GPS (8 page)

He’d been at fault, but this last little grilling from Riley had exposed a side in her that made the distance between them feel right for the first time. Still, she probably figured that he was going to get his shit together out of some absentee love for her, and to that end, she was wrong. At least he hoped.

Jeff sat in the car thinking, not noticing how much of a conversation piece his car had become in greater Albuquerque. He was starting to embrace having no motivation for anything in the long term. He’d spent some long days and nights both before and after the marriage went to hell knowing there was a huge vacancy in his life, something most people had that made them give a shit about their lives, something that he didn’t have, at least not anymore. He still held out hope, however, that there would be something and that maybe him getting past Riley was what he needed to help him find that something.

As he now worked his way through the store’s center aisle, cluttered with falling bags of pretzels and the two kids who were making them fall, to get to the ATM at the back, he had an unexpected feeling of survival about him, a swelling in his chest. It was like the feeling a person gets right after losing control of the car in a rainstorm, skidding off the side of the road and screeching to a stop inches from the guardrail. He had no idea where he’d gone, how he’d gotten there or if he’d ever be going back. He could only remember that short glimpse — the screams, the rearing, grunting horses and the SUV convoy raking through everything in its path.

He slid his hand into his back pocket as he walked past the brats, pulling out his wallet, and a sudden flash of the little girl in the picture came to him. He didn’t get the same feeling of annoyance when he thought of her that he did with all other humans age 15 and under. Her helplessness made her much different than most of the kids in his day-to-day path. Somewhere deep in his mind was the knowledge that he could have created that kind of connection with Riley, that he should have when he had the chance. It was always too late, it seemed.

The little girl made Jeff wish that whatever else there was to that scene in the desert, before and after what he saw or remembered, that he had done something. That he didn’t just hide on the sideline. That he had been somebody over there that he could not seem to be over here. But how could he have? If there was any place to hide from that attack, he would have been wrestling with dozens of the other people for it and would have been found anyway. How did no one see him out there? Was he really there?

If Jeff would have looked over his right shoulder at the moment he was asking himself that question, he would have gotten reassurance that he was there. A New Mexico state trooper was giving the mud-crusted Celica a good, long stare over the frames of his sunglasses as he sauntered across the parking lot from Pump No. 14 to the store entrance. Nothing against the law about having a dirty car, of course, but the Celica in its current state was quite an attention-getter. Jeff remained oblivious at the back of the store.

He typed in his pin number, and he thought about how ATMs in convenience stores always took forever. And only the ones inside convenience stores. And bars. Why? Since this one apparently did not want to disappoint in that regard, Jeff impatiently opened up his wallet to see what, if any, money he might already have. He’d never gotten to that part of the personal inspection that morning at the Elegante. Had that maid been flirting with him? That seemed a like a month ago right now.

There was no money in the wallet, naturally, not even a dollar. But there was, in the place of money, a folded-up piece of white paper. The ATM droned on and on, seeming to call out to other ATMs in the area for help as to what to do next, how to make the bills inside the machine come rolling out. Jeff set his wallet on the stupid thing so he could unfold the sheet of paper, which he immediately thought he recognized in another brief fit of deja vu.

As the 10 Andrew Jacksons he’d requested finally crept out one by one into the steel tray underneath the ATM, and as the New Mexico state trooper pondered the many different kinds of cookies this particular store — called Endless Sun — had to offer in the adjacent aisle, Jeff said the words he saw scrawled on the paper, out loud, almost triumphantly, and without realizing he was doing it.

“Únete a la revolución!”

- 9 -

A convenience store hot dog never tasted so good, Jeff thought to himself as he watched, for the first of what would prove to be three times, the Celica being pushed through the Gold Wash treatment at Scrubbles, right down the road from the University of New Mexico. The crew of blue-T-shirted men looming at the other end of the giant car wash’s tunnel — each one’s hands draped in matching blue towels, waiting to embrace another dripping car as it rolled out — could not help but notice Jeff’s car from a good distance as it passed through.

