GPS (7 page)

“Riley, I’m so sorry about all this. I had no right to call you like that, and I know you’re sick of hearing that it’s the last time, but I swear to you, if you just …”

“Where the hell are you, Jeff? Is this some kind of joke? Are you drunk?”

The change really must be happening, Jeff suddenly thought, because the drunk question barely even registered on him. Normally, he would have blown his top at that question. Instead, he breathed deeply and spoke as calmly as possible.

“I’m in New Mexico. I had the Zephyrs and Isotopes on Thursday night, and …”

“What are you still doing there on Saturday, Jeff? Do you remember what you told me on your message? You don’t do you? You were hammered, as usual, and you called me, as usual. Only this time, it wasn’t the usual Jeff stuff. That stuff I can handle. Now, it’s something way different. You mean to tell me everything you talked about, that horrible thing you saw, was in New Mexico? Where are the police?”

Although he wouldn’t dare say so out loud, Riley had broken into one of her familiar routines, firing off questions she apparently didn’t want answers to, because she didn’t wait for answers. Instead, she replaced the last question with another one. The normally engaging reporter was suddenly cross-examining, and he’d already lost track of what the questions were and which ones, if any, he could answer.

“The police? I don’t know, I mean, I don’t need the police. There’s no danger, no one’s hurt. Look, Riley, please forgive me just this one last time and tell me what exactly the message…”

“No danger? Jeff, I saw the picture! You sent me the picture, do you not remember any of this? How can you tell me nothing’s wrong now? I’ve been calling you almost on the hour since yesterday. You said you’d seen something terrible, had gotten lost on the road somehow, or something, and that you saw some terrible thing, people being hurt and killed. You never said where you were or exactly what happened, but Jeff, that picture! You obviously dealt with this the way you deal with everything. Erin Go Bragh! Bottom’s up! But you involved me in this now, Jeffrey, and now I want to know what it is. The whole thing. Please tell me you didn’t make all this up. But that picture ... there’s just no way, Jeff.”

No matter how much of a turn their marriage had taken in the last year, Jeff and Riley had always maintained a level of respect for each other that kept them almost completely clear of petty insults. But now, Jeff could sense drops of venom forming on Riley’s tongue, and he wished more than anything else he’d been in control and not dialed that number. Now he was being asked to explain something for which he had positively no explanation.

“Riley, look. I think, I know, I didn’t make this up. I might be a louse who drinks too much and makes idiotic, ill-timed calls to his estranged wife. But I would never make up something just for your attention. I’ll be honest with you, OK? I have no clue what I saw, where it was or what the hell I was doing there. Actually, I’m not even sure I was lost because I didn’t know where I was headed in the first place. I guess the answer to all this is that I’ve totally lost it. What I mean is, I never meant to …”

“Just look at the picture!” Riley hung up before another word could be said.

Jeff immediately accessed the stored photos on his phone, and as usual, he started scrolling through them in the wrong direction, oldest to newest.

That meant an impromptu slide show of photos depicting the demise of a relationship. Most were typical phone photos, ones people take at places and events not quite important enough as to warrant bringing along an actual camera. Mostly, they were shots of Riley standing or sitting in various places around New Orleans, and of course none of them showed the two of them together. Typical, he thought. Here was one of her sitting, alone, if you didn’t know any better from this photo, in Jacques-Imo’s. The last time he’d been there, if memory served, he was the one flying solo, and he’d tested that “Be Nice or Leave” sign after a few too many. Maybe he was crazy, or maybe he’d just become too much of a drunk to remember he wasn’t crazy.

There was even an image from the Zephyrs’ 2007 home opener, when Riley and other esteemed writers from the city were honored after the sixth inning for their “words of comfort and kindness during a time of peril in our city.” Her post-Katrina work had been so good, she’d graduated to some other class of citizen in town, yet she still chose to live the simple life of driving a crappy car and living in a house that cost her nothing. Jeff knew she’d earned her new status just as well as he knew he hadn’t.

