GPS (24 page)

For safety’s sake, the men from each of the divisions would split up again and go their separate ways to more remote locations after what the revolucion hoped would be two to three days of intense training and planning. As for the many newcomers Paulo expected to arrive at that day, each would be assigned to one of the four transient divisions at the stadium and then sent on to continue their training out in the desert. After that, it would be a matter of picking the perfect night and attacking.

Simmons wondered if that lunatic Delaney would be riding back with Fonseca’s crew to Victoria, where Paulo had hoped to return and seal up some of those old camps while his transient division waited for the official word to move on the hidden canyon of Destinoso. Simmons planned to return on Thursday, his next off day at home, to oversee the training in the big city and assume his own role as one of the lead snipers.

It was thrilling — despite the constantly fragile state of the revolucion — to imagine all those men coming together from across the country to begin the actual legwork toward the big hit at the Destinoso ranch. And even though Delaney was totally insane, Simmons had to agree with Fonseca that he was just the kind of guy that could help them, if he didn’t get them killed in the process.

As he walked up one final incline on the tangled jungle trail, the shirtless Simmons spied the transients already hard at work, rushing to pack things up and put them into the beds of the trucks without speaking to one another. Fonseca was standing off to the left of the campsite clearing, gazing into his handheld GPS and not seeming to sense Simmons’ tall frame walking out of the jungle brush.

But like he often did just when Simmons thought Paulo had gotten completely hypnotized by the GPS, Fonseca snapped out of it in his cool, calculating manner. This time, without even looking up from the miniature screen in his hands, he simply raised his right arm and pointed in the direction of Simmons, then a wry smile stretched across his face. Like he always did — not that anyone in the camp that morning didn’t recognize Simmons’ muscle-laced body on sight — Josh silently flashed the sign of the revolucion; he clenched his right hand into a fist, pulled it to his face and kissed it, then unfurled it into a peace sign.

Peace by force.

- 28 -

“Lemme hold that piece you got on the windshield, son. Lemme take a quick peek at dat joint.”

The man who crept up behind Jeff while he sat in the driver’s seat of the Celica with the window rolled down late Sunday night was able to do so because the man behind the wheel was in a drunken stupor, and had been every night for three weeks running now.

Jeff had been smart enough to realize — even before he left for the 6 p.m. first pitch at Zephyr Field earlier that night — he’d better take a cab to the game and then another one back home from Jacques-imo’s after hitting the town with Nifty Carlson following the game. The bench coach for the Las Vegas 51s would be facing quite a hangover for his flight back to Nevada at dawn. But when Jeff got home to the Esplanade Avenue apartment hours after the game ended, he was dumb enough — drunk enough — to start thinking about the desert, the revolucion and, well, was there any way back?

He asked himself over and over, as though an answer would just suddenly tumble out of his brain, finally making sense of the whole thing. Given the steady, unexpected development of details in his mind over such a short period of time about his experience, he figured maybe something really would just come to him.

It did. At least sort of. Amazing how some — albeit very few — great ideas and answers really do come to a person who happens to be completely gonged on booze at the time. But any intelligent thoughts that were staggering through Jeff’s brain in recent weeks were coming to a man that was either drunk or hung over all the time, so their mere delivery to his thoughts was only half the battle.

Jeff thought — as he stood swaying back and forth in front of his toilet that night, missing his target as much as he was hitting it — about the GPS abruptly displaying some sort of timer on his way home from Florida. It had said something about beginning training. There was definitely a clock of some sort, and maybe it had a meaning in terms of getting back. Regardless, it was a lingering oddity, something that seemed to reach out to Jeff and keep him thinking about it all, like the words written in the men’s room stall and on the techie message board. If the clock did have some meaning, it was tough to figure out now.

Nonetheless, Jeff had crashed down on the couch for a minute, sifting his brain and trying to recall what day that was, what time of day it had been and most important, how much time was left on the clock? It was counting down, wasn’t it? Yes, of course. If he could just remember the details, maybe he could figure out when the clock would have hit zero, and maybe, maybe...

