Gps Read online

  Now, she’d finally lost her patience. He’d apparently made the call, or even calls, in his drunken stupor last night that drove her past her breaking point with the man with whom she’d long since parted ways. Or was it two nights ago? If it was really Saturday, how did he manage to stay in his room an extra night, and what the hell did he do for that entire extra 24 hours that was now lost? What did he do that caused that dream sequence he saw, or remembered, inside the car?

  Well, it was definitely Saturday. Jeff spun around and peered down at the Albuquerque Journal box next to the door now revolving nonstop with unattended kids going in an endless loop. As he stepped down and squinted at the box’s front window, he saw that it was, in fact, April 12, 2008, and that the Isotopes had plowed over the Zephyrs in the Friday game in the series, 10-2.

  Maybe Ricard and Ainsley really were shit, he considered briefly, then considered stepping into the path of the revolving door and trapping those kids inside for a few minutes until their absentee parents came to find them, undoubtedly on their way to the airport.

  One thing at a time. First, it was time for the grizzled veteran of road travel to try to explain to the front desk, or perhaps have explained to him, just how it became Saturday without him knowing it or without him being booted from his room. And, for that matter, whether or not a mudslide had come through the part of town he apparently was in the night before.

  “Ah, Mister Jeff, you are ready to check out now?” a man behind the desk with RAMON on his nametag asked him, immediately putting Jeff on the defensive as he approached the counter. First-name recognition from hotel clerk to random guest left little doubt as to whether his legend was growing among the Elegante staff, and the girl who first poked her head around the office door and then jumped up to come to the counter and size him up while suddenly acting busy clinched that feeling.

  “Uhh, yes. But I think I need to pay for last night’s —”

  “You are already paid up, Mr. Delaney,” Ramon interjected politely, glancing at his computer screen. “You would like a receipt?”

  “I would, but. Did I ... when did …”

  “I think maybe you have a rough night on Thursday night, and then I think you have another one Friday,” Ramon said, smiling. “You call yesterday morning, early, right after I get in around seven in the morning, during breakfast. You say, no room service and no disturb. But you did say you need one more night, how did you say, to figure out which way you would drive back to Louisiana. Then, when I look out and see your car... I mean, you had an accident or something that night?”

  “Oh nothing like that, Ramon, I assure you. Just doing a little desert romping with some old college buddies,” Jeff lied, even though technically that could have been true since he really had no idea how all that earth had come to plaster itself to the car.

  “Oh geez, you gotta be careful out there, lots of ways to get yourself hurt or worse,” Ramon said, carefully folding Jeff’s receipt in half and handing it over the counter. “So anyway, why don’t you go over to that big car wash, down University Boulevard toward the college? Get your car cleaned up, then you start feeling better.”

  Ramon had no idea, of course, that the trashed car was only heading to the car wash long enough to make it drivable again, and that was by no means a path toward happiness at this point. Soon, he would either become further enlightened or further confused when, for the first time since mid-winter, he soberly dialed Riley’s number. But that would still have to wait. At the moment, the Celica wouldn’t even make it to the car wash without some attention. Getting his wits about him, sort of, Jeff walked back out through the now cleared revolving door and headed for the trunk of his car.

  There, he planned to tear through the crust and find within his rarely-used ice scraper, still with an orange price tag stuck to its business end.

  Fresh beads of sweat washed over Jeff as he pounded the top of the car’s trunk with flailing fists in attempt to loosen the crust’s grip on his car’s rear container. Now dripping onto the sun-baked Celica, he used the well-traveled bottle opener on his keychain to core out the key slot. He wriggled the key through the mostly dried sand and grime and made it turn while simultaneously flexing his left arm against the underside of the spoiler, which was still mohawked wildly with long stems of dried grass and other debris.

