Out There: a novel (4 page)

“You could go say hey to the C de Bacas,” Nigel said, but then seemed to think better of it. “Long as you don’t get any big ideas about you know who.” Nigel knew about Jefferson’s long-standing thing for Josephina.

Jefferson hesitated. “I think I’ll just sit here and watch you fiddlin’ around, how’s that?” he said finally. “No one’s expecting me anywhere.”

“You’re welcome to do that, cousin—but I’m not fiddlin’. This is pure science you’re witnessing here. You can stay, but I demand respect, man. Respect—you know what I mean?” He raised one eyebrow at Jefferson and then the other.

Down the street and around the corner, Manny’s old pit bull barked, as he always had at anyone walking near his fence. He was joined by the baying of unseen hounds and mixed breeds who seemed to bark and bay whenever the old pit bull did. A Harley gunned its engine, and behind an open window somewhere nearby, a baby was crying.

Jefferson was home, and so much was exactly as he had left it. Yet his hands jittered in his pockets as he walked, and he was certain not all was well inside him.

Out
there he had had many fears, and most were more immediate and tangible than dying a quick and simple death. He was afraid of being maimed, particularly of losing a leg—like Deblanc before he’d died—or of losing an arm or a hand or even the knuckle of one thumb—like Tristan. As he thought about the dangers, and tried to focus on the goodness in life, Jefferson could not help but cling to his wholeness, such as it was. He feared being hit with a grenade, not because it might kill him but because of how he imagined it would hurt. In the same way he feared a bullet being lodged into the meatiest part of his thigh, as he’d seen happen to Henry of Golden, Colorado, before his poor heart eventually stopped. He did not fear so much being killed immediately from a shot to the back of his head—like the nice guy from West Seneca, New York—but he was terrified by the possibility of being shot in the eye or the throat—like poor Ramon—and then
surviving
.

But some of his fears had nothing to do with war. Jefferson feared being kidnapped and suffocated in the trunk of a car. He feared that Esco would fall in the kitchen, and no one would find her in time to help. The thought of a scorpion stinging him on his stomach while he was sleeping paralyzed him, or the idea of rattlesnakes, anywhere, but most often coiled under the driver’s seat of the Corolla or behind the Rubbermaid box under Esco’s bed. He feared what he imagined his mom’s life to be. Out there, he’d been afraid he’d never make it back home. Now that he was home, he feared that time was not passing, that every day was another Monday, that the angels he imagined hovering around him, protecting him, were nothing but delusions.

Jefferson spent the morning pulling weeds in the backyard, trying to let the irises’ beauty shine through, thinking of his sweet Esco, and remembering how much he’d missed her out there.

Jefferson’s grandmother was half Mexican, one-fourth German, and one-fourth Scots-Irish. Her given name was Escolita, but her father had called her Esco as a baby, and the name stuck—when she became a mother, her children had called her Esco, and after that her two grandsons learned the name as well. After her mother’s death her father had raised her as a German Scots-Irish American child. She helped him with the family store, sweeping the front steps and the back porch each morning and evening and refilling the bins of onions and potatoes, and when business was slow, he taught her to play the fiddle. By the age of seventeen, Esco had a high school diploma and a growing list of places she wanted to visit: St. Petersburg, London, Paris, Rome. Against her dark brown skin her eyes shone crystal blue.

Jefferson remembered the day it had truly dawned on him that he was in a foreign land without Esco. It had been early in his first tour, and he had just eaten a terrible burrito at a stainless steel table. The first wave of homesickness had broken over him just as he identified the odd taste in the beans as turmeric. He’d yet to find anyone among the food service staff who understood the difference between a jalapeño and a green chile. It would have been smarter to avoid the burrito altogether, but his hunger had made him hopeful. It felt like the kind of late afternoon he’d have spent lounging on the couch with Nigel, watching reruns, a bowl of Cheetos between them, Esco in the kitchen making tamales.

Esco didn’t belong in a war zone, but Jefferson wished she were there nonetheless. She had never been to Mexico, and she’d lost her Mexican mother at the age of fourteen, but not before she’d learned how to make tamales and
biscochitos
. Her beans would not have tasted of Indian spices. She would have busied herself at the sink while he ate at the counter. They would have talked about the weather or the unusual mixed-breed dogs roaming the base or nothing at all, as the sun shifted across the strange desert outside.

