Out There: a novel (24 page)

Who were all these good people who had written all these good books?

He told himself the feeling he was feeling was not nostalgia, that the scratchy sensation at the back of his throat was not emotion. He told himself that the sense of homecoming could not be real, because this was a place he’d never been before. And yet.

From what Jefferson remembered, and what he’d been told, and the little research he’d conducted on the subject, reading had come easily to him in first grade at Kaune Elementary. He’d been encouraged by the fact that Esco had learned alongside him.

He remembered it being like a code game, deciphering those twenty-six symbols into sounds, those combinations of sounds into meanings. He’d thought for so long—in pre-kindergarten and kindergarten—that that thing adults did with papers and books, holding them out twelve inches from their noses and shifting their eyes from left to right and back again, was just an adult joke, like Santa Claus. But then he’d deciphered his first code—S A T, “sat.” C A T, “cat.” B A T, “bat.”

Shazam. It was real. Not a joke at all. Jefferson remembered this as a singular moment of piercing light behind his eyes, a moment in which the great bird within him took flight, his wings pushing the heavy air down below him, his heart lifting to the sun.

He remembered none of the details after that, only the magic of stories and the way some of them lit a candle inside him. But according to the elementary-school report cards Esco kept under her bed in the Rubbermaid box, Jefferson had mastered all the codes and puzzles presented to him. He had progressed, so that by eighth grade he was given the Language Arts Award by his nice teacher Ms. Johnson, whose face he remembered as pink and glowing. At the time he had dreaded walking in front of the entire DeVargas Middle School student body at the end-of-year awards assembly to accept the certificate, and Esco had been too shy to ask if picture taking was allowed, so she stood off to the side of the bleachers, her Instamatic 300 tucked in her purse. So only the off-white certificate in the Rubbermaid box remained to prove that he’d been something special.

Later, among the more than two thousand other students at Santa Fe High, Jefferson had reveled in anonymity. How he’d loved watching all the swarms of young people, the soccer players and cheerleaders and football players, the gangs, the pregnant young mothers, the artsy ones carrying portfolios, the actors. Jefferson continued to learn, and he always did his assignments, but he tried to avoid any bright lights. Many years later, as an adult, Jefferson was sometimes asked by his friends how he’d ever managed in such a huge high school, with so many dropouts and drama. The question always surprised him. He had enjoyed Santa Fe High. He’d never been to the circus, but he knew lots of people paid money to go see the show, and he imagined that was something similar to his experience, merely showing up at his high school.

A few days after his nineteenth birthday, his duffel packed and waiting by the front door, his high school diploma stashed in the Rubbermaid box under Esco’s bed, Jefferson had made a flash decision that might have been predicted if his entire history of reading were to be studied. He told Esco to wait just a second, that he had to go get one more thing, and he turned around in the hall, ran back to his bedroom, and grabbed his copy of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
from under his bed.

Wouldn’t he need it?

Now, lost in a far corner of Spanish Literature, a rectangle of heavy oak tables with low lamps off to the right, Jefferson followed signs to the M’s.
M
for
Márquez
. When he did not find it under
M
, he found his way to the G’s.
G
for
García Márquez
. And there it was.

Cien años de soledad.

Four copies. All in Spanish.

He pulled one out from the shelf, sat down on the hard, cold floor with it, opened to the first page, and began reading—first mouthing the words silently, then in a whisper, and finally out loud for anyone nearby to witness.

Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo.

It was one of his favorite lines, and though his Spanish was terrible and he stumbled along as he read, Jefferson spoke the line many times as he slumped against the stacks that day.

Muchos años después . . .

Muchos años después
 . . . su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo.

Finally he stopped, unzipped his backpack, retrieved his own copy of the novel, and opened to its first page. He read the English words he’d come to know so well, the ones that for some reason on that particular day in the comfort of the Querétaro public library made him feel like a genuine lover of books rather than just one kid with an odd obsession for one famous writer. Jefferson imagined Gabriel García Márquez sitting at his desk, coming up with the words, probably having already written much of the novel that was to follow, and knowing that these words were the right ones, the perfect ones, with which to begin his story.

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

Esco
had always loved bookstores, even though she’d only occasionally had the extra money to make a purchase. That was the beauty of the public library. Those memories . . . Walking to the library with Jefferson when he was in elementary school. The click-clack of his metal wagon over the hackberries. He’d gone through a period after middle school of reading less and playing more basketball at the park, but she’d kept on walking to the library alone, trying her best to be a role model and, more importantly, doing what she had come to love. Maybe some day when he was older he’d remember how much reading had meant to his old grandmother, and that knowledge would make a difference.

That was why she’d never bought a TV. That and the fact that she couldn’t stand the idea of all that sitting around while the earth rotated on its axis. Good German Scots-Irish Mexican Americans did not sit around waiting for life to be revealed on a screen.

The summer after his junior year in high school, when Esco was certain Jefferson was out drinking beer with friends, but when he’d actually just been lying on the couch at Nigel’s, watching reruns, he had not read a single book. Even after she’d checked out copies of
The Howling
and
Kujo
for him and placed them on his bed with a note that rea
d
stephen king will rock your world!
!
That was also the year that he stopped going out with her anywhere. When he was home, he was in his room with the door closed, even taking his plate of food in there, muttering under his breath whenever she asked him to help unload the groceries or water the tomato plants in the back. He’d continued with the pruning, however. He’d always loved making the bushes into pretty shapes, sort of like their own botanical garden.

