GPS (9 page)

Maybe then he would allow himself to think about the latest thing on his growing list of concerns. Maybe somewhere out there in one of those long Texas stretches, Jeff would devote a few minutes of thought to what in the hell the revolution was. Or revolucion, more correctly. It could be a Latino punk band, for all he knew.

It was an unknown that could very well remain unknown. Jeff’s first glimpse into that weird, harsh world might also have been his only one, and that was probably a good thing, maybe good enough to make him appreciate living in
this
world and not that one. One little snapshot of that place — that scene of revolution if that’s what it really was — was enough to tell Jeff that maybe it was best if he treated it like a dream and eventually forgot all of it, forever.

He had no idea what life at home would be like upon his return, but he was anxious to get back there again, if only for a few hours. On one hand, something suggested to Jeff that everything had changed out here in New Mexico. Whether the memory of it would be real or dream-like in its future impression on him, something certainly changed. Yet, when he steered back down Esplanade toward everyday life, he didn’t expect anything to actually feel or look any different.

He climbed into a surprisingly clean-feeling Celica amid a seriously taxed-looking and huffing towel crew. As he did, Jeff played the 14th and final message on his phone before speeding off like some asshole in a Mercedes. He realized at once he was still lucky, somehow, that Riley was who she was, even as painstaking and tedious as it could be to deal with. Even in her final days of dealing with Jeff-related problems, she still delivered like those great hitters always did.

“
Jeff, it’s me, one last time. I’m going by your place to feed Lefty. Remember him? Maybe I should give him a steak and a beer. He deserves it. Please drive safely, Jeff.”

- 10 -

Jeff drove out of Albuquerque following signs for 25 South toward El Paso, and he left the town in its swirling dust forever, he hoped. He did so without ever taking the Warren Global Positioning System back out of the trunk of the Celica after his afternoon at the car wash, and didn’t think about it. Instead of the woman’s voice which had mesmerized him for the last week, Jeff had his much more familiar one back now, and it took him a good 50 miles to even realize it.

That brief, final message from Riley was the only one he played in its entirety, but that combined with the earlier exhausting conversation made it clear the estranged wife still thought about Jeff, whether she cared or not. He’d overlooked the GPS in the trunk for a number of reasons, the biggest likely being his current mental and physical anguish. But it was also because of Riley.

He was still clinging to some hope that when he got back to New Orleans, the full explanation he felt he still owed her could be delivered in person. He thought that was important. He didn’t actually believe that it would lead anywhere else — he wouldn’t let himself believe that — but he still thought it was vital that he tenderize Riley’s reporter armor in hope that maybe out of stubborn, habitual concern for him, she would let him explain ... explain ...

“Explain what? What am I trying to explain?” Jeff shouted to his empty car as he drove, now at a steady 80 miles per hour toward, oddly, Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. “What is so important about all this if I can’t even put it into words? What happened? Where was I? What did I do?”

A constant backdrop of desert nothingness surrounded the Celica as it passed under the glowing dusk sky, and one by one the miles rattled off toward El Paso and I-10 East, where the drive would really get long. Jeff reminded himself (in Riley’s voice) almost hourly that driving was a relaxing thing, a great time to think.

It was after 8:30 p.m. now, and as he mentally replayed the end of his conversation with her — “Just look at the picture!” — for about the hundredth time, he had to keep reminding himself that in some way, this had all really happened to him. Didn’t it? As he neared the exit for Truth or Consequences, Jeff’s fuel light blinked on. Although a large part of him was already sizing up the possibilities of a Saturday night in El Paso — just another few paces further down the trail at this point — Jeff abandoned his thoughts of pleasure in lieu of more stressful ones. Whether or not he owed Riley an explanation, he couldn’t stop thinking he owed himself one. But that was the trouble. He couldn’t find an explanation for what it was or how it had happened, let alone what it meant.

