Out There: a novel (20 page)

He pushed the bike back toward the road, his backpack loaded, Remedios secure in the carrier, and his mind full of the day’s itinerary. Yes, he was traveling hundreds of miles south through Mexico to find Gabriel García Márquez, but where was he going
today
, and what portion of the healing process might be on the agenda? Jefferson had begun to think of the process as piecemeal, each episode relieving its own distinct burden and forming a link in the chain of events he needed to heal. Leaving Santa Fe had been a link. Trusting himself to learn to ride the Kawasaki had been another link. Facing the bergamot woman with honesty and fear, yet another. And inviting the twins—apparitions or not—to share his oak tree for the evening was yet one more step in the process of reclaiming himself after war.

Eventually
Jefferson remembered her, as if it had all been a very real dream. There had been the real flesh of a real woman in the real Iraqi desert in the very real war, and it had begun with a package of gum.

Her name was Tajia. She was a hairdresser from the Philippines who’d left her kids and spent all her life savings for the chance to cut soldiers’ hair in Iraq for $300 a month. She lived with eight other hairdressers in a metal storage container in a barbed-wired compound within the larger Camp Anaconda. Though twice the age of Josephina C de Baca, Tajia seemed young and buoyant compared to Jefferson’s grandmother and Auntie Linda. And there was no doubt of her passion.

He’d been chanting the various passages about one or the other of the various Aurelianos or José Arcadios being driven mad by the scent of imagined lovers. Frankly, the idea was so mesmerizing to him that he wondered why it had taken a novel to bring the idea to his mind. He’d experienced the crazed phenomenon of scent with Josephina, so he knew it was real, that his own nose was capable of this obsession.

What he realized on that Wednesday afternoon in March was that he desired a real woman to smell. Imagined scents might work for some men—he couldn’t say much about those Buendías in the novel, he hadn’t known them personally—but he needed more. Josephina had not been near enough to smell in almost a decade.

Tajia the Filipina, on the other hand, was less than two feet away from him at least once a day, right next to the little shop where he bought his gum and candy bars and magazines. Those were real drops of perspiration he could see along her hairline. That was her breath on his face when she stared at him and sighed. He could smell her. Cumin and baby powder.

When she looked at him while buzzing the back of another soldier’s neck, he shivered. Yes, Jefferson was in the middle of what García Márquez had called “the dung heap of war,” but here with him, just across from the convenience shop counter, was a sweaty woman, a real one in the flesh, and he began to believe that his fears just might be turned into pleasure. Afterward he did not remember anything of Tajia’s face except her deep amber eyes, flecked with blood spots of exertion. She was about his height and much heavier, making Jefferson chuckle at what the two of them would have looked like as a couple if they’d ever left the storage container together. There was no doubt that her bottom was fat, but it was also, in its own way, much more delightful than his own. In fairness, he was nothing but a skin-and-bones kid at that time, not too far into his first tour.

On the day they met, Jefferson had helped carry Teresa Blue’s body from the site of that horrible series of explosions. Though hers was not the first death, she was the first woman he’d seen die.  He had touched Blue’s still-warm skin, and he had helped load her still-warm body on the humvee, and he had sat with her slowly cooling hand in his own as they’d driven back to Anaconda. He could not remember how it had begun, precisely, or what the middle part had been, or why they had been wherever they had been in the first place. A terrible lonely waste of a day. 

He knew it might seem unfeeling of him to associate his passionate affair with the story of another young woman’s death, but war had turned every one of Jefferson’s beliefs inside out. Inside out and screwy. Several minutes before the fatal blast, Teresa had walked past Jefferson, close enough for him to smell her distinctly female scent, something vaguely musky and sweet.  The scent in that moment had made him remember the calm of having been held at his mother’s breast long ago, and at the same time race forward in his mind toward the full-blooded possibility of touching a woman with whom he was enraptured.  He’d thought to himself in that moment that despite the horror of war, at least there remained human touch, skin to skin.  And then the world had been rocked, and the woman named Blue had become a casualty of a series of improvised explosive devices, a sight Jefferson knew he would replay many times in his mind, over and over again, for the rest of his life.

