and stared at Felipo.

  “I will tell you a story,” he said. “Don’t worry. Please.”

  Luz looked out to the never-ending dark of the valley. Where am I . . . and where am I running to now?

  Felipo waved his four-fingered hand to the south. “Our horse ranch was in the hills between Saltillo and Monterrey . . .”

  6

  FELIPO WAS TEN YEARS OLD. IGNACIO WAS VERY YOUNG. THEY lived with their parents, and in the other homes on the property lived the ranch hands as well as another family, including the teenage Juan Luis Medina.

  They bred horses and accepted reservations from tourists who wanted the real caballero experience. Felipo’s family took the tourists riding in the mountains and along the riverbed. They stopped for a lunch of cold marinated steak, tortillas, and beans packed by Felipo’s mother and his aunts. They stopped on the trail where it overlooked the valley, and far down there an ancient pyramid stood. The pyramid was brown, awash in sunlight. One could see this and feel the ancient ones, hear their enduring murmurs.

  The teenage Juan Luis hated the ranch life, and he began making visits to Monterrey on the weekends. Word eventually reached the family that he’d become an halcón—a lookout—for a gang of narcos tied up with the Gulf Cartel. When the men of the ranch accused him, Juan Luis denied it. They knew it was true, but they let Juan Luis stay because somehow boxes of toys started arriving for the children on the ranch. Then more boxes, of clothes, and of fruits and vegetables. It was the cartel, of course, giving those things. Generous souls. But it wasn’t long before Felipo’s father woke in the night to a commotion and found a group of men unloading packages from a truck and carrying them into the Medina house.

  Felipo’s father grabbed Juan Luis by the shirt, and one of the other men wrenched him away from the boy, telling him to go back inside, old man. Into his own home. The next day Felipo’s father tried to banish Juan Luis from the property.

  Days later, a noise like a wind woke Felipo. He opened the bedroom door, and the hallway was full of smoke. He ran to Ignacio’s bed, where the mute child sat with arms extended and face contorted in soundless wailing. Felipo lifted his brother and ran from the house.

  And Felipo would always see this, imagining it over and over again. How it must have happened.

  They were there. His mother and his father, on their bellies in the dirt. The lights from the truck were on them. Their blood, black and glistening and soaking into the earth. He could not see either face but it was them and they were dead.

  Ignacio squirmed, mouth agape. The truck tossed soil and fled down the drive. A towering crash—their home’s chimney collapsed through the roof tiles and the beams. The whole house would burn.

  Felipo passed his brother off to one of the others who had gathered with the commotion. He got the shotgun from behind the seat in his father’s truck. The truck keys were melting in the house, so he sprinted to the stable and saddled Pegaso and set off at a gallop after the fleeing vehicle. The taillights were specks and then they were gone, headed east, toward Monterrey. Felipo kept the heading, riding until the sun broke, piercing over the hills.

  He rode through an outpost of sorts—a gas station and a few other bunkers of cinder block. Still miles yet from the Monterrey–Saltillo highway. A truck was parked outside one of the blocky structures. Felipo dismounted, hitched Pegaso to a fence post, and went to the bunker’s wooden door. He put his ear to it but didn’t hear much. He opened the door and stepped through, shotgun at his waist.

  There were five or six men in the room. Most of them were asleep in various spots on the floor. Felipo’s memory of this would always be blurred, the images strangling down to a constricted view of the two men who were still awake, where they sat at a table with beer bottles before them. One of these men was Felipo’s cousin. Juan Luis turned toward him. Juan Luis watched Felipo raise the shotgun, watched him take aim. And then someone grabbed Felipo from behind, pulling the gun so that he blew a hole in the ceiling. The man was large—or much bigger than a ten-year-old, at least. He wrested the gun away from Felipo, and the other men, rudely awakened, began to laugh.

  Felipo did something then, a stupid gesture he’d seen in an American movie, something he understood only marginally. The men laughed all the harder, and one of them seized the finger, and they held him over the table, hands clamped and pinning his wrist, and Felipo remembered the pressure, the incredible pressure, only.

  He woke to them cauterizing the wound with cigarettes, and he passed out again. When he woke the next time he was alone in the house and bruised and bloody. He tasted blood in his mouth. He got up and hobbled out onto the empty and dusty road. They left Pegaso alive, thank God.

  7

  LUZ HELD HERSELF, SUDDENLY COLD. FELIPO WAS QUIET. “I’M SO sorry,” Luz whispered.

  Felipo lifted his face, ghostly and eyeless in the dark. A small shrug.

  “No,” Luz said, hoarsely. “I’m sorry you found me on the road. That it was you, not somebody else.”

