GPS (31 page)

“After today, you leg it out, you’ll start feeling different about things,” Paulo went on. “You got to —”

“Leg what out?” Jeff interrupted, now feeling very much like the usual old Jeff, the one who dominated conversations and rarely waited for complete answers. “You mean this leg?” He lifted up his bandaged limb, nearly losing his balance the minute he did. “This one’s already out, at least for now. And to be honest, I wouldn’t mind joining it, if you know what I mean.”

“What do you mean?”

“Mean? I mean I think I might want to get out of here, get back home, go back to what I consider real life. I mean this is quite a thrill, but I mean, I can’t just jump into this thing. It’s not my fight.”

“You’re full of shit, Delaney,” a young Latino man on the right side of the dugout suddenly cut in. “Not your fight? You Americano? You human? If you are, it’s your fight. Screw him, Paulo, let him ride off. We don’t need another Simmons, no offense.”

Paulo studied Jeff without flinching while Jeff wondered what any of what that man just said actually meant. Ride off? What was that supposed to mean? Paulo’s two-way radio broke the silence, chirping out something in part Spanish, part English. The English part Jeff could make out came at the very end, and said, “It’s a total loss, man, just so you know. Out.” Paulo appeared to speak in spite of what he’d just heard on the radio.

“When I say leg it out, I mean you need to get that dark cloud off you, bro,” he said. “You know what I mean. Not the sunburn, or the leg, but the other thing. You can run off home and make your leg and your skin feel better, but I bet you won’t beat that other thing back home.”

Jeff stood in silence.

“That other thing? It don’t just work itself out,” Paulo continued. “That one you got to confront head on. My father used to say the only thing that goes away by ignoring it is your teeth. So today, you go off on your own. Confront the demon. All by yourself. Oh, and find dinner too.”

Jeff paused as long as he could. “Dinner? Is that a joke?”

“You go out there and start to think about the connection between you and your gun, the way it enables you to be free, to eat and drink and make your own rules, but only when you do what you have to. Then you think about the connection between you and that monkey on your back, how it keeps you from being free, from doing anything other than, well, that. So go do what you have to out there.”

“Out where? Out there?” Jeff asked waving an arm over his shoulder and pointing toward the desert and mountains beyond the stadium and the city. Paulo nodded. “Can I drive my car out there? Where is it, by the way, my car?”

“You drive out there and you’ll never drive back, I promise. You need to get out on foot, get into the scrub, up in the foothills. Take the Springfield. Learn how to shoot it. Embrace your surroundings. You’ll eat before you go and you’ll take plenty of water and you’ll keep your shirt on this time. You’ll bring back dinner — to prove you learned something about your gun — and you’ll leave the monkey in the desert when you come back. For good this time.”

Looking at the cast of characters in front of him, Jeff again found himself unable to comprehend how it was the revolucion maintained a regiment of people who actually came here from somewhere else. And stayed.

- 37 -

Within an hour, Jeff knew he had done something stupid.

An hour was a long period of time even by Jeff’s standards in which to realize he had done one of those things from which one could not simply turn back. The objects in his field of view, which seemed perfectly normal just minutes before, had taken on a singed, melting quality on their edges as he sat beneath a leaning Joshua tree where the steady incline toward the next set of mountains was evident.

He had no idea where he was, but needed only to find a clearing in the endless scrub of yuccas and stunted fir trees to see where the city was in the distance below, and the two adjoining sets of ruins further into the horizon. With only a guarantee that he was heading into a “pretty safe” stretch of the foothills at the base of the mountain ranges which were the spine of the country, Jeff had limped off on his own that day, like he was told. He did so still mystified that anyone became compelled to abandon their daily realities and live on such short terms in this hornet’s nest. Yet, here he was, one of them, going solo into the countryside with a fresh wound on his leg and sunburn still gripping his back and shoulders.

