GPS (35 page)

He stood still on the sidewalk, looking back and forth between Jeff’s front door and the side alley adjacent to the courtyard one last time, and at the now perfectly still and attentive cat staring back at him. The animal had been squealing, pleading and running its beaten body back and forth on his legs since the moment the cab had reached the curb. Even through the charcoal-colored suit pants he was wearing, Felix could feel the ribs of the animal as each one had clinked across his shins.

“Beat it, gato! I can’t help you right now!” he’d snarled when he first approached Jeff’s front steps minutes before. The cat had reared back, but then persisted in the desperation of something which is so in need of help it no longer minds the consequences of begging for it. It came right back to his leg with a pained yowl, all the while peering up at him.

“Hit that thing with one of your bats and let’s get outta here. I got fares,” the man behind him had hollered from his cab, which even from the New Orleans street reeked of stale cigarettes and lit cigarettes.

“You getting paid, dude, shut up and let me think for a minute,” Felix said without ever looking back at the man behind the wheel. “I give you an extra hundred to shut up right now.”

Dead silence followed, other than the cars on the street and the constant squealing and pleading from below. The cat’s purr was audible above the sounds of the city. Felix had pounded on the door for a solid minute to no avail. Then, without thought of repercussion, he’d flicked an expired credit card he’d pulled from the back of his wallet across the door seal, and much to his shock, he was in, creating an even stronger feeling than before that he was about to walk in on Jeff. He hadn’t locked the deadbolt in one of America’s most larceny-filled cities? Felix figured he had to be inside.

But there had been no sign of life in the apartment upstairs, just dead, still air, leaving Felix feeling even crazier for coming all this way and then forcing his way inside. He had ignored the pink LATE NOTICE dangling from the doorknob, ignored the fact Jeff’s car was nowhere to be seen out front or through the garage windows. For some reason, he still thought he was going to scale those steps and find Jeff inside, either dead or dead drunk. But Jeff wasn’t there, and Felix had seen no evidence of where he might have gone and now didn’t know what else to do but leave.

For weeks, ever since the trade, he had been trying to track Jeff down by phone, email and even word of mouth. Ascondo had gone on a tear over in Frisco. He batted .347 with four home runs and eight doubles in 20 games in Double-A. He was murdering the ball and doing so for an organization that noticed. The Rangers’ scouts loved him. After spending just three weeks in the Texas League, Ascondo was called up to Triple-A Oklahoma City to fill in for a couple of injured outfielders, just in time to make the trip to New Orleans for a weekend series. The magic went with him.

On Friday night, Ascondo had entered the Oklahoma City-New Orleans game as a pinch hitter in the fourth inning with two outs. He singled to left, and stole second
and
third base before being stranded. He struck out in the sixth. In the eighth, he got a gift fastball out of the hand of New Orleans reliever Teddie Riley and smashed it over the left field fence for a three-run home run and an 8-5 RedHawks win amid dead silence at Zephyr Field.

Earlier Saturday night, before breaking and entering Jeff’s apartment, Ascondo had gone 1-for-2 with a double in a 6-2 New Orleans win. Felix’s electricity lit up the ballpark, the way it did everywhere he went, but never once did Ascondo see or hear from Jeff. During the Zephyrs’ Friday afternoon BP session, Ascondo had showed up and asked around as to Jeff’s whereabouts but got no answers. No one could say for certain the last time they’d seen him, only that it had been a while.

In a brief, pained phone conversation with Sandy Morino in New York, however, the Mets’ player personnel director said he
had
spoken to Jeff, less than a week ago, in fact, and that he very likely
was
home because his assignment out in Utah had been a total washout. So Sandy had looked up what he said was Jeff’s correct address, spelled it out to Felix and promptly hung up on the man he had traded away from the Mets just weeks before. So Felix had come to find Jeff again, knowing he would regret leaving town Sunday night without at least trying to speak to him.

He’d spent little time in the dusty, hot apartment. He knew at once there was no way Jeff was still with Riley. This was far from the home Jeff used to describe when talking about his life in New Orleans. This place had nothing feminine in it. He peeked into the bedroom, then the bathroom in the same sort of mandatory way lifeguards clear out swimming pools a couple of times a day — just to make sure there were no bodies.

