Out There: a novel (2 page)

Esco and Nigel were both smiling, waving at him hopefully, nearer now but still distorted and blurred through the multiple planes of Plexiglas. He knew what he had to do. He’d been traveling for almost a week now, from the day he left Iraq, so he’d skipped a few days, and now he felt ungrounded. Unthinkable, to cross this tricky, shifting threshold without placing his hands on the ground.

From her side of the door, Esco had all the clarity she needed. There Jefferson was. He might be jumbled through the glass, but she could see him. He was alive.

But she couldn’t understand what was happening. Why had Jefferson stopped and placed his duffel by his feet? Maybe he needed help. Why was he looking over his shoulder?

Jefferson checked behind to see that no one was walking too close, rubbed his hands together, and planted them on the floor in front of him as he kicked his heels up behind him and over his head. He paused for a moment to get just the right bend in his knees, just the right arch in his lower back, for equilibrium, and then began to walk on his hands. God, it was good to be upside down. This would make all the difference, his hands heavy and pulsing now, a heartbeat in his fingertips, the skin deep purple.

He felt a great amassing of himself between his eyebrows and even farther back than that, behind his eyes, back where he imagined they connected to the filaments of his mind, all the mystical wirings of his inner universe. He was one with the orangutans and the spider monkeys and the lemurs, the bats and stalactites who slept all day in the caves of Carlsbad, the icicles on warm days that hung long and drippy from underneath the eaves, all reaching, reaching, reaching for the earth.

Esco, seeing her grandson upside down on the other side of the security barrier, pulled away from Nigel’s grasp and rushed the glass doors, yelling, “Come on, honey. Stop doing that! Get up! Come on!” It was as if someone was playing a terrible joke. She was so close to holding her grandson tight, and now this. A security guard near her stood up and began talking excitedly into her phone.
We could have a problem—I need some help down here.
Another guard, from back at the intersection of Concourse A and Concourse B, was running Jefferson’s way. What was going on? Why was he on his hands, now that he was so close to home?

But Jefferson had come to the natural end of his pose—dizziness and a feeling of lonely dehydration, was how he usually described the sensation that brought him down—and so he kicked down out of it and smiled a big smile at the uniformed man who had rushed up to him, yelling “Move it along! Move it along!”
Why was he holding on to Jefferson’s triceps so hard, pushing him along, making him walk—after all that—through the regular glass door off to the far right, the door usually reserved for people in wheelchairs? Hadn’t the man ever realized some people needed a little extra grounding to get through a revolving door?

The guard pushed him through the door, and Jefferson lugged his duffel the final paces to his family. Esco was wearing her favorite mauve tracksuit, the one that had always made him cringe at the way it accentuated her thick middle. But her hair was cut short as always, wiry in its health, and her skin glistened. Nigel swayed from side to side on in-turned ankles that nevertheless appeared to be holding steady under their burden. He was as big as ever.

It was true that Jefferson had left the jurisdiction of the US Army, officially and in good standing, at 8:15 that morning at Fort Drum, but only now, as he crossed the security threshold in Albuquerque, did he know he’d truly made it. He felt tired suddenly, much more so than he’d realized before the chanting and the walk down the long hall and the handstand and, even before that, all the packing and planning. But there was some relief, even if it was not the instantaneous happiness he’d hoped might descend like a miracle upon him. The smile on his lips was only partially forced, he realized, and he was able to find a few words, more words in fact than he had spoken in many days.

“Esco,” he said, embracing her. “Nigel—” He held the large arm of his cousin, beginning to weep. And he found that he could say nothing more; he could only hold them and let them hold him in return.

Now that he was living the moment, though, Jefferson felt that something about it wasn’t right. Esco was there, and that was right. Nigel was there, and that too was right. The Sandias welcomed him out to the east, and though he could not see them, Jefferson sensed the Jemez Mountains up in the north. The distant plateaus and red rocky mountains and wide-open sky all participated in his return, listening and watching and recording. So too the birds of the high desert and the lizards and the burrowing rodents of the ground. Jefferson’s body, unscathed, was there as well. But some large, unidentified piece of his spirit—he didn’t know where it was, or how long it had been missing—had remained behind.

