GPS (17 page)

My place, Jeff repeated to himself. My turf.

Perhaps tomorrow night should be a booze-free event as well, he considered momentarily, heading for the shower for a little further thought on the matter. That certainly would free up tonight. As it happened, Jeff and his cat returned to the back porch that night, having nothing better to do but put the town to sleep without having to stumble home afterward. Lefty busied himself stalking the giant New Orleans cockroaches and slinking lizards while Jeff busied himself with alcohol, this time the much tamer-tasting standard Bushmills to which he’d become all too accustomed.

He tried to sort out exactly what he was going to say to Riley about New Mexico and his seemingly impossible experience. All he’d come up with so far was that he was lost in the desert, saw what he’d taken a picture of and gotten the hell out of there, never to return. He didn’t know what to say when asked how he got there, where exactly
there
was and how he’d gotten back. He couldn’t decide whether to painfully detail his dream, the revolucion and whatever he thought it was, or its apparent mass appeal in multiple worlds. He knew one thing for sure, and that was that he had no intention of bringing the GPS into any of it. Jeff had no answers to the many other questions that would surely follow.

He stared straight up into the steamy night, and he tried to imagine what she was going to look like sitting out there. Riley definitely had a way of changing the atmosphere in a room without saying a word, and Jeff knew this new outdoor creation — still just a few hours old — would be forever branded by the following night and her impending arrival. She would leave a tattoo on this place. Her wonderful scent alone would stay for days.

But like Felix Ascondo’s fateful Florida State League at-bat, Jeff had no way of knowing whether it would be good or bad in the end. If it was bad, he hoped he would be man enough to not let an estranged woman ruin what could become a miniature paradise, a place where stress didn’t stew, but rather flew up into the humid, faint breeze. Jeff didn’t have another coherent thought after that. He steadily nodded in his chair, until finally he thrust his glass, clinking with melting ice cubes and tinted by the remaining drops of whiskey, onto the table, thinking to himself he would rest for a minute and then take himself and his cat into the house ...

But when he awoke with a start it was 4:38 a.m., according to his cell phone. It didn’t occur to him at that moment that Lefty was gone, but by the time he made it to the top step of the garage it did. The cat had gotten inspired by his vast new square of space and had gotten carried away.

The scent coming from the closet had been playing with Lefty’s brain since before he ever set foot in the courtyard, and after a few hours out there and the incapacitation of his owner, the cat had searched for and promptly located a way out. He scooted his husky frame under a small gap between the ground and the fencing that separated the courtyard from the rear alley, an opening which was almost completely masked by the shrub in front of it.

By the time Jeff stumbled back into the courtyard, hoping he would find Lefty asleep in the chair next to the one he’d been sleeping in, his veteran companion was more than 10 blocks away, engaging in his second-ever cat fight, this time against a far more formidable and accomplished opponent than the first. The first bout had been an easy one against an undersized stray outside of Hartford about nine years ago. A much meaner encounter had awaited a much older Lefty this time, and as Jeff had always suspected, this one didn’t go so well.

But something had ticked in the cat that had never ticked before, some intoxication that began with the arrival of those strange-smelling clothes and had persisted for days now. It had given the animal a sudden jolt of unbridled courage and curiosity. It would have driven the cat mad had he remained stuck in that tiny apartment, and it just so happened the courtyard he’d stared longingly at all those afternoons while his owner was on the road had suddenly become available to him. With that sudden freedom, Lefty — undoubtedly taking years of cues from its owner — had taken it too far. An outside force called to him and he answered, just like that.

Rapt with a feeling of overwhelming panic for the safety of his pet out in the real world and acutely aware of how alone he suddenly felt, Jeff stood for five full minutes in the soft glow of the gas lamps still burning in the courtyard, imagining over and over the cat emerging from different sets of shadows. Had there been anyone to see him standing out there, having long since searched the courtyard and found Lefty’s escape hatch in the fencing, they would have seen the reflection of tears on the man’s face as, once again, the world spun away during one of his alcoholic stupors.

