Gps, p.21
Gps, page 21
The giant grapefruit-colored sun was setting in the west, and Jeff flipped down the visor on the Celica as he made the bend. The initial shock had worn off now, giving way to the sheer reality that he had no real idea where he was, where he was going or what would happen next. He also began to wonder, as he tried to take stock of all the other vehicles around him, if any of the other drivers on this road had any less of an idea what was going on than him.
His eyes were glazed over in the final blasts of the afternoon glare, reminding him of how tired he really was. When would he sleep? He could see the profile of the tall building the cars were being ushered toward, and it was definitely a baseball stadium. Again, he tried to catch a glimpse of anyone in the rough-looking crowd that looked even remotely similar to him. No one that he could see immediately, but there was a pretty ordinary car — looked like a Subaru station wagon — two cars back in his lane. Then one about five cars back on the right that looked to be a Mercedes or a Lexus, something way too nice for this turf.
As he inched closer to the stadium, passing gun-toting guards who all sent him haunting nods, the sun finally fell behind the cement façade of the main grandstand. As his eyes adjusted, Jeff could gradually make out the words chiseled into the building’s concrete face, and they gave him goosebumps as they became legible: Estadio Revolucion. There was ivy growing over the letters, and pretty much all over the stadium. Jeff could now see the place did, in fact, have a standard stadium parking lot, complete with booths likely built for baseball traffic and not wars. That’s where everyone was being herded.
He couldn’t ignore how antsy the soldiers seemed to be, how often they seemed to be bracing themselves for some sneak attack or some giant explosion, and then the real reason came crashing through from seemingly nowhere. A thud came from behind, causing Jeff first to rear back and look over his shoulder, then stick his head completely out the driver’s side window with a grimace on his face. The sound of metallic impact caused the guards to scramble up the sides of the cement median.
They looked like rodeo cowboys trying to save their hindquarters from a charging bull as a chain reaction of bumper-to-bumper impacts dominoed their way up the line of cars. A new recruit must have made a less successful arrival.
Jeff yanked his head back inside the car just in time to brace himself properly for the Chevy Bronco behind him to slam solidly into the Celica. The sudden jolt — and then the conk! of his own car’s front bumper knocking into the Four-Runner in front of him — left Jeff dazed enough to not even realize his engine died on impact. Everything stood still for a moment. Jeff collected himself, then grabbed at his keychain and tried to start the car. It didn’t respond. All the lights on the dashboard flashed, but the engine didn’t fire.
Suddenly petrified by the image of being dragged out of his unresponsive car and gunned down by the soldiers was enough to make Jeff start frantically cranking the Celica until, after at least a minute of failed attempts, it hummed back to life as though nothing was wrong. In front of him, a man who looked to be in his early 20s was gazing back at him from his rearview mirror with a frown, and unbuckling his seat belt. This time, there was no escape hatch being offered. If the guy in the Four-Runner wanted to fight him for being the 19th car in a 20-car pileup, he could certainly take it up with the Federalies pacing the roadside.
“Get back in your car! Right now! Hawkins, get back in your car!” The man in front of him in the Four-Runner never even touched a toe to the ground before the soldiers closest to him had spun from watching the accident scene unfolding to aiming their guns squarely at the Four-Runner’s driver. How did they know his name with so many cars and drivers out here?
And then everyone including Jeff whirled back the other way again as a man, this one perhaps 30, shirtless, and sporting a collection of tribal tattoos picked right off the posters on the tattoo parlor wall was suddenly scrambling up the shoulder toward them. About 20 yards behind him was the man’s SUV, a red Yukon with the door hanging open and a smashed front end. About five yards behind him and gaining were five soldiers with their guns trained on the man.
But instead of opening fire, as Jeff was now bracing himself for, the soldiers simply tried to catch the man and stand in his way. They tried to grab him, but the man flailed his arms into the air and suddenly lunged to his left, grabbing for the top of the median wall and pulling himself up. The man scaled the wall, and as Jeff remained clenched for the sound of gunshots, he instead heard the same guard who’d asked him for his name shout, “Let him go! Let him go! No shoot him! No waste the bullets!”
The shirtless man paused for a moment at the top of the median and looked back, seemingly shocked himself not to be shot and killed by now, then scaled the top of the wall and slid down the other side. His panicked footfalls were quickly washed out by the sounds of horns and shouting from behind. The guards again dispersed down the road in attempt to regain order.
“Where the hell’s he going?” Jeff shouted aloud, leaning out of his car window and not at all realizing he was speaking out loud. The same guard who’d talked to him and who’d spared the man’s life seconds before turned and looked at Jeff with a grin.
“My friend, there are worse things than bullets that will kill you out there.”
- 32 -
From The (Orem, Utah) Daily Herald
May 8, 2008
Orem residents, police left wondering about bizarre accident
By Andy Reynolds
Daily Herald Staff Writer
A handful of Orem residents, including a Utah Valley State graduate student, a family of five and the Orem Police Department, is uncertain about the cause of a nine-car accident Wednesday evening.
Officers and emergency medical personnel were dispatched to the intersection of West University Boulevard and Sandhill Road shortly after 7 p.m., where a multiple-car accident, possibly a hit-and-run, was reported.
