GPS (36 page)

Simmons was the exception. Despite his feigned, robotic indifference when Jeff had asked him what day it was, it was clear from everything he’d heard and seen that Simmons kept one of the craziest schedules in human history, and there certainly could be no easy-going way of maintaining it.

Those thoughts, and many more like them, had littered his head as Jeff had driven deep into Texas the night before. While he plunged farther and farther south and west, he had become increasingly aware of how close he was, technically at least, to the fighting. It made him even more confused about how it all worked, how that side was reality and this side was reality simultaneously, yet separately and at different times. He didn’t understand it, but felt sure that if he’d just kept on driving, had decided to skip the Sunday game in Midland and just keep rolling southwest across the U.S. border, he wouldn’t have found the revolucion army anywhere down there, and no Freemen Brigade. Just Mexico.

He’d spent the drive moving his eyes constantly back and forth from the road to the GPS on the windshield, wondering if something crazy would happen. Although he’d now successfully traveled back and forth twice, he’d never been able to predict the event and had begun to wonder just how much Paulo really understood all those beeps and announcements and prompts that chirped out of his electronic travel companion. And further, how it was that GPS units across the planet were regularly becoming portals for teleportation into a parallel existence somewhere in the haze of the future. And why.

It didn’t appear the transients came over on any set schedule. New arrivals came crashing through all the time, apparently, often ones that never had time to register on Fonseca’s magical handheld GPS. As Jeff increasingly began to believe maybe he
was
cut out for the revolucion, he also began to believe Fonseca really did need him, and for more than just pulling triggers, he hoped.

Jeff stirred back to reality again. It was already nearing triple-digit temperatures on the west Texas plain. Ever since he’d steered the Celica into the ballpark, Jeff found himself loving the heat more than ever. He looked at his bare arms to see that his burn was slowly becoming a deep tan. It had been a long afternoon already, but Jeff spent it as a willing, almost happy spectator, mainly because he was terrified that temptation would run him down later that night when all the action was done, the business was over and the scouting report was filed.

With two outs in the top of the seventh inning of the relatively uneventful game, led 2-1 by visiting San Antonio, Cintron got his call as a pinch hitter. When he did, Jeff found himself pulled temporarily out of the well of daydreams that had tugged at him all afternoon and all of last night.

There were brief moments when he forced himself to watch the game, but baseball always takes breaks, and he kept drifting away during the calm stills between innings, staring into the hardpan sizzling in the distance and later into a horizon faintly sketched with the pastels of early evening. The stadium lights had come on at some point to further define the lengthening swords of sunlight.

“
Now pinch hitting for San Antonio, number thirty-one, Francisco Cintron.”

Even with Cintron finally standing in at the plate, Jeff’s mind wanted to wander back into the atmosphere. Like Felix Ascondo, Cintron had his own set of pre-pitch nuances which seemed to prolong the at-bat, and many other at-bats across the planet. Cintron quickly fell behind, one ball and two strikes. He then began swinging at everything, fouling off five straight, including a few that he probably should have hammered.

By the time Cintron put the ball in play with a solid crack, Jeff’s attention had already steered away from the batter’s box again, down to the front row where a curvy blonde woman was trying to concentrate on the game while the two young girls flanking her on each side seemed bent on climbing all over their seats and each other.

Jeff watched the woman instead of the baseball, but even she could not take his mind off the desert. Seeing her raised another of his dozens of questions about the revolucion that he hadn’t gotten around to asking in his time there. Where were the women? Were there women, other than the apparent whores brought there by the Freemen? Did they plan on reproducing at some point? Perhaps the revolucion world frowned upon all of the vices of the traditional world, including the wonderful distraction of women. But more likely, the women and children had fled south with the rest of the nation, Jeff figured, as the FB constantly pushed them. He thought of the little girl in the picture and wondered if he would ever see that part of the war.

