GPS (18 page)

This time, the man seemed just as concerned for his own life as he was getting Jeff out of there. As they crested another slope, Jeff was staggered by a sudden, blinding wave of morning sunlight, losing his footing briefly and allowing the man in front of him to gain an extra 15 feet on him into another piece of open desert of loose sand grains. Pumping his legs, Jeff felt like he was trying to run the length of a child’s swimming pool. Ahead, he saw the man making his way toward what appeared to be a cliff, and his heart sank again, death a sudden reality.

When the man got to the edge, he turned and sent a painstaking look in Jeff’s direction. Jeff wondered, as he bounded toward the waiting man, if that look was aimed at him, or past him. He could sense himself being chased now, and was emitting a worried whimper as he kicked sand in every direction. As he approached the edge, the man shouted at him, “Get over! Get over!” and leapt over the edge.

Jeff scaled the broken fence in front of him in one daring leap, then slid rapidly down an incline, only keeping himself upright enough to keep the avalanche of sand and stone moving in a uniform direction down the slope. Like a kid at the end of a playground slide, he landed butt-first with a jolt.

He awoke on his New Orleans patio with a shout.

- 20 -

Either Riley sensed the same importance about the evening that Jeff had or perhaps she’d come from something or someone more important than him Thursday night. Because when she slinked into the Esplanade Avenue apartment — where Jeff had even managed to light some candles after he’d finished dinner to create some atmosphere in his otherwise nondescript living room — she did so wearing a stunning blue dress.

Not that Jeff needed anything to send him off course. He awoke late Thursday morning with a panicked shout, falling out of the same patio chair in which he’d passed out for the second time in the last 10 hours. The second time he awoke, the sun was already beating onto the courtyard and that, along with the alcohol, another crazy dream and the despair of the previous night had helped to stir his brain into mash.

The thought of his missing cat was a constant invasion to his otherwise blurred thoughts, along with the question of how he would explain the disappearance of Lefty to the woman who had kept the creature alive on more than one occasion. And that would be just the introduction. Then, the real questions would have to be answered, the ones which brought the estranged wife to the front door in the first place.

The images of his most recent dream could have been a blessing, as unsettling as those images were. Jeff knew there was a connection between the intensely detailed sleep scenes and what happened to him one week before, whether they were precise memories of it or not. There was enough content within them to help make sense of some of what happened, or at least enough to explain what was going on in this place he’d visited, and the place that was now visiting him on an increasingly regular basis while he slept. The where, the who and the why of the thing were still spinning around in the unknown.

Bent on keeping the promise of not drinking in Riley’s presence, Jeff went through his daily detox by doing everything in his power to prepare for her presence, mostly taking silly-looking things out of immediate view in the apartment, which made it look all the more empty and reaffirmed his decision to do business in candlelight.

Over and over through the afternoon and early evening, Jeff found himself peering out the window onto the courtyard, hoping he would see Lefty out there bathing in the sun. He even called out to the cat dozens of times as he paraded around out there, sweeping and straightening. But nothing. The picture in his brain of the old cat wandering hopelessly through the streets served as a constant backdrop to the day, and if Jeff had a crystal ball that could have shown him the cat that sticky April afternoon, he would have seen that his mental image was practically dead on.

Those thoughts were his companion until the doorbell rang around 9 o’clock. The woman outside couldn’t possibly know the truth about the cat, though like his now infamous trip to New Mexico, it certainly wouldn’t pass by without some sort of explanation from Jeff.

“Our young Lefty has become quite the adventurer lately,” Jeff blurted out almost as soon as they’d sat down to dinner in the lamp-lit New Orleans night. “The big oaf managed to squeeze under the fence a couple of times, but he usually comes right back in a couple of hours,” Jeff said with a fake smile that he knew looked fake, which was countered by Riley’s theatric mid-drink pause, her wine glass up to her lips and her eyes trained suspiciously on the man across the table.

