GPS (47 page)

She never remarried and, though it would have staggered Jeff to even consider such a possibility when it might still have mattered, she never got over him. Learning that he had simply vanished changed her life more than anything else she’d gone through — more than Katrina, Africa, or the death of her parents. While she could never completely believe his outlandish claims that final night they were together, she could never rule them, or him, out either.

She’d read the reports about Jeff’s car crashing out in Utah, and it being found with no trace of him anywhere, and she lived her life with a feeling that maybe she knew something no one else did about the incident. There were two rifles in the trunk, and shells and camping gear and supplies. But the only fingerprints on any of it were Jeff’s, making foul play seem unlikely. It made Jeff’s claims seem more real in their increasingly distant aftermath.

Riley’s thinking on the subject had evolved over the years, from her early suspicions that Jeff was abducted and murdered or perhaps simply drank himself to death and never got found, to the belief that he really had found a way out of this world — if anyone wanted out, it was Jeff — and he either never found his way back home or never cared to return.

She couldn’t shake the memory of that final night in the courtyard, how impassioned Jeff was and how earnestly he seemed to need her to believe him. At the time she had nothing but indifference for what she considered his self-inflicted wounds. Until her dying day the picture of Jeff, Riley and Lefty on the wrought-iron balcony of their first apartment — taken by Jeff's friend Glenn on his drunken New Orleans visit — stayed at her bedside.

Jeff stayed in her heart.

--

Felix Ascondo never played for the Mets or at Shea Stadium, though he did play three games at the Mets’ new CitiField. The fact that it was a few years too late for it to be at Shea was bittersweet, naturally, but it was further proof that dreams-come-true usually come with some adjustments.

After his uncanny 2008 season, Felix spent the next one, a far less dazzling one, splitting time between Triple-A Oklahoma City and Double-A Frisco, hobbled by knee injuries. But in 2010, Ascondo made it all the way, parlaying a July call-up to Texas into his rookie season in the majors, staying for the rest of the campaign. He platooned in right field and became a fan favorite because of his flair for pinch hitting and stealing bases at critical times.

In 2011, Ascondo’s bumbling Rangers lost two out of three to the mediocre Mets in a poorly-attended, meaningless weekend interleague series. While the realization of his childhood dream — much like his roughly three-year major league career — was a mere speck of dust on baseball history, it was Ascondo’s day in the sun. After lackluster performances in the Rangers’ Friday and Saturday losses that weekend — Ascondo had played both games and went 1-for-7 with three strikeouts — he’d earned himself a spot in the dugout for the start of Sunday’s matinee. It was a disappointing downturn in the midst of his best season as a pro, spent almost entirely as the Rangers’ starting right fielder.

Later on that sun-drenched afternoon in Flushing Meadows which was every bit the setting of the Ascondo brothers’ dreams, however, Felix smashed a three-run, pinch hit home run that put the Rangers ahead 6-3 in the top of the eighth inning. No one in the sparse crowd made a peep other than the 20 fans in the right field corner, who were rocking madly up and down, screaming with delight.

Ascondo, for the first and only time in his major league career, had used his full allotment of away tickets that day to make sure his aunts, uncles and a few cousins could fly in from Santo Domingo and join his wife and three children in the stands.

The Associated Press photographer at CitiField that afternoon captured an image that gave Felix physical proof that he’d lived his dream. Though most in attendance that day forgot the hit as soon it cleared the right field wall, the AP photo portrayed a much more magical moment, and it
looked
like Shea.

It showed Ascondo rounding second base after hitting his home run. Filling most of the background of the image was the giant black top hat behind the stadium’s outfield wall that the big red apple slid out of and that flashed HOME RUN! just like it had at Shea, but only on ones hit by the home team. To the right was the scoreboard and Ascondo’s giant smiling face on its digital screen.

While the picture didn’t show it, Ascondo had choked back tears from the time that picture was taken until he pulled the towel off his head 10 minutes later in the dugout and ran into right field for the bottom of the eighth inning. When he got out there, even more shouts of glee broke loose from the corner where he stood, shaking, thinking mostly of his brother Carlos.

A giant blow-up of that AP home run photo later adorned the main wall in the lobby of Felix’s, the seafood house in Santo Domingo which Ascondo had named as much after his favorite New Orleans oyster bar as he did his own namesake. He had opened the restaurant upon his retirement from American baseball in 2013.

Though he loved his brief time in the majors, a pending trade to Seattle earlier that year and a likely assignment to Triple-A had been enough to make Ascondo walk away. While he never stopped thinking about Carlos, Felix did stop imagining what it would have been like to be on the home team that weekend in New York. He simply let it go.

Felix invested a portion of his baseball earnings into the restaurant and later into a Dominican professional baseball team, and the lifetime .261 batter was successful at both ventures. Ever secure in his decisions, Ascondo never spent a day missing the game after that.

Though he was a devoted husband and father, Ascondo’s favorite thing in the post-baseball world was his nightly cigar-smoking session on his sprawling stone patio.

--

It was on that same Santo Domingo patio that, in the fading afternoon sun some years later, Lefty took his last breath, sprawled out on his back and content, and with his caramel-colored left paw raised triumphantly in the air.

Over the years, the aging cat slept more and more soundly and spent less and less time bounding through his lush backyard. But since he’d scooted under that fence in New Orleans and nearly died on the streets that spring in 2008, the old cat had long since embraced total happiness and lived like a prince, eating as much seafood as cat food and drinking from marble fountains instead of a self-replenishing plastic dish.

Felix was never sure why he’d taken the meowing skeleton off the sidewalk that night when he stumbled out of Jeff’s apartment. He certainly didn’t want it at the time, he merely pitied it. It had cost him a fortune to fly the cat back to Oklahoma with him, then to Texas and finally to the Dominican Republic. But it had become a part of his daily life and he’d grown to love the animal dearly.

Ascondo and his kids bought the creature — which never grew the fur back on its scarred neck — a small wooden casket, and buried him in the shade of a maple tree beneath an engraved marble headstone that read LEFTY DELANEY. Felix always remembered names.

For the rest of his life, Ascondo spent his evenings gazing out at the headstone through a haze of cigar smoke, wondering what happeend to his old friend Jeffy.

- The End -

Author’s notes

In writing GPS, I took some liberties in terms of the minor league baseball system, simply because I was bound somewhat geographically with how I wanted to tell the story and where I wanted it to go at what time. That being said, I attempted to remain as true as possible to league structure and team affiliations for the 2008 baseball season. Yet, many baseball followers will know that, for example, the Orem Owlz play in the Frontier League, a short-season rookie league which would not have begun play that early in the spring.

Also, the parallel between many of the places described in the story and actual cities, states and streets is intended, most specifically those in Louisiana, New Mexico, Florida, Texas, Utah, etc. But again, some liberties have been taken in terms of the overall geographical accounts and names and descriptions of certain places, especially out in those long stretches of the desert.

Cover design by Natalie Sayewich.