This was the part of the homecoming that was not right; not all of Jefferson had come home.

Outside, a plane scudded down the runway and took to the sky, and he thought of all those other soldiers returning home. Survivors from San Francisco and Waco and Charlottesville and Birmingham, Las Cruces and Española and Abiquiu and Los Alamos, each one leaving a plane and walking through an airport and hugging and being hugged. Each one returning home.

“Let’s go home,” said Esco, curling her small arm into the crook of Jefferson’s elbow as she had since he was a teenager. Nigel picked up his duffel, and the three of them moved as one through the airport and out into the familiar solace of the high desert.

When
that horrible thing happened to Ramon’s throat on the forty-seventh day, Jefferson wrote it down on a piece of paper and folded it inside the cover of the book, thinking it would be his tribute; there, he would keep Ramon’s memory close to his heart. It was a single line on a blank piece of paper, a lone memory of a solitary loss Jefferson had seen happen right next to him.

Not too long after, the thing that happened to the guy named Adair, from Hollidaysburg, joined the thing that happened to Ramon. Then there was Dudzinski, twenty-two. Then Hazelton, twenty-nine. Then Alton with the corn-husk voice from Nebraska.

Still, it was not a list.

The string of losses on that piece of folded-up paper kept multiplying, but Jefferson would not call it a list. Like an ancient scribe recording by candlelight all that would otherwise be forgotten, Jefferson wrote, memorializing hometowns and the ages of the men and women he had watched die. With few exceptions, these were the only details that stuck with him. Not so much the names—names had always been secondary for him, difficult to remember—and only occasionally a detail about the face or the voice, but rather the places from which these soldiers had come. The trees rooted in the land in those places, the birds that roosted there, according to their own natures. These were the pictures that took up residence in his mind.

Out
the car window, purple mesas and red sky slid past, a welcome celebration for Jefferson’s eyes. He knew Esco and Nigel were trying not to ask questions. What parts of him were aching? How could they make it better? The ordinary part of Jefferson’s brain had expected this, but so much more of it was spinning. He’d thought something about these two would have changed, but when he looked at them, it was as if he had never left. He’d thought his hands would have stopped twitching by now. He’d thought Nigel would at least have said something about his beaded high-tops. He wondered if he should recite from García Márquez, something simple for the two of them, something that might help, but decided against it when he noticed the deep wrinkles in his grandmother’s forehead. Maybe she had changed a little, after all. He was sure those wrinkles hadn’t been there before.

She reached out to him with her right hand. “Oh my boy. Oh my boy—it
is
you. Is it really
you
?”

Her hands were as soft and hardworking as he remembered, patting his shoulder and then tucking short hair behind her ear, correcting the steering wheel as it veered right. She couldn’t stop saying it. “You were gone for so long, honey. Gone a long, long time. Is it really
you
?”

“Looks like it, Esco, sweet old woman,” he said when she stopped talking. She seemed tired. He held on to her hand as she drove, smelling her lavender conditioner. He wanted to tell her stories about the guys he’d met, and explain why he hadn’t come home once in more than three years, but his mind was jumping along the highway.

What he really wanted to talk about was the puppy, how he’d dreamed of her on the last leg of the flight. He was hoping Esco could drive straight to the animal shelter on the way home. The pup could help him unpack, witness his struggles with sympathetic eyes and ears. Jefferson imagined reading to the pup after everyone else had gone to bed, maybe a little García Márquez, maybe a little of the list. And then the pup would be with him when he woke up on his first new day home. But Jefferson didn’t know what time it was as they continued on up the highway toward Santa Fe—he couldn’t even say what day it was—so he decided to hold the dream inside just a little longer.