He wondered suddenly where Roswell was from here. That place with the alien landing strip and all the alleged government cover-ups? Maybe something really was at play out there in the desert wind. Bullshit, he answered to himself not long after. There was something weird that had happened out there, for sure, but even in his semi-crazed state, he couldn’t convince himself to start worrying about some sort of alien abduction in Roswell. But where was it from here, just the same? He’d been within miles of it on his way to Albuquerque, and now it seemed he had to be close again. He didn’t remember seeing exactly where it was...

“Where’s the GPS?” Jeff yelped, half-panicked, but he immediately remembered leaving it in the trunk at the car wash. Nonetheless, the mere realization of disconnection sent Jeff zooming down the first exit ramp he could find. The first gas station he saw was the Endless Sun on Culberson Street. He jumped out of the Celica, yanking the trunk-pop lever, spun around behind the car and lifted the trunk to the sounds of ever-lingering sand and dirt delicately falling within.

There, in a heap next to his old Juggs radar gun — “the only gun I ever carry these days,” he used to joke — was the WARREN case. Seeing it brought a sigh of strange relief from Jeff. He reached in and grabbed the case. It was hot to the touch after spending the day in the New Mexico heat, Jeff assumed. He unzipped it, slid his hand inside and quickly yanked it back out upon touching the GPS, which was blazing hot. Instead of throwing it back in the trunk or simply dropping it onto the pavement at the Endless Sun — his first inclination — Jeff carried the GPS, still in its case, around to the driver’s side door and tossed it onto the passenger seat.

Despite the lingering throb in the first two fingers on his left hand, he was going to force himself to act natural no matter what happened next. Maybe he would just ignore all the inexplicable things that seemed to be coming his way in regular waves now. Jeff walked over to the gas pump, pulled the nozzle loose and plunged the hose into the Celica’s gas tank. He flipped up the lever on the pump and pressed 87. As the gas flowed, Jeff walked back to the driver’s seat, sat down inside with his legs hanging out and grabbed the GPS again. He robotically slid out the unit — now just slightly warm in his hand — and snapped it into place.

“
Warren GPS Technology. Welcome.”

The sound of the voice jarred his brain back to the scene he wanted to forget, and what connection if any it really had to him and the world he’d been living in the last 38 years. Despite their recurrence, he was trying to convince himself he would never be back there again. It was a brutal world from what little he’d seen — and photographed — and as he headed inside to pay for his gas and hopefully hit the head around back, he was aware again of a faint feeling of valor accompanying his thoughts of that scene and that place and that horrible, cruel stampede. Had he done something?

There might be a way back, sure. It had happened once. But was there a reason to go back if there was a way? Of course there wasn’t, other than to find certain death. And what about getting back home a second time when he had no idea how he did it the first time? It had cost him an entire Saturday, $100 cash and countless years off his aging car’s life to do it — however he did it — the first time. And it had actually cost him Friday too. His apparent drinking binge afterward hadn’t helped.

Minutes later, Jeff stood in the dim, open stall inside the Endless Sun men’s room, pants unzipped, pondering what connections there could be between this and other worlds. His thoughts — and his stream — came to a halt. He was subconsciously scanning the scrawled and markered words on each wall surrounding the toilet when, right below someone’s sadly incorrect
‘Yankees suck’
sentiment, he saw something familiar.

He was almost relieved when he saw it. The little phrase gave him an instant answer to one of his overriding questions, while stirring to life a million more. They were questions that rode all the way home to New Orleans with him that night. He walked out feeling immediate vindication for all of his frantic thinking about whether it was all real or not. He was shaking under his jacket from his most recent surprise.

Performing in the same methodical, unthinking way he had adopted recently, Jeff had pulled out his phone and snapped a second photo for his budding Albuquerque trip scrapbook while standing there with his pants unzipped in the bathroom. The image captured the rarely-photographed inside of a men’s room stall where, very clearly, one could make out Jeff’s unwitting new battle cry, carved into the aluminum siding of the john in careless, haggard lettering:
‘Únete a la revolución.’

He slid back into the car. Despite his immediate excitement, Jeff worried he wouldn’t be able to stay awake for the remainder of the miles between here and New Orleans. He also worried that if he ever was to return to the other world, it likely wouldn’t come as a matter of his own choosing. He understood, or thought he understood, that the other place was real, and that he and his car had romped through its soil and sand together. He understood that when he had climbed into his car last Thursday night at Isotopes Park, he’d been dragged off into some other realm, taking his direction from an unseen guide. And now he knew that other people knew too.

