Gps, p.19
Gps, page 19
The unseen man who eased up behind the car with the blinking windshield was not certain there was someone inside. Jeff was slumped down in the driver’s seat in the early stages of passing out when it happened. The potential thief ultimately proved to be something of a lucky soul by his own drunken clumsiness, because if someone in that car had been waiting to rob him, it would have been easy. The man’s shuffling feet had made the dozing Jeff stir back to life.
Before the booze got the best of him, Jeff had stared at the screen without blinking an eye, trying to find some new wrinkle in its soothing pixilation, something that would have once terrified him but now fascinated him. He was rooting for it. He wondered whether or not the answer might simply leap out and drag him away while he was on the road out west on Tuesday. And then he had just trailed off.
“Oh, hey there,” Jeff said, startled, turning his face up to the man and feeling his flood of fear quickly being replaced with a strange, simmering confidence. “Um, no, you can’t hold this thing here, friend. Not for a minute. That’s something I’ve got to have…”
“Well, nobody said I was gonna take it, did they? I just said can I hold it for a minute?”
A memory started playing in Jeff’s mind, and nothing about the desert this time, but about Jeff’s first visit to New Orleans as a kid. He remembered the feeling of wanting to be as streetwise as the guys who played all the tricks on the tourists, which is exactly what they had wanted him to want. He always kicked himself for falling for that first scam out there on Canal Street — “How much will you give me if I can tell you where you got your shoes at?” — but Jeff was glad it had happened right away, because he promised himself ever after he would never be suckered again. Tonight included.
“Well, I guess my answer is just no, no you can’t hold it then, friend. I don’t hand my valuables away on the street. Or did you think I was a college kid who got drunk at Mardi Gras a couple months ago and decided to stay on for a few ghost tours?” Instead of the GPS acting up, it was now Jeff who was talking crazy, wondering amusedly if this guy was going to pull a gun out of his pants to shut his smart mouth.
“Listen man, I was just askin’ you real nice like, but if you want, we can talk like some real men.”
As the man beside the car backed up two steps, glanced around at the empty street and then stepped forward to the car door again, Jeff suddenly, subconsciously, slid his right hand into the storage bin on the middle console of the Celica, which as always, was not snapped closed. That was usually because the CDs he kept crammed in there were easier to reach that way. But not this time. Jeff had made some impromptu, just-in-case sort of preparations (just in case what, he wasn’t sure) the last couple of days, and had forgotten about many of them already, thanks to The Old Bushman.
“You wanna talk like a man?” Jeff asked, trying to sound truly inquisitive. “Hmm, OK. Well, go ahead, friend. Act like you’re a man. You first. Go ahead. Start talking. Act like a goddamn man, friend.”
The man flashed a smile back at Jeff, who didn’t seem to realize his own teeth were bared into his favorite, anything-goes grin. He then caught a flash of it in the rearview mirror.
“We’ll see who’s the man after I cut that grin off your face,” the man seethed back at Jeff. “And we’ll see what else I’m gonna take besides that little TV on the windshield.”
The man pulled a gnarled, wooden-handled knife out of the waistband of his jeans. Jeff barely sat up in the driver’s seat. He never stopped smiling, but the man standing beside the car ready to slice him to ribbons stopped smiling as soon as Jeff started talking again.
“Oh, that?” Jeff now pointed casually to the windshield with his right hand, the one holding the Ruger .38 Blackhawk revolver he now remembered buying on Saturday morning and stashing right there in the car. He never imagined using the thing for real, let alone two days later. “That? That’s a GPS, friend, not a fucking TV, you idiot. If that was a TV, believe me friend, it would show you some shit you wouldn’t be ready to see. And since we’re here in the street, talking out who’s who and what’s what, let me give you some important information. You take even one step closer to me, my car or my little TV on the windshield, you’ll need a global positioning system — that’s what it’s called — to tell you where you’re going.”