  Felipo sighed. “I am glad we can help. That’s all.”

  But Luz saw the dying man in the desert so long ago, felt the heavy sloshing of the water jug in her hand. A regret like poison for the rest of her life. The horrible paradox of one’s duty to survive and the choices God still made you make.

  “Thank you for this,” she said. “No,” she said when Felipo tried to wave her gratitude away. “Thank you.”

  After a while Felipo went on. “Ignacio and
I, we moved to my grandmother’s after that. It is not hard to imagine what became of the ranch.”

  Luz imagined the sweltering shed where they held her, the packages of narcotics stacked against the walls. “Your cousin doesn’t work for them anymore, does he?”

  Felipo shook his head. “I heard sometime he’d become a sicario for them. A, you know, assassin. But then he fell out of their favor. There were different stories.”

  “What are the stories?”

  Felipo grumbled. “They aren’t pleasant.”

  Luz said, “I don’t care.”

  The boy sighed again. “One story says the Zetas bought him and paid him to kill his own boss, but he failed.” Felipo drew a finger across his face to explain the scar—punishment. He began to say something else, trailed off.

  “What.”

  “I don’t want to use some of these words in front of you.”

  It was a ridiculous notion. “It’s fine,” she said.

  “I heard,” Felipo continued slowly, “that my cousin likes boys instead of girls. One day his boss, who considered himself a righteous man, caught Juan Luis with another man’s cock in his mouth, and so—” He paused. “I heard this from some other guys, you know? Not my grandmother.”

  “It’s okay,” Luz told him.

  “So his boss killed the other man, but first he measured the man’s cock across Juan Luis’s face with a knife.” Again, he drew his finger across his face. “Cicatriz.”

  There was quiet on the mountain. The deep sky, the apprehended universe. “Why didn’t his boss kill him, too?” Luz asked. Then she clarified: “Why let him live, I mean, if either story is true? He’s like a renegade now, he robs them, right?”

  Felipo shrugged. “Like I said. They are just stories. The stories are everywhere, about everyone.” He lay down on his blanket and exhaled. “Who can say what is the truth?”

  Luz thought about stories. About stories and what they could do, and of course it was only what they could do that mattered. She wondered whether Cicatriz would keep looking for her. As if Felipo read her mind, he spoke up.

  “I think you’ll be safe now. It was probably easy enough for him, a short drive, once he saw the knife in the road. But now. I don’t know. He’ll have other concerns.”

  “I hope,” Luz said, “he left your family alone.” Her imagination ran with the thought. A septic guilt.

  “Don’t worry,” Felipo said.

  “I hope your grandmother just told him we ran up the mountain. I hope she just told him what he wanted to know and he decided to give up.”

  “I know,” Felipo said.

  “I’m sorry for getting you and your family into this. I’m sorry.”

  “Stop.”

  “But I am. I worry for Ignacio.”

  Felipo didn’t say anything at first. He shifted on his blanket. Then he answered:

  “I worry for my brother, too, but not because of this. I worry for him because he will grow up and be unsurprised that things like this happen, and happen all the time. That is not your fault.”

  8

  SHE WAS RUNNING. SHE WAS RUNNING AND BEARING LEFT AND left. This track, a circle without escape. Her ghost runner gained. Cold and clawing. The breath burned in her throat, in her lungs. There needed to be an exit—but she never came to it and she couldn’t stop for the spirit gaining on her. As she’d never done in her waking life, she glanced to see the shape of her ghost runner and saw that it wasn’t a man at all but an enormous hand, a man’s hand with cracked fingernails and silver baubles jangling around his wrist. The hand was large enough to crush her. Her legs dragged but she pushed on, running. The walls hemming her in were made of rope, coarse rope thicker than she was tall. Rope threaded from fibers that cut at her arms and face like saw grass. Another hand descended ahead of her, ready to pluck her from the ground and crush her to jelly, and she had no claws and no stinger with which to fight. She couldn’t stop but there was no escape, and so she ran toward that waiting grip.

  9

  IN THE SUNRISE SHE WATCHED A FREIGHT TRAIN SMOKE ACROSS the valley. They rode the horses into the hills and onto the plain and crossed the now-empty tracks. The power lines overhead buzzed. Felipo kept the horses at a walk, not wanting to push the old animals. They went along a country road concurrent with wire-fenced cattle pasture. The land undulated again, gently. An irrigated field. A blue cordillera in the distance. Las Monarcas must be somewhere in the foothills, Luz thought. They rode, passing Felipo’s water thermos back and forth.

