GPS (6 page)

The team of horses was nothing more than the front line in this one-sided rampage. Rolling steadily across the expanse of dark brown scrub in huge zig-zagging lines behind them, like giant desert insects, was a fleet of black Range Rovers with their headlights on moving at about a 5-mile-per-hour clip over every cactus, bush and human being in its path.

In this flash of terror it was unclear who the victims were, or the aggressors. It was uncertain where the people — all on foot and most clinging to whatever clothes or belongings they could carry at a frantic retreat across the desert — were being driven from or to, or why. The only certainty was the fury. It was being unloaded with such force, the stampede created its own dust storm which chased the mob and came washing over the victims laid to waste in its path.

The brigade moved at a ferocious stroll that was always just faster than its prey. While the attack might have been aimed at driving its victims off the land they were occupying, its participants appeared just as bent on eliminating them altogether.

“
Warren GPS Technology. Welcome.”

Jeff snapped back to reality with his eyes locked on the GPS screen. It seemed to have reset itself. It blinked off of whatever he’d been staring at the last several minutes. In that blink, Jeff realized he was completely rigid, his back numb and stiff from being pressed so firmly against the Celica’s driver’s seat and his knuckles white from gripping the steering wheel as though he’d been in a hopeless skid on a snowy mountain road. And now the unit was showing him the screen it always did when he first plugged it into the lighter. But like a radio station that steadily fades out on a long drive while another one butts its way in, the sleek 8-inch screen seemed to be getting interference, flashing back and forth from the home screen to some oddly-colored map.

The bright pink-and-orange shapes appeared to depict land masses and bodies of water in some strange place, and every time the GPS blinked away from the home screen, Jeff couldn’t help but be reminded of the box of fluorescent crayons he played with as a kid in New Haven. He had no immediate thoughts about what any of it meant, because at the moment things were happening faster and more peculiarly than he could handle. And his physical state, he now realized, needed more immediate attention.

It was the first real episode of his developing insanity, he thought. Jeff now realized he’d been sitting in his car — the one that looked like it had been dragged off the bottom of a lake and then towed to the Elegante and abandoned — for close to an hour now. Millions of things might have been going on in his own hallucinatory world, but in the world of Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States of America, he was nothing more than a man drawing an increasing amount of attention as he continued to occupy the Celica, a hotel parking spot and an Elegante room key.

With that realization, Jeff crawled out, made it to his feet again, gave the car door a serious heave and watched — that dangerous smile suddenly spreading over his face again — as about five pounds of dried earth slid off the sides of his car. No need to make this experience last any longer, he thought, finding his legs and striding toward the hotel lobby, where he intended to plunk down the room key with authority, thank the good people for one hell of a night and head to that car wash he thought he’d been thinking about earlier, before he’d sat down in his car and seen that miniature horror film in his brain — or was it on that screen on the windshield?

Without one more little snag, all that might have happened. But as Jeff neared the revolving lobby door, which at this particular hotel Jeff found amusingly out of place, a buzz in his right front pocket gave him another jolt of fright.

That was mainly because when it did vibrate, it reminded Jeff that it
had
been
vibrating since he first woke up and stuck his face in the hotel toilet. Remarkably, he’d managed to stay distracted from it for this long. He fumbled the phone out of his jeans pocket, flipped it open and saw his next shock of the still young day: 26 missed calls. Then, after he pressed the red cancel button on the phone, he got another one. Today wasn’t Friday morning at all. It was
Saturday
, according to his phone.

“What in the hell happened to Friday?” he shouted at the parking lot, more terrified now than ever before that he was, in fact, losing it.

Twenty-one of the 26 missed calls, he saw as he plopped down on the curb, still outside the hotel lobby, were from Riley’s cell phone. About six months ago, Jeff would have run through traffic just to get one call back from his soon-to-be ex-wife. Now, he’d done something worth 21 responses from her, and had no idea what it was.

How fitting, he thought. One of the better illustrations of the current relationship between Jeff and Riley was how tough it was for him to listen to her voice on a message, let alone speak to her on the phone or in person. His drunk dialing had almost ceased in the last two months, at least as much as Jeff could recollect, and with that, so had Riley’s willingness to respond.

Now, she’d finally lost her patience. He’d apparently made the call, or even calls, in his drunken stupor last night that drove her past her breaking point with the man with whom she’d long since parted ways. Or was it two nights ago? If it was really Saturday, how did he manage to stay in his room an extra night, and what the hell did he do for that entire extra 24 hours that was now lost? What did he do that caused that dream sequence he saw, or remembered, inside the car?

Well, it was definitely Saturday. Jeff spun around and peered down at the Albuquerque Journal box next to the door now revolving nonstop with unattended kids going in an endless loop. As he stepped down and squinted at the box’s front window, he saw that it was, in fact, April 12, 2008, and that the Isotopes had plowed over the Zephyrs in the Friday game in the series, 10-2.

Maybe Ricard and Ainsley really were shit, he considered briefly, then considered stepping into the path of the revolving door and trapping those kids inside for a few minutes until their absentee parents came to find them, undoubtedly on their way to the airport.

One thing at a time. First, it was time for the grizzled veteran of road travel to try to explain to the front desk, or perhaps have explained to him, just how it became Saturday without him knowing it or without him being booted from his room. And, for that matter, whether or not a mudslide had come through the part of town he apparently was in the night before.

“Ah, Mister Jeff, you are ready to check out now?” a man behind the desk with RAMON on his nametag asked him, immediately putting Jeff on the defensive as he approached the counter. First-name recognition from hotel clerk to random guest left little doubt as to whether his legend was growing among the Elegante staff, and the girl who first poked her head around the office door and then jumped up to come to the counter and size him up while suddenly acting busy clinched that feeling.

