GPS (38 page)

The first chance he got, Hawkins was planning to disappear forever.

- 48 -

“Ummm. Yeah, Felix is an old buddy of mine, Mrs. Avery, don’t worry.”

As he said Felix’s name into his phone, Jeff stared at the same name written on his refrigerator —
“CALL ME NOW!! — FELIX”
—
and tried to sound as casual as possible.

After what he’d seen out in Texas, Jeff had spent the entire drive home with Josh Simmons’ face — now hammered onto the body of a Midland RockHounds baseball player — haunting him. He’d argued with himself for hours about whether or not he would drink when he got home, or whether he might drink on the way home.

The absence of whiskey on his tongue hadn’t become comfortable yet, but he was sober for the first time in years, and that made it more of an argument than it had been for a long time. Each day, it was becoming harder and harder to justify going back to the bottle, as much as his body ached for a drink.

He’d dried out enough to realize that if he was going back to the desert, he’d better be damn sure he stayed sober. His leg was healing, his sunburn was peeling, and he was feeling a physical strength now, despite his crazed week in the desert, that had fallen dormant in his drunkenness.

He sure as hell couldn’t go through another detox like the one he’d just endured out there, and in truth, sobriety would be the least of what he would need over there. He’d also need more than khakis and worn-out running shoes this time. He needed survival supplies. The time for going over there armed with nothing but stupid questions was done.

Seeing Simmons trotting in from center field was like seeing a ghost, and Jeff had acted accordingly, running terrified all the way home. The scene in Texas had made it real, and not just that the other side was real, but that the travel between the two worlds was real, too, and that Jeff was far from alone in his discovery. All of his childish musings about whether or not it was all some sort of drunken hallucination were erased forever when the Midland center fielder stared directly at him. There was no doubting it now, no way of writing it off.

It made Josh’s double life seem even more difficult to imagine. Jeff wondered whether Simmons thought he had somehow looked him up and came to find him at the stadium that afternoon, and whether Simmons would kick the shit out of him for it. It seemed highly possible.

When he thought of the desert which he could now feel waiting for him, he had a simple, yet frightening concern. Would he make it back? What if the code Simmons had programmed into the GPS to get Jeff to Old Victoria was wrong, off by even one little letter or number or symbol?

As he sped home that night, he felt relieved to be alone, the kind of relief only someone who feels he’s being chased can appreciate. He even pictured Simmons stomping out of the dugout and into the parking lot, hopping into his Lexus and coming after him.

After he fled the stadium, Jeff had crammed the GPS and his phone under the passenger seat of the Celica and tried not to think about either of them, which made him think about both constantly. He’d crossed into Jefferson Parish late Sunday night, and it occurred to him that he was very likely on the verge of eviction. With that thought, he’d found a reason to confront the unseen demons swirling around him.

With New Orleans slowly unfolding in the distance in front of him, Jeff fished his right hand beneath the back of the passenger seat and clutched his phone. The GPS, he noticed wearily, was unnaturally warm, even through its case, as his forearm brushed against it.

He had been keeping his phone turned off almost all the time now, perhaps further evidence he was cutting all off his ties to the old world. He powered it on and braced himself for a flood of messages.

There was only one, but it was the voice he most expected to hear:
“Jeff, this is Mrs. Avery. I understand you’re out of town, but we need you to call us immediately. Even if it’s late. This guy, this Felix Ax-, Ex-, Ex-conda, or whatever his name is, has paid your rent, and your late fee. But I just wanted to make sure that’s OK with you, and that he’s not, I don’t know, someone you don’t want to associate with or don’t want paying your rent. He told me it looked like your place had been broken into or something, so I sent Ernest over there right away, and he said everything looked OK. Please call us, Jeff.”

So, for the second consecutive night, Jeff’s landlord was wakened by the phone in the middle of the night, this time by her bewildered, delinquent tenant. Mrs. Avery sounded tired but expectant when she answered and repeated her concerns about Felix. Jeff stood in his kitchen, pacing, practically too dumbfounded to respond.