The deep burst of Cintron’s bat stopped his stream of thoughts. The sound made everyone in the stadium sit up and emit a simultaneous, “Ooh!” Jeff jerked his head up to see Cintron sprinting out of the box toward first base, watching the trajectory of a long line drive heading somewhere out toward the gap in left-center field.

“Get it daddy!” screamed one of the girls in the front row, now jumping up and down and squealing. Then Jeff stood, scanning the sky above the outfield and trying to find the ball. The Midland center fielder was sprinting almost directly toward the outfield wall, constantly peeking over his shoulder as he went. How strange it was that suddenly everyone Jeff scouted did something important in his presence, as though he was being constantly challenged to notice the same things all the other scouts noticed. It wasn’t going out of the park, Jeff thought to himself, but Cintron might be able to leg this into a triple, maybe even more than that if he was fast enough.

When Jeff caught sight of the descending baseball, his eyes shifted back to the center fielder’s relentless pursuit. He wondered if he was about to watch the guy plow right into the wall and kill himself. When the outfielder reached the warning track, and as the ball appeared destined to bounce at the base of the wall, the center fielder flung himself, glove outstretched, into the air.

He did a brutal belly-flop directly onto the red dirt of the track. He slid to a stop on his stomach, inches from the center field wall, and he did so with his glove raised in the air and the white flash of the baseball visible in its webbing, even from the 10
^th
row behind home plate.

“Holy shit,” Jeff said aloud, thinking at once of the famous Willie Mays basket catch and thinking this one to be of equal standard. The small Midland crowd began shrieking with delight at the sight of the man and his triumphantly raised glove, still prone on the warning track. He stood up slowly and brushed himself off, the ball now in his throwing hand. He heaved it back to the infield and began trotting in from the farthest reach of the park toward the roars of approval coming from the tiny crowd.

Already past second base and aimed toward third on the play, Willy Cintron had stopped dead in his tracks when he heard the roar of the home crowd. He’d spun and looked into the outfield with a stunned expression on his face, joining every other person in the stadium in doing so. When he had seen the ball in the raised glove, Cintron tossed his batting helmet in disgust, sending it spinning across the infield. He peeled off his batting gloves and headed for the visitors dugout.

As the outfielder slowly came into view, trotting toward the apron of the infield, it was clear to Jeff he wasn’t the same center fielder who had started the game. Midland had made defensive changes heading into the top of the seventh, but the daydreaming man in the 10
^th
row behind home plate hadn’t heard a word of them over the public address.

The two girls and the fine-looking blonde were still on their feet, cheering wildly as the RockHounds jogged off the field, many of the players slowing their pace in order to congratulate the center fielder as he made his steady trek toward the home dugout. Jeff was stiff with unexpected excitement, the first baseball-related thrill he had since Ascondo’s triple for the St. Lucie Mets. Before that, it had been years.

He thought of Nifty Carlson’s message from the other day, the one he of course hadn’t answered yet. Was it Simpson he’d said, the stud Midland center fielder, perhaps? Jeff wanted to get a glimpse of this magnificent outfielder, put a name to a face and ponder why he didn’t already know who this was. The outfielder crossed second base on a steady jaunt inward, exchanging baseball glove high-fives with a couple of teammates as he jogged.

Jeff stopped breathing when the man trotted up and over the pitcher’s mound and looked up toward the seats behind home plate, his face coming into full view beneath the brim of his hat. The man smiled and winked toward the woman and the young girls in the front row, who again squealed their approval. When the man’s eyes shifted upward, however, the smile vanished and his lips separated slowly. His mouth fell open and his jog slowed to a walk, sending some of his teammates running clumsily right past him.

The man locked eyes with Jeff long enough to make the woman in the front row, and the two little girls, spin around and look at Jeff too. The man tore his eyes away and hurried into the dugout with his head aimed directly at the ground.

Jeff never sat back down. He walked to the end of his row, scaled the stadium steps and practically sprinted into the parking lot. He got into his car and drove all night back to New Orleans with both the GPS and his cell phone turned off.

