GPS (22 page)

Back when he had his shit together, Jeff often made his nationwide baseball visits by way of a 747, but now it was just him and the Toyota. As he imagined his impending cross-country trip the following week — mostly trying to decide whether or not he wanted to go all the way to Utah first and then backtrack to Texas, or vice versa — the voice of the man at the Lube-Right popped into his head
(“Man, this old girl needs an overhaul soon. You’ve got some electrical problems here, man …”)
and then quickly vanished.

An hour later, Jeff was strolling back into the courtyard from the garage, the bottle inside the apartment now at its half-empty, half-full stage. Since the advent of his new backyard escape, Jeff often amusedly measured his increasing intoxication by leaving the bottle inside and making himself climb the garage steps each time he wanted a refill. At the same time he was taking his party back outside, Riley was waking in the glare of the blinding Sudan sun streaming through the window of her Khartoum hotel suite. In the distance, the uneasy-sounding cries of birds she’d never heard before filled the background.

Her estranged husband, naturally, was doing exactly what she imagined he would be doing, once she calculated the eight-hour time difference in her brain. But she had awakened with pleasant thoughts of him nonetheless, interspersed with the continued shock that she was in Africa, one of five writers the New York Times had selected to take on the most dangerous assignment any of them had ever known. With the fearlessness that defined the woman, Riley had accepted the offer and had flown to London, then Cairo and finally Khartoum before giving herself any chance to second guess the decision.

Ever since her departure now two weeks in the past, Riley too had replayed that scene in the courtyard hundreds of times. Much like Jeff’s incomplete conclusions that night after he’d spent a full week of thinking through what had happened to him out in the desert, Riley knew there was plenty of evidence of something, but yet no concrete answer as to what any of it was.

It had confused her far more than she’d let on that night, in large part because so much of Jeff’s story seemed, at least in some way, too real for even him to concoct. Jeff always had a somewhat holier-than-thou way of delivering statements which he felt were true, and he had delivered his strange explanation about New Mexico — but it really wasn’t New Mexico, she supposed — in a way that seemed too impassioned and far too detailed to be a lie. In so many ways, his story was so unbelievable that she had trouble selling herself on the notion that he would even try to put such a thing past her unless it was true.

Jeff knew her. Was there any way he’d gone so far off the deep end that he thought she would buy all this stuff about driving his car into some other plane of existence if it wasn’t true? Was there any way he could have made up that photograph, the one she herself had spent long hours pondering and trying to discount?

Like she’d done dozens of times on her sleepless, seemingly endless journey across the Atlantic Ocean, Riley picked up the phone she’d left sitting on the night stand in her tiny room. She powered it on and scrolled to the image that was now just as detailed in her mind and her dreams as it was on the tiny phone screen. There she was, some lost little girl left alone in the desert, awaiting whatever terror might be next.

She couldn’t help but liken it to the bleak desert fields and body-strewn plateaus that she knew awaited her to the west of Sudanese capital city. The picture, real or not, would very likely be a common thread between the world Jeff had somehow seen and the one she was about to see every day for the next year.

Jeff now moved his baseball research further west, finding the web site for the Orem Owlz, his other assignment on next week’s grueling trek. It was more of the same stuff — an identical Web site to the previous one other than the different team logo and colors and different player names and faces filling it. Like the games he now painstakingly watched, and the players he scouted, they were all the same. Likewise, Jeff figured both of his stops would be nearly identical when he and the Celica made them.

Just like Ellis Denson in Corpus Christi, Francisco “Willy” Cintron was destroying pitching in the Pioneer League. And like Denson, and most other minor leaguers for that matter, Cintron was probably sitting in a dugout somewhere right now hoping some scout would send back enough evidence to a major league club to get him the hell out of there.

Jeff no longer thought of himself as a savior for players like that, a guy who rolled into town and noticed all the important fine details and helped his organization sift through the bullshitters and sign the stars. His history with Felix Ascondo alone was all the proof he needed that he was no one’s guardian angel in baseball, or in any other facet of life. Though Jeff never gave it a thought that night, as the clear empty glass of the whiskey bottle upstairs began to overtake the remaining brown fluid inside, Ascondo was one of those guys stuck in a dugout hoping to be rescued by an astute scout that night.

