GPS (10 page)

It really was a world away, he thought, as Lefty glided back and forth on the bed, purring loudly while giving each of his sleek black sides a turn to run down Jeff’s outstretched fingers. He knew there weren’t any roadmaps to get back to where he’d been. If he could just explain his experience to the right people, recount the whole story, it could land him at the Pulitzer Prize banquet. Maybe Riley could be his guest. God, that would be worth it, he thought, as he stuffed his clothes from New Mexico into the overflowing closet hamper and began the search for clean ones.

The thing Jeff was subconsciously, foolishly trying not to connect to this new world was the GPS. For one thing, it just wasn’t logical. For another, he couldn’t simply dive into the thing and walk off, though it would have seemed like that’s just what he was about to do to any bystander outside his room at the Elegante Hotel last Thursday afternoon. Just the same, he knew in the back of his mind that somehow that thing had hypnotized him, and then … and then everything went nuts.

Jeff scanned the walk-in closet for his next set of clothes — perhaps a few grades nicer would be in order for this trip since he would be hanging with upper management. That notion carried him away from one final bit of evidence of his time away from the world of America, 2008.

It was a forgotten shred of paper. Unlike the flyer he’d apparently had time to fold up and slide into his wallet, this artifact he had stuffed hurriedly into his back left pocket, the one pocket that had been totally ignored on every pair of pants Jeff had ever worn. A week later, that little piece of paper would disintegrate into thousands of meaningless fragments when the jeans he’d been wearing that night — along with the other tattered and mud-covered clothes he hadn’t thought about since he first awoke on what had proven to be a stunner of a Saturday — got a much needed wash.

Just after 8 p.m., with Lefty standing aloofly in the living room shadows — cats can’t tell you to piss off but they can think it and let you know they’re thinking it — Jeff dragged himself and his big duffel back out the same door he’d just come through about 12 hours before, and popped the still dust-lined Celica trunk open. The plan tonight was simple. Normality was the focus. He’d reached levels of unrest the last few days to make even Jeff realize he couldn’t take much more.

It was a savagely beautiful evening in New Orleans, of course, offering Jeff even more reason to wish he was staying. Remarkable, he thought, how great something can seem when it’s not available. This was precisely the time of year that had made Jeff an unhappy prisoner to his profession. The minute he began to resent baseball for all the free time it had cost him over the years, it was effectively over.

That’s when every minute on the road began to tick more slowly and every line at the airport got longer. Every time he got home to his wife, he seemed to be leaving again even sooner. Maybe if he had just divorced baseball right then ...

But now, in the aftermath of the unexpected and inexplicable events of the last few days, Jeff felt that he had something to look forward to when he got through the rest of this stretch that awaited. Perhaps more correctly, he looked forward to finding something to look forward to in the future. That was enough to start things off. He scaled the apartment steps one final time to grab his work bag, and he suddenly thought of two things simultaneously. The first thing was that he hadn’t exactly been cramming for the quiz that was waiting in St. Lucie, was not up to date on what his players were doing. The other thing was that the GPS was still on the table from when he tumbled into the apartment half asleep that morning.

He walked over and picked it up with some care, sort of like someone picks up a pet snake, and found it was still every bit as warm inside its case as it had been in the New Mexico desert. Strange, sure, Jeff thought, but nothing really in comparison to the version of strange he now knew.

So the GPS had cast a spell on him out there, and it might have somehow opened a door to some other world. So it was still apparently processing information and wondering where Jeff was, even though it had been sitting dormant and disconnected on the table for 12 hours. Big deal. Not taking the GPS to Florida never crossed his mind in those moments. Where it might end up taking him, however, did.

But worrying about such things was not part of the deal anymore. Couldn’t be. Jeff knew, as he now gazed across the apartment and spied what looked like a note on the refrigerator, that he’d never forget what he had seen, whether he ever ended up in that world again or not. He could erase that picture off the phone right now and still see the girl’s face every day for the rest of his life.