Afterward he’d sat awhile as a middle-aged Pakistani woman mopped the floor and two others prepared nachos and fries behind the counter. He’d resisted touching the book as long as he could. A few strangers had been making comments about it recently, saying that he was becoming too attached. He’d made it through the previous day without taking the book out until evening, and now it was after midday of the following day.

Jefferson looked around to see if anyone was watching. The mess hall had emptied out, no one left now but the mopper, the cooks, and a handful of guys eating several tables away. No one from his platoon. No one he recognized. And so with anxious hands he pulled the book out from his backpack. The clear packing tape he’d reinforced the cover with was wearing thin, and he knew he’d have to buy more soon and reinforce, especially along the spine. The bottom corner of the cover was curling back on itself, as were the first forty or so pages. He’d lose that corner soon if he didn’t reinforce. There wasn’t much to be done about the pages. He’d just have to be more careful. Letting the book tumble about in his backpack wasn’t helping. Maybe he could figure out a better way to carry it.

He opened the pages and flipped back and forth, even though the ritual felt unlikely to help that day. It couldn’t get him the only thing he wanted just now, which was an afternoon at home—his
real
home. To glance over and see the back of Esco’s head as she washed dishes in the kitchen, to hear Nigel belting out an Abba tune and swiveling his hips like John Travolta.

He flipped absentmindedly back and forth a few more times and then made himself stop on a section of the novel he hadn’t read carefully, that perhaps in fact he had skipped over in his hurry to prepare for English class all those months previous, for its pages remained crisp. He looked down and read the word
Úrsula.

He read on, pulled by curiosity. Who was this
Úrsula
?

Jefferson sat on the metal chair at the metal table in the middle of an unknown desert and read about Úrsula Iguarán, the salty woman who’d told her infamous full-grown soldier son she’d pull down his pants and spank his bottom if he didn’t behave himself. Jefferson read the sentences three times to make sure he had gotten it right, glancing around the nearby tables each time to make sure no one was watching. Esco was the only woman Jefferson knew who’d publicly claim the right to pull down her grandson’s pants and give him a spanking.

He read on.

After a few more paragraphs Jefferson felt he was beginning to recognize this old woman in the novel, Úrsula Iguarán, with her sturdy nerves, her love of rearranging furniture, her willingness to discipline her own grandchildren. The familiarity began to cut through his melancholy.

He read on.

He scanned whole sections for her name, each time reading, then flipping through the pages until he caught it again.
Úrsula.
She was everywhere, always working or lecturing a family member. Always ready with a meal for whoever happened to be in her kitchen.

By the end of an hour’s worth of haphazard reading, he had no doubt. The old woman on the pages was both an ancient family member and a new friend. From that day on, whenever homesickness threatened him, whenever he imagined he might never again return to Santa Fe, Jefferson would flip through the pages until he spotted her name. He’d shake his head as he read about her and he’d feel as if his own grandmother, Esco, was somehow near.

More and more, the thought that the two women would never truly get to know one another gave him a bittersweet pang. He would buy Esco a copy of
One Hundred Years
when he returned home, he decided. He’d earmark or sticky-note a few of his favorite Úrsula passages, passages he could share with Esco—though, knowing his grandmother, there was no need; she would read the novel from cover to cover until she knew it better than he did himself.

The old woman from the novel seemed to have been
born
old, just like Esco. It was difficult to imagine Úrsula Iguarán as the young woman with whom her husband had fallen in love. And Esco? Had she ever been fresh? Jefferson had seen one tattered black-and-white photo of her long ago, a smiling child next to her father and their mule, but it was difficult to connect that young girl to the old woman whose thick ankles swelled out above her socks. She must have been one of those teenage girls with matronly breasts and a face that had always looked wise.

Both women were busy from morning to night, Úrsula with her candy animal business, Esco making tamales and running the store and wiping down the linoleum countertops. Both wore yellow on Sundays, and sneezed when the sun shone too bright in their eyes. They could have been twin sisters separated at birth.