Felix didn’t hate Jeff for what happened, though he would have been well within his rights to pin at least some of his current situation on the drunk scout he thought was his friend. Instead, he simply soldiered on in the only way he knew. Ascondo made his Double-A debut that night in the Texas League, striking out in his first two at-bats before hammering consecutive doubles for the Frisco RoughRiders, playing on the road at Midland. He knew his dream of playing for the Mets had likely died that unforgettable night in Florida when he’d been told about the trade, but Ascondo was already steadfast in pursuing a new version of his dream, albeit in a much different place. As he gazed out across the Texas flatland in the distance beyond the outfield wall, he figured he must be further from New York now than he was the day he was born in Santo Domingo, and that still hurt.

Ascondo tried to remember that life was never supposed to be easy, that the overall goal of bettering his family’s situation back home didn’t care what uniform he wore. If nothing else, the trade to the Rangers had vaulted him straight to Double-A, quite a leap from the South Atlantic League, and in a mere matter of weeks.

Felix still had a singular focus and an outlet for all of his pain and disappointment — pitchers. Just as much as he thought about the status quo of his own life as he peered out into the lonely Texas night, however, he thought about ol’ Jeffy and the demons that always seemed to be chasing him, even as he shuffled out of the clubhouse that night in St. Lucie.

The bottle neared emptiness and Jeff’s brain neared the topping-off point of impairment. A light scratching sound he did not notice began on the other side of the apartment, at the front door. There, a thinning, scraggly black cat was trying to figure out a way into the door that bore not only a familiar human scent but also his own. The large gash on the back of the cat’s neck had not healed much during his weeks on the street, and the animal was nearing desperation in its attempt to reconnect with the old life that it could not fully remember in its brain, but could still recognize with its nose.

The cat emitted a long, pained yowl as it stared hopefully up at the door, sensing the person it knew to occupy this place was still behind that door somewhere. The cat had emptied the green food dish next to the door in a matter of minutes upon picking up its scent from the rear alley, but even after some dedicated clawing at the door, there was no response.

After a few minutes, the cat moved with a limp back down the alley — still on the hunt for a way back to its former life — and back into the streets it had felt so compelled to explore just a few weeks earlier.

The walk turned into a hobbled run when the cat heard a sudden crash from somewhere behind him. Jeff had drunkenly tossed the empty bottle into the recycling bin, where it shattered into pieces against the collection of others. He sucked down the night’s final fingers of whiskey in the same amount of time it took him to walk back down the garage stairs one last time and out into the courtyard. When he got there, he stumbled back into his chair.

He passed out and dreamed of the desert.

- 26 -

“We was all just a buncha dumb kids when dat wah came callin’ on us, you know dat’s right. Came callin’ on us like dat hurricane did, whetha we was ready fo’ it o’ not. Changed all us fo-eva, it did. We wadn’t kids fo’ long, dats da right truth. Took da youth right out some of us, took da life right out some of us.”

Jeff’s first inclination when he sat down at Zephyr Field and heard a weathered-looking old man in front of him start talking — the man had a purple heart medal pinned to a plain white t-shirt — was to get up and go sit somewhere else. But tonight, he would have heard mostly the same thing everywhere else in the stadium.

He had arrived in plenty of time for Friday night’s Las Vegas-New Orleans game. Even in the face of his almost constant half-drunk hangover during his waking hours, Jeff was early enough to watch batting practice and even introduce himself to the hulking Tyler Mack after the Zephyrs’ latest addition pounded dozens of baseballs out of the stadium from the batting cage that cloaked home plate.

But when he turned around 20 minutes later to find an empty seat — or row, he hoped — to watch the action, Jeff found the stadium was already full beyond his normal comfort level. He jogged his alcohol-ridden brain to try to figure out why all these people had picked this particularly stormy-looking night to cram into the park for the game. As he scanned across the main grandstand, the answer became clear. All those silver-haired men and women were here because it was Veterans’ Appreciation Night. Wonderful, he thought.

