GPS (13 page)

Jeff, still feeling an ache in his knee that made him remember at once the awful struggle of running in the loose sand of the desert floor, walked stiffly to the door and stared out the peephole at his most recent screw-up, standing outside his door in a purple suit.

- 14 -

The roller-coaster rhythms of reggaeton would never, in Jeff’s opinion, be a good backdrop for anything other than a drunken night out. As he tried to get a feel for weaving through Florida beach traffic behind the wheel of Felix Ascondo’s massive rented Hummer that afternoon, the trumpets and big bass beats cascading through the truck and out its windows only added an extra layer of confusion onto the man who quite literally had been dragged out of his hotel room just 20 minutes before, still half-asleep and still haunted by visions of that other place.

The extraction was done in the way Ascondo did everything — with fair, yet uncompromising force. His unfailing kindness and sense of humor were often masked in the gruff, unpolished ways of the Dominican streets from which he had extracted himself. The smile Ascondo had worn outside the door to Jeff’s spacious suite was, in truth, a lot like the one its occupant had been wearing the last couple of weeks, as the line between Jeff’s realities and fantasies seemed to thicken at times and then disappear completely like the horn section now blaring at him as he steered the flamboyant outfielder toward the Tradition Field complex in Port St. Lucie.

Sometimes your smile is your greatest armor.

It had been an unconscious understanding of that which prompted Jeff to simply swing the door open that afternoon as soon as he recognized through the peephole the man who was perfectly content to knock that hotel door right off its hinges if he needed to. The reality was — as he had first looked at the clock in the living room to see it was 12:31 p.m. on what he then remembered to be Monday afternoon in Port St. Lucie — he had been pinned down, surrounded.

Ascondo’s arrival, for all he knew, might have saved him from whatever or whoever was compelled to shoot at him on his way out of that place in his dream. So instead of trying to hide behind the door that was being kicked into splinters, Jeff accepted that there was no way to avoid taking his own beating. The man who had scouted Ascondo and who had hammered down shot after shot of Patron with him that memorable night in Santo Domingo a few years back bent his lips into his new smile before he opened up his Vistana Beach Club door to reveal, apparently, a much more comical version of himself than he realized.

When the two men locked eyes for the first time since spring training — Ascondo, of course, already knew he’d been blown off by Jeff just a week earlier in Savannah — even the man with a stare as hard as a coffin nail couldn’t keep his own smile from unfurling itself again and ruining what he hoped to be quite a tirade, at least to start things off.

“Why you trying to mess me up, Jeffy? Don’t you know — Jeffy? Jeffy? Man, what is going on witchu, dude?” Ascondo reared back, grinning fully now and looking down his mirrored shades at the pasty, sweating man in the doorway. “You been on a bender, bro? I mean, I didn’t think you messed with dat stuff, chico. But you look like you been huffing that cocaine like a vacuum!”

In Ascondo’s simultaneous rage and amusement, he exaggerated certain words to make them sound more like coca-EEN and vac-YOOM. The smile which accompanied the pronunciations added even more punch as Ascondo, without invitation, stepped right into the room and right into Jeff’s bewildered face.

As he waited out the initial attack without even speaking, Jeff suddenly remembered idolizing the man who had drawn a crowd wherever they went that night in Santo Domingo. People wanted to know where the kid was going next, when he was going to get drafted and whether or not they could give him a ride to the next night spot. He held the attention of everyone in the city. Now he held Jeff’s for the first time since the scout helped negotiate his trade from the Astros to the Mets the year before.

“I thought this was our deal, bro, but this is no part of the deal. You fucking leave me sitting in Georgia all year while I beat those bitches up and down for nothing? Dat what you gonna try to do? You think nobody else see who the fuck I am? They all talking to me now, bro, they telling me get outta the Sally League, you too good already. But you know what mess the deal up? You know what mess me up when you leave me sitting in that fucking airport? I like you, dude. You always were real to me, until now. Nobody else come to Dominican and hang like you, Jeffy, and that counted. Why you wanna fuck me now?”

