Gps Page 8

  He walked over and picked it up with some care, sort of like someone picks up a pet snake, and found it was still every bit as warm inside its case as it had been in the New Mexico desert. Strange, sure, Jeff thought, but nothing really in comparison to the version of strange he now knew.

  So the GPS had cast a spell on him out there, and it might have somehow opened a door to some other world. So it was still apparently processing information and wondering where Jeff was, even though it had been sitting dormant and disconnected on the table for 12 hours. Big deal. Not taking the GPS to Florida never crossed his mind in those moments. Where it might end up taking him, however, did.

  But worrying about such things was not part of the deal anymore. Couldn’t be. Jeff knew, as he now gazed across the apartment and spied what looked like a note on the refrigerator, that he’d never forget what he had seen, whether he ever ended up in that world again or not. He could erase that picture off the phone right now and still see the girl’s face every day for the rest of his life.

  The real question was, did any of this have any bearing on the rest of his life? Was there something life-changing to be gleaned from the experience? Could he just suddenly stop his endless fretting about the minute details of daily life out of some fear, some possibility, that he might get taken out of his world of misery and thrown into another, much more brutal one? Was there some purpose to what had happened? Was it not purely a random, unfathomable, yet meaningless event?

  He smiled at the possibilities though not exactly sure why. He seemed destined to wear the experience like a badge, so maybe that was the purpose to it. As terrible as it was, Jeff’s glimpse of suffering in some unknown place seemed like a motivation, and he had no idea why other than the fact he’d lived to tell about it. “But there’s no one to tell it to,” he said to Lefty as Jeff approached the kitchen fridge — his apartment had one table, one couch, one chair and two refrigerators. Jeff knew from across the room what it was he’d seen stuck to the antiquated, mint green refrigerator, and who it was from. Lefty hadn’t written it, for God’s sake, and intruders usually didn’t leave notes.

  “Can we please just talk about this?” were the words Riley had scribbled down when she, not for the first time, had accounted for the cat’s well-being while Jeff was gone.

  Of course we can talk about it, he thought. But Riley will be disappointed to know that the who, what, when, where and most certainly the why portion of the conversation will still be a little vague. Actually, though, that little note had granted Jeff a wish he’d carried with him since the minute she’d hung up on him in Albuquerque. Now he would be forced to come up with an explanation for everything.

  With that, he bustled back down the stairs, back out onto Esplanade Avenue and hopped into his increasingly familiar captain’s chair in the Celica. Without hesitation or thought of consequence, he snapped the GPS onto the windshield and plugged it in.

  “Warren GPS Technology. Welcome.”

  The drive ahead was 750 miles, straight across the northern face of the Gulf and through the Florida Panhandle. Despite the pitch-black night, it was another one of Jeff’s favorite driving courses. The Gulf Coast had fascinated him since childhood, largely leading him for the first time to New Orleans. His drive on I-10 East meant a stroll past the great Gulf towns of Gulfport, Biloxi, Mobile and Pensacola.

  Out in the brown, swollen waters in the distance to his right were the haunting night lights of the flaming oil rigs, a reminder to Jeff as his thoughts wandered that he was unmistakably on the Gulf Coast and not steering into some mysterious place. Just the same, he’d already promised himself he would stay out of his own brown sea, the Bushmills, on this trip. No need to fuel any new fires.

  He figured driving at night and doing it almost exclusively on major highways would make it about a 10-hour stroll each way. Most of the trip was I-10 East, from home all the way to the friendly mile marker of Lake City, Fla., then 75 South down to the greater Wildwood metropolis and onto Florida’s Turnpike, straight toward the Atlantic Ocean and the glorious Tradition Field Complex in St. Lucie.

  Jeff noticed the GPS a good deal less this time around. It seemed to have nothing in the offing outside of chirping out the very few changes in direction on this particular jaunt. She protested when he stopped for gas, as usual, and was much busier at the beginning and end of the trip than the long miles in between. Mostly, she seemed bored. The GPS had become a constant companion already, and Jeff hoped it would become a more predictable one.