Several hours later Jefferson was buying grape bubble gum at the convenience shop, thinking that if he stuffed three pieces into his mouth, it might buffer him against the terrible memory.

Tajia was sitting on a step stool, watching Jefferson buy his gum. That was all. But as he paid the man for his gum across the counter, Jefferson was aware of that cumin scent drifting into his space and making him shiver. Tajia watched him, put her scissors in her mouth, and bit down, laughing. There was no doubt she was laughing at Jefferson. He shuddered again, got his change, and left the shop. That night he could not escape the tormenting scent. In the sheets of his bed, in the hand towel as he dried his face, escaping his bathroom bag as he dug for his toothpaste, it lingered: cumin on fresh waves of baby powder.

The next day, after he’d paid for his gum, Jefferson walked the several paces to the hairdresser’s booth and sat down in her chair. He could have waited another week or so for a haircut, but he could no longer ignore the anxiety in his blood, not now that the memory of Blue’s death haunted him. Shy as always, he said nothing and hoped she’d be able to read his mind.

“Why gum?” she asked finally in a heavy Filipina accent as she combed through his coarse black hair. “I see you all the time, every day. You buy gum, so much gum. Why?”

“My nerves,” he told her. “It helps.”

“You need something more than gum,” she said as she shaved the errant hairs away from the sides of his jaw and the back of his neck. When she was finished, Tajia gave Jefferson directions for finding her that evening. In less than two minutes in her strained English and on the back of his very small receipt she wrote directions to the storage container located deep within the barbed-wire compound. At the bottom of the note she wrote
after nine
with a happy face.

That night Jefferson followed the scent of cumin and powder all the way to the storage container, which, as Tajia had promised, was unlocked. He had guessed it would be the sleeping container she shared with her hairdresser friends, but it was nothing more than a room filled with shelves of nonperishable food. The fumes were too much in the container housing beauty supply and cleaning products, Tajia explained, and she was lucky enough to be friendly with the woman who kept all the keys. “She understands some of us need some privacy around here,” Tajia told him.

What followed was an unexpected consequence of war, the animalistic passion of two lonely people far from home. Tajia taught him what she could, and Jefferson discovered the rest. He was quick to learn his way around her very large body, exploring her crevasses and inlets and hills and valleys. He let instinct take the place of thinking, his skinny body becoming lost in her luxurious wet folds. They spoke hardly at all as they converted their solitary fears into bites on the neck and clawings across the shoulders and consensual invasions. Unlike love, it was detached and violent and selfish, and in that way he left each night feeling sated and alive.

The affair lasted almost three weeks among the bags of pancake mix and vats of canola oil, until without notice Tajia was nowhere to be found.

Later Jefferson learned she had been sent, along with four other Filipinas, by armored vehicle to a base 125 miles to the south to replace hairdressers killed by an explosion there. Though he never saw her again, her scent of cumin held on to his T-shirts and socks until he returned to New Mexico, and for a long time he dreamed of sweating happily between her thighs.

His eyes had been opened. No matter how he tried to minimize the experience later, no matter how he justified it as part of the craziness of war, Jefferson now believed in unbridled sex with the wrong woman in the wrong place. He believed sex would never be quite as good in bed as it was elsewhere. He believed it would never be quite as good if the woman was beautiful and kind and gentle. He imagined all the wrong places in which it might feel right. Washaterias and the stairwells in large public buildings and T.J. Maxx fitting rooms and unprotected benches within litter-strewn parks. He imagined all the wrong women. The therapist from the VA. His sixth-grade teacher from Kaune Elementary. Esco’s old friend, MaryLou. Ms. Tolan. He even tried one afternoon to imagine making love to his own mother, but because he could not imagine her face or her body, he had to stop. Sometimes his mind wandered to Josephina Maria C de Baca, but because he believed she was beautiful and kind and gentle, and also because he still hoped that one day the two of them would truly love one another, he tried not to linger on her. He began to think that life was not about love. He began to think that life was just a series of attempts to do the best you could not to be lonely or afraid.

