Out There: a novel (3 page)

Jefferson found himself wanting to recite again—that dry anxiety forming in his throat, that thirst for the words—but he took another bite of his burrito instead. The night before, he’d taken the book out in the bathroom before getting into bed and sung a few favorite lines in what he imagined to be a whisper. Esco had given him an odd look when he’d jumped—cannonball style—into his old bed, but he ignored it. He’d tell her all about García Márquez and the novel later, when he felt more connected to his surroundings. When he’d spent some time in the backyard, maybe, clipping back the chamisa and rosemary bushes he was sure had grown wild while he was away. When he’d caught the scent of piñon and begun to remember this place he had called home for so long. Airplane travel created a problem for people like him, who needed time to adjust to the land. It was too much to be in one sandy country at the beginning of the month, in another sandy country by the middle of the month, with ten days in between at a military base in New York near Lake Ontario.

In the bathroom he’d looked in the mirror at the vaguely familiar outline of skin and bones and cartilage. For several minutes he’d whisper-chanted his own version of the line from the novel—
I have the tired look of a vegetarian. I look like a tired vegetarian
—laughing to his reflection. That idea always struck him right in the funny bone. What did GGM have against vegetarians?

His skin looked tired, as did his eyes, which made sense. A pretty woman in the army had told him that war was terrible for your complexion and your eyes. “Unless you like looking wise.” She laughed. “They say every death you witness adds ten years.” She’d been wrong, though, Jefferson thought, sitting down on the tile floor. He looked old, but he didn’t look ancient. After that he’d begun again with another tribute to GGM, another riff on a line that he loved for its humor in the face of sadness.
All the politicians are the same. The only difference is, some go to church at eight o’clock and some go at eleven.
Oh, how he loved that line, and in the cozy pink-tiled bathroom of his home, he found it had just the cadence to calm his brain. Just this one line, he thought to himself as he chanted. Just this one line. And he had gone on to chant it for fifteen minutes with his head propped against the wall next to the tub, like he’d done in middle school when he’d wanted to listen to Coldplay in privacy. Even chanting very softly, he liked the natural way his voice paused after the first two syllables of
politicians
before belting out the final two syllables more quickly and in a lower register—
PO-LI-ti-shuns
. After singsonging the entire line for all those minutes, Jefferson became so attached to this word that he chanted it for an additional three minutes.

Though he loved the sound of the word
politicians
, it brought up the difficult topic of politics. Jefferson didn’t understand why anyone spent energy on politics. In the range of all human activity, politics seemed so dishonest and low. He imagined the good things all those politicians could have done with their lives if only they’d chosen other paths. If he found himself in a conversation that turned political, he just threw his hands down on the nearest level patch of sand and kicked his heels high overhead. This tended to kill the conversation.

He was trying to remember what the next line had been when Esco, still standing across the kitchen counter but now staring at his chest, said, “What was that you were singing last night in the bathroom? Sounded nice—a song, maybe?”

“Oh, that,” he said. “You heard that?”

She gave him the be-serious look.

“More like chanting,” he said.

She just stared.

“I’m serious—you know me, I’m no singer, Esco.”

But her curled lip said she was in no mood for his funny talk. “And what’s that you’ve got under your shirt?” she said.

Jefferson returned his grandmother’s penetrating gaze with a pinched-eyebrow look of his own. Though he wanted to move toward honesty and openness, he didn’t have the energy now. To allow himself to heal, he needed to take his time when it came to discussing difficult issues. And the book strapped to his chest? García Márquez’s godlike words? Words that had been a blanket of comfort ever since the night Ramon from Las Cruces was shot in the throat, two feet from Jefferson in an overturned humvee? That was his own private business, and it was sacred. For all her spirituality, all her love of books, Esco would not understand his need to have GGM’s words strapped to him, so close.

“Under my shirt? It’s nothing, really,” he said, trying to reassure his grandmother, not deceive her. He rubbed the book reflexively through his shirt, and grabbed a handful of Cheetos. “Sure is good to be home, Esco. Sure is good to be home.”