Long after the man had run off into the New Orleans night, Jeff sat in the car waiting, hoping, daring anyone else to come try him. Lucky for Jeff, the gun was still in his lap when he awoke to the 5 a.m. sun on Esplanade Avenue Monday morning. The Celica doors were still unlocked, the window still rolled down and the GPS still flashing on the windshield.
The green food dish, Jeff noticed as he dragged himself and his pounding head into the apartment and up the steps, was completely empty.
- 29 -
“Warren. We know where you’re goin’.”
Jeff drove down Esplanade on Tuesday morning, the car packed by a physically awake but mentally absent man who — instead of dreaming of his war in the desert as he slept all day Monday, and then all night into the sunshine of early Tuesday — dreamed on and off about the almost certain death of his beloved cat in the streets of New Orleans. He’d been feeding strays the last couple of weeks and he knew it, and he dreamed of all the cats that weren’t quite Lefty stepping past the front door and taking a few bites.
While the well-being of others in his life had simply been left behind for the time being in Jeff’s mostly woozy waking hours, his missing-at-best and likely starving and injured cat was becoming a regular visitor in his otherwise occupied thoughts, and his dream-filled slumber. They were brief, but stabbing images, unlike the revolucion movies that reeled past him in endless-loop projection on some nights and vanished completely on others. He thought about the desert almost constantly now, and he had become fully aware of how much it was changing him.
He knew he’d had some of those feverish waking dreams in recent weeks too, the ones in which imaginary conversations with fictional people that began while Jeff was sleeping often continued playing in his mind even while he stared at the cracks on his bedroom ceiling, perfectly awake. They were long, confused conversations with men he couldn’t remember exactly, but knew he’d met once because he could remember their collective voices and their mood, mannerism and movement.
Jeff had bought two guns to represent his most outward change. The Ruger he had picked out at a pawn shop on Rampart Street, and then, later that same day, Saturday, he went into an outdoors megastore over the lake bridge and bought himself a deer rifle with a big scope. He paraded around the apartment with both of them for the rest of the night, posing in every reflection he could find. The guns weren’t loaded but Jeff was staggeringly loaded at the time. He kept on drinking until it was getting light Sunday morning, and he’d passed out and forgotten the details of it until now, as he and the GPS aimed the Celica down the Gulf shore toward Corpus Christi.
To top it off, hadn’t he also been drunkenly doing push-ups and sit-ups those last few days before getting wrecked with his buddy Nifty and spending 36 hours completely passed out? It seemed he had, and Jeff flexed his sore biceps as proof.
“What the hell for?” he asked the empty car with a shrug, now speeding out onto 1-10 west to begin the eight-hour steer around the Gulf. He suddenly saw a flash of memory of his late father trying to show two rail-thin boys how easy push-ups were on the living room floor. Then, his eyes were drawn back to the GPS, tracking innocently away for the moment and lighting a simple-looking path down to Corpus Christi. He looked at the screen and thought of the countdown clock. Had he missed it? Was it over? What had happened?
“Think about baseball, idiot,” he said, interrupting himself.
Jeff had vowed sometime after Riley’s departure for Africa, the Ascondo trade and Lefty’s disappearance that there would be no more drinking on road trips, not even beer. There would be work. It was the least he could do, he’d told himself during an attempted moment of clarity, which guys like Jeff always seemed to have when blasted off their rails. It was a typical drunk’s compromise, a way of still being drunk most of the time, just not all of it.
“I knew I would hate this idea,” he said, unable to shake the pestering suggestion in his mind to just stop and find something at a package store along the way, check into a hotel and at least get a little burn in the back of his throat before he trudged off to Whataburger Field that night.
“Whatatimeforadrink,” he said.
He’d bought bullets as well, Jeff remembered, pulling his brain back out of the bottle. Plenty of bullets, or shells. It was more official to call them shells. Or slugs. The clerk at the Outdoor Megamart scoffed at Jeff when he’d asked him — while Jeff was being outfitted with his very first hunting rifle, but not a hunting license or any other pertinent hunting gear — what kind of slugs he used in his Blackhawk. Jeff didn’t know enough to even make up a lie, so he didn’t. The guy snickered at him, even as Jeff was spending on ammunition the money that would have covered the electric bill. And for weapons he would likely never need except to cause himself more trouble.
