JONAH DISEMBARKED FROM THE BUS IN NUEVO LAREDO, UNABLE to latch onto coherent thoughts. Another passenger approached, an American. He wore a T-shirt and cargo pants and hiking boots. A large camping bag rose above his shoulders. The man had combed brown hair, sunburned skin, and a scruff of beard on his square jaw. He stood in front of Jonah, a grin on his face, and said, “We’re a couple of lucky gringos, dude.”
Jonah’s skull throbbed as he stared back and waited for the words to mean something.
“The narco and the bus driver knew each other.” The man shook his head with wonderment. “Can you believe that shit?”
Jonah blinked. The burning car, the man in the mask. It came to Jonah’s recollection truly as a dream. But he hadn’t dreamed it; he had witnessed it. Past and present shimmered. What was real leached into what was not. The burning car was impressionistic in his mind, and as he tried to grab detail, more slipped away.
“Christ, we’re lucky sons of bitches.” The man turned and beckoned. “Come on, let’s get a cab together. Better that way.”
Jonah hardly spoke. The man said he’d been down south, attempting to climb a mountain. He’d had a friend with him who’d become ill and had to fly home. But Jonah’s mind wandered as the cab ferried them to the border. He would have liked to tell Bill about this trip. He imagined that his brother could have told him something that would help, but Bill wasn’t anywhere. A small voice—Luz’s voice, maybe—told him to reach, to pray, but instead he silenced his mind and knuckled his tired eyes.
The cab stopped in a turnaround near the bridge. Jonah had only three dollars to contribute to the fare, and the climber picked up the rest. When Jonah said thanks, the climber replied: “I know a thing or two about going down old Mexico way. Sometimes you come back with more, sometimes you come back with less. Don’t sweat it.”
Jonah followed the climber into the foot traffic returning stateside. Fencing rose high overhead, hemming in the pedestrian lane. Jonah trailed his fingers along the chain-link and looked out at the river below. There were the city lights ahead and the city lights behind. It was not as dark as the night he had first crossed, but much of the river lay in interminable shadow. Except for the marker on the bridge, the border was still invisible.
Jonah wondered about Luz crossing the river as a child. He believed she’d swum across with her uncle, but he didn’t know the whole story. It was a memory she had never fully shared, and the way she guarded it made him too hesitant to ask. Perhaps with that memory resided an answer, something that would now remain forever unknown.
The globes of streetlight standing on the fence over the lane were a pale yellow. Not much automobile traffic this late, but a fair number of walkers. The line bunched and slowed as they neared the border station.
“Things been pretty wild here lately,” the climber said, turning to Jonah. “Must be why the wait. The customs dudes will be turned up to Max Hard-Ass, I’m sure.” He slapped Jonah on the shoulder. “But with our luck we shouldn’t complain, eh?”
Jonah said, “Yeah,” but he couldn’t recall the unreal occurrence on the bus as vividly as he wished. More detail would equal fear, and more fear would engender gratitude, and more gratitude would mean that the experience had been useful to him in some way. But the memory was too hazy. What he needed just wasn’t there.
Jonah gripped the bridge fence and tried to imagine how harrowing Luz’s crossing might have been. He waited in line with the others returning to America and it struck him that the ease with which he could return was part of the problem, that it was one of the things that kept the border between him and Luz. What might Jonah discover if he simply turned around, went back to Mexico, and tried to find a place to swim across?
He could imagine it. Willows thrashing in the wind. The wet mud smell of the river. Moonlight fragmenting in the gentle chop. The current tugging at his jeans. Is it shallow and slow and easy? Is it deceitfully lethal, like the Mississippi? He could reach the American bank and identify with Luz anew, based on their shared experience. This would be the hope, that the risk alone might rend the veil from all he couldn’t understand. And, perhaps, she might still want him then.
Shoes scuffled forward. The American bank passed beneath the bridge. The first dark treetops. The river looked swollen tonight.
Luck, the climber called it. Jonah had never thought of himself as a lucky person, but depending on his vantage point there was luck to be found in his life. Meeting Luz when he did and where he did—that had to be luck of some kind. Looked at one way, it had been a good conclusion at the end of a long, unlucky sequence of years.
Before entering the border station he glanced back at the river, one last time. No, he thought. Swimming across wouldn’t help him understand Luz any better than he already did. Her crossing had been necessary, as had been the method. There was no separating those facts from the experience itself. To extend himself into harm’s way for personal proof—well, that offered just another false promise.
But. He could create something, build something, restore something. The revelation filled his lungs. These were actions made of meaning. These were endeavors with which he could vindicate his own existence. He walked into the air-conditioned border station with visions of McBee Auto in his mind. The old place renovated, repainted. Doors open, all personal automobiles welcome. McBee Auto would be a business for the neighborhood to rally around. There was pride there, for him and for others. He would be responsible for all of it.
There, Jonah saw, was something earned.
He walked forward, bolstered with purpose.