  A fresh couple of pounds of the dirt and sand slid into his cluttered trunk as it tore open, sending a cloud of dust into Jeff’s face. For no real reason at all, Jeff broke out laughing. He’d mostly lived in fear of denting, dinging or scratching every rental car he’d ever driven because he always declined the insurance. Now, as a whole new Jeff began to take shape, he wished somehow this was a rental, and not because he cared whatsoever about the Celica. It was more because he wished, just once, he could steer a car that looked even remotely like this one into the return hub at an airport.

  The scene in his head was wonderfully amusing, and the smile it brought to his face remained there as he got a sudden burst of energy and began vigorously scraping away the crud on his front and back windows, then the sides and even the mirrors.

  He stood there for a moment, taking pride in his success, when the phone he’d stuffed back into his pocket without having played a single message began buzzing again. This time, with a happy grin, he fished it out and flipped it open.

  - 7 -

  “Hey Riley!”

  “Jeff? Where are you? Did you call the police?”

  Jeff was shocked at the sound of the first genuine concern he’d heard in Riley’s voice in months. While the couple’s January split was the last thing in the world Jeff wanted, he had known for quite some time it was coming. Since that time, things had gone in opposite directions, Riley creating more and more distance between them as she began to learn what life was like without him, and Jeff trying to cling to every shred of their relationship as it frayed beyond fixing.

  There was no cheating, no lying that Jeff knew about, certainly not on his end and he doubted on hers either. Instead, there was Riley’s steady metamorphosis into something that was beyond Jeff, coupled with his own self-indulged downward spiral. The demise of the marriage was nothing more than her learning to treat Jeff in the same no-nonsense way she treated everyone else who played a mere bit part in her rise to personal greatness. Jeff had come to understand in the last three months that the unique treatment he’d gotten from her in the years of their marriage, the thing that cemented him into the relationship and kept him going when his work and travel had left him unraveled, carried an inevitable expiration date.

  In the beginning, Riley had a way of switching off the city reporter in her and becoming someone who shared everything with him and never ceased to want to know more about him. Whether her interest was genuine or feigned, Riley could spout more knowledge about minor league baseball prospects than most professional managers, and that had always counted to Jeff.

  But the underlying fears she had about Jeff in the long term had been seemingly realized less than five years into the marriage. His cynicism had taken the turn she always hoped it wouldn’t.

  She saw his sarcasm about people become bitterness, and the second she sensed any of that bitterness being directed at her, the bond was broken. In a sense, Jeff was like every man who’s ever been dumped in that the stinger she’d left in him drove him to prove to her he could change, yet Jeff didn’t have any more illusions about them reuniting even if he did.

  In his experience, people didn’t change anyway, at least not just because someone had identified their problems for them. Regardless, Jeff was becoming a different man, and even he couldn’t dispute it. The tone of Riley’s voice on the phone made Jeff wonder if she sensed that too.

  The last time they’d spent together as an official couple was the previous New Year’s Eve, out on the town together with a band of Riley’s people from the Times-Picayune. And even that night ended with a long, pained sigh from Riley and the condescending declaration that Jeff was too young to be so mad. Now Jeff felt he was creeping ever closer to the other sort of mad, the one that would land him in a rubber room if he maintained his current pace. So be it.

  “Police? Look Riley, believe me when I say I’m not playing dumb here. I don’t know what happened, other than I left the game last night ... Thursday night…” Jeff now knew this was going to be the toughest explanation of his life, and did he really need to explain this to his ex-wife? He had no idea what he was going to tell her, mainly because he had no idea what he’d told her in the first place. Police? What the hell was she talking about? Think, think.

  “Jeff, forget all that. I don’t even know where you are. Let’s start there, and then maybe you can tell me what all that madness was you left on my voicemail yesterday at the crack of dawn.”

  “Riley, I’m so sorry about all this. I had no right to call you like that, and I know you’re sick of hearing that it’s the last time, but I swear to you, if you just …”

  “Where the hell are you, Jeff? Is this some kind of joke? Are you drunk?”

