La Linda

La Linda is a fluorspar-mining company town on the Coahuila bank of the Rio Grande, reachable from the Texas side by a bridge that closed when the mine did and was sealed for good after 2001. Kaczynski's narrator lives in south Brewster County, has driven to the end of that dead-end road many times, and has never been across. The story is his attempt to account for a fascination he admits he cannot fully explain.

Two episodes carry it: a long-ago softball game in which miners from La Linda thrashed an ad-hoc team scraped together from around the county on the school field at Marathon, and a present-day trip to a small store to buy groceries for a family that has crossed without papers, an errand the narrator keeps to himself. It ends on open ground with a coyote, and a line about Franciscans.

The journal's note describes the piece as set near the river in south Brewster County and centered on the narrator's fascination with the town across it.

David Kaczynski has published a short story and poems in literary magazines since the early 1990s. His memoir Every Last Tie (Duke University Press, 2016) recounts his family's history and his and his wife's decision to go to the FBI about his brother, Ted Kaczynski. He lived for years in the Big Bend country of West Texas.