GPS (34 page)

“
Message, three, Thursday, May 8
^th
, 10:55 a.m.
—
‘This, message, is for … Jeff, Delaney … If you are not … Jeff, Delaney … please discontinue listening to this message. By, continuing to listen to this message, you confirm that you are … Jeff, Delaney …’
Message, deleted.
”

“
Message, four, Thursday, May 8
^th
, 12:19 p.m.
—
‘Jaybird, hey it’s Johnboy. Remember me? Your goddamn brother? Jesus, dude, drop your cock and call me once in a while, pretend like you miss me or something. Anyway, miss the hell out of you man. Call me. I thought we were gonna set up a fishing trip down your way. I’ve got bags of vacation time I need to use this summer, and if another fall rolls around and I still haven’t reeled in at least one of those Louisiana redfish, it’s your fault brother. Hope everything’s cool. See ya.’”

“
Message, five, Thursday, May 8
^th
, 4:48 p.m.
—
‘Hello Jeff, it’s Mrs. Avery again. I’m a little worried about you. I thought for sure we’d see you by now. It’s Thursday and we’re about to head out of here for the day. It’s three days now, and, well, we really need your rent as soon as you can get it to us, and we’ll have to talk about your late fee when you come by. If you come tonight and we’re not here, we’re heading into town for dinner, but we’ll be back after that. Thanks, Jeff.’”

“
Message, six, Friday, May 9
^th
, 10:46 a.m.
—
‘This, message, is for … Jeff, Delaney … If you are not … Jeff, Delaney …’
Message, deleted.
”

“
Message, seven, Friday, May 9
^th
, 11:19 a.m.
—
‘Good morning, Jeff old friend, Sandy Morino here. Hope your day is gentle and easy. My, you must have done quite a little rain dance out there in Utah the other night. I do believe, according to the latest weather models, it’s most unfavorable out there and has been for days, especially for this pleasant time of the year. I wonder whether or not you were able to put your expert eyes on our friend Mr. Cintron before the entire stadium got washed away out there, and if not, how soon we will be able to learn about the ins and outs of his baseballing ability. As I’m certain you are aware, the New York Mets experiment is continuing with very poor results. Imagine, swept at the hands of the mighty Brewers. Last place by a mile now, as I’m sure you’re astutely aware. We’ll soon be out of jobs, I would guess, but in the meantime, we might buy ourselves a few more days if we were to acquire some talented young players. Do let me know about your progress in that regard. Good day, Jeff.’”

The Celica came to a stop in front of Jeff’s apartment and abruptly stalled out before he could turn the key and kill the engine himself. Jeff began rifling through his very limited stores of knowledge on cars. It didn’t take long and did nothing to change the fact that the car had just quit on him, and the dashboard was on tilt, blinking every light — CHECK OIL, SERVICE ENGINE SOON, BRAKE FLUID, COOLANT LOW.

He shook his head, stood out of the car and waited for the stiffness of a long drive to take hold of his body, but it didn’t because he’d been in the car for less than 30 total minutes, as he was about to confirm. The questions he’d been asking for the last several days about all of the details of his new world hadn’t stopped forming in his brain, only now he was the only one around to provide the answers. This one, however, was an easy one. What time was it? It had been mid-morning, probably 10:30 or so, back in the old stadium when he left. The Celica’s clock, like the rest of the car, had been on the blink for months now, so he popped his phone back open and saw that it was just before 1:30 in the afternoon in New Orleans. Given the time difference, as creepy a realization as it was, that really would be about right if he’d been in Mexico and somehow catapulted himself into Louisiana.

Though he thankfully hadn’t managed to bring any gruesome souvenirs back with him, he had plenty of memories, and some raging sunburn and a gash in his right leg to keep the revolucion foremost in his exhausted brain. At the front step next to the empty green food dish (Lefty had deserved a better owner, he thought) Jeff sorted through a pile of Times-Picayunes and put them in chronological order — Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and finally Saturday. He flipped that one over to see the top right corner and the date, May 10, 2008. He swung the front door open and dumped the newspapers at the bottom of the stairs without opening them. A pink LATE NOTICE dangled from the doorknob and despite Jeff’s intention of yanking the embarrassing thing off, he forgot it immediately after dragging his travel bags up the stairs.