Esco was hearing an echo. Ever since Jefferson walked through that door at the airport, his words had come at her as if in a dream. His voice sounded faraway and hollow, like her mother and grandmother’s voices when they visited in the night. The boy was heavy, too, as if he’d stuffed himself with white bread and soda over there. She noticed a tightness in his jaw—he must have been grinding his teeth—and his eyes seemed to pulse to a brooding, uneasy drumbeat. Though his body bore no visible wounds, it was clear that his soul was sick.

She didn’t believe that he had nothing under his shirt—she could see the outline of something stiff and rectangular—but she was too tired to pursue it. All she wanted now was to sit on her stool in the kitchen, watching him eat his food. She too had trouble envisioning the future, what Jefferson would do now that he was home. But she was older than he was—a lot older—and she’d had plenty of practice in waiting. Most things in life resolved themselves in time.

“Go see your cousin,” she said finally. “He really missed you.”

Jefferson
walked with the pup the two blocks to Nigel’s, past the Old Man Ramirez rental shacks and the old woman’s adobe with its boarded-up windows and the plastic tulips in pots on the porch. She might be dead by now, but the same concrete blocks were still stacked by the mailbox. Passing Brae Street, he thought of Josephina. She was probably home right now, probably married. It was stupid even to think about it, so he kept on. He cut through the chamisa and scrag grass of the vacant lot and headed straight for the shed in the corner of Nigel’s backyard.

Auntie Linda, Nigel’s mother and the much-older sister of Jefferson’s own mother, was probably still asleep in the house. Esco had had two daughters, both wild as jackrabbits. Unlike Jefferson’s mom, Linda had stayed around, but in her fifty years she had yet to find a job that mixed well with her hard late-night habits. Nigel’s dad Jorge, a kind-hearted loner who worked for one of the museums, had stayed around too.

Jefferson could see Nigel in the entrance to the shed, his bulky body filling half the doorway, spilling over the upturned concrete blocks that served as his stool. In addition to the shell of a Ford Pacer, the shed housed tin cans full of nails and screws, a stack of old tires, an electric train set, and a ten-speed’s seat and handlebars. Throughout the neighborhood Nigel was known as a fixer. At the moment he was fiddling with his old motorbike, and he didn’t look up.

Jefferson ducked through the doorway and positioned himself in Nigel’s line of sight. From the old CD player on the windowsill floated the screechings of the Bee Gees. He could have sworn the Gibbs brothers had been belting out the same track the last time he’d visited Nigel’s shed. Nigel had loved the Bee Gees since sixth grade, when “Stayin’ Alive” was the first 45 he ever played on his portable record player. Smokey Robinson and certain Johnny Cash tunes also held special places in his heart.

“Wuzzup, Nigel? Looking good.” Jefferson indicated the motorbike, which had been an on-again, off-again project for Nigel as long as he could remember. It too had begun as handlebars and a seat.

Nigel smiled broadly. “Can’t complain,” he said. “My bike’s almost done, you’re home safe and sound .
 . .
stayin’ aliiii-iiiii-iiii-iiive
 . . .”

Jefferson bowed.

Nigel paused, but when they finally came, his words were as expected. “So, you think you’re gonna be okay after a while? You look pretty good to me.” He chuckled to himself as he tightened a screw. “Life pretty much back to normal, you think?”

“Right. Life back to normal.”

From around the corner came the deep rumble of a Harley—Manny-Down-the-Street, Jefferson guessed, still fixing bikes out of his garage. He looked for the metal folding chair that had at one time been his, but it was nowhere to be seen. He knew the Pacer was off-limits, as were the stacked tires, so he crossed his ankles and sat in the dirt.

The two had never been big talkers, but there were things Jefferson needed to share if Nigel was going to understand the New Jefferson. It would take time. For now he would let Nigel believe that all was well, that his transition back home would be smooth. Jefferson wanted to believe this too, but the shakiness in his hands and the way he’d jumped just now when Nigel dropped his wrench on top of the metal toolbox made him doubt it.