He had paused at the end of the hallway on his way back into the living room and saw a pet’s self-replenishing dish, which was empty, and a few cat toys scattered near it. Almost as if it were taking a direct cue, the cat outside began clawing at the front door downstairs. In the kitchen, Felix’s jaw dropped for a few seconds when he saw the number of empty whiskey bottles overflowing from the recycling bin next to the refrigerator. He also noticed a note on the fridge, which read,
“Can we please just talk about this?”

So there was at least one feminine thing there, a note clearly written by a woman, Riley he figured, and its words didn’t suggest things were all that peachy even if they were still together. He rooted around in the kitchen drawers, thinking for the first time that the annoyed cabbie might well have dialed the police by now to report the burglary he was witnessing. He found the same notepad Riley had used to write her note, then grabbed a pen and wrote his own words to Jeff.
“CALL ME NOW!! — FELIX”
were the words he chose, knowing he was leaving behind a pretty simple paper trail if the police did show up. He replaced Riley’s note with his own.

When he’d gone back down the stairs he noticed the large bag of cat food inside the door and grabbed it, but then dropped it again. He bent over to the other side of the landing and grabbed one of the newspapers in a large pile and pulled the rubber band off of it.

How long had it really been?

Monday, May 5, 2008.
He was here Monday, for Christ’s sake, Ascondo thought. He grabbed another one and ripped the rubber band off.
Wednesday, May 7, 2008.
Then another. As he unrolled it, Ascondo saw his own name emblazoned across the top left corner, and
Saturday, May 10, 2008,
in the top right corner. Today. Where was Jeff now? He got this morning’s paper, so he had been here, or someone had been. But Jeff hadn’t showed up at the ballpark in two days, had his phone turned off constantly and hadn’t paid his rent.

Felix stepped outside and dumped the entire bag of cat food onto the top step, completely covering the green dish in a steady avalanche. At once, the skeletal black cat with the orange left paw came bounding down the sidewalk and buried its face in the pyramid of food.

The cab driver was sitting hunched over, head on the steering wheel with the headlights turned off. He didn’t look up as Felix had come back out onto the sidewalk and walked once more around the corner and down the alley next to the apartment. He grasped the top of the fence — thankfully Jeff had never put barbed wire or broken beer bottles up there to ward off burglars — and pulled himself up to spy the courtyard. He already knew it was empty, had switched on the back light upstairs and looked out from inside, but he took one last look anyway. What looked like a well landscaped square of stone had apparently seen some unwanted guests recently, as there were piles of empty beer cans and fast food bags on the table. The chairs had been broken apart in an apparent attempt to use them as firewood.

Ascondo had been met by the cat again as soon as he turned the corner back onto the Esplanade sidewalk and strode toward the cab. He went up the steps and grabbed the pink paper off the doorknob as he walked past and found a phone number for who must have been Jeff’s landlord printed at the top. He swung the cab’s rear door open, paused, then turned back toward the apartment. The cat was sitting perfectly still in the middle of the sidewalk and looking up at Felix. That’s when Ascondo stopped and pondered the animal for a long moment, breathing out a few heavy sighs as he did.

“You’re not putting that thing in this cab, brother,” moaned the driver, now sitting upright again and squinting back at Felix.

“I thought I paid you to stay shut up,” Felix said, still standing next to the open door and rubbing the back of his neck for another moment.

As the cab squeaked its way all the way back to Metairie, its driver shaking his head and smoking as it went, Felix wore a faint smile on his face in the back seat. He dialed the number from the pink slip on the door. A sleepy-sounding woman who identified herself as Mrs. Avery answered the call, and instead of asking her of Jeff’s whereabouts, Ascondo told her he was supposed to check in on the apartment while Jeff was away on baseball business and that he’d found the front door hanging open when he arrived. He told her everything looked fine inside but that he feared someone had attempted to break in, and he asked if she could please track down Jeff, that he was leaving town and wouldn’t be able to.

Before hanging up, Felix also gave Mrs. Avery his credit card number and told her to use it for Jeff’s May rent, and his June rent, and whatever late fees there were.