She wore a black dress that night that gave men of Jeff’s ilk misconceptions about where a night like that might end up — but it was nowhere on that particular night. No matter how many times he’d undressed her in his mind that night, he didn’t undress her in their bedroom because he’d passed out on the living room sofa.

As he thumbed repeatedly on the button to make the pictures pass by as quickly as possible, he couldn’t help but think she looked less and less happy in each one. Just as that thought began to really bother him, he zipped right past one that made his heart skip a beat.

Now sitting on the hood of his mud-mobile, ice scraper lying next to him, Jeff let out an audible whimper as the frame blinked quickly past him. It went past in strobe-light effect, one still flash in a series of stuttering, hallucinogenic frames which made Jeff drop the phone onto the hood of the car and look away at once. It was a glimpse of Jeff’s life caught on camera, something he could keep forever if he wished, but something he already wished he’d never seen, let alone photographed. He looked nervously around the Elegante parking lot, as if it to brace himself before looking back down at the phone. He didn’t know if he could bring himself to focus on it and absorb all of its details.

But he did, mainly because he already knew there was no way in hell of avoiding it. He inhaled deeply, grabbed the phone off the car and put the instantly recognizable image directly in his face. Eyes locked on the tiny phone screen, Jeff couldn’t help but think of Riley, and of Riley seeing the same thing he was seeing, and how he’d screwed this whole thing up in so many ways.

Just a day or so ago, as all this started to happen to him, whatever it was that had started to happen, it was only him that it was happening to, and that was bad enough. But not now. No, not anymore. Because after he’d seen what he saw, he really
had
dealt with it the way Riley thought he did.

He’d gotten plowed because he didn’t know any other medicine for coping with it. Out of some instinct, some reflex he was trying to overcome, he’d dialed her number. He’d included her in it and now he not only could hear her voice in his head for the first time in days, he could sense those wheels of hers turning from a thousand miles away.

Jeff sat perfectly still, eyes fixed on the phone. Thoughts crashed back and forth in his mind including, for the first time, the notion that he really had been there, somewhere. He had a picture to prove it and perhaps to haunt him for the rest of his life. For several minutes he kept his eyes locked on the image, allowing their lenses to burn the pixilated photograph onto his brain.

The little girl in the fuzzy, dark image did not appear to notice Jeff when he apparently had the wherewithal to pull out his phone and capture an image of the carnage that must have unfolded right in front of him early that morning. Had anyone noticed him out there in the desert, and if not, why or how hadn’t they? Had he been just sitting in the car at that point, or had he actually somehow been catapulted out of it and onto his own two feet in some other place? Had he been hiding?

The very bottom of the image was masked by some sort of dark brown desert scrub, suggesting maybe he had been trying to lie low. That would certainly have been his reaction to the scene if it passed before him again, and Jeff supposed he didn’t have any reason to think it wouldn’t.

It wasn’t so much that the girl didn’t see him, he seemed to remember, it was that she had already seen so much else she seemed completely numb to whatever was next. Her eyes had never fixed upon anything, and in the skewed phone photo, they were hidden beneath her dropped head. There was nothing in the hazy background behind her other than a scatter of hazy debris and towers of black smoke against a brightening sky. The blur of her face that he could see looked empty as the wind blew her black hair back. If he could have seen her completely, he would have seen eyes that looked like they had already cried out all the tears they had.

In the foreground was something very easy to recognize and very clear. At the girl’s feet and stretching across most of the bottom half of the frame above the line of desert floor in the photo were a person’s — a woman’s — legs. The left one was resting against what Jeff assumed was her now orphan daughter, and the right one was broken grotesquely upward at the shin.

Jeff still hadn’t left the Elegante parking lot, or even started his car.

- 8 -

“
Hello Jeff, Sandy. Hope you are having a splendid day. I got your emails and my, my, what fine things you have to say about our favorite two child prodigies in their jaunt to the American Southwest. Sounds like you all had a great time. I’m sure you saw SportsCenter or maybe even watched some of the delightful Mets game when you got back to your hotel. And so as it happens, dear friend, we will be forced to introduce Mr. Ainsley to the cheerful last-place fans right away. Do call me, kind sir.”