  The satellite picture offered its usual zoom-in, zoom-out picture in its normal colors. The Gulf looked bluer on his screen than it ever had to the naked eye, Jeff thought, and even the most Katrina-beaten towns and villages along the coast appeared as simple white dots in masses of cheery emerald green.

  Blue was actually the color of Katrina, not that anyone who had endured even one gust of the hurricane would have chosen that color to identify the storm themselves. It seemed a pretty obvious reminder of the water, after all. Fly into a more well-to-do city like Phoenix and it’s a marvel how all those little blue rectangles down below turn out to be swimming pools as the descent into Sky Harbor International Airport deepens. On the descent into Louis Armstrong International, on the other hand, and those aren’t swimming pools down there, though they have contained plenty of water.

  When the federal government had done whatever it had done after Katrina, one of the enduring colors thereafter, which still made Jeff cringe at each sighting, was the blue of cheap plastic tarp covering the most serious physical wounds from the storm. It was everywhere then, and shockingly still everywhere to this day.

  All these hundreds and hundreds of days after the final drops of floodwater relented, there were still seemingly thousands of square miles of that awful blue tarp everywhere, almost as much of it as there were FEMA trailers stacked in random fields. Mostly, the blue tarp still served as roofing and siding on storm-beaten houses, and anyone in the city or anywhere else on the Gulf Coast certainly had seen their fill of it long ago. If it glowed in the dark, it would have lit Jeff’s way into Florida.

  Jeff and Riley, in one of their greatest post-storm endeavors as a couple, co-managed the Katrina Blues in the 9-and-under Crescent City Youth Baseball League the spring after the storm, a league as pieced together then as the Treme neighborhood to which the team belonged.

  It was a strange moment in Jeff’s life, mainly because it was a truly happy one, and the only one in which he felt a true passion about children.

  Such a strange departure was Jeff’s unexpected love for his little band of ballplayers, it proved one of the major sticking points for Riley in the downfall of the marriage. She herself never championed having kids by any certain age, but Riley certainly held out hope that Jeff would warm to the idea of parenthood at some point, and that it would just sort of happen like it did to every couple. As she screamed and ranted and high-fived and danced outrageously through that one and only season as a baseball co-manager, Riley spent a lot of time thinking Jeff would become the perfect father.

  It never happened.

  The Blues, who surged to the championship game that season before losing to a team sponsored by the New Orleans Saints, wore specially-designed uniforms thanks to Riley’s mom. Each of the plain black team hats and T-shirt jerseys was adorned with a fleur de lis logo that had been snipped out of real 9th Ward roof tarping and hand-stitched into place by Marie Peletier herself. Thanks to Jeff, the Blues had taken enough batting practice with the Zephyrs that year to make Double-A players jealous.

  Instead of worrying about other worlds and little kids whose lives he could likely never touch, Jeff spent a large chunk of his Florida Panhandle stretch reminiscing with a faint grin about that team photo, the kids with their runner-up trophies and their ear-to-ear grins. Every dime collected that season when the hat got passed went to post-storm efforts, or technically into the effort to save the homes and livelihoods of every kid on that team. The end-of-the-season bash was held in the Delaney living room, and Jeff could still hear the bustle of all those kids running rampant in their home and still loved every shred of memory he had of it. Those little voices seemed like ghosts now, but he smiled anyway.

  Jeff roared on through the night, through Mississippi and Alabama in no time at all. The rare companionship of pleasant thoughts made the time fly, and with only the glow of the mostly silent GPS and the Celica dashboard in his face, he hammered through the Panhandle as well, stopping only for gas and a couple of chicken burritos from the Endless Sun outside of Tallahassee at dawn Monday morning.