Jeff drunkenly trudged around the neighborhood streets, hoping that he would hear Lefty’s unmistakable voice call out to him from some alley, and that the whole incident would end right there. But he gave up some time after dawn, when the New Orleans sanitation crews were out scraping away another layer of tourist sludge from the greater French Quarter. He made the agonizing walk back to his apartment and immediately locked eyes on the self-feeding, self-watering dish at the mouth of the hallway.

At the same time, Lefty, now bearing a serious gash on the back of his neck and walking with a limp thanks to another on his right front leg, was in a desperate search for a scent he recognized. He looked left and right, as lights and strange noises angled in on him constantly, and he wished he could find the same portal that had brought him into this world, so he could get back out.

- 19 -

There were many others like him, people who had somehow found their way here, answered the call whether they realized that’s what they were doing or not.

Like him, they usually stood out from those that were already hardened to this world. Even in this dawn-hazed desert scene that looked like anything other than real life, he was shocked at what he was seeing in front of him, at what was now very clear as he trudged closer and closer to it. His mind immediately wanted to change his direction, to send a message down to his legs to stop and spin around and (Get out of here, man!). Would there be just more desert behind him when he turned, even more SUVs circling, more dark figures on horseback leading similar missions off in the distance, or was this just some big, flat white screen like at the old West Hartford drive-in movies?

He bounded clumsily toward the black metal object in the sand, knowing this was no remote control world he was seeing. He wasn’t able to manipulate the action in this movie. If there could be a dream inside this one, a dream that could help explain this dream, it would be the one where Jeff had connected with a fastball and sent it screaming into right field only to find his feet were cemented to the ground.

Only in this one, he was trying to slam on the brakes, trying furiously to just turn around and run in the opposite direction, no matter what was behind him. Why was he running into the face of certain death? Even as he heard shouts from behind him, telling him for sure this was a three-dimensional scene, he took the final three steps before lunging to the desert floor and grabbing the unattended machine gun out of the sand.

As though he’d been trained for this very moment already, Jeff stood up and steadied the gun in his arms, cradling the butt end against his shoulder.

He inhaled and yanked the trigger, and shots sprayed across his view, each bullet looking for something to latch onto and rip to pieces. The first half dozen of them had zoomed off into the distance, but the next several dotted their way across first the rear door and then diagonally up and across the driver’s side window of the black Range Rover about 30 yards in front of him and heading into the already warming, lengthening horizon. He could hear muffled screams from inside for a split second before the vehicle steered violently to its right and spun to a stop.

Now moving forward again, he spied another truck behind the first and sent a hail of bullets that direction. Most had bitten into the desert floor before even nearing their target, but as Jeff steadied himself for a moment again, just 20 or so yards from the truck now turned and driving directly toward him, he erupted another stream of shots, and this one ran from the grill up the hood and straight into the cabin.

The desert was alive again, as a massive umbrella of SUVs and gunmen on horses made U-turns and swung back in direction of the unexpected attack. Finally Jeff spun around, but only because someone had grabbed his arm. He reared back, ready to continue his shooting spree on whatever he saw and whoever had grabbed him. Instead of one man, he saw about 20 men in shreds of clothing, armed to the teeth with second-rate looking machine guns very much unlike the scorching hot one he was holding. None of their guns were raised, so Jeff lowered his, and was immediately hustled down a winding path and into a series of sun-bleached canyons and passes.

“You gotta move man! That was crazy! You just gave away a prime ambush site, man, that was nuts!” the young man who kept pushing him from behind huffed at him. The man was moving at an incredible pace considering the amount of heat already swirling in the air. Jeff turned and stared at him for second, further drawing the man’s ire.