While Jefferson was away at war, Esco had sometimes visited one or the other of the two remaining local bookstores in town, just to feel closer to him; there were young people in those places, people who seemed to be home from college or doing their best to find healthy entertainment in the small town. Esco alternated between the cozy bookstore on the edge of the ritzy neighborhood and the larger downtown one, housed in an old brick mercantile with wood floors and large windows. Sometimes she bought a classic she’d always meant to read—
The Custom of the Country
,
The Portrait of a Lady, The Brothers Karamazov
—even though she knew it made more sense to borrow these books from the library. Once she’d cut out a review of a book about the Scots-Irish and their role in building America. She’d gone right out and bought that one and read it, no stopping, late at night until she was done, suddenly feeling elated about her own heritage, about which she’d previously known so little.  Aside from what she knew of her father as a hard worker, she’d never really thought much about what it meant to be Scots-Irish, whereas she’d seen firsthand the real connection of her husband to his people’s language and music, to their trials and celebrations. She guessed it had been one of the intangible reasons she’d fallen in love with him.

But who knew why her grandson had gone away to be a soldier? Though she’d hated that decision, she had not told him so, letting him make his own choice. She’d learned from being a mother of two daughters—learned the hard way—that telling a teenage child what to do and what not to do would never work. As the grandmother, Esco tried to raise Jefferson to strength and independence by letting him go out into the world, letting him try, letting him fail. By opening the door when he came back home.

But Jefferson had come back home from war only to leave again on some cockamamie motorcycle trip. She’d been closer than ever to telling Jefferson exactly how stupid she thought his plan was—she’d been less than a day away from spilling her torrent of warnings and admonitions—when he’d explained the details. He’d drive Nigel’s Kawasaki down to Mexico City to find Gabriel García Márquez. His hero. The man who had saved his life.

On the surface, Esco expressed a somber tentativeness about Jefferson’s decision to leave home again; she fretted and whined to her daughter, Linda, and to Nigel, about the fact that Jefferson knew nothing about motorcycles and nothing about Mexico and very little about highway maps; she endeavored to burn a never-ending series of orange candles on the kitchen table until Jefferson returned safely once again; she gazed in a southerly direction each evening at dusk, offering a prayer of safekeeping. But inside, every deep and ancient part of her said,
Yes
, and she began to experience feelings of wonder and delight at her grandson’s decision to find the famous writer. To be so brave. To have such hope. This grandson of hers, if he made it back alive, he would do good things in the world.

When Jefferson had outlined his plan in casual tones as they sat on the back stoop, watching the sunset, Esco had concealed her surprise. He’d begun by talking about a book that had become incredibly important to him, a book, he finally admitted, that had saved his life. Esco had followed his story without a pause. The concept of a book saving one’s life was not new to her. She’d had the experience several times, though never on an actual battlefield.

But what was the book? she wondered. Who was the writer? She asked her grandson, trying to predict even as he paused and spoke the words.
Catcher in the Rye
?
A Separate Peace
?

But then he had told her, “It’s Gabriel García Márquez, Esco.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
?”

Ah, she had thought. García Márquez. Of course.

Midway
through his second tour, Jefferson began to feel an imperfect nostalgia for life. He was no longer sad. He had been surprised so many times that he had become a believer in the power of abrupt change. He knew without any doubt that he was meant to live, and with that knowledge came confidence, and this confidence changed his understanding of himself and the way he lived. GGM was the reason. Good fortune had followed the reading of his words, and so Jefferson became an evangelist, proclaiming the gospel of Gabriel García Márquez.

There were those who did not understand, those the text could not reach, those Jefferson’s behavior confused. They said, on the one hand, that he had lost his mind, and on the other that none of this (“this” being Jefferson’s preaching from a large book he had strapped to his chest) was funny anymore. That someone should take that stupid book away from him so he would stop with the crazy words, the proselytizing, the rants. So he would focus on his job as a soldier. But there were others, important others, who were touched. Jefferson believed in these believers, and his daily work became reaching out to them with the words he knew would save them, too.

Jefferson
made his way south, each day eighty or ninety or a hundred miles closer to the great writer and his city. He and the pup and the bike settled into an easy rhythm, the measured clip of the tires on the pavement below and, up above, in his mind, an exuberant mulling of possibilities. And in every place—town or roadside market—in which he stopped long enough to listen, Jefferson heard tales of wonder and delight.

There was Ocampo, where he met a man who trained snakes to dance, traveling throughout the region with his troupe of venomous serpents, performing in dance clubs and community centers and the courtyards of wealthy families. There was San Miguel de Allende, where he knelt at the altar of the cathedral next to a yellow-toothed, nutmeg-scented woman who gave him a pair of woolen gloves she had knitted, and told him he had to visit the colorful nearby town of Guanajuato. So then there was the diversion to Guanajuato, where he met a man who claimed to have conversed with the devil (dressed in a red leotard and a top hat) while on the way to visit his dead mother in the cemetery of his childhood village. In Comonfort there was the threadbare Vietnam vet who had lived there since 1975, carving wooden toys and drinking black coffee. In Celaya there was Anjali, a woman who fed Jefferson tamarind chicken and claimed to have known his great-grandmother from an earlier lifetime, when she had been a southern belle in Mississippi.