GPS (12 page)

Too late. Instead of the loud-mouthed, 6-foot-5 Cajun out of Tulane who was undoubtedly sitting one wall away in the extended clubhouse talking about tattoos, strippers or tattooed strippers, Jeff thought about a much more demure Cajun out of LSU, the one who pasted a one-lined note (
“Can we please just talk about this?”
) to his indoor refrigerator over the weekend. As usual, he couldn’t wait to see her, whether for the pleasure or the pain of it, and there would likely be some of both. Where would they meet? Not his place or hers, Jeff thought. But where ...

“... and I think it’s safe to say he’s already spent whatever bonus he ever earned on all that fucking ankle tape and Jacuzzi water,” Sandy continued, stopping to chuckle at his own joke but never realizing he’d used the ‘R’ word. “So if you feel good about Cintron when you get around to him, we’re going to move on that too I think. So, is everything cool with you? You know I’m not a guidance counselor but you’re looking a little rough even by your own rough standards.”

“Me? Yeah, I feel great,” Jeff said without flinching. “I just haven’t really slept the last few days. A little under the weather, I guess.”

“Well, pop some greenies or something, man, because I need you. ... Jeff ... Jeff, I’m kidding. Man, you really do need some sleep. And you can get some out there in Waveland on the beach, believe me, I know,” said Sandy, unwittingly delivering the most surprising statement of the whole little sit-down. A sleep reference. “But first, you gotta get moving. Lakeland at Lucie at 7 p.m. sharp. I need the full skinny, all of it. I want to know what he eats for lunch today. He should be landing at Lucie County International at 11 a.m., so don’t keep our boy waiting.”

“What?” Jeff reared back in his seat, momentarily wide awake again. “I've gotta pick him up at the airport?”

“Is that what I just told you? Yes. Please. The driver isn’t here today, so yes, please go pick up our dear friend Felix and make sure he’s brought his fucking bat and his fucking fast-man shoes with him,” Sandy said, and abruptly popped open his buzzing cell phone, waved Jeff out of the room and smiled before saying in an absurd voice, “James! What’s goin’ on in Or-e-gon? How many times did that bastard strike out last night?”

- 13 -

Jeff started calling Felix Ascondo “El Gobernador,” the governor, after spending a night out on the town with him four years previous in some of the seediest Santo Domingo dives he could have ever dreamed existed. Ascondo was a man of the streets, had been a child of the streets, and he interacted with every soul out there that night, even the guys most people tried their hardest to keep their eyes away from.

Jeff looked and felt ridiculous as he, the teenaged Ascondo and a roving band of followers strolled in and out of every boozer in what most would have called the worst part of town, and amid an assortment of blatant illegalities from cock fights to cocaine sniffed right off the bar.

While Jeff was spending that time trying to sell the explosive hitter and base stealer on the Astros system, he was also spending it hoping that if he did make Ascondo a Houston draft pick that year, the teenager would somehow make an even trade — the chance of big money in America in exchange for the street cred in the Dominican. Like with most things, it was a little less cut-and-dried than that when it did happen. A good deal of Ascondo’s brashness had made the flight with him to America and never went back until Ascondo himself did.

After two full seasons in the Houston system and then the trade to the Mets early in the 2007 campaign, it seemed Ascondo was on the brink of yet another career move. Whether he realized it yet or not, he was now caught up in Sandy Morino’s endless movin’-up-or-movin’-out loop. It wasn’t such a bad thing, as it was the same mentality that had been applied successfully to two of Jeff’s other proteges, Ainsley and Ricard, and it had actually worked with them, making them better players and more lucrative to other clubs. It meant that Ascondo had been identified as someone who would either climb the ladder quickly and land himself a real contract or who would become someone else’s project. Jeff was the man in charge of riding that fine line, it seemed.

On one of Ascondo’s better weekends as a pro, he’d hit two home runs the previous season on a Saturday fireworks night in the same Florida town of Port St. Lucie, then playing for the Low-A Gulf Coast League Mets on a rehab assignment. That was two days before he was called back up to Savannah to finish out the season, and he’d bought an obnoxiously-priced, and colored, pair of alligator slip-ons to commemorate the first of what he hoped would be many big nights in American baseball to come.