He saw all sorts of military and war memorabilia attached to the unexpected crowd. Some people wore those POW-MIA shirts, some wore their old medals pinned to their everyday clothes and plenty more much younger people, he now saw, were wearing their active duty military dress.

It reminded Jeff that he had been dreaming more and more about that machine gun lying in the sand, about how it felt and sounded as the bullets sprayed out of it after he grabbed it, how it rocked his entire body. Having never been a hunter or a gun enthusiast, the bullets in his recollections sounded like hailstones pelting the roof of a car when they rammed into those SUVs. Jeff considered, as he walked off the field and into the crowded, bustling stands, the reason why he felt so compelled to do something so insane in that desert in his dreams. He tried to measure what it was that sent him running, gun raised, right at them.

Fighting in a war was something he’d never been put in a position to even consider doing in his 38 years, but somehow these recurring dreams that now played and replayed the same scenes over and over again carried with them real life emotions.

He had vehemently opposed the war in Iraq since its beginning, and though he’d watched hundreds of times with great admiration all the fatigue-clad soldiers walking through the airport terminals, he’d never been a part of any such conflict in his life and never wanted to be. In fact, he often thought how lucky he was to have been born way too late to experience Vietnam and way too early to experience Iraq. But the dreams that were now a regular visitor in his life gave him the pressing sense of answering such a call, something that was worth shooting for, fighting for. Maybe even dying for.

And yet, as he gazed at the long string of ancient-looking men filling the seats in front of him after he’d picked his own seat 10 rows up from first base — their heads swiveling back and forth in conversation — the stories of war, heroism and camaraderie in the face of certain death they were telling were real, and undeniably appealing. Conversely, his own thoughts of a war in some other world, where he had begun to believe he really had taken up arms and fired live rounds toward an unknown enemy in the distance, seemed far less real now, but maybe just as appealing in their own strange way.

“I’ll never forget that day. My life really did change forever that day,” a very polished-looking gentleman wearing a beige suit he had to be roasting in said, immediately drawing the attention of each of the other men to his left and right, and from Jeff. “I was an 18-year old kid, standin’ on a street corner over there in Algiers, thinking about joinin’ a jazz band and whistlin’ at every piece of tail that walked by. Just standin’ out there actin’ a fool. When that man, that white boy in the uniform, came up to me, he looked mad, mad to see another man just standin’ out there with nothin’ to do. The Japs and the Germans were already runnin’ the world over by then, takin’ all they could get, and there I was doin’ nothin but wastin’ time. ‘Don’t you want to want somethin’? Don’t you need to need somethin?’ he was askin’ me. And I just stood there, bitin’ on my bottom lip, you know how I do.”

The other men broke out laughing, giving the man in the middle a chance to take a breath, shift in his seat, and dig deeper into his memory.

“Fore I know what I’m doin’, I’m signin’ my name on that dotted line, you know. It wasn’t but two days went by I was down there in the bayou trainin’ for somethin’ I didn’t know nuthin’ about. Never fired a rifle in all my days and never wanted to. An’ they couldn’t tell you what it was gonna be like when we all got over there in Europe. How do you explain somethin’ like that to an 18-year-old kid? Just like the Grand Canyon or somethin’, you just got to go see it, put your own eyes on it, live through it, to know what it’s about.

“But once you marched through those streets, human ashes blowin’ in the breeze and dead soldiers and people layin’ all over, you knew then you was never gonna be the same. But you knew you was doin’ somethin’ that meant somethin’. Even if it didn’t mean nothin’ to you at the time, you knew you was doin’ somethin’ that needed doin’. Didn’t take long to change me, no. I got over there and learned real fast that man Hitler was fittin’ to take over. You know, maybe I’m a fool but I believe we really did stop that from happenin’. It didn’t take me more than five minutes over there to see how serious they were. That’s what got me in it all the way, you know, what got me through, kep’ me from freezin’ to death at night and starvin’ to death durin’ the day.”