Sandy Morino was the man with the job Jeff used to dream about but now wouldn’t take if it were forced on him. The Mets’ director of player personnel was a great guy, one of the few left in that category in Jeff‘s opinion. Sandy generally exuded the kind of people skills that made it clear the separation between himself and Jeff in terms of being qualified for that kind of job.

The personnel boss spent his days collecting information from the scouts and the other teams and trying to keep it all neatly hammered into the maze of the entire organization, and trying to somehow make it translate into wins instead of losses and make it all seem logical to the ownership. He spent all of his nights watching baseball. The man, in his always delicate tone, was demanding a call back from Jeff immediately, undoubtedly to discuss Ainsley’s extremely subtle defensive ability at first base and its potential effect on a last-place team.

After awaking to a series of inexplicable things Saturday and then having a rare semi-sober chat with Riley, Jeff decided it was time to flee New Mexico at once, before he checked himself into a hospital and spent the rest of his days there. While the entire state might not have been to blame for all that had gone on the last several days, Jeff was quite sure if he stayed, he’d be treated to even more horrors and would be tempted to treat them with the same medicine, which was likely not helping at all.

So he listened to Ramon, the hotel clerk who seemed unfailingly concerned for his comfort and well-being — mainly because Ramon didn’t have any stake in any of this and hadn’t known Jeff quite long enough to judge him as succinctly as those who did know him. After sliding off his mud-masked hood and feeling an unexpected rush of relief upon remembering he had at least cleaned off his windows already, Jeff heaved the driver’s door open again, climbed into the car and, without hesitation, turned the key and listened to the Toyota engine cough a little — very likely expelling some dirt and grime out of the tailpipe — and then roar to life.

“
Warren GPS Technology. Welcome.”

“Ah, Jesus Christ!” Jeff moaned, half frightened by the voice coming from the windshield and half sick of it already. He flailed his arms weakly up at the GPS until his right thumb found the power button on the side and pressed extra hard. To his surprise, it very simply and politely said farewell —
“Warren. We know where you’re goin’.”
— and blinked off. A sigh of relief escaped Jeff and he backed the car out of its spot, rammed it into drive and steered through the parking lot, undoubtedly allowing the Elegante and its staff to collectively breathe its own sigh of relief.

As the car got moving an awful grinding sound came from beneath him, the sound of the abrasion caused by the slow breakup of all the mud and grime in the wheel wells, on the axles and throughout the undercarriage of the car. One last little gift for poor old Ramon, he thought, as he looked in his rearview mirror and saw a massive dirt trail following him out of the hotel lot. The thing that passed him by without his noticing — as Jeff rolled out onto University Drive and began searching for an ATM — was the now fading mud trail on the
other
side of the hotel’s parking lot entrance, the one he’d created on his way back into the Elegante at the first peek of dawn 36 hours before.

Less than a mile down the road, Jeff veered into a gas station with an ATM INSIDE sign ablaze in the window. He was thinking to himself how Riley was probably stewing away in her bedroom office right now, the room that just a few months ago was their bedroom but which was now empty except for her desk. She was probably scouring away at what little information she’d gotten from Jeff about what had happened.

She probably hoped he was going to have some moment of clarity thanks to her, and leave whatever it was completely behind him, and maybe even give up the bottle. Not because she still wanted to be in his life, of course, but because she always wanted to be the happy thought in everyone’s head and the reason everything always seemed to have a way of working out in her world.

Maybe Riley the reporter would go on the hunt for more, though. After all, that would be one hell of an interesting story to have anyone tell you, whether you cared about them or not, or whether you were a writer or not. Maybe that photograph was headed for the front page of tomorrow’s Times-Pic.

Whatever, Jeff thought. As it happened, he was steadily feeling better and it had nothing to do with Riley. As the absurd-looking Toyota chugged through the convenience store parking lot and into a spot right out front, Jeff began to feel more and more annoyed about Riley’s undying need to be involved, yet uninvolved. He was glad to feel this annoyance, though, because it was a feeling he’d been waiting for, hoping for. If he could just control himself, all the time, he had a mind to start embracing the separation she’d asked for and gotten.