THEY REACHED SAN ANTONIO IN THE AFTERNOON. THEY PULLED off the interstate toward downtown, and Jonah was looking for Luz’s cathedral. He recalled the weight of her head on his chest, the soft words she spoke, the fragile memories shared. After he brought her back to New Orleans, he thought, they would take a road trip together to San Antonio. She could show him around. He saw it. They’d push a stroller around.
“You all right?” Colby asked. “You missed, like, four parking spots.”
“Yeah,” Jonah said. “Sorry. Thinking.”
“Something’s been bothering me,” Colby said.
“Huh?”
“We going to visit Luz. And you say we’re gonna come right back, graduate, and enlist. You gonna be cool with that? I mean, saying hey to Luz and coming right back?”
“Well,” Jonah said, “no.”
“So . . .”
“I’d like to be with her and help when the baby gets closer.”
“But you can’t. Not if you wanna be able to bring her back.”
“I guess not. Gotta get back to graduate and enlist. That’s where the money will come from. But if I can look at her, you know?—see her in person and make a plan, I think it’ll go over better. Don’t you?”
“Sure,” Colby said.
“I can’t get her on the phone, anyway. Not unless she calls,” Jonah said. “This way, I can see her and make her a promise.”
“Yeah.”
Jonah parked the truck along a small park. A lot of people were out and about. They opened the cooler Dex had given them and took out the containers of chili, and they set off following the crowd. Signs directed them toward the PASEO DEL RIO / RIVER WALK. The street wound gently downhill and ended where the narrow green river passed through the shade of the buildings. Trees grew from cutouts in the flagstone. Shops and restaurants hemmed in the water. People sat at outdoor lunch tables. There were water taxis and tour boats. Music, somewhere. A tour guide’s voice buzzed from a loudspeaker as a boat passed, and the boys crossed the river on a skinny arch of stone steps.
“This is sweet,” Colby remarked. “Luz tell you about this?”
“Once or twice.”
Jonah stopped a man and asked for directions to the San Fernando Cathedral, and the man jerked his thumb in the direction the crowd was moving.
“Mickey-Bee, a church?”
“Like a historical church.”
“But this is nice down here.”
“Something I wanna see. Come on.” And Colby groaned, but he followed.
The crowd led them to an open plaza where the stone cathedral and its boxy spires rose above the throng. A martial drumbeat built: one . . . two . . . one-two-three-four.
“Hear that?” Colby said.
The beat drummed up images in Jonah’s memory—the marching band in its regalia tromped in step beneath the boughs of the live oaks, snare drums counting it out and bass drums punctuating. The dance team sashayed and the steppers walked it out. A whistle shrilled and the brass jumped in—trumpet, trombone, sousaphone. The three of them shook it in the street, laughing. Jonah saw Luz. Hold onto this: she dances, eyes downcast but a smile on her face. She backs against the night, the parade. The flames of the marching flambeaus glow all around her. Then they pass and the costumed folk on stilts move in the shadow over her shoulders, and Jonah sees her.
Jonah and Colby pushed to the front, near the cathedral. Jonah waited for the music, for the brass. But nobody danced, nobody smiled. The band wore red and gold plumed helmets—a drum corps only. They marched slowly. In their midst a man wore a ragged and bloody piece of linen and bore a wooden cross, the crux of it over his shoulder and the foot of it scraping along the cobblestone behind him. Blood dried in the creases down his face, beneath his crown of thorns. Other men dressed like Romans cracked whips and shouted, but they shouted in Spanish. The cross clattered to the street and the soldiers swarmed the man, whips flailing. After a while, they got the man back up and he dragged the cross onward.
“That real blood?” Colby asked.
A man nearby whispered, grave, “Sí.”
Jonah nudged another man. “That real?”
“No.” The man shook his head.
The drum corps slid by, one . . . two . . . one-two-three-four.
They backed out of the crowd. Colby was troubled. “I forgot it was Good Friday.”
“Me too.”
They made for the River Walk and sat on an iron bench next to the river, the leftovers from Dex in their laps.
“Easter’s the only day of the year I go to church with my mom,” Colby said. He stirred food, spooned a bite, dumped it back into the container. “Fuckin’ water rats.”
Jonah, chewing, nodded to the narrow green waterway. “Ain’t much of a river.”
“Nah,” Colby agreed. “Luz liked this place, huh?”
She had loved it. Why? The gruesome parade told Jonah nothing new about her, though he sensed some truth of hers in this place, thrumming just out of reach beneath the flagstones. The way the river had been beaten down to this narrow dribble suddenly infuriated him. “Let’s go,” he told Colby.