“Esco make you your favorite breakfast?” Nigel asked.

“Yup. Tasted so good. I don’t know what was up with the army’s tofu, man, but I couldn’t get it down. Practically had to start eating meat, I’m telling you.”

“Doesn’t look like you skipped many meals to me, cousin.”

“You’re one to talk, big guy.”

At this Nigel lumbered up from his stool, an elephant trying to be a yogi in his loose sweatpants and a threadbare tent of a T-shirt. His beaming face seemed the size of Jupiter up close. The Gibbs brothers were still screaming from the windowsill as Nigel took his place in front of the car. Holding an imaginary microphone and staring with theatrical menace first at Jefferson and next out and up, as if to a broader crowd, he proclaimed, “If you got it, flaunt it, baby. If you got it . . . flaunt it.” He swiveled his fat hips and rolled his giant shoulders, closed his eyes and nodded his chin to the beat, singing along about a mother or a brother. Staying alive.

It’s good to be home
. That seemed to be the thought of the day, but Jefferson felt he was beginning to say it too much, to think it too much, so he held the sentiment inside. He wasn’t even sure what it meant. He was glad not to have to go out on any details today. He was glad he didn’t have to report to anyone about anything. He was glad that he could eat out of the refrigerator. And yet.  He’d had months to prepare for his return, months of anticipating his first day home, and now that it was upon him, none of it felt quite right.

He grasped at the book. Still there.

He stared down at the dirt and tried to think of the perfect line for this moment. There had to be one. All those lines about women waiting for their sons and husbands and lovers to come home from war, only to find them unrecognizable . . . Nigel wasn’t a literary kind of guy, and he certainly wasn’t a woman, but he’d probably appreciate one of those. But nothing came to Jefferson. He clutched at the book. It would make all this anxiety go away—and it would make Nigel so happy—if he could only rip the novel out from under his T-shirt and look for the words he needed there, but instead he reached for a piece of string in the dirt and wove it absentmindedly in and out of his fingers.

“There’s a jangle in here somewhere,” said his cousin. “Driving me crazy.”

Jefferson wove the string between his fingers, five rows deep, tighter now than he’d intended. He wanted the whole thing off now, but as he pulled, it gripped.

It’s good to be home.

If he thought it enough, would it be true? Perhaps he should start chanting that, as if it were a line from the novel. His hands had begun to tremble again. He wanted to open the book and recite, but his plan had been to wait until noon. Surely he could make it till noon. But even then, not with Nigel around. Not yet. He couldn’t expose the book like that. It had to be held close. Protected. Jefferson stroked the outlines of its cover and saw that Nigel was watching him. Perhaps his cousin thought he was crazy, like those guys in the dining hall in Iraq had.

Eventually Jefferson would need to explain.

But first he cleared his throat and began in a middle register, what he liked to think of as G from his long-ago days playing trumpet in middle school band.

It’s good to be home.

Oh I say, it is good. To be home.

As he sang, Jefferson imagined himself a raven, flying through the never-ending New Mexican sky. A raven that had just escaped a brush with death would not worry what it was going to do with itself today. It would fly, and it would sing.

Nigel continued working quietly as Jefferson sang, occasionally looking up at his cousin, shaking his head slightly, and smiling. Finally, he spoke.

“What’re you gonna do today, Jefferson?”

“No idea. Maybe clean up the yard. It looks terrible.”

He’d glanced out the back window this morning. The irises and crocuses were coming up, but the overgrown garden told the larger truth: Jefferson had been away for too long. It would be good to get his hands in the dirt. It would be good to clear away some dead branches. After that, who knew? Maybe he’d get his bike, ride down to the arroyo behind the high school and sit for a while in a sunny spot. He didn’t really want to go on campus. He didn’t want to see anyone at the high school, though he wouldn’t mind running into Ms. Tolan or Coach Shelton. It was the end of track season, he suddenly realized.