Ascondo had begun to pace around the massive suite’s living room, and while he became more and more animated, the man born to play baseball took imaginary swings of the bat in the air, seemingly without even realizing it. Since the age of 4, he’d taken thousands of swings each and every day — in the beginning with a tape-ball and a broomstick against the back of his mother’s house and now, as Jeff well knew, like a tireless worker ant in the batting cage of whichever clubhouse he called home.

One of the things Jeff had always remembered about Ascondo was that at 15, about the same time his stroke on the baseball started taking that extra jump and his legs started carrying him from first to third in a flash of fury, he had witnessed the murder of his older brother behind a seafood market. Carlos Ascondo had once been a pitching prospect in the final days of the Montreal Expos’ existence, but had never been able to separate himself from the streets the way Felix had.

The younger brother had excelled in school despite his own ties to the barrio. While he learned to speak fluent English in hopes of someday being interviewed by Tim McCarver after a World Series game in America, his brother began doing favors for a local drug operation.

In keeping with the way things usually worked in places like Santo Domingo, the man now riding shotgun while Jeff chauffeured him around in Florida was climbing the major league ladder in accordance with his dreams while his brother rested in a grave outside his barrio in the Dominican, buried by a couple of shotgun blasts. Ascondo had vowed revenge that night after sprinting home through the streets, but the fact was he didn’t possess the kind of muscle it took to carry it out, and he had come to America still trying to come to terms with that.

The barrios were rarely a source of good luck, and in the case of Carlos, they brought the result of death at a young age. Carlos had made a delivery at a dance club less than a mile from the sitting room where he was born, had been robbed at gunpoint by a rival crew on his way out the door and was killed the following night by his own crew for what it had cost them. Carlos was walking his kid brother home from baseball practice that night, and the two had stopped at the market for sodas when a car pulled up behind them. Two men grabbed Carlos from behind and dragged him to the back alley as the market owners knowingly scrambled for cover.

Within seconds, it was over. Still wielding the wooden bat their mother had given the brothers the year before as a joint birthday gift — Carlos was three years older, but they had September birthdays two days apart — Felix scrambled around the corner in time to see his brother’s legs kicked out from behind him by one man as he was shot in the chest twice at close range by the other. The gunman had taunted the stunned, motionless Felix to take a swing at him with his bat. Felix hadn’t, of course, but he had tried to treat every pitcher ever since as that gunman. With every swing of the bat that first winter he discovered Ascondo playing in the Dominican, Jeff could feel the kid’s rage, could feel him gritting his teeth and knew for certain that’s what could make him a star.

As Jeff now neared Tradition Field, where Ascondo would join the St. Lucie Mets whether Jeff thought he was ready for it or not, it occurred to him that Ascondo, whose number of friends in the world easily numbered in the thousands, thought of him as one of those friends. And at the moment, a pretty bad one.

True, maybe Ascondo was skewing the line between business and friendship, but the man had a point when it came to the lack of respect Jeff was showing him. It was just that of all the players in Jeff’s rotation at the moment, Ascondo would have seemed the least likely to be a fast leaper out of spring training. There was still that glimpse of stardom that Jeff had spied at winter ball, but Ascondo had been slowed at a critical time by injuries. His recent, sudden surge, though unseen and unnoticed by Jeff, was proof that baseball kept on going whether you were there to see it or not. Lately, Jeff hadn’t been there to see it.

Now, despite the chance he was on the verge of being traded again, the kid was acting completely in control of his own destiny in a way that made Jeff awestruck. He peered over at the lavender-encased man with a script tattoo across the side of his neck — “Los 19-8-02” — Ascondo’s way of never letting his brother’s death separate itself from him.

Beyond his unbelievable inner strength, one of the outfielder’s strongest qualities — and one of the most annoying to Jeff — was his memory of useless names and information. The man who struggled to remember to lay off breaking pitches managed to always remember random things about other people’s lives.