“Keep your eyes on the road, chico,” Ascondo barked at the driver each time he saw the man’s frown appear in the rearview mirror as the cab passed under the city’s streetlamps.

- 44 -

No matter how far he drove, how hard he concentrated on the road, the radio, the GPS or the assignment which awaited him in Texas, Jeff could not shake the feeling of the monkey chasing after him, gaining on him.

And as he now sat about 10 rows behind home plate inside Citibank Park in Midland, he could feel the monkey in the seat behind him. It had made the trip with him from home in the back seat, occasionally tapping him on the shoulder as he drove. Like the GPS on the windshield, it had been mostly quiet on the long drive west. But it still wanted attention, still wanted Jeff to bring back the familiar feeling that had been missing these last several, painful days.

It was boredom which brought on the beast, and without alcohol, everything was boring. That was the bitch of it. That was how he’d gotten stuck in this endless loop. Jeff wanted Willy Cintron, who still hadn’t heard his name called since the Sunday afternoon game began, to be more exciting than the prospects of an afternoon drink. But that was unfair to Willy because even Jeff knew the hot prospect could never hit a ball far enough or run the bases fast enough to make that happen.

Still, as slow as things got here, Jeff felt like he finally had the strength to keep up the fight, at least while he was on the road. It was at home that he knew he could not escape temptation, as Paulo had correctly pointed out already. The desert, too, called to Jeff, but in a different kind of way, and as deadly as it was there, it seemed a hell of a lot better of a way for him to go than passing out in a chair alone and choking on his own vomit.

He couldn’t go back just yet, which was perhaps more dangerous than Paulo would have given credit. Ironic that the man who said Jeff’s home was a dead end was the one who’d sent him back here. All part of the test, Jeff figured. He mulled over the possibility that Cintron might not scale the dugout steps at all until the game ended, and that maybe he would be stuck here in Texas for Monday’s game as well, and that maybe that was a good thing right now.

He had made it into Midland so late Saturday night there wouldn’t have been a bottle of whiskey to be had even if the temptation did have its way with him, so he’d fallen asleep out of sheer inactivity in his hotel room. He had awakened early Sunday morning and had spent two hours in the hotel breakfast room downstairs watching CNN and trying to rekindle his taste for coffee. Thank God for afternoon games on Sundays, he thought the entire time he sat there.

Part of him still felt foolish for even making this trip. Maybe he should just put his foot down and call it quits with Sandy, the Mets and baseball altogether, once and for all, like he’d been thinking for ages.

But if he did that, he knew he’d better be damn sure that he could survive on the other side, because that’s the only thing that would be left. Quitting on the Mets would surely be his swan song on this side of reality. Jeff had long since accepted that he had no other marketable skills to offer this world. Given the Mets’ now dire situation — last place in the NL East and disappearing quickly — he would undoubtedly be on Sandy Morino’s movin’ out list soon. Should have been long ago.

With such stressful feelings came that instinctual urge for a drink, an urge which never really left completely, but which peaked sharply at certain times of the day, like now. But Jeff wanted to fight back now, so he tried to wield his latest experience as a weapon against it. When temptation ate away at his stomach, he tried to quell it with images of the desert, and now he had quite a stockpile of those. He pondered his place in it all, now that he knew he had one, and remembered that he wouldn’t have a place there as a drunk.

They were onto him, and that was a good thing. So during the early innings in Midland, Jeff did his usual while waiting to see if Willy Cintron would get a sniff of the action. He thought about anything and everything but baseball. He wondered how the trek to Old Victoria was going and considered for the first time what might happen to him if the convoy was attacked by the Freemen as it crossed the desert and traversed the mountains. There were no phone lines between here and there, no way of knowing what might be happening, good or bad, only that time was churning away over there the same as it was over here.

He wondered why there didn’t seem to be much of a calendar over there. Paulo had been quick to tell him May 7 was the big training day, yet no one over there seemed to give a rip what day and time it was unless it pertained to new arrivals like Jeff, or other matters of the revolucion’s link to this world. And even in those cases, it appeared Paulo relied almost entirely on his little GPS, or his two-way radio, to tell him what was going on. Paulo’s leadership seemed far more rooted in his actual combat experience than his wisdom.