The Infinite

by Nicholas Mainieri

  “Dex. It’s me. Jonah. I’m getting on a bus soon from Texas to Baton Rouge. I don’t know how long it’ll take. Dad’s truck is okay, don’t worry. Colby drove it home. Uh, I’ll call you soon as I can. Hoping you can come get me.” He hung up and handed the phone back to Gonzalez and said, “Thanks.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Gonzalez answered, shifting the SUV into gear.

  “Why are you helping me?” Jonah asked.

  Gonzalez shrugged in a way that suggested he was thinking of a response, but then he said nothing and they drove in silence to the same bus station where Jonah had said good-bye to Colby. The heat rolled in waves from the pavement as they walked toward the entrance. Again, Jonah tried to tell the man he appreciated the assistance.

  “You know,” Gonzalez said, “my great-grandfather fought with Zapata. That’s what they say, at least.”

  Jonah didn’t understand, but he listened.

  “I guess it could be true. Anyway, my mom likes the thought. You ever heard of Zapata?”

  Jonah told him no.

  “Well,” Gonzalez went on, “don’t worry too much about what Connelly had to say. He can be a dick.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  Gonzalez opened the door and looked south, past Jonah. “History,” he said, “proves all of us wrong, sooner or later.”

  4

  JONAH SLEPT FOR MUCH OF THE FIFTEEN-HOUR RIDE, WAKING FOR the transfers and not talking to anybody. A crick cinched up the side of his neck. He allowed half-asleep ruminations, dreaming of future things. I’ll run specials on oil changes. I’ll do discounts on realignments, help you deal with all the goddamn broken streets. He woke when the bus crossed the Sabine in the dark and he remained alert as it ascended over Lake Charles, the void opening beneath the bridge. The bus stopped briefly in Lafayette, and Jonah got out, plugged his phone into an outlet in the station, and called his brother.

  Dex was waiting for him in Baton Rouge wearing a ball cap, T-shirt, and jeans. The air in his Dodge Ram blew cool and strong. The swamp suggested itself, flashing past in dark bursts along the unlit two-lane state highway. Thinking of Luz’s midnight departure, of the incompatibility of their visions, of Luz’s kidnapping and what it must have been like—it all made dread stir in Jonah’s gut. Jonah didn’t want to tell Dex what had happened. And how to explain to his brother what he wanted to do next? As of this moment, the auto shop was just an idea. Just a figment. To put actual words to the dream required knowledge, figures, plans. Without that, Jonah didn’t yet have the confidence to utter it—as if hearing it aloud would reveal it, too, as just another foolish and ultimately heartbreaking enterprise. He could imagine the subtext of Dex’s reply, whatever the actual words might be—What the hell do you know about making something like that happen, little Jonah?

  Eventually Dex broke the silence. “You look rough.”

  “I know.”

  “Sharon’s at the camp. You’ll get to meet her.” Dex paused. “I figure we can go there for a night or two, and I’ll get you back to New Orleans for school on Monday.”

  “Okay.”

  The outside seemed to repel Jonah’s focus. The engine hummed. He saw Dex reflected in the window, watched him glance between him and the highway.

  “Luz lost the baby.” Jonah said it without turning from the window.

  There were no words. His brother’s eyes were on him, then they slid to the highway again.

  After a while Dex said, “There’s gonna be a cookout tomorrow. Might be good. Take your mind off things.”

  Jonah didn’t answer and so Dex went on.

  “I shot this hog. You know, one of them feral things. They migrate to where the food is. Killed all a neighbor’s chickens. Whole mess of blood and feathers. You shoulda seen this thing, real big son of a bitch. Three-, four-inch tusks. Had to flag down a guy on the road to help me get it in the truck.” Dex chuckled, glanced at Jonah. “Anyway, dude a few camps over has this Cajun microwave, so we’re gonna roast the meat under that charcoal and have a little party.”

  “Cool,” Jonah offered. It was just a word to say.

  “You’ll like it,” Dex tried.

  “All right.”