At about 12:15 on Monday afternoon, one of those gator shoes kicked the door of Suite 39 at the Vistana Beach Club, twice with great force. After being stranded at the St. Lucie County International Airport for almost an hour, Ascondo had rented the most expensive car the Prized Rentals desk would offer him. He then sped down the highway toward the beach in his red Hummer while thumbing through all the Mets-related numbers in his cell phone until he found Sandy’s.

The perplexed player director assumed upon hearing Ascondo’s uproar there was some sort of flight delay or mix-up at the airport, but still hadn’t considered what had actually happened. He simply said Jeff was staying out at the Vistana and must be running late, and then he hung up on the outfielder and went back to his other line, where the lead northeast scout was expressing little faith in the impending second arrival in as many seasons of Romero Martinez to Binghamton.

Ascondo headed right to the source of the problem. After a feigned friendly conversation with the girl at the Vistana office, the Dominican walked a quick pace to the suite that had Jeff’s pinkish Celica parked out front. The man inside had practically crawled on hands and knees up and into the suite’s bed. It had called to him almost non-stop for three hours before he was able to return to it following his meeting with Sandy, and he found it still neatly made and untouched. The effects of New Mexico lingered still, and sleep came quickly.

For the first time this season, Jeff had decided when he left New Orleans the previous night that he would test the New York Mets’ ‘reasonable accommodations’ clause. These accommodations had looked extremely reasonable, and he had no idea how hopelessly into the bed’s grasp he would fall that mid-morning. While Sandy was watching Teddie Riley take his swings and curse about low pitches in the cage at Tradition Field, and while Felix Ascondo zoomed into Port St. Lucie spitting tobacco and curses about Jeff, the man in Suite 39 slept like he did as a boy on snowy school days in Connecticut.

His body had scarcely moved since he pushed open the bedroom windows and plowed under the covers, but in his head, there was complete anarchy that he could not control or turn off. The dream that raged in his brain had brought back more details about his mysterious night in New Mexico than any cell phone photograph could, and it knotted a tight, steady frown into Jeff’s sleeping face. But the rest of his body seemed in refusal to react, and this wasn’t just the chase dream where the brain says go but the legs are cemented in place.

This was the first of many dreams Jeff would have that spring and summer which reflected a brain that didn’t want to stop processing information, even when the body below would not, or could not, join the act. Even as he tried in his waking hours to find the thing that would make him feel normal again, the same fretting brain that had ruined his marriage was starting to run wild in his sleep, when he could not make it stop.

As that summer pressed on, however, Jeff gradually learned to expect the images and memories that came to him during his slumber — and in his car. He began to carry them through his daily life and came to embrace them until he’d finally just accepted his parallel worlds equally, at least for a time.

The mostly fictional, completely distorted scenes he’d been watching his entire sleeping life were changing gradually, like Jeff himself, into something different and more defined. His dreams became more real, painted in finer details, with background noises, breezes in his face and sweat rolling down his body.

They took him back there to that place, creating a mental struggle about Jeff’s time in New Mexico. On one hand, the images started to seem as much a real memory at times as a dream. Slowly, the dreams were becoming a replay of reality, at least real by some other definition in some other place. At the same time, they effectively clouded Jeff’s thoughts enough to make him question everything that happened out there and whether or not any of it — the glowing car, the blackout, the little girl, the Range Rovers, Ramon, the car wash — had ever really happened.

But he already had proof that something had happened. The Celica still lined with desert dust was unmistakably real, and so was the photograph of the girl, and the flyer he’d stuffed into his wallet. No dream could deliver those things from his slumber or his alcohol blackouts into the real world, and that was that. In the moments before Ascondo’s right foot reconnected Jeff to his more traditional reality, the motionless man on the bed had been seeing his other world in the clearest picture since the first time he’d truly seen it, when he’d been there. Now he was seeing a part of it he hadn’t seen during his episode in the car the previous Saturday.