None of Jeff’s attempted follow-up questions to Paulo and the other men sitting in the dugout were answered that morning. He was outfitted with two full canteens affixed to a heavy-duty leather belt. In a slot on the back of the belt, Jeff had put the Blackhawk pistol, freshly reloaded. Strapped across his upper back was a Springfield rifle, thankfully not the same one that had jammed up on Simmons the day before. And in a low-slung backpack that was murder on his sunburn, he had shells, a flare gun, a massive hunting knife, a tube of aloe, a lighter, aspirin, a long thin blanket and a package of beef jerky.

There were no rules here, not necessarily anyway, but there were apparently endless tests of survival like yesterday’s and today’s. This impromptu early afternoon hunting trip, like everything here, was an on-the-spot measurement of wherewithal. It wasn’t just knowing what to do, it was actually doing it, or dying.

The little details of everything were starting to jump out in colorful pops in every direction now. The things he saw he also began to hear, and to feel, or at least it seemed that way. He started to sense the swaying branches of the firs, started to feel the vibrations emitted by the wings of the thousands of monarch butterflies stirring in their branches. When he saw them out of the corner of his eye, the trees looked like they were on fire.

In his first two hours on the trail, Jeff had not spent any bullets, partly because he had been too terrified to give himself away to anything that might be hiding out here. Even if he wasn’t scared, he hadn’t seen anything alive except for ants, grasshoppers, butterflies, scorpions and a few circling vultures, none of which seemed to fit the billing of dinner.

Though he’d seen no humans yet, he had seen two former ones, and they were the source of Jeff’s stupid act, the one he was now quite certain he would regret. Not live to regret either, just regret. Instead of leaving the two skeletons alone for fear of, at the very least, disease, Jeff stood in awe of them for several minutes. As he did, he noticed and snatched up a small cloth bag he found lying in the dust near the one closest to the clearing he’d entered.

Jeff had found the sets of bones next to an old campfire when, for the first time, he had deviated from his straight-on course into the foothills. The discovery served as a sobering reminder of what awaited people who veered off the trail, or at least it should have. He’d scurried away in a sudden fit of terror after snapping up the small, faded purple bag with a drawstring top. Back on the trail, which really wasn’t much of trail but was the most direct line through the increasingly tall trees toward the mountains, Jeff had paused to see if he detected any movement around him.

Then he crouched gingerly, untied the drawstring and pulled the bag open. Instead of gold coins or diamonds like he’d pictured when he first saw the bag, there were a few pesos and a large, bulbous square of aluminum foil about the size of his fist. Without hesitation, the man who knew he was supposed to be out here trying to magically cure his addiction to alcohol by shooting a gun unwrapped the foil to see if some sort of mind-altering chemical — one that he recognized — was waiting within. One was.

The only other time Jeff had tried peyote, he and Riley had had quite a time. They’d laughed their asses off one minute, cried about their families and lost friends the next, and concocted plans for outrageous success that would soon be forgotten the next. It was done more as a dare than a desire to hallucinate. It reflected a time when Jeff and Riley challenged one another, back when the bond was still intact between them, not that doing mescaline in your 30s was necessarily a healthy challenge.

He gazed with nervous excitement at the puffy cactus bulbs that filled the palm of his hand. They sort of looked like grotesquely bloated, greenish sand dollars. Jeff thought of that night, one of the few he and Riley actually spent together during their Katrina escape to Arizona, and did so in happy little cloudlets of lost time. He studied what he figured to be the same things Riley had amused herself all that night by calling “those weird little buttons.”

Then, Jeff crammed two of them into his mouth and furiously chewed them, bitterness etched onto his face. He knew this was not the customary way the Native Americans ingested them, but didn’t care. No rules.

At what had to be about 2:30 in the afternoon, those little cactus nodules were working their way into Jeff’s brain, setting off the same firework pigments his GPS displayed when everything started to go crazy. In a moment typical of a now-personality, the man who’d been deprived of alcohol for a few days had now opted for an even stronger dose of escapism. This time, he
did
want to hallucinate, at least he thought that he did for a brief second before he had gorged himself on the peyote.

Now, he sat against the tree in one of those long stupors that take the skepticism (I don’t feel anything yet) out of the chemical takeover and allow the claws to completely dig in. He stared into a tangle of brush in front of him. It was a ball of chaos, like his life. It looked a lot like the mess he’d made of everything. It was all the disappointment he felt and made others feel, one mistake intertwining with the other.