When Jefferson finally came home from war, Esco upheld what he thought of as her Úrsula Iguarán tradition. She made two trips to Sam’s Club in one week, she told him, filling the house with veggie burgers and chips and ice cream. She baked a double batch of
biscochitos
, Jefferson’s favorite, even though it was not Christmas. She prepared black bean and zucchini tamales, and she bought a new aluminum patio set with four chairs and an umbrella for the back stoop—so they could watch the sun set in comfort, she said. And in a plastic pot by the front door, she planted an overflowing mass of purple petunias—a symbol, Jefferson thought, of all the worries of which she could not speak.

Day
by day the part of his brain that knew he had nothing to fear became smaller. He was alert in a way he’d never been, his eyes detecting motion to his far left and his far right, his nose sure it caught a whiff of burning flesh and ammonia. Deep within him, his soul cowered at the frightening proximity of life—Esco’s simple cooking, Nigel’s perpetual tinkering, the familiar sounds of the neighborhood—it all seemed to accentuate his heavy burden. When the sun shone, he could feel its malignant rays inciting cancer in the cells of his skin; when the tyrannical late-spring wind blew cold, he felt small, vulnerable, a paper kite caught in a dust devil.

The part of him that knew how to hide and how to please took over. This made many things simpler, but by the second week, he had an appointment with a doctor at the VA in Albuquerque. He didn’t think he was unstable, and he didn’t think he had an issue with whatever everyone seemed to be worried about, but he did wonder about his future. At what point would he need to move on from his current status as ex-soldier
to whatever role he would establish for himself in the next phase of life? Part-time student?
But hadn’t he missed all boats headed out for college? Grandmother’s assistant?
Although he wanted to be there for Esco whenever she needed his help, did unloading boxes and sitting behind the counter selling gum and soda really qualify as a plan?
Nigel’s assistant?
Could he stand the grease and the music—and anyway, did Nigel need any help? Neurosurgeon?
Probably not. Tree trimmer?

It wasn’t that he hoped for answers. He was smart enough to know there were no answers—at least not yet—to most of the questions jangling in his head. But the idea of a woman whose sole job it was to sit and listen to him talk—that such a woman existed!—was enough to convince him to skip his morning bull session in Nigel’s shed and make the one-and-a-half-hour train trip to Albuquerque. He imagined a plush couch facing floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Rio Grande Botanic Garden, the only place in Albuquerque, aside from the zoo, he remembered visiting as a child, and though Jefferson knew the doctor’s office would not literally be adjacent to the gardens, he nonetheless imagined that green manicured view. That Albuquerque was always greener and warmer than Santa Fe was a known fact.

He knew that the doctor was a woman because of her e-mail:

Looking forward to meeting with you next week, Jefferson.

May 1, at 11:00 a.m. Let me know if you have any questions before we get together.

Dr. Emily Wesleyan

Raymond G. Murphy VA Medical Center, Building One, 2nd floor

1501 San Pedro Dr. SE | Albuquerque, NM   87108

He tried to imagine how the doctor would look and smell and sound. In the end he settled for the most minor of assumptions, what must at a minimum be true of any person who’d agreed to counsel ex-soldiers: that she would be kind.

The Rail Runner wove its way south along the highway through misshapen rocks, breaking out into a fine view of the high Cochiti plateaus and, of course, the Jemez. It was a landscape for the movies, a landscape to be populated with celluloid cowboys and Indians. From the downtown train station he rode the bus up Coal Avenue and over on University and way up Gibson, through a part of Albuquerque he’d never seen before, landing finally at the VA. Building 1 was just there on his right when he got off the bus. It wasn’t as serious-looking as the five-story hospital building over to the left, which seemed to be brimming with activity, lots of men and women, some in uniform, but many not, some pushing walkers, some walking just fine. There were trees and grass near Building 1, just as he had hoped, and in the middle of the circular drive a giant flagpole waved the Stars and Stripes as well as the more somber flag of prisoners of war and those missing in action. The soft click-clack of the flags against the pole was a comfort, and the shade of the ponderosas and cottonwoods quieted Jefferson’s spirit as he walked beneath them, preparing himself for what was to come.