“You lost Lefty? I assumed he was up there asleep. Really Jeff? I mean after all this time, he’s going to become one of those outside cats that only shows up for the food? He won’t live like that, not in this town, and don’t you think there are enough strays in town already?”

No mention of New Mexico yet. But it had to be coming. Riley had dropped her fork next to the tuna steak that Jeff had proudly plunked down in front of her five minutes before. The mood had already been cast. Hurricane Riley was set to unleash.

But shockingly, it still didn’t happen. Instead, Riley gave a sigh and a shake of the head as she again raised her glass and heartily drew on the cabernet within. As promised, Jeff was drinking Hawaiian Punch like a fifth grader. But he had the sudden, familiar urge to match the burn Riley often brought to his gut these days with a burn in the back of his throat. Not tonight, he thought, not tonight.

“I hope you haven’t lost him for good,” she went on somewhat blankly, seeming to have her mind stuck elsewhere, instead of in the middle of Jeff’s business, the reason he assumed she’d come. “I would hate to call you in a couple months and find out ... I just hope he’s OK. This is great, Jeff, I have to hand it to you. This is like at the Redfish.”

She grabbed her fork again, and shoveled in a bite to help her mask her awkward pause. He could have played along, naturally, and simply treated her feeble attempt at a compliment as just that. But when it came to the words of Riley, Jeff simply had no armor. So he was just frowning at the table. A couple of months? It suddenly occurred to him that perhaps Riley had brought divorce papers for him to sign. When their eyes met again, Riley wore an expression of exhausted confusion, not concern. As beautiful as she was, she looked completely worn out, and he was undoubtedly the source.

“So what happened out there, Jeff? Why did I get a terrifying photo sent to me last week?”

The first two questions had been fired and Jeff had no better answer to them right now than he did when he sent her the photograph. But instead of just sitting there and shrugging away, like a kid in class who thinks all he has to do is squirm in his chair and stare at the ceiling and wait for someone else to get called on, Jeff threw his mind into gear. He quickly collected everything he had seen, whether he’d seen it in a dream, in a trance, a blackout or in death-defying reality, and started explaining it in the most matter-of-fact way he could manage.

He tried to condense a week’s worth of panicked confusion and delusion into some nice, neat encyclopedia entry. The most surprising part of the near 10-minute speech was not Riley’s complete silence and unwavering, incredulous stare throughout, but the perfectly eloquent manner in which Jeff suddenly had pieced everything together.

At once, he described the revolucion, the cruelty of its opposition, and the sights, sounds and smells of it as he had witnessed it and lived it and even fired gunshots in it. Though he certainly never said where any of this was, he did manage to recount fine details, even uttered the name Paulo, which he didn’t realize he remembered until it came flying out of his mouth.

Even as Riley’s empty stare dug into him, a stare that in the recent past had made Jeff feel like the boy crying wolf, he kept going, and as it turned out, kept remembering. Though she sat there without responding to any of it, never once interrupting but instead just looking on motionless for 10 minutes, Jeff found he was making himself feel more enlightened about the last week. He was making more sense to himself about it somehow, even though none of it had made a bit of sense until now. At the end of it, feeling a stir of success in his butterfly-filled belly despite Riley’s dubious expression, he shouted, triumphantly, “Unete a la revolucion!”

He stood for a moment afterward, admiring the sound of his voice as its echo cascaded through the back alley and bounced back at him. Eventually, as silence enveloped the courtyard, he sat back down. As soon as he did, Riley began asking questions, breaking what seemed an hour’s worth of building tension.

“Let me get this straight, Jeff. Wherever you think you were or whatever you think you were doing, after all of your nights of medicating yourself to come up with an explanation for what you saw, you think it was some good thing? You had a week to think this over, and what you’ve concluded is that this was some moment of victory for someone? For you? That little girl in the picture, would she think it was worth shouting about?”