The real question was, did any of this have any bearing on the rest of his life? Was there something life-changing to be gleaned from the experience? Could he just suddenly stop his endless fretting about the minute details of daily life out of some fear, some possibility, that he might get taken out of his world of misery and thrown into another, much more brutal one? Was there some purpose to what had happened? Was it not purely a random, unfathomable, yet meaningless event?

He smiled at the possibilities though not exactly sure why. He seemed destined to wear the experience like a badge, so maybe that was the purpose to it. As terrible as it was, Jeff’s glimpse of suffering in some unknown place seemed like a motivation, and he had no idea why other than the fact he’d lived to tell about it. “But there’s no one to tell it to,” he said to Lefty as Jeff approached the kitchen fridge — his apartment had one table, one couch, one chair and two refrigerators. Jeff knew from across the room what it was he’d seen stuck to the antiquated, mint green refrigerator, and who it was from. Lefty hadn’t written it, for God’s sake, and intruders usually didn’t leave notes.

“
Can we please just talk about this?”
were the words Riley had scribbled down when she, not for the first time, had accounted for the cat’s well-being while Jeff was gone.

Of course we can talk about it, he thought. But Riley will be disappointed to know that the who, what, when, where and most certainly the why portion of the conversation will still be a little vague. Actually, though, that little note had granted Jeff a wish he’d carried with him since the minute she’d hung up on him in Albuquerque. Now he would be forced to come up with an explanation for everything.

With that, he bustled back down the stairs, back out onto Esplanade Avenue and hopped into his increasingly familiar captain’s chair in the Celica. Without hesitation or thought of consequence, he snapped the GPS onto the windshield and plugged it in.

“
Warren GPS Technology. Welcome.”

The drive ahead was 750 miles, straight across the northern face of the Gulf and through the Florida Panhandle. Despite the pitch-black night, it was another one of Jeff’s favorite driving courses. The Gulf Coast had fascinated him since childhood, largely leading him for the first time to New Orleans. His drive on I-10 East meant a stroll past the great Gulf towns of Gulfport, Biloxi, Mobile and Pensacola.

Out in the brown, swollen waters in the distance to his right were the haunting night lights of the flaming oil rigs, a reminder to Jeff as his thoughts wandered that he was unmistakably on the Gulf Coast and not steering into some mysterious place. Just the same, he’d already promised himself he would stay out of his own brown sea, the Bushmills, on this trip. No need to fuel any new fires.

He figured driving at night and doing it almost exclusively on major highways would make it about a 10-hour stroll each way. Most of the trip was I-10 East, from home all the way to the friendly mile marker of Lake City, Fla., then 75 South down to the greater Wildwood metropolis and onto Florida’s Turnpike, straight toward the Atlantic Ocean and the glorious Tradition Field Complex in St. Lucie.

Jeff noticed the GPS a good deal less this time around. It seemed to have nothing in the offing outside of chirping out the very few changes in direction on this particular jaunt. She protested when he stopped for gas, as usual, and was much busier at the beginning and end of the trip than the long miles in between. Mostly, she seemed bored. The GPS had become a constant companion already, and Jeff hoped it would become a more predictable one.

The satellite picture offered its usual zoom-in, zoom-out picture in its normal colors. The Gulf looked bluer on his screen than it ever had to the naked eye, Jeff thought, and even the most Katrina-beaten towns and villages along the coast appeared as simple white dots in masses of cheery emerald green.

Blue was actually the color of Katrina, not that anyone who had endured even one gust of the hurricane would have chosen that color to identify the storm themselves. It seemed a pretty obvious reminder of the water, after all. Fly into a more well-to-do city like Phoenix and it’s a marvel how all those little blue rectangles down below turn out to be swimming pools as the descent into Sky Harbor International Airport deepens. On the descent into Louis Armstrong International, on the other hand, and those aren’t swimming pools down there, though they have contained plenty of water.

When the federal government had done whatever it had done after Katrina, one of the enduring colors thereafter, which still made Jeff cringe at each sighting, was the blue of cheap plastic tarp covering the most serious physical wounds from the storm. It was everywhere then, and shockingly still everywhere to this day.