As he now peered through the windshield and into Louisiana skies that carried the promise of late-afternoon storms, Jeff wondered if he would be graced with his first rainout of the still young season. Not tonight, he hoped. He wanted fair skies, and he hoped Ellis Denson and the Hooks had brought their best stuff. Just because he was going to work didn’t mean he wanted it to be difficult work.
Getting on the road by 4 tomorrow morning (no drinking tonight), he thought as he drove, would give him a slim chance, if he hauled some serious, serious ass, to be in Orem, Utah, some 1,500 miles across the American Southwest (without a hangover), and into one of likely hundreds of choice stadium seats (without having a drink first) in time to file a report on the new kid, Willy Cintron. He figured with a quick nap after tonight’s game (and not a single drink), plus a good four or so hours sleep after tomorrow night’s game, and he would be eastbound on a major highway by Friday morning, and home some time within the parameters of the weekend.
And then what?
Go back to being drunk and depressed, Jeff supposed, something he knew was true but something he figured would either just work itself out or, or ... “Or maybe something else will happen,” he said, looking away from the road and back to the GPS. And for the first time ever, it did something when he acknowledged it, coincidence or not.
For all the times Jeff had spoken to the machine on the windshield, it never seemed to respond. It always just did what it did, blinking and spinning, zooming in and back out, and then suddenly something strange would happen when it saw fit and when Jeff least expected it. This time, Jeff was looking right at the thing, expectantly, when the Warren woman spoke.
“In, 36, hours, begin training.” Then the little counter, the one Jeff had thought about hundreds of times the last few weeks, appeared on the 8-inch screen. In his own defeatist mind, Jeff had always seen the clock in his thoughts as reading 0d0h0m0s. Time’s up. This one, which immediately started to elapse when it popped up along the right side of the screen under DESTINATION, began at 1d12h0m0s and counted down.
“Yes!” Jeff shouted with sudden, unexpected glee. “Finally! Unete a la revolucion, godammit!” He took both hands off the wheel and triumphantly balled them into fists, flexing his arms and gritting his teeth with that deranged smile that he again glimpsed in the rearview mirror. He was exhilarated. But that was just 10 or so seconds in the life of a man who was always looking for the other side of the coin.
Very quickly, the smile was gone. Part of him wanted to scoff, and part of him wanted to scream. Was the thing really talking to him? Was it really giving instructions meant for him? This was his trip, after all, she was interrupting. But hadn’t the GPS been acting weird since pretty much the day he started using it? Of course. It was the thing that had taken him across and there was no denying it. It was his only way to get back. But what did this training, or this ticking clock, have to do with anything he’d seen that first time, or anything he’d been dreaming about ever since? Wouldn’t he trash the car and himself this time if he did go back? The first time had been rough enough.
For the first time, Jeff thought of the GPS as something other than a machine. Not a person, necessarily, but not not a person either. A persona, perhaps. He was suddenly overcome with the somebody-else-is-in-the-room feeling, and it made his back and his jaw tighten in fear. While he tried to keep the car moving inside the painted lines of the highway, he collected his courage and gazed dubiously at the GPS screen in front of him. He spoke to it with sarcasm. He didn’t know it, but he regressed from 75 miles per hour to about 58 in just the time he spoke.
“I can’t really train tomorrow, I don’t think. You see, I’m a baseball scout. Well, sometimes I am, and I just don’t think I can do any training right now, or, I guess, in 36 hours,” Jeff said with a nervous grin, all the while feeling his throat clench with anticipation. He imagined a horror movie scene where the wires of the GPS suddenly burst out of their jacks and start snaking their way toward him, wrapping around his neck while he tries to keep the car on the road. All the while, the speaker would be bleating out at him, “Insubordination, insubordination, insubordination…”
But there was none of that. There was no answer at all. The little talking contraption was here to give him information, not to answer his questions or reconfigure its schedule to suit him. After about two minutes of Jeff veering the Celica to the far left and far right borders of the right lane as he stared at the screen for some further response, speeding up and down erratically as he went, the clock simply blinked off and the GPS resumed its normal programming. Typical.