“No way, not happening,” he’d said aloud, lifting himself back off the couch and beginning a drunken scavenger hunt around the tiny apartment. Instead of his usual trip to the rear courtyard of late, this time Jeff decided take it street-side, still awash in thoughts and possibilities.

The harder he’d tried to make something new click, the more he understood he had never come upon any new memories or ideas by trying. The images of the desert seemed to find him instead. As he tried to figure out what had happened and how it had happened, he tried to utilize the steady stream of clues and reminders that had already come his way.

The GPS he’d grabbed off the table had quite frankly become a little boring lately, Jeff thought, at least since that last long trip home from Florida. That was the night the clock popped up on the screen and everything went weird for a few minutes. There was none of that when he was here at home. Though he still took great delight in cranking up the GPS everywhere he went, it wasn’t doing anything unorthodox lately.

Maybe it only happened on long trips. Maybe there was some amount of time or mileage that had to pass before the thing started acting crazy. Maybe this other world could only be entered from that one specific place in New Mexico. Maybe all of this was nothing more than a new source of stress for the old traveling man, because maybe whatever it was, it was something that was never coming back to him, and maybe it was someplace to which he could never return. Maybe the very thought of ‘maybe’ would haunt him for the rest of his life. Maybe.

“C’mon man, I ain’t gonna do nothin’, I just wanna see it, man. I never seen nothin’ like that,” the man now leaning right in on the Celica’s driver’s side door said to Jeff, who felt helplessly pinned inside his own car. He had been dumb, alright, coming out here and sitting in the car this late at night with the GPS blinking away and asking for trouble, a worm wiggling on a hook. Jeff really was asking for it, and here it was.

Earlier, there had been the usual Bushmills shots for dessert inside the ever-popular Jacques-imo’s — everyone got one there, not just Jeff. Then they steered briefly on to the Samuel Smiths but naturally, they eventually swerved back to ‘the Old Bushman,’ as Nifty had referred to it all night. And now this.

Jeff had stumbled back down the apartment stairs with Lefty’s now half-full (half-empty) bag of cat food. He’d dumped a heavy load of it down into the green ceramic dish next to the step, set the bag back inside the door and walked out to the car. Wrestling the bag of food, a drink and the Warren GPS down the steps had been a chore, but he had managed it and then spent 20 or so minutes in the car watching the device flashing at him from above the dashboard.

The unseen man who eased up behind the car with the blinking windshield was not certain there was someone inside. Jeff was slumped down in the driver’s seat in the early stages of passing out when it happened. The potential thief ultimately proved to be something of a lucky soul by his own drunken clumsiness, because if someone in that car had been waiting to rob
him
, it would have been easy. The man’s shuffling feet had made the dozing Jeff stir back to life.

Before the booze got the best of him, Jeff had stared at the screen without blinking an eye, trying to find some new wrinkle in its soothing pixilation, something that would have once terrified him but now fascinated him. He was rooting for it. He wondered whether or not the answer might simply leap out and drag him away while he was on the road out west on Tuesday. And then he had just trailed off.

“Oh, hey there,” Jeff said, startled, turning his face up to the man and feeling his flood of fear quickly being replaced with a strange, simmering confidence. “Um, no, you can’t hold this thing here, friend. Not for a minute. That’s something I’ve got to have…”

“Well, nobody said I was gonna take it, did they? I just said can I hold it for a minute?”

A memory started playing in Jeff’s mind, and nothing about the desert this time, but about Jeff’s first visit to New Orleans as a kid. He remembered the feeling of wanting to be as streetwise as the guys who played all the tricks on the tourists, which is exactly what they had wanted him to want. He always kicked himself for falling for that first scam out there on Canal Street — “How much will you give me if I can tell you where you got your shoes at?” — but Jeff was glad it had happened right away, because he promised himself ever after he would never be suckered again. Tonight included.