It was Josh Simmons.

PART IV

“
Some guys are admired for coming to play, as the saying goes. I prefer those who come to kill.”
— Leo Durocher

- 45 -

David Hawkins thought about the impending return of Jeff Delaney to the transient army, and it made him even further pissed, even more determined to take his stand the first chance he got.

Delaney’s presence would just push him further down the totem pole, further into obscurity. And what did it matter? There was no status worth fighting for here, no honor in this God forsaken place. He’d tried that route already and failed, failed big time. Riding alone on the bed of a pickup truck in the middle of the nighttime chill, the blackness drove into Hawkins. He couldn’t sleep and couldn’t see two feet in front of him, so he instinctively began to stew in hopeless anger about his potential end result in life.

The journey had barely begun. Something had to change, but now he had something. It was still so new he had to keep reminding himself. He just had to wait. Before now, he’d always reached the same conclusion — if he could just end things on his own, he would be free from this place. But for some reason, despite all the bloodshed he’d witnessed on a daily basis in the fighting, Hawkins could not force himself to take his own life. He knew that now, and normally that would have just added to the hopelessness of it all, but now he’d seen a flash of hope, the first and only one he’d seen in better than a year.

Countless nights he had sat up alone, volunteering for watch duty, hoping the will to end it would finally consume him. He would use the pistol he always kept strapped to his side, or maybe even the mostly unused rifle he’d been issued somehow, and get it over with before he gave himself the choice not to. But night after night he couldn’t do it, and in fact had never even brought himself to hold a loaded gun anywhere near his face.

He couldn’t have explained it, and had no one to explain it to, but somewhere between a brain that wanted to do it — told him to do it — and the finger on the trigger, the message got interrupted. Suicide had seemed the only means of ending the cursed life he’d otherwise spend here. He’d refused in the first month to even believe any of it was real. And until a little over a week ago, he hadn’t spent a single second here doing anything but hoping to find some way back out, or hoping to die. It had been mostly the latter because on the same night he arrived he’d lost almost all hope of ever leaving.

There was no honor or courage or fun about anything going on here, and he was as certain of that now as he was that first night. Even when he’d had what he thought was a moment of purpose, a moment when he believed in destiny and that being stuck here
was
, in fact, his destiny, it was a fleeting one.

The part-time car thief, full-time video game, cocaine and pill junkie had momentarily believed that his uncanny memory, sense of direction and untapped marksman skill would create a new life for him here. But he was informed quickly, about as quickly as he’d been informed he was stuck over here forever, that he wasn’t going to serve any purpose here beyond dying as a foot soldier in a war no one would win. When it came to the big hit on Destinoso, Hawkins was a hose man — one of the expendable goons charged with siphoning the gas out of all the FB trucks. In other words, he would either be one of the first ones engulfed in flames or one of the first ones downed in a hail of FB bullets. In Hawkins’ mind, neither of those would have been bad at all if he didn’t know what he now thought he knew.

He hated every minute of the war, hated the non-stop cat-and-mouse fighting and didn’t accept Paulo or any of the others as people with even a shred of sanity. They didn’t understand him and they didn’t trust him. They also didn’t like him. Funny, Fonseca didn’t trust Delaney one bit either, yet he fawned over him constantly.

The desert had done nothing for Hawkins except kick his addictions, and that was little more than what he would have gotten out of a prison sentence, he figured. People like Delaney got this crazed look in their eyes when they came to this place, like they were high on the idea of killing without consequence, and that only confirmed they were well on their way to crazy before they ever left home. Hawkins wanted no part of fighting for his life every day, so much so he spent all these months praying for death instead.

Though he’d ultimately accepted that he wasn’t ever going to develop the courage to do himself in, he had constantly hoped to get killed some other way — gunned down in an ambush or even run over at random by some new arrival in a full-size pickup. But it just didn’t happen. Hawkins had outlived all but the highest ranking guys in the entire transient division.