  The change really must be happening, Jeff suddenly thought, because the drunk question barely even registered on him. Normally, he would have blown his top at that question. Instead, he breathed deeply and spoke as calmly as possible.

  “I’m in New Mexico. I had the Zephyrs and Isotopes on Thursday night, and …”

  “What are you still doing there on Saturday, Jeff? Do you remember what you told me on your message? You don’t do you? You were hammered, as usual, and you called me, as usual. Only this time, it wasn’t the usual Jeff stuff. That stuff I can handle. Now, it’s something way different. You mean to tell me everything you talked about, that horrible thing you saw, was in New Mexico? Where are the police?”

  Although
he wouldn’t dare say so out loud, Riley had broken into one of her familiar routines, firing off questions she apparently didn’t want answers to, because she didn’t wait for answers. Instead, she replaced the last question with another one. The normally engaging reporter was suddenly cross-examining, and he’d already lost track of what the questions were and which ones, if any, he could answer.

  “The police? I don’t know, I mean, I don’t need the police. There’s no danger, no one’s hurt. Look, Riley, please forgive me just this one last time and tell me what exactly the message…”

  “No danger? Jeff, I saw the picture! You sent me the picture, do you not remember any of this? How can you tell me nothing’s wrong now? I’ve been calling you almost on the hour since yesterday. You said you’d seen something terrible, had gotten lost on the road somehow, or something, and that you saw some terrible thing, people being hurt and killed. You never said where you were or exactly what happened, but Jeff, that picture! You obviously dealt with this the way you deal with everything. Erin Go Bragh! Bottom’s up! But you involved me in this now, Jeffrey, and now I want to know what it is. The whole thing. Please tell me you didn’t make all this up. But that picture ... there’s just no way, Jeff.”

  No matter how much of a turn their marriage had taken in the last year, Jeff and Riley had always maintained a level of respect for each other that kept them almost completely clear of petty insults. But now, Jeff could sense drops of venom forming on Riley’s tongue, and he wished more than anything else he’d been in control and not dialed that number. Now he was being asked to explain something for which he had positively no explanation.

  “Riley, look. I think, I know, I didn’t make this up. I might be a louse who drinks too much and makes idiotic, ill-timed calls to his estranged wife. But I would never make up something just for your attention. I’ll be honest with you, OK? I have no clue what I saw, where it was or what the hell I was doing there. Actually, I’m not even sure I was lost because I didn’t know where I was headed in the first place. I guess the answer to all this is that I’ve totally lost it. What I mean is, I never meant to …”

  “Just look at the picture!” Riley hung up before another word could be said.

  Jeff immediately accessed the stored photos on his phone, and as usual, he started scrolling through them in the wrong direction, oldest to newest.

  That meant an impromptu slide show of photos depicting the demise of a relationship. Most were typical phone photos, ones people take at places and events not quite important enough as to warrant bringing along an actual camera. Mostly, they were shots of Riley standing or sitting in various places around New Orleans, and of course none of them showed the two of them together. Typical, he thought. Here was one of her sitting, alone, if you didn’t know any better from this photo, in Jacques-Imo’s. The last time he’d been there, if memory served, he was the one flying solo, and he’d tested that “Be Nice or Leave” sign after a few too many. Maybe he was crazy, or maybe he’d just become too much of a drunk to remember he wasn’t crazy.

  There was even an image from the Zephyrs’ 2007 home opener, when Riley and other esteemed writers from the city were honored after the sixth inning for their “words of comfort and kindness during a time of peril in our city.” Her post-Katrina work had been so good, she’d graduated to some other class of citizen in town, yet she still chose to live the simple life of driving a crappy car and living in a house that cost her nothing. Jeff knew she’d earned her new status just as well as he knew he hadn’t.

  She wore a black dress that night that gave men of Jeff’s ilk misconceptions about where a night like that might end up — but it was nowhere on that particular night. No matter how many times he’d undressed her in his mind that night, he didn’t undress her in their bedroom because he’d passed out on the living room sofa.