  5

  FRAGRANT CITRONELLA TORCHES BURNED AROUND THE YARD IN an effort to keep the mosquitoes in check. People from up and down the bayou were gathered. There was music and beer and laughter. Frogs trilling in the swamp. The sky in the east deepened, a dark indigo rolling across heaven toward the last tangerine wreckage of the sun. The roasting hog meat smelled good. The old boy who cooked wore an apron and an industrial-looking oven mitt. The Cajun microwave looked like a coffin with a tray of glowing coals on top of it.

  Jonah sat in the grass at the perimeter of the party, patting Donald the dog. Dex’s girlfriend, Sharon, sat with him. She was tall, about the same height as Dex. Short blond hair she tucked behind her ears. A soft Cajun accent. She held a cigarette with long slender fingers.

  “You know, your brother’s told me lots about you.”

  Jonah’s difficulty imagining that must have been apparent.

  “Really,” she said. She tapped ash into the grass. “Dex reminds me of my own brother, in a way. Like, other people are always gonna know him better than I do, my brother.”

  Sharon told Jonah that she and her brother were a few years apart and had never been close growing up. She told him about their roughneck father, who had worked his life away offshore. Her brother was a former marine, like Bill. He’d survived three tours in Iraq. But he had a drinking problem now, and he’d been wrestling with it for a couple of years. “He got a job,” Sharon said, “on a shrimp boat, finally. It’s a tough living, but he seems to like it. It seems to help.” She paused to finish her cigarette, and then she spoke through an exhalation of smoke: “That’s all you can hope for, really, for the people you care about. Don’t you think? That they find a way to be that gives them peace.”

  Jonah nodded, turned a little inward. Donald rolled onto his back and pawed at the air, and Jonah patted his belly. Sharon opened her pack of cigarettes.

  Jonah said, “Think I could have one of those?”

  The corner of her mouth turned up. “You smoke?”

  “Nah, not usually.”

  She glanced around. “Just one. Don’t let your brother see.”

  Jonah puffed lightly, tried not to cough. After a bit he got up. Donald stood, too, wagging his tail, waiting for orders. “Think I’ll go for a walk. Wanna come?”

  “No, thanks, Jonah.” She held her hand out and Jonah helped her up. She nodded at Dex, where he stood with a beer, talking to the cook. “I’ll check on that grump.”

  Jonah walked with Donald down the trail along the bayou’s edge. The mosquitoes descended as soon as he left the halo created by the torches.

  He reached the new landing and all the moored boats. Donald ran forward, nails clicking against the boards. Electric lights were on under the overhang. The space against the ceiling was turbid with moths. Jonah looked at the grander structure of the landing and thought about rebuilding things.

  “Don’t look natural on you.”

  It was Dex, arriving along the path behind Jonah.

  “Smoking, I mean.” Dex waved his own cigarette.

  “Oh,” Jonah said. “Yeah.” He dropped the butt and ground it out.

  “Sharon told me you were down here.”

  “Yep.”

  Dex was holding two bottles of beer in his other hand and he offered one to Jonah. He took it and sipped and didn’t look at Dex.

  “You wouldn’t remember this,” Dex said. “You woulda been only three or four.” Dex stepped forward and leaned against one of the landing’s support posts. “Bill wanted to go play catch on the levee, you know, like down past where the St. Thomas projects used to be. He had Pop’s old glove. Pop gave it to him. Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  “So Bill was like, Come on, let’s go. Holding his glove like this, like a football. I did
n’t want to go. I was playing Nintendo or something. Dumb. I can’t even remember now. And he kept being like, Come on, Dex, come on. And I said no. He got annoyed and said he’d just go by himself. And I said—” Dex paused and shook his head. “I said, How are you gonna play catch with yourself?”

  Dex drained his beer and set the empty standing on the boards.

  “Bill just walked out. He came back later, real upset. His eyes were all red. And I remember he had dirt stains here, on his shoulder. He got down to the levee and a group of bigger kids roughed him up and they took Pop’s glove and they threw it in the river. I mean in the goddamn river.”

  Faint music wafted across the water. The wind shifted and all was quiet again.

  “I don’t know,” Dex went on, “if it woulda made any difference if I went with him. Probably not. I was smaller than he was. But that’s not what bothers me. We played catch again. Lots more times. We were fine. But eventually the days when we could play catch came to an end, right? And it’s not the good days I can think about anymore.”