“I knew Felix was going to be in town … and I knew that I wasn’t going to be in town … so I left a key for him … and anyway, yes, I suppose him covering the rent is fine for now, just this one time …” Jeff recited a skewed, impromptu explanation into the phone, trying to answer as many questions as possible before Mrs. Avery had a chance to start asking more. His own questions continued to swirl in his brain as he spoke.

Was he sounding at all believable? What in the hell was Felix doing in New Orleans anyway? Why hadn’t he called? Well, he very likely
had
called, Jeff supposed, but he hadn’t left any messages if he did. How, and why on earth, had he known to call Mrs. Avery and pay the rent? Why would he?

The only people who knew the answers were Mrs. Avery and Felix himself, and Jeff wasn’t about to ask either of them. Like Simmons, maybe Felix was looking for him because he, too, wanted to beat the shit out of Jeff. But paying his rent instead seemed an odd consolation.

“Well, alright Jeff, I guess we’ll just let this whole thing slide off into the past,” the woman said kindly into the phone, her voice deepened by her interrupted sleep. “You just can’t be too careful, and well, it just struck me as odd when he called like that and started spelling out his credit card information. Here we were, beginning to worry if something had happened to you out on the road, and then this guy calls and pays June’s rent,
and
July’s —”

“He paid July too?” Jeff interrupted.

“That’s right. So anyway, it just so happens that when the phone woke me up last night, I still had Saturday’s paper on the nightstand next to me. Ernest had slept through the whole phone call, of course, and I couldn’t for the life of me get back to sleep after that. So after I woke him up and sent him off to check on your place I unfolded the paper, and imagine my surprise to discover that your friend Felix had single-handedly beaten our poor ol’ Zephyrs on Friday night. I saw on the news earlier tonight that he was at it again — 3-for-4, and Oklahoma City got two out of three from us. We need to get rid of that ol’ Teddie Riley. I just can’t bear another year of him. Anyway, have a good night Jeff, and come August, let’s not have anymore rent-related drama, OK?”

“We won’t, I promise.” Jeff hung up the phone, snatched Felix’s note off the fridge, and laughed to himself in the heavy, stale air. Without sitting down, he collected his travel bags and dragged them into the bedroom.

He then walked back into the kitchen, pulled a long black trash bag from beneath the sink and walked over to the overflowing recycling bin. With a great crash of glass, Jeff turned the bin upside-down into the mouth of the bag, and the remains of a couple of months of an alcoholic’s life vanished.

He collected the other trash around the place and hauled it all downstairs and into the alley. Apparently, Felix had decided to feed every stray in New Orleans when he’d broken in, as a giant mound of cat food had been piled on the front step outside, and was now riddled with ants.

He loved Felix, but was thankful he hadn’t been around when Ascondo had come to find him. He didn’t think at this point he could or would ever tell another soul on this side of reality about the other side of it, and that certainly included Felix. A part of him still wished he hadn’t told Riley. At the same time, he wished there was some way of saying goodbye to both of them, just in case.

Jeff had missed another magic moment in the life of Ascondo over the weekend. Unreal. The guy was ripping up Triple-A? Some scout Jeff was. He imagined Sandy sitting at his desk and thinking the same thing while spying the Pacific Coast League box scores and seeing Ascondo’s name and corresponding numbers.

If Jeff was going to keep his baseball charade alive for at least one more week, he would need to make a couple of productive stops at Zephyr Field over the next couple of nights, prolong the inevitable, and then see what happened from there.

He would need an early start the next morning. He figured he’d spend what money he had on the things he needed to survive, and when he finally sat down on his couch in the early hours of Monday morning, he did so to begin making a list. He would head back to the Outdoor Megamart and stock up — hiking boots, a canteen, a good knife, sunscreen and whatever else he could afford. Although he still needed to pay his electric bill, and his cable, and car insurance, he simply had more pressing needs before the Mets paid him again, possibly for the final time.

After he’d done a little business with the Zephyrs, Jeff was heading for the ruins outside of Old Victoria and didn’t know when or if he was coming back after that.