He was running at a frantic scramble, shoes filled with sand and right knee screaming at him from below. The terrain caused a clumsy, flailing stride that would stagger even the most agile of runners in its loose, scattering grains. In front of Jeff, another man about his age was kicking up the same spray of desert, though at a much more experienced pace. Behind him were the sounds of shouting men and gunshots being fired — he prayed into the air and not at his back.

“Get over, get over!” the man shouted from ahead as he scaled what looked to be the remains of a wooden-plank fence and half-ran, half-slid down a steep incline and out of view. Jeff followed without the slightest pause. He flung himself over a broken plank and leapt feet-first down the hill, sliding all the way down a mix of sand and stone and onto his butt at the bottom of a long, flat valley that showed what appeared to be the only flashes of green foliage for miles around.

About 100 yards in front of him was what appeared to be the back end of his red Toyota behind a stand of stunted-looking Apache pines. Still acting on pure instinct, Jeff broke into a dead sprint over much more solid earth toward the piece of red automobile he spied in the distance, racing past the man who had led him out of the peril he likely would not have escaped alone. As he passed by, the man wearing a tattered flannel shirt and jeans nearly whitened by the desert sun grabbed at his sleeve, spinning him almost to the ground.

“Take this and get the hell out of here! May 7
^th
, May 7
^th
! Don’t forget! We need you man! Unete a la revolucion!”

When two solid bangs came in quick succession, Jeff was still about two paces from his car, having snatched a tiny sliver of paper out of the man’s hand. He crammed it into his back left pocket with his left hand as he simultaneously dug in his front pockets for his keys with his right. He didn’t dare look back over his shoulder for fear he would see everything he was running from immediately behind him.

He could even feel the cool splash of what were likely his last drops of saliva glancing off his cheek as he gasped at the sound of the first clap behind him. When the second followed just a step later, he was resigned to the fact that it was going to knock him dead right in front of his potential escape hatch.

But instead of leaving him there forever, that second bang yanked Jeff immediately out of his desperate dash to the car and straight up in bed in a large, swanky room, curtains dancing lazily in the breeze behind him.

His head still rocked in the fury of his long sprint to freedom. Completely disoriented, and without a clue of where he was or what was happening, Jeff shouted out of some instinct, “Hang on!” The true traveling man, whether in this world or some other, rarely wanted to be bothered, and for Jeff, this sentiment had become a reflex at the sound of knocking doors. Even without the aid of his normal travel companion, Mr. Bushmills, Jeff found himself lost between the world he was running from — the sweat covering his chest and the spit on the side of his face, apparently, had made the jump with him — and the one in which he’d just awakened.

“Hotel staff!” a distant voice shouted from the other side of the big wooden door that was still little more than a blur as Jeff squinted through the bedroom entrance and across what appeared to be a cavernous living room. The crashing waves Jeff heard in the distance behind him as he struggled to catch his breath and send his pounding heart back into his chest brought his brain back to Florida. Florida. What was he doing in Florida?

“Room service!”

Boom! Boom! Boom!

On the other side of the big wooden door, Ascondo was giving the soles of the gators a workout now, so much so that plenty of other hotel guests had already heeded the sounds of the outfielder’s pounding heel, and many had opened their doors and peered out before Jeff opened his. What they saw was a muscular Dominican man wearing a lavender suit with matching shoes and giant mirrored sunglasses, smiling while scaring the daylights out of whoever was behind door No. 39. What they didn’t know was he had planned to take a baseball bat out of the car next to add to the effect.

Who in the hell is that? Jeff was still half in a dream, still bracing himself for death, and still seeing himself just inches away from the Celica after the two deafening shots rang out from behind him. He was still trying to plunge fully into the waking world, where someone was hammering away at the door. Room service? It occurred to him — before another barrage from Ascondo — this wasn’t booze he was shaking off, it was genuine, unrelenting exhaustion.

“Mister Jeff Delaney! We need to come in and search your room! Have had reports of drug activity at this room! Open up!”