Among the things he didn’t see by not fully opening Saturday morning’s paper was the little teaser box on the upper left-hand side of the front page. Below a SPORTS header were the words,
“Ascondo torches Zephyrs, page C1.”

- 42 -

Jeff had been given a stay of execution through the sheer unpredictability of the spring weather in Utah, and yet in some way, after all of his worrying over what would happen with the Mets, the message from Sandy was disappointing. Of course he hated the idea of some ugly message from his boss telling him he was out of a job, but the message he heard had proven that while he was gone, somehow, his status quo had been maintained in the baseball world, his neck saved again, and he had become resigned to the fact it was finally going to be over this time.

Even though time simultaneously moved in both of Jeff’s worlds, by an act of what seemed like cruel luck he hadn’t missed a thing while he was gone, except the rent. That meant he now had a decision to make, as opposed to coming home to find one already made for him.

Without pausing to look out onto his courtyard and without noticing the pile of Bushmills skeletons in the recycling bin in the kitchen, Jeff headed straight into the bedroom and fell asleep. Just before he did, however, the final lingering threads of his old self stirred enough to make him promise himself he would check on the Orem Owlz and Willy Cintron, see what their schedule was for the next few days and then decide how important it was for him to prolong the charade of being a baseball scout.

Within four hours, he was awake again. He dragged himself into the living room, fished his laptop out of his big travel bag and powered it on. With visions of Paulo, Simmons and bullets roaring through the desert in the back of his mind, he accessed the Owlz Web site, where the second headline was,
“Without Willy: Cintron takes big leap to Texas League.”

He clicked on the story to find that Cintron was being wooed from rookie ball all the way to Double-A San Antonio, a club that was apparently becoming the New York Mets of the Texas League this spring. They apparently thought Willy was the way, and so too did the Mets and the Blue Jays. Superb. Cintron had been called up yesterday, it said, and was joining the team for the rest of the weekend series at Midland.

Where did Jeff finally draw the line? His immediate reaction was to plan a trip, another trip to Texas to see another hot baseball prospect, like he’d done his whole life, it seemed. It’s not like the prospects ever got any better than the ones before them. They didn’t run any faster or hit the ball any farther, and Jeff couldn’t understand why he hadn’t just quit this baseball bullshit years ago. More and more, he found himself ashamed of the whole thing, his entire career. Sure, baseball scouts were mostly good people in his experience, but what were they really doing that was so valuable?

And while he was thinking about it, was there any point to making even one more miserable trip just to belabor a point he’d made countless times already? A sudden feeling of guilt washed over him because he thought of his father going to work every single weekday of his life, reporting to the same spot on the same assembly line at the same time to spend eight hours watching an infinite parade of bottles. He didn’t make them, didn’t sell them, didn’t box them and didn’t drink them. He just watched them, his job to make sure they kept on coming out, and to fix something if they stopped coming out.

Jeff would have hated every minute of it, but somehow dear old dad had made the time pass through the people who passed it with him. He embraced the daily routine of stories, jokes and discussions with his fellow working stiffs, from the bottling line to the break room and back to the line again. He became one of those men who spent Monday through Friday counting down the minutes until the weekend, and then counting down the minutes on the weekends until he could jump right back onto the endless treadmill of service.

Even through what proved to be a nasty divorce, Jeff’s father had never missed a day of work in his life until he was forced to retire in order to take on the job of dying of cancer. That was the pot of gold at the end of dad’s rainbow, and ever since his death, Jeff had promised himself he would never be someone’s slave in exchange for a gold-plated retirement watch.

He had become a slave to himself instead. The whiskey had slowly reeled him in, dragging him away from the other things which once made him aspire to be happy in the traditional way — get married, and when that got old, have kids, and when that got old, root for grandkids.