  They halted around midday and approached a stand of juniper. The tree bark reminded Luz of the alligators she’d seen with Jonah in the New Orleans aquarium, their rough hides. The trees cast marbled shade on the rock, and water bubbled and ran over the stone into a small, sediment-colored pool. The horses bent to drink and Felipo unpacked the food his grandmother had hastily gathered for them.

  “My favorite,” he said, “was at the end of the rides, when we let the tourists race.”

  “Even if they were like me?”

  He gestured at the horses with a wedge of tortilla. “You see how good they are. They all were.” He smiled, wistful. “There was a flat grassy stretch near the end of the day’s ride. A field. We lined them up to race, a pair at a time, but if there was an odd number of riders my father had me race the final tourist.”

  Pegaso lifted his mouth from the water, sneezed, shook his head.

  “I was the better rider, but I would give them a race, do you see? Pull ahead and then slow down and fall even. I could see it in their faces. The thrill. And then I always let them win. They threw up their arms and shouted.”

  Luz smiled. “Always?”

  “Most of the time.” Felipo shrugged. “Not if they deserved to lose.”

  Luz laughed, and then a rush of color and noise swept through the juniper trees—monarch butterflies, thousands of them, surging into the oasis. They rose in a whispering gyre, wing strokes brushing against skin, and began to settle, blanketing the trees in a shimmering quilt of orange and black. All the while, the migration thickened. A grotto of wings. A monarch wobbled onto Luz’s palm, then fluttered off again.

  “I remember this,” she said. She smiled. “I’d almost forgotten.” There was the hill somewhere in Las Monarcas, the hill with the big oak tree at its crown. The monarchs came every year, soon after Easter. Soon, now, she realized. Her mother used to lead her by the hand up the winding trail, just a thin scratch in the hillside. Luz’s calf muscles burned from the hike. Her mother helped her along, pulling with her hand rough and chapped from the scalding water and the lye. They crested the hill into the susurration of so many wings. They are here for you, my daughter.

  And now, in this living grotto, Luz looked to her own hands, her dishwashing hands that were not soft, either. Her bloodied fingertips and broken nails. She saw her future, her new future, charted like a course on a map. She would be home in Las Monarcas, and she would have her own child. It would be the same migration, one year and then the next, and she would repeat the same ritual, one year and then the next.

  That is your life. It is determined. Can you do it, Luz? Can you do it?

  She looked at the monarchs where they rested, and fear filled her.

  VII

  You leave those feelings alone.

  1

  BEFORE THEY LEFT THE CAMP, DEX OUTFITTED THEM WITH TUPPERWARE containers of leftovers and gave them a hundred dollars for their help. Hardly an unnecessary word passed between Dex and Jonah while they packed, and Dex watched them back out of the driveway but never raised a hand in farewell. They drove west through the Atchafalaya Basin, one great primordial sweep of water and earth and flora. By midmorning they had crossed the Sabine and entered Texas. They passed through Beaumont, and then Houston reared up, serpentine tangles of overpass and exit ramp. They crept along in the six-lane gridlock.

  “This as far as I been from home,” Colby said. “After this, it’s all new.”

  “Y’all eva
cuated to Houston, too?”

  “Yeah. Me and Mom and Jamal.” Heat danced over the cars. Colby spoke to his window. “He’s been gone to jail since before I met you.”

  “What he do?”

  “What he had to, I guess.”

  “Huh. I got an uncle in Angola.”

  “So you know what I mean, then.”

  Jonah shrugged. “The second time in there for him. Dumb-ass.”

  “What he do?”

  “Busted parole. They found him in a Biloxi casino with a bunch of money wasn’t his.”

  “Ha. What about the first time?”

  “Know the difference between manslaughter and murder?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Manslaughter.” Jonah punched the horn and immediately felt stupid for doing so. He looked at Colby. “Like you said. What he had to do.”

  They lurched forward before taillights flared through the column of cars.

  “That’s how Pop explained it, at least,” Jonah said. “When my uncle got out he was gonna come live with us, so my dad tried to explain it to me. I was a kid. I asked if he was a murderer. I didn’t know the fucking difference, you know? I still don’t, not really. But Pop smacked me across the mouth and I ran out to the backyard.”

  Colby listened, face placid.

  “Jamal ever tell you that crying was for pussies or anything like that? I got that shit all the time. So I just stand there, holding my breath. Don’t fuckin’ cry, I say to myself. And Pop comes out and stands behind me. He says sorry. He always said sorry. I dunno. He grabs my shoulders and turns me around and looks me in the face and goes, Jonah, listen to me. I’m telling you this because I love you. What your uncle did was an accident, yeah, but he had to protect himself. He wouldn’t be here at all—alive, I mean—if not for this.”