“I think maybe you have a rough night on Thursday night, and then I think you have another one Friday,” Ramon said, smiling. “You call yesterday morning, early, right after I get in around seven in the morning, during breakfast. You say, no room service and no disturb. But you did say you need one more night, how did you say, to figure out which way you would drive back to Louisiana. Then, when I look out and see your car... I mean, you had an accident or something that night?”

“Oh nothing like that, Ramon, I assure you. Just doing a little desert romping with some old college buddies,” Jeff lied, even though technically that could have been true since he really had no idea how all that earth had come to plaster itself to the car.

“Oh geez, you gotta be careful out there, lots of ways to get yourself hurt or worse,” Ramon said, carefully folding Jeff’s receipt in half and handing it over the counter. “So anyway, why don’t you go over to that big car wash, down University Boulevard toward the college? Get your car cleaned up, then you start feeling better.”

Ramon had no idea, of course, that the trashed car was only heading to the car wash long enough to make it drivable again, and that was by no means a path toward happiness at this point. Soon, he would either become further enlightened or further confused when, for the first time since mid-winter, he soberly dialed Riley’s number. But that would still have to wait. At the moment, the Celica wouldn’t even make it to the car wash without some attention. Getting his wits about him, sort of, Jeff walked back out through the now cleared revolving door and headed for the trunk of his car.

There, he planned to tear through the crust and find within his rarely-used ice scraper, still with an orange price tag stuck to its business end.

Fresh beads of sweat washed over Jeff as he pounded the top of the car’s trunk with flailing fists in attempt to loosen the crust’s grip on his car’s rear container. Now dripping onto the sun-baked Celica, he used the well-traveled bottle opener on his keychain to core out the key slot. He wriggled the key through the mostly dried sand and grime and made it turn while simultaneously flexing his left arm against the underside of the spoiler, which was still mohawked wildly with long stems of dried grass and other debris.

A fresh couple of pounds of the dirt and sand slid into his cluttered trunk as it tore open, sending a cloud of dust into Jeff’s face. For no real reason at all, Jeff broke out laughing. He’d mostly lived in fear of denting, dinging or scratching every rental car he’d ever driven because he always declined the insurance. Now, as a whole new Jeff began to take shape, he wished somehow
this
was a rental, and not because he cared whatsoever about the Celica. It was more because he wished, just once, he could steer a car that looked even remotely like this one into the return hub at an airport.

The scene in his head was wonderfully amusing, and the smile it brought to his face remained there as he got a sudden burst of energy and began vigorously scraping away the crud on his front and back windows, then the sides and even the mirrors.

He stood there for a moment, taking pride in his success, when the phone he’d stuffed back into his pocket without having played a single message began buzzing again. This time, with a happy grin, he fished it out and flipped it open.

- 7 -

“Hey Riley!”

“Jeff? Where are you? Did you call the police?”

Jeff was shocked at the sound of the first genuine concern he’d heard in Riley’s voice in months. While the couple’s January split was the last thing in the world Jeff wanted, he had known for quite some time it was coming. Since that time, things had gone in opposite directions, Riley creating more and more distance between them as she began to learn what life was like without him, and Jeff trying to cling to every shred of their relationship as it frayed beyond fixing.

There was no cheating, no lying that Jeff knew about, certainly not on his end and he doubted on hers either. Instead, there was Riley’s steady metamorphosis into something that was beyond Jeff, coupled with his own self-indulged downward spiral. The demise of the marriage was nothing more than her learning to treat Jeff in the same no-nonsense way she treated everyone else who played a mere bit part in her rise to personal greatness. Jeff had come to understand in the last three months that the unique treatment he’d gotten from her in the years of their marriage, the thing that cemented him into the relationship and kept him going when his work and travel had left him unraveled, carried an inevitable expiration date.

In the beginning, Riley had a way of switching off the city reporter in her and becoming someone who shared everything with him and never ceased to want to know more about him. Whether her interest was genuine or feigned, Riley could spout more knowledge about minor league baseball prospects than most professional managers, and that had always counted to Jeff.

But the underlying fears she had about Jeff in the long term had been seemingly realized less than five years into the marriage. His cynicism had taken the turn she always hoped it wouldn’t.

She saw his sarcasm about people become bitterness, and the second she sensed any of that bitterness being directed at her, the bond was broken. In a sense, Jeff was like every man who’s ever been dumped in that the stinger she’d left in him drove him to prove to her he could change, yet Jeff didn’t have any more illusions about them reuniting even if he did.

In his experience, people didn’t change anyway, at least not just because someone had identified their problems for them. Regardless, Jeff was becoming a different man, and even he couldn’t dispute it. The tone of Riley’s voice on the phone made Jeff wonder if she sensed that too.

The last time they’d spent together as an official couple was the previous New Year’s Eve, out on the town together with a band of Riley’s people from the Times-Picayune. And even that night ended with a long, pained sigh from Riley and the condescending declaration that Jeff was too young to be so mad. Now Jeff felt he was creeping ever closer to the other sort of mad, the one that would land him in a rubber room if he maintained his current pace. So be it.

“Police? Look Riley, believe me when I say I’m not playing dumb here. I don’t know what happened, other than I left the game last night ... Thursday night…” Jeff now knew this was going to be the toughest explanation of his life, and did he really need to explain this to his ex-wife? He had no idea what he was going to tell her, mainly because he had no idea what he’d told her in the first place. Police? What the hell was she talking about? Think, think.

“Jeff, forget all that. I don’t even know where you are. Let’s start there, and then maybe you can tell me what all that madness was you left on my voicemail yesterday at the crack of dawn.”