Nigel thrust his head into the gap between the two front seats, not sure what to say but wanting to be a part of it all. Little Jefferson was home. True, he looked a bit beefy. The beaded high-tops were a nice touch—Little Jefferson always did have a certain flair—but what was with that plastic headband cocked catawampus across his forehead? And there’d been some commotion down at the end of the straightaway at the airport—Nigel could see the other passengers hanging back, staring, as Jefferson approached the security barrier—even before the hand-walking that had almost gotten them all arrested. But Jefferson was alive, and now they were in the car, headed home, and it was all going to be okay.

Darkness was coming as they began the climb up La Bajada Hill, a little more than halfway home. Esco and Nigel would do just about anything for him, Jefferson told himself. He wished he could sink his hands into the earth right now, let the blood run heavy into his head, but that was impossible in the car, so instead he closed his eyes and prayed. As Esco gunned the Corolla up the long rise, he visualized his fingers gripping the stones by the road, his feet waving to the ravens.

Nigel tapped him on the shoulder. “You prayin’, cousin?” His big head was too close.

“Sorta,” Jefferson replied, his eyes slits.

Nigel got the message, withdrawing his head and sitting back.

Jefferson closed his eyes and summoned back the place where his hands traveled through the rough scrabble along the highway, thought about needing a dog and wanting a dog and how Esco and Nigel had to understand this.

The Corolla crested the top of La Bajada Hill, and Jefferson knew the timing would not get any better. Esco and Nigel might be tired and ready to get home, but at that moment they were also the least likely people in the world to say no to anything his heart desired.

He cleared his throat. “Do you think we could stop at the animal shelter on the way home, Esco? I’m hoping to get a dog—a puppy, really. I’m thinking a sweet puppy with an old soul to keep me company now that I’m home. You know, to listen.” Jefferson stopped, not knowing what else to say.

Esco seemed to force a smile, and Nigel said, “We can do whatever you need us to, cousin,” and so they drove to the animal shelter. It was twenty-five minutes before closing time, and there were background investigations and forty-eight-hour waits and fees to be paid. But the volunteer on duty had lost her lover in Vietnam, and she looked upon Jefferson with a pure and heroic love as he explained his need for a dog, and escorted him through the kennels until he settled on the pup of his visions, a gray-eyed blue heeler that had some oddly comforting measure of hound in her bold voice.

He named her Remedios the Pup, after Remedios the Beauty in
One Hundred Years
, who was said to be wise beyond her years and of a beauty so intense as to drive men to insanity. Nigel, not understanding the reference, said of the pup, “Well, she is a very pretty girl,” and Esco just clicked her tongue in approval.

Once they got home, Jefferson nestled Remedios in soft towels on his bed. No one slept much that night because of her various needs and insecurities. Esco stationed herself on a cot at Jefferson’s feet, and Nigel slept in his sleeping bag on the floor. They were not taking any chances with Jefferson’s safety, they told him. Though they were sure he was okay and the pup would be his guardian angel, they’d still sleep better right there with him.

Over
the next few days Esco found herself unable to settle.
She stood behind the counter as Jefferson ate his tofu breakfast burritos, filling small bowls with cashews and Cheetos and raisins, dusting the tile mosaic of Our Lady of Guadalupe over the stove, sitting on her stool with her book, pretending to read but unable to track the words along the page. She had so many questions she wasn’t brave enough to ask out loud. When would he tell her how he really was? When would the stories from over there begin to come out of him? And what was he carrying strapped to his chest, under his shirt? She’d noticed the bulk of it when they hugged at the airport, but she hadn’t said anything, waiting for a better time.

And what had happened to his voice? Aside from a few words of greeting at the airport and his request to stop by the animal shelter on the ride home, she had only heard Jefferson baby-talking to little Remedios the Pup and singing late at night in the bathroom. He hadn’t mentioned the new turquoise paint on the kitchen cabinets. And had he forgotten the garden behind the house? She’d thought he would go straight back there.