Although they had no trouble spotting the crash, authorities still cannot determine what, or who, caused the pileup. The incident produced no major injuries, but closed the intersection for more than an hour.
When they arrived, police officers found motorists arguing with one another as to who was at fault and what had happened. The only consistency in witness reports was that one car — described as a faded red Toyota Celica — was no longer at the scene of the accident.
“The guy just roared right into oncoming traffic,” said Stacy Melido, who was uninjured despite her disabled car being removed from the scene on the back end of a tow truck. “We were all coming across University, and this guy just decides to drive right into all of us. Nuts. Totally nuts.”
The question still on the minds of police is where that car went and how the driver was able to flee the scene unnoticed.
Another witness said he was next to the Celica waiting out a red light on the eastbound side of University Boulevard when the driver “suddenly just floored it right into all of us,” causing the wreck.
“There are some angry drivers out there, and he was definitely one of them,” said the witness, who chose to remain anonymous. “He was yelling at other drivers, even me I think, and this other guy pulled up next to him on the other side, and the guy started yelling at him too. Then he just floored it.”
Although numerous witnesses gave similar accounts of the accident and the driver in the red car who allegedly caused it, no one was able to identify where that driver went in the aftermath or obtain a license plate identification.
“He was there, and then he was gone,” Anthony Davis, a UVS grad student, said of the mystery driver. “That’s all I can say.”
Orem police chief Omar Ellevante said his department is still investigating the crash, which forced six vehicles to be towed from the scene.
- 33 -
“Guns are beautiful creatures, aren’t they?”
Jeff recognized Paulo Fonseca immediately. The man now stood over him, petting Jeff’s Ruger .38 Blackhawk with his right hand. It was sweltering inside the tiny office beneath the spacious old baseball stadium. So many thoughts were at play inside Jeff’s jumbled head, he could not summarize everything that had happened and felt too tired to try.
He remembered the events of the previous day in only a clouded confusion, and in fact he could not recollect for certain what day it was now, or what had happened last night after he parked his car in the lot of the antique stadium and was ushered quickly through its main gate. He only knew that his body had shut down not long after that, and that he had been awakened with a start and without a hangover, only adding to the strangeness of the young day. He had been on a dusty mattress next to at least a dozen other men on mattresses camped out in one of the stadium’s outdoor hallways. Even the first rays of dawn had felt like mid-afternoon.
The man he’d seen in his head for weeks was now examining Jeff’s belongings, which were spread out on the table, looking like the beginning of a police interrogation. Most notably, they included the Ruger, the Winchester deer rifle, his laptop and an empty Bushmills bottle. The last item on the list was the first one that caught his attention when he walked into the room. If Jeff’s reaction to the bottle was some sort of test by Paulo, Jeff had failed, because his tired eyes lit up as soon as they met that dangerously familiar site. Empty bottles, like this one, seemed much more common than full ones in Jeff’s world.
The fact that this one was empty irritated Jeff, in part because empty ones, certainly this empty one sitting out on the table like evidence, likely meant more bad things than good, more unfun than fun. The full ones were full of fun and possibilities. Jeff felt ashamed for the longing look he knew was on his face when he saw it. But shame was a one-way street to annoyance to Jeff. And the fact was, shame or no shame, he would have forked over the guns and the computer right then for a chance to turn even that empty bottle upside-down, stick his tongue into the neck and pray for a few drops to roll down onto it. Instead, he sat in the dim room and listened. And listened.
On the wall to his left was something that kept pulling his attention away from the yet unmentioned whiskey bottle, and the incessantly rambling Fonseca. It was a large relief map of Mexico, like the ones yanked down from blackboards every day in schools across planet earth, though Jeff wasn’t convinced this was planet earth. The map was littered with thousands of tiny colored pins, depicting the both the history and the status quo of the revolucion to this point, what had happened in what place, who occupied which piece of land and how hard one side shoved the other.
Jeff learned that the invasion of the Freemen Brigade — those were the terrorists on the horses and in the black Range Rovers — had largely been made possible by the cartel wars. The rival drug factions in the nation had effectively taken millions of lives in the last half century, crumbled entire cities, disbanded the military, crippled an already failing economy and littered the countryside with bodies. The Freemen liked to believe it was their own sheer might and determination, Paulo said, which had allowed them to dissolve the border and take such a quick foothold in the north. But they had merely added to the death toll, and continued to do so with only the revolucion army left to slow their procession south.
To Jeff’s right, the revolucion flag — a solid orange banner with a large, raised brown fist in the middle and a white dove perched on its knuckles — covered the entire wall. Along the bottom were the words “Paz por la fuerza.”
Despite the words which were foreign to Jeff, it seemed the sudden surge of well-to-do white trash from the north, and perhaps the steady arrival of people like him, had mostly made English as important here as Spanish. Good thing for Jeff. The only Spanish he encountered was in writing thus far, or when one native spoke to another. But everyone seemed perfectly willing to treat him like an American in America so far.