I
cannot understand why people go to war over things they cannot touch with their own hands
.

This idea, thought by Colonel Aureliano Buendía, the great revolutionary of Macondo, conceived by GGM, and later revised in his own words by Jefferson Long Soldier, member of the Army’s Tenth Mountain Division, originally from Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Who, thought Jefferson, could understand?

That must have been why the reading helped him. It was as if he had his own personal conversation several times a day with a wise man, a man who was reminding him of a larger perspective. Of the possibility of hope. Some people read
One Hundred Years
and saw nothing but blood and family dysfunction and gratuitous incestuous sex and the trampling of the poor by the rich. Jefferson read those same passages, and instead of feeling trampled, he felt a beacon of the writer’s love, as if his own great-grandfather was telling him family lore, all the good and all the bad of it, to buffet Jefferson against the rigors of life. It was as if the writer was saying, “You think you’ve got it bad? Well, let me tell you about this character named Colonel Aureliano Buendía, who fought and lost thirty-two wars and never experienced true love.”

When nineteen-year-old Galen from Albuquerque went down several weeks later, so close to Jefferson that blood from the boy’s head wound stained Jefferson’s shoes, the timing was in fact lucky. Jefferson had entered an illuminated state by then, making him more equipped than ever before to handle close encounters with death. He wore the novel, now taped and tattered, strapped next to his chest with an Ace bandage he’d bought from the convenience stall. He’d seen the villain in so many movies wrap his chest around and around with gauze to stanch bleeding from a gunshot wound, so in the same way he wrapped his own chest, slipping the novel in tight next to his skin. The book was a comfort. At night, he kept it wrapped against him in case he had trouble sleeping, and needed to recite by the light of the moon. There was also the added protection—a 458-page shield—it would provide, were a stray bullet to find its way through the barracks and into his bed at just the right angle at just the right speed.

On that deadly day, Jefferson had squatted down next to Galen and held his still-warm hands. Just moments before, Galen had told the story of how his Polish grandparents lived through World War II. “The Nazis took over my grandmother’s farm,” he’d said. “They stole and butchered their cow. Can you imagine it? The Nazis, man! My grandfather was eight years old and starving to death.”

The conversation had turned to why each of them had signed up for the army, and after Jefferson had said he didn’t really know, Galen had returned to the topic of his grandparents. “I signed up right after nine/eleven,” he told Jefferson. “They were still in New York at the time, and the whole thing freaked them out, like the sky was literally falling, you know? Like it was Hitler returning from the grave.”

Jefferson held Galen’s hands until they grew cold, and then he slipped the novel out from the bandage and out from under his shirt and began flipping through the pages, searching for words. He needed just the right ones, something to help make sense of this one death. The blood had pooled around Jefferson’s feet by then and was trickling down a step where the two had been sitting. From his lap a few moments later the words
trickle of blood
caught his eyes. This was it, the perfect string of words for the circumstance, the sentence that might connect him to a larger world. With his finger he followed the passage backward to its beginning and then began to recite slowly the very long sentence about José Arcadio being shot and his blood trickling out under the door and down the street and around corners and over curbs, all the way to his mother’s house, around the dining room table and into her kitchen, where she was cracking thirty-six eggs for bread, so that she might learn of his death.

As Galen’s face lost its pink, as his blood turned from red to black, Jefferson chanted the words as he imagined the boy’s mother and how she might discover the news. He did not know Galen’s mother, but he imagined a woman getting ready to crack eggs for pierogi dough, and how a mother’s intuition might tell her that her son, this Galen, had lost all his blood out of the backside of his skull.