He reviewed his latest photo from the Endless Sun’s men’s room, and something else occurred to Jeff. He revved the Celica and turned on the headlights, shifted the car from park to drive, and then put it back in park again and sat pondering the GPS for another moment, like he’d been doing for days on end, it seemed. “There was an address, or something, wasn’t there?” Jeff asked himself, fumbling for his wallet and fishing the flyer back out. He unfolded it, and along the bottom of the page at the right, as though it were a flyer for an underground rave, was what Jeff thought to possibly be an obscure address, or meeting place, written in tiny block letters that were really nothing more than a list of names to him. It said,
“Viejo Calle Francisco - Madero Ote.”

Jeff sat still, mulling over the foreign words for a minute before trying to dismiss them. But he kept thinking maybe they were the passwords or code for some new journey or place. Address? Why was he so certain about that? They were just words. Despite his prowess in bringing Dominican baseball talent stateside over the years, he still relied helplessly on Spanish translators like most Americans in such dealings. He had no real clue what the words were.

His attention was trained on the GPS. He scrolled to the ADDRESSES therein and when he saw HOME — the first one he’d ever programmed into the thing last week — he hit SELECT with a smile suggesting a brief calm and ease despite his recent trauma. He steered onto I-10 East for the long haul home. He tried to concentrate on the road, on how fast he could get home and how much time he would have before leaving for Florida. Not much, he knew.

The GPS address list didn’t contain any information regarding Calle Francisco or Madero Ote, not specifically at least, but its trip history did contain an oddity that would have thrown Jeff even further off kilter had he noticed it. It was an address for a trip taken late Thursday night and into Friday morning, and although Jeff himself never entered the jumbled, coded address or intended to make the trip, it was there, recorded into the history of the device. The listing on the GPS was much more obscure than the one on the flyer. Right above the address to Isotopes Park — 1601 Avenida Cesar Chavez SE — was one far less precise.

The destination was called NE1230GTSW12040RMR3408. Jeff had already been there. He just didn’t remember it fully yet, would not have known what to call it and would never be able to find it again on his own or recognize it if he did. He didn’t know how he had gotten there, or why, and wouldn’t have any concept of where it was in relation to New Mexico, Texas or Louisiana. Whether or not he might be able to return there on his own free will or not, Jeff didn’t know, but the first visit had happened above and beyond his control.

Jeff had a remarkably incident-free ride across all three states through the night. It was Sunday morning when he did drive down Esplanade finally, and it was Sunday night when Lefty’s cold nose on the back of his neck stirred him awake in his bed. Much of the physical anguish he’d felt had gone — except for the continued sharp pain in his once surgically-repaired right knee — but Jeff found his thoughts were as cloudy as ever about what happened to him since he’d last seen his feline companion.

- 11 -

It was a good thing the old cat was bucking for some attention that Sunday night because, to his shock, Jeff woke with just enough time to collect himself and leave for Florida. As he stared wearily down at his beloved Lefty, he began longing again for the midsummer days of Zephyrs homestands.

He had a mind to work on this, his last lingering relationship. He would kill for even 10 more minutes of laze with his cat and his suddenly luxurious bed. Like a graveyard-shift factory worker, Jeff prepared for his night of work while the city outside kicked into its usual evening gear. The zydeco was likely just starting to flutter down Bourbon, sending its endless echo across the French Quarter. The town always picked up a little extra steam in the spring months following Mardi Gras.

Jeff had no idea what he would be doing next after his visit to the never exciting Extended Spring Training facility in Port St. Lucie, no idea where the Mets’ disastrous start to the season would take him. He only knew that the frantic, drunken excursion from which he’d just returned made him long for a boring life at home. He still sensed, vaguely, that swell of pride and sense of belonging he’d associated with the entire experience, but after his day of intense slumber, Jeff’s overriding feeling when he thought of his trip to Albuquerque was one of darkness and despair.