All these hundreds and hundreds of days after the final drops of floodwater relented, there were still seemingly thousands of square miles of that awful blue tarp everywhere, almost as much of it as there were FEMA trailers stacked in random fields. Mostly, the blue tarp still served as roofing and siding on storm-beaten houses, and anyone in the city or anywhere else on the Gulf Coast certainly had seen their fill of it long ago. If it glowed in the dark, it would have lit Jeff’s way into Florida.

Jeff and Riley, in one of their greatest post-storm endeavors as a couple, co-managed the Katrina Blues in the 9-and-under Crescent City Youth Baseball League the spring after the storm, a league as pieced together then as the Treme neighborhood to which the team belonged.

It was a strange moment in Jeff’s life, mainly because it was a truly happy one, and the only one in which he felt a true passion about children.

Such a strange departure was Jeff’s unexpected love for his little band of ballplayers, it proved one of the major sticking points for Riley in the downfall of the marriage. She herself never championed having kids by any certain age, but Riley certainly held out hope that Jeff would warm to the idea of parenthood at some point, and that it would just sort of happen like it did to every couple. As she screamed and ranted and high-fived and danced outrageously through that one and only season as a baseball co-manager, Riley spent a lot of time thinking Jeff would become the perfect father.

It never happened.

The Blues, who surged to the championship game that season before losing to a team sponsored by the New Orleans Saints, wore specially-designed uniforms thanks to Riley’s mom. Each of the plain black team hats and T-shirt jerseys was adorned with a fleur de lis logo that had been snipped out of real 9th Ward roof tarping and hand-stitched into place by Marie Peletier herself. Thanks to Jeff, the Blues had taken enough batting practice with the Zephyrs that year to make Double-A players jealous.

Instead of worrying about other worlds and little kids whose lives he could likely never touch, Jeff spent a large chunk of his Florida Panhandle stretch reminiscing with a faint grin about that team photo, the kids with their runner-up trophies and their ear-to-ear grins. Every dime collected that season when the hat got passed went to post-storm efforts, or technically into the effort to save the homes and livelihoods of every kid on that team. The end-of-the-season bash was held in the Delaney living room, and Jeff could still hear the bustle of all those kids running rampant in their home and still loved every shred of memory he had of it. Those little voices seemed like ghosts now, but he smiled anyway.

Jeff roared on through the night, through Mississippi and Alabama in no time at all. The rare companionship of pleasant thoughts made the time fly, and with only the glow of the mostly silent GPS and the Celica dashboard in his face, he hammered through the Panhandle as well, stopping only for gas and a couple of chicken burritos from the Endless Sun outside of Tallahassee at dawn Monday morning.

At the same time Jeff was striding back toward the car sitting at the gas pump, Lefty was hundreds of miles to the west, crouched stealthily in front of the open closet door in Jeff’s bedroom looking over Esplanade Avenue. The strange scent emanating from the tangle of clothes in the hamper was intoxicating to the cat. He’d been pacing back and forth to and from the closet all night. He had inched closer and closer each time, not daring to get too close to whatever was emitting that dangerous, alluring aroma.

Now, just a few inches from the hamper, Lefty craned his neck as far as it would stretch, trying to make a connection between his brain and the messages coming from his tireless nose. As he did, a whisker lightly brushed against one of the legs of Jeff’s muddy jeans poking out from the lid of hamper. Lefty reared back, hissed will all his might, and fled down the hall with his tail dragging on the floor.

Inside the back left pocket of those jeans, unknown to Jeff and his cat, was a slip of paper Jeff would never see. On it was a name and a date, scrawled in black ink. It had been passed to Jeff in the broadening sun the previous Friday morning.

“
Paulo Fonseca. May 7.”

- 12 -

“Ascondo? Really? Man, I don’t think he’s ready at all.”

It was already steamy and sticky in Port St. Lucie. Jeff’s craving for more sleep had lingered as he drove out of New Orleans the night before was yanking furiously at his eyelids now, as he sat across from Sandy Morino a little after 7:30 Monday morning.