“Well, I guess my answer is just no, no you can’t hold it then, friend. I don’t hand my valuables away on the street. Or did you think I was a college kid who got drunk at Mardi Gras a couple months ago and decided to stay on for a few ghost tours?” Instead of the GPS acting up, it was now Jeff who was talking crazy, wondering amusedly if this guy was going to pull a gun out of his pants to shut his smart mouth.

“Listen man, I was just askin’ you real nice like, but if you want, we can talk like some real men.”

As the man beside the car backed up two steps, glanced around at the empty street and then stepped forward to the car door again, Jeff suddenly, subconsciously, slid his right hand into the storage bin on the middle console of the Celica, which as always, was not snapped closed. That was usually because the CDs he kept crammed in there were easier to reach that way. But not this time. Jeff had made some impromptu, just-in-case sort of preparations (just in case what, he wasn’t sure) the last couple of days, and had forgotten about many of them already, thanks to The Old Bushman.

“You wanna talk like a man?” Jeff asked, trying to sound truly inquisitive. “Hmm, OK. Well, go ahead, friend. Act like you’re a man. You first. Go ahead. Start talking. Act like a goddamn man, friend.”

The man flashed a smile back at Jeff, who didn’t seem to realize his own teeth were bared into his favorite, anything-goes grin. He then caught a flash of it in the rearview mirror.

“We’ll see who’s the man after I cut that grin off your face,” the man seethed back at Jeff. “And we’ll see what else I’m gonna take besides that little TV on the windshield.”

The man pulled a gnarled, wooden-handled knife out of the waistband of his jeans. Jeff barely sat up in the driver’s seat. He never stopped smiling, but the man standing beside the car ready to slice him to ribbons stopped smiling as soon as Jeff started talking again.

“Oh, that?” Jeff now pointed casually to the windshield with his right hand, the one holding the Ruger .38 Blackhawk revolver he now remembered buying on Saturday morning and stashing right there in the car. He never imagined using the thing for real, let alone two days later. “That? That’s a GPS, friend, not a fucking TV, you idiot. If that was a TV, believe me friend, it would show you some shit you wouldn’t be ready to see. And since we’re here in the street, talking out who’s who and what’s what, let me give you some important information. You take even one step closer to me, my car or my little TV on the windshield, you’ll
need
a global positioning system — that’s what it’s called — to tell you where you’re going.”

Long after the man had run off into the New Orleans night, Jeff sat in the car waiting, hoping, daring anyone else to come try him. Lucky for Jeff, the gun was still in his lap when he awoke to the 5 a.m. sun on Esplanade Avenue Monday morning. The Celica doors were still unlocked, the window still rolled down and the GPS still flashing on the windshield.

The green food dish, Jeff noticed as he dragged himself and his pounding head into the apartment and up the steps, was completely empty.

- 29 -

“
Warren. We know where you’re goin’.”

Jeff drove down Esplanade on Tuesday morning, the car packed by a physically awake but mentally absent man who — instead of dreaming of his war in the desert as he slept all day Monday, and then all night into the sunshine of early Tuesday — dreamed on and off about the almost certain death of his beloved cat in the streets of New Orleans. He’d been feeding strays the last couple of weeks and he knew it, and he dreamed of all the cats that weren’t quite Lefty stepping past the front door and taking a few bites.

While the well-being of others in his life had simply been left behind for the time being in Jeff’s mostly woozy waking hours, his missing-at-best and likely starving and injured cat was becoming a regular visitor in his otherwise occupied thoughts, and his dream-filled slumber. They were brief, but stabbing images, unlike the revolucion movies that reeled past him in endless-loop projection on some nights and vanished completely on others. He thought about the desert almost constantly now, and he had become fully aware of how much it was changing him.

He knew he’d had some of those feverish waking dreams in recent weeks too, the ones in which imaginary conversations with fictional people that began while Jeff was sleeping often continued playing in his mind even while he stared at the cracks on his bedroom ceiling, perfectly awake. They were long, confused conversations with men he couldn’t remember exactly, but knew he’d met once because he could remember their collective voices and their mood, mannerism and movement.