  Jonah kept quiet. The hollow space in his chest tightened.

  “When you passed through with Colby,” Dex said, “you asked me if I remembered saying something to you a long time ago.”

  “Yeah,” Jonah said.

  “Well,” Dex said. “I lied. I do remember. You asked me if I was worried, too, about Bill getting sent to war. I told you we shouldn’t talk about him because you only lose the things you care about. Like if we pretended we didn’t care about him, he’d be all right or something.”

  Dex exhaled.

  “I mean,” Dex continued, “yeah, you do only lose things you care about. The loss of something you don’t give a shit about isn’t a loss at all.”

  “No.”

  “But I was wrong when I said we shouldn’t talk about him.” Dex rubbed his hands together as if he were cold. “I turned mean because I missed Bill. I was worried about him. We all missed him. But Jonah, man, we didn’t blow up that bomb. And maybe I didn’t go with Bill to the levee that day, but I didn’t throw Dad’s glove in the river. And, okay, things didn’t work out with Luz—but you didn’t send her back to Mexico. You did your best.”

  Jonah rubbed his eyes.

  “There are other things at work out there,” Dex said. “That’s what I think now. Things that only want to take the special stuff away from us. I don’t know if they’re from God or if they’re just, like, ghosts or something. I don’t know. I’m not smart enough to know that part. But I do know that soon enough they catch up to you, and they take something you care about away from you, and you realize you never did a good enough job with that thing when you had it. What I’m trying to say, Jonah, is, I’m sorry for a lot of things. I’m sorry.”

  Jonah was looking at his brother. In a low voice, not quite a whisper, he said, “Thanks.”

  “I been thinking I shoulda gone to Mexico with you. Ha.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Or I shoulda done something like it once. I feel—I dunno—like maybe I missed my chance at something. To help me figure out who I am, what I am.”

  “I know what you mean,” Jonah said, and an answer occurred to him. “But I know who you are, Dex. I know what you are, too.”

  Dex shrugged and looked away. For a moment he seemed overtaken. “Anyway,” he started, clearing his throat. “I’m glad you’re here, Jonah.” He came forward and put his arm around Jonah’s shoulders. “Come on, let’s get back.”

  Jonah said, “I been thinking about what I want to do next.”

  “Okay,” Dex said.

  “I want to fix up Pop’s old business, get it running again.”

  Dex halted and glanced at him. “McBee Auto?”

  Jonah nodded. Waited.

  Dex said, “That’s a hell of an idea.”

  “I think I could do it,” Jonah said, “I think—”

  “I do, too,” Dex answered. “I think you can do it.”

  Jonah let the thick air into his lungs, and Donald the dog brushed against his leg, making for the camp and the smell of the barbecue, and outside the light of the landing, night had fallen, complete and pulsing and full with the promise of tomorrow.

  “I just don’t know how to get started,” Jonah said, “like in a money sense.”

  “Oh, we can take care of that,” Dex said. “First thing, we gotta clean the building out. Then we can take a loan out against the house. I can set that up when the time comes.” They started moving together, away from the landing. “It puts the house at risk if you can’t pay the loan back, but you’ll get the business going, I know you will. And I’ll help, too. But first thing’s first, we gotta spruce the place up. I haven’t been there in a long time. How’s it look?”

  “Like shit,” Jonah said.

  Dex laughed. “So we got work to do.”

  “Yeah.”

  The brothers returned together to the party, and the next morning they drove to New Orleans.

  XVII

  . . . y será infinita mi voz.

  1

  SHE WATCHED MORNING RISE THROUGH THE VALLEY. THE PYRAMID was there, beyond the tops of the foregrounded juniper and piñon. Physically, Luz felt good. Well rested. She took a shower and buckled the knife to her calf and put on the same clothes she’d worn the day before. She looked at the closet and gave some thought to hanging up her mother’s dresses, but she did not intend to be here very long—she just didn’t know where she’d go yet, or how—so she left the dresses rolled up in her bag. She did not want to feel as if she were moving in.