The downward turn in his life seemed to revolve immediately around his failure to accept the normal terms. At some point, he’d become convinced there was no happiness in any of that, at least not for him. It’s not that he hated kids, he just knew he was in no rush to create another human being with the same wiring as himself. Even when he thought about having kids with Riley, and even when they’d talked about it, Jeff had a way of seeing those imaginary kids as more hers than his. For whatever reason, those kids remained imaginary and Jeff remained miserable.

At the moment, it seemed such a fine line between saying hell with it and driving off to another baseball game, and saying hell with it and never setting foot in another baseball stadium again for the rest of his life. Baseball was his job, his line of bottles to watch, and it was a hell of a lot easier than almost any other job he could think of. Yet, he knew it would never make him happy again, never leave him kicking back and smiling about life.

As he sat on the couch and began to doze off again, a frail black cat scooted down the alley adjacent to Jeff’s apartment, moving toward Esplanade Avenue’s steady stream of cars and pedestrians. The green dish Lefty had grown accustomed to visiting in recent weeks had been empty for more than a week, and the cat was gradually losing its sense of connection to the smells around the apartment. Still, it had long since found the gap in the bottom of the fence and regularly went in and out of the courtyard through it.

After a long, pained sniff of the rear bumper on the red car parked out front, the cat was whisked away, across Esplanade and into the Marigny by the smell of a more likely meal. Around the corner on Frenchmen, restaurants like Adolfo’s and Marigny Brasserie had become a lifeline for the cat now, and the shrimp and crawfish heads, oyster shells and fish guts in its dumpsters were the only things keeping it alive.

Inside the apartment on Esplanade, Jeff stirred back awake, and with the unexpected, finger-snap decisions that now characterized him, he went down the hall and began rummaging through his closet for clean clothes. He was going to Texas to see Willy Cintron, once and for all. If he treated it as more of a challenge, a quest, than just another baseball errand, it seemed more worthy of his time. But the truth of the matter was different. The truth was that Jeff knew he didn’t want to deal with Sandy’s wrath just yet, and that the only thing waiting for him in New Orleans was another empty whiskey bottle. He also knew that right now, he couldn’t go back to the new world he’d discovered. Not yet.

- 43 -

“What’chu want, gato?”

Felix Ascondo stood on the lamp-lit, crumbling Esplanade Avenue sidewalk, looking down at an animal worn thin by neglect and street ineptness. Ascondo huffed in annoyed breaths and wiped his brow and rubbed his neck incessantly as he stared down at the sidewalk in front of him.

He’d spent the better part of the night trying to figure out one last move, one last way to make contact with Jeff or send him a message he might still get. And now, he was trying to make the decision to leave without having done so.

Until five minutes ago, Felix had never committed a crime in his life more devious than his handful of speeding tickets since arriving in America. But he’d just broken into Jeff’s apartment with a New Orleans cab driver watching him from the curb. The cabbie was long since ready to go, and ready for Ascondo to fork over more cash for agreeing to run this little errand, which carried the smoky, squeaking Crescent Cab all the way from Zephyr Field in Metairie into the city. The meter was still running.

Ascondo was trying to imagine some way other than Jeff’s unresponsive cell phone and empty apartment to reach the man who he feared had become permanently unreachable. Jeff’s phone went straight to voicemail, and because Ascondo had no idea what was happening to him or where he might be, he couldn’t think of what to say to Jeff when he did call. Thus, he’d left no message at all.

Like he did before many of his other dealings with Jeff over the years, Felix played over in his mind what he would say to him the next time he spoke to him. It would be quite a tirade, as usual, and the thought reminded him of the day earlier in the spring when he stood in Florida kicking the door at that fancy hotel villa Jeff was passed out in, splitting the heel of one of his prized purple shoes in the process. So much had changed in the life of Ascondo since that day, it was tough to imagine it had all happened in such a short amount of time. In a much darker sense, he felt the same must be true for ol’ Jeffy.