“Well actually yes, Riley. I mean, she’s part of the oppressed …”

“Oppressed? How on earth do you know that, Jeff? You get lost, you see all this and now, in a week, you’ve got this big story about revolutions in the desert and fighting for what’s right? Where, Jeff? In the real world, the drunken world or just in a fantasy?”

“That’s just it Riley. This is
not
a fantasy. My car was there. I was there. And I don’t know where, but I know it was real. I woke up with a piece of paper in my wallet, and I mean …”

“You wanna know what’s real, Jeff? What’s really real? This is what’s real.” Riley grabbed her purse and wrestled her cell phone out. She flipped it open, touched a few buttons and then held it out.

“
You have, four, saved messages. First, saved message. Friday, 6:40, a.m.”
Her speaker phone blurted out more concrete evidence of Jeff’s plummet out of reality.
“Riley, Riley, um, it’s late but I needed to hear your voice. I just sent you something. It’s something shocking and it’s really bad, on your phone ... it was really bad. I mean, I was driving and got lost and all at once it was like I couldn’t see the road around me. The car went into a spin, I think, and, and when the dust cleared, somehow, I was in this completely different place. I ran for help, or because I was too scared to stay in the car, and I heard all this traffic, or something, off in the distance. I went looking and I saw this, I mean, all these people, all these people being run down and trampled and tortured. God, Riley, what happened? It seemed like there was nothing I could do, but then these other people were there that helped. God, it was like a war, a really one-sided war. I think I did something crazy, Riley. I mean, I did do something crazy, I tried to help, but ... I just don’t understand.”

More silence followed. Minutes and minutes of it, uninterrupted. Two increasingly estranged adults each likely thought of hundreds of things they wanted to say next, but neither did for what seemed like an hour. Unable to bear the weight of it any longer, and frustrated nearly to tears at this point by every aspect of his life and how much of it he no longer understood, Jeff mustered his calmest voice, and spoke to the woman from whom he’d never kept a secret. She was now sitting hunched over with her elbows on the table and her face staring at the ground below her.

“It, it was just some insane out-of-body experience, Riley. It was some glimpse of something I just can’t put into words. I know that I can’t put it into any kind of context in reality, but it wouldn’t still be haunting me like this if it hadn’t really happened. In fact, I —”

PART II

“
Baseball is something like a war.”
— Ty Cobb

- 21 -

The transient army still had fresh men coming through every couple of weeks. Often, they were men who had been there before. Even though he needed quantity more than quality, Paulo Fonseca prayed Jeff Delaney would be one of them sometime soon.

May 7 was the big day, the day he hoped a slew of them would answer the call, but Paulo wished he could have guys like Delaney right now, April 30. After two years in the war, however, Fonseca knew there was no point looking a week into the future when you might not make it through today. That’s why he kept the transients as much in the dark as possible when it came to times and dates when they came across.

The Americanos and the other outsiders that came here mostly wanted something to care about, and Fonseca knew how to put that desire to use. They didn’t know it, but the transients were expendable and that’s what made them so valuable. They came and went in a bizarre, unpredictable cycle, but the transients were what made the biggest uprising of all seem possible to Paulo. Without them, there would not be enough bodies to spend on it, and the only bodies there would be would be desert- and mountain-tested thoroughbreds, men far too valuable to throw away on a potential suicide mission.

The transient army — if he could manage to find the final pieces of it and keep them alive and committed to the cause — could help the revolucion push the perros right back over the border and keep chasing them, picking up new membership along the way.

There was simply no way of knowing the number, how many more new men would come, which would actually stick around, which would die and which, if any, he could really trust. He only knew that some would undoubtedly come, some would undoubtedly die, and a few others would run off, find their way back across and never dream of returning. Delaney had found his way back home, at least he assumed, even with the Freemen Brigade gunmen shooting at him from above the pass. But Fonseca had certainly helped him escape. Delaney had gone berserk out there — just minutes after his arrival no less — and showered the back of the FB’s convoy with bullets.