  At the same time Jeff was striding back toward the car sitting at the gas pump, Lefty was hundreds of miles to the west, crouched stealthily in front of the open closet door in Jeff’s bedroom looking over Esplanade Avenue. The strange scent emanating from the tangle of clothes in the hamper was intoxicating to the cat. He’d been pacing back and forth to and from the closet all night. He had inched closer and closer each time, not daring to get too close to whatever was emitting that dangerous, alluring aroma.

  Now, just a few inches from the hamper, Lefty craned his neck as far as it would stretch, trying to make a connection between his brain and the messages coming from his tireless nose. As he did, a whisker lightly brushed against one of the legs of Jeff’s muddy jeans poking out from the lid of hamper. Lefty reared back, hissed will all his might, and fled down the hall with his tail dragging on the floor.

  Inside the back left pocket of those jeans, unknown to Jeff and his cat, was a slip of paper Jeff would never see. On it was a name and a date, scrawled in black ink. It had been passed to Jeff in the broadening sun the previous Friday morning.

  “Paulo Fonseca. May 7.”

  - 12 -

  “Ascondo? Really? Man, I don’t think he’s ready at all.”

  It was already steamy and sticky in Port St. Lucie. Jeff’s craving for more sleep had lingered as he drove out of New Orleans the night before was yanking furiously at his eyelids now, as he sat across from Sandy Morino a little after 7:30 Monday morning.

  While he battled to follow Sandy’s easy-going, yet somehow manic pace and do so with two open eyes, Jeff was dying to dive into that California king back at the Vistana Beach Club on Jensen Beach, with the Atlantic Ocean outside providing the lullaby free of charge.

  Jeff wondered, as the man pacing in front of him searched aloud for a bottom line he could draw underneath the Mets’ fiasco of a start, if Sandy ever even thought about sleep. He must have slept, surely, but to a true baseball man like Morino, sleep was little more than a daily interruption in life’s long walk. To Sandy, it was a few hours here and there when his body forced him to shut down and recharge, to save and store the day’s masses of information for future use.

  On this morning in Florida, it was hard for Jeff to imagine his baseball superior having been jump-started awake in his own hotel bed by the shrill sound of a 5 a.m. wake-up call. Instead, he found it much easier to picture Sandy already sitting up in his bed when that call came. In that scene, the room was only as bright as the early sun sneaking through the window, the laptop whirring in front of him and the TV flashing across the room. ESPN would already be providing Sandy his normal morning rations of badly played-out highlight calls — “and that’s a sacks-packed jack” — and even worse music as their backdrop.

  But that dawn serenade was the soundtrack to Sandy Morino’s life, and today probably hadn’t started any differently. When the phone chimed its triple-ring at 5, Sandy likely never even peeled his eyes away from his laptop — which had become just a large, glowing growth on his chest in the last decade or so. Instead, he probably picked up the receiver on the night stand and dropped it right back in its cradle without even a hint of a balk in his delivery.

  The information flow never stopped in baseball and that was part of its design. A professional baseball organization was a beehive, a massive unit made possible by hundreds of individuals all seemingly doing an equal part. Even with perfect player health through an entire six-month regular season, sheer progress and unavoidable human aging meant there would always be steady flux from rookie ball to the majors.

  The unexpected, naturally, was what made it baseball. The torn hamstrings and the constant undertow of human error on the field — and the slacking off by people away from the field like Jeff, who no longer worked as hard as the other bees — were what caused impromptu trips to the lonely extended spring training camps of major league clubs that have long since departed for their summer homes. It was baseball’s unpredictability and its imperfect people that made Sandy great at his job. He not only expected the ups and downs of the individual workers in the hive, he relied on them. Making the workers keep working and finding newer, better ones was his most basic job description.

  Sandy embodied what Jeff could have become in the baseball business. In fact, with Jeff’s interest waning almost daily, Sandy represented something that had passed Jeff by, even at 38 and even though Sandy was only 41. Sandy likely saw the Mets’ big board in his sleep, if he did sleep, and he could be stirred awake in the middle of the night and tell you, in order, the Mets’ opening day lineup for the last 30 years. If he’d worked for the Reds it would be true for them too.

  To further accentuate their differences, Sandy spent a large portion of his days on his cell phone, meticulously fine-tuning the Mets’ personnel from the Major leagues to the Venezuelan League, all while trudging steadily on his office treadmill. He swigged coffee like a cop, and even on this humid morning, Sandy was pounding away on a paper cup full. He was the kind of coffee man who was willing to drink anything served out of a coffee pot, any color and any thickness.

  “Well, I didn’t hear anything from you out of Savannah after the Augusta series, so I figured that’s what you thought,” Sandy said, swirling his cup and frowning down at it like he’d spotted a foreign object, mulling over the Sand Gnats’ right fielder to whom Jeff had given the cold shoulder after four innings. “He struggled with the knee all spring, for sure, and he’s still too much of a free swinger, but Jeff my boy, I’m hearing all kinds of chirps about him since we left camp. Lots of those little birdies think he’s outgrowing the Sally in a hurry.”

  Even when it came to the development of 21-year old Felix Ascondo down in the South Atlantic League, there were a few things Sandy knew that Jeff did not. They were simple things he knew and things Jeff should have known too, but clearly did not. Sandy’s greatest flaw was trust, and he trusted Jeff, so as troubling as his scout’s seeming indifference was, Sandy was trying to cut him some slack. He gazed inquisitively at Jeff, who this morning looked thin, tired and hollow sitting there in a busted-down chair in the Mets’ spring training clubhouse.

  Both the High-A St. Lucie Mets and the short-season Gulf Coast League Mets had nicely cushioned, air-conditioned offices and clubhouses at Tradition Field, but Sandy loved the humid, blue collar feel of the dim Extended Spring clubhouse, and always seemed to prefer to do his business in its murky confines when in Florida. SportsCenter was blaring through the surround-sound in the adjacent players lounge, where the guys unlucky enough to still be in camp while the season roared to life across the country were collecting themselves for another day of wishing they were at least in the minors. That was a bad thing to be rooting for this early in the spring.

  One thing Sandy knew that Jeff didn’t was that Ascondo — who had been drafted at the age of 17 into the Houston system out of the Dominican by none other than Jeff Delaney himself — had proceeded to dismantle the Augusta GreenJackets for pretty much all but the four innings Jeff had bothered to watch in that Thursday-to-Sunday series.

  While Ascondo still probably wasn’t the player Jeff had initially purported him to be when he had pushed for the Mets to unload a pitching prospect and acquire him from the Astros the previous spring, Sandy found it odd that Jeff wasn’t pushing for Ascondo now. Jeff was just sitting there, shrugging his shoulders at the mention of a touted prospect he’d brought to the club, yet not providing a shred of detail as to why.

  Ascondo had made himself tough to ignore. The fleet-footed outfielder had gone 10-for-18 in the four-game set with Augusta. In that stretch, he had displayed almost everything the Mets were hoping to see. He stole six bases and swung at almost no bad pitches, and he’d managed to catch the eye of scouts from Baltimore and Texas in doing so. Unlike Jeff, those guys had gotten word back to their personnel directors about the rise of Ascondo — and about his dissatisfaction with the Mets.

  Apparently, the Orioles and Rangers had scouts that were into baseball, in it for the full nine innings of it, unlike the Mets’ scout, who was currently fighting off sleep and having trouble remembering what day it was, and who also hadn’t done a lick of baseball-related work for almost four days now. Other teams’ scouts weren’t just out there watching one or two guys a night, either. They were watching everyone, thinking about where or how they might all fit into their own team’s beehive.

  The one important thing Sandy didn’t know, however, and the thing that would have made this morning much different if he had known it was that the man sinking deeper and deeper into the chair across from his desk was wrong. Jeff’s frazzled look was troubling, as was his recent refusal to communicate, but it didn’t give Sandy reason to think Jeff was cashing out on him. He still thought Jeff knew better than the other guys, despite what he was hearing from every other direction.