- 49 -

Hawkins ran so hard for so long, his temples had begun to hammer exhaustion into his skull and downward through his body. He tried to keep his legs pumping for just a few seconds more, but his vision began to cloud and his equilibrium steered him toward fainting.

He crashed behind a stand of yuccas, and the sound of his pounding pulse inside his head made it impossible to hear anything else. It made him unable to tell if he was being followed, if there were footfalls heading his way or if there were voices shouting at him in the distance. If he hadn’t been spotted, his long, painful days with the transients in the desert were over, and it was surprising how quickly his opportunity had come.

It was under the gray gloom of dawn that the revolucion convoy had paraded slowly into the skeletal outskirts of Old Victoria. After a rough camp had been made in silence, Paulo had approached Hawkins, who stood in a semi-doze, leaning against the truck he’d ridden on all night. The other men were already unrolling their packs for a respite before the sun tore them back off the desert floor and into another long day.

“Wake up, bro,” Paulo had said, grinning with his little GPS flashing in his hand stupidly, helping people from miles around to spot them if they were watching. “You gotta take this watch. You can sleep when the guys wake up and get started.”

Hawkins was suddenly wide awake, his hands reaching habitually down to his side to make sure his gun was there. “No problem, Paulo,” he said, almost breaking into a grin but fighting it back. “No problem. You gonna bed down too, or what?”

“Hell yes. We just drove a thousand miles. I’m sure you slept like a baby on the back of that truck. It’s all you, bro.”

As Paulo spoke, and as his GPS flashed errantly in his hand at his side, Hawkins couldn’t help but think what he’d mostly thought ever since he’d been sentenced to stay here forever. He thought how incompetent fools like Paulo always seemed to end up in power, and how it was so rare for the ones with actual intelligence, like himself, to ever get over on the ones in power.

It was Paulo’s pompous, flippant behavior that had helped Hawkins find his path out finally. He’d always wondered how it was that Paulo’s GPS told him all that stuff — all those new people coming in and where this or that was happening — if he really had swiped it off the guy in the desert like he’d told people a thousand times in the last year. Why would it show friendly arrivals on an FB-programmed GPS?

Hadn’t Paulo or anyone else thought about that yet? Hawkins had long since realized that everyone who had ever popped up on Paulo’s screen was, in fact, an FB recruit. The only thing that made them part of the revolucion was the fact the men which made up their division were being fetched by Paulo and the other division leaders with stolen merchandise.

Although Hawkins would never have admitted it, it was actually a brilliant scheme, albeit completely accidental. In essence, the revolucion was fighting the FB with the FB’s own soldiers, and maybe that’s why Paulo treated so many of the transients like expendable baggage.
Did
Paulo know?

How much did any of them really know?

That question had been the outcome of a year spent with the transients. But suddenly, the answer didn’t matter. Hawkins had pulled rank, had erased himself from Paulo’s equation. But he wasn’t out of hell just yet. He still needed a car with a GPS and a living driver. As fast as things had happened, he feared this part of his adventure could be the longest and most difficult to survive.

But he was armed with a great idea. When Hawkins had replayed all the bullshit stories he’d heard from the others and applied them to his own tragic story, he’d figured out a basic, vital concept about the Warren GPS, something more valuable than wondering what Paulo knew or didn’t know. Yet, it seemed so simple and so obvious that Hawkins wondered how many, if any, others in his same predicament had ever escaped this way before.

Did everyone else know about this already and they just never told dolts like Hawkins because they needed soldiers for the war? Possible, but not likely, was always his answer. Not this bunch.

Though he never said so, Paulo was stuck here too, or at least he thought he was. The way Fonseca presented it to everyone, he was here because he was committed to the revolucion. But in all this time, he never ever wanted to go home, even for a couple of hours. Never once in a year. He didn’t ever go back because he was dumb enough to believe that he was stuck here. He had no car of his own, was always riding with someone else or in one of the hundreds of revolucion transport vehicles, so he must have lost his.