Jeff stood watching from inside, following the car’s first cycle through the many different phases — pre-rinse, undercarriage soak, cleansing coat, Scrub-down, rinse, blow-dry and quik-wax — Jeff began laughing out loud at what he saw, nearly choking on the SunDog he’d chosen as his first meal of the day.

It wasn’t an act of insanity, being stricken with laughter at the sight of one’s own car in this particular state, he didn’t think. It was just that the machinery at Scrubbles seemed so utterly unprepared for this. Did no one ever really go romping through the desert out here, like he’d tried to suggest to Ramon in the hotel lobby? Or maybe they designated cars for that sort of thing that were only used for that sort of thing, and then they likely used self-serve car washes or washed them in their front yards like real men.

The blanket of crud on Jeff’s car stood almost completely firm through the first Gold Wash. By the time the quik-wax started squirting out onto the still dirt-caked car, he was right on the other side of the glass, almost in tears from his fits of laughter, following along and even pointing a couple of times in anticipation as arms swung in along the sides of the Celica and sprayed multi-colored goos and creams in complete vain, despite what looked like a beach worth of sand and dirt showering down into the water trap beneath.

As the car approached the end of the indoor spectators’ area and the men and their towels at the end of the tunnel, Jeff was practically howling, bringing about a serious stare from the receptionist and gapes from much of the Saturday afternoon horde inside the car wash lobby. The reaction from the guys at the end of the tunnel was a sudden, simultaneous about-face from the car. They’d apparently gotten a cease-and-desist order from the control room not to waste any of their pristine blue towels on Jeff’s car until it had gotten another one or two blasts of the Gold Wash.

Jeff didn’t give a shit about the growing attention he and the Celica were getting with every second that passed, gleefully paying for the first wash and going ahead and ordering a second. He even walked out the front door to where the other car owners waited on the sidewalk like expectant fathers, just to catch a glimpse of their faces when his little sweetheart was thrust off the track a second time, probably still caked in mud but freshly quik-waxed a couple of times nonetheless.

He plopped himself down on a bench and watched one of the boys hop into the car so he could wheel it back around for its second Gold treatment. He momentarily embraced reality once again, but only because he knew he had to. He pulled out his phone to play the remaining 14 messages from the 26 calls he’d managed to miss during his little escapade.

The first one had been the one he’d already played from Sandy, and he’d simply gotten sidetracked and never went back to hear the rest until now, as he watched one good-looking car after another get the wipe-down from the Scrubbles towel boys. The wind in this town could have been saving them a fortune on towels, he would have thought. Just roll the cars out and let them sit there a minute. But at Scrubbles, it seemed, the blue T-shirt and towel combo was just too good, because it was blustery enough to force Jeff to crank his phone volume to its limit just to hear it.

He heard Riley’s voice, in increasingly louder and louder levels of impatience, on the first 12 messages and knew enough to keep hitting delete each time. Right now, she was probably screaming about him to herself, or maybe even to an unlucky one of the former couple’s mutual friends. Now they were mostly just Riley’s friends again.

It was already clear to him — as he waded through the messages, still shocked at the sheer number of responses he’d provoked from her — that without the booze there likely would have been no call to Riley. Or would there have been? Blacking out didn’t necessarily affect how profoundly wonderful or terrible something might have been during said blackout. Just because he’d managed to erase almost every detail of the other night (day?) didn’t mean everything he’d forgotten was easily forgotten.

In fact, he was already pretty sure the scene, or memory, in his mind, or in his car, or whatever, wasn’t finished with him yet. He was pretty sure more and more of that scene would come back to him over time. He guessed that pretty much clinched the fact it
was
a memory and not just some fantasy. He might have called Riley because it was so profoundly terrible he had to tell the one person he knew might possibly believe what he was saying.