Jeff zoomed across the Texas border, and it was becoming more and more evident the dark, thickening clouds in the distance would be exploding through the horizon soon. He could even see a section of sky over the water that had that odd, textured look of heavy rain sheeting to the earth. The GPS continued to disappoint, just doing the usual business again. Jeff even scrolled through the various option menus when he’d stopped for gas near Wharton. He rifled through all of the GPS’s bells and whistles on the main menu screen, all of which he’d done before, and found nothing of any great interest. Nothing about training either.
The clue Jeff continued to miss was the strange, coded address that had been burned into the unit’s memory when he’d crossed over during his trip to New Mexico. But that only would have confused him further. When he steered back onto I-77 South, he drove into torrents of late spring rain which, in these parts, had trouble finding a place to go when they landed, so the water tended to just slosh around in deadly ponds on the tops of the roads. Jeff was slowed to a crawl for the next 30 minutes.
The Celica was herded in with dozens of other cars performing a ritual, rolling dance, windshield wipers bashing away in unison at the buckets of rain beating them. Everyone but Jeff was blinking their emergency flashers to help light the way. His flashers, he’d just discovered, no longer flashed, even on the dashboard. Apparently, neither did his turn signals. He was never so grateful for functioning headlights in his entire driving life, but began fearing what would happen if they, too, simply blinked out on him.
Even with the angry weather and Sandy Morino’s far-reaching baseball eye to worry with in Corpus Christi — not to mention the almost constant itch to steer the car into a liquor store parking lot and relieve some stress — Jeff thought about the ticking clock, and the most recent GPS announcement.
What time was 36 hours from now? Or no, it was more like 33 hours now, he supposed. And what was the time difference in Utah, where he vowed to be tomorrow night? What time zone were the GPS demons in? He couldn’t do the little bit of math required to figure any of that out at the moment, especially with the asshole riding his brakes dangerously in front of him. He drove nervously the rest of the way into Corpus Christi, wondering about the countdown and forgetting to turn off his windshield wipers until they screeched dryly at a stop light in town, the rain already a memory racing off into the distance.
The storms had gone and the sun immediately elbowed its way through the layer of steam above the Texas Gulf Coast. By Tuesday night, a throng of fans filed into the Hooks’ ballpark with umbrellas they wouldn’t even need.
Jeff sat through actual moments of mild enjoyment that night at the game. Denson was the real thing, a tall skinny guy with uncanny plate presence. Every at bat, he was digging pitchers into deep holes by waiting for his own pitch and swinging a ferocious bat at the ones he liked. It was an easy night, as it happened, as Denson was simply his kind of player. Perfect. Jeff even called Sandy at the end of the game just to make sure the boss knew his scout was doing his job for a change.
Afterward, he felt like a person stuck in rehab with nothing to do. A sober Jeff spent an hour or so filing a scouting report from his laptop at the Villa Del Sol Hotel and doing as much of tomorrow’s work on Cintron as possible. He would give the fine hotel just one hour of his slumber, then leave the key in the room and roar off into the night at breakneck speed. He would face an unbelievable race against the clock to have even a shot at seeing a few innings of Wednesday night’s game in Utah.
Jeff didn’t know what would happen when the clock reached zero — he pictured that little GPS counter, which he presumed was now ticking quietly to itself, zipped up in its little sleeping bag on the other hotel bed — and at this moment, he didn’t care. In truth, by the time he went to sleep, he’d convinced himself he didn’t believe the messages were even intended for him. Who would want him? What did they need a 38-year-old drunk for?
Jeff closed his eyes and thought of the men in the desert, the first time he’d spun around and seen them all standing behind him with their guns at their sides, ready to flee the scene. He’d done something crazy out there, and their astonished looks said so. And they wanted him, and maybe that’s why the clock seemed to be ticking on his haunted GPS. But why? For what? More insane behavior?