  Ninfa had prepared eggs and black beans with fresh salsa and warm tortillas. There was good coffee in the pot. Off the kitchen was an alcove with a square table, where Cecilia sat drinking coffee. She was dressed in her customary black. There was an assault rifle propped against the wall behind her. Ninfa bustled in the kitchen, wished Luz a good morning, told her to sit. A morning news program babbled on the wall-mounted flat-screen between two mounted deer heads.

  Cecilia, examining football scores in a paper open on the table, didn’t acknowledge Luz when she sat. Ninfa brought her a plate. The salsa ran around the rim. Cecilia folded her paper and sat back with her coffee. By way of a greeting she finally looked at Luz and winked without smiling.

  “Your uncle isn’t home yet?”

  Cecilia shook her head. She rolled her hand through the air and held up fingers: Two days. Then she drained her coffee and scooted out from the table. She hefted her rifle and left through the front door.

  Ninfa came out from the kitchen then, and asked if she might join Luz.

  “Of course.”

  The woman sat. She stirred milk into her coffee. “I have worked here for five years, since this has been señor Zegas’s home. It will be nice to have someone else around.” She leaned forward, cupped an old hand around her mouth, and added quietly, “Someone I can speak with, I mean.” Terror flashed on her face and she added, “Please do not tell Cecilia I said that.”

  Luz waved her concerns away, more interested in the notion that Ninfa believed she was here to stay, for a while at least. But she held onto this, decided not to prod further. Instead she asked the housekeeper about the home, who came and went.

  “Oh,” she said, “this is señor Zegas’s house alone. His niece works in Monterrey, but she stays in the house when she visits. I also make my quarters here, naturally. But the men rotate in and out, and they bunk in the other cottage.” She paused, sipped her coffee. “I always assumed señor Zegas kept his girlfriends in other places. It will be very nice having you here.” Again, that quick look of terror: “My mouth runs now that I have somebody to speak with—forgive me.”

  Luz crossed her arms. The coffee settled hot in her belly, making her feel sick. “Did somebody tell you I was his girlfriend?”

  Ninfa’s features scrunched. “Aren’t you?”

  A heavy pause. Luz didn’t answer. She asked how Ninfa came to be there.

  She began to clear the plates f
rom the table. She spoke over her shoulder. “My husband once worked with him, too, but he passed, and señor Zegas has treated me well.”

  Luz said she was sorry. Ninfa’s tone indicated that it had happened a long time before, but Luz couldn’t help seeing the man with graying hair, hand clapped to his eye, tumble into the void beyond the brink of the cliff.

  2

  LUZ WALKED OUTSIDE IN THE AFTERNOON. ANOTHER NARCO was rocking in a chair near the door, holding his rifle between his knees. He rolled his eyes toward her lazily, uninterested. Cecilia sat at the other end of the porch, smoking a cigarette, staring someplace else.

  Luz approached and asked if she might borrow a pair of athletic shorts. Cecilia didn’t look at her, but she flicked the cigarette out into the dirt, got up, and motioned for Luz to follow. They returned through the living room, passing beneath the mounted trophies with the marble eyes, to a first-floor bedroom. Cecilia’s bag was open at the foot of her bed. She propped the rifle against the mattress, rummaged, came up with a pair of black gym shorts, and tossed them to Luz.

  “Thanks,” Luz told her. “I need to get some new stuff, I guess.”

  The sicaria shrugged and walked away. Luz wished to hear her speak, wished to hear her express something unique. But Cecilia was a mute soldier. And Luz grasped that Cecilia’s refusal to express an opinion or any kind of perspective had less to do with her physical muteness than it did with the way she’d been silenced in a much deeper way.

  Luz left the house again a few minutes later and passed the narcos without a word. She passed the cottage and the other vehicles and entered the rocky track that came up the mountain. The trail continued to rise past the clearing. Luz heard a jingling, a clopping of hooves. An old man in baggy clothes, huaraches, and a straw hat shuffled alongside a mule laden with split firewood for sale. The leñero lifted his face and spotted Luz. He raised his hand in greeting. Luz turned and started up the mountain. Before turning out of sight she glanced back to see the old man and his mule bear into the clearing, heading for Oziel’s house.