Message No. 13 was Sandy again, telling Jeff he needed to get over to Port St. Lucie, the Mets’ year-round training complex and home of both the organization’s High-A Florida State League club and its rookie Gulf Coast League team, by Monday morning. There were a couple of fast decisions to be made, according to Sandy, and one decision at the top meant at least one decision at every level on the way down. Ainsley would be on his way up immediately, but a trade was likely going to be the long-term fix for the problem.

And no, Jeff suddenly realized in answer to Sandy’s yet unanswered first message, he had
not
seen SportsCenter — he didn’t remember watching any TV recently — and had spent most of his time staring at the 8-inch screen on his car windshield, which just now was hidden safely in the trunk. He suddenly imagined the GPS kicking to life in there, getting confused in the car wash tunnel and having a complete meltdown —
“off-route! off-route! off-route!”
— and it didn’t seem like an impossibility at all, despite it being completely disconnected. Undoubtedly, ESPN had given its usual overdose coverage to the Mets’ cataclysmic start to the season, which now apparently included the loss of their $88 million first baseman for the rest of the year.

Sandy was in New York, and was surely pacing between his office and the adjacent room that housed the Mets’ big board, the road map connecting every player at every position in the entire organization from Venezuela to Kingsport, Tenn., to Shea Stadium itself, and basically every other professional at every position who was now or could in the future become available via free agency or trade.

Sandy’s latest message, left just a few hours earlier that Saturday, said there were players currently under Jeff’s jurisdiction that might be involved in trade talks. Even if not, it meant he would be expected to provide Sandy some serious counsel as to the worth of said players to the organization and where Jeff thought their collective careers might be heading.

“Shit,” was Jeff's one-word summation of all of it, and that caused a very proper-looking father on the bench to his left — whose kids were somersaulting over the back of the bench and causing general, typical havoc — to spin around and stare at Jeff, as though the little hellions behind him still possibly thought swearing was a big deal. Jeff grinned at the man as though he had complimented Jeff’s car, and he went on thinking about which one or ones of his minor league minions might be thrown into the Mets’ trade grinder.

Jeff hadn’t seen the highlights from the Mets-Dodgers game from Thursday night, obviously, but the Associated Press capsule from the game in the Albuquerque Journal in the car wash lobby said some players in the Dodger dugout heard a distinct pop as the Mets’ star first baseman tore his hamstring. He did so while foolishly trying to dive headlong into first base to beat a throw from third on a simple grounder. Those were just the sorts of things that happened to big-dollar teams with big-dollar players that were having a rotten start to the season. Now the ripple effect would travel throughout the organization, and Jeff would travel throughout the United States trying to follow it.

As his car neared the finish line at Scrubbles for the second time, Jeff noticed a couple of the car wash crew members had been enlisted to stand inside the tunnel so they could disable certain parts of the Gold Wash that seemed pointless for this particular car, which quite frankly seemed like a gyp in Jeff’s eyes, especially at $34.95 a pop. He’d actually considered roughing it and going over to the self-serve bays with the cash he’d grabbed from the Endless (literally) ATM, but couldn’t bear the thought of cramming a hundred dollars into a high-pressure hose, one quarter at a time, for the rest of the already late day.

He also had the issue of being completely broken down mentally and physically — his right knee was killing him — and being more than a thousand miles from home. Yet, for some reason he felt like pushing Scrubbles to its car-care limit this afternoon, and had gotten his chance.

With his car still clearly streaked with caked-on dirt and some of the spoiler still having reeds and twigs pulled out wildly from its cracks by the car wash brushes, a discussion ensued out front among the blue crew. One of the towel men turned to walk over and ask Jeff if he was satisfied, and Jeff was already walking toward the man, brandishing that dangerous smile again. “Send her through one more time, boys!” he broadcast loudly, suddenly thinking how far away from the shackles of the airport security line he felt.

One more and done, he thought. Once he paid for this third Gold treatment, Ramon would be right. He would be feeling better, and would be leaning hard on the gas pedal toward home.