Yet, there was Mexico on the wall to his left, and presumably right outside the office door, too. This sure as hell wasn’t good ol’ Zephyr Field or Home of the Owlz Stadium or Whataburger Field he was sitting beneath.
He looked to his left and studied the map for a long moment. Still not particularly listening to Paulo, who hadn’t stopped talking, Jeff assumed the orange pins concentrated in the middle of the country, which sporadically fanned out to the south, represented the revolucion on this map. There were also green and red pins dispersed at random through the same regions, but far fewer. Then, there was a sea of black pins that formed a nearly solid mass in the north-central region and fanned out in almost every direction, which had to be the Freemen. If it was an accurate depiction of the state of things, the map probably wasn’t the best recruiting tool to have hanging on the wall.
But despite its sobering layout of pins, the map seemed a necessary prop for Fonseca’s discourse because it seemed to give him immediate points of reference in the grand timeline. Jeff looked at it when Paulo looked at it, only Jeff wasn’t listening as much as he was just hearing. Fonseca not only spoke English, but did so impeccably well, with just a slight accent, another in the line of peculiarities about the man he noticed really did have a sailor’s spyglass tied to his belt like Jeff had dreamed about.
Paulo spoke in exhausting detail about the finer points of the war, a war Jeff was apparently expected to join. So far, he wasn’t hearing much that inspired him to do so. Intermittently, the man would squint at the map, stop talking and reach into his pocket for what at first looked to be a cell phone or an MP3 player, but was apparently a portable handheld GPS (We know where you’re goin’).
Paulo paced the room all morning, detailing the history of the conflict, the meaning and the cause of it all, while the man sitting at the table was mostly splitting his thoughts between finding the nearest full bottle of whiskey and finding a way back out of here. Or both, if possible. Though his body felt more energized this morning than it had in months, he wanted more sleep in a real bed. Jeff’s addiction kept him awake for the moment, asking him to please trade in his glimpse of sobriety for the comfortable, dizzying effects of booze. He tried to keep his eyes off the empty bottle.
Jeff heard piles of details about the troops of the revolucion, how and when and where they traveled and how and when and where they’d scored victories or had their own blood spilled. How all the vehicles that were either found in the desert or which came over with transients and were abandoned by their terrified owners (and the ones left behind when men were killed in battle) were moved on up the road of the revolucion.
He talked about the constant thievery between the warring sides of vehicles, gasoline, guns, alcohol … Whatever else was on that list got washed over in another mental wave of whiskey for Jeff. When Paulo mentioned the alcohol, both men shot immediate glances to the bottle on the table and then back to each other, but neither mentioned it. The mere confirmation that this new world contained alcohol gave Jeff dangerous new hope and a whole new pang for liquor.
As Paulo spoke (and as Jeff wondered if this unexpected seminar was standard procedure for all the newcomers or if he was getting this classroom session because he was special in some way), he showed the same kind of calm passion Sandy Morino exhibited while talking baseball in his own office. God, Jeff thought, how would he ever explain his latest no-show to Sandy without getting fired once and for all? And what had become of the poor bastards trying to get home last night in Utah, the ones he drove his car right through? Had they all crashed? When did he get to go back? Did he get to?
“Guns have been the cornerstone of every major change in modern world history,” Fonseca went on, now leaning over the table and speaking directly into Jeff‘s face. “Bullets carry reform from point A to Point B, you know? And so will you, Hermano.”
Jeff doubted that seriously, but didn’t say so. Instead, he just kept sitting there trying to look interested but uncommitted, something he was good at. Paulo fixated himself on Jeff’s gleaming new firearms, and the guns’ owner began to consider the weight of Fonseca’s words. Whether or not Jeff could or would make a change in this place, it sounded like a quick and not necessarily painless way to die. He wondered if Paulo had any inkling of just how different the two of them were. Like he often did, Jeff suddenly blurted out the thoughts in his head, breaking his long silence.
“What makes you think I can just show up here, come flying in here on some magic carpet, and, well, know my ass from a hole in the ground? What makes you think I would? I mean, am I under arrest, have I been drafted or something, or am I free to try to find my way back out of here? Christ, I’ve never even shot a gun in my life —”
“Oh no?” Paulo cut back in. He turned to his left and walked to a metal locker in the corner of the flag side of the room. He swung the door open. The man wearing the same faded jeans and flannel he was that day out in the desert pulled out an M16 which had a dull glow of newness.
“’Member this, bro?” Paulo asked, suddenly sounding a lot more like the guy who he’d been hearing in his sleep and with whom he’d gone scrambling through the desert and jungle. Jeff did remember it. Immediately, he imagined the way the bullets drew dotted lines up the doors and the windshields of the SUVs as he unleashed them across the desert that morning. He didn’t answer.
“Look, Delaney. This ain’t the Marines. No straight lines to march in, no forms to fill out and no uniforms to starch. The guys out here, even the ones like you coming from somewhere across the way, they do it because they want to. There are plenty of addictions, Delaney (another glance toward the bottle), but none that compare to the rush of fighting for survival. You think you came here by accident? It’s no accident, bro. You didn’t just come. You came back. I didn’t invite you here and, no, you’re not under arrest. But that don’t mean you’re not here for a reason.”