But instead of anguish, Jeff felt an unexpected affection for the confusion he felt about his surroundings, and about his fears of the unknown and about his mostly unhappy life. Someone had told him once there was nothing sexier than misery, and perhaps that was true. With that thought, he turned a massive smile into the slowly aging sunlight and felt his mind reach out to hug the staggering heat. (“Embrace your surroundings.”) He thought of Riley again, her accidental perfection, and tried to copy and paste her image into the horrible framework of African genocide. He couldn’t.

Mostly, he just stared into the hot atmosphere above, and steadily, he saw possibilities begin to appear like skywriting. He’d done nothing with himself for all these years, other than constantly shrug off today to get to tomorrow, but there were definite possibilities in today. For the first time since he’d arrived, a feeling of infinity overcame him and he didn’t mind it. Trying to understand the hows and whys of this world, and in what way it related to his own world, was pointless. Maybe that’s what it took to stay here and survive and find happiness — stop questioning everything and just live.

One of Jeff’s least favorite sayings was, “Everything happens for a reason.” Of course it goddamn did, he always thought when he heard someone say that. It was a silly saying people uttered in order to make the ups and downs of their own mundane lives have some gleam of purpose. But like an awful pop song or bad commercial, that little saying was wandering around in Jeff’s brain now as the hallucinogen swam deeper into his bloodstream. No longer in fear of being seen or heard in this expanse of nothingness, he began his usual discourse in response to it, out loud.

“My wife left me. It’s because I’m a miserable drunk. That’s the reason! My skin is burning off of my body. It’s because I spent an afternoon in the desert not wearing a shirt. Everything — even sunburn — happens for a reason! That guy yesterday, he died because I shot him seven times. That’s the reason! Hell yes!”

Despite his best efforts to stop it, however, his tripping mind kept challenging him to apply the little saying to all of this. To apply the simple little phrase to why he was here, alone, cut off from everyone and everything he’d ever known. Was there some profound reason he could come up with for the decisions he’d made? Probably not, and maybe that was okay. “No rules!” he shouted into the wind. Stop thinking and start doing, he thought, but he stayed cemented to the tree anyway.

Jeff began to think harder and harder but seemed to make less and less sense of things. The sounds and sights and colors began to dominate everything, and random voices and conversations began streaming inanely into and out of his mind. Euphoria rammed away at his paranoia. One of the last concrete, normal thoughts Jeff later remembered having that day was that he needed to get to his feet, raise the gun and shoot something. Maybe lots of things.

He limped about 250 yards farther up the incline and climbed slowly up the lower row of branches of a large fir tree. While it felt like his depth perception was skewed completely, it was remarkable how Jeff’s brain was still in control of his body. With his neck arched against his left shoulder, he strained to put his pulsating vision onto whatever was making sudden footfalls in the distance ahead. He looked down and realized he was already holding the loaded Springfield. He craned his neck back in the direction of the growing sound. Something was coming, and even the gibberish that played in his head and the color bombs blasting off in his periphery could not mask it.

He raised the rifle and tried to look through the scope. Though his hands were remarkably steady as he did, the jumble between Jeff’s ears now pounded out New Orleans ragtime, and instead of the tiny clearing up ahead, he saw Uncle Lionel Batiste bouncing up and down on stage at The Spotted Cat, sweat rolling down his temples, waving his hanky in the air and stomping his feet with a Miller High Life on the floor next to him. Jeff was content with the image for now, and even felt his body start to groove to the sound of the music instead of trying to focus on the circle of green and brown in the scope of the rifle.

But the music stopped suddenly when, over a fallen tree about 50 yards away, came first one, then two and then three whitetail deer. They stopped in the small clearing, ears flickering as they leaned over to chomp on the small tufts of grass on the ground below. Jeff pulled the trigger without thinking, and without fear of being heard. The gun’s blast seemed to trail slowly in and out of his ears like the images in front of him did to his eyes.