“Whatchu gonna do, Jeffy?” he asked, turning to the man behind the wheel, who was still wearing the T-shirt, shorts and flip-flops in which he had answered the door that afternoon. “You gonna keep fucking around, dude, until you get canned by the Mets? That what you wanna do? Then whatchu gonna tell Riley? You gonna just become a drifter over there in New Orleans? Man, I thought I could trust you, bro, but that night I see you in the stands in Savannah, you barely even watching the game. What I’m supposed to think, thatchu gonna be able to help me get into the big leagues now? Now I know, dude, now I know what the other ones think bout me and I know you probably gonna end up forcing me to go somewhere else.”

Jeff was getting the hang of driving now, not just the Hummer either, but driving the Hummer in the Ascondo way, lane-changing and rubber-necking while the controlled confusion of the reggaeton raged on. Jeff was annoyed by the fact another human being who wasn’t Riley — of course Ascondo remembered
her
name — could have him so easily pegged without really knowing any of the details of his current, collapsing life.

“I don’t know, Felix. I mean, you’re right, I guess — ”

“See, that’s what I mean, bro,” Ascondo interrupted. “Since when you become a guesser, dude? You remember when I strike out three times that game in winter ball — all sliders — like they could just throw me that shit any time and I go for it. Remember? Remember my manager down there, he don’t give a shit. He let me strike out and strike out, over and over again until I get released and they forget all about me. It was you that tole me nobody don’t never get nothing by guessing, and you right about that. Now you the one guessing and you getting lost like me on a slider. I don’t go for the slider no more, bro. Not me.”

“Well life isn’t always as simple as that, Felix, you’ve got to — ”

“Bullshit, dude. It is that simple. It’s like baseball, black and white, like you tell me that day and I never forget it. Simple don’t always mean easy, like you say, but it do mean black and white. You got to cancel out all those other colors and make a decision. How you not remember this now when it seems like your life is headed for shit? Whatchu been doing with yourself? You still got that unlucky black cat, Lefty? And what’s going on with Riley, bro? You still married or what?”

There was no way Jeff was going to rake the coals directly onto himself by talking about Riley, and the fact Ascondo was being such a sage to him now after being flatly abandoned in Savannah last week and left at the airport just an hour earlier was too staggering to comprehend.

“What? Yeah, of course. I mean, you know, we have our problems that we’re working on but it’s all fine,” Jeff lied. “Man, I just want you to be able to look at everything we’ve been through together. I wouldn’t all of a sudden just walk out on you — ”

“Fourth inning, dude! You kidding me? Fourth inning you walk out on me! I strike out, you walk out! You lucky I didn’t blow the whistle on your ass that night! Too bad for you all those guys trying to do a better job than you
did
do a better job than you that night. Now they all interested, they all wanna see what I can do for them. But playing for the Mets is what’s supposed to be for me, what me and my brother used to dream about, and I ain’t gonna take no for an answer. What’s your answer Jeffy? You think you gonna walk out on me tonight before I start ripping shit out of the Florida League? You do it again, and we’ll both be out of New York.”

It wasn’t until he wheeled the Hummer up to the Tradition Field player entrance that Jeff even considered the fact that because he was driving Ascondo’s car, he now had no way back to the hotel. He sure as hell wouldn’t be walking into the Mets’ spring complex dressed as he was now.

“Enjoy my ride, and watch your speed cuz I don’t get no insurance on these things,” Ascondo said casually as he hopped out of the truck and walked around to the back to grab his bags, leaving a frowning Jeff still sitting behind the wheel. Apparently, the Dominican was still several paces ahead of the bumbling scout. He knew when he kicked that hotel door he would be leaving Jeff his car.

“You look like shit,” he called from the back of the truck, bending over now and peering into his bat bag curiously. “Try to wear something nice tonight and park my car in the player lot when you get here. This way, you can no fucking leave me standing out in right field while you go off drinking. You be right here ready to see what everyone else seeing. Have fun, dude.”

For some reason, it was then that it occurred to Jeff he hadn’t had a drink for days now.

- 15 -

“
Pinch hitting for St. Lucie right fielder Mike Lacey, Nuuummmmber thirty-nine, Feeeeeeelix Assscaaaaaando.”