  As he thumbed repeatedly on the button to make the pictures pass by as quickly as possible, he couldn’t help but think she looked less and less happy in each one. Just as that thought began to really bother him, he zipped right past one that made his heart skip a beat.

  Now sitting on the hood of his mud-mobile, ice scraper lying next to him, Jeff let out an audible whimper as the frame blinked quickly past him. It went past in strobe-light effect, one still flash in a series of stuttering, hallucinogenic frames which made Jeff drop the phone onto the hood of the car and look away at once. It was a glimpse of Jeff’s life caught on camera, something he could keep forever if he wished, but something he already wished he’d never seen, let alone photographed. He looked nervously around the Elegante parking lot, as if it to brace himself before looking back down at the phone. He didn’t know if he could bring himself to focus on it and absorb all of its details.

  But he did, mainly because he already knew there was no way in hell of avoiding it. He inhaled deeply, grabbed the phone off the car and put the instantly recognizable image directly in his face. Eyes locked on the tiny phone screen, Jeff couldn’t help but think of Riley, and of Riley seeing the same thing he was seeing, and how he’d screwed this whole thing up in so many ways.

  Just a day or so ago, as all this started to happen to him, whatever it was that had started to happen, it was only him that it was happening to, and that was bad enough. But not now. No, not anymore. Because after he’d seen what he saw, he really had dealt with it the way Riley thought he did.

  He’d gotten plowed because he didn’t know any other medicine for coping with it. Out of some instinct, some reflex he was trying to overcome, he’d dialed her number. He’d included her in it and now he not only could hear her voice in his head for the first time in days, he could sense those wheels of hers turning from a thousand miles away.

  Jeff sat perfectly still, eyes fixed on the phone. Thoughts crashed back and forth in his mind including, for the first time, the notion that he really had been there, somewhere. He had a picture to prove it and perhaps to haunt him for the rest of his life. For several minutes he kept his eyes locked on the image, allowing their lenses to burn the pixilated photograph onto his brain.

  The little girl in the fuzzy, dark image did not appear to notice Jeff when he apparently had the wherewithal to pull out his phone and capture an image of the carnage that must have unfolded right in front of him early that morning. Had anyone noticed him out there in the desert, and if not, why or how hadn’t they? Had he been just sitting in the car at that point, or had he actually somehow been catapulted out of it and onto his own two feet in some other place? Had he been hiding?

  The very bottom of the image was masked by some sort of dark brown desert scrub, suggesting maybe he had been trying to lie low. That would certainly have been his reaction to the scene if it passed before him again, and Jeff supposed he didn’t have any reason to think it wouldn’t.

  It wasn’t so much that the girl didn’t see him, he seemed to remember, it was that she had already seen so much else she seemed completely numb to whatever was next. Her eyes had never fixed upon anything, and in the skewed phone photo, they were hidden beneath her dropped head. There was nothing in the hazy background behind her other than a scatter of hazy debris and towers of black smoke against a brightening sky. The blur of her face that he could see looked empty as the wind blew her black hair back. If he could have seen her completely, he would have seen eyes that looked like they had already cried out all the tears they had.

  In the foreground was something very easy to recognize and very clear. At the girl’s feet and stretching across most of the bottom half of the frame above the line of desert floor in the photo were a person’s — a woman’s — legs. The left one was resting against what Jeff assumed was her now orphan daughter, and the right one was broken grotesquely upward at the shin.

  Jeff still hadn’t left the Elegante parking lot, or even started his car.

  - 8 -

  “Hello Jeff, Sandy. Hope you are having a splendid day. I got your emails and my, my, what fine things you have to say about our favorite two child prodigies in their jaunt to the American Southwest. Sounds like you all had a great time. I’m sure you saw SportsCenter or maybe even watched some of the delightful Mets game when you got back to your hotel. And so as it happens, dear friend, we will be forced to introduce Mr. Ainsley to the cheerful last-place fans right away. Do call me, kind sir.”