The entire group scurried single-file down into the cool stone hallways beneath the rage of the desert. The man behind Jeff looked out of place here, as Jeff most certainly did, but only because he looked so modern and everyday American. Peeking from beneath the man’s faded desert camouflage shirt was one of those quasi-retro, impossibly American T-shirts — those high-priced ones that were designed to look shitty and were always adorned with played-out slogans like,
“Heads, I get tail. Tails, I get head”
on them. And in comparison to most of the others running frantically, yet somehow without sliding and breaking an ankle down the canyon pass, the guy had clearly seen a barber and a razor very recently. On his feet were leather hiking boots that still looked brand new.

It was this man who had taken the role of making sure the new, unexpected visitor kept pace and didn’t get himself and the rest of them killed. Jeff was only about 20 paces into this 10-minute scramble when the man — or boy, as he didn’t look to be more than 21 — had wrestled the gun away from him. “You’re not gonna shoot me, or get me shot, and strand me in this hell hole,” he said as he took the rifle and immediately shoved Jeff along. The man’s words and gritted teeth suggested he expected some sort of struggle, but Jeff simply let go of the gun as though he’d forgotten he was carrying it.

About the same time the ground mercifully began to even out and the path began to widen, the gunshots and angry shouts from above and behind them began to ring out. No one stopped when they’d reached the bottom of the incline, which was largely shaded by a mass of Apache pines and firs. In fact, most of them — it was clear there were at least 25 of them now, and maybe four or five that looked as green, unprepared and modern-day American as Jeff himself — broke into a dead, desperate sprint in and through the trees, never looking back.

They seemed to know precisely where they were headed as they began scattering into the stand of trees in different directions like roaches. With his knee sending pain shooting up his leg from below, Jeff tried to fix his eyes on one of the men and follow him. But as soon as he’d selected one of the more ragged-looking ones, wearing just cut off camo pants on his dark brown body, another man came and found him, jumping out of the brush and into his path.

“Keep running and listen!” the man yelled as he pulled Jeff off to his right and up a slight incline in the trees and brush. “We’re about a half mile from camp, and after that crazy shit, you don’t wanna be there right now. Crazy shit, man, that was crazy shit! I know you never been here before, but I need you back. Keep running man, or you’re gonna die right here! When I say break right, you steer off into this jungle with me. When you catch glimpse of your car, you get in and get out, you hear me? Use your GPS, select HOME and get out! I’m gonna talk to my main man about you — he’ll love that gun — and tell him we need you back, man. Wait for the word, man, it will be coming. This revolution could get done with people like you. Go now! Break right!”

Even in Jeff’s half hour or so of total time spent in this place, it was evident these guys knew this terrain in much the same way as a fishing boat captain knows the otherwise blank-looking blue ocean.

Jeff could only hear the sounds of the others now as they trampled through the thickening brush, which was steadily becoming more of a jungle. He wondered, since they were being chased by what appeared were hundreds of well-equipped men with modern guns, how the so-called camp would be any sort of safe haven to them, unless it had a jet plane waiting to fly them out of there when they arrived. But all he’d been told to do was get the hell out, and that’s all he could concentrate on now. He didn’t want to die here any more than the guy who had been behind him before dashing off past him and vanishing into the unexpected green coolness of the valley.

Nearly gagging for his breath now, Jeff did everything in his power to concentrate on the ground below him. Any misstep would likely be a fatal one, and now he was confused as to whether the breaking brush nearby was caused by friends or enemies. He nearly ran up the back of the man in front of him — armed with a machine gun and a handgun but also flanked by a dangling compass and what appeared, despite its absurdity, to be an old sailor’s collapsible spyglass sticking out of his small backpack — when the man suddenly stopped dead in his tracks.

Jeff fell to his knees uncontrollably, flush in sweat and physical anguish, and peering up at the man, who was scribbling something onto a scrawl of paper from his backpack. The guy was barely sweating, breathing in measured, deep rhythm. Then, the sharp, distinct sound of a breaking branch and the accompanying grunt of an